PATRIMONIO DI S. PIETRO
of Rome in the territories progressively occupied; to these were added the confiscations carried out by Leo III the Isaurian, among the reprisals ordered by him in the third decade of the 8th century against the Church of Rome on the occasion of his iconoclastic edicts, whereby the P. di S. P. was reduced almost exclusively to the territory then constituting the Roman Duchy. Outside of this, as far as is known, only the patrimonium Caietanum remained, perhaps a remnant of the ancient patrimonium Campaniae. As for the patrimonies located beyond the Alps and overseas, they had all disappeared.
Regarding the structure, the reorganization and renewal work carried out by the popes should be noted: to Gregory II (715-31) is probably due the creation of new patrimonies: the suburbanum patrimonium Tusciae and the suburbanum patrimonium Appiae, formed from the estates closest to Rome; the patrimonium Tiburtinum, which gathered properties around Tivoli, previously included in the patrimonium Sabinense, lost due to the Lombard conquest; and the patrimonium Labicanum. The formation of the two suburban patrimonies and the Labican one is certainly linked to a significant increase in the Church's property near Rome.
Innovative was the work of Pope Zachary (741-52), who introduced a new type of large agricultural enterprise called domusculta, probably in the sense of "an area cultivated on behalf directly of the master", associated with the collateral idea of "an area cultivated by workers domiciled therein". Such domuscultae were created and regulated by a special constitutum, or papal decree of foundation, which specified their administration rules, assigned priests for liturgical services, established the use of the proceeds, indicating, where applicable, which and how much part of them was to be reserved for the private expenses of the pontiff's household (ratio dominica), with an absolute and categorical prohibition on all successive popes and any other person to alienate the domusculta in any way, under penalty of anathema. Another substantial difference between this new type of large agricultural enterprise and the previous ones lay in the fact that, while it also included smaller internal agrarian units (massae and fundi), their management, like that of the entire domusculta, was held directly by Church officials, without the intermediary of conductores or other lessees. The rural workers, tillers of the land, or livestock breeders and keepers, and the administrative staff lived within the territory of the domusculta, which was therefore provided with churches, mills, warehouses, storerooms, and offices. And to facilitate exchanges within each domusculta, and between one domusculta and another, special copper tokens or tallies were put into circulation, which bore the pope's name and had a conventional value, a sort of prelude to the coins minted by the papacy in the future Papal States. The lands were cultivated, as it turns out, with wheat, barley, legumes, leeks, olive groves, and vineyards. Wheat, oil, and wine must have been the most important agricultural products. Cattle, horses, sheep, and pigs were raised on the pastures.
Five were the domuscultae created by Zachary: Galeria (area of Santa Maria di Galeria), at the 14th milestone of the Via Clodia; S. Caecilia, at the 5th milestone of the Via Tiburtina (roughly in the area of Ponte Mammolo); Lauretum (from Castel Porziano to Pratica di Mare); Antius and Formia (respectively in the area of Anzio, and in the tract north of Anzio, where the Romans had built the formae, or conduits, to channel the runoff of water from the nearby mountain slopes: estates of Bosco del Padiglione, Terre del Padiglione, Campomorto, and Carano). Zachary evidently followed a systematic criterion, intended to give the various domuscultae a certain reciprocal contiguity and to provoke an increase in the productivity of the Church's landed property, combined with more efficient administrative management, worthy of ancient Roman traditions, because it served to attract inhabitants and rekindle economic activity in the countryside south of the Tiber, which lay abandoned and depopulated, also due to the raging fevers, aggravated by the widening of tracts turned into swamps by stagnant waters. And that there has been a remarkable demographic recovery here since the time of Zachary is shown by the reappearance, in the second half of the 8th century, of the episcopal see of Tres Tabernae, not far from Cisterna di Roma, which Gregory the Great had been forced to suppress in 592, uniting it with that of Velletri, because the dioceses had been devastated by the hostilis impietas of the Lombards.
A worthy continuator was Hadrian I, by which time the popes had become the temporal domini of Rome and its territory, with the establishment of six other domuscultae: the two domuscultae Galeria (the first between the Via Clodia and the Via Aurelia, probably resulting from the enlargement of the one established by Zachary; the second, contiguous, in the area of the final stretch of the Via Portuense, at the 12th milestone from Rome, Ponte Galera); the domusculta Capracorum, in the area crossed by the Via Cassia between Veii and Nepi (Capricoro and Crepacore, near Mazzano Romano); the domusculta S. Leucii, at the 5th milestone of the Via Flaminia (Tor di Quinto); the domusculta Calvisianum, at about the 15th milestone of the Via Ardeatina, between it and the Via Laurentina; the domusculta S. Edisti, contiguous to the previous one, at the 16th milestone of the Via Ardeatina.
Essentially, during the period of the final crises of the Lombard Kingdom and of Byzantine rule over the Roman territory, the most extensive, homogeneous, best administered, and consequently most productive and profitable properties belonged to the Church of Rome. It is not possible to evaluate in figures the economic potential of such properties, nor even to think of an approximate figure in relation to the three and a half talents of gold (114.608 kg; Fabre calculated their equivalent at the end of the 19th century as 393,000 francs, and Sperring, before the upheaval of monetary values that began with the 1914-18 war, at 15,120 pounds sterling) which Theophanes, writing at the beginning of the 9th century, indicates as the total annual income of the properties confiscated by Leo III the Isaurian from the Church of Rome at the time of Gregory III (731-41), in the imperial duchies of southern Italy and in Sicily. In the Roman Duchy, the growth and reorganization of the P. di S. P. coincided with the shrinkage in surface area and the decline in economic capacity of public lay properties, due to the progressive drying up of the material resources available to civil and military authorities. The Church of Rome, which had always used the incomes and products of its properties with the utmost liberality for works of charity and assistance (whence the properties themselves were rightly and antonomously called res pauperum Christi; a luminous example had been given by Gregory the Great), was naturally led to meet the needs of the population ever more extensively, taking upon itself to an increasingly large extent even those activities of collective interest hitherto discharged by municipal and state powers, which the latter were no longer able to perform. To this must be added the fact that the areas in which almost the entire P. di S. P. was by now concentrated comprised a good part of the Roman Duchy; that the properties of the Church were crossed by the main arteries of access and transit; that some of the strongpoints of the defensive belt of the Duchy also arose within them (the castellum of Ceccano, certainly; almost certainly the castra of Bieda, Sutri, Orte, Bomarzo, and Amelia); it is therefore easy to realize how the popes found themselves in the necessity, due to the inadequacy or outright hostility of the Emperors, of dealing directly with the economic, military, and political problems inherent in Rome's relations with Byzantium, the Lombards, and the Franks, in the interest of the Church and of the entire population that lived and worked in the Roman Duchy. All this undoubtedly constituted a sum of factors that carried great weight among those which contributed to the origin of the temporal power and dominion of the popes.