of Rome in the territories gradually occupied; to this were added the confiscations carried out by Leo III the Isaurian, among the reprisals he ordered in the third decade of the 8th century against the Church of Rome, on the occasion of his iconoclast ordinances, whereby the P. of St. P. was reduced almost exclusively to the territory then constituting the Roman Duchy. Outside this there remained, as far as is known, only the patrimonium Caietanum, perhaps a remnant of the ancient patrimonium Campaniae. As for the patrimonies situated beyond the Alps and overseas, they had all disappeared.
As regards structure, the work of reorganization and renewal carried out by the popes must be recalled: 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 properties closest to Rome; the patrimonium Tiburtinum, which gathered the properties around Tivoli, previously included in the patrimonium Sabinense, lost through the Lombard conquest; and the patrimonium Labicanum. The formation of the two suburban patrimonies and of the Labican one is certainly linked to a considerable increase in the Church's properties in the vicinity of Rome.
Innovative was the work of Pope Zachary (741-52), who introduced a new type of large agricultural estate, called domusculta, probably in the sense of "area cultivated on the owner's direct account," to which was associated the collateral idea of "area cultivated by workers domiciled there." These domuscultae were created and regulated by a special constitutum, or papal decree of foundation, which specified the rules of administration, assigned priests for the services of worship, established the use of the revenues, indicating, where applicable, which and how great a part of them was to be reserved for the particular expenses of the pontiff's household (ratio dominica), with an absolute and binding prohibition on all succeeding popes and on any other person to alienate the domusculta in any way, on pain of anathema. Another substantial difference between this new type of large agricultural estate and the preceding ones lay in the fact that, although it too comprised smaller internal agrarian units (massae and fundi), their management, like that of the entire domusculta, was held directly by officials of the Church, without the intermediary of a conductor or other lessees. The rural workers, tillers of the soil, or breeders and keepers of livestock, and the administrative personnel lived within the territory of the domusculta, which was therefore provided with churches, mills, storehouses, depots, offices. And to facilitate exchanges within each one, and between one domusculta and another, special tokens or copper tallies were put into circulation, which bore the name of the pope and had a conventional value, a kind of prelude to the coins of pontifical minting of the future Papal State. The lands were cultivated, as it appears, with wheat, barley, legumes, leeks, olive groves and vineyards. Wheat, oil and wine must have been the most important agricultural products. On the pastures cattle, horses, sheep and pigs were raised.
Five were the domuscultae created by Zachary: Galeria (zone of S. Maria di Galeria), at the 14th mile of the Via Clodia; S. Caecilia, at the 5th mile of the Via Tiburtina (roughly in the zone of Ponte Mammolo); Lauretum (from Castel Porziano to Pratica di Mare); Antius and Formia (respectively in the zone of Anzio, and in the stretch north of Anzio, where the Romans had built the formae, or conduits, to channel to the sea the outflow of waters coming from the nearby mountain springs: the 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 mutual contiguity and to bring about an increase in the productivity of the landed properties owned by the Church, combined with a more efficient administrative management, in a manner worthy of ancient Roman traditions, because it served to bring back inhabitants and to rekindle economic activities in the countryside south of the Tiber, which lay abandoned and depopulated, also because of the raging of fevers, aggravated by the widening of the stretches turned into marsh by stagnant waters. And that from the time of Zachary there was here a notable demographic recovery 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 found himself compelled to suppress in 592, uniting it with that of Velletri, because it was a diocese laid waste by the hostilis impietas of the Lombards.
A worthy continuator was Adrian I, when by then the popes had become the lords also temporal of Rome and its territory, with the institution 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 instituted by Zachary; the second, contiguous, in the zone of the last stretch of the Via Portuense, at the 12th mile from Rome, Ponte Galera); the domusculta Capracorum, in the zone crossed by the Via Cassia between Veii and Nepi (Capricoro and Crepacore, near Mazzano Romano); the domusculta S. Leucii, at the 5th mile of the Via Flaminia (Tor di Quinto); the domusculta Calvisianum, at about the 15th mile of the Via Ardeatina, between it and the Via Laurentina; the domusculta S. Edisti, contiguous to the preceding one, at the 16th mile of the Via Ardeatina.
In substance, during the period of the final crises of the Lombard Kingdom and of Byzantine rule over Roman territory, the most extensive, homogeneous, best administered, and therefore most productive and profitable properties belonged to the Church of Rome. It is not possible to assess 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 (kg. 114.608; Fabre calculated its equivalent, at the end of the 19th century, at 393,000 francs, and Sperring, before the upheaval of monetary values that began with the war of 1914-18, 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, in 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 Patrimony of St. Peter coincided with the shrinking in surface area and the decline in economic capacity of public lay properties, owing to the progressive drying up of the material means at the disposal of the civil and military authorities. The Church of Rome, which had always used with the greatest liberality the revenues and products of its properties for works of charity and assistance (whence those very properties were rightly and par excellence called res pauperum Christi; a shining 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 ever greater extent also those activities of collective interest which until then had been carried out by the municipal and state powers, and which these were no longer able to discharge. Add to this the fact that the zones in which virtually the whole Patrimony of St. Peter was by then concentrated comprised a good part of the Roman Duchy; that the Church's properties were crossed by the principal arteries of access and transit; that there also stood within them some of the strongholds of the Duchy's defensive belt (the castellum of Ceccano, certainly; almost certainly the castra of Bieda, Sutri, Orte, Bomarzo and Amelia); it is easy therefore to understand how the popes found themselves compelled, owing to the lack or indeed the hostility of the Emperors, to deal directly with the economic, military and political problems inherent in Rome's relations with Byzantium, with the Lombards and with 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.
BIBL.: sources