PATRIMONY OF ST PETER. — Originally this term denoted the aggregate of landed property belonging to the Church of Rome, by analogy with the designation patrimonium principis, which in the late Empire indicated the complex of public property. Just as the Emperor was considered owner of all the goods of the State, as well as of his personal goods, so the owner of all the goods of the Church of Rome was considered its very founder, St Peter, of whom the popes were merely the administrators. It followed that the properties of the Church of Rome, and the foundation of its right over them, had a nature that transcended the limits of ordinary human, private and public properties, and which therefore had its own essential and peculiar importance, destined to become manifest in due course with repercussions of a political character.
The origins and growth of the P. of St P. derived above all from the continuous donations of popes and faithful of every social and economic condition, of emperors, princes, down to modest private individuals, made over the centuries to the Church of Rome, especially from the time of Constantine the Great, himself a most munificent donor.
The most complete and reliable information on the P. of St P. is available especially for the time of St Gregory the Great (d. 604). The landed properties owned by the Church of Rome were then grouped into large agricultural estates, each corresponding to certain zones in which the respective complexes of lands were located, and each designated by the most prominent toponym for the purposes of its identification (roads, inhabited centres, civil administrative districts), added to the generic term patrimonium. Each patrimonium constituted its own administrative organism, managed under the direction of a high official of the central papal administration with the title of rector. These were appointed directly by the pope, normally from among the deacons, subdeacons, notaries or defensores of the Church of Rome. Each patrimonium consisted of a varying number of agricultural units, massa (i.e. massa fundorum, a term therefore indicating “complex of estates”), each of which included a varying number of smaller units (fundi). Sometimes one also finds, with a meaning akin to that of massa, the term condum (condoma), used to indicate properly a family of rural dependents who had a common dwelling and master (cum e domus; cum e dominus). The individual massa and fundi were identified either by some toponym of the area, or by the name of a family that had been their owner before the Church of Rome. The individual condumae were instead probably identified by the name of the dependent who directed the family nucleus of workers with which they were constituted (at least this is the usage attested for the 8th century in the Lombard territories of southern Italy). The agricultural management of the massa was entrusted to a superior category of tenants, conducentes; the fundi were directly cultivated by small tenants and by the mass of rural workers, coloni, rustici Ecclesiae, of semi-free or servile condition. The ordinary revenues of the patrimonia consisted of periodic censuses (pensiones), owed by the conducentes and coloni, and paid in money or in kind, or in both forms. The conducentes exacted these from the coloni and then paid them over, together with their own, to the respective rectores. Extraordinary revenues came from other sources, e.g., from donations or grants by public authorities, lay and ecclesiastical, and by private individuals. The net proceeds, after deducting expenses and management costs, were sent by the rector to the central administration in Rome, in the quantities, kinds and types and qualities established by the administration itself, according to the orders of the Pope. Expenditures consisted of the expenses and management costs of the Church’s charitable and welfare works, as well as payments of land tax and other dues owed to the imperial treasury, collected at the quarterly instalments, in September, January and May, of the financial year, running from 10 September to 31 August (indictio). The accounts (rationes) were kept in special registers by the rector, who presented them for audit after the close of each financial year.
The list of patrimonia of which there is record, or which may be presumed to have existed, for the second half of the 6th century and the beginning of the 7th, included: patrimonium Liguriae (in the region between the Alps, the Adda, and the Po); patrimonium Alpium Cottiarum (on the Ligurian coast, between the western Alps and the Magra); patrimonium Ravennae et Histriarum; patrimonium Piceni; patrimonium Tusciae; patrimonium Sabinense et Carseolanum; patrimonium Appiae; patrimonium Campaniae; patrimonium Sammicium; patrimonium Apuliae et Calabriae; patrimonium Lucaniae et Bruttiorum; patrimonium Siciliae (divided by Gregory the Great into patrimonium Panormitanum and patrimonium Syracusanum); patrimonium Sardiniae; patrimonium Corsicanum. The properties within the city of Rome and its immediate surroundings constituted the patrimonium Urbanum. It does not appear that this was managed by its own rector; probably it was cared for by the seven deacons who had administrative responsibility for the corresponding ecclesiastical regions of Rome, each assisted by a regional subdeacon. Beyond the Adriatic were the patrimonium Dalmatianum and the patrimonium Illyricanum, certainly reduced to very little or already disappeared because of the ravages of the Avars and Slavs. Beyond the western Alps, in the kingdom of the Franks, was the patrimonium Galliae, or Gallicanum, limited to not many properties in the zones of Arles and Marseilles. On the African coastal strip, the patrimonium Africae or Germanicarum was to gather properties existing in the region of Hippona (Bona in Algeria; not far away was Germanica, a city of Numidia).
Between the mid-7th century and the second half of the 8th there were profound changes in extent and structure, as a result of events that altered the situation in Italy.
As regards extent, the Lombard conquest led conquering kings and dukes to confiscate the goods of the Church of Rome in the territories progressively 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 iconoclastic decrees, whereby the P. of St P. was reduced almost exclusively to the territory then constituting the Duchy of Rome. Outside this, so far as is known, only the patrimonium Caietanum remained, perhaps a relic of the ancient patrimonium Campaniae. As for the patrimonies situated beyond the Alps and overseas, all had disappeared.
With regard to structure, mention must be made of the work of reorganisation and renewal carried out by the popes: 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 to the Lombard conquest; and the patrimonium Labicanum. The formation of the two suburban patrimonies and that of Labicum is certainly linked to a considerable increase in the Church’s properties near Rome.
Pope Zaccaria’s work (741–52) was innovative in that he introduced a new type of large agricultural estate, known as a *domusculta*, probably meaning “an area cultivated directly on the owner’s behalf,” with the collateral idea of “an area cultivated by workers living near Rome.” Such *domuscultae* were created and regulated by a special *constitutum*, or papal foundation decree, which laid down their administrative rules, assigned priests for liturgical services, and stipulated the allocation of revenues, indicating, where necessary, what and how much of them was to be reserved for the particular expenses of the pope’s household (*ratio dominica*). The decree also imposed an absolute and binding prohibition on all future popes and any other person from alienating the *domusculta*, under penalty of forfeiture. Another fundamental difference between this new type of large agricultural estate and earlier ones lay in the fact that, while it also included smaller internal agricultural units (*massa* and *fundus*), their management, like that of the entire *domusculta*, was conducted directly by Church officials, without the intermediation of tenants or other leaseholders. The rural workers, whether tending crops or livestock, and the administrative staff lived within the territory of the *domusculta*, which was therefore equipped with churches, mills, warehouses, storage facilities, and offices. To facilitate exchanges within each *domusculta* and between one *domusculta* and another, special copper tokens or tickets were put into circulation, bearing the pope’s name and having a conventional value—something like a prelude to the future monetary units of the Papal State. The lands were cultivated, as far as can be determined, with wheat, barley, legumes, leeks, olive groves, and vineyards. Wheat, oil, and wine were evidently the most important agricultural products. The pastures supported cattle, horses, sheep, and pigs.
Zaccaria founded five *domuscultae*: Galeria (in the area 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 area of Ponte Mammolo); Lauretum (from Castel Porziano to Pratica di Mare); Antius and Formia (respectively in the area of Anzio, and in the stretch north of Anzio where the Romans had built the conduits or channels to convey to the sea the outflow from nearby mountain springs: estates of Bosco del Padiglione, Terre del Padiglione, Campo-morto, and Carano). Zaccaria evidently followed a systematic approach, aiming to give the various *domuscultae* a certain mutual contiguity and to bring about an increase in the productivity of the Church’s landed properties, coupled with more efficient administrative management, in a manner worthy of ancient Roman traditions. This effort helped to attract inhabitants and revive economic activity in the countryside south of the Tiber, which had lain abandoned and depopulated, partly because of the prevalence of fevers aggravated by the expansion of marshy areas. That there was a significant demographic recovery here from the time of Zaccaria is evident from 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 diocese had been devastated by the relentless hostility of the Lombards.
Adriano I proved to be a worthy successor when the popes had become temporal lords of Rome and its territory as well. He established six more *domuscultae*: two *domuscultae* named Galeria (the first between the Via Clodia and the Via Aurelia, probably resulting from the enlargement of the one founded by Zaccaria; the second, contiguous, in the area of the last stretch of the Via Portuense, at the 12th mile from Rome, Ponte Galeria); the *domusculta* Capracorum, in the area traversed by the Via Cassia between Veio and Nepi (Capricoro and Crepacore, near Mazzano Romano); the *domusculta* S. Leuci, at the 5th mile of the Via Flaminia (Tor di Quinto); the *domusculta* Calvisianum, about the 15th mile of the Via Ardeatina, between it and the Via Laurentina; the *domusculta* S. Edisti, contiguous to the previous one, at the 16th mile of the Via Ardeatina.
In essence, during the final crises of the Lombard kingdom and Byzantine rule over Roman territory, the most extensive, homogeneous, and better-administered properties—and therefore the most productive and profitable—belonged to the Church of Rome. It is not possible to assess in figures the economic potential of these properties; nor can one even hazard an approximate figure in relation to the three and a half talents of gold (114.608 kg; Fabre estimated their equivalent at the end of the 19th century as 393,000 francs, and Spearing, before the monetary upheavals that began with the 1914–18 war, as 15,120 pounds), which Theophanes, writing at the beginning of the 9th century, indicates as the total annual income from properties confiscated by Leo III the Isaurian from the Church of Rome during the papacy of Gregory III (731–41) in the imperial duchies of southern Italy and Sicily. In the Duchy of Rome, the expansion and reorganization of the patrimony of St. Peter coincided with the shrinking in area and decline in economic capacity of the lay public properties, due to the progressive depletion of the material resources available to civil and military authorities. The Church of Rome, which had always used the revenues and produce of its properties with the utmost liberality for charitable and welfare works (so that these properties were rightly and by antonomasia called the *res pauperum Christi*; Gregory the Great had provided a shining example), naturally came to meet the needs of the population more and more extensively, increasingly assuming those collective activities hitherto carried out by municipal and state authorities—activities these latter were no longer able to perform. Added to this was the fact that the areas in which, one might say, the entire patrimony of St. Peter was now concentrated included a large part of the Duchy of Rome; that the Church’s properties were traversed by the main arteries of access and transit; and that within them stood some of the key points 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, given the lack or even hostility of the emperors, to take direct responsibility for the economic, military, and political problems inherent in Rome’s relations with Byzantium, the Lombards, and the Franks, in the interests of the Church and of the entire population living and working in the Duchy of Rome. All this undoubtedly constituted a set of factors that carried great weight among those which contributed to the origin of the popes’ temporal power and dominion.