PATRIMONIO DI SAN PIETRO. — Originally this was the name given to the totality of the landed property of the Church of Rome, by analogy with the designation patrimonium principis, which in the late Empire indicated the aggregate of publicly owned property. Just as the Emperor was considered the owner of all the property of the State, in addition to his personal possessions, so the owner of all the property of the Church of Rome was considered to be its founder himself, s. Pietro, of whom the popes were merely administrators. It followed that the property of the Church of Rome, and the basis of its right over it, possessed a nature transcending the limits of ordinary human property, both private and public, and therefore had its own essential and distinctive importance, which was later destined to become apparent through repercussions of a political character.
The origins and growth of the P. di S. P. derived above all from the continuous donations made over the centuries to the Church of Rome by popes and faithful of every social and economic condition, by emperors and princes, and even by humble private individuals, especially beginning in the time of Costantino Magno, himself an exceptionally munificent benefactor.
The most complete and reliable information on the P. di S. P. concerns above all the time of s. Gregorio Magno (d. in 604). The landed property owned by the Church of Rome was then grouped into large agricultural estates, each corresponding to one of the particular areas in which the relevant complexes of land were situated, and each designated by the place-name of greatest importance for purposes of identification (roads, inhabited centres, civil administrative districts), added to the generic term patrimonium. Each patrimonium constituted its own administrative organization, managed under the direction of a senior official of the central papal administration bearing the title of rector. He was 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, massae (that is, massae fundorum, a term therefore meaning “complex of estates”), each of which comprised a varying number of smaller units (fundi). At times, the term conduma (condoma) is also found, with a meaning akin to that of massa, properly used to designate a family of rural dependants who shared a dwelling and a master (cum and domus; cum and dominus). The individual massae and fundi were identified either by some place-name of the area or by the name of a family that had owned them before the Church of Rome. The individual condumae, on the other hand, were probably identified by the name of the dependant who directed the family group of workers of which they were composed (such, at least, was the practice attested in the 8th century in the Lombard territories of southern Italy). The agricultural management of the massae was entrusted to a superior category of tenant farmers, conductores; the fundi were directly cultivated by small tenant farmers and by the mass of the rural population, coloni, rustici Ecclesiae, who were semi-free or servile in status. The ordinary revenues of the patrimonia consisted of periodic rents (pensiones), owed by the conductores and coloni and paid in money or in kind, or in both forms. The conductores collected them from the coloni and then paid them, together with their own contributions, to the respective rectores. Extraordinary revenues came from other sources, for example, from donations or grants by public authorities, both secular and ecclesiastical, and by private individuals. The net proceeds, after the expenses and operating consumption had been deducted, were sent by the rector to the central administration in Rome, in the quantities, forms, and types and qualities established by that administration, according to the Pope’s orders. Expenditures consisted of the expenses and operating consumption of the Church’s charitable and welfare works, as well as payments of the land tax and other dues owed to the imperial treasury, collected at the due dates of the quarterly instalments, in September, January, and May, of the financial year, which ran from 1 September to 31 August (indictio). The accounts (rationes) were kept by the rector in special registers, which he submitted for audit after the close of each financial year.
The list of the patrimonia of which there is information, or whose existence may be presumed, for the second half of the 6th century and the beginning of the 7th, comprised: patrimonium Liguriae (in the region between the Alps, the Adda, and the Po); patrimonium Alpium Cottianum (on the Ligurian coast, between the western Alps and the Magra); patrimonium Ravennate et Histrianum; patrimonium Piceni; patrimonium Tusciae; patrimonium Sabinense et Carseolanum; patrimonium Appiae; patrimonium Campaniae; patrimonium Sanniticum; patrimonium Apuliae et Calabriae; patrimonium Lucaniae et Bruttianum; patrimonium Siciliae (divided by Gregorio Magno into the patrimonium Panormitanum and the patrimonium Siracusanum); patrimonium Sardiniae; patrimonium Corsicanum. The properties within Rome and in the immediate vicinity of its gates constituted the patrimonium Urbanum. There is no evidence that it too was managed by its own rector; it was probably cared for by the seven deacons who bore administrative responsibility for the corresponding ecclesiastical regions of Rome, each assisted by a regional subdeacon. Beyond the Adriatic lay the patrimonium Dalmatianum and the patrimonium Illyricianum, certainly reduced to very little or already vanished as a result of the incursions of the Avars and Slavs. Beyond the western Alps, in the Kingdom of the Franks, lay the patrimonium Galliae, or Gallicanum, limited to a modest number of properties in the areas of Arles and Marseille. On the African coastal strip, the patrimonium Africae or Germanicianum must have comprised properties existing in the region of Hippona (Bona in Algeria; Germanicia, a city of Numidia, was not far away).
Between the middle of the 7th century and the second half of the 8th, profound changes in extent and structure occurred as a result of the events that altered the situation in Italy.
As regards its extent, the Lombard conquest led conquering kings and dukes to confiscate the property of the Church