PIEVE. - A name that is found attributed, in Italy, to a parish or even to villages or towns.
Its origin must be sought in the word plebs, used, with the advent of Christianity, to indicate the community of the baptized. At first this expression plebs christiana had a generic meaning; but, from a certain period, not precisely datable, it came to indicate not only the people of the baptized, but also an institution; perhaps at first both together, that is, a mass of persons conceived corporately and the unitary institution that derived from it and was summed up in the entity church, a building of worship, where the mass of the faithful gathered and prayed; finally also the territory on which that people of the baptized had settled: thus one said, for example, the plebs of such-and-such a Saint. The generic meaning is preserved here and there almost everywhere and is a literary usage, but it is lost and fades with time and across places; the specific, juridical, constitutional meaning, on the other hand, remains circumscribed in determined regions, takes root and consolidates itself in a determined territory.
This territory is northern and central Italy, roughly north of the 42nd-43rd parallel (Viterbo-Chieti), including Corsica (excluding Sardinia or at least part of Sardinia) and some Latin valleys north of the Alps. It is a zone that, from the historical-political point of view, is Frankish-Carolingian and, from the glottological point of view, Romance-speaking. But the fact remains that the Latin-ecclesiastical word plebs was imported much earlier into England, where it still remains in Wales (Celtic pleuf) whence, after the Saxon occupation of the island, it emigrated with the Britons, pure Celts, grouped in claus, into French Brittany. Here it remains, through numerous variants, rooted in the soil with about two hundred toponyms (it is not known, however, whether in Brittany the plebs had in the medieval age the same constitutional structure as in Italy). Already in the 5th century in Italy, that is, in the regions indicated above, the word plebs was used, it seems both in the corporate sense and in the institutional one (the plebs Cluentensis of two documents of Pope Gelasius).
The constitutional structure of the Italian p., in its own territory, is singular. It is different from the parish: the latter is the church of the late Middle Ages; the p. is the church of the early Middle Ages; and it is the baptismal church, mother of all the other minor churches of the district; it often presents itself with a multiple clergy and an archpriest who is a great archpriest, with an originally common patrimony and with a broad territory in which many subject chapels are often found. This is the typical schema; but it is possible to find p. which, although being such, that is, mother churches, do not present all these characteristics. Evidently it is a form of organization of the rural territory, eccentric in comparison with the diocesan capital, but centripetal in relation to the population scattered over the broad rural district. Naturally these baptismal mother p. grow in number with the flow of time, of population and of the economy. But it seems certain that at their origin they repeat, through their districting, the frameworks of the Roman municipal organization. The correspondence between the Roman pagus and the p. is still to be studied and deepened; certainly the map of the districts of the most ancient p. can reproduce the administrative geography of the early medieval territory in the Italian countryside.
The Italian area of expansion of the p. ceases where the type of settlement with scattered population (Celtic-Gallic) stops and where the form of colonization of the Greek city type begins (southern Italy and the Mediterranean islands). Outside Italy, in France, for example, the rural archpresbyterate was vigorous in the first centuries, which perhaps had a structure analogous to that of the Italian p., but which rapidly dissolved.
P., pievania, piviere is, therefore, a rural district that prevails until the late Middle Ages, when the rural commune is about to arise; but the rural communal districting modifies the whole of the pleban organization. Around the great city communes several p. are grouped in the same modern communal territory, while the pleban districts remain still recognizable in the peripheral communes of the old diocesan territory. Finally the unitary bond that ties the mother church to its subject churches is dissolved; there remain to it only titles of honor which in the end are also erased, and the subject chapels are entirely equated with the old mother church.