VICEDOMINUS. - For the patrimonial administrations of bishoprics and monasteries, Roman imperial legislation and the canons of the Eastern councils already laid down the norms and the discipline for the cases in which it was not appropriate for the bishop and the abbot to concentrate the administration in their own hands.
Thus in the East a special official was created, the oeconomus, whose appointment was declared obligatory principally by the Council of Chalcedon (a. 451). The institution passed also into the Western Churches, where alongside the Greek word oeconomus the word vicedominus was sometimes used, to designate the official who, for the economic administration, took the place of the dominus; these were not priestly functions, but dominical ones.
Today the word vicedominus has disappeared from Western canon law, while the term oeconomus has remained, both in the East and in the West, to designate almost always a vicarious function, of a character both priestly and economic.
Since bishoprics and monasteries needed, besides an official for the economic administration, also an official who would defend and protect their rights and the temporal acts of the administration in court, in the West this was, corresponding to an analogous official existing in the East since the imperial period, the advocatus. The functions of the v. and of the advocate intertwine and become confused in the history of the Western Church and especially in Italy: sometimes both are encountered simultaneously; sometimes several v. and several advocates are found; sometimes it is a single person who absorbs the functions of both. In certain phases of their history the v. and the advocate are no longer simple officials of the Church, but also officials whose activity was relevant to the prince. This depended on the relationship of the potestas of the dominus, bishop or abbot, with the prince.
V. are encountered in Italy in the 6th century, at Rome and at Ravenna; and for them especially Gregory the Great lays down prescriptions in his letters, through which the typical v. is seen represented, who reappears likewise in the Decretum Gratiani. The v. had to be a cleric, and he takes, in the episcopal curias, an important rank, often beside and above the archdeacon. He is chosen and appointed by the bishop; and if the latter omits to do so, provision must be made, says St. Gregory the Great, communi consilio of the whole clergy. He has the function of episcopium disponere; he participates in all acts of administration; his importance increases in the absence of the bishop, whom he partly replaces. In the 8th-9th centuries his powers, with the expansion of the patrimonial and territorial power of the bishop, increase; and the v. becomes a general agent of the bishop, furnished with a public standing recognized in Carolingian legislation. By now he is an obligatory official within the sphere of ecclesiastical immunity, an intermediary between this and the public power of the king and the prince; he must administer the immune lands in the interest of the Church, but also in that of the State. Hence the institution was generalized, the appointment made obligatory, in which the royal power or its representatives participated; certain personal guarantees are required of the v., and over him the royal power exercises jurisdiction.
As internal administrator of the episcopal Palace, the v. has left few traces of himself; instead, as agent of the bishop who enjoyed a sphere of immunity, according to some writers he also exercised jurisdiction within the immune territory, over free men, over non-free men, over coloni, over serfs. Sometimes he exercises the powers proper to the advocate.
In the 10th and 11th centuries a new phase of the institution is noted. Among the vassals of the bishop is encountered a vicedomino who is for the most part a lay lord, possessor of a fortified castle. The feudal movement has stripped the ancient v. of the character of an ecclesiastic strictly dependent on the bishop. The bishop, with the acquisition of a part of the sovereign public powers, needs, in order to secure his vassals, an effective protection, a lieutenant chosen usually from among the most powerful lords, for whom, as an appanage for his services, he establishes a fief.
The functions of the v. lord of this age are a mixture of those of the advocate and of the Carolingian v. The v. is the protector of the bishopric, represents the bishop in court, sometimes replaces him in the administration of justice. Other functions are the ancient ones of official of the immunity, that is, jurisdiction and distractio. Others will have arisen curious from the epoch in which the v. was nothing but an ecclesiastic strictly dependent on the bishop. In some places, where armed protection is no longer needed, from a layman he will return to being an ecclesiastic. Of the functions consisting in the administration and the guarding of episcopal property, the v. seems later to have preserved only that which makes him guardian of the palace and of the bishop's property, in case of vacancy of the episcopal see. He exercises without scruple the right of interim administration during the vacancy, and the right of spoilation over the movable substance of the deceased bishop (Dante says, of the v. of Florence, «... when our church is vacant, they grow fat standing in consistory»).
The condition of the v. changes with each bishopric; other officials limit his powers; he takes part in city life, even against the bishop; he has a part in the struggles for the formation of the commune; he nevertheless always remains dependent on the bishop. The formation of the commune provokes imbalances that are regulated after struggles, violence, turmoils. The fief, having become hereditary and alienable, prolongs the conflicts. The struggle is open between bishops, popes, emperors, kings on one side, and v. and advocates on the other, especially with regard to those functions and those rights that had become useless or had degenerated. The conflict ends with a new regulation or with renunciations by the v. or the advocate of the fief. The v. or the advocate, simple agents of the bishop, will preserve functions and rights sometimes merely symbolic, and their presence will be recorded, only as the object of certain rights and honors, until the abolition of feudalism or the French Revolution. In some places in Italy there is still the v. as a dignity of the cathedral Chapter.