4 - The Religious Governance of the Latin World, 1150–1378

Summary

The papacy managed to meet the mushrooming demand for its documents. A new genre of documents appeared, ‘letters of grace’, granting special privileges. Demand for benefices was one major category. Only a small proportion of papal registers were registered, and two or more people might receive the same grant, so the curia developed a system of ranked formulae to see which letter had priority. Another genre met the demand for papal justice: ‘letters of justice’. These appointed judges delegate in the localities. A remarkable institution called the Audientia litterarum contradictarum made the system functional. Behind all this there was no proper bureaucracy with division between home and work, salaries and line managers. Slightly more like a bureaucracy was the Apostolic Penitentiary, which dealt with absolutions from excommunication and dispensations. In the fourteenth century, with the papacy based in Avignon, record keeping was less random and rules to regulate the otherwise unbureaucratic administration were formulated for both Penitentiary and Chancery. High level letters were handled separately from the quantitatively enormous routine business. The Schism that started in 1378, shortly after the papacy returned to Rome, marked a sharp break.