There was a strong emphasis on the bishop as administrator and judge.
By Dr. Ian N. Wood
Professor Emeritus of Early Medieval History
University of Leeds
The Church of the post-Roman West amassed a vast amount of landed property, largely in the course of the late fifth, sixth, and early seventh centuries. The revenue from these possessions was divided between the churchmen (clergy and ascetics), church-building, the requirements of cult, and charitable activities, notably concern for the poor and, in certain specific periods, the ransom of captives. This, I have argued, constituted a redistributive process of the sort described by Arjun Appadurai and Carole Appadurai Breckenridge in their definition of a temple society. Although what has been defined as the spiritual economy of the late-antique and early medieval West has normally been discussed in socio-religious terms, I have insisted that it should also be understood as a matter of hard economics.
The model presented by Appadurai and Appadurai Breckenridge has little to say about the relationship of secular authority to the Temple, other than that protection of the temple was “one of the primary requirements for human claims to royal status.”1 Early medieval rulers unquestionably did regard themselves as having a duty to protect the Church and Christian religion. For instance, the bishops noted the concern for the faith (“ad religionis cultum gloriosae fidei cura”) shown by Clovis in his summons to the first Council of Orléans,2 and similar comments are made about the concerns of Childebert I at the fifth Council of Orléans (549),3 of Charibert at the second Council of Tours (567),4 of Clovis II at the Council of Chalon (647–653),5 and of Childeric II at the Councils of Bordeaux and St. Jean de Losne (662–675).6 In return, bishops and priests prayed for the king and the kingdom, as at Clermont in 535.7 Yitzhak Hen has noted that “chants and prayers became an instrument by which heavenly protection could be sought for the benefit of the kingdom and its ruler” in the course of the Merovingian period.8 Kings granted fiscal immunities to ecclesiastical institutions to facilitate such prayer.9 The canons of the Catholic Council of Agde (506) in Visigothic Gaul begin with prayers for the Arian Alaric II and his kingdom,10 while in Spain the Councils of Toledo, from the Third onwards, almost all begin with a reference to royal support, and some make reference to the king’s presence.11 On occasion, the conciliar decrees are followed directly by a royal statement.12
The significance attached to prayers for the king and the kingdom has been noted by numerous scholars.13 This was a world in which the liturgy and the liturgical year mattered. Easter was, inevitably, a time of particular significance, and it constitutes the backdrop of a number of moments of political tension. One of the seventh-century conflicts in Francia about which we are best informed, that involving bishops Leodegar of Autun and Praeiectus of Clermont, blew up at the Easter court of Childeric II in 675.14 Praeiectus was accused by Hector, the patricius of Marseilles, of taking over the land of a woman called Claudia. Hector was backed by Leodegar, but Praeiectus received the backing of the maior palatii Wulfoald. As a result, Hector was killed, having fled from the court, and Leodegar was exiled. Subsequently, however, Praeiectus was murdered. The events give an exceptional insight into conflicts involving bishops, but it is important to note the context of the Easter court and the recurrent liturgical elements in the story. Praeiectus refused to answer a summons because it was made during the holy days of Easter. Childeric, who had withdrawn to the monastery of St. Symphorian, demonstrated his support for the bishop of Clermont by inviting him to say Mass.
Although there is little to suggest a formal Easter court in the early Merovingian period, Gregory of Tours does say that Guntram had the Treaty of Andelot read out to him and bishop Felix of Chalons-sur-Marne at Easter, before proceeding to hear Mass.15 Gregory also notes on a number of occasions where kings held their Paschal celebrations.16 The Easter court had already been an occasion of importance for the rulers of Gibi-chung Burgundy: their law-book, the Liber Constitutionum, was issued at Easter 517.17 The State, in other words, functioned within the Christian calendar. But that is only a small aspect of relations between the ecclesiastical and religious authority. Here I will examine some other aspects of the relationship between Church and State in greater detail.
As we have already noted, Claudia Rapp has argued that the bishop emerged as a “new urban functionary” in the course of Late Antiquity.18 The development is most striking in Rome, where the pope was both instructed by the emperor and had, as a matter of necessity, to oversee much of the running of the city19 — as can be seen most obviously in the Register of Gregory the Great.20 Outside Rome, it is in Francia that episcopal authority has attracted most attention, and it has been the subject of an extended discussion of what has been termed Bischofsherrschaft21 — the exercise of episcopal leadership which was at its most striking in the later Merovingian period, when bishops such as Savaric of Auxerre and Milo of Trier effectively controlled their diocesan cities.22
I begin with brief consideration of Bischofsherrschaft, which is usually discussed with relatively little reference to contemporary secular authority. I will then turn back to a more anthropological model, based on John Haldon’s comparative examination of the late medieval Vijayanagaran Empire of south India, Merovingian Gaul, and early Byzantium in his formulation of the “Tributary Mode of Production,”23 to offer some comments on the differences between the Frankish world and that of the Exarchate of Ravenna in the sixth and seventh centuries,24 before looking finally at one respect in which the difference be-tween the two regions lessened in the eighth century.
Bischofsherrschaft is a term often applied to describe the position of the bishop in Merovingian Gaul. It was promoted by Friedrich Prinz in 1973,25 and subsequently by Reinhold Kaiser in 1981.26 As Steffen Diefenbach has noted in the most recent general assessment of the concept, it was used primarily in an institutional sense,27 referring to the bishop’s jurisdictional and administrative activities, which stretched beyond the moral and spiritual duties associated with cult and charity to matters of legal authority in the form of the episcopalis audientia — although it has to be said that this is less well defined than is sometimes assumed; its limitations have been noted for some while, most recently by Caroline Humfress.28
To this emphasis on the bishop as administrator and judge, however, was added a notion that bishops of the Merovingian kingdom were often of senatorial extraction (whatever that may mean)29 — and that members of the aristocracy, on finding that the opportunities which had been provided by the traditional cursus honorum were blocked with the ending of the Roman Empire, instead turned their attention to a career in the Church.30 This is in contrast with Italy, where Clare Sotinel has noted that less than three percent of the bishops whose origins are known were from the senatorial class.31 In Rita Lizzi Testa’s view, the early fifth century was an age when “clergy and bish-ops came from lower orders, and were lacking in administrative experience”32 — an observation that would seem to hold true well into the sixth. As Steffen Patzold has noted, however, there are major problems with the traditional reading of the Gallo-Roman and Frankish episcopate — the evidence is quite simply not strong enough to support the notion that the Merovingian Church was dominated by the senatorial aristocracy.33 To illustrate the aristocratic nature of the Gallo-Roman Church a handful of examples are regularly produced. Above all, there are bishops from the intermarried families of the Apollinares and the Aviti in Clermont and Vienne, as well as the Nicetii in Lyon, the Ruricii in Limoges, the Gregorii in Langres and Tours, and the Leontii in Bordeaux. But despite these examples, as Patzold points out, there are plenty of cities whose bishops are known not to have been of senatorial origin, and even more dioceses where we have no evidence for the social origins of the bishop.
In Bernhard Jussen’s reading of Bischofsherrschaft, more important than the social origins of the bishops was the religious aspect of episcopal authority, especially in those cases where the bishop was an ascetic.34 And even those bishops who were not ascetic had oversight of the performance of cult in their cities. In fact, the idealized image of Bischofsherrschaft had already received its fullest analysis in Martin Heinzelmann’s study of the epitaphs of the bishops of Lyon, published in 1976.35 Heinzelmann demonstrated that there was a set of virtues, above all ascetic, but also charitable and associated with episcopal authority and action, that were invoked regularly in describing the holy bishop and his exercise of office.
Although the ideal is certainly promoted in Merovingian sources — in epitaphs and in narratives (both hagiographical texts and the Histories of Gregory of Tours) — it is important to recognize that it is an ideal. As Simon Loseby has stated, the bishop of Tours’s “model of Bischofsherrschaft […] corresponded only imperfectly to reality, as he knew well. Gregory was striving as far as possible to present bishops as the leaders of an undifferentiated urban populus.”36 Despite the fact that bishops did indeed have powers conferred on them in law, both secular and ecclesiastical, there are well-known occasions where they found their position challenged by the local count, as is well-known from the evidence for Clermont,37 and Tours,38 but also by unnamed but equally dangerous opponents, as in Cahors,39 and on occasion by their own clergy (for instance in the cases of Sidonius Apollinaris40 and later of Leodegar of Autun41), and, as Greg Halfond has noted, by other bishops.42 The most extreme cases of challenge offered to bishops are to be found in the episcopal martyrdoms of the seventh century, studied by Paul Fouracre43 — which are a witness both to the power of the bishop and to the perilous nature of his position: in Fouracre’s words “it was, after all, the power which bishops exercised, and the struggles for power, at local, regional, and supra-regional level, which were behind the killings.”44 Halfond has placed the relations between bishops and the royal court at the start of his recent discussion of the Merovingian episcopate.45 In Francia, episcopal authority was potentially considerable, but although there were some cities that were effectively episcopal republics in the final third of the Merovingian period — notably Auxerre under Savaric46 and Trier under Milo47 — they were the exception rather than the rule.
To judge by the evidence of the Councils of Toledo, the episcopate played an even greater role in Visigothic government and certainly of the formulation of royal rule in Spain than it did in Francia.48 The letter known as the De fisco Barcinonense, which was probably composed in the context of the Second Council of Zaragoza (592), reveals that they also had a role in the oversight of the collection of taxation.49 Despite this, in the seventh century, Visigothic kings (especially Chindaswinth and Recceswinth) were fairly ruthless in their exploitation of the Church.50 There is nothing comparable in the relations between Merovingian kings and their bishops in the seventh century (despite episcopal martyrdoms), although one can see tensions between Guntram and the Burgundian episcopate in the sixth.51
Bischofsherrschaft is a concept, then, that should be invoked with precision and care. Bishops were frequently powerful, but their authority was curtailed by local and supra-regional circumstances. In any case, my present concerns are not simply with the episcopate, but rather with the position of the Church as a whole within the wider society. Christianity did not just impinge on politics — it also had an influence on the fiscal and economic structures of kingdoms. One reason that bishops were potentially powerful that has not been much emphasized in discussions of Bischofsherrschaft is their wealth and the ways in which they might deploy it — not least their charitable actions, although scholars have noted the support that a Church might receive from the matricularii, those on its poor list.52 But, as we have seen, the landed wealth controlled by a bishop could be colossal. It is significant that when Charles Martel broke the power of the bishops of Auxerre, he did so by alienating their estates.53
According to Haldon,
“Christian rulers in the East and the West legitimated the extraction and distribution of surplus […] through political/theological systems of thought which highlighted the duty of the state and its rulers to defend the faith and to promote the variety of associated activities which this entailed […]. This institutional Christianisation of society […] directly affected how labour was exploited and how surpluses were appropriated and consumed.”54
In Haldon’s reading of the early Frankish World, the process begins with the “conquests and extension of Merovingian royal power, together with the institutional and administrative means of extracting wealth which the first Merovingian kings adopted,” which in turn created a class of warriors who invested some of their wealth in “secular property and warfare,” but also “in the Church: bishoprics and the ecclesiastical lands to which they thereby had access, and monastic foundations.”55
Military activity was unquestionably a major issue in the sixth century, as the Merovingians established themselves throughout Gaul, clashed with the Visigoths, and intervened in Italy. Thereafter, however, it is not clear that warfare (as opposed to minor conflict — some of it, admittedly, destructive) was a particularly significant feature of Merovingian society. Certainly, any able-bodied man might find himself called upon to fight,56 but few did with any regularity or for any length of time, and almost all the conflicts that we hear of in the seventh century would seem to have been between the military followings of rival aristocrats. It is surely significant that Charles Martel was actually defeated by the Frisian dux or rex Radbod in 715/716, and that he withdrew from the northern Rhineland until after the Frisian ruler’s death three years later.57 Yet Radbod himself was scarcely in a position to raise a substantial trained army — Frisia was no centralized state, and, in any case, its waterlogged geography militated against it producing large armies.58 When faced with a major military threat, that of the Muslims, it is interesting that Charles had to turn to the Lombard king Liutprand for help — a point that is registered by Paul the Deacon,59 but not in the Frankish chronicles and annals (and therefore overlooked by historians). Unlike the Franks, of course, the Lombards had remained a militarized society throughout the seventh century, because of the threat posed by the Byzantine Exarchate. The much-cited Frankish Marchfield is not mentioned in contemporary sources between the sixth century and 761, which was the start of a sequence of such gatherings.60 The meetings would seem to have been the revival, perhaps even the creation of a political institution. It is by no means clear that the reference to the campus Martius to be found in Gregory’s account of the Vase of Soissons story, when Clovis was inspecting his army, is to an annual institutionalized meeting.61 Although attendance at the bannum when necessary was required by seventh-century law,62 Charles Martel may have initiated much of what we regard as “Merovingian military organization.”
Despite the fact that the Merovingian kingdom was founded on a series of successful wars, in the seventh century it was dominated not by the military, but by the Church. We have noted the significance of the religion for the political life of the regnum, as well as the growth in churches, monasteries, and above all in their possession of property in the post-Roman period. To this we can add the extension of immunities from taxation and from various obligations on ecclesiastical land.
As the Church acquired property, so too it acquired privileg-es. In a law preserved by Eusebius, Constantine exempted clergy from public services.63 In the course of the fourth and fifth centuries churches were exempted from some taxes64 and public services.65 In 359/360 the Council of Rimini exempted Church property from the compulsory provision of public service, and, although the Council was condemned as Arian, its rulings in this respect passed into law.66 Further exemptions from munera sordida, including the menial services of road building and the repair of roads and bridges, were issued from the 380s onwards67 — we are almost in the world of the trinoda necessitas of eighth-century Anglosaxon England (which surely derived from Roman precedent). They could, however, be reimposed: exemptions from public service were removed by Valentinian in the crisis of 441, when the emperor insisted that neither the imperial household nor the Church should be exempt from any compulsory public service because of the burdens faced by other taxpayers.68 It is perhaps not surprising that there is a lack of clarity in the Merovingian period as to whether or not a church was exempt from certain taxes and obligations.
Whether or not there was any significant break in the exemptions enjoyed by the Church, in Francia we find them again already in the canons of I Orléans.69 The property donated by Clovis which yielded the revenue to be divided between the restoration of churches, the bishop, the poor, and the ransom of captives was explicitly granted immunity, both with regard to the land and to the clergy.70 The Praeceptio of Chlothar II provides further detail on the grant of immunity (both fiscal, from public charges, and judicial, from the introitus of a judge). Clause 11 states:
“We grant to the Church out of the devotion of our faith dues from cleared land, from pasturage and the tithe of pigs, so no royal agent or tax collector may have access onto Church property. Public agents should demand no obligation from the Church or from clergy, who deserved immunity from our grandfather or father.”71
Chlothar II, in other words, traced these immunities back to Chlothar I and Chilperic I — that is, to the period after Clovis’s death in 511.
Some immunities were granted to specific religious institutions and were not general concessions to the Church. Gregory tells us that he managed to convince Guntram’s tax collectors that the city of Tours had been exempt from tax since the days of Chlothar I, but those same collectors had just successfully revised the tax lists for Poitiers, which they had updated, and where they had made allowance for the poor and the infirm.72 But although the bishop was involved in the arguments about tax in these instances, it is unclear whether the taxation of ecclesiastical property and of the clergy was actually at issue. There was a disagreement over whether the pauperes and iuniores of the ecclesia and basilica of Tours were exempt from military service — Chilperic eventually agreed that they were,73 but iudices subsequently tried to claim that the homines sancti Martini were liable to serve.74 Certainly the exemption was not general: the Lex Ribvaria lists fines for non-attendance at the bannum, along with a failure to offer hospitality to a royal agent, although a Romanus, a homo regius, and a homo ecclesiasticus was fined at half the rate of the rest of the population75 — but the clear implication is that some churchmen were required to serve in the army. A further illustration of a concession to a particular diocese comes in Gregory’s statement that Childebert II remitted for the diocese of Clermont all taxes “due from churches, monasteries, clergy who were attached to a given parish, and indeed anyone who was employed by the Church.”76
Our most precise evidence for exemptions comes in the charter material of the seventh century. This provides plenty of evidence for the concession of immunities, occasionally to lay persons, but above all to the Church — both episcopal and monastic.77 The great charters of fiscal and judicial immunity have become the backbone of the study of the seventh-century Frankish Church, not least since the studies of Eugen Ewig.78 A number of monasteries are known to have received exemptions from taxes and the performance of public services, and also to have been freed from any interference by secular judges. A further set of episcopal immunities removed certain monasteries from the oversight of the bishop. Many of these grants would have been financially considerably advantageous, but there are also some marvelously specific concessions. The second part of the grant of Chilperic II to Corbie issued in 716 that confirmed the concession of toll income (telloneum) at the southern port of Fos, which we have already noted, also deals with the exemption from toll for 10 of the monastery’s couriers (viredus sive paraveridus), and with them 10 loaves of good bread and of coarse bread, a modius of wine, 2 modii of beer, 10 pounds of bacon, 20 pounds of other meat, 12 pounds of cheese, a goat, 5 chickens, 10 eggs, 2 pounds of oil, 1 pound of garum, an ounce of pepper, 2 ounces of cumin, as well as sufficient salt, greens, and wood.79 In other words, the couriers could take subsistence for their journeys with them.
The concessions made to the Church certainly annoyed some kings. Famously, according to Gregory of Tours, Chilperic I complained that “my treasury is always empty. All our wealth has fallen into the hands of the Church. There is no one with any power left except the bishops. Nobody respects me as king: all respect has passed to bishops in their cities.”80 Gregory presents the king as being unreasonable (and irreligious), but there is good reason for thinking that he had a valid point. In the previous generation, Chramn had been advised by Leo that the churches of saints Martial and Martin had denuded the royal treasury.81 There is some evidence that Dagobert I secularized some Church property.82 But this assault on ecclesiastical land-holding cannot have amounted to much. And in any case, kings continued to endow the Church with property, and the late seventh century would seem to mark a highpoint in the granting of immunities. But essentially, because the Franks were not involved in large-scale foreign wars between the early seventh century and the arrival of the Arabs, the Merovingians had no need for the revenues that the Church had acquired. What they needed to do was to serve God, and this they did pretty well. In doing so, they facilitated the emergence of an ecclesiastical economy. In the words of Alexander C. Murray, the immunities reveal that the Merovingian State “employed fiscal means to encourage religious works, and in the seventh century, to judge by surviving charters, to finance the liturgical activities of clerics praying solemnly for the health of the kingdom and its king.”83 This comes remarkably close to the criteria of a temple society laid down by Appadurai and Appadurai Breckenridge.
A further comparison with southern India, as described by Isabelle Clark-Decès, is striking:
medieval royal gifts indicate a peculiar cultural conception of statecraft that involves neither (or involves minimally) the use of large standing armies nor of elaborate bureaucracies […] the Pallava and Cola kings […] were less interested in conquering and administering the lives of their subjects, than in dramatizing their generosity, and hence political superiority, through the construction of enormous temple complexes, and the patronage of temple worship.84
Although the scale of the Indian temple complexes dwarfs any-thing in the Merovingian world, the description is otherwise applicable to the states of the early medieval West. On the other hand, it contrasts with another model of a temple society discussed by Haldon, that of the Vijayanagar Empire, as interpreted by Burton Stein (though one might note that Stein has not been universally accepted),85 which, unlike the interpretation of the Pallava and Cola kingdoms, does place some emphasis on the military: “Political authority, and the potential to extract resources in the Vijayanagar Empire, depended on a combination of military/political coercion and connections of a ritual nature .”86 Other studies, like that of the early medieval Kalukyan State based on the temple of Draksarama by P.S. Kanaka Durga and Y.A. Sudhakar Reddy, have placed the mobilization of warriors at the heart of a temple society: “the temple provided human resources to the caste society, which, in turn gradually made use of the services of […] militant tribes and drew them into statecraft.”87 Although the “military/political coercion” to be seen in the seventh-century Merovingian world was relatively slight, this was not the case elsewhere.
The Frankish Church would seem to have been unusual in the exemptions and immunities it received from the State, although there are parallels to be drawn with Anglosaxon England, where churches in the early eighth century were exempt from certain services, most notably that to provide fighting men.88 This was not the case in Visigothic Spain, at least by the end of the seventh century. According to the Life of Fructuosus of Braga, so many men joined his foundation at Nono that the local dux was worried about military recruitment.89 Shortly thereafter, how-ever, in a law of Wamba from 675, clergy were explicitly required to serve in the army when necessity demanded.90 This, however, was rescinded by Erwig six years later, which only put the obligation to fight on the dux, comes, and gardingus, omitting the episcopus sive etiam in quocumque ecclesiastico ordine constitutus.91 Equally, churches were obliged to pay some taxes, despite the fact that in 633, on Sisenand’s instructions, the bishops at IV Toledo announced tax-exemptions for all free-born clerics.92 In XVI Toledo from 693 bishops were forbidden from drawing on parish revenues to pay exactiones or angaria (transport dues).93 As E.A. Thompson noted, this is the one direct piece of evidence from the seventh century to suggest that the Visigothic Church was subject to tax.94 There is, moreover, no indication that clergy could avoid paying the census, which was demanded from all landowners, with no exception specified.95 In his survey of Visigothic taxation, Santiago Castellanos invokes Haldon’s model of the “Tributary Mode,” and its value for understanding “political relations in the distribution of surplus production.”96 Unlike Francia, however, Visigothic Spain does not bear much comparison with the model of a temple society as defined by Appadurai and Appadurai Breckenridge, although there are other models which perhaps come closer.
In his discussion of temple societies, Haldon contrasts the Byzantine World with that of the South Indian temples. He notes the importance in the Empire of liturgy and ritual for the expression of the symbolic order, which clearly does stand some comparison with the Indian situation.97 Here the Merovingian world could scarcely compete, despite the regular expression of prayers for the king and for the state, and also despite Simon Loseby’s observation that “[e]very [Frankish] city had its own liturgical round, orchestrated by the bishop […]. It was on feast days, in particular, that the city-community came together to join the great and the good in procession, to exchange their surplus at market, and in hopeful expectation of miraculous happenings in and around the churches of the saints.”98 Haldon notes the importance in Byzantium of the closeness of Church and State, but he goes on to argue that “in this particular historical formation, and in contrast to the South Indian examples, it did not express itself also, or serve as, a key institution of surplus distribution necessary to the economic survival of the state institution.”99 I would argue, however, that compared with the Merovingian State, the Byzantine Exarchate in Italy did depend on the redistribution of surplus from estates that had been donated to the Church.100
The difference between Francia and the Exarchate is apparent from a strikingly under-exploited passage to be found in a letter sent by Gregory the Great to kings Theudebert II and Theuderic II, to which Murray has drawn attention:
“We have heard that the properties of churches do not pay taxes, and we marvel greatly at this circumstance if there is a desire to receive illicit gains [that is simony] from those [that is bishops] to whom licit gains [that is taxes] are transferred.”101
Gregory clearly expected the Church to pay tax, and he was surprised that the churches of Francia did not do so.102
There are a number of references to taxation in Gregory the Great’s Register, which give an indication of the range of taxes to which the Church of the Exarchate and its tenants might be subject. In one letter the pope refers to the sextariaticum (a maritime tax covering risk), an exactio which could amount to 73 and a half solidi, a grain levy, pondera excepta and vilicilia (steward’s taxes), burdatio (public tax on cultivated land), and a tax levied on farmers when they married.103 Some of these were levies raised by the Church or its agents, but some were State taxes, and these could be very high. In a letter to the empress Constantina, Gregory commented that some Corsicans were finding the tax burden so heavy that they were moving to Lombard territory.104 Despite the details, however, nothing in the Register allows a sense of the overall scale of tax-paying, although Tom Brown argued that “at a time when civilian tax-payers were impoverished by war and the state was fighting for its life against the Lombards, ecclesiastical property was called upon to make a major contribution to the government’s revenues.”105 But Gregory does mention a loan of 600 pounds of gold to the Exarch.106
We get some sense of the burden from the Liber Pontificalis, where we hear that Justinian II remitted the annonocapita/annonacapita (poll-tax) for Sicily and Calabria during the pontificate of John V (685–686), and 200 annonocapita for Bruttium and Lucania during that of Conon (686–687).107 In the account of this last pontificate we also hear of the return of the dependents of the Roman patrimony taken as a pledge for the payment of tax arrears. A further indication of the significance of the tax paid by the papacy to the empire is to be found in Gregory II’s threat of a tax boycott in c. 724–726, recorded by the Liber Pontificalis,108 and by Theophanes, who notes:
“When Gregory, the Pope of Rome, had been informed of this [‘the removal of the holy and venerable icons’], he withheld the taxes of Italy and Rome and wrote to Leo a doctrinal letter.”109
The pope subsequently distributed particularly large amounts of money to the poor, to prevent the Exarch Eutychius getting hold of it.110 Even more striking is the evidence provided by Theophanes on the supposed confiscation of papal estates in Sicily by the emperor Leo III, and his demand that the tenants pay three and a half talents of gold to the treasury:111
“Now the emperor, who was furious with the pope for the secession of Rome and Italy […] imposed a capitation tax on one third of the people of Sicily and Calabria.112 As for the so-called Patrimonies of the holy chief apostles who are honored in the Elder Rome (these, amounting to three and a half talents of gold, had been from olden times paid to the churches), he ordered them to be paid to the Public Treasury.”113
The Chronicle of Theophanes dates this expropriation to 731/732, but as Wolfram Brandes has argued (not least because of the silence of the Liber Pontificalis), the date is probably incorrect — and the loss of the papal estates should be placed much later in the century.114
More specific is the evidence for Ravenna.115 From a fragmentary papyrus we learn that at some point between 565 and 570 the Church of Ravenna received 2,171.5 solidi from some property (probably part of the former Gothic territory granted by Justinian), of which 932.5 solidi went to the comes patrimonii and a further 1,153.5 to the prefect, leaving 85.5 solidi.116 Agnellus reveals that the Ravenna Church paid 15,000 solidi to the Empire out of the revenue of its Sicilian estates117 — that is very nearly half of the total yield of 31,000.118 This, we are told, was an annual payment. In other words, the Empire received large amounts of revenue from the Church.
Tom Brown has argued that the Empire granted out lands to the Church in exchange for tax and rents:
“This policy was followed precisely because the alternative of entrusting state property to secular officials involved a serious risk of alienation, especially since the whole centralised machinery of domanial administrators and palatine inspectors was breaking down.”119
Although this is highly likely, it is largely an argument from silence: there are numerous references in Gregory the Great’s letters to agents of the imperial patrimony, but very few thereafter. We do, however, have extraordinary evidence for leases agreed by the Church of Ravenna. The tenth-century Codex Bavarus or Breviarium ecclesiae Ravennatis details the land transactions of the Church in 8 territoria of central Italy — largely in the Marche. This deals with 168 transactions (mainly leases, but also a handful of donations), most of which are unfortunately undated. In the period of the Exarchate we know of 10 transactions from the episcopate of Damian (692–709)120 and 14 from that of Sergius (744–769).121 We also hear of grants to the exarch Theodore Calliopa, who was in post 643–645, and again from 653–666, from both the Codex Bavarus,122 and from the Ravenna papyri, where he was granted the lease of a property that his father had originally donated to the Church.123 Theodore is known from Agnellus to have built a monastery dedicated to his name-sake, in the region of the city known as the Chalchi, and he was a patron of the church of Sta. Maria ad Blachernas.124
Tom Brown describes the papyrus contract between Theodore and the Church of Ravenna as an emphyteutic lease.125 These were long-term leases, originally of estates of the imperial patrimony. We find, for instance, in a law of Theodosius from 393:
“The emphyteutic right, by which landed estates belonging to our patrimonial domain or the privy purse are assigned to possessors in perpetuity, is maintained, not only by our orders but also by those of our predecessors, as so indefeasible that once an estate has been delivered, it can never be occupied by Us or by anyone else while the others are in possession.”126
The books of the Corpus Iuris Civilis have numerous clauses on emphyteusis, including a full title on “emphyteutical contracts and leases.”127 The basic significance of emphyteutic leases is contained in a law of Gordian: “It is perfectly evident that the possessor of land under emphyteusis cannot be deprived of the same without his consent, if the rent is paid regularly at the time it is due.”128 In other words, an emphyteutic lease had the advantage for the lessee that the lease was permanent, and for the lessor that the revenue could be guaranteed. From the government’s point of view, this also meant that they could be relied upon to provide their required services. A law of Constantine from 323 states that emphyteutic farms “shall be considered exempt from all extraordinary burdens, so that they shall pay only the regular and customary dues.”129 But in the straightened circumstances of 416, a law of Honorius and Theodosius II states that: “no house […] subject to emphyteutic right […] shall be exempt from such a compulsory public service”130 — that is, from regular taxation.
Although it would seem that in origin emphyteutic leases were associated with the imperial patrimony, a law of Valentinian, Theodosius, and Arcadius also envisages that they could be issued by churches.131 Even more significantly for territory under the control of the Byzantine emperor, in a Novel of 544 Justin-ian enshrined in law the right of churches to make emphyteutic grants.132 Not surprisingly, the wording of the ecclesiastical contracts seems to have been modelled on that of the imperial chancery.133 Tom Brown has suggested that ecclesiastical leases in Italy were made with the encouragement of the government, which would clearly benefit from the regular oversight of the payment of services134 — the empire was effectively using the Church as an agent,135 much as it was using the Church to continue State evergetism — as in Justinian’s order that pope Vigilius supervise the distribution of the annona civica. Brown has also argued that bishops used grants of land to gain influence over generals, citing the very favorable lease offered to Theodore Calliopa.136 The result was the economic interdependence of the Church and the military.137
Brown offers a reading of the material which is one that is essentially seen through the eyes of the State. It is significant that his main statement of the case is to be found in a monograph entitled Gentlemen and Officers. The same case might equally be made with greater ecclesiastical emphasis — the key players would then be Churchmen and Officers. This fits with F. Homes Dudden’s insistence that Gregory the Great saw no distinction between Church and State.138 And here a model of a temple society — albeit not necessarily that of Appadurai and Appadurai Breckenridge — is worth bearing in mind.
There is good reason for putting considerable emphasis on the Church. If we take the Codex Bavarus, which is one of the main sources to show the support given by the Church to the military, we should note how small a percentage of the leases is granted to military officers. In its 168 entries I have noted 8 references to magistri militum,139 8 (or 9) to duces,140 14 to tribuni,141 2 to gastalds,142 and 1 each to a vicarius numeri, a miles numeri, an auctenta numeri, an exercitalis, and to a scabinus143 — in other words, military men appear in approximately 20 percent of the leases and donations listed in the Codex. Moreover, 2 of the leases in question were granted to ex-tribuni,144 and 4 were to the widows of military men.145 And on a number of occasions the soldier is only one petitioner among several for property — the others sometimes being named as relatives, some of whom were also clerics. Interestingly, women are listed in almost all of the contracts, either as wives (even of clergy), widows, or as daughters — the significance of the wives and widows is clear from the fact that conjugalis is among the most common descriptors to be found in the text. Hardly any of the leases can be dated to the period before the end of the Exarchate, and some of them are unquestionably later, but 10 are from the episcopate of Damian (692–709)146 and 14 from that of Sergius (744–769),147 and there is no reason to think that all the undated leases listed (which constitute the majority) relate to a later period. In other words, support for soldiers and veterans is present, but the Codex Bavarus is a document of Church economics, not of military finance. Moreover, alongside all the leases listed in the Codex Bavarus, there are also donations to the Church of Ravenna, including one by a tribunus and another by a gastald.148 And if we turn to the Ravenna papyri, we find the grants of a spatarius from c. 600,149 another from the son of a general from 625,150 and a third from a soldier from 629.151
The army surely dominated the Exarchate to an extent that it did not dominate late-seventh-century Francia, not least because of the ever-present threat of the Lombards — Tom Brown has estimated that most of land of the peninsula was in the hands of the Church or of military commanders.152 But if we are thinking, as anthropologists do, of redistributive processes, it is the Church which has the greater role to play.
But while one needs to treat the significance of emphyteutic leases for the support of the military in Italy with a slight amount of caution, it is worth noting that the model of ecclesiastical support for the military would take on much greater significance in Francia in the course of the eighth century. The leases of the Codex Bavarus have the title petitio: at least in theory the lease was a response to a petition. In origin, the same is true of the precaria.153 Legal historians have insisted emphyteutic leases and precaria are indistinguishable.154 I am not sure that a Merovingian abbot would have agreed — he would have hoped that any grant of land he was obliged to make to a layman was not permanent, or at least was limited to a small number of generations. And in this he would have had the support of Justinian and Isidore, both of whom saw precaria as temporary concessions of usufruct.155
I would, nevertheless, suggest that it is worth considering the precaria that Merovingian abbeys and dioceses were forced to make by Charles Martel alongside Tom Brown’s interpretation of the emphyteutic leases in the Exarchate. According to the Gesta abbatum Fontanellensium, an inventory of the holdings of the monastery of St. Wandrille was drawn up in 787, according to which 2,120 out of 4,264 mansi were let out as precaria at the time156 — in fact, if one adds up the figures provided in the text, the upper number is incorrect and should read 3,964.157 We are given greater detail on the properties granted out to comes Ratharius during the abbacy of Teutsind.158 These included 3 large estates and vineyards that had been given by king Childeric II, together with other properties, totaling 29 domaines. Among other churches that suffered in the course of the secularization of property under Charles Martel was that of Auxerre, where, according to the Gesta Pontificum Autissiodorensium, the bishop was left with 100 mansi, the rest being divided up between 6 principes baioarios.159 It would seem that the beneficiaries of the precaria were often men who might be called upon to fulfil military obligations.
The secularizations of the eighth century, in both Francia and England, seem to have been sizeable.160 But they were probably necessary, at least in Francia, where the Muslim threat presented a totally new challenge to the Franks, who for almost a century had enjoyed comparative peace, even if factions, religious and secular, had been in competition, which sometimes spilled over into violence. The actions of Charles Martel certainly struck a blow at the economic power of bishops and abbots. But in the course of the later eighth and ninth centuries there would be some redress: Herlihy’s estimate of the extent of Church land in the ninth century is not unlike the estimate I have given for the seventh.161 In fact, Charles Martel did not intend to under-mine the centrality of the Church within the Christian society of the Franks — he was concerned primarily with ensuring that it supported his followers: it was still to play a crucial role in the process of the redistribution of landed resources. He himself donated the royal estate of Clichy to St. Denis in 741,162 and over the following decade Pippin III started to uphold the same monastery’s claims to property.163 A charter issued in 751 was, in Michael Wallace-Hadrill’s words, “like wholesale restitution.”164 Pippin also issued legislation protecting monastic property at the Council of Soissons in 744.165 And it is worth remembering that the second most substantial will from the Merovingian period is that of Abbo, a close supporter of Charles, who left the majority of his vast landed wealth to his foundation of No-valesa in 739.166 The Council of Estinnes, authorized by Pippin’s brother Carloman in 743, recognized the need for support for the army in a time of crisis, but put strict limits on the use of precaria.167
Scholars have, of course, long been aware that the Merovingian and Carolingian Churches were very rich, as indeed was the Church of Rome and that of Ravenna. But, on the whole, they have not seen the accumulation of wealth as leading to a distinctive pattern of economic distribution. I have tried to suggest, however, that to reduce the wealth of the Church to being no more than a segment of the elite is to fail to register the extent to which it was an integral part of a socio-economic structure that was dominated by the priorities of Christianity. These priorities, the performance of cult and the provision of charity, were funded with the income from perhaps a third of the property of the post-Roman West — although in the Exarchate a good proportion of that revenue was also transferred to the State. Many churchmen may have been decidedly unchristian in their personal actions, but the injunctions of the Gospel, which I have cited on numerous occasions, were nevertheless hugely influential. In order to appreciate the nature of the early medieval economy it is more useful, I have argued, to turn to the models of temple societies that have been constructed by anthropologists, than it is to invoke modern western economic theory. And, one might note, that the temple societies of southern India provide examples of the integration of the military into the equation.
The temple societies of western Europe did not emerge over-night, with the conversion of Constantine: indeed, I have tried to suggest that the fundamental notion of supporting religion with landed endowment was relatively slow in taking hold, not least because the Gospels provided no guidance on the possession of land (indeed they challenged it). The emergence of a landed Church instead went hand in hand with the establishment of churches and the recruitment of clergy: the endowment of the Church which effectively ended in the establishment of temple societies in some areas of the early medieval West took place over a period of centuries. But the process of redistribution, which anthropologists have seen as essential to their models, did not follow the same line in all parts of the post-Roman West. The economic process was different in Francia from what it was in the Exarchate. Anglosaxon England would seem to have had much in common with Francia, to judge by the secularizations of the early eighth century,168 but, although its Christianity may have been influenced from the continent, it was largely a new import of the early seventh century. Spain looks curiously different — but how much the difference is a matter of social reality, how much it reflects the source material, and how much it is the result of historiographical traditions is an interesting question. Despite the variety all these areas had one thing in common — churches that came, in the course of the sixth and seventh centuries, to be hugely well endowed with land, and which used the revenues from that land to support kingdoms that made some attempt to abide by a set of religious and ethical concerns that had only entered the mainstream in the early fourth century. The grand narrative of Western Civilization tends to lead us to see the emergence of Christian society as perfectly straightforward. Looking at the post-Roman period through the prism of models created to understand the temple societies of India helps us to break away from a rather teleological vision, and to have a sharper appreciation of some of the more distinctive aspects of the socio-economic structures of the early medieval West.
See endnotes and bibliography at source
Chapter 6 (149-182) from The Christian Economy in the Early Medieval West: Towards a Temple Society, by Ian N. Wood (Punctum Books, 02.14.2022), published by Punctum Books under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.