‘Governing the world by writing’ is the intriguing title of a recent book about the late antique and medieval papacy. The subtitle reveals it to be about relations with Dalmatia only,Footnote ¹ but the concept is applicable to the present work, which tries to explain how the papacy governed the world, in its religious aspects at least, by means of documents. The ‘power’ with which the book is concerned is ‘power to’ more than ‘power over’.Footnote ² ‘Protocol’ in the title is understood in a sense transferred from the world of computing as ‘A (usually standardised) set of rules governing the exchange of data’ (Oxford English Dictionary). The implicit analogy with software is not inappropriate, since an argument running through the book will be that cleverly designed systems compensated for the inadequacies of the ‘hardware’ of papal government – for its lack of a properly financed bureaucratic infrastructure.

The title does not refer to the parts of medieval documents called the ‘protocol’Footnote ³ by specialists in Dipomatics (called Diplomatic in the U.K.),Footnote ⁴ though that discipline is the key method used in the book. The discipline is devoted to understanding the structure and setting or genesis of documents. It is one of the twin pillars of the training of medieval historians, alongside Palaeography. Diplomatics should really be part of the training not just of medievalists but of anyone using documents for research, as it is a very general methodology. Yet there is no general treatise on Diplomatics in English, and the generally good book-length treatises in other scholarly languages are technical textbooks well insulated from the historical interpretation to which Diplomatics can make crucial contributions.

On specifically papal Diplomatics, R. L. Poole’s decent study of the papal Chancery, over a limited period, is over a century oldFootnote ⁵ – and it has been a long century full of major highly relevant papers. As noted in the Preface, the excellent book-length treatises in German, Italian and French that focus specifically on papal Diplomatics are rigorously ‘pure’ and uncontaminated by application to substantive history. They do not try to answer a central historical question about a phenomenon unique in world history, namely, how did the papacy govern the religious life of Europe without the financial and military resources of a secular state?

Letters with ‘little power of implementation’Footnote ⁶ poured out from the curia to regions from Norway to Sicily and Poland to Portugal, solicited and accepted, yet the popes had few and risibly weak battalions and for most of the period lacked financial resources commensurate with its authority. ‘The medieval Church was a state’, according to Frederic William Maitland’s famous dictum.Footnote ⁷ But this was a paradox to wake his readers up to its character as a European government. Unlike ‘real’ states its military powers of enforcement were minimal except where its own modest-sized central Italian state was concerned. Generally speaking, states need the sanction of physical force. The papacy could not deploy the latter outside its own lands.

The small secular state, the ‘Lands of St. Peter’, gave it independence from other secular states, but the resources of this third-rate principality were required for its own governance: the income from the papal state was not commensurate with government on a European scale, especially in the wake of the eleventh-century ‘papal turn’, with the intensification of papal involvement in the life of the Church which followed a few decades after it. Again, it is true that the papacy began to raise direct taxes on ecclesiastics, initially for crusades. Such taxes did not solve the problem of paying for government, however: for one thing, kings learned how to cream off the lion’s share of papal direct taxes; for another, popes regarded the autonomy of the papal state in central Italy as indispensable for independence (probably an accurate assessment) and had to haemorrhage money to pay for Italian wars, above all against emperors who had non-negligible claims to authority in Italy. Furthermore, the cities of the papal states were politically volatile. In the fourteenth century the papacy for a while gave up trying to rule from Rome and moved to the more central Avignon, which belonged to the kingdom of Naples, which was in turn held as a papal fief. In this period papal income was hugely enhanced by taxes on benefices vacated under specified conditions.

Had the papacy been content to remain at Avignon for good, without attempting to reconquer the papal states, a well-funded bureaucracy might have been on the cards. For a while, popes maintained ‘the fiction that Rome in a curial sense attended on the pope’,Footnote ⁸ and a capacity to design governmental systems was undoubtedly in evidence, as will become clear. The ingenuity was, however, deployed to find substitute systems for proper salaried bureaucracy, which could not be afforded. As the money flowed in from the new sources of revenue, it also flowed out. Separation from Rome was widely felt to be inappropriate, and popes fought expensive wars to re-establish control of the papal states.

To put it crudely, the drain of these wars on papal finances cancelled out the income from benefices. In fact, the papacy never really had a fiscal base capable of supporting a conventional government on a Europe-wide scale, at least under the Ancien Régime. In the Renaissance period and after, it resorted to the expedient of sale of offices. Though this did have some sociological compensations, to be explored in Chapter 5, it was a desperate measure from a rational financial point of view.

Thus the papacy lacked the money to pay either for a proper bureaucracy or for military resources to back up a bureaucracy’s authority. Given that, the question of how the papacy coped with a Europe-wide governmental burden is central, and it cannot be answered without the help of Diplomatics. It is what I will call ‘Hageneder’s question’, after the Austrian scholar Othmar Hageneder who posed it more clearly than anyone, and answered it with reference to one class of papal documents,Footnote ⁹ using Diplomatics, an approach the present volume tries to extend to other genres and a longer period. Mutatis mutandis, ‘Hageneder’s question’ needs to be asked about Late Antiquity and the earlier Middle Ages too, as also about the post-Schism and post-Trent periods.

In Late Antiquity and the first medieval centuries popes issued decrees with the aplomb of Roman emperors but with none of the power the emperors had enjoyed. What kind of power did popes have? Diplomatics can tell us that it was the power of ‘responsive’ governments, answering rather than initiating, and also that the prooemia of the responses were a channel through which the apostolic see poured its image into the minds of those to whom it responded, and of the readers of canon law collections into which their responses were incorporated.

There was again an asymmetry between impact and resources – analogous to the high and late medieval disparity though on a vastly lower quantitative level – from the time of Charlemagne to the generation before the mid-eleventh-century ‘papal turn’. Paving the way for the turn was a steady demand for papal documents from the localities. Documents were produced, but sometimes in shockingly poor Latin. Apparently the papacy could not count on scribes and administrators who knew their grammar. Diplomatics can tell us why papal documents did not lose their power to impress. In a nutshell, the answer is that their physical appearance was remarkable and impressive, and the script in which they were written so archaic as to be practically illegible. Much more on all this below.

We need to ask how the papacy was administratively capable of exercising so much power. One answer which may spring to the mind of modernists will not work: fear of spiritual sanctions cannot explain the phenomenon. Such fear did indeed play a part from the late eleventh century on, but it was a result rather than a cause of the growth of papal government. To project back to Late Antiquity or the early Middle Ages the profile and prestige of the high medieval papacy is to put the cart before the horse. So how did the papacy acquire that prestige in the first place? Furthermore, even granted the fear of spiritual sanctions which certainly did count for something eventually, how on earth did the papacy cope with the sheer pressure of business that we can see was thrust upon it?

Elements of the answer are in fact at hand in a plethora of highly specialised monographs and technical articles, mostly by German and Austrian historians.Footnote ¹⁰ Medieval papal Diplomatics seems to have been a field attractive to Protestant and belief-neutral scholars as well as to Catholics, perhaps because of the appeal of doing research in Rome. Even this impressive German-language scholarship is not, however, brought together within a single book-shaped frame.

A central aim of this book is to make a picture out of these pieces of the puzzle: to synthesise the rich and impressive but scattered scholarship on medieval papal Diplomatics and to show how they cumulatively answer ‘Hageneder’s question’. I try to do this with regular reference to unpublished original documents which this scholarship can illuminate.

To extend the chronological range of applied Diplomatics is a further aim. Even the rich German-language scholarship on Diplomatics seldom trespasses outside the period between Gregory the Great (c. 600) and the Reformation. For the problem in hand, however, these are not natural limits. As a renowned Marxist historian long ago observed: ‘triumphant in late Antiquity, dominant in feudalism, decadent and renascent under capitalism, the Roman Church has survived every other institution – cultural, political, juridical or linguistic – historically coeval with it’.Footnote ¹¹ His words about ‘the Roman Church’ are especially pertinent to the papacy, and the Diplomatics of its documents are part of the explanation. But the explanation has to extend back before and on after the medieval period as traditionally understood (roughly, 500–1500). In an ideal world the analysis would penetrate into contemporary history, but I have let it peter out where my first-hand familiarity with manuscript sources dries up. Any scholar who claimed to be on top of all the sources for papal history for even a much more limited period would be a blatant liar, but I have done serious sampling and transcribing of papal documents into the early modern period.Footnote ¹²

In summary, as already stated in the Preface: the book tries to show what the technical discipline of papal Diplomatics can contribute to an explanation of how the papacy could meet the demand for its practical authority, from c. 400 to c. 1600.

Diplomatics can supply several keys to the problem of how the papacy ruled so much of Europe’s religious life. For one thing, Diplomatics underpins the now generally accepted folk-theorem that the growth of papal government was demand-driven. It is easy to assume that there was an eventually successful then finally self-destructive top-down ideological campaign (an interpretation eloquently articulated though not invented by the late Walter Ullmann). But Diplomatics has shown that this was not the case. It is true that popes did propagate Petrine ideology in their replies, but they seldom initiated communication. Every specialist in high medieval papacy will now tell you that its government was ‘responsive’. That works for earlier periods too, as far back as the third century, even. In the Church at Rome the idea of office charisma invested in the successor of St. Peter goes back very early. At first it was probably not widely shared, at least as understood in Rome, by other Churches in the Roman empire, but in the West, especially, there was a demand for papal services which could be turned into a belief in the office charisma.

In Late Antiquity the papacy found itself acting as a kind of help-desk in a complex religious world made up of autonomous and often fast evolving sub-systems: the religious year, key rituals like baptism, heresy, penance, celibacy, monasticism, Christological doctrine. There was uncertainty over whether this or that evolution was legitimate, and about the incompatibilities that tended to arise between different sub-systems as they evolved with lives of their own. The first general council, Nicaea 325, resolved a series of uncertainties and became a paradigm for how to do so. General councils could not easily work, however, without an emperor to get the bishops together and keep them focussed on finding solutions. In the late fourth and fifth centuries the collapse of the Western empire left a demand without the means of satisfying it through councils, which had for some decades been meeting that need. Instead, bishops looked to the apostolic see (as what we now called the papacy then called itself), which already had a special standing because it was in the former capital of the empire and claimed succession from the leader of the apostles. This is not to say that the apostolic see had anything like the status it would later acquire. The driving force behind requests for responses was a need felt especially by bishops to resolve the uncertainties that beset them.

The foregoing has been argued elsewhere,Footnote ¹³ but it is only the start of an explanation. Adopting a methodology articulated by another Austrian historian, Heinrich Fichtenau, we need to understand the impact of the arengae or prooemia to papal documents. When the apostolic see replied to bishops, answering their questions, they prefaced their replies with arengae, preambles, that emphasised papal authority. Belief that the bishop of Rome was successor to St. Peter, the leader of the apostles, went back into the mists of time in Rome itself: as A. H. M. Jones put it: ‘… from an early date the bishops of Rome claimed a pre-eminent position in the church, and … they claimed it as successors of Peter, the prince of the apostles’.Footnote ¹⁴ Some papal responses were prefaced with strong statements about the apostolic see’s authority. These were incorporated into the canon law collections that were put together at the turn of the fifth and sixth centuries, and which circulated widely in the early medieval West. They were also included in the ninth-century ‘False Decretals’, or ‘Pseudo-Isidore’, which included many genuine decretals from Late Antiquity. Pseudo-Isidore was widely copied and transmitted these arengae to a still wider public. Together with the decretal tradition itself they constitute a causal chain, converging to be sure with other causal chains,Footnote ¹⁵ that explains the willingness of so many people to respond to the movement known as the ‘papal turn’, or, more traditionally, the Gregorian Reform. The idea of papal ‘office charisma’ became more deeply embedded in mentalities, building on a foundation laid, notably, by arengae and related ideological content in papal decretals going back centuries: ideological papal arengae go back before the fall of the Roman empire in the West.

Not long after that a new kind of document contributed to the growth of papal prestige. By the end of the sixth century, monasteries with large landholdings had become a key part of Christian life. They sought and obtained privileges from kings but also from popes. Those papal privileges were extraordinarily impressive as material objects. They were several metres long, on papyrus (at a time when parchment had become the normal ‘support’ for writing), and written in strange archaic script, the ‘Roman Curiale’, that hardly anyone could read other than the scribes themselves. The very aspect of these documents was a source of papal prestige.

In the course of the eleventh century these papyrus privileges were phased out, for reasons to be discussed below. The visual impact of the parchment privileges that replaced them was also exceedingly striking. New forms continued the tradition of documentary manifestation of papal authority.

In the twelfth century more and more workaday documents were required, in response to a snowballing demand for papal judgments and favours underpinned by a now widespread belief in papal office charisma. Twelfth-century English monarchs from Henry II on were experiencing similar demand for their services, but they had a tightly controlled administrative and financial system at their disposal. Counties and sheriffs were part of an integrated royal system, but bishops and dioceses were not integrated into a papal system in anything like the same way, and never would be. In administrative and financial terms there never was a ‘medieval Church’, but a multitude of more-or-less autonomous systems held together by the Latin language and belief in the apostolic see, alongside demand for the latter’s services. The question was, how to meet that demand?

Explaining how that demand was met is, as hinted above, a key contribution of papal Diplomatics. As one cannot sufficiently emphasise, the papacy did not have a bureaucracy funded by monetary taxation, as the English monarchs did (to oversimplify somewhat). For reasons adumbrated above, that possibility was not open to the papacy. Nonetheless, the documentary productivity of the papacy from the later twelfth century on was extraordinary, and technical Diplomatics is the key to understanding how it was managed. It is a complex story but some red threads run through it. The papal court showed great ingenuity in devising systems that minimised the need for thinking at the centre and outsourced the thinking to unpaid ad hoc ‘honoratiores’, able men acting without pay. The administrative costs at the centre were paid for stage by stage, rather than through a ‘taxation and salary system’ such as underpins the governments of virtually all states today. Finally, ecclesiastical benefices supported absentee officials, something that was regarded as morally dubious by moralisers in the period itself and by its modern historians, though it can be argued that both have imperfectly understood the benefice system and its patchwork uneven character – there was huge variation in the value of benefices – so that some of the moralisation can give place to in-depth explanation. Never assume that people understand their own society!

Here papal Diplomatics merges into straightforward historical interpretation, but for present purposes at least that is a good thing. As a glance at its history shows, ‘Diplomatics’ started as a technique for detecting forgery, then evolved into a broader study of the structure and setting of documents. The final stage has been the realisation of the symbiotic relation between the ‘auxiliary science’ and mainstream history. Diplomatics is not a handmaid but integral to historical understanding of the papacy.

As suggested above, Diplomatics ought to be de rigueur in the use of any kind of historical document of any period. It identifies the performative efficacy in the world of a document – which often means its legal force. Its history as a discipline dates from the seventeenth century, but papal Diplomatics has a pre-history of acuity on the part of some popes in assessing the authenticity of this or that document.Footnote ¹⁶

Given that Diplomatics is a discipline that can be applied to almost any kind of document or historical problem, some delimitation of the remit of the present study may be forgiven. In this and the following chapters the focus will be on papal letters which are ‘witnesses to processes of a legal nature’, to quote one of the greatest ever specialists in the field, Harry Bresslau.Footnote ¹⁷ Margaret Meserve has pointed out in the period covered here, after the invention of printing, printed papal documents were not ‘published’ in the legal sense, even though the papacy made early and frequent use of the new medium. ‘Roman printers began to publish the texts of papal decrees quickly enough, but … a bull … was still considered officially published only when it was copied out on parchment and posted on a circuit of important doors.’Footnote ¹⁸ Thus the important story she tells about the papacy and printing lies outside our scope.

The ‘legal force’ litmus test brings in documents commanding acceptance of a doctrine, but not all the types of source included in the comprehensive definition Leonard Boyle (discussed below). Excluded from the book’s remit are records relating to financial administration,Footnote ¹⁹ and documents which do not attempt to affect what is lawful or unlawful: papal letters conducting what one might call religious diplomacy, and/or to ‘admonish, exhort, and console’.Footnote ²⁰ Such letters survive throughout the period that concerns us, and from the period well before we get letters with intended legal force. (We have a non-trivial body of letters by bishops of Rome, Liberius (352–366) and Damasus I (366–384)Footnote ²¹ – both controversial figures in different ways – from the pre-decretal period.) Ordinary letters of this sort can be interpreted with what might be called the ‘Diplomatics of common sense’, in that these letters are not so different qua sources from modern communications by rulers. In an ideal world these classes of sources would have been included, though traditional Diplomatics also tends to marginalise them. On the other hand, the registration, at the centre, of documents with legal force and, where available, the records of discussions that lay behind such documents are included. They certainly help us understand how the papacy ran a world government without the resources of a state.

Chapter 2, ‘The History of Papal Diplomatics’, traces the evolution of Diplomatics as a discipline.Footnote ²² It begins in the seventeenth century, an age of antiquarian scholarship, with an argument between a Jesuit and a Benedictine monk about the genuineness of charters. The Benedictine’s seminal treatise De Re Diplomatica gave the discipline an identity, the core of which is preserved in treatises on ‘pure’ Diplomatics, and also specifically on papal Diplomatics, up to the present day. The discipline’s boundaries did not remain static, however, and already in the eighteenth century a tradition of applying Diplomatics to substantive historical problems had begun, at the university of Göttingen. In the post-War world the contours of applied Diplomatics as a method were carefully outlined as a method by Fichtenau, of the Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung; and from Othmar Hageneder in the same institute came the question behind this book.

Chapter 3, ‘Papal Documents, c. 400–c. 1150’, starts from papal letters resolving jurisprudential problems. Like the bulk of later papal letters, their production was demand-driven. Their structure owed much to Roman imperial models. An element of the imperial model was the arenga, a preamble which could be a vehicle for propaganda. A study of the arenga was one of Fichtenau’s key contributions to Diplomatics. In responding to demand for legal solutions, popes took the opportunity to begin with arengae which legitimated their claims to authority. Since early papal decretals were transmitted in canon law collections that were widely copied into the eleventh century and beyond, the arengae of Late Antique decretals help explain the ready acceptance of papal claims in the Gregorian Reform.

While Late Antique decretals were being transmitted to new generations, popes corresponded with kings and emperors, by the mid-to-late eighth century at times in surprisingly faulty Latin, and, furthermore, also around that time a new genre of papal document appeared alongside them: solemn privileges, written on papyrus. These were mostly for monasteries. Not much thought was required to compose them, as beneficiaries brought drafts of the substantive part and a formulary supplied the top and the tail. What exactly these privileges granted is a matter of debate. Since they were written in a script descended from late Roman cursive and hard to read, their import may have been unclear even at the receiving end. In fact this was probably an advantage. The archaic script covered a multitude of sins against Latin grammar and diminished the likelihood of some clever young monk making fun of it. Even just handling one of these privileges would have been a challenge, given their length and the frailty of the papyrus support. That too would have diminished the likelihood of carping criticism of Latin solecisms. And the appearance would have inspired awe, not just because of the strange script but precisely because they were so long physically. With the papal revolution of the eleventh century the late Roman script and the metres-long papyrus format were abandoned, to be replaced by new devices to make the document impressive. What exactly they were granting to monasteries became clearer in the twelfth century.

Chapter 4, ‘The Religious Governance of the Latin World, 1150–1378’, shows how the papacy tried to meet the mushrooming demand for its documents. In the course of the twelfth century, the type of privilege that had emerged during the papal revolution began to be replaced by a new kind of document, the sort that would become known as a ‘letter of grace’. In the late twelfth century, papal documents began to be written in the kind of prose rhythm called the cursus. The range of functions for which papal responses were needed stimulated an enlargement of the range of contents of papal documents.

The spectrum of privileges sought expanded. It was letters of grace that met the demand. 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.

To ensure the follow-through of grants another category of letters was developed: litterae executoriae. In their external features, these resembled ‘letters of justice’, which appointed judges delegate in the localities, to bring papal justice in the religious sphere to anyone who asked for it. An ingenious system was devised to minimise administrative costs and the need for anyone at the centre to think about a case. A formulary and a remarkable institution called the Audientia litterarum contradictarum helped make it work.

The administrative engine behind all this was not a bureaucracy as we understand it: there was no division between home and work, piece-work payment by the client rather than salaries, no line management. Slightly more like a bureaucracy was the Apostolic Penitentiary, which was crystallised institutionally in the thirteenth century and flourished ever afterwards. It dealt with sins too serious for an ordinary priest to absolve, but also with absolutions from excommunication and dispensations. In the fourteenth century, with the papacy based in Avignon, there was a process of rationalisation. 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 plague of 1348 seems not to have marked a break, but the Schism that started in 1378, shortly after the papacy returned to Rome, would certainly do so.

Chapter 5, ‘From Schism to Counter-Reformation, c. 1378–c. 1600’ starts with the fall-out from the Schism that lasted a generation from 1378 to 1417. The breakaway cardinals returned to Avignon, taking much of the administration with them (so that the ‘Avignon Registers’ continued in Avignon while a new series called the ‘Lateran Registers’Footnote ²³ filled the gap in Rome). The departure of so many Chancery scribes was a problem for the Rome-based papacy. To manage, it developed an entirely new kind of document, the brief (breve, plural brevia) – new that is to the curia but modelled on some secular systems – written by a different set of men, and before long distinguished by humanistic script. From this time on a dual system operated: Chancery and Secretariate. Initially the latter was for high-level letters, but in the later fifteenth century it took on routine business too. The interplay between Chancery letters and briefs written by secretaries in the fifteenth century needs a lot more elucidation as one moves into the post-Trent period.

Another post-Schism innovation was the sale of offices, an apparently absurd system nonetheless soon adopted by secular rulers: but it bound the upper classes of the papal states into the curial system and helped end the hostile relationship that went back to the late eleventh century. In the thirteenth century the papacy had spent a lot of time away from Rome, and in the fourteenth century the curia moved to Avignon for a quieter life. In the early modern period residence in Rome was no longer problematic, perhaps because the elites of the papal state were so invested financially in the system.

Arguably more important than any of these developments was the complete reorganisation of papal government after the Council of Trent. By contrast with the excellent scholarship on the medieval and Renaissance papacy, the papal Diplomatics of the post-Trent period is little studied and poorly understood. The last part of the chapter attempts to map out at least sketchily this terra quasi-incognita, looking at the changes in the functioning of the Penitentiary, the processes behind the production of letters by the Chancery and of briefs by the secretaries, and at the Congregations of the Council and of the Inquisition. The documentation generated by these two sub-systems on the problem of whether Calvinist baptism was valid (for example) is of a kind that medievalists can only envy.

Chapter 6 looks for lines running through all the centuries covered. One well-known continuity is papal archive keeping. Another, well studied for the central medieval period but important over a much longer span of time, is the use of judges delegate. At the risk of iteration, finally, a salient phenomenon is ingenuity in developing systems capable of meeting demand for papal government.