Patronage and commissioning of public events and buildings was a key tool in the attainment and replication of social status in antiquity. In the early Middle Ages, new ideals emerged around Christian forms of wealth and support, and different values were attached to the acquisition of agricultural land. Urban properties took on new relevance, and agricultural property became socially valuable in new ways. Cultivated spaces within cities came to be newly prestigious. This chapter considers the principal means by which aristocrats and rulers performed status and power within the late antique and early medieval cities of Italy, marshalling the new evidence of urban cultivation to inform our understanding of power in the built environment. It then develops three examples of this process from the mid eighth century to the early tenth, in Rome, Ravenna, and Naples. These examples show clearly the sophisticated strategies employed by rulers, ecclesiastical institutions, and families alike to control cultivated spaces, and the social status which came with successful strategies.

This chapter looks at the upper echelon of power in the church of St Omer, examining the system of patronage that controlled and regulated it and the ways in which that control affected the careers of musicians. It does this by means of a close examination of the careers of three well-placed individuals in the church’s governing chapter. Its primary focus is on Nicolas Rembert, canon and later dean, and a former singer in St Peter’s, Rome. Rembert was a consummate church politician who exercised his legal and political skill in Rome to provide canonries for prominent singers and support music by means of income from a St Omer canonry suppressed through his influence. His period as dean also saw the bringing-in of important musical figures including the copyist and celebrated composer Jean Mouton. The other two central figures in the chapter, both members of the Burgundian court chapel, show the close relationship with the ruling regional dynasty and the contrasting effects it could have on church personnel and politics.