ABOUT
Materials on this website are intended to facilitate an investigation of control over land, of property management, and of social inequality on papal estates in the sixth and early seventh centuries. This was a time in which the Byzantine Empire and the Lombards were competing for control over Italy and Europe was reckoning with the aftermath of the late antique Little Ice Age and the Justinianic Plague.
The data found here were derived from the letters of Pope Gregory the Great (540–604), which are an invaluable source for social and economic conditions. The volume of surviving letters—around 850—is unusually high in comparison with contemporary corpora of sources and also extraordinarily detailed. They contain estate surveys, tax records, and inventories of papal holdings, consisting both of churches and monasteries. They also contain names of those who inhabited numerous papal estates in the Italian peninsula, Sicily, Gaul, and Mediterranean islands. In most cases their gender, rank, and personal status are either explicitly stated or can be inferred: these people ranged from local patricians and matrons, to free farmers, to peasant tenants, to slaves. The lordship exercised by churches and monasteries under Roman control differed from that of lay lords in significant ways, among them their participation in an institutional network that crossed political boundaries. Crucially, this network was formally committed to religious norms which had implications for the reciprocal obligations between ecclesiastical patrons and their peasant dependants. This 'moral economy' can at times be seen to have moderated both the church's own wealth accumulation and the exploitation of its labour-force. While exploitation never ceased, its excesses could be mitigated by boundaries that were defined morally, or legally, or borne out by negotiations.
The current website comprises a searchable database and corresponding maps, containing data of interest to social-economic history concerning specific places mentioned in the letters (hence some of the more general statements from Gregory's 'economic manifesto' in letter 1.42 are excluded). These are both raw and synthesised data concerning farmers, labourers, serfs, slaves, gender, land ownership, land alienation, leases, dispute settlements, and so on. These data contribute to our understanding of the manner in which social inequality in this bubble of a moral economy was impacted by the political, economic, and environmental challenges of the age.
The project was conceived and designed by Dr Roy Flechner with technical oversight by Mart Makkink, MPhil MA. Data collation was expertly undertaken by Neal Dawson, MA. Additional data collation was provided by Maddison Miles and Alex English. We gratefully acknowledge financial support received from Enterprise Ireland and the College of Arts and Humanities at University College Dublin.