RICERCA ITALIANA     

The inquiries on Regular Clergy's patrimonies and revenues in the Italian States (XVIth-XIXth Centuries)

Università degli Studi di Bologna

Abstract

Reserch program (abstract)
The reserch program is structured in seven points:
1) the completion of the production of microfilms about the inquiries on Regular Clergy's patrimonies in 1649. We have 3.900 declarations (on microfilms) from Archivio Segreto Vaticano; we must add 2.000 statements about Orders that didn't put their documents in that archive.
2) the production of microfilms about Republic of Venice's inquiries, and about other Orders (XVI-XVII-XVIII centuries)
3) the perusal of the statistical data and the creation of a database with informations as the localization, the number of the religioners, the revenue, the debts and the credits of monasteries and convents.
4) the translation of this statistical data on regional maps with the Geographical Information System (GIS)
5) the insertion of these informations on the web, at the address of our international reserch group: www.regularclergyeconomichistory.it
6) the enlargement of this database by two ways: a) the insertion of statistical data of other inquiries, expecially about Republic of Venice, that refers to different periods and different institutional landscapes; b) discovering new informations by Innocenzo X's inquiry, as the amounting of the lands owned by the Orders, the kind of use of these lands, the agrarian production, the agricultural contracts, or the number of immovables, the statistics about loans, etc.
7) the discussion of the reserch results >>>

Principal Investigator

Fiorenzo LANDI Università degli Studi di BOLOGNA

Research Objectives

Objectives of the research programme

The research programme is proposed as the completion of a project already underway, which aims to determine, in global terms, the role and weight of the patrimony and revenue of the Italian religious orders within the Italian States from the beginning of the sixteenth century until the end of the nineteenth century. It is characterised by the nature of the sources that will be used. The large part of these are the findings of pontifical and regional state enquiries; in particular of the enquiry conducted in 1650 under Pope Innocent, spanning the entire Sicilian peninsula.
With regard to the latter, we have already succeeding in microfilming dossiers contained in the Vatican Secret Archives and the Jesuit headquarters, covering 3900 monasteries.
For each of these monasteries we have formed a database with certain key explanatory data: the exact location (city and province, state, diocese, ecclesiastical province) the volume of entries and exits, of debits and credits, and the number of monks. We are already in a position to represent the orders and congregations covered by the first screening. The data was prepared according to a Geographical Information system programme, that functions by means of the arrangement of each item on a database according to the order of their current nomenclature.
More than two thousand dossiers in the custody of the central archives of several orders are still lacking >>>

First Results

Concerning the first part of the research, we expected to finally integrate in unique data base immediately accessible information that contained in the inquiry of 1649: the names and the placement of all 6200 monasteries, with all relative information of their economic status (the heritage, the revenues, the debts and the credits), their institutional and organizational status (the real number of stuff members of monastery as well as their geographical origin) etc.

In this way millions of information will be unified and available.
The capitalization of the filed information inside of survey schema would be the same for all monasteries and convents. Because of own homogeneity, the result makes not just easy but very useful also any partial observation.

In this phase we expect to obtain mainly these results:

To select immediately any synthetic and simple information (name, place, income, expenses, debts, credits and number of religious).
To create or "photograph" the map of the territory that will show the concentration of personal religious and resources to identify the significant themes in depth.
To make available all basic information on web site to anyone who is interested.The second phase will be dedicated to comparison: we will compare regional situation as well as they appear from the data's of 1650.
For each area, like Venetian Republic, we will evaluate equivalent information >>>

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

At the beginning of modern age (only referring the possession of the lands) the abbeys, the monasteries and the convents owned 40-50 millions of hectares in every region of Europe; moreover they also owned a lot of immovables, had large money at their disposal (used by loans to privates or institutions), and enjoyed, directly or indirectly, a series of feudal rights. The relative revenue made the Regular Clergy one of the absolute protagonist of the pre-industrial society, economically too.
Every land of Europe was characterized by this accumulating process, progressive and unstoppable, but was also characterized by the kind of dissolution of these patrimonies: the confiscation. All the biggest patrimonies were born by imperial donations or gifts, and ended by confiscations. There were four waves of confiscations: the first one with Luthero's Reform, the second one with the enlightened kings, the third one with the French Revolution, and the fourth one with the liberal governments during the XIX century.
The Regular Clergy's economic history is a unitary phenomenon, with similar features all over the Europe (in the beginning, in its development, in the decline), but - paradoxically - there isn't the same unity in the historiographical production, characterized by the lack of a synthesis on the European landscape. There are only two different attempts (both not relatives to all Europe) product in Spain and France. The first one, begun during the international >>>