432 Sessa
best evidence for the administrative activities of Rome’s bishops pertains to
property management. Since at least the early 4th century the Roman church
was a legally recognized corporate property owner, possessing both move-
able and immovable wealth, including slaves.34 During the Ostrogothic era, it
owned estates throughout much of Italy, in southern Gaul, North Africa, and
Dalmatia.35 These properties were valuable to the church because of the rents
they generated, which had to be systematically collected and recorded. While
Roman bishops had long managed properties beyond the city, the Ostrogothic
period saw important developments in this particular area of ecclesiastical
administration.36 Rome’s bishops now drew more regularly on established
domestic terminology and administrative principles to manage the church’s
land. For instance, the letters of Gelasius and his successors refer to the
church’s properties as patrimonia, a term used in private households and in
the imperial and royal courts to denote estates grouped together on the basis of
geography and managed as a unit.37 And since the tenure of Simplicius (if not
earlier), the Roman church dispersed its income according to the principles
of the quadripartitum, a fourfold division of ecclesiastical revenues into funds
for the bishop, the clergy, building maintenance, and charity.38 Gelasius’ corre-
spondence also contains numerous copies of tax and income receipts, though
it is unclear from later 6th-century sources whether the Roman church had
already adopted a single main accounting book called the polypticha.
To assist them with the legal and financial issues that large-scale estate own-
ership entailed, popes relied primarily on pre-existing networks of clerics and
lay officials. Gelasius, for instance, looked to a layman named Agilulphus for
protecting Rome’s properties in Dalmatia and to a local deacon in Picenum to
make an inventory of his church’s properties in that region, while his successor
Vigilius sent a Roman deacon to oversee the church’s patrimonia in Dalmatia.39
Roman bishops also increasingly relied on legal counsellors, known as defen-
sores ecclesiae, for assistance in estate management.40 A letter from Agapitus to
Caesarius of Arles presents the first reference to a defensor serving as interme-
34 Sessa, Formation of Papal Authority, pp. 113–16.
35 Marazzi, I “Patrimonia”, pp. 111–47.
36 However, Richard’s claim (The Popes and the Papacy, p. 315) that Ostrogothic-era popes
developed a “fully operational rectorial system” goes beyond the limits of the evidence.
37 Moreau, “Les patrimonies”; Jones, Later Roman Empire, pp. 411–27. Scholars debate
whether Gelasius or Vigilius first used the term patrimonium in this manner.
38 Marazzi, I “Patrimonia”, pp. 65–9.
39 Gelasius, Frag. 2, ed. Thiel 1868, p. 484 and Ep. 4, ed. Ewald 1880, p. 10; Vigilius, Ep. 14.8, ed.
Schwartz, ACO 4:1, pp. 190–1.
40 Sotinel, “Le personnel episcopal”, pp. 110–14.