Mapping the Church and Asceticism in Ostrogothic Italy 487
was based on agriculture, grazing, forestry, and breeding livestock.38 The
recently discovered villa at Faragola (Ascoli Satriano, south of Foggia) was built
in the late 5th century, when many villas lay deserted elsewhere.39 Sometimes
the owners of such villas, the majority of which were managers (conductores)
of imperial or landlord estates rather than senators, decided to build churches
on these properties;40 in other cases, small villages developed on ecclesiastical
lands around churches that were often built on the structures of a Roman villa.
As a result, the agrarian reorganization of the region gave rise to a substantial
network of rural dioceses.41 In northern Italy, in contrast, where the civitates
were less numerous but more important and more territorially extended, evan
gelization, diocesan structure, and ecclesiastical organization were almost
exclusively a civic phenomenon.
The Ostrogothic church, therefore, gathered the fruits of Christianity’s prog
ress over the course of the 4th and 5th centuries, and only toward the end of
this period, during a number of wars, did Italy’s network of dioceses begin to be
subjected to a gradual process of destructuration, which was likely the result of
the disintegration of related imperial structures. By the end of the 5th century,
however, Pope Gelasius (492–6) had formulated a new criterion for belong
ing to an ecclesiastical diocese, which surpassed the old civil administrative
units based on territory and focused on a group of faithful and its bishop who
administered baptism as a fundamental indicator of membership.42 This new
criterion, which he elsewhere summed up in the formula territorium etiam non
facere dioecesim (a territory does not make a diocese),43 was probably neces
sary to legitimize novel developments in the practice of worship and liturgical
and sacramental life, which had been provoked by changes in metropolitan
and diocesan structures. These had made precarious and unstable the frame
work of the church and its dioceses, while engendering continuing conflicts
between various bishops and between bishops and their metropolitan lead
38 Vera, “Dalla villa perfecta alla villa di Palladio”, p. 203. For changes to the environment
and agriculture in Ostrogothic Italy see Squatriti in this volume.
39 Volpe et al., “Faragola (Ascoli Satriano)”, pp. 265–90.
40 Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, pp. 471–8.
41 Otranto, Italia meridionale, pp. 149–50; Otranto, “La cristianizzazione della Calabria”,
p. 363, fig. 2 and pp. 367–71; Volpe/Turchiano, “The last enclave”, pp. 542–65.
42 Gelas., frag. 19, ed. Thiel, pp. 494–5: “Quid novae aedificationi antiqua ecclesiarum poterit
praeiudicare divisio, quum in ea non futura, sed quae erant praesentia finirentur?.... Nec
enim terminis aut locis aliquibus convenit definiri, sed illud facere diocesim, quod supe
rius continetur, ut constet commanentes, a quo fuerint lavacri regeneratione purgati.” On
this development, see Violante, “Le strutture organizzazione della cura d’anime”.
43 Gelas., frag. 17, ed. Thiel, p. 492–3.