Version classiqueVersion mobile

Itinéraires du savoir de l’Italie à la Scandinavie (Xe-XVIe siècle)

 | 
Corinne Péneau

La Scandinavie médiévale

The Apostolic Penitentiary and the Nordic Countries

The Importance of a New Source Material

Per Ingesman

Texte intégral

  • 1 F. Tamburini, Santi e peccatori. Confessioni e suppliche dai Registri della Penitenzieria del’Arch (...)

1In 1995 a book was published which caused a certain stir in Italy. The title of the book was Santi e peccatori, “saints and sinners”, with the subtitle “confessions and supplications from the registers of the Penitentiary in the Vatican Archives (1451-1586)”.1 In the book one hundred selected documents are printed. An introduction provides the reader with an overview of the contents of the text examples. This is a list of all imaginable as well as unthinkable sins and crimes: infanticide and abortion; breach of celibacy and adultery; various sexual perversions; witchcraft, sorcery and heresy; manslaughter, violence and seerobbery; apostacy from the Christian faith and sacrilege; theft, counterfeiting and forging of papal letters – besides various transgressions of canon law rules concerning ordination.

2The book was written by Filippo Tamburini, and the reason why it caused a stir was not only the content of the documents, but also that the material in case was hitherto unknown. The Penitentiary Archive, the content of which Tamburini for the first time made known to the Italian public, had until then been practically hermetically closed as its content has been considered as being under the rule of confessional confidentiality.

  • 2 F. Tamburini, “L’archivio della Penitenzieria apostolica e il primo registro delle suppliche (1410 (...)
  • 3 Besides the doctoral dissertation and Santi e peccatori, his books include Ebrei Saraceni Cristian (...)
  • 4 On the series see Vatican Archives. An Inventory and Guide to Historical Documents of the Holy See (...)

3The new material from the Penitentiary has also been a surprise to scholars. To a large degree, Tamburini can be credited for the fact that the archive of the Penitentiary in 1983 was made accessible for research in the Vatican Archives. Tamburini himself was a former archivist in the Penitentiary and knew the material as no one else. In 1969, he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the archive,2 and since then he has in a long series of articles and books made the scholarly world aware of the content of the Penitentiary material.3 Since that there has been an increasing scholarly interest in the Penitentiary and its archive, and gradually it has become clear that the opening of the Penitentiary Archive must be characterised as one of the most sensational ones in modern archival history. This has to do not only with the character of the material, but also with the quantity. The series of supplications and bulls from the Penitentiary, from which Tamburini has taken his documents, comprises around 750 volumes, covering the period from 1410 to 1890.4 Since each volume normally contains at least 500 pages, with copies of several documents on each page, the total number of documents in the archive could easily run up to a million, perhaps more. However, at present the documents can only be consulted for the period before the reorganisation of the Penitentiary in 1569.

  • 5 Schmugge has recently received a Festschrift which comprises both a bibliography of his own works (...)
  • 6 Illegitimität im Spätmittelalter, L. Schmugge ed., Munich, 1994 (Schriften des Historischen Kolleg (...)

4Following in the footsteps of Tamburini, the German professor Ludwig Schmugge began systematic studies in the Penitentiary material in the late 1980s.5 By using computer registration and analysis of the register entries he showed how the material could be used for the study of a specific topic, namely illegitimacy. As for the late Middle Ages, nearly 38,000 documents in the Penitentiary registers are dispensations and absolutions to people who wanted to become priests although they were born out of wedlock. Schmugge and a group of international scholars to whom he presented a computerised version of this material have shown that it sheds much new light on an important phenomenon in late medieval society.6

  • 7 I have myself contributed to this field in “Danish Marriage Dispensations: Evidence of an Increasi (...)
  • 8 No studies have been published yet, but see for instance L. Schmugge, P. Hersperger and B. Wiggenh (...)

5Another important type of papal dispensations, for marriage within forbidden degrees, is also extantly represented in the Penitentiary registers, and several scholars have started working on them, inspired by Schmugge’s work on the illegitimacy documents.7 Penitentiary dispensations and absolutions for violence, committed either by clerics or against clerics, are also so numerous that they can be studied with the help of computer analysis.8

  • 9 Tamburini, op. cit. (1995); Tamburini, op. cit. (1996); Tamburini and Schmugge ed., op. cit. This (...)
  • 10 Repertorium Poenitentiariae Germanicum, L. Schmugge et alii ed., I-VI, Tübingen, 1996-2005.
  • 11 Finished projects include Les suppliques de la Pénitencerie Apostolique pour les Diocèses de Cambr (...)

6Since the opening of the Penitentiary Archive, various initiatives to edit the new material have been launched. Tamburini’s Santi e peccatori as well as his later books are thematic source editions.9 These are, however, atypical because all other editions are based on geographical criteria. Schmugge himself has been the leader of a project which has published a complete registration of all medieval Penitentiary material relating to Germany.10 Other scholars have either finished or are currently working on editions for other parts of late medieval Europe.11

  • 12 Of the dispensations for defectus natalium they are for instance only 1 percent of all, see Schmug (...)

7Material concerning the Nordic countries in the Penitentiary registers represents no large proportion compared to what these registers hold for countries such as Spain, Italy, France, Germany and the Netherlands.12 It is, however, of considerable importance since very few medieval sources are preserved in the Nordic countries themselves compared to what we find in Central, Southern and Western Europe. The purpose of this article is to present the work Nordic scholars have been doing on the Penitentiary material. First, I will give a detailed account of an attempt made by Nordic scholars in 1927-28 to gain access to the Penitentiary Archive. After this piece of “prehistory”, I will consider the work and findings by myself and other Nordic scholars after the opening of the Penitentiary Archive in 1983. And finally I will discuss the importance of this new source material through a Danish case study where the new material from Rome will be brought together with material from local archives.

  • 13 There exists no description in an international language of this enterprise. The best work written (...)
  • 14 See n. 37.
  • 15 Bullarium Danicum. Pavelige Aktstykker vedrørende Danmark 1198-1316, A. Krarup ed., Copenhagen, 19 (...)
  • 16 Repertorium Diplomaticum Regni Danici Mediaevalis. Fortegnelse over Danmarks Breve fra Middelalder (...)

8Because of the scarcity of material preserved at home, Nordic scholars in the past have made great efforts to find and edit papal material pertaining to the Nordic countries in the Middle Ages. After the opening of the Vatican Archives in 1881, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish historians worked for years in the archives, first in the decades around 1900, then again in the 1920s and 1930s.13 Their work resulted in a large number of transcripts and photocopies of Vatican sources from the Middle Ages. Unfortunately, many of these are still unpublished and stored in the national archives, especially in Sweden, and to a certain degree also in Norway.14 Only Denmark succeeded in making a special edition of all the material. Therefore, in this case it is most easy to measure the importance of the Vatican material compared to sources preserved in the country itself. Around 7,500 documents from the papal archives can be found in the two Danish publications of Vatican material.15 In comparison, Denmark itself has preserved something in the range of 30,000 documents from the Middle Ages, in original as well as in copy.16 The papal material thus gives a very substantial supplement to the country’s own sources.

  • 17 Besides Bååth’s article, mentioned in n. 13,I have used the archival material from the Nordic expe (...)
  • 18 The central archives in Rome of monastic orders such as the Dominicans and the Order of the Holy S (...)
  • 19 Bååth, loc. cit., p. 83-84. It was the Dane Johs. Lindbaek who searched the Rota archive in 1906; (...)

9The Nordic scholars who worked in Rome at the beginning of the twentieth century tried to make use of all the material in the Vatican Archives, examining systematically all of the major and minor series of registers originating from the papal curia in the Middle Ages.17 They were aware that such material could be found also outside the Vatican Archives, especially in the Archivio di Stato in Rome, which they searched too. In the same way they looked for material from parts of the papal administration, which at that time had not handed over their archival material to the Vatican Archives.18 This was especially the case in the second round of archival search, which took place in the interwar period. The aim of the Nordic work was partly to go through some of the well-known holdings of the Vatican Archives for the second time and partly to search material having been left out during the first search round. Now they went through the archive of the Roman Rota, which had been looked at briefly in 1906, but was now much easier to search through systematically, since it had been handed over to the Vatican Archives in 1927.19 Here we also find the first traces of a Nordic interest in the archive of the Apostolic Penitentiary.

  • 20 So Göller in his preface to the first volume (1907) of his large study on the institution: Die päp (...)
  • 21 His description of the archival material he had seen is in E. Göller, “Das alte Archiv der päpstli (...)

10At the beginning of the twentieth century it was thought that the archive of the Penitentiary – except for a few volumes which had come into the Vatican Archives – had been destroyed in connection with the move of the papal archives to Paris at the time of Napoleon.20 That this was not so became known around 1910. At that time, the great German specialist on the medieval Penitentiary, Emil Göller, found out that the archive of the Penitentiary still existed in the Vatican. He was given the opportunity to take a closer look at it and found that it contained an extant series of supplication registers going back to the beginning of the fifteenth century. He was allowed to record the material in it, but not to use it for his magisterial study of the Penitentiary up to its reorganisation under Pius V (1566-72).21

  • 22 Ibid., p. 14-15.

11The reason for this was that it was believed that the registers contained not only material pertaining to the foro externo, that is public offences and crimes, but also to the foro interno, that is sins mentioned in confession – and therefore to be kept secret. In a preliminary description of the contents of the Penitentiary Archive from 1913, Göller claimed that this was wrong: the registers contained only foro externo material; letters in foro interno matters were simply not registered. He therefore concluded that there were no objections to be made against making the Penitentiary material accessible to research.22

  • 23 Schmugge, Hersperger and Wiggenhauser, op. cit., p. 6.

12Referring to this argument, in the years to follow several scholars tried to get access to the Penitentiary material.23 Among them were historians from the Nordic countries. The circumstances around this deserve a detailed examination as an interesting contribution to the history of Nordic work in the Vatican Archives.

  • 24 Rigsarkivet, Oslo, Kjeldeskriftafdelingen, Protokol fra De nordiske Vatikanekspeditioner, p. 117-1 (...)
  • 25 F. Tamburini, “Per la storia dei Cardinali Penitenzieri Maggiori e dell’Archivio della Penitenzier (...)

13In the inter-war period, Nordic research in the Vatican Archives took place in a formalised cooperation funded by the respective Secretaries for Education and Culture in the four countries. There was an agreement that every country should do approximately the same amount of work, measured in months, and protocols and letters were kept with details about the planning and execution of the archival work in Rome. This material, today in the National Archives of Norway in Oslo, indicates a Nordic attempt to gain access to the archive of the Penitentiary in 1927-28.24 The attempt was known by Tamburini, who has described the discussions and considerations it led to among Vatican authorities, without, however, knowing the existence of the Nordic sources about it preserved in Oslo.25

  • 26 Ibid., p. 349.

14In May 1927, the leading Swede among the Nordic historians working in Rome, L. M. Bââth, had obtained permission for the Nordic historians to access the archives of the Penitentiary through one of the great scholars in the Vatican, Cardinal Franz Ehrle, and the head of the Royal Library in Stockholm, Isak Collijn. It seems not to have been written permission, and there is some uncertainty about its exact formulation. Tamburini has described the discussions which the permission gave rise to in the Vatican. The prefect of the Vatican Archives, Monsignore Angelo Mercati, used the Nordic scholars’request to propose to the leader of the Penitentiary, the so-called maior penitentiary, Cardinal Andreas Frühwirth, that all Penitentiary registers prior to the time of Pius V should be transferred to the Vatican Archives, where they would be more accessible to scholars. Mercati shared the opinion of Göller that there was nothing to be kept secret in the medieval register series of the Penitentiary. To keep the Penitentiary Archives together he proposed that not only the supplication registers, but also all other parts of the Penitentiary Archives prior to Pius V be transferred to the Archivio Segreto Vaticano.26

  • 27 Ibid., p. 349.

15After having received these proposals from the prefect of the Vatican Archives, on 20 May 1927 the maior penitentiary went to the pope himself to ask for his agreement. However, the response was negative: The Penitentiary treated matters pertaining to the Jorum internum et sacramentale, and to this historians could never be admitted.27

16In reality, this decision was to block all access to the Penitentiary registers for more than fifty years. It did not, however, stop the plans for the transfer of the oldest part of the Penitentiary Archive to the Archivio Segreto Vaticano, and thus opened up new questions: How was the material to be kept in the Vatican Archives? Who should have access to it? Could it be possible to use it if no internal or sacramental (i.e. confessional) matters were revealed?

  • 28 Ibid., p. 349-350.

17In October 1927, an agreement between the Penitentiary and the Vatican Archives concerning the transfer was reached. The files from the Penitentiary would be transferred to the Archivio Segreto Vaticano, but stored in separate rooms to which the Penitentiary itself had the keys. The prefect of the Vatican Archives appointed a priest from his staff, Monsignore Giuseppe Gullotta, who would be responsible for the transfer and the arrangement of the Penitentiary material in its new location. On 7 October 1927, he received the keys from the daily leader of the Penitentiary, promising not to reveal the secrets he might happen to read when reordering the archival material.28

  • 29 Ibid., p. 349 with n. 34 and p. 350 with n. 36.

18Thus, the situation had changed in decisive ways when the Nordic scholars during their expedition to the Vatican in 1928 tried to put the permission obtained the year before into effect. At the beginning of their work, on 28 February 1928, some of the Nordic historians visited Cardinal Ehrle and explained to him that they wanted to go through the Penitentiary Archive as soon as possible. The cardinal said the archive was then being transferred to the Vatican Archives and therefore was difficult to use. Another problem was that the maior penitentiary, Cardinal Andreas Frühwirth, who in 1927 had agreed to give the Nordic scholars access to the archive, had in the meantime been promoted and had been replaced by Cardinal Lorenzo Lauri.29 Ehrle promised, however, to phone the prefect of the Vatican Archives, Angelo Mercati, to make him take over the case.

  • 30 He was referring to Arm. 39 vol. 51A, 54A and 54B in the Archivio Segreto Vaticano. It was Göller (...)

19Angelo Mercati told the Nordic scholars that they had to get new permission from the new cardinal maior penitentiary. To speed up the case, Bââth asked Collijn – who was in Rome at that time – to use his influence again. Collijn asked the prefect of the Vatican Library, Monsignore Giovanni Mercati, who in turn went to his brother Angelo Mercati, prefect of the Vatican Archives. The answer was that the Penitentiary hesitated to make the archives accessible to research because of the many cases pro foro interno in the documents. Angelo Mercati promised, however, to discuss the matter with the new maior penitentiary and reply as soon as possible. To enforce the argument, the leading Norwegian scholar among the Nordic historians, Professor Oluf Kolsrud, through Collijn and Giovanni Mercati, pointed out that some volumes from the Penitentiary were already known to the expedition and contained exclusively causas pro foro externo, so that it could be believed that this would hold true for all the medieval material.30 During a meeting of the Nordic historians on 18 April 1928 it was decided to await further messages from Angelo Mercati and then later hand in a written application with detailed arguments.

  • 31 Tamburini, loc. cit. (1982), p. 350-353.

20Angelo Mercati now asked Giuseppe Gullotta to make a report on the archive of the Penitentiary with a proposal of how to make it accessible to scholars. Gullotta, who at this time had finished his reordering of the Penitentiary files, looked through the supplication registers up to the death of Clement VII (1534), and on 30 May 1928 delivered a report to Cardinal Lorenzo Lauri, in which the question of giving scholars access to the material was discussed. Tamburini has shown that the report rested on a very superficial investigation of the Penitentiary registers, and that it made a serious mistake by anachronistically applying a modern understanding of the distinction between the external and internal fora to the medieval registers. This made Gullotta propose very strict rules for possible access by scholars to the Penitentiary registers. His actual proposal in the report was that trustworthy priests should go through all the registers and other historical material from the Penitentiary and sort out what cases did not contain anything to be kept secret and could therefore be made accessible to scholars. On the whole, Gullotta was very sceptical towards the idea of giving scholars – not least Protestants – access to the Penitentiary material, mentioning explicitly the danger of it being used to attack the Catholic Church.31

  • 32 Ibid., p. 350 and 353-354.

21Naturally, Angelo Mercati was not very happy about this report, and when he forwarded it to the maior penitentiary on 1 June 1928, the prefect of the Vatican Archives expressed severe reservations. He pointed out that the former maior penitentiary, Cardinal Andreas Frühwirth, had been in favour of giving access to the Penitentiary Archives, thinking that nothing in the material could be of harm to the Church, and that an expert like Göller on his examination of the register series had found no cases that had to be kept secret.32

  • 33 Ibid., p. 355.

22The very well balanced letter from Angelo Mercati, pointing to another conclusion than Gullotta’s report, had a certain effect. In an audience on the very same day, 1 June 1928, the pope declared that although in principle the Penitentiary Archive “in no ways and under no pretext... could be opened to scholars”, the Penitentiary itself in concrete cases could decide if and to what degree it would give access.33

  • 34 The good relations between Angelo Mercati and the Nordic scholars are also well-known from other s (...)

23This opened up a possible solution for the Nordic scholars, and they now approached Giuseppe Gullotta himself. At a meeting with Kolsrud on 15 June, Gullotta spoke of his results: he had personally examined that part of the Penitentiary Archive the Nordic scholars wanted to go through (84 register volumes until the death of Clement VII in 1534) and he had found that this, the oldest part of the Penitentiary registers, not only – as claimed by Göller – contained cases pro foro externo, but also pro foro interno. Therefore, according to Gullotta, the oldest part of the Penitentiary Archive could not be made accessible without restrictions. Gullotta had two alternative proposals for that: a) to take out of the register volumes those parts that could be made accessible to historians, or b) to organise a society of catholic priests who could receive authority to go through the material and communicate to the historians the external material. Gullotta further told Kolsrud that while the present maior penitentiary was firmly against opening the archive to historical research, Angelo Mercati was very sympathetic to the Nordic scholars and was interested in making the Penitentiary Archive at least partly accessible.34 When Kolsrud once again pointed to the volumes already looked through by the Nordic scholars, Gullotta said that he held it unlikely that the Nordic scholars personally could go through the Penitentiary registers. He thought it, however, not impossible to realise another one of Kolsrud’s ideas, namely to authorise a catholic priest from Scandinavia with knowledge of Nordic history and language to do some research in the Penitentiary Archive.

24On 18 June, in a conversation with Bååth and another Swede, Angelo Mercati confirmed the information Gullotta had given to Kolsrud. He added that, although he was not without hope (non dispero), it would require time and patience to get a positive answer. Thereafter, the Nordic scholars gave up their attempts and decided to let the case rest.

  • 35 Tamburini, loc. cit. (1982), p. 355.

25Angelo Mercati, however, still tried to help the scholars from the Nordic countries. When in the following year the Nordic scholars were searching for a specific supplication from the time of Leo X (1513-21), he again asked the Penitentiary to allow the scholars from Denmark, Sweden and Norway to consult register volumes prior to 1540. This produced no results, but the correspondence between Mercati and the daily leader of the Penitentiary which it led to is interesting and at least one point deserves to be mentioned. While the Penitentiary referred to the papal decision of 20 May 1927 with its definitive denial of access to the archives, Mercati on his side pointed out of how great importance for the Nordic scholars the Roman archives were. This was, he wrote in a letter of 2 October 1929, especially the case with the Vatican Archives, che ha come aperto un mondo nuovo per la lora storia – “which has in a way opened a new world to their history”.35

  • 36 APD, vol. VII: Supplementum, A. Krarup ed., Copenhagen, 1943. Only the Rota material was not publis (...)
  • 37 In Norway what had been found in the first round of Vatican research had been published in a speci (...)

26In the inter-war period, seven Nordic expeditions to the Vatican were carried out, the last one ending just a few months before the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. The war and the poor years that followed in the second half of the 1940s and in the 1950s brought the Nordic work in the Vatican Archives to a halt. Around the same time, the scholars who had been leading in the work in the inter-war period, such as the Swede L. M. Bååth (1874-1960), the Norwegian Oluf Kolsrud (1885-1945) and the Dane Alfred Krarup (1872-1950), died. With this, a tradition of research going back to the pioneering period shortly after the opening of the Vatican Archives was broken. The Danish edition project was brought to an end with the publication in 1943 of a supplementary volume with all the new findings of the inter-war period,36 but the Norwegian and Swedish plans for corresponding editions were never carried through as originally intended.37

  • 38 This was reported to me by for instance the late Kai Hørby at Copenhagen University – a leading sp (...)
  • 39 The International Congress of Historians in Rome in 1955 made a request to the Vatican to open the (...)

27In the 1960s, prospects became better for research in the humanities. The Italian government offered favourable conditions for the establishment of foreign academies, and the four Nordic countries all acquired institutes in Rome. However, specialising mostly in archaeology and art history, none of them showed any interest in taking up the work in the Vatican Archives from the pre-war period. Dominant trends in historical research at that time, more interested in political, social and economic than in ecclesiastical and religious history, did not encourage any new efforts either. Among medievalists in the Nordic countries it became more or less an established fact that there was nothing left to find concerning the Nordic Middle Ages in the Vatican Archives.38 Only one or two specialists remembered something about material in the Penitentiary Archive.39

  • 40 Brigide Schwarz (Berlin) has kindly informed me that while working on the Repertorium Germanicum i (...)
  • 41 Cf. n. 36.

28When I went to the Vatican Archives for the first time in 1987,I shared the general opinion among Nordic historians. I did not really expect to find anything new concerning the subject I was working on, Denmark and the papacy in the last generation before the Danish reformation of 1536, so in a way I just wanted to confirm that there was really nothing to be found. Much to my surprise, I discovered that there was still a lot of work to be done. Gradually, I became aware that the large series of registers in the Vatican Archives cannot be said to be totally explored for Nordic material,40 and that there is material concerning Scandinavia in lesser archives, like that of the Roman Rota, still unknown to Nordic medievalists.41 To this is added the material of Nordic relevance in the registers of the Penitentiary which in 1983 was at last made accessible to research.

29Thanks to the pioneering work of Filippo Tamburini and Ludwig Schmugge, a number of scholars in the field of papal studies became aware of the importance of the Penitentiary material around the middle of the 1990s. As the first historian from the Nordic countries, I acquired access to the archives of the Penitentiary in 1994. Since then I have gone through the registers of the Penitentiary from the start of the series in 1410 up to 1540 and have found approximately 1,500 new papal documents pertaining to the Nordic countries.

  • 42 The main result of her work is a book containing an analysis of the Penitentiary material concerni (...)
  • 43 T. Jørgensen and G. Saletnich, Synder og pavemakt. Botsbrev fra Den Norske Kirkeprovins og Suderøy (...)
  • 44 Auctoritate Papae. The Church Province of Uppsala and the Apostolic Penitentiary 1410-1526, Stockh (...)

30I have shared the results of my findings with scholars from the other Nordic countries, and after m’a few other Nordic historians have also gone through the register series. In particular, Kirsi Salonen from Finland has done a very large piece of work here.42 The result is that for all the Nordic countries editions of the material from the Penitentiary archive are either in preparation or already finished. The material from the Danish church province will be published by myself in an edition which I hope to finish within the next few years. From the Norwegian church province, which besides Norway itself also comprised Iceland, the Faroe Islands and other North Atlantic isles, the material has been published by Torstein Jørgensen in collaboration with an Italian scholar, Gastone Saletnich.43 And finally, the material from the Swedish church province, comprising Sweden and Finland, has been published by Kirsi Salonen and Sara Risberg.44

31With this material, the Vatican Archives have reopened a new world to the historians of the Nordic countries.

  • 45 This is based on a counting of numbers in APD for the period 1450-1536.

32The Nordic material in the registers of the Apostolic Penitentiary means a large increase in the sources for the history of the Nordic countries in the Later Middle Ages. Again it is quite easy to measure the importance for Denmark. We have around 750 new documents, which is a 10 per cent rise compared to the number of documents from Vatican sources hitherto known. If you look only at the period from 1450 to 1536, representing the bulk of the new material, the increase is even higher, around 20 per cent compared to the number of documents from Vatican sources hitherto known for that time period, around 3,80ο.45

33This attempt at measuring the importance does not, however, do full justice to the material. It must be borne in mind that the new material from the Penitentiary is rather different from the material known from the “old” register series. This makes it even more valuable than its mere numbers indicate.

  • 46 See for instance APD nos. 1539, 1540, 1541, 1551, 2424, 2539, 2540, 2571, 2593, 3044, 3122, 3286, (...)
  • 47 B. Schwarz, “Dispense der Kanzlei Eugens IV. (1431-1447)”, in Illegitimität im Spätmittelalter, L. (...)

34It is true that you can find, for instance in the Danish edition of material from the Vatican Archives, dispensations and absolutions of the same sorts as in the registers of the Penitentiary.46 They are, however, rare, owing to the fact that it was easier and cheaper to get letters issued through the Penitentiary than through the Chancery.47 On the whole, the well-known series of Vatican, Lateran and Supplication registers mainly contain provisions and other material concerning benefices, material concerning litigation, be it between individuals or institutions, and material concerning the confirmation of rights, estates and privileges. Such material has great value, of course, but the value lies, it must be admitted, within a comparably narrow field. The new material in the Penitentiary registers seems useful on a much broader level: in social and cultural history, religious history, history of mentalities, etc. In a way that the old material does not, it provides us with an often astonishingly vivid look into the thoughts and deeds of ordinary people and glimpses of medieval daily life.

  • 48 See K. Salonen, op. cit., but also some of her articles, for instance “In their fathers’footsteps. (...)

35Nothing final can be said about the value of the new material until it has been meticulously edited and worked through by Nordic historians, bringing together all the new information with existing knowledge from other Vatican sources and from Nordic sources. Kirsi Salonen has demonstrated that especially concerning the Finnish material.48 Below, I shall give an example of a Danish account book which holds information about the acquisition of dispensations from the Penitentiary in Rome.

  • 49 APD no. 4941. Cf. my article”En kirkepolitisk Romrejse på reformationstiden”, Piranesi. Italienske (...)

36From the end of 1523 to the end of 1525, the Archdeacon of Lund was in Rome. His main task was to seek papal confirmation of the cathedral chapter’s election of a certain Aage Jepsen Sparre to the post as Archbishop of Lund. This was not an easy task since Aage Jepsen Sparre – a canon belonging to a local noble family – was contested by two other candidates for the post, one of whom had the support of the King of Denmark at the time, Frederic I, the other the support of the exiled king, Christian II, and therefore also of his brother-in-law, Emperor Charles V. I cannot go into the details of that complicated case here; the important thing is that a small account book kept by the archdeacon has been preserved.49 It records income and expenditure in connection with travelling to and living in Rome for the archdeacon and a young clergyman who accompanied him. It becomes important in our context because it also lists expenses in connection with the obtention of a number of dispensations from the papal Penitentiary.

37The account book mentions marriage dispensations for three couples and dispensations of an unknown sort for two individuals. In all cases the persons involved belonged to the nobility and gentry of the archdiocese, the most important of them being relatives of the elected archbishop.

38Two of the marriage dispensations I found in the registers of the Penitentiary. They were given to a nobleman by the name of Aage Brahe who had married the sister of the elected archbishop, Johanne Jepsdatter Sparre. This was an illegal marriage since Aage Brahe had been married before to a woman related in the fourth degree to Johanne, while Johanne had been married to a man related in the third degree to Aage. The case became worse since the couple had married in full knowledge (scienter) of this fact. Therefore, they needed not only a dispensation allowing them to marry, but also an absolution for having married without dispensation.

  • 50 Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Penitenzieria Ap., Registri delle Suppliche vol. 71, fol. 190r and 226r

39In a volume of the registers of the Penitentiary from the first year of Clement VII we find two supplications from Aage Brahe explaining these facts.50 They are both dated 5 October 1524. The taxes for them are noted as 23 1/4 for the first one, 17 1/4 for the other, or 41 altogether. In the first instance, Cordelias is noted as the taxator, in the second instance N. Gladiatoris. This was, however, not all that was to be paid. As was usual for high-ranking people, a special price had to be fixed with the datary. So also here: componat cum datario say the letters.

40What we find in the account book, then, is the issue seen from the archdeacon’s point of view. The account book first tells us that the archdeacon received 30 ducatos de camera for the dispensations for Aage Brahe on the last day of September 1524. To the messenger who brought money and letters, the archdeacon gave 1 julium. Then the account book contains the following other expenses in connection with getting the dispensations from the Penitentiary:

  • 22 ducatos de camera paid ex commissione domini datarii to the substitute of the datary, Bertrandus, on 5 October.
  • ducatos de camera paid to Johannes Cordellis, sollicitator penitentiarie, for two dispensation bulls on 8 October.
  • 12 quatrinos paid for two seal capsules of lead on the same day, and
  • 2 julios paid for the registration of the bulls in the archive, where they were registered in secundo libro secretorum on the same day.
  • 51 I have searched in vain in the libri secretorum of Clement VII in the Archivio Segreto Vaticano.

41This information is quite interesting. First, it is interesting to see how fast the bulls are acquired. The archdeacon received money and directions from Denmark on 30 September, on 5 October his supplications were approved and he could deal immediately with the datary, and on 8 October the bulls were handed out to him and he could get them registered in the archive. Second, it is interesting that the archdeacon has the two bulls registered in the archive. What we have preserved now are the registers of the Penitentiary in which all supplications were recorded. But besides that, it was obviously possible to have the bulls themselves registered too if you were willing to pay for the extra security. To the best of our knowledge, these registers with bulls are not preserved.51

42There are also several unsolved problems. One of them is: how did the archdeacon know how much money he needed? Did he first go to the datary for a preliminary deal and then write back to Denmark that he needed 30 ducatos de camera? Or is it the other way round: he had 30 ducatos, so the compositio with the datary had to be within those limits? In a way, this strange figure of 22 indicates this: it seems that after paying the taxes, etc. to the Penitentiary, there were 22 ducatos left, and so that was what the datary could get.

43The Nordic countries were part of the Christian church led by the pope in Rome. Because of their distance from Rome they might not have had the same intensive contact with the curia as other, closer parts of Europe. Contacts existed, however, and therefore the archives of the papal administration contain important material for the history of the Nordic countries in the Middle Ages. And it is not only their relations with the papacy, but also quite a number of internal things that we often know little about from the scarce records preserved in the Nordic countries themselves. Such is the case with the material from the papal Penitentiary made accessible in 1983.

  • 52 Ingesman, op. cit.

44The archival material from the Apostolic Penitentiary opens a new world almost unknown to Nordic historians. The same can be said concerning the material from the Roman Rota. Let me especially point to one specific phenomenon in that regard: the material from the papal curia has a value not only in terms of the information it contains, but also by the fact that a number of national sources now say more than they did before. It provides a meaningful context, so to say, to a number of documents scattered throughout the Nordic countries that have been difficult to use so far. With the account book from Lund presented in this article, I have given one example that is related to the Penitentiary material. For the Rota, many more examples are to be found in my recent book on this institution and its handling of Danish cases in the Middle Ages.52

Notes

1 F. Tamburini, Santi e peccatori. Confessioni e suppliche dai Registri della Penitenzieria del’Archivio Segreto Vaticano (1451-1586), Milan, 1995.

2 F. Tamburini, “L’archivio della Penitenzieria apostolica e il primo registro delle suppliche (1410-1411)”, Pontificia Università Lateranense, Facoltà di S. Teologia, Rome, 1969 (unpublished “Tesi di laurea”).

3 Besides the doctoral dissertation and Santi e peccatori, his books include Ebrei Saraceni Cristiani. Vita sociale e uita reliyiosa dai registri della Penitenzieria apostolica (secoli XIV-XVI), Milan, 1996. A list of his most important articles on the Penitentiary can be found in the introduction to a volume with Penitentiary documents concerning heresy and Lutheranism, which he published together with Ludwig Schmugge: Häresie und Luthertum. Quellen aus dem Archiv der Pönitentiarie in Rom (15. und 16. Jahrhundert), F. Tamburini and L. Schmugge ed., Paderborn, 2000, p. 7-8 n. 3.

4 On the series see Vatican Archives. An Inventory and Guide to Historical Documents of the Holy See, F.X. Blouin Jr. ed., Oxford, 1998, p. 213-216, especially p. 214-215.

5 Schmugge has recently received a Festschrift which comprises both a bibliography of his own works and a number of studies on the Penitentiary inspired by his research: Päpste, Pilger, Pönitentiarie. Festschrift für Ludwig Schmugge zum 65. Geburtstay, A. Meyer, C. Rentei and M. WittmerButsch ed., Tübingen, 2004. Also three other anthologies containing studies on the Penitentiary material are to a large degree inspired by Schmugge and his work: The Roman Curia, the Apostolic Penitentiary and the Partes in the Later Middle Ages, K. Salonen and C. Krötzl ed., Rome, 2003 (Acta Instituti Romani Finlandiae, 28); The Long Arm of Papal Authority. Late Medieval Christian Peripheries and Their Communication with the Holy See, G. Jaritz, T. Jorgensen and K. Salonen ed., Bergen-Budapest-Krems, 2004 (Medium Aevum Quotidianum, Sonderband XIV); Et usque ad ultimum terrae. The Apostolic Penitentiary in Local Context, G. Jaritz, T. Jorgensen and K. Salonen ed., Bergen-Budapest-Krems, 2006.

6 Illegitimität im Spätmittelalter, L. Schmugge ed., Munich, 1994 (Schriften des Historischen Kollegs. Kolloquien, 29). Schmugge himself has further elaborated on the theme in its German context in his book Kirche, Kinder, Karrieren. Päpstliche Dispense non der unehelichen Geburt im Spätmittelalter, Zürich, 1995.

7 I have myself contributed to this field in “Danish Marriage Dispensations: Evidence of an Increasing Lay Use of Papal Letters in the Late Middle Ages?”, in The Roman Curia, the Apostolic Penitentiary and the Partes in the Later Middle Ages, K. Salonen and C. Krötzl ed., Rome, 2003 (Acta Instituti Romani Finlandiae, 28), p. 129-157. Other contributions can be found in the three anthologies mentioned in n. 5.

8 No studies have been published yet, but see for instance L. Schmugge, P. Hersperger and B. Wiggenhauser, Die Supplikenregister der päpstlichen Pönitentiarie aus der Zeit Pius’II. (1458-1464), Tübingen, 1996 (Bibliothek des Deutschen Historischen Instituts in Rom, 84), p. 98-116; K. Salonen, The Penitentiary as a Well of Grace in the Late Middle Ages. The Example of the Province of Uppsala 1448-1527, Helsinki, 2001 (Suomalaisen Tiedeakatemian Toimituksia/Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae, 313), p. 278-310.

9 Tamburini, op. cit. (1995); Tamburini, op. cit. (1996); Tamburini and Schmugge ed., op. cit. This was also the case in a couple of articles: F. Tamburini, “Suppliche per casi di stregoneria diabolica nei registri della Penitenzieria e conflitti inquisitoriali (sec. XV-XVI)”, Critica Storica, 23 (1986), p. 605-659; F. Tamburini, “Una indagine su religiosi e laid del Nuovo Monda dai registri della Penitenzieria Apostolica (1504-1576)”, Quellen und Forschungen aus Italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken, 73 (1993), p. 418-495.

10 Repertorium Poenitentiariae Germanicum, L. Schmugge et alii ed., I-VI, Tübingen, 1996-2005.

11 Finished projects include Les suppliques de la Pénitencerie Apostolique pour les Diocèses de Cambrai, Liège, Thérouanne et Tournai (1410-1411), M. Maillard-Luypaert ed., Turnhout, 2003 (Analecta Vaticano-Belgica, First Series 34); Le suppliche alla Sacra Penitenzieria Apostolica provenienti dalla diocese di Como (1438-1484), P. Ostinelli ed., Milano, 2003 (Materiali di storia ecclesiastica lombarda (secoli XIV-XVI). Penitenzieria Apostolica). A publication of English material in the Penitentiary registers, to be edited by Peter Clarke and Patrich Zutshi, Cambridge, is in preparation. Planned and finished projects for the Nordic countries will be treated below, see n. 43 and 44.

12 Of the dispensations for defectus natalium they are for instance only 1 percent of all, see Schmugge, op. cit. (1995), p. 166.

13 There exists no description in an international language of this enterprise. The best work written on the case is L. M. Bååth, “De skandinaviska historiska expeditionerna till Rom 1920-1939”, in Archiuistica et mediaevistica Ernesto Nygren oblata, Stockholm, 1956, p. 54-61.

14 See n. 37.

15 Bullarium Danicum. Pavelige Aktstykker vedrørende Danmark 1198-1316, A. Krarup ed., Copenhagen, 1931-32 (1,044 nos.); Acta pontificum Danica. Pavelige Aktstykker vedrørende Danmark 1316-1536 (henceforth APD), I-VII, L. Moltesen, A. Krarup and J. Lindbaek ed., Copenhagen, 1904-43 (6,482 nos.). All the material until 1412 is now being republished in the Diplomatarium Danicum, Copenhagen, 1938ff. Also for Finland the material from the Vatican has been edited, but together with all other documents from the Middle Ages; see Finlands Medeltidsurkunder, I-VIII, R. Hausen ed., Helsinki, 1910-35.

16 Repertorium Diplomaticum Regni Danici Mediaevalis. Fortegnelse over Danmarks Breve fra Middelalderen, I-IV (1085-1450), K. Erslev, A. Hude and W. Christensen ed., Copenhagen, 1894-1912 (8,049 + 603 nos.); 2nd series, I-IX (1451-1513), W. Christensen ed., Copenhagen, 1928-39 (13,142 nos.) is a registration of all medieval documents preserved in Denmark itself. It does not, however, provide independent numbers to documents known from copy books and registers. With these and the documents from the period between 1513 and 1536, the amount of which can only be guessed at, the total number must be at least 30,000.

17 Besides Bååth’s article, mentioned in n. 13,I have used the archival material from the Nordic expeditions to the Vatican in the national archives in Oslo and Stockholm. Rigsarkivet, Oslo, Kjeldeskriftafdelingen, Protokol fra De nordiske Vatikanekspeditioner; Riksarkivet, Stockholm, Bââthska samlingen 58, 65, 66, 67.

18 The central archives in Rome of monastic orders such as the Dominicans and the Order of the Holy Spirit were also searched. Material found here was published separately, see especially Handlingar rörande dominikaner-provinsen Dacia, K. H. Karlssson ed., Stockholm, 1901 (Historiska Handlingar, 18, 1); J. Lindbæk and G. Stemann, De danske Helligaandsklostre. Fremstilling og Aktstykker, Copenhagen, 1906, Diplomatarium, passim.

19 Bååth, loc. cit., p. 83-84. It was the Dane Johs. Lindbaek who searched the Rota archive in 1906; see the small report in his article from the following year, “Biskop Niels Skave i Roskilde og Sorø kloster”, Historisk Tidsskrift, 8th series I (1907-08), p. 278-279 with n. 1 on p. 279.

20 So Göller in his preface to the first volume (1907) of his large study on the institution: Die päpstliche Pönitentiarie von ihrem Ursprung bis zu ihrer Umgestaltung unter Pius V., I-II, Rome, 1907-11 (Bibliothek d. Kgl. Preuss. Historischen Instituts in Rom, III-IV and VII-VIII), see vol. I, p. VI. This he was able to correct in the preface to the second volume (1911) (vol. II, p. VI-VII).

21 His description of the archival material he had seen is in E. Göller, “Das alte Archiv der päpstlichen Pönitentiarie”, Römische Quartalschrift für christliche Altertumskunde und für Kirchengeschichte, Supplementheft 20 (1913) (= Kirchengeschichtliche Festgabe Anton de Waal zum goldenen Priester-Jubiläum (11. Oktober 1912) dargebracht, F.X. Seppelt ed., Freiburg i.B., 1913), p. 1-19.

22 Ibid., p. 14-15.

23 Schmugge, Hersperger and Wiggenhauser, op. cit., p. 6.

24 Rigsarkivet, Oslo, Kjeldeskriftafdelingen, Protokol fra De nordiske Vatikanekspeditioner, p. 117-128.

25 F. Tamburini, “Per la storia dei Cardinali Penitenzieri Maggiori e dell’Archivio della Penitenzieria Apostolica. Il trattato ‘De antiquitate cardinalis Poenitentiarii Maioris’di G. B. Coccino († 1641)”, Rivista di Storia della Chiesa in Italia, 36 (1982), p. 349-356.

26 Ibid., p. 349.

27 Ibid., p. 349.

28 Ibid., p. 349-350.

29 Ibid., p. 349 with n. 34 and p. 350 with n. 36.

30 He was referring to Arm. 39 vol. 51A, 54A and 54B in the Archivio Segreto Vaticano. It was Göller who had pointed out that these three register volumes originally belonged to the Penitentiary, but had been separated from the Penitentiary Archive. Göller, op. cit., vol. II, 1st part, p. 3-4.

31 Tamburini, loc. cit. (1982), p. 350-353.

32 Ibid., p. 350 and 353-354.

33 Ibid., p. 355.

34 The good relations between Angelo Mercati and the Nordic scholars are also well-known from other sources. See for instance the preface to vol. VII of the APD.

35 Tamburini, loc. cit. (1982), p. 355.

36 APD, vol. VII: Supplementum, A. Krarup ed., Copenhagen, 1943. Only the Rota material was not published, perhaps because it was found to difficult to fit into the general concept of the edition. After having finished a study of the Danish Rota cases I am now working on an edition of all material concerning Danish cases for the Rota. For further information see P. Ingesman, Provisioner og processer. Den romerske Rota og dens behandling afdanske saget i middelalderen, Århus, 2003.

37 In Norway what had been found in the first round of Vatican research had been published in a special volume of the Diplomatarium Norvegicum: vol. XVII: Romerske oldbreve, Christiania, 1902-13. In 1923, Oluf Kolsrud proposed that Norway – like Denmark – should work towards an independent edition of all papal material concerning Norway, called “Acta Pontificum Norvegica”. In this edition, the new material found in the inter-war period could then be edited together with the material from the first round already published. This plan, however, was never realised and therefore the Norwegian material from the Vatican found in the inter-war period is still unpublished (Bååth, loc. cit., p. 78). In Sweden, it had already been decided in 1914 that the material from the Vatican should be edited as an appendix to the Diplomatarium Svecanum, an “Acta pontificum svecica”. Only a part of this work, comprising cameral material until 1492, was, however, actually published: Acta pontificum svecica, ser. I: Acta cameralia, I-II, L. M. Bååth (ed.), Stockholm, 1936-57. Cameral material after 1492 and all other Vatican material is therefore still unpublished. Since 1946, all Vatican material concerning Sweden has been taken into the Diplomatarium Svecanum, but as the Diplomatarium Svecanum only proceeds very slowly – publishing not more than one volume a year, and still not further than 1375 – this decision means that the late medieval material will still be unpublished for many years to come.

38 This was reported to me by for instance the late Kai Hørby at Copenhagen University – a leading specialist on Danish medieval history, who had been working in Rome – when I consulted him prior to my first visit to the Vatican Archives in 1987. A written statement of it can be found in Velio Helk, “Studier i jesuiterordenens hovedarkiv i Rom”, in Afhandlinger om arkiver, Copenhagen, 1964, p. 39.

39 The International Congress of Historians in Rome in 1955 made a request to the Vatican to open the Penitentiary Archive (see Schmugge, Hersperger and Wiggenhauser, op. cit., p. 6). Among the Danish participants in the congress was Niels Skyum-Nielsen – for many years a leading editor of the Diplomatarium Danicum and thereafter professor of medieval history at Copenhagen University. Herluf Nielsen, former editor at the Diplomatarium Danicum, has informed me that Skyum-Nielsen made an attempt to gain access to the archives of the Penitentiary in the 1960s. No written records of this attempt seem to exist, but it was presumably inspired by the Rome congress. I would like to thank Inger Dübeclc, Thelma Jexlev and Herluf Nielsen for their kind information about these matters.

40 Brigide Schwarz (Berlin) has kindly informed me that while working on the Repertorium Germanicum in the Vatican Archives a lot of documents pertaining to Danes which are not in the APD have been found, especially in the Registra Suppiicationum.

41 Cf. n. 36.

42 The main result of her work is a book containing an analysis of the Penitentiary material concerning Sweden and Finland: K. Salonen, op. cit. I would like to thank Kirsi Salonen for reading through and commenting on a draft version of this article.

43 T. Jørgensen and G. Saletnich, Synder og pavemakt. Botsbrev fra Den Norske Kirkeprovins og Suderøyene til Pavestolen 1438-1531, Stavanger, 2004 (Diplomatarium poenitentiariae Norvegicum).

44 Auctoritate Papae. The Church Province of Uppsala and the Apostolic Penitentiary 1410-1526, Stockholm, 2008.

45 This is based on a counting of numbers in APD for the period 1450-1536.

46 See for instance APD nos. 1539, 1540, 1541, 1551, 2424, 2539, 2540, 2571, 2593, 3044, 3122, 3286, 3333, 3443, 3849, 4273, 4527, 4705, 4713, 4981, 5793, 6003, 6168, 6433, 6440.

47 B. Schwarz, “Dispense der Kanzlei Eugens IV. (1431-1447)”, in Illegitimität im Spätmittelalter, L. Schmugge ed., Munich, 1994 (Schriften des Historischen Kollegs. Kolloquien, 29), p. 133-148. Cf. also Schmugge, Hersperger and Wiggenhauser, op. cit., p. 218-237.

48 See K. Salonen, op. cit., but also some of her articles, for instance “In their fathers’footsteps. The illegitimate sons of Finnish priests according to the archives of the sacred Penitentiary 1449-1523”, in Roma, Magistra Mundi. Itineraria Culturae Mediaevalis. Mélanges offerts au Père L. E. Boyle à l’occasion de son 75e anniversaire, J. Hamesse ed., Louvain-la-Neuve, 1998 (Fédération internationale des instituts d’études médiévales. Textes et études du Moyen Âge, 10,3), p. 355-355-366; “Finnish illegal marriages 1449-1523”, in Nordic Perspectives on Medieval Canon Law, M. Korpiola (ed.), Helsinki, 1999 (Publications of Matthias Calonius Society, II), p. 151-167; “Long Path to Forgiveness. The relationship between Finland and the Holy See in the Late Middle Ages, specially in the light of the cases in the Penitentiary Registers”, Quellen und Forschungen aus Italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken, 79 (1999), p. 283-318; “Monaci finlandesi nell’archivio medievale della Penitenzieria Apostolica”, Settentrionale, New Series, 14 (2002), p. 142-157.

49 APD no. 4941. Cf. my article”En kirkepolitisk Romrejse på reformationstiden”, Piranesi. Italienske Studier, 6 (1991), p. 93-124.

50 Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Penitenzieria Ap., Registri delle Suppliche vol. 71, fol. 190r and 226r.

51 I have searched in vain in the libri secretorum of Clement VII in the Archivio Segreto Vaticano.

52 Ingesman, op. cit.

Auteur

Université d’Aarhus

Le texte et les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont sous Licence OpenEdition Books, sauf mention contraire.

Cette publication numérique est issue d’un traitement automatique par reconnaissance optique de caractères.
Rechercher dans OpenEdition Search

Vous allez être redirigé vers OpenEdition Search