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Abstracts

Filippo Carlá,
Res tamquam proprias retenebat: Personal and Collective Property in the Late Antique Church

In an often neglected passage of his Historia Francorum (8.39) Gregory of Tours presents us with the argue which opposed in Le Mans the bishop of the city to the wife of his predecessor, who claimed that all gifts given to the Church during her husband’s bishopric had belonged personally to him and thus, via inheritance law, now to her. This episode reveals one of the least considered problems which were connected with the processes of institutionalization of the Christian church in Roman society (and law): the definition of forms of private and institutional ownership. It is aim of this paper to investigate these aspects, starting from the moment in which, under Gallienus, Christian groups were legally recognized and could start structuring themselves in the forms foreseen by Roman law. Also through a comparison with other subjects of public law (such as, most famously, the collegia), as through a steady attention to the moments of testamentary bequest, which are very sensitive markers in this field, it will be possible to show that moments such as the one described by Gregory were not seldom, because of a lack of specific regulations, or simply because of loopholes and short circuits between different institutions, and that a thorough analysis of this development is necessary in order to better understand even the genesis of institutional structures such as the patrimonium S. Petri.

Carles Buenacasa-Pérez,
The formation of the ecclesiastical heritage of the north African churches in the western Roman Empire (IInd-Vth centuries)

From documentary evidence, we may assume that the creation of the African ecclesiastical heritage is not attested in Cyprian's times (as many studies has said), but started at the end of the third century, and was completed during the fourth century. As soon as Christianity was recognized as a legitimate religion by Constantine I, the Christian church was endowed with a certain quantity of land assigned to its sustenance. This situation was perpetuated by his successors (excepted Julian the Apostate), who granted to the Christian bishops a great deal of honors and economic privileges.

In Africa, the Catholic ecclesiastical heritage was mainly composed by rural estates (fundi) and church buildings and this inheritance grew very fast due to the protection of the imperial legislation and new ways of warranting and increasing their resources: private munificence, imperial patronage, economical exploitation of the martyrs’ cult, and incorporation of the properties of the Donatist Church and pagan temples. From Augustine’s letters and essays, we know about the existence of praepositi charged of the administration of the ecclesiastical heritage of Hippo and we also know how all these rural properties were scattered throughout the territory of the Hippo’s diocese (a precedent of medieval parishes) and they were administered by priests who lived in these rural fundi.

As regards the Donatist ecclesiastical heritage, sources are really succinct, but they allow us to infer that the properties of Donatist church were significant and were also continuously increasing thanks to the help of private donations (mainly legacies) and some strategies like being a tenant of public estates.

Claire Sotinel,
Contribution to a study on the impact of Christian Churches on offer and demand laws: How did Christian Churches affect the patterns of consumption?

One way to study the relationships between economy and Church might be to explore the various ways in would the Church might have contributed to change the patterns of consumption. This could be a two ways research:

First, as an institution, are Christian churches centers of consumption added to the existing ones, or do they replace (part of) the existing? How different from other major consumers is their consumption pattern? How can they compare to them? (in quantitative as well as in qualitative terms). We probably know enough on Church building, liturgy, building maintenance, scriptoria, and distribution to the poor, etc. to gather information on at least some Churches as consumers.

Second, does the teaching of the Church affect the consumers’ behavior? Food, clothing, luxuries should be used in different ways by Christians, according to Christian texts. Besides the extreme case of asceticism (which should be investigated in terms of consumption), did people change their way of consumption in a Christian empire? A comparison between the ‘official’ teaching of the Church and the observations made through archaeology and papyrology might help to answer the question.

Rudolph Haensch,
Die Verwaltung des Kirchenvermögens in den verschiedenen Teilen des Imperium Romanum

Es soll untersucht, wer von den kirchlichen Ämtern in welchem Reichsteil für das kirchliche Vermögen zuständig war und welche Regelungen es für dessen Verwaltung gab. Offensichtlich gab es für die Organisation der Verwaltung unterschiedliche Modelle: Im Westen wurde sie zumeist vom Bischof geleitet, in Rom vom Archidiakon, im Osten wurde sehr schnell die Institution des Ökonomen installiert. Noch unterschiedlicher dürften die Regelungen auf der Ebene der einzelnen Kirche gewesen sein, die sich langsam zur Kirchgemeinde entwickelte. Während die Einkünfte im Westen anscheinend mit Hilfe von Teilungsregeln weiterverteilt wurden, gab es im Osten feste Ausgabeposten. Die Kirchenverwaltung ist ein Beispiel für die ganz unterschiedlichen Entwicklungen im Rahmen der Christianisierung des Reiches.

Yuri A. Marano,
Managerial Bishops in Late Antique Italy (5th-6th AD): a Re-Appraisal of Written and Archaeological Evidence

In his latest book, Through the Eye of a Needle. Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, P.L. Brown observes how the last decades of the 5^th century and the 6^th century were marked by "the emergence of a new figure in the landscape of wealth – the rise of what may best be called the ‘managerial bishop’”[1]. Since the mid- of the 4^th century, local Churches had accumulated wealth and landed properties thanks to generosity of the faithful. Not by chance, bishops had at their service skilled lawyers to hold onto what they received, and administrators who were devoted to making the best out of those properties the Church had been able to retain[2].

In Italy, these developments are well-documented from the written sources, but recent investigations enable us to appreciate them from an archaeological point of view too. In the last decades, industrial installations (oil and wine presses, kilns for the production of bricks, tiles and pottery, forges, sculptural workshops, fulleries and tanneries) annexed to Early Christian churches have been brought to light. They share several features with late antique aristocratic villas and attest the wide range of activities carried out by bishops[3]. This matches with the data of written sources: the construction by a praetorium at Saint Stephen’s basilica nearby Rome, recorded in the Liber Pontificalis, echoes Palladius (de re rustica, 162), who advocates incorporating workshops for artisans, including smiths and markers of dolia and wooden barrels, in the villa-praetorium. It is highly implausible that such a mobilization of labor and resources simply aimed at self-consumption or charitable activities: indeed, written, archaeological and numismatic evidence highlight the involvement of bishops in periodical rural markets (nundinae), as well as in the exaction of taxes[4]. At the same time, the fact that 5^th and 6^th cent. churches were large buildings for the standards of the period makes the economy of means deployed by the bishops all the more impressive.

My paper aims at a reappraisal of the archaeological data concerning the economic (production and trade) role of the Church in late antique Italy (5^th-6^th cent. AD), projecting them on the background of the written evidence. The economic role of bishops will be compared to that of lay actors, such as emperors and aristocrats, examining it as a special factor in sustaining agricultural and craft production on a substantial scale and relating it to the size and scale of economy as a whole.

Gilles Bransbourg,
The State and the Churches - aimed at maximizing their 'rente' extraction power

Any productive system implies a sharing formula, in order that its economic value added is shared between labour, capital and state. Ancient economies are no exception to that rule. The Later Roman

Empire witnessed the development of a global taxation system following universal principles and the rise of Christian collective organizations as major land owners. Since both entities - the State and the Churches - aimed at maximizing their 'rente' extraction power, a dynamic relationship had to develop, implying at different times a varying degree of convergence, cooperation, as well as competition and conflicts.

Using the available numerical information, our paper will try to capture the evolution of that relationship from Diocletian to Justinian. We will endeavour at a better understanding of the economic genesis of the history of separation and reunion between Church and State.

Peter van Minnen,
Church and Economy in the Egyptian chora in Late Antiquity

This paper attempts to update E. Wipszycka, Les ressources et les activités économiques des églises en Égypte du IVe au VIIIe siècle (Brussels 1972). The past forty years have seen increased interest in Late Antiquity among papyrologists, and many relevant new texts have been published, which this paper tries to take into account. But the perspective on the economy of Late Antiquity as a whole is now so much different from what it was forty years ago that another kind of update is also needed. How do churches in Egypt proper (with the exception of Alexandria) fit into the approaches advocated by those currently working on the economy of Late Antique Egypt? Some continue to foreground the role of the state and the taxation system, while others focus on the role of large estates and local agency. Both the state and large landowners are assumed to have generated wealth to exercise power (or vice versa).

Were churches in the Egyptian chora like large landowners? The answer is a definite no. The sources of income differed: churches accumulated landed property and other forms of real estate through gifts and legacies and did not have to pass them on. Churches in the Egyptian chora did not accumulate as much land as, e.g., the Apiones of Oxyhrynchus and did not risk confiscation or extinction.

Did churches perhaps behave like large landowners? The answer is again a definite no. Churches adopted existing mechanisms for the exploitation of property but only up to a point. As institutions they developed their own kind of management; they focused more on local income and expenditure than on transferable income from multiple regions in Egypt; when they did transfer income, it went beyond the borders of the Roman Empire, where they were also socially active, rather than to Alexandria or the rest of the Roman Empire, where large landowners were politically active. Churches in other words were not accumulating wealth to exercise more power (let alone exercising power to generate more wealth) but to enlarge the scope of their “social action.” The evidence suggests that they were by and large successful.

How did churches impact the economy? Not by accumulating more property than large landowners, which they did not. Not by spending locally, which they did but never very substantially. Churches impacted the economy by developing new ways of doing business that could survive the extinction of families and the collapse of the state.

With the help of ideas borrowed from the New Institutional Economics this paper develops a new model to capture the ways in which churches made a difference to the economy of Late Antique Egypt. It moves away from the macroeconomic perspective informing much of the research done on the economy of Late Antiquity in the last couple of decades and toward a microeconomic perspective that fits the papyrus documents from the Egyptian chora much better. How things were done is sometimes more interesting than how much was done.

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