Chapter Four—
The Definition of Diocesan Boundaries (2): from 1265

On the first day of Lent, 5 February, in 1315, during a papal vacancy, Giovanni Papazurri, "by the grace of God and the apostolic see," bishop of Rieti, sat in the choir of his cathedral church, in the presence of fifteen canons of his chapter and "all, or at least the greater part," of the clergy of Rieti (Ciuitatis Reate ) and many other men (aliis pulribus hominibus ), and read to them his constitutions on the rule and care of the parishes within his diocese.^[1] It cannot have taken Giovanni long to read "the constitutions." They form a short, although dense, document, hardly more than a single elaborate statement, a condemnation of and remedies demanded for the presence of inadequate clergy, or the absence of clergy, in parishes. The improper appointment of inappropriate men to rule the parishes of his diocese, Giovanni said, left their churches widowed. The care of souls was neglected. The souls of parishioners were cheated. The parishes were deprived of divine services and teaching. The blood of the people of the parishes of his diocese should not be on his hands, Bishop Giovanni said. The concept of diocese, the definition of diocese, and so of diocesan boundary, that Giovanni expresses here, is stunningly different from the definition to be culled from Rieti litigation in the early thirteenth century. Bishop Giovanni's diocese is a collection of parishes full of men and women with souls to be ministered to; every soul counts. The diocese, like the parishes of which it is composed, fills out, is blown up, to extend fully to its borders.

Giovanni Papazurri (1302-1335/6) was a bishop who held synods and

councils. Their constitutions and enactments, or at least some parts of them, were recorded and recalled. The constitutions of the council of Ash Wednesday 1315 were, at the bishop's orders, redacted by the Reatine citizen and notary, by imperial authority, Matteo Barnabei (or Matteo di Barnabeo), who then copied them into what would become his great parchment cartulary of copies of the Reatine church's documents, a cartulary eventually of twenty-four gatherings each of twelve folios which would cover the entire period from February 1315, the month of the constitutions' proclamation, to January 1348 (see plates 24 and 25, from 1317 and 1342). The constitutions were thus placed almost at the beginning of this, for Rieti, revolutionary piece of ordered record-keeping. Matteo Barnabei does not call the Ash Wednesday 1315 gathering a synod, as its recorder (quite possibly Matteo himself) does Bishop Giovanni's meeting in the "papal palace" at Rieti on 6 April (Easter Day) 1315 (but neither does he call Ash Wednesday Ash Wednesday, nor is Easter called Easter).^[2]

It is said of the Easter 1315 meeting that its constitutions and sentences were read and promulgated by the lord bishop in the papal palace, in general synod (in generali synodo ), with the chapter of Rieti present, today, 6 April, thirteenth indiction, before these witnesses (named) and many other prelates, canons, and clerics of the city and diocese of Rieti (etiam magna multitudine alia prelatorum, canonicorum, et clericorum ciuitatis et diocesis Reatine ) in the year of our lord 1315, while the church of Rome was vacant, without a pastor. In his cartulary, in 1318, Matteo Barnabei refers specifically to the synod of I August 1311, from one of the statutes of which the addressee of a letter had been freed by license.^[3] And in the Paris-Rieti manuscript an eschatocol of a synodal document, without naming its recording notary, talks of its constitutions and sentences having been read on 4 April (Holy Thursday) 1303 "in pleno synodo" in the papal palace, with canons, named witnesses, "et etiam magna alia multitudine prelatorum, canonicorum, et clericorum ciuitatis et diocesis Reat' ad ipsam synodum conuocatis (and a great many other prelates, canons, and clerks from the city and diocese of Rieti who had been called to this synod)."^[4] The Holy Thursday and Easter synods proclaim their diocesan inclusiveness.

It is possible that in writing of the Ash Wednesday council Matteo Barnabei simply omitted the words et diocesis by accident and chose not to include the multitudine alia phrase—he was a writer (this creator of the word pulribus ) sometimes rather careless with, or insensitive to, the formation of words, at least for a man who spent his life with them, a

man, in memory at least, built of them. But, even so, it may seem odd here to break into Giovanni Papazurri's collection of synodal constitutions with the description of constitutions not from a council identified as a synod. There is a reason. Bishop Giovanni's other constitutions, those which are clearly synodal, are preserved in the Paris manuscript where they have been almost inextricably mixed with those of other Reatine bishops or at least those of Bishop Biagio da Leonessa (l347-I378).^[5] The confusion seems complete. A section, which begins "In nomine Domini, amen. Nos frater Blaxius, miseratione diuina episcopus Reat' episcopus," ends three folios later with the Holy Thursday 1303 eschatocol. And this is followed in the hand of the Paris manuscript scribe by a rubric announcing "constitutions made in the second synod"; and there then follows a series of constitutions ending with the Easter 1315 eschatocol, which is itself written in a different (or at least cursive as opposed to normal book) hand and which completes the synodal constitution section of the manuscript. The hands suggest that the Paris manuscript scribe was writing at a time not very distant from Biagio's episcopate, but he was evidently sufficiently unaware of, or uninterested in, Rieti episcopal chronology not to have been productively disturbed by the order he created.^[6]

Short injunctions following Biagio's "excommunicamus et anathematizamus" of heretics seem constructed to a single pattern which is almost surely Biagio's and seem very different in style from the constitution on the common goods of collegiate churches, which seems most securely, in part because of his name's being embedded within it, Giovanni's (but not all of the constitutions most likely to be Biagio's are in this easily identifiable quick style: de pena clericorum excedentium in laicos —very Biagio in subject and treatment and which has his name embedded in it—is not, although it does seem to share some of the simple lucidity of syntax of the short injunctions).^[7] Close observation of or reference to a Lateran Council or to legislation of Boniface VIII suggests Giovanni; the use of Virginis gloriose perhaps suggests Biagio.^[8] When Matteo Barnabei appears we are before I349.^[9] Admitting the possibility of eventual reasonable separation of at least some of the constitutions' attributions, their observer must for now hesitate before pointing to any Paris manuscript constitution and saying that it represents a position of 1315 or 1303.

This lack of separation, this creation of recorded copy of a group of constitutions and canons which cannot be separated and attributed to individual episcopal authors, or even scribes, is much to their point, to

the point of fourteenth-century synodal legislation and proclamation, and to the point of Bishop Biagio da Leonessa as diocesan bishop. At Rieti Biagio seems to have been a diocesan of agreeable competence disinclined to emphasize revolutionary distinctness. A voice in the manuscript which is almost surely his repeatedly talks about his predecessors' constitutions per predecessores nostros bone constitutiones.^[10] Biagio could have been expected sensibly to gather his predecessors, or at least Giovanni's, useful constitutions, to adjust them to his own purposes and add to them his own seemingly necessary or beneficial enactments: in its present form the Paris collection does not actually reveal this reasoned accommodation, but it admits of this reasoned accommodation's having been a step on the way to the surviving disorder.

The conflation of Giovanni and Biagio is part of a much greater scheme of borrowing and conflation which makes groups of synodal statutes from all over the peninsula, and much of Europe, part of a great family with a confused and complex genealogy, stemming at least from Innocent III's Fourth Lateran Council, and in a different but perhaps even more important way from Alexander III's Third Lateran Council of 1179, and the whole tree, at least in Italy, given, seemingly, new life by Clement V's Council of Vienne in 1312. The great initial period of Italian diocesan synodal legislation, of response to the stimulus offered by Innocent III in 1215, seems, in much of Italy, to have been the early fourteenth century. No one has as yet disentangled the Italian genealogy in brilliant exercise as has the great English historian of synods disentangled that of thirteenth-century England; but strong beginnings have been made from places as far apart as Novara and Amalfi.^[11] Clearly Giovanni Papazurri's synodal legislation which cannot be isolated should not be isolated.

When Giovanni's constitutions of Ash Wednesday 1315 are seen as part of and in connection with the extended Reatine synodal activity of the Paris manuscript, their message about changed diocesan boundaries is not lessened, but rather it is confirmed and, much more, expanded into an almost embarrassingly articulate intelligibility. The Paris statutes begin with an arenga , an explanation of purpose: "quam periculosum sit et tremendum pastoralis officii dignitate fungentibus, quam sit onerosa cura regiminis gregis dominici (how dangerous and terrible it is to bear the dignity of the office of pastor, what a burden is the care of the rule of the Lord's flock)."^[12] Theirs is a message in general statement and in detail of serious pastoral care, full of solemn echoes; twice we hear the ancient clause, which was heard also by listeners to the Fourth

Lateran, that the care of souls is the art of arts: "cum sit ars artium regimen animarum."^[13] These are rules offered as part of the struggle for the salvation of the human race (pro salute humani generis ).^[14] They are rules directed to the parochiani , the parishioners of the diocese, through their to be made worthy and effective priests, and even more directly through what they themselves see at Mass.^[15] Every priest when he celebrates Mass shall do it by the light of wax candle upon the altar and on that altar shall be a cross to remember there the passion of Christ (ad memoriam passionis Christi ).^[16] The Body of Christ in the Eucharist shall be conserved with honor in a clean pix or container, and when it is carried, properly covered, it shall be preceded by candle and bell; the Elevation of Mass is clearly regulated, so that at the words "Qui pridie" the priest holds the Host not too elevated but before his chest, and then when he says "Hoc est enim corpus meum" he raises the Host high so that all can see, and holds the Host firmly with both his hands.^[17] The parishioners of the diocese are to see clearly God's body in the Eucharist.

The synodal constitutions are very much concerned with getting the faith as well as the sacraments to the people of the diocese—and the constitutions themselves must be read and explained throughout the diocese.^[18] Priests must teach about the seven sacraments. They must teach parents to teach their children the Credo, the Pater Noster, the Ave Maria.^[19] Confessions are to be frequent (non tantum semel in anno, sed pluries ) and probing and instructive.^[20] Heresy and usury, like abortion and arson, are faced, unsympathetically of course, but, although vicious, as elements within the community of the diocese.^[21]

Not all of the injunctions can have been enthusiastically received even by the orthodox laity unengaged in major financial sins: even the simple farm worker busy among the sheep must have heard with restrained pleasure of the reminder that he should not have sexual relations with his wife from Advent until the octave of the Epiphany, from Septuagesima until the octave of Easter, and for three weeks before the feast of Saint John the Baptist.^[22] But even this deflating admonition showed an episcopal awareness of the people, individuals with souls, in the bishops' diocese. This awareness, now apparent in Rieti, was not, it should be stressed again, peculiar to the diocese of Rieti; and certainly not all the injunctions connected with it were new, or even modern: the canon, for example, a sacramental canon, which instructs its reader or hearer what to do if a fly or a spider falls into a chalice of consecrated wine (no longer of course wine) is essentially that which Bishop Richard Poore

of Salisbury chose to exclude from canons which he copied and composed between 1217 and 1219, and for which exclusion of the old he has been praised by the historian of English synodalia.^[23]

It should he further noticed that the fourteenth-century emphasis on sacraments offered by an instructing and orderly clergy is an emphasis also (and it can been seen as primarily this) on episcopal control and on profitable diocesan order—the strong emphasis upon proper reception of Holy Orders, upon sins for which absolution is reserved to the bishop, which blend into the control of presentation and institution to clerical livings and to the strong demand for episcopal fourths of mortuaries and tithes.^[24] And very surely there is an emphasis upon the kind of order ensured by written record, from the constitutions themselves to the statute decreeing that every church shall have written down at the end of a missal or breviary a list of all its possessions (or in another statute the list is ordered to be written in a book or gathering kept in the treasury or sacristy of the church).^[25] And each parish priest shall have a "manual" (with the order of baptism, catechism, extreme unction) and office books for day and night; and each priest is to be persuaded to have his missal and breviary according to the Roman rite.^[26]

None of this obscures the fact that the diocese of the synodal statutes is an enclosure of parishioners with their own parish priests all of whom are or should be concerned with the salvation of each man's or woman's soul.^[27] The careful probing confessions and the Eucharist held up for the people to view suggest something quite other than, different from, the farmer's listening outside the church's wall at San Leopardo. These fourteenth-century diocesan boundaries, seen by the bishops of Rieti sitting in choir or palace, have very different dimensions from those that Rainaldo de Labro or even Tommaso the Corrector were seen trying to secure. To the fair objection that of course litigation documents and synodal constitutions expose different attitudes toward diocese, the response must be that of course they do, but that the litigation documents are the pertinent ones which survive from the episcopate of Rainaldo de Labro and that the synodal ones only begin to survive from the episcopate of Giovanni Papazurri—but further that the litigation documents seem to fit the period of Rainaldo (as in a different way does his being host to Francis) and the synodal documents, Giovanni. Certainly there is a sense of a tremendous leaping when one compares Giovanni's Ash Wednesday 1315 constitutions with the only at all comparable constitutions which survive from the thirteenth century, Bishop Rainaldo da Arezzo's constitutions of 9 March 1250. Rainaldo's rather

disorderly compilation is concerned only with his chapter, and no doubt it would be more fairly compared with Giovanni's various chapter regulations, one set of which is in fact the archival partner of Rainaldo's (that is, it shares with Rainaldo's constitutions the same archival designation). Thus compared, the contrast does not seem so great, or rather it has another color. But Rainaldo's chapter constitutions are all that he, or really any of his thirteenth-century fellow bishops, has to offer; Giovanni's chapter regulations are a specific, not necessarily pacific, but relatively minor part of what he produced.^[28] The distance from Rainaldo to Giovanni is very great.

Giovanni Papazurri would not at first glance seem the obvious agent for the production of the sacramental blossoming of a newly imagined diocese. He came from a major Roman, of the city of Rome, family: "one of the great Roman families (le grandi famiglie romane )," "a family of ancient tradition" in the words of two very learned historians of Rome.^[29] His was not a family quite of the first order, but it was and would continue to be intricately intermarried with other important families. Properties of the family's branches and family business were sewn through the city's center from the neighborhood of Trevi and of the church of Santi Apostoli to the Campo dei Fiori; and in some areas of the countryside, as far away and south as Ferentino, Papazurri properties lay thick and heavy on the ground. Papazurri women touched greatness, in the mid and late fourteenth century, in two directions, by participating in the crowning of Petrarch, and by giving Bridget of Sweden a house to live in. A man who has been identified as Giovanni's own father was buried in Santi Apostoli: HIC IACET CORP(VS) / D(OM)INI NICOLAI MUTI / DE PAHPAZVRIS'; and there remains a drawing of his tomb which emphasizes, with his clothes, the importance of his position, and which shows the family stemma (arms), the crescent moon, beneath his feet.^[30]

Giovanni first appears in the register of Boniface VIII as one of the pope's chaplains and as a canon of Santa Maria Rotunda, Metz, acting for the pope as part of a commission which included Giacomo (or Jacopo) de Labro, canon of Rieti; the pertinent letters are dated 16 and 17 March 1296. His position and his title imply a university education. Then in October and December 1297 he appears again, still a chaplain but now a canon of the Lateran. He remained a chaplain and canon of the Lateran until 9 March 1298, when he was provided by Pope Boniface to the bishopric of Olema in Greece. On 6 February 1300 Boniface released Giovanni from Olema and translated him to the see of Ìmola, after he, Boniface, had refused to accept for that see its chapter's choice.

Then, on 5 August 1302, Boniface translated Bishop Giovanni again, this time to Rieti.^[31]

When this Roman, provided and twice translated by Boniface VIII, former papal chaplain, had become bishop of Rieti, when he wrote letters in letter patent form, he always (in preserved letters) used, or his scribes did, a style then coming more generally into vogue, but not visible in the preserved letters of any earlier bishop of Rieti; he called himself bishop "dei et apostolice sedis gratia," that is, bishop by the grace of God and of the apostolic see.^[32] Of Giovanni this was clearly an exact description, at least in its second half. But in spite of this papal patronage, Giovanni's translation to Rieti was not entirely smooth. He provoked from Boniface VIII, or from his chancery, an angry letter (if the letters in papal registers can speak anger); Giovanni had proceeded to Rieti without himself receiving, or sending a proctor to the curia to receive, his letters of translation—"spurning our letters," Boniface snaps—and the reader quickly has a sense of the touching of these two difficult men in a moment of tension.^[33]

Giovanni Papazurri seems to have left no visible traces at either Olema or Ìmola.^[34] It is possible that he did not reside in either place and that he came to Rieti, his third bishopric, with no practical experience of bishoping. But although Olema and Ìmola may have left no mark on him, his connection with the Lateran lasted a lifetime and he was, in the end, buried there. As bishop of Rieti Giovanni remained a Papazurri, and the connection is underlined by Matteo Barnabei's having occasionally noted the involvement of Bishop Giovanni in, or the importance to him of, an act recorded in Matteo's parchment cartulary by placing, as well as a miter, the Papazurri stemma in the margin of the folio on which he wrote the record of the act.^[35] One of Bishop Giovanni's nephews, Francesco, became a canon of Rieti; and lists of witnesses to Giovanni's acts, the names of the people gathered round him, repeatedly recall his Papazurri, his Muti, and his Roman connections.^[36]

When he was within the diocese of Rieti, Bishop Giovanni did not always stay in the city of Rieti. His predecessors had not, of course, been completely tied to the city: Bishop Gottifredo in 1276 was at the convent of Santa Filippa Mareri where he had perhaps gone to die, and his predecessor Tommaso the Corrector, who had supposedly visited his diocese, was, perhaps in the course of that visitation, at Collefegato thinking of Santa Filippa in 1253; and both Tommaso and Rainaldo de Labro have told us of their predecessors' formal procuration-gathering

progressions through the diocese.^[37] But—and in this he certainly seems typical of other thirteenth-century bishops when they were within the diocese at all—Tommaso's surviving dated acts place him, essentially always, in the city of Rieti itself. In another medium they tell again the story Salimbene would tell of Tommaso's predecessor's, Rainaldo da Arezzo's, interpretation of diocese.^[38] Giovanni, the Papazurri Roman, extends diocese, in his constitutions, and in his habitation. As early as 1310 Giovanni was at Torano, in the extreme southeastern corner of the diocese, across the river Salto from the diocese of the Marsi, inducting a new rector in the church of San Martino.^[39] More significantly in the late winter and spring of 1324 he was staying in Collalto, in the southernmost part of the diocese, near the point on the river Turano where the four dioceses of Rieti, Sabina, Tivoli, and the Marsi touched. From there his contact with the other center of diocesan government, the vicar general and chapter in Rieti city, was by messenger—so that a document issued by the bishop on 7 April might be officially read, copied, and dated by the others in Rieti only on 12 April.^[40] From 1324 to 1331 Bishop Giovanni was in Montereale at the center of the distant northeastern segment of the diocese; it is quite possible that over those years he lived there continually.^[41]

On 18 July 1334 Bishop Giovanni was corresponding with his vicar from Rome.^[42] Giovanni's presence in Rome makes his observer face the reason for his absences from his cathedral city, the reason for the carefully copied and described episcopal letters with their described red seals. Rome was not a distant part of Giovanni's diocese. Some part of the motivation for Giovanni's exile may have been, in the grander sense, political. The second half of his episcopate was clearly a time of renewed disorder in central Italy. Even without being able to recreate the detail of local and regnal politics which would explain Giovanni's absence from his city and cathedral, Giovanni's observer can accept the serious possibility that it existed.^[43]

But another, although not necessarily unrelated, kind of friction and animosity may have been the principal cause of Giovanni's removal, his inability to live happily with segments of the cathedral clergy and particularly his chapter. Although Giovanni was at times considered sympathetic enough even to act as arbiter for the local clergy, signs of tension clearly exist.^[44] Giovanni's early capitular legislation, that which he issued in 1303 and which he had copied in 1306, might seem, were all the documents from everywhere before us, conventional, but it is certainly unpleasant—suspecting betrayal, the revelation of secrets, and

fraud; demanding oaths; restricting absolution. And the beauty of the hand and elegance of the composition of a document written by the notary by royal authority Luca da Santa Rufina, with his notarial sign a kind of Byzantine cross hanging from its last line, does not hide the acerbity, almost brutality, of Bishop Giovanni's tone in his demand that each canon pay his share of the expense of sending Tommaso Capitaneo to Naples to get from King Robert money owed for the anniversary payment in memory of his father's coronation at Rieti.^[45]

There is more direct, although not in detail unambiguous, evidence of hostility between Bishop Giovanni and his chapter which drove him from his see—finally to a Rome which in 1334 must have seemed wildly different from the Rome of 1302, the year of Giovanni's translation to Rieti. When Giovanni's successor was elected, some of the canons who elected him were under a kind of shadow. The matter or problem is revealed in a letter issued by an auditor of the papal chamber in Avignon and dated 3 August 1338; it was copied by Matteo Barnabei in his parchment book. The document records the absolution of a group of canons who had been accused of expelling and despoiling Bishop Giovanni and so had been cited by two rectors of the patrimony. The accused canons were said initially to have been contumacious. Yet later they were absolved by one of the rectors, the bishop of Orvieto, acting in Montefiascone on 3 December 1322, after one of the canons, Tommaso Cimini, had appeared for himself and the others before the rector. The canons who had been absolved and were specifically named were Tommaso Cimini, Giacomo di don Tommaso, Andrea the abbot of Sant'Eleuterio, Matteo di magistro Biagio, Matteo di don Angelo di Tufo, and Matteo di don Paolo.^[46] Whatever the attitude of these canons had been toward Giovanni before their excommunication, it must have been chilled by the excommunication.

Again, Giovanni Papazurri, this repeated providee of Boniface VIII, this nepotist member of a rich and broadly connected Roman family, a man capable of annoying his provider through a casual, or perhaps arrogant, ignoring of proper form, this man who may have been an absentee bishop in his first two sees, and who certainly was long away from the cathedral city of his third, who could produce a remarkably antagonistic tone in pronouncing his demands to his seemingly alienated canons, this man seems an unlikely hero of the Eucharist, Confession, and the parishioner's soul. His figure is not, of course, really very visible. The lines with which one would draw him are not continuous. His episcopate is the first Reatine episcopate continuously described by

a conscientious and, in copying, articulate recorder, Matteo Barnabei; but from that record in spite of the quite dazzling (in this little theater) acts of Giovanni's which are written into it, he himself, the bishop, is generally absent. The history of the church proceeds without him.

One must ask, is it simply an accident, coincidence, that his long episcopate coincided with such a lot of important change—in the definition of diocese, of church, in governing and in writing about government, in the moving of memory into continuous record, in ways of building church and burying? Was he just standing there, or really just standing in the distance, when it all happened?

I think that, in the end, particularly after one has thought about Giovanni and new chapels and the new tribune of the cathedral, and then remembered the synodal constitutions, that it is virtually impossible to reject the connection between Giovanni and change.^[47] Not much can he known of the man; what can be known seems contradictory, contrapuntal, contrapostal. He is aggravated and aggravating. But he seems repeatedly even when he is not speaking originally to speak revealingly, tellingly. Though the words are conventional when he talks of his mind and soul in planning his chapel dedicated to the Savior, I at least believe that he is thinking of his mind and soul, in a world of minds and souls.^[48] When, from Montereale in February 1328, he founded Santa Caterina, the new convent of cloistered Benedictine nuns in Cittaducale, in response to the supplication of Gentile da Foligno, the spiritually powerful Augustine Hermit and friend of Angelo Clareno, he could have acted without personal interest in nuns, Gentile, or Angelo; his response may have been merely formal and bureaucratic, but that seems unlikely.

When, in an arenga to the constitution most clearly his in the Paris manuscript, he says "tanto circa regimen et statum ecclesiarum nobis subiectarum tenemur amplius reuoluere intuitum nostre mentis, quanto in esamine stricti judicii tenebimur reddere rationem," I believe that this absentee (but not yet from Rieti) turns the problems of government and justice over in his mind, seriously, and seeks the right and apposite answers so that he may appropriately occupy his position as a responsible shepherd of the Reatine flock of souls. I think that we hear in him not, or not just, a formula from a formulary of arengas but the echo of Charlemagne lamenting at the end of the Bodley Roland or of Joinville's Louis IX worrying about good governance, although in a geographically restricted and overtly spiritual sphere.^[49] In this romance of Giovanni Papazurri's mind no reader need follow me.

In talking Giovanni Papazurri, one talks of Matteo Barnabei. It is the notary, perhaps, whom we really see. One can, and must, argue that what we have watched is not a revolution in government and thought but rather a revolution in writing and recording. And then one must ask: is there a difference? how can one define the difference? can one separate the two pairs? does one pair push the other?

It would make sense to say that Matteo Barnabei, by himself, constructed the diocese of Rieti and gave it its real boundaries; it would make even more sense to say that he constructed the diocese that we can remember or find again. Either would be a statement more exact than the clichés of historical caution would tempt us to believe. Of course caution, common sense, and observation of the evidence force us to realize that he did not do it alone or begin the construction. Bishop Tommaso has made that clear. And, partly with Bishop Tommaso in mind, one must approach Matteo Barnabei from his past in order to appreciate his accomplishment. When one does appreciate it, one will appreciate the accomplishment, not the man. One cannot know the man, not even, not at all, in the way one can know Giovanni Papazurri, his partner, in a sense, in creation.

One can know that Matteo had a son, named Severio, who was old enough on 8 November 1346, when he acted with Matteo as a witness, to be a witness and probably a priest since he is called dompnus , and that, presumably, the Matteo notarii Matthei Barnabei, a witness on 12 July 1334, was another son.^[50] One can know that Matteo was alive and working on 8 January 1348, and that he was not alive long after that date, and that he was active as a notary by imperial authority and working in the church of Rieti by 1308 and by 2 December 1314 he was already able to call himself "nunc scriba domini episcopi et capituli," and that by 12 February 1315 he had substituted the word notarius for scriba .^[51] One can know that he was a citizen of Rieti, and know if not find the house and lands he was given as a feudum by the chapter on 23 June 1337.^[52] One can know his itinerary between 1315 and 1348—a very Reatine itinerary. One can know very well his notarial sign, the capitals E and M of his notarial subscript, the way he decorated his grand initial I for In nomine domini , his mode of composition and dating and spelling (and so something of the way he heard sound). Best of all one can know his hand, his actual way of writing, and follow its progression, or in fact decline, year after year in his great book, from 1315 to 1348—and it was in its early years a very beautiful, a very perfect hand. So at the very center of the history of the diocese of Rieti, of its definition, is this man

whom one cannot know as a man, unless one decides that knowing what we do know, not at all like what one knows of Rainaldo da Arezzo, but instead the shape of an h or of the abbreviation for pro , is also knowing a man (plates 24, 25).

There is very good reason to approach Matteo Barnabei through Bishop Tommaso the Corrector. Tommaso, although in his own way mute, was obviously a very strong and thoughtful administrator and diocesan who very definitely and distinctly did not do what, in their doing it, made Matteo and Giovanni, at Rieti, so remarkable. Tommaso came to Rieti from one of the two finest chanceries in Europe. He was a government man, a (if the word is used cautiously) bureaucrat. At Rieti he obviously did not govern alone. He used clerks and assistants. He wrote through notaries. But he did not create (or he seems not to have created) that system of what the chapter would later call obedientiaries, of people at least temporarily assigned to specific offices with specific responsibilities and a specific title.

So titled himself that he is known by his old title, Tommaso the Corrector, he did not give titles. He did not appoint an official bishop's scribe or notary. A number of scribes can be seen to have been working around the church of Rieti in the 1250s and early 1260s—Tommaso, Andrea Pasinelli, Rainerio, Rainaldo, Ambrogio, Magister Matteo.^[53] Most prominent among them, in the surviving documents, is a papal notary and citizen of Perugia, Ranaldo, who worked repeatedly for Bishop Tommaso.^[54] It is possible that Tommaso organized the episcopal-capitular writing office around Ranaldo, and that Ranaldo's neat but modest redactions, characteristically carefully and economically gathering a number of related documents into the panels of a single piece of parchment, a sort of proto-enrollment repeatedly noticeable in thirteenth-century Italian ecclesiastical writing offices, are connected with Tommaso's administrative interests and skills. But it seems clear that Tommaso did not appoint an official episcopal notary and that he did not develop a system of enrolling governmental acts in a codex register or cartulary.

If one moves back from Tommaso and Ranaldo one moves into a rather different scribal and diplomatic world, where things are relatively unsubdued and grand, and encounters scribes of documents for the church of Rieti who are called scriniarii of the holy Roman church and the city of Rieti: Giordano, Oddone, and Magister Bonofilio.^[55] The earliest of these three, Bonofilio, produced in 1233 a square document (16.5 cm by 16.5 cm) elaborately prepared and written in a sort of Ho-

norius III hand and also elaborately dated (incarnation, indiction, month, day, pontifical year: temporibus domini Gregorii VIIIJ pape . . .).^[56] In 1225 a document of Matteo scriniario used the titulus to note abbreviations and added to its date "tempore domini Honorii IIJ pape" the statement that Frederick emperor of the Romans was then ruling, and the notation that the day was counted from the beginning of the month.^[57] That document records a sentence of the then bishop Rainaldo de Labro and the judge Berardo Sprangone.

With these two, bishop and judge, the observable diplomatic, the scribal practice, of the church of Rieti in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries begins. Berardo Sprangone "dei gratia judex et scriniarius sacre Romane ecclesie et Reatine ciuitatis," a Reatine of already observed importance, wrote documents during the pontificates of Innocent III and Honorius III (1198–1227) (plate 21).^[58] Trapezoidal (the heads broader than the feet) but otherwise variously proportioned, sometimes decorated, carefully written in a hand that would have seemed respectable although perhaps a little archaic in Rome, produced by a major literate figure within the community, a judge in fact as well as a scribe, and a governor, these primitive elaborate documents argue both secretarial arrangements and a context very far from those of Bishop Tommaso and Ranaldo of Perugia and particularly from those which would noticeably begin to develop under Tommaso's obscure successor Bishop Gottifredo (1265–1275/6). In October 1265 a document is notarized by a man who describes himself as "Johannes Petri dei gratia Romane ecclesie et Reatine ciuitatis et dicti episcopi notarius."^[59]

Giovanni di Pietro, whose physical substance we have seen being transferred after his death, in 1318, to the building of the new tribune of the cathedral church of Rieti, was an official titled employee of the church of Rieti, its bishop's notary.^[60] Giovanni had been active in cathedral circles for several years before 1265; he acted as a notary for the chapter on 13 June 1263; he was a witness, in the choir, on 4 February 1261.^[61] He was to remain active until at least 3 May 1314 when he wrote in his protocols the draft of a document (which he himself did not extend) in which he described himself as "dictorum dominorum episcopi et capituli scriba."^[62] He thus spent more than fifty-three years as a professional man, a notary, involved in episcopal and capitular business. He was almost surely dead by 23 September 1314 when Simone Bonjohannis extended and redacted the 3 May 1314 document from "protocollis quondam notarii Johannis de Reate."^[63] He had, one might reasonably assume, begun working for the church of Rieti when he was

quite young; and the reasonable assumption is strengthened by the remaining record that his license to act as a notary by papal authority was issued by Pope Urban IV (1261–1264).^[64]

Giovanni was probably a native Reatine; as an adult he was certainly a citizen of Rieti. He seems always to have been a layman, in the sense that lay prebendaries were laymen. His father's name was Petrus Johannis, of which name his own was a characteristic inversion. Almost surely Johannes Petri's, our Giovanni's, grandfather's name was also Giovanni. The notary Giovanni's name, fully extended, was Johannes Petri Johannis Tedemarii (or Teodemarii). The Tedemarii (or Teodemarii) would seem to have been fixed as a patronymic surname by Giovanni di Pietro's generation since his own name, at least once, includes the Teodemarii without the preceding Johannis.^[65] Giovanni was married to a woman named Verardesca or Berardesca who survived Giovanni but was dead by, or in, October 1338.^[66] He seems to have had no surviving children or other close personal heirs.

By 1294 Giovanni held property in the Porta Cintia region of Rieti (near San Domenico) and was acquiring more; in January of that year he promised 33 and 1/3 gold florins to Pandolfono Jacobi Accani of Apoleggia for a third of a house next to some of his own property there.^[67] A property owner, lay, wived, Giovanni lived a citizen in Rieti, but his legacy, besides his part of the tribune, is a collection of great drifts of notarial instruments, which record a great variety of acts of the late thirteenth-century and early fourteenth-century bishops and chapter, and which form a very significant segment of the preserved individual loose documents in the chapter archives.

All of these documents are immediately recognizable because of the notarial sign which Giovanni used on all his subscribed work, an adaptation of sheath and ribbon, which, with a little imagination, can be seen as a J , because of its left-turning tail, with an efflorescent vegetable top, always placed by him (which was not true of all of his contemporaries) in the conventional notarial position before the subscript; his hand, too, in his subscribed work is recognizable, consistent and legible but without elegance. Although always recognizably his, Giovanni's notarial work is uneven. A document of some importance, an institution, which he wrote for Bishop Berardo in 1296, at the height presumably of his notarial powers, and which was once sealed with the bishop's seal, is a miserable job, owing in part to its badly dressed parchment, which looks like the sheep from lunch.^[68] On the other hand Giovanni's document from 1289 and the episcopate of Bishop Andrea, with which he

records the reception of a canon and in which he assigns himself no title, is a really handsome little piece of work (plate 22).^[69]

In spite of the importance that should be assigned to Giovanni's having an official title, that title wavers, as in fact Giovanni's work does: "episcopi notarius" for Bishop Gottifredo; "episcopi scriba" for Bishop Andrea; "episcopi scriba" also for Bishops Berardo and Giovanni; but also "nostrum notarium" for Bishop Giovanni; and finally in 1314 "dictorum dominorum episcopi et capituli scriba" under Bishop Giovanni.^[70] Giovanni di Pietro was not, when one can observe the phenomenon, the sole notary or even the always sole notary prebendary of the church; in some ways, and literally, he was one of a group. Conversely he was probably not solely occupied with the bishop's and chapter's business. In 1270 he redacted the record of a permutation between the friars of San Domenico and private persons; in 1292 he redacted a document concerning a Rieti prebend at the mandate of the beneficiary, not as the official notary of the church.^[71] Although either of these acts could be disguised commissions of the great church, Giovanni's independent actions, since he seems to have kept no cartulary and his protocols seem not to have survived, would not be expected now to exist. In record keeping he seems not to have been particularly creative or imaginative. In fact his long tenure of the central position within his writing office may have retarded its development. And yet there are from his time of dominance, and from the episcopate of Pietro da Ferentino and his vicar general Pietro Romano, from 1278 and 1282, impressively preserved records of prebendal income, division and reassignment, which themselves make clear Giovanni di Pietro's initial involvement, although the handsome document in which they now survive would seem to come from a time close to that of Giovanni's death. Giovanni's 1278 and 1282 work may well have been reassumed, built up into this small codex record by his successors, but in this case he does at least seem to have helped form, with his lists, a sort of recording which would be developed into a serious instrument of government in the hands of Matteo Barnabei.^[72]

Certainly as bishops came and went, and canons (or some of them) stayed, Giovanni di Pietro remained at the cathedral church of Rieti for more than fifty years, an official at the center of its writing office, providing it with memory in two ways, with his own retaining mind (retaining at the very least the memory of practiced form and behavior and of location), and with the retained defining documents which he wrote and which he, or his employers, kept in archive. To that diocese which

extended from the cathedral church on its central hill and which was defined by the actions on and in connection with that church he gave a new kind of official and to-be-retained definition, so that one can surely say that a new kind of (perhaps potential) definition of diocesan boundary, a new kind of official writing that implies and describes boundary, begins with his assuming his official position in 1265, a year before the diocese's loss of Amiterno (or the serious beginning of that loss).

Giovanni di Pietro's employers appreciated him. On 8 October 1293, when both the see of Rome and that of Rieti were vacant, the chapter of Rieti, assembled, as they say, in their accustomed manner in the choir of the cathedral church, received Giovanni "Petri Johannis Theodemarii" long (ex olim ) their notary as a lay prebendary of their church for as long as he should live and they ordered their chamberlain, dompnus Tommaso Capitaneo, to grant to Giovanni from treasury and cellar his share of daily distribution of commons, and they granted Giovanni as a prebend eight giunte (and again the modern Reatine giunta is 1,617.32 square meters) of land in Roscia or Vergaria Roscie of Colle Baccaro (and it is the name that is questioned, not the place because the boundaries are named), and they ordered two canons of Rieti, Rainaldo Alfani and Bartolomeo di don Oddone, to induct him and give him corporal possession of his tenement. And then on 26 November 1294, when the see of Rieti was no longer vacant, Bishop Nicola acting in his chamber, in a nest of Cistercians (Angelo abbot and Fra Simone da Foligno and Fra Giacomo da Butri, all monks of San Pastore), confirmed all that the canons had done.^[73]

These documents are a monument to the appreciated value of written government. They are also, in their own forms, revealing. They combine notarial form with the form of the sealed letter. The chapter caused the notary Matteo Rayn' Tudini Cifredi to make a public instrument recording their grant, and the resulting document begins and ends conventionally for such an instrument; but it includes within it signs of the letter form; and the chapter had the instrument sealed with their seal. And Bishop Nicola, who rehearsed in his own letter-instrument both the grant and the induction by the chapter and had the whole thing notarized by the notary Pietro "Paczanelli," also had his document sealed with his seal. Rieti's was a church for which notaries wrote; its writing officers were notaries. But it was, not unconventionally, a writing office of mixed form. It knew the seal and the letter patent. It could not have not known them. Early and late in the thirteenth century

Reatine writers could watch papal spigurnels at work in their own Reatine palaces. Cardinals' sealed letters, Cistercian sealed letters, the sealed letter of an archdeacon of Siena, the abbot of Bominaco's sealed document, and certainly the bishop of Narni's seal (which Bertuldo had redirected) came before the eyes of Reatine writers.^[74] And the bishop and chapter of Rieti had their own seals and used them: Rainaldo da Arezzo in 1250; Tommaso in 1261; the chapter of Rieti its own seal in 1280 (plates 26 and 27); Pietro in 1282; Nicola in 1295; Giovanni in 1324; and the big (7.5 by 5 cm) pointed red wax seal of Bishop Biagio bearing the image of Virgin and Child and hanging from the document by a white and green cloth string that looks a little like a golf shoelace (plates 28 and 29).^[75] Reatine writers (at least some of them) knew how to use and adapt letter forms. But, again, theirs was a notarial office; they were notaries. To the notary Giovanni di Pietro succeeded, essentially, the notary Matteo Barnabei.

The speed with which Matteo Barnabei began his great parchment cartulary after the death of Giovanni di Pietro (nine months almost to the day after Giovanni's last preserved document) suggests, perhaps, that he was waiting to take over. He had done some work for the church as early as 1308 and was already a scriba of bishop and chapter by December 1314, as we have seen. The parchment book is reasonably described as a cartulary. It deals primarily with acts which concern property rather than, insofar as these things are separable, acts which would be described as governmental or administrative. It copies, essentially, previous notarial acts or extends notes from protocols, in which property transfers are recorded, rents and incomes are fixed, holdings are divided or exchanged. In its very first entry it records that, on 2 February 1315 in the church of Rieti before three witnesses, Tommaso Capitaneo as proctor of the bishop and chapter had leased to a woman, Giovanna Petri Celli, and her heirs, one-half a house lot with a small garden behind it, with specified boundaries including a public road, in the parish of San Nicola, for an entrance fee of 18 soldi of Ravenna and a rent, to be paid each year on 15 August, of 11 small denari of Ravenna, "now the usual money."^[76]

This action—the limited alienation of property by the bishop and chapter through a representative to an individual or individuals—is the base material of the book, its minimal matter. From this base material the book moves into much more complicated proprietary actions, ones which are much more closely connected with the distinguishing characteristics of the church of Rieti as an institution as well as its central

financial structure: it deals with the relations between bishop and canons, and among canons; it describes the structuring and restructuring of prebends; it copies wills and codicils to wills; it records essential acts of physical piety like the foundation of chapels. Miscellaneous in its inclusions, it seems not to exclude. On its second page, it begins its record of Giovanni Papazurri's parochial constitutions. Particularly in its early years, the book is thick and dense.

It is a book primarily concerned with property, with the property of the bishop and chapter. Matteo Barnabei, who can appear as the notary for either bishop or chapter, is repeatedly the notary of bishop and chapter together, of the vicar general, of either or both, and perhaps most frequently of the church at Rieti, the undefined complex—in his person and his work Matteo recalls a seal mentioned in 1287, but not preserved: the seal in the singular of the bishop and chapter of Rieti.^[77] It should be noted that this is not a cartulary of the notary Matteo in which he includes acts connected with the church of Rieti; and it is not that one of a series of cartularies in which he places for convenience of reference the acts of the church. It is the cartulary of the church of Rieti; and in its existence it gives the church a new kind of existence. But in its distinctness and inclusiveness it still remains sharply notarial: not only is, for example, the record of the initial act, the grant to Giovanna Petri Celli, the copy of an instrument notarized by Matteo Barnabei himself, but also the whole book is a notarial act with Giovanni's sign and subscription appearing in gathering after gathering.

Matteo Barnabei's surviving individual notarial instruments are not so unusual in their fineness as is his book, at least in its first two hundred pages.^[78] But they are clear and effective, the work of an accomplished notary. They share with his parchment book that notarial characteristic which gives the book much of its value as a source, the insistence upon the exact notation and sometimes description of what could be considered peripheral detail. Truth to the notary is pertinent detail of time, place, persons present, kind of action, type of currency.^[79] So when Matteo Barnabei, quickly after Giovanni di Pietro's death, decided or agreed to begin the composition of this planned and official book which would detail and preserve the acts of the central, cathedral church of Rieti and its officers, he in fact also decided to give that part of the diocese which his acts would touch, its substance, a new kind of retained reality. The cartulary is thick with detail and people; it gives flesh, and the memory of flesh, to that which it touches. It is full of movement. Although it interprets property broadly, it, perhaps inadvertently, argues the im-

portant reality of property in governmental and even pious act. The description is continuous: year follows year, and within each year month follows month; and the latter action, explicitly when that is appropriate, remembers the former. Continuity is description; or at least it moves description to a different depth.

I would argue that the creation of this book changes the diocese of Rieti. But it has, for purposes of diocesan description, clear limitations. The movement of which it is full, is restricted: it is generally movement from the choir of the great church of Rieti to the bishop's chamber, from the area at the foot of the campanile to the loggia of a Reatine citizen's house, from a canon's chapel to a canon's house. Occasionally its action moves to a distant piece of property, a church or chapel; and of course it almost begins with the parochial constitutions. But essentially the church of Rieti in Matteo's parchment book is the community, or closely tied to the community, on the hill in the city. This church often does not seem to be, but even in a way seems the opposite of, the new church, the newly defined diocese, of the synodal constitutions—and of course neither Matteo nor his book claimed for it new powers of definition.

As the book proceeds, moreover, from 1315 to 1336, through the period of its coverage of Giovanni Papazurri's episcopate, the bishop, who might be expected to represent a larger view of diocese than the chapter, seems to slip out of the book's pages as Giovanni himself slips into his years of provincial and then Roman exile, or at least distance. Further, as the book proceeds, its quality seems to decline. The strong beauty of Matteo's hand, as it appears for example in the year 1317, seems to be waning, or tiring, by, say, 1328. A reader who compares as a sampling the book's page 100, from 1317, with its page 484 from 1342, is aware of, in this sense, a sharply negative change (plates 24, 25): and he should note that the first one hundred pages have covered only three years, and that the next three hundred eighty-five pages have covered twenty-five years. The great book seems to be pulling itself in, minimizing itself.

It is thus rather stunning to find that in (or by) the 1340s, Matteo Barnabei has started a whole new career of collecting, recording, and defining, in paper. His most adventurous and in some ways important work is no longer confined to, or to be found in, his continuing parchment book. (And Matteo's own awareness of the distinction between his work on parchment and on paper and also the fact that the development of his work in the 1340s was already in preparation at least by 1334 are shown in a note in his parchment book for 5 February 1334

where he talks of "aliis actis meis qui scripti sunt in carta bammacina [other acts of mine which are written on paper].") Of Matteo's new books of paper (some of which paper at least was milled in Sulmona) there are two sets, of two books each, which deal with different matter and come from different (but overlapping) periods: 1340–1347; 1346–1347.^[80] The earlier two books are continuous. They have sometimes been designated as different in matter: "Liber Collationum" and "Liber Contractuum"; but, although the earlier book in the beginning does quickly show its concern with collationes , presentations and institutions to clerical livings, both are concerned with a variety of actions as the generic contractuum suggests, and the distinction between the two is chronological. The later two books are court books, which, essentially, record the acts of the tribunal of the vicar general of the cathedral chapter, to whom or which jurisdiction sede vacante fell, from the vacancy of 1346–1347, after the translation from Rieti of Bishop Raimond de Chameyrac and before the translation to Rieti of Bishop Biagio da Leonessa. Although the first set of books is, essentially, entirely the work of Matteo Barnabei, and the second two are essentially his collections of material, none of the books proclaims itself his as flagrantly as does the parchment book (although four of the five gatherings of the 1340–1343 book do conclude with his sign and subscription). The parchment book emblazoned with his sign was the book of the church of Rieti, but these relatively depersonalized books show the diocese of Rieti in understood and seemingly accustomed administrative and judicial behavior; they are work books, connected with quick, pervasive action.

On the first seven folios of the 1340–1343 paper book are seven presentations and renunciations; one jumps quickly into what has seemed the book's business. An act of 3 March 1341 is a revealing example of that business: Leonardo Abbiamontis de Valviano di Cittaducale, patron for three parts of half of the church of San Nicola di Valviano in Rieti diocese, vacant through the death of Petrucio Henrici da Montereale, former clerk of the church, presents to Bishop Tommaso, for institution to the vacant church, his, the patron's, son Tuccio.^[81] On 6 February 1342 Don Caputosto of Poggio Bustone as patron for an eighth part of the church of San Giovanni of Poggio Bustone, vacant through the resignation of Oddone Pasinelli, and the same Caputosto patron for an eighth part of Sant'Angelo of Poggio Bustone, vacant through the resignation of his own son Tommaso, presented to both churches: his own son Buccio to San Giovanni and Matteo di don Pandulfo of Poggio to Sant'Angelo; on 13 February Don Reche di don

Synibaldo of Rieti, patron of one-half of Santo Stefano di Catico, vacant through the resignation of Syniballo his son, re-presented Syniballo (and the presentation was confirmed).^[82] On the last day of February, three brothers, two of whom were canons of Rieti, Matteo, Angelo, and Cola di don Paolo, patrons together of one-fourth part and one-twenty-fourth part, respectively, of San Pietro and San Quirico de Plagis, presented to this complex a clerk native to the place of the two churches.^[83]

This splintering of churches and livings seems to make nonsense of the episcopal constitutions concerning good pastors properly presented. In order that it should not make nonsense of the pastoral synods, obviously, very careful observation, control, and record keeping were necessary. The synods and the splintering together present problems of dealing with patronage vastly different from and more pettily complicated than those involved with the attempted control of the great baronial patronage of the Amiterno lords at Ferentillo or the Lavareta lords at Lugnano. Clearly, as these later cases show, the central diocesan episcopal control of these relatively petty (in the individual instances) patrons did not keep them from presenting, successfully, their own relatives (and in other cases friends and clerks) to these livings; and there is no suggestion that it was meant to do so, if the presentees were themselves technically suitable.

But the recording of these presentations in Matteo Barnabei's first paper book, taken together with other actions there recorded—the regulation of licenses for absences to study at university, the imposing of conditional controls when presentment arrangements seem to suggest danger to parishioner welfare—show a serious concern for the implementation of the creative ideas about and definitions of diocese stated in the synodal constitutions, show the necessity for that implementation of records of the sort that Matteo Barnabei here created, and show the integral connection between Matteo's kind of written government and the expanded interpretation of diocese and, thus, of diocesan boundary. An example of the sort of episcopal supervision which Matteo was able to record is that of April 1342, actually during an episcopal vacancy when diocesan administration was in the hands of the cathedral chapter, when the chapter, acting as if it were bishop in this matter, issued a constitution regarding the churches of San Giovanni "de Castro Vetere" (Castel di Tora) and Santa Maria de Illicis; it dealt with the fixed residence of priests and canons in the churches and care of souls, before it accepted, with the provision of observing the constitution which protected the spiritual rights and needs of the church's parishioners, the

clerks presented for these churches by their potent patrons, the lords of Mareri.^[84]

The two books which Matteo put together which deal with cases heard by the chapter's vicar general sede vacante or his representatives move into the diocese in a different and superficially more vivid way. They show the episcopal chapter's assumed competence in litigation in the diocese, its assumed interest in justice and in the control of diocesan crime. That they come from a period of episcopal vacancy is noteworthy, but not entirely surprising. Innovation, and unusually careful and visible control by an appointed official, seem not to have been unnatural or unreasonable corollaries of episcopal vacancies. Further, these books more than any of the others suggest that they may, but only may, be first survivals rather than that they were first occurrences; a chapter might naturally have in its, admittedly pretty random, archives, records of diocesan courts under its rather than a living bishop's control.

The division of matter in the two books as they survive is not completely rational, but it is essentially a separation into the two named categories. The normality of judicial administration is early set in the book of civil cases: the vicar sits for tribunal in Rieti in the papal palace ad solitum bancum , at the accustomed bench, and he sits in hora causarum , at the hour at which cases are heard.^[85] A man named Cola di Giovanni Planetis is ordered on pain of excommunication to give over to his dead wife Lippa's executors the thirteen unpaid florins of the twenty-five she left to pious bequests.^[86] The validity of marriages is repeatedly examined. Pietro Paolo di Giovanni Cicarelle of Rieti is claimed to have contracted marriage with Maxia or Massia di magistro Angelo da Rodio di Aquila but to have refused to accept her as his legitimate wife. Maxia's side claims both were of legal age at the time of the contract: Pietro Paolo was over fourteen and she over twelve; and this was commonly known publica uox et fama and particularly in the contrada Ponte. In the end Maxia's case could not be established.^[87]

From the mind of the contrada Ponte, the vicar general must turn his attention in another case to the mind of the contrada Arce. Were Cola di Pietro Pauloni of Rieti and Margarita di Tommaso Nervi of Rieti within the fourth degree of kinship and should their marriage be annulled? Witness after witness from the contrada is called and asked to dig into his or her own and common knowledge of the genealogy of the two parties. Pietro di Matteo tells what he has heard from Pretiosa, his mother, and Matteo, his father, and other older people: Margarita Syniballi and Venuta Syniballi were sisters, and also sisters of his mother,

Pretiosa; Margarita was the mother of Pasquale who was the father of Giovanna who was the wife of Tommaso Nervi and the mother of Margarita, the wife in the contested marriage; Venuta was the mother of Gualterio who was the father of Petrutia who was the wife of Pietro Pauloni and mother of Cola, the husband in the contested marriage—so that husband and wife were indeed within the fourth degree and were in fact (in modern terms) third cousins. Matteo Feste had seen together Margarita and Venuta, the sisters, and Pasquale and Gualtiero, the cousins. Matteo di Giovanni Berardi says Margarita had a sister whose name he cannot remember, and Margarita had a son Pasquale, and from the sister whose name he cannot remember came Gualterio. The first action of the case had happened on the last day of July, when Cola who had initiated the proceedings brought the case against Margarita; on 12 August Cola was himself present before the vicar, and Tommaso appeared for his daughter and brought the vicar two letters written on paper and sealed by Rainaldo former bishop of Rieti. By 17 October a nuntius declares that he has delivered a mandate to both parties forbidding carnal intercourse until the case is decided; and this mandate is rehearsed on 24 December 1347, more than a year later and then final sentence delivered (and written by Matteo Barnabei) on 8 January 1348 by the vicar sitting under the loggia of the papal palace with Cola present but Margarita absent, in which sentence the marriage is definitively annulled and the two are free to marry other parties.^[88] The binding close together in the book of the actions in this long case argues for its composition as a case book, not a list of daily actions.

The prominence of Rieti and its contrade in a book dealing in good part with marriage and inheritance is unsurprising in various ways—concentration of population, wealth, observation by people of one another, and understanding of legal technicalities and qualms of conscience, presumably went together with the availability of the vicar's court. But quickly after the Arce case the book moves into the country and two old women (mulieres antique ) of the village of San Patrignano de Plagis are being asked to stretch their memories back into village genealogies.^[89] And then on successive folios in the papal palace are heard speaking themselves or through proctors: Don Giovanni Pantano abbot of the church of San Lorenzo di Sambuco, men from Santa Rufina and San Vittorino de Arpagano, Puccio Francisconi of the village of Colle Secca of Leonessa (but diocese of Rieti), Roberto di don Angelo rector of San Marco di Rocca Sinibalda, Magister Matteo di magistro Giacomo di Piediluco.^[90] And it is clear that country diocesan places should be

prominent too, although not in the same concentration as are affairs from Rieti, because the causes include definition of feuda and benefices and disputes over tithes—as, the latter, in the case of the church of San Valentino de Rocca Canetra.^[91]

These five large gatherings of paper folios with interesting paper marks, this book has tucked into it sealed letters and consilia , by legists of local note like Giovanni di Canemorto and Don Casalle, judge of Rieti.^[92] It includes material heard and initially decided by a subordinate vicar general, the chapter's vicar general for the area of Montereale, Pietro abbot of San Lorenzo di Montereale who acted in Montereale.^[93] It also preserves on a paper letter from the vicar general in Rieti a partly surviving and partly legible wax seal (red, pointed oval, ca. 4.3 cm high) with a legend including "sigillum," "icariorum," and "cap," and figures including at center top a miter and beneath it where a figure of a man might he a crozier standing alone. The letter is said, by itself, to be issued "sub sigillo curie nostre."^[94] This book loudly proclaims by the 1340s the regularity of functioning of an administrative diocese which stretches to its distant boundaries and for its most distant part supplies its own local vicar. Its seal, with miter over crozier but no human figure, proclaims the continuity of diocesan office not dependent on the presence of a specific human being.

Within the book of civil cases is at least one case of violent crime: that of Mathiutia di Nicola Massei, who is said to have laid her violent hands on Angelitto di Nicola Massei, her brother and an oblate at San Domenico Rieti, hit him on the face until she drew blood, and hit him a number of other times; she is excommunicated, but her proctor also represents her brother Petrucio and her sister Margarita.^[95] Oddly, because of its placement, the case, like the crozier seal, gives a sharp sense of continuity of office and administrative function, because the case was presented before the vicar general of Bishop Rainaldo, Francesco archpriest of San Sehastiano Poggio Fidoni, who is further identified as Francesco di Giovanni de Bussata, and who in a later folio and case is called "Don Francesco di Giovanni Bussata in this office our predecessor" by the vicar general actually active in the cases of the book, Francesco archpriest of Santa Maria Antrodoco.^[96]

The criminal act book (a book of criminous clerks) begins with a complaint of violence against a Rieti clerk, Antonio di Angelictio Petroni Oddonis, with an alias, Gauto, who had attacked another man of Rieti, Jannutio di Nicola Bartolomei, with knife and sword, and hit him two times in the head without, however, drawing blood. The clerk,

Gauto, had escaped from the chapter's jail—he broke jail ("fregit dictum carcerem")—a jail which was next to the church and palace and bishop's garden; and the fracas had occurred in Porta Carceraria fuori in the house of Rainaldo Molendinario (the miller) "in qua domo erat taberna et uinum in ea uendebat et predicta est publica uox et fama in dicta strada (in which house was a tavern and in it he sold wine and this was public knowledge in that street)." The chapter's vicar general had sat as a tribunal at the bench of justice in the papal palace in Rieti at the hour for hearing cases (in ora [or hora ] causarum ) and listened to pleading on 27 June, 28 June, and 4 July 1346 and had in the end fined Gauto 110 lire, of which 10 lire was for the insult he had offered and the blows he had given, and 100 lire for breaking jail.^[97]

On the following 30 August the vicar general was forced to listen to the story of a different kind of violence, this time from a country village instead of the northern edge of the city. Filippa di Gentile of Verano claimed that she had been raped, in her father's garden (in Verano in the contrada Colle Stangtini next to the property of the heirs of Stangtino), by dompno Giovanni di Bartholomucio, the priest of San Vito di Verano. He, Filippa said, was diabolically inspired, and she unwilling and a woman of good reputation. The relationship was complicated and perhaps in some ways explained by her further statement that the priest had formerly kept Filippa's sister, Gerrantia, as his concubine.^[98] In the same August the vicar listened to the case of a Rieti clerk who had entered by force and violence a house in the Porta Cintia di sopra in Rieti, in which house lived a man from Città di Castello and his Perugian wife, a woman of good reputation; the clerk had, against the Perugian wife's will, seized her body, thrown her to the floor, and raped her.^[99]

In September the vicar dealt with two offenses committed, it was claimed, by the same foul-mouthed priest in the contrada "Unda." The priest, Pietro Britte of Rieti, had attacked his fellow-priest Pietro di Giovanni Turani of Rieti next to a widow's shop in the contrada and called him "Bisstone de merda"; and the same priest in the same month had attacked Lucto Saleztrum in the same contrada before the house of Rainaldo Cimini in which Lucto had a shop and called Lucto "Bisstone de merda."^[100] In the same month and in October a man formerly of Spoleto who lived in Castro Butri—and again the hearing under the arcade of the papal palace in Rieti is about events which occurred, or didn't, outside the city in the diocese—complained that a priest of San Pietro di Butri, armed with a knife and angry, had assaulted him in the

piazza before his own, the plaintiff's, house, and said "Bisstone stelgu de lu puctana, pro una manecare faciam te occidere"—and Matteo Barnabei notes that he, Matteo, recorded this hearing. The vicar general listened and made decisions which brought fines to chapter coffers; sometimes he found against both sides—as in the Butri case in which the defendant was fined for his language and the plaintiff for failing to make his case.^[101]

With his collationes and his described cases which retain the recent memory of the piazza at Butri, sharp with the ugly half-translated vulgarity of an angry priest, and the longer memory of the contrada Arce, softer with the memory of dead aunts and of cousins seen together, Matteo Barnabei has written, and so created or recorded, a fully imagined and extended diocese, a governed place. In late 1347 full diocese and full record exist. Something of what is newly seen, any viewer would probably argue, is simply a new extension of writing, perhaps even of preserving; but could that viewer believe that the new writing is not the result of a new sensibility which sees a diocese as a more extended, more living, and more governable thing—and so is at least responsible for making it that? And could he or she believe that the newness was not created in collusion between Matteo the writer and the governors and administrators for whom he worked, and in collusion between them both and the society which formed them and which they governed?

Our understanding of this newness is extended by the survival at Rieti in the dean and chapter archives of three small parchment books: the first is identified as "III.B.1"; the second as Liber or Libro or Book VI; the third by the original date of one of its copied documents, "1212." The book called "1212" contains the parchment copy of the list of possessions of the cathedral church which was composed in and just after the year 1225 and which is essentially identical with the paper copy used here earlier in examining property and people in the Porta Carceraria. The parchment copy has not, however, lost its initial passages. In fact it begins, after an invocation, by saying that it is a copy of an old register found in the cathedral archives which lists land, vineyards, houses, and other possessions of the church as well as rents and incomes of various sorts derived from the church's possessions:

In nomine domini, Amen. Hec est copia siue renouatio cuiusdam Registri antiqui reperti in archiuio ecclesie Reatin' de terris, vineis, domibus et aliis possexionibus dicte ecclesie Reatine et de censu, pensione, decima et aliis redditibus qui debentur eidem ecclesie Reatin' de possexionibus supradictis.

It then continues to say that it was made at the time of and by the mandate of Bishop Giovanni, with Giovanni Papazurri's usual style, "by the grace of God and the apostolic see":

facta tempore et de mandato Reuerendi in Xristo patris et domini domini Johannis dei et apostolice sedis gratia episcopi Reatin'.

This copy, with its notarial-inscription beginning, was the copy of a document, an old register, which was found, in the time of Bishop Giovanni Papazurri, in the cathedral archives (which thus clearly then existed in some form) and was made at Bishop Giovanni's order. The inclusion within the document of the name of the presiding bishop (in the ablative) dompno [sic] Raynaldo episcopo Reatin' acting with three canon "obedientialibus" (and using an overlapping but not identical group of witnesses for each porta), ties together two very ditierently active bishops, Rainaldo de Labro and Giovanni Papazurri.^[102] (And again two copies of the 1225 list survive, this one in parchment and the one in paper.)

The "1225" list is preceded by another list, which contains fifty-eight items, from 1212, a copy, "exemplum," it says in introducing itself, of a certain instrument written by the judge and "scriptuarius" Berardo Sprangon' and copied at the mandate of Bishop Giovanni (Papazurri) by the public notary Matteo Pandulfi.^[103] The copied 1212 document speaks in Berardo's name and says that he made it "rogatus a domino Episcopo Adinulfo et Reatinis canonicis" so that various annual rents and incomes from houses, lots, and various properties given in various ways by Reatine citizens and others of the comitatus of Rieti would be recorded together, copied from various instruments which Berardo himself had written at various times. Berardo's document concludes with his subscript. There then follow five notarial subscriptions to the copy, which is dated 17 April 1315, of which subscriptions the last is Matteo Pandulfi's own in which he identifies himself as a citizen of Rieti and notary public by authority of the urban prefect. The third of these subscriptions is that of Pietro di notaio Giovanni de Clausura, a notary by royal and imperial authority and "nunc notarius et scriba dicti domini episcopi"; the second is Matteo Barnabei, "ciuis Reatinus, nunc notarius episcopi et capituli."^[104] This copy ties together, then, the, in his own way, active Bishop Adenolfo and his scribe Berardo (who in fact appears as a cathedral tenant in the Porta Cintia in the "1225" list) with Bishop Giovanni and the, in this case, observing, and perhaps supervising, notary Matteo Barnabei—and the chapters of the early thirteenth and early fburteenth centuries.

The book identified as "III.B.1," which records the definition and adjustment of prebendal incomes in 1278 and 1282 during the episcopate of Bishop Pietro da Ferentino with the participation of the notary Giovanni di Pietro, includes part of Bishop Tommaso the Corrector's list of diocesan churches. Book VI, which lists prebendal incomes in and after 1307 from the episcopate of Bishop Giovanni Papazurri, records the work of the capitular chamberlain Tommaso Capitaneo.^[105] Taken together the three parchment books help both to define and underline the newness of Matteo Barnabei in the time of Giovanni Papazurri. They show that in some matters even of recording, Bishop Giovanni could utilize the work of some of his predecessors and their scribes and notaries—and the predecessors' names are worthy of note: Adenolfo, Rainaldo de Labro, Tommaso the Corrector, Pietro da Ferentino. The three books show that Matteo Barnabei did not work alone, but they also show even more clearly the importance of his initial period of official activity.

Matteo Barnabei did not survive 1348, although he very surely did not die young. His successors, who did survive, conserved what he had created. They had it for a base; but they developed a different and more dispersed kind of record keeping. Of these successors three seem most significant: Bishop Biagio da Leonessa, the last bishop for whom, perhaps for as little as three months, Matteo worked; the notary Silvestro di don Giovanni; and the prebendary turned canon Ballovino di magistro Giovanni, who in 1372 gave fifty forms of his own money toward the cost of the new cross for the church of Rieti.

Silvestro di don Giovanni of Rieti was a notary by imperial authority, whose importance to the history of the church of Rieti is particularly connected with the survival in the chapter archives of his paper cartulary, very much the cartulary of him the notary, of his contractus, protocolla, et acta, described by him, and with his sign on its cover folio. The matter of the book stretches from 6 March 1336 through 17 June 1351. The cartulary (which is a very rich source) would seem on the surface to have no official connection with the church of Rieti but to be a perfectly ordinary notarial cartulary compiled by a notary who worked repeatedly for members of a group of rich and patrician local families, some of whose members held official positions in the church and/or left it significant bequests in their wills, families like the Pasinelli, the Cimini, and the Secinari.^[106] The election to the bishopric of a member of one of these families, who had been a client of Silvestro's, Tommaso Secinari, in the late 1330s would seem to have brought Silvestro more firmly

into the ambit of the cathedral church and its clergy. Certainly the connection was maintained or reestablished after the death of Tommaso. In the 1350s and 1360s Silvestro describes himself as "nunc notarius et scriba dictorum dominorum episcopi et capituli" and "nunc notarius et scriba dicti domini episcopi"—notary and scribe of the bishop and chapter but also notary and scribe of the bishop.^[107] But Silvestro, and this seems particularly significant to the pattern of which he forms a part, not only does not work alone, as the only notary of Biagio and his church, but does not give clear evidence of having dominated a group as his predecessors Giovanni di Pietro and Matteo Barnabei did. In fact Bishop Biagio's style in employing official writers is suggested by an early document of his, once sealed, in letter form, dated on 14 July 1349 from his palazzo in Leonessa ("Dat' et act' Goness'in palatio nostro") and written by Francesco di Angelo of Leonessa, notary by imperial authority, and "nunc notarius, familiaris, et scriba dicti domini episcopi"—the bishop himself is very present (see plates 28, 29).^[108]

The position and importance of Ballovino di magistro Giovanni are very different from those of Silvestro di don Giovanni. Ballovino was, like Silvestro, one of a group of recorders, but his recording was particularly innovative. He kept the church's, essentially the chapter's, new and carefully itemized account books from their first appearance, or surviving appearance, in 1355 until he was succeeded in this chore, his as chamberlain or camerlengo , by Don Agostino in 1379 (plate 20). He was alive still, and active, in 1382.^[109] Since he had been repeatedly present acting as a witness to church business since the very early 1330s, present also for some part of the heresy trial of Paolo Zoppo in 1334, increasingly present in the late 1330s, and a prebendary and major actor for the church by 1337, his was a long connection, over fifty years, with the church of Rieti. On the eve of the Black Death he was still a prebendary; on its morrow, in 1349, he was a canon—a progression not earlier recorded in the church of Rieti. The actual progression is recorded in a document of 2 September 1348 which regrants Ballovino's old prebend which he had renounced to accept his canon's benefice.^[110] As camerlengo and keeper of his books, he gave his church a new kind of thickness and continuity of memory and existence. He built on, extended, specialized part of what Matteo Barnabei had made.^[111]

Even the most restrained observer who cannot allow himself to see that the remembering, copying, thinking, mapping, and defining of this string of senior clerks (in the writing, not necessarily the other clerical sense) created, moved to physical existence, and perpetuated a new kind

of diocese with new kinds of boundaries, must see in them the development of a more professional chancery, the development of a central office in the government of the diocese. And the observer will have noticed during this development that of another central, nonchancery, official, who could find himself aptly represented by a miter over a crozier, without a human figure, on a seal. The development of the vicar general and his office is concurrent with the development of the new "chancery" and visible in its records. It also changes the nature of diocese and the position of the diocese's bishop particularly by offering a type of continuity of office, by allowing the development of a more professional bureaucracy (and being the central part of that development), and by freeing the bishop, if he chose to be free, from the trapping details of his increasingly elaborate job.^[112]

One returns again to the administrator bishop, the organizer, Tommaso the Corrector, provided to the see from his own curia by Pope Innocent IV. Tommaso did not, obviously, do his important work alone. But when we can see him surrounded by his helpers, as we seem to be able to, for example at vespers on 26 April 1261 in the choir of the cathedral church with the chapter, those witnessing helpers are dompno Manuele, dompno Pietro Beralli, and Ugolino, his familiares , a little core of household clerks (in this case two-thirds priests) without specific continuing names for specific continuing jobs.^[113] Certainly, at a time when continuing vicars (sometimes called vicars general) were beginning to become, or about to become, more common in Italian dioceses, Bishop Tommaso shows no sign of having had a vicar general.^[114] In fact vicars general appear with the two successors of Gottifredo, Tommaso's own, not very well documented, successor.^[115]

These two men were Bishop Pietro da Ferentino, translated by Pope Nicholas III from Sora in 1270, and Bishop Andrea Rainaldi, translated by Pope Honorius IV also from Sora in 1286.^[116] Both, because of their backgrounds and careers, can reasonably be called curial bishops. Pietro da Ferentino is, and was, known by various names; one of the names used for him was Pietro Romano or "de Roma." At Rieti, this busily political bishop who had reason to appreciate a vicar, chose as vicar general a man called Pietro Romano or "de Roma," who was a canon of San Valentino, Ferentino.^[117] Andrea, who succeeded Pietro both to Sora and to Rieti, had been a chaplain to Cardinal Giacomo Savelli (who became Honorius IV in 1285); his career before Rieti would have suggested to him the utility of vicars. Andrea, who had been a canon of Rieti before he was provided to Sora, chose as his vicar general at Rieti

another canon of Rieti who had also been a chaplain of Giacomo Savelli; this man was Ventura Rainaldi, surely Andrea's own brother.^[118] The third vicar general to be found at Rieti in the thirteenth century was Berardo, canon of Ancona. He, in 1298, acted as vicar general for his uncle Bishop Berardo, whom Boniface VIII had translated to Rieti from Ancona in 1296.^[119] Three bishops of Rieti translated to Rieti from other sees employed at Rieti as vicars general their own relatives. The picture does not seem particularly edifying, but what at Rieti one can know of two of the bishops and one of the vicars—of neither Berardo can much be said—should cause the observer to be wary in making judgment. In any case, with these three, in the late thirteenth century, visible vicars general begin at Rieti.

Vicars general reappear at Rieti with Matteo Barnabei's newly full documentation and with Bishop Giovanni Papazurri. None of Giovanni's known vicars general was a Papazurri. Six of these vicars general, one specifically for the area around Montereale, are known to have existed. In 1323 two of them worked sometimes together and sometimes separately; twice they use their title in the plural (or it is used of them): vicarii generales . Of these two one, Giovanni, the secular abbot of the church of San Lorenzo di Fano in Montereale, had a chamber, a camera in the episcopal palace at Rieti; the other, Matteo Pandulfoni, was a prebendary of the cathedral church and extremely active, as Matteo Barnabei's parchment book shows, in its affairs.^[120]

In June of 1325 appears Francesco archpriest of San Rustico di Valle Antrodoco, the figure most important in the development of the office of vicar general—at least he is if he is the same Francesco who appears as Francesco archpriest of Santa Maria di Canetra, vicar general, on 28 November 1332 (after Francesco of San Rustico's last act two days earlier on 26 November), and as Francesco vicar general and archpriest of Santa Maria di Antrodoco on 21 May 1338 (after Francesco of Santa Maria Canetra's last visible act on 14 March 1338), as I am convinced that he is. Even though he did not remain vicar general constantly, Francesco was active in the government of the church at least until 1347, and he was vicar general for the chapter sede vacante from 1337 to 1339 and from 1346 to 1347. Bishop Giovanni's absences from his cathedral city and Francesco's presence there during Francesco's long continuous first tour of duty from June 1325 to September 1334 must have made observers, and particularly the chapter with whom he worked daily, come to think of him as "the vicar general." Certainly members of the chapter knew his work well before they commissioned him as their own vicar

general in 1337.^[121] The bishop's absence from Rieti and the vicar's presence theme threw the vicar, with particular force, into the events surrounding the heresy trial of Paolo Zoppo in the summer and fall of 1334. What the vicar counseled and some of the things he said are quoted in the account of the trial. What he thought and how his behavior was viewed is not knowable; nor is it possible to say whether or not there was a connection between the trial's "unsuccessful" conclusion (in the record) and Bishop Giovanni's removing Francesco from office—nor in fact is it possible to say whether or not there was a connection between Francesco's working so constantly and seemingly successfully with members of the cathedral chapter and other Reatines and his removal from office.

When a messenger from the inquisitor, then moved to Leonessa, who took letters to Francesco as vicar general in Rieti, reported back that Francesco had refused to accept the letters, he conventionally reinforced the verisimilitude of his account by being specific about the place where the refusal had occurred: in the house where Francesco lived, that is, in the episcopal palace, in the vescovado.^[122] This act, the vicar's living in the vescovado, gives a physical extension to the office. Giovanni, abbot of San Lorenzo di Fano, had lived in the episcopal palace as vicar; so did Francesco's immediate successor, Andrea de "Postrotio," vicar from October 1334 to November 1335.^[123] When Bishop Tommaso Secinari's second vicar general Filippo da Siena, prior of San Bartolomeo de Sanguineto in the diocese of Perugia, became vicar general in 1341, he moved from a room in a private house where he had been living to a room in the episcopal palace (camera sua domorum palatii episcopi ).^[124]

Bishop Giovanni Papazurri's first visible vicar, in 1315, had been a canon of Ancona, Ingraymo de Montelpro.^[125] His vicar general local to Montereale, Nicola canon of San Flaviano di Montereale, acted in 1320, and connects this early period with Pietro, abbot of San Lorenzo di Montereale, vicar general at Montereale, subordinate to Francesco at Rieti during the vacancy of 1346–1347; and this division of diocese which already existed under Giovanni Papazurri is also apparent during the Leonessa phase of the heresy trial of Paolo Zoppo because of the repeated presence of dompno Giovanni Petri Berardi, archpriest of San Cristoforo di Posta Cornu, vicar (without the designation general) of the bishop of Rieti in the terra of Leonessa.^[126] The cluster of vicars general from the first half of the fourteenth century includes other men: Bishop Tommaso Secinari's first vicar general, his co-canon, Giacomo di don Tommaso; Raymond's vicars general other than Filippo da Si-

ena—Guillelmus Servientis, a bachelor in laws, and Francesco, or Cecco or Cicco, di Giovanni Bussato (the son of a man who had particularly enraged Paolo Zoppo's inquisitor); two vicars general of the chapter in 1341–1342—Nicola di don Nicola di Roio di Aquila, canon of L'Aquila, and Francesco di Ofagnano (Fagnano Alto), canon of Rieti.^[127]

There seem to have been roughly a dozen of these men, some of them probably not connected with Rieti over a very long period of time, but rather particularly acceptable because of their special knowledge, skills, or connections with their employer or employers. But some of them, moving in and out of office, worked for the church concurrently, as did Francesco, archpriest of the Antrodoco and Canetra churches as vicar, and Matteo Pandulfoni, as chapter proctor.^[128] During the episcopate of Tommaso Secinari, in August 1340, both of these men were present as witnesses as Filippo da Siena acted as vicar general.^[129] Clearly they formed part of a small cadre, a little network, of professional administrators on whom the church of Rieti could count for normal administration. The most significant single office they could hold was that of vicar general, and because of that office the administration of the diocese could continue to function normally in the absence of the, or a, bishop. The vicar general could do those things a bishop could do which did not depend upon the bishop's sacred orders and which had been delegated to the vicar and not withheld from him—as confirmationes et collationes were specifically withheld from Nicola di don Nicola di Roio in the chapter's commission to him of 24 September 1341.^[130]

When Bishop Biagio da Leonessa succeeded to the bishopric of Rieti in 1347 he found this administration in place. When, after the Black Death, he had reassembled the administration of his diocese, Biagio used vicars general; so in September 1363, in the episcopal palace at Rieti, Biagio's vicar, Giovanni da Montegambero, and Silvestro di don Giovanni his notary and scribe, can be observed together; and in September 1369, Biagio's vicar general, Pietro di Mascio de Labro, a canon of Rieti, joins other members of an impressive staff, assessor, official, and notary, in giving counsel in a difficult case being heard at the usual bench of law next to the "episcopal church."^[131] In October 1293 when the chapter assembled, during an episcopal vacancy, to grant Giovanni di Pietro his prebend, they had their seal but they acted without any trace of the presence of a vicar general; their vicar general is the central character in the vacancy of 1346–1347.^[132]

Although Lucius III's geographically descriptive privilege of 1182 could still seem worth copying in the later fourteenth century, the di-

ocese that it had attempted to describe had found by the middle of the fourteenth century an unrecognizably fuller and more extended shape. A way of viewing, of thinking about, diocese, which gave form to and was formed by the writing of a kind of official chancery and the administration of a vicar general, allowed or demanded continuity of recorded geography and chronology. The diocese of Rieti was no longer a scattering of mountain tops and jurisdictional disputes. It was a place to which serious sacramental synodal constitutions could be projected and their results observed. The recording of what bells the farmers heard outside the church in Borgocollefegato, and the recording of what the people in the piazza of Castro Butri heard the priest say, "Bisstone stelgu de lu puctana," occurred in differently bound dioceses with differently extended ways of listening and remembering. Amiterno fell away from a diocese of a different kind from that to which Monteleone was bound.

When dompno Francesco di Giovanni Bussata, acting not as vicar general but as archpriest of the church of San Sebastiano in Poggio Fidoni for the church, in 1346, dealt with the old problem of tithing among parishioners, he did it with an exact sense and knowledge of boundaries of various sorts that made his discussion fit exactly into the new mapping of his newly observed and observable diocese.^[133] Bishop Tommaso the Corrector's proto-portolan imagination as he sent his arrows out into the relatively unknown geography of his diocese did not in the hands of later bishops (insofar as we know) develop into a physical map of the place, but rather into a different and remarkably complete verbal mapping, which coincides in time, not surprisingly, with the geometric and planned new towns of the diocese, of which Cittaducale maintains the most striking presence (see plate 14).^[134] Recollections not "valid for more than a kilometer" were brought together by careful administration and recording.^[135] Bishop Biagio and his chapter were offered an administration in which the observer can notice close analogies to that essential quality of the new towns which provoked from their recent historian the statement: "In the new towns it was never necessary to straighten streets."^[136]