It is now understood that the Restoration of the Papal States and the Catholic Church, beginning in 1814, following the (first) defeat of Napoleon, was only partially attained. Many ecclesiastically-owned buildings and assets, both fixed and moveable, were purloined, sold or pillaged during the periods of French occupation in and around Rome (1798–99, 1808–14) and not all found their way back to their pre-revolutionary owners. The setbacks began in 1797 following the Treaty of Tolentino, according to which the papal government was forced to pay the French millions, effectively bankrupting itself. Pressure resulting from this chaotic financial state was brought to bear on all ecclesiastical institutions, especially religious congregations. The papal government levied taxes on them to the tune of one-sixth of their annual revenue, a sum most were hard pressed to come up with, especially as revenues slumped and currencies were devalued. Another tax with a similar aim would be imposed upon these bodies in 1814, the weight of which was intolerable for most religious congregations. The head of one order explained that the ‘enormous tax on capital’ and ‘the annual interest’ was ‘too much’, citing no chance of meeting the demand.Footnote ¹

For religious orders and their monasteries this was a period of double jeopardy. While they were asked to help to salvage financially the papal government during periods of ‘tranquillity’, they were also targeted by the invading French in the interim periods. Everything of value, from ecclesiastical hardware, such as chalices or ciboriums, to paintings and marble altars was confiscated (or extracted); bank accounts were emptied; even fixed assets were taken and often placed at auction at discount to buyers powerful enough to ensure difficulties in undoing these transactions after 1814. This denuding of the Church was no mean feat on the part of the French and the Consulta Straordinara.Footnote ² As the chief governing body in Rome over a nearly four-year period (1810–14), it published an astounding 5,600 edicts. By far the largest undertaking was the unloading of the thousands of monastic properties.Footnote ³ Monasteries derived their income and wealth from these various income-producing lands within their portfolio, most of which featured a vineyard, a farm or other rental property, commercial or private. Sant'Apollinare in Classe (just outside Ravenna), for example, had around seventy properties on its books in the late 1790s.Footnote ⁴

With monasteries stripped of most of their income-producing assets, other forms of income such as stipends from masses or bequests were sought. Yet these too were in short supply during and following the revolutionary period. Currency fluctuations, difficult economic times and general losses resulted in many financial pledges to pious institutions going only partially or completely unfulfilled. In 1828 one cardinal lamented this fact, recalling how the French Revolution had robbed monasteries of a main source of income.Footnote ⁵ One representative petition from the period can be found asking for a reduction of the long-term obligation of sixty masses per year to a mere two due to insufficient funds.Footnote ⁶ And where there was a general intention to follow through with such financial commitments, often there was a shortage either of functioning altars or of clerics able to say the masses, or both.

In such a miserable financial state, religious orders were forced to look to unconventional means of creating (or preserving) income. What this article will show is how religious houses and their monasteries aggressively staked legal claims to inheritances of deceased members, all of whom had been secularised during the earlier French period of occupation, sometime between 1796 and 1814. At the centre of this legal quagmire stood one order, the Camaldolese, a branch of the Benedictine order, though they were by no means alone in dealing with this Church-wide problem. What marked this otherwise austere order was that it permitted its monks to control their personal finances.Footnote ⁷ Such a situation had, for centuries, served the order well, as a large proportion of their intake had been from monks of noble families, who assigned part of their wealth to the order. Yet the French decrees of suppression so upset the balance that such personal liberties were now detrimental to the congregation's well-being.

However, it was not just religious congregations that were struggling to move forward; ordinary citizens in the pontifical state were no better off.Footnote ⁸ Estimates suggest that around 25 per cent of Romans ‘lived off the state at this time’.Footnote ⁹ But as the government and its curial members were themselves in dire straits, patronage schemes were not functioning properly.Footnote ¹⁰ Thus, relatives of the deceased also made claims to inheritances, also believing them rightly theirs. Such circumstances and the conflicts which they subsequently produced have hitherto not been discussed in the context of the Restoration, and only in a few isolated instances throughout the Church's long history. And the income at stake was not insubstantial; inheritances were a key feature of pre-industrial, Italian societies.Footnote ¹¹ Drawing upon what is known of neighbouring France, they amounted to ‘20–25% of national income between 1820 and 1910’.Footnote ¹²

Inheritances represented two main forms of income for religious orders: stipends for masses of special intention and general bequests of cash or other valuables. What this article will focus on are the liquid assets as opposed to the numerous smaller items often found in wills, many of which were ecclesiastical in nature and of little commercial value. The reason for this focus is simple; money (and property), not vestments or missals, were objects of greatest desire on the part of those involved and the reason litigation ensued. In looking at a dozen or so examples from the Camaldolese order, drawn largely from its main archive in Camaldoli in Italy as well as from the Vatican archives, this article will show the heightened importance that inheritance took on during the Restoration.

The historiography of inheritances has several prominent characteristics: first, the bulk of studies focus on later medieval and early modern periods, as testaments are prevalent among extant documents; secondly, there is a decidedly social aspect to most of the research, with economics and law occupying other areas of interest. Wills have provided insight into family relations, social class and gender, especially where the role and rights of women are concerned.Footnote ¹³ Barbara Harris, for example, examines wealthy widows over the course of a century in the early modern period in England in order to detect societal and legal changes with regard to women's rights.Footnote ¹⁴

Religion and the Roman Catholic Church also occupy a substantial place in the historiography because of its historically preponderant role in Western society, including the administration of canon law, which held sway in most of Catholic Europe until the modern era. Thus, studies on testaments and inheritances generally began from a biblical understanding that sons were the natural inheritors of the family possessions and land; over time, advances and deviations from this paradigm spawned academic articles.Footnote ¹⁵ In terms of extra-claustral or secularised clerics, there are two dissertations which deal with this topic, but they treat the subject more generally and not with a focus on wills, and not during the complicated Napoleonic period.Footnote ¹⁶

Indeed, discussions of wills contested between Church and society are few. Elizabeth Lehfeldt partially addresses this topic when she examines disputes between female monasteries and the ‘natal family’ of their acolytes over fulfilment of the promised dowry, the reception of the annual maintenance allowance, and the monasteries’ ‘rights to familial inheritances subsequent to profession’.Footnote ¹⁷ Thomas Frank also discusses the conflict between these two sides in a Franciscan context in the Middle Ages, drawing attention to the testators’ relatives who ‘protested against what they considered to be an illegal reduction’ of their portion of the inheritance.Footnote ¹⁸ But the type of recurring problem that existed during the Church's Restoration in Italy has never been discussed.

Highlighting legal disputes over inheritances following the defeat of Napoleon, this article makes important additions both to the legacy of the Revolutionary period and the Restoration. Until now, the focus of legal interest has been in determining the degree to which the Napoleonic code was retained in the areas of the former empire. The Napoleonic code featured prominently in the laws and legal codes of non-Germanic lands after 1814. In Italy, the code was retained in the north; adopted piecemeal in the south; and in the Papal States was abolished in the Roman patrimony soon after Pius vii’s arrival in spring 1814, and in 1817 in the Legations.

The laws regulating inheritances of religious clerics were straightforward prior to the European Reformation. From the early Middle Ages, religious had no privileges over any inheritance because of the vow of poverty. Their goods were given to their monastery, except for the portion covered in any will made prior to entering religion.Footnote ¹⁹ The great upheaval of the European Reformation created irregular conditions across much of Europe and required more nuanced legislation. In 1577 Pope Gregory xiii addressed the inheritances of religious: ‘Goods possessed by regulars, who with permission lived outside their monastery, belong to the community; the property of those who dwell in the world without permission and of those who are perpetually secularized follow the general law of spoils [jus spolii].’Footnote ²⁰ This meant that benefits derived from ecclesiastical offices were reserved for the Church, though distinguishing ecclesiastical from patrimonial income often proved difficult. Since regulars were prohibited from making a will upon entrance into a monastery, most possessions inevitably became the Church's.

Another related Gregorian decree from 1577 created a divergence of opinion during the Napoleonic period and would give rise to numerous legal cases. ‘Members of orders which have been suppressed by civil authorities’, read one decree, ‘may under certain conditions, owing to a special privilege, dispose by will of property acquired.’Footnote ²¹ What exactly these conditions entailed was left to the interpretation of local ecclesiastical tribunals and papal auditors, whose legal jurisdiction was within the Papal States. Naturally both family members of the deceased and his or her former monastery felt conditions and special privileges spoke to their situation.

Between the late 1790s and 1810s, clerics in Italian lands were living outside their monasteries; most continuously, others, in two distinct intervals, forced to secularise by the French. What is more, many of those affected decided not to return after 1814 – more than 40 per cent in some areas and religious houses.Footnote ²² The reasons for this high figure were many: loss of interest, incompatible lifestyle, marriage, transfer to a diocesan parish, entering a new profession, assisting ill parents or simply becoming too old or infirm. The matter was indeed a thorny one, for these former clerics had left their profession in compliance with the (French) law, a law which was subsequently invalidated and replaced by church law.

Prior to 1814 there was little or no ecclesiastical governmental apparatus to mount effective, legal challenges as rightful heirs to inheritances at the death of one of their own (ex-)members when a dispute arose; Napoleonic law had replaced canon (and Roman) law throughout most of Italy after 1804; so too the legal system, as the Corte di Cassazione (or high court) replaced ecclesiastical tribunals.Footnote ²³ And since religious orders ceased to function in Napoleonic Italy, they had no basis by which to stake their claims. However, at the start of the Restoration, the Church began trying to locate former religious. The Roman Curia decreed that all secularised clerics had to return to their original monasteries once they reopened and disavow any previous oaths to the French. If a former monk or nun desired to remain outside their religious house, they were required to petition the Roman Curia (i.e. the Congregation of Bishops and Regulars), in order to collect their pensions, set up by the French at an annual rate of fifty-four lire.Footnote ²⁴ What almost no one, then or later, understood was how this process of secularisation would further muddy the legal waters, giving rise to quarrels over inheritances, and, in the process, straining tribunals to the point of requiring a special, papal-appointed committee to pronounce on the issue more generally in the late 1820s.

The system whereby former regulars were granted apostolically-approved secularisation was set up in an adversarial manner. The petitioning cleric was required to justify why he or she could not return to their religious house and to provide a letter of support from their local bishop. The supplicant's religious order also had to register an opinion on the validity of a given request, after reading the petition and supporting letter. Since petitions, by their very nature, represented a potential loss for the religious order, they were often viewed with deep suspicion by its leadership, which wanted to retain as many of their members as possible. After all, one of the prerequisites to restarting a monastery at the Restoration, as stipulated by the Council of Trent, was the availability of at least twelve able-bodied members.Footnote ²⁵ Therefore, only under special circumstances would a monastery voluntarily release a former member from their vows and allow them to remain permanently outside the monastery and collect a pension.

If the opinions of the bishop and the religious congregation were in agreement, then the decision to grant a release was fairly straightforward, as in the case of old age or poor health. Annibale Tuccoli, aged eighty, was typical of more than a few petitioners;Footnote ²⁶ so too Gregory Prati, elderly and blind. However, dissension was a more common occurrence, which foreshadowed some of the legal acrimony. On one occasion the Camaldolese order twice opposed the release of one monk from his spiritual obligations, citing dishonest intentions. In response, the petitioner wrote passionately and bluntly to the leadership. He accused them of a forced restoration and felt his request had been unfairly denied: ‘The refusals [on the part of the religious order] which have taken place twice have made me even more determined. Only death will change my opinion. And if the scarcity of monks forces you to take individuals back with force, this is always a spiteful [cattiva] decision.’Footnote ²⁷

But beyond the personal acrimony lay an untold financial aspect to the process of secularisation. Religious orders stood on less firm legal ground as legitimate heirs once a member was released from his or her oath. Who was to be the beneficiary of someone who was living outside the monastery (some for up to twenty years) and with no intention of returning? Or even more complicated still, what if the petitioner died during this curial process of secularisation? Often, these proceedings took months, even years, as when a monastery permitted someone a temporary stay outside the monastery. What was to become of the deceased's estate during these periods? The strictures of Pope Gregory xiii from 1577 were clear when it came to monks who were given temporary approval to live outside the monastery; they were also unambiguous about apostates, those who left the monastery illegally – they too forfeited the rights to their possessions. However, during the Napoleonic period, religious had neither been given approval for their absence nor had left illegally. And with most clerics having returned home to live with immediate family or a relative, their kin's sense of entitlement to their possessions strengthened.

One point of dispute illustrating the desperate times of the Napoleonic era and the subsequent Restoration centred around wills which stipulated a certain number of masses of intention. In one case (from 1820) members of the Camaldolese order complained about the lack of provision accorded to each mass: ‘Concerning the obligation [of masses], … it is reduced to [almost] nothing.’Footnote ²⁸ Furthermore, the author of the will (testatore) drew up an ambiguous document which disadvantaged the Camaldolese order even more. Not only had he not specified the day or the month when the seventy-nine masses were to be celebrated, he also failed to name the exact church where they were to be said; what is more, other masses of intention were stipulated for other churches outside the order, which normally meant income only for the host church. Canon law stipulated that masses were to be said in the venue and for the stated amount expressed in the will.Footnote ²⁹ And while it is unknown whether or not the order challenged the content of the will in court, their feeling about the income from these masses reveals the heightened sensitivity of wills and finances during this period.Footnote ³⁰

If stipulations pertaining to mass stipends rankled, the testaments involving cash payouts were even more vexatious. It was not just congregations who baulked at the figures stipulated in wills, family members did as well. The heirs of a certain Don Carlo Ceccomani contested an agreement made between the deceased and the order in 1819, obligating him to pay a fixed yearly amount of nearly eighteen lire which took the form of a tax for the property belonging to the monastery which Ceccomani had used: ‘Now the Ceccomani heirs have taken up [legal] action in order to avenge the existence of a debt which in fact [they contend] never existed [ripetizione di indebito]; they declare that the Monastery must provide the taxed amount to the Procura [public attorney].’Footnote ³¹ Such scenarios heightened feelings of antipathy between the natal family and the religious order. The abbot of the monastery at the centre of this dispute penned a letter to his order's leadership, discussing documents which would put to rest the confusion. In the process, he referred to the other side as ‘the adversary’.Footnote ³² The order's procurator general, Mauro Cappellari, the future Pope Gregory xvi (r. 1831–46), called requests by the heirs ‘excessive [pretension]’. After two years and with outside legal assistance, the order finally won a decision in a bishop's tribunal, forcing the heirs to make good on Ceccomani's obligation.Footnote ³³

When Gualberto Savorelli died in October 1815, a great dispute arose over his intentions concerning appropriations in his will. The order contended that during his final confession and last rites, he stated (verbally) that he desired 300 lire of his funds to go towards the renovation of the first monastery (of the Camaldolese congregation) restored in the province.Footnote ³⁴ The order argued that this qualified them for the money. But, when the will was disclosed, it contained no such clause. The order's vicar general claimed that the monk's wishes and his testament were changed by family members to exclude the congregation.Footnote ³⁵ The will, which had been drawn up with apostolic authority by a notary from Forlimpopoli, directed all funds to go to Savorelli's widowed sister and children, and another brother.

There was more at stake for the family than just 300 lire, roughly enough for a family of four to live for eighteen months. Canon law spoke unequivocally about the consequences of the improper handling of wills. It was deemed a ‘mortal sin’ if one did not ‘execute the will of the testator’.Footnote ³⁶ It was also a mortal sin not to pay the creditors mentioned in the will.Footnote ³⁷ The Savorelli case took unexpected turns. Part of the order's claim rested on the reopening of Sant'Apollinare monastery in Classe (Ravenna). Sant'Apollinare may have been the first monastery to reopen in the region, but it had been confiscated from the order in 1798 and lay mired in a dispute over guardianship at the time of this case.Footnote ³⁸ Initially entrusted to the local government, the famed Byzantine monastery with rare mosaics adorning the apse was eventually (and controversially) handed over to the Jesuits during the Restoration and partially converted into a school. The ecclesiastical tribunal adjudicating on inheritance raised this point in denying the order's petition, citing that there was in fact no current functioning Camaldolese monastery in the region of Romagna. Undeterred, the order retorted that the money would be security for future works on another monastery, adding that the general intent of Savorelli was to assign this money to the order, and it need not matter which of its monasteries reopened first. In the end, on 16 January 1816, fifteen months later, the order's appeal to the Roman Curia failed and the matter reverted to local jurisdiction.

The order and its member monasteries not only went after money left in testaments that they felt entitled to, they also made claims on wills in which the deceased had been a debtor to the order. The most egregious case for the Camaldolese, though not the most costly, involved the monk Bonifazio Fantini who died in 1819. At the beginning of the Restoration, it was discovered that he had been embezzling money from the order during his time as its accountant – from May 1808 until the suppression in mid-1810. It seems that the unscrupulous Fantini had fabricated receipts in order to account for the nearly 400 lire that was taken.Footnote ³⁹ In October 1815 his scheme was uncovered.Footnote ⁴⁰ When confronted with the facts, Fantini finally confessed and agreed to a plan of restitution.Footnote ⁴¹ However, his premature death in April 1819 meant that the order had only received a very small part of the stolen sum. Complicating the matter, he had decided in September 1814 not to return to monastic life.Footnote ⁴²

What is more, the order was not the only creditor making demands on the monk's modest estate. There were six other interested parties to say nothing of Fantini's mother, Maria Fantini, a destitute widow. The order had pressed its case before the papal magistrate. Fantini's heirs, including his widowed mother, were represented by a certain Mr Biondi of Foligno.Footnote ⁴³ The widow had legal rights in the case of the death of her husband – up to 50 per cent of the inheritance – but there was no such provision in the event of the death of an offspring.Footnote ⁴⁴

The case itself was held in an ecclesiastical tribunal in Foligno, presided over by the local bishop who ‘with conciliation’ helped bring the matter to an ‘amicable’ end.Footnote ⁴⁵ The actual proceedings belie such a description, as it seems at one point the order appealed to the pope himself (the final option in papal juridical procedure), suggesting that the decision at the diocesan and curial levels were unsatisfactory to them. On 30 September 1819 the widow Fantini asked the order for a reprieve in this case. The order's negotiations with the widow – or at least her representative, Biondi – resulted in a compromise over how to appropriate the 1,570 lire. The order cut their requested amount in half to 260 lire, leaving the widow with just under 500 lire, ‘enough to live out her days’.Footnote ⁴⁶

The elder Fantini was not the only widow caught in the order's legal crosshairs, nor were all cases contentious. The widowed mother of former monk, Mariano Baracconi, was reportedly ‘content’ with the fixed sum she was awarded; the Camaldolese's sum was capped, also at 260 lire, leaving the widow with a ‘sufficient residual for her maintenance’.Footnote ⁴⁷

In the case of the Giampè family, the order exhibited great understanding and patience, due to the amount involved (13,000 lire) and the good standing of Luigi Giampè. His father, Count Antonio Giampè of Fabriano had borrowed a ‘very large’ [vistoso] amount of money from the order sometime between 1805 and 1814, ‘in order to systematize the affairs of his family’.Footnote ⁴⁸ The order never pressed for repayment as it was understood by all sides that at his death, the amount would be returned. However, the order was ‘defrauded of these hopes’, when the heiress to the Giampè legacy, Countess Vincenza, ‘refused to recognize and repay the credit’. The order pressed their case before an ecclesiastical tribunal and the bishop of Fabriano, who held jurisdiction. In these circumstances, the order exhibited extraordinary leniency towards their confrère Luigi, permitting him a three-year leave from the monastery in the mid-1820s. As part of Giampè’s request for his absence, he cited the desire to transfer presidership of a family inheritance to one of his brothers.Footnote ⁴⁹ The order agreed to the proposed change.

The Giampè and Fantini affairs were not isolated incidents, merely the most vexing. On another occasion the order produced proof that the heirs of a deceased by the name of Giorgi owed the monastery of S. Gregory al Celio a sum of 200 lire for income related to a vineyard.Footnote ⁵⁰ And when a certain brother Gregory Prati died in 1817, he owed the order 1,000 lire, dating back to 1797, accruing at an immodest rate of 5 per cent per annum.Footnote ⁵¹ The order stood ready to press the matter with the local diocesan tribunal should the heirs prove resistant to its demands on the money, complaining that only four years of interest had been paid.Footnote ⁵² The case eventually involved legal counsel on the part of the order.

Even prior to Prati's passing, the order's main concern over the inheritance was clear from private correspondence. In July 1817 one confrère wrote to Cappellari, fearing that Prati's relatives were positioning themselves to take his inheritance and squeeze the order out of its rightful share: ‘With maximum confidence and secrecy I believe it my duty to tell you about our feebleminded, octogenarian brother Gregorio; I know that he has made a declaration to one of his nephews. I do not know precisely his intention; but it could be for them to deprive the Commissioner of Goods [il Commissario de’ Spogli], [a plan] which God does not desire.’Footnote ⁵³ While Prati was still in good standing with the order, he had been granted his secularisation, formally releasing him from his monastic commitment. Two weeks later Cappellari responded forcefully to the above missive, threatening to take legal action should the relatives try to claim the inheritance: ‘I could decide to oblige him to pay, but for now I wait … but in the case that they [the heirs] would give him poor advice, or if, after his death, his heirs would do it [circumvent the order], then you present this letter to the Bishop's Curia and advise me immediately, so that I can go at once to the Roman Curia.’Footnote ⁵⁴ In the end, legal action was necessary. The order successfully appealed to Pope Pius vii on 24 February 1821. It had three requests: an exemption from the inheritance tax, that the Administrative Treasury return undisclosed assets, and reception of their portion of the inheritance.Footnote ⁵⁵ However, it seems that all this effort and wrangling were for naught as there was little left of his legacy after the initial claimants took their share.Footnote ⁵⁶

Such was the preoccupation with money on the part of the monastery or congregation that the death of a cleric was often secondary to its financial implications. This was seen in the Prati case where members of his former order were more concerned about the actions of Prati's relatives than they were about his passing. In the case of one monk, condolences occupied one sentence, before turning directly to more pressing financial considerations: ‘Last Friday, I was unfortunately informed of the devastating news of the death of brother Clemente Bertoni, who had been in Rome until the fourth of December. I must point out … along with this news [the presence of] creditors who are making claims on a third of his pension as the official records will reveal.’Footnote ⁵⁷ And in the case of Fantini financial concerns were addressed in the same sentence as the news of his death, suggesting that the order would press debtors of the deceased for repayment: ‘As soon as the Procurator General communicated [to me] the news of the death of the said religious [cleric], … he judiciously recognised the debtors of the heritage and especially of the religion [monastery], in keeping with the inheritance laws.’Footnote ⁵⁸ The news of a Sister Giustina's death was almost overshadowed by what was found in her possession: ‘Yesterday Sister Giustina, a novice Cistercian, died and was found with a very great [grossissimo] amount of cash … having given the money to her relatives with permission prior to entering S. Parisio.’Footnote ⁵⁹ On another occasion, the bibliophile Cappellari spoke of the death of one of his confrères in November 1805; in the same sentence he reminded his fellow Camaldolese about actions to take: ‘the Abbot Canonici has died … you are asked to recuperate all [books] from his heirs [eredi] and transport them to S. Michele’.Footnote ⁶⁰

So widespread and contentious was the issue of deciding on the rightful heirs that the papacy finally intervened in the autumn of 1827 in order to determine a more general policy and to put paid to the endless litigation which was taking place not only between society and religious orders, but also ‘between Propaganda [Fide] and religious corporations’.Footnote ⁶¹ In the event, Pope Leo xii (r. 1823–9) formed an ad hoc committee of four cardinals, including Cappellari, to examine the question of the hereditary succession of non-resident religious.Footnote ⁶² Leo's motu proprio on 19 January 1828 heightened the importance of this issue. A meeting that June set the questions which Cappellari alone addressed the following January (1829). But before anything official was determined, Leo died, on 10 February. Pius viii (r. 1829–30) resumed the case in June 1829, and Cappellari revisited the matter in September 1829, executing his task with ‘perspicuity’,Footnote ⁶³

Informed by more than two decades of litigation, Cappellari registered his opinions to the committee. Three of the four questions dealt with the fate of the possessions of those deceased religious who died outside the cloister.Footnote ⁶⁴ The first question addressed the very general notion of the rights of inheritance and a core problem that had plagued the Church following the period of secularisation: did the Church possess the rights to the inheritance in question if the deceased had been living outside the monastery but was still in good standing? Cappellari and the committee concluded that if the heritage were under the Church disposition, it is of course a right that belonged to the Church to manage the heritage. The second question was thornier, and dealt with the status of the inheritance of a regular cleric who at the time of death was outside the monastery, having been forced out, secularised and subsequently received an indult to remain permanently outside the monastery. On this matter, Cappellari and the committee offered an interesting solution that again favoured ecclesiastical institutions:

In other words, the only way that the Church did not have a prerogative over the ‘goods’ was if the deceased had used them and taken them outside the monastery, and they were deemed unessential to the Church. The wording was ambiguous enough – deciding what was essential or not – that this net could indeed be cast far and wide on behalf of the Church. The assumption was that those men and women who remained outside the monastery without permission had automatically forfeited their rights to claims over their possessions, even if they had initially been forced out by the French. The third question and answer was an extension of this same issue and the clearest concession to the next of kin: ‘If the Religious [cleric] had the right to dispose of these goods he can lawfully dispose of them.’Footnote ⁶⁶ This right applied if the goods in question were part of a will drawn up prior to entrance into religious life.

When Cappellari became Pope Gregory xvi, he limited even further various conditions surrounding inheritances, introducing legal changes in his most important motu proprio, that of 10 November 1834.Footnote ⁶⁷ Three of the first five sections in part i deal centrally with inheritance, some having direct links to Gregory's own, earlier experiences: widowed mothers and their son's inheritance and last wishes.Footnote ⁶⁸ In addition, section vii addresses the obligations of the deceased's estate to creditors, another oft-encountered scenario.Footnote ⁶⁹

More than anything, these legal amendments reveal a feudal and sexist mindset. Gregory strengthened the inheritance law pertaining to the nobility, known as fedecommesso.Footnote ⁷⁰ He allowed for more valuables to be subject to this law, which aimed to preserve the wealth of a noble family by assigning the assets to the oldest male and forbidding unauthorised sales of property and other valuables (those valued at more than 3,000 lire) by other members of the family.Footnote ⁷¹ Gregory also reinforced the primacy of the male as heir, ‘enormously favouring’ them ‘to the detriment of females’ when it came to general rights of succession and inheritance.Footnote ⁷²

The Restoration was a messy affair, messier than originally thought. Financial need outdistanced resources, creating legal conflicts over money. While there is not enough evidence in this study to suggest any measurable political decline resulting from all this litigation, it does suggest that inheritance disputes did play a role in separating papal power from the people involved. This is significant given the static nature of the historiography of the papacy and the Risorgimento for the period 1815–46.Footnote ⁷³ The Catholic Church was both popular and opposed to political innovation. Its popularity among many Italians is attested by the neo-Guelf movement and the number of enlisted pro-papal militiamen.Footnote ⁷⁴

So while no one disputes that the Church was the chief obstacle to the Risorgimento due to its high standing in Italy, the evidence from this article suggests that further research into pockets of resistance to papal power are merited and could provide subtle clues to the eventual dissolution of the Papal States. This is especially so since revolution – such as the Risorgimento – is often linked to a breakdown in the rule of law. Such breakdowns often result from a loss of trust. John Locke pointed out the inherent deficiencies of absolute monarchy, which the papacy in some sense could be viewed to be, as both ‘judge and plaintiff’.Footnote ⁷⁵ On this point, Bertrand Russell's insight is still relevant: ‘Obviously if the government is the judge it will always decide in its own favour.’Footnote ⁷⁶ The alterations to the legal code related to inheritances in 1830 and 1834 inevitably benefitted the Church, as did most of the decisions taken during the Restoration.

Thus, wills not only provided temporary financial reprieves, they also introduced division between the Church and society. The Restoration was, in such cases, a zero-sum game: a win for one side, usually the Church, meant a loss in some intangible form, such as trust or allegiance on the other side. This division discredited church authority within the community and, however small, could have indirectly fed into the mix of the Risorgimento. In this sense, inheritance disputes were one of the ‘underlying sources of instability’.Footnote ⁷⁷

The example of Count Camilo Benso di Cavour reveals how perceived legal injustices had political consequences. In 1828 he was incensed by what he perceived as ecclesiastical impunity when a monk charged with murder was given immunity. This injustice at the hands of the dominant political power deeply affected Cavour's politics towards religion and the Catholic Church later and soured his attitude toward monasteries in particular.Footnote ⁷⁸ As canon law replaced Napoleonic law in the Papal States such feelings by those on the wrong side of the law were doubtless similar. It was here that those affected could see most clearly how the strong arm of ecclesiastical law was out of step with the more modern sensibilities of jurisprudence in effect in most other parts of Italy.Footnote ⁷⁹ So too in greater Europe, where the trends in legal reforms, whether French or German, were more national and secular. In the process these citizens were provided with greater equality under the law and protection against the Roman Church, whose authority was whittled down to strictly spiritual matters by the end of the nineteenth century.