Introduction
On 4 September 1656, in Jerusalem, an envoy of Propaganda Fide – the Roman congregation in charge of the global expansion of Catholicism – received and countersigned an extract of the account books of the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land.Footnote 1 The document covered roughly the first three years of guardianship of Friar Mariano Morone da Maleo, the guardian of Mount Zion and custos of the Holy Land since 1652. It was likely prepared in compliance with a decree issued in 1654 by Propaganda Fide which compelled the Custody of the Holy Land and its commissariats to give their accounting to the congregation.
Departing from the above-mentioned extract, this article studies seventeenth-century accounting and, more generally, economic documents produced by the Custody in the light of Propaganda Fide’s attempts to expand its authority over the Custody’s finances. By doing so, the article makes a twofold contribution. Firstly, it expands our understanding of accounting documents produced in missionary territories; secondly, it contributes to research on the local outcomes of the papacy’s policy of administrative centralisation, which was ultimately intertwined with the global expansion of Catholicism and, in the missionary field, was embodied by the establishment of Propaganda Fide in 1622.
Numerous works on the heterogeneity of early modern Catholicism have highlighted how the attempts by the post-Tridentine Church to globally expand its reach and authority generated highly localised and negotiated outcomes.Footnote 2 Both in Europe and in missionary territories the way Catholicism was experienced and the Church’s ability to exert its jurisdiction and implement doctrinal uniformity were concretely shaped by local factors and by the agency of a variety of individuals among which were local laymen and clergy, political powers, and religious orders. With regard specifically to existing missions, the Church’s increasing attempts to strengthen its authority over them were met with resistance from both those political powers, whom the papacy had tasked with evangelisation through patronage, and the mendicant orders.Footnote 3 The latter had been charged with the organisation of missionary activity in many places, such as Latin America and, since the Middle Ages, the eastern region of the Mediterranean. Rome’s, and specifically Propaganda Fide’s, attempts at reshaping and controlling mendicant missions, and the mendicant orders’ reactions to this, have been investigated regarding Latin America and Bosnia.Footnote 4 This article contributes to this research, focusing on Propaganda Fide’s attempts to control a specific aspect of the Custody’s organisation, i.e., the administration of alms. Through the focus on the Custody, the article therefore provides a glimpse into Catholic expansionism, and further evidence for how papal and imperial authority negotiated on the periphery.
Formally recognized by the papacy in 1342, the Custody of the Holy Land was initially regarded as part of the province known, amongst other names, as Terrae Sanctae, which had been founded by the order in 1217. This aligned with the broader Franciscan administrative structure in provinces, consisting of subunits known as custodies, which in turn encompassed various monasteries. In the following century, the Custody of the Holy Land gained increasing autonomy from the homonymous province and its headquarters located in Cyprus. In the sixteenth century, despite retaining the name Custody, it was de facto configured as a province, whose jurisdiction extended over Syria and Cyprus, and successor of the province established in 1217.
In the seventeenth century, the headquarters of the Custody was the Monastery of St. Saviour in Jerusalem. It was headed by a custos, who bore the title of guardian of Mount Zion, and had the prerogatives of a provincial minister.
After the establishment of Propaganda Fide, the Custody fell under its jurisdiction, although it was not a mission. In the Middle Ages the spread of Catholicism was not even among its tasks, which were the guarding and maintaining of the Holy Shrines and particularly of the Holy Sepulchre. The friars also had to provide lodging and spiritual assistance to pilgrims and administer sacraments to those Catholics, mostly foreigners, who happened to be in Palestine.Footnote 5 The friars’ earliest engagement in missionary activity dates to the 1550s.Footnote 6 However, it was only starting in the 1620s that evangelisation became one of their main activities, in the framework of Propaganda Fide’s efforts to frame the Custody as a mission and expand its control over it. Even though the Custody was not technically a mission, the dynamics at play were similar and even more evident than with other mendicant missions facing the expansion of Propaganda Fide’s control.
As comprehensively explained by Megan Armstrong, the reasons underlying the particular interest shown by Propaganda Fide toward the Custody and the latter’s importance in the global expansion of Catholicism lie in the Holy Land being both a spiritual centre and a Catholic frontier, due to its significance as a shared religious landscape and site of global pilgrimage.Footnote 7 Armstrong has also convincingly argued that during the seventeenth century Propaganda Fide successfully managed to reshape the Franciscans’ ministry in the Holy Land. Building on this research, this article investigates Propaganda Fide’s efforts to control a specific aspect of the Custody’s functioning, the alms administration. Works on the expansion of papal authority over mendicant missions have often overlooked the financial aspect, yet this is a central domain in Propaganda Fide’s attempts at controlling the missions.Footnote 8 This is particularly true in the case of the Custody, because of the large amount of money collected for and administered by St. Saviour’s Monastery. Furthermore, the economic mismanagement was the pretext under which Propaganda Fide tried to reshape not only the economic administration but, more broadly, the very governance of the Custody. Conversely, it is in the economic domain, and particularly in the administration of alms (and the control of cash flows), that Propaganda Fide’s jurisdiction conflicted with that of the Spanish Crown, the Custody’s major funder. Additionally, it is in this domain that the friars put up a stronger resistance, the assimilation of the Custody to a mission was questioned, and Propaganda Fide’s efforts to expand its authority ultimately failed. The article sets out to investigate the local and structural factors that explain this failure, combining the analysis of two sets of accounting documents and their production during the seventeenth century. Both were issued by St. Saviour’s, the first consisting of economic and accounting reports sent to Propaganda Fide; the second of the monastery’s own account books, a collection that starts in 1603 and reaches the contemporary period with some lacunae.Footnote 9
In the last decades, research on early modern account books has gained new momentum. Since the publication of James Aho’s influential book on the origins of double-entry account books,Footnote 10 numerous works have explored the potential of these documents in different fields of research: from cultural to literary studies, from management to organisational studies.Footnote 11 As a result, early modern accounting has now become a central topic for disciplines as diverse as sociology, history, and literary studies, with each adopting a wide set of methodologies and approaches. As for mendicant account books, works on the topic focus mostly on the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and some on the sixteenth;Footnote 12 there are very few on the later period either in Europe or within a missionary context,Footnote 13 especially by comparison with research on Jesuit missions.Footnote 14 This is in part due to the scarce survival rates of these kinds of documents. From this perspective, the study of the Custody is very promising, because of the richness of the accounting and financial documents that have survived and their chronological scope.
This article delves into recording and accounting practices and combines two complementary approaches. It examines the production of economic and accounting documents aimed at Propaganda Fide across the century from a diachronic perspective. This analysis, which runs through the article, is enriched by a closer, qualitative, study of the documents’ organisation and content. Combining these two approaches, the article first sets out to explain the function of the accounting records from both the congregation’s and the friars’ perspectives. It reveals and explains changes in the documents’ structure and recording practices, explores why and how their content was selected and organised, and discusses the bearing of organisational and normative changes on accounting practices and bookkeeping. Secondly, the analysis of the production of economic documents sent in response to Propaganda Fide’s requests is the starting point to investigate its attempts to control alms flows and their outcomes.
Since John Low’s seminal study on the Portuguese imperial networks, the relationship between the production of documents and long distance control has been largely acknowledged.Footnote 15 Altogether, research on both social networks and knowledge management has employed the frequency of communication to measure the strength of underlying relationships.Footnote 16 In the Custody’s case, the analysis of the production of accounting and economic reports aimed at Propaganda Fide thus allows us to “measure” the growing interactions that, according to Birgit Emich, characterise processes of “centralisation” within the Catholic Church.Footnote 17 More specifically, the documents’ uneven distribution during the century uncovers trends and fluctuations in Propaganda Fide’s attempts to control the Custody’s finances and in the friars’ responses.
In addition, from a more qualitative point of view, the analysis of the accounting documents sent to Rome brings to light the congregation’s efforts to implement standardised procedures for information gathering in the economic domain. The relationship between standardisation and processes of centralisation and of global expansion has been amply discussed by works on global imperial networksFootnote 18 and on the early modern papacy.Footnote 19 Regarding Propaganda Fide specifically, the link between its global scope and the development of an information management system has been convincingly explained by Giovanni Pizzorusso.Footnote 20 Scholars have also analysed the circulation of information between Rome and missions with regard to the administration of sacraments.Footnote 21 This article enriches these historiographies as it focuses on Propaganda Fide’s attempts to impose standardised procedures for information gathering and frames these, and their varied outcomes, within the congregation’s efforts to expand its authority over the Custody as well as the global expansion of the Catholic Church.
In fact, more broadly, the focus on the accounting documents, while adding further complexity to our understanding of the relationship between the Custody and Propaganda Fide, ultimately contributes to research on the global expansion of Catholicism by confirming the highly localised and negotiated nature of Rome’s centralisationFootnote 22 and, in general, what has been described by Christian Windler as the composite nature of early modern Catholicism.Footnote 23
The first section of what follows describes the Custody’s financing system and analyses accounting and economic documents sent to Rome between the 1620s and the 1650s. Departing from the analysis of the above-mentioned extract of the account books of Mariano Morone da Maleo, sections 2 and 3 investigate their function and explore Propaganda Fide’s attempts to standardise procedures for information gathering in the economic and other domains of the friars’ life. The last section explains the failure of these attempts, calling into question external and internal factors, partly reconstructed through the change in bookkeeping practices, as reflected by the seventeenth-century account books of St. Saviour’s Monastery.
Economic Information and Documents: Propaganda Fide’s Intent at Controlling the Custody’s Finances (1620–1650)
The extract of the account books of Mariano da Maleo was by no means the first document on the Custody’s economy to reach the congregation. Between the 1620s and the 1650s, numerous reports on the Custody’s finances were sent to Propaganda Fide for monitoring purposes and/or upon the congregation’s request.
Research has pointed out that the arrival of resources from Europe had a negligible impact on the survival of overseas Catholic missions and that their viability was rather ensured by the missionaries’ economic activities, such as investments in real estates and participation in local and international trade.Footnote 24 This is not the case with the Custody. Although since the Middle Ages Franciscans in Jerusalem had been involved in the local economy,Footnote 25 a large part of their incomes was represented by the alms arriving at St. Saviourés Monastery from other Franciscan provinces. Because of the importance of the Custody’s task and of its location in Muslim-ruled Palestine, since the fifteenth century, the collection of alms for the maintenance of the friars and the Holy Sepulchre had been encouraged and protected across Europe by a large body of normative texts issued by the popes. Throughout the centuries the need to collect and send alms to Jerusalem led to the establishment of an increasingly well-organised financing system that in the seventeenth century relied on fundraising and multifunctional institutions, called commissariati of the Custody of the Holy Land. Headed by “commissaries,” they were located in the main harbours and cities in Europe and in the Iberian overseas territories.Footnote 26 Saviour’s was the hub where the alms from overseas arrived and were eventually redistributed to the other Franciscan monasteries in the area.
The Spanish Crown was by large the Custody’s main funder. After the Custody’s establishment, its main donors were the Angevin and then Aragonese kings. Thorough the kinship with the latter, the Spanish monarchy inherited the claims to the title of King of Jerusalem, first awarded to the Angevin monarchs, and the patronage of the Custody, with the entangled rights and duties. In 1489 Queen Isabella of Castille established an annual donation of 1000 ducats in favour of the friars. Afterwards, recurring donations were granted by Charles V and Philip II.Footnote 27 In the seventeenth century, the collection of alms for the Holy Land was carried out and encouraged all throughout the Spanish territories, and the royal treasury (Real Hacienda) helped finance the Custody through taxations and various credit instruments.Footnote 28 These efforts reflect the importance of Spanish patronage over the Holy Places in the process of state-building and to support its image as the preeminent Christian power in Europe.Footnote 29 However, in this period, the French monarchy as well tried to enhance its internal legitimacy and position within the broader Mediterranean context by invoking the religious significance, political importance, and legitimizing power of the Custody. Exploiting its status as Protector of the Holy Places, obtained through the 1604 capitulation granted by the Ottomans, the French monarchy tried to establish its own patronage over the Custody, at the expenses of the Spanish crown.Footnote 30 In this complex geopolitical context, Spanish prerogatives had to be asserted and strengthened. They started to be increasingly grounded on the donations bestowed upon the Custody and the position of the Spanish monarchy as its main funder.Footnote 31 Generally speaking the analysis of the money and devotional objects sent by European monarchs during the seventeenth century, leaves no doubts about the political significance of the Custody.Footnote 32 Despite the increasing amount of donations and growing variety of their origin, during the whole century, the primacy of Spanish donations remained unchallenged. The Custody’s dependency on Spanish alms ensured the Crown a significant leverage against French claims and Rome’s interferences during the whole seventeenth century, even though the Spanish Patronato over the Custody was formalised only in 1772, with Charles III’s Real Cédula. The political significance of the donations to the Custody, also lead to an increasing willingness to control their circulation and administration by Madrid. This willingness, as we shall see, was further encouraged by Rome’s interferences.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century changes in the Custody’s production of accounting documents and the related normative framework reflect the interest in controlling the cash flow by various actors: Propaganda Fide, the Spanish Crown and the superiors of the order. Within the Franciscan order, the first provisions requiring commissaries to keep accounting date back to 1512.Footnote 33 In 1628, Saviour’s Monastery as well was obliged to record the alms that had arrived in Jerusalem and their use.Footnote 34 However, the friars had already started to record the alms received in the Registri delle Condotte since 1615. The first account books which we know of dates to the last decades of the sixteenth century, in line with the issue, in 1593, of a general constitution of the order obliging all the monasteries to keep account books.Footnote 35 Account books were produced by St. Saviour’s together with other financial records. Sometimes they were sent to the order for audit purposes. In other cases, the order received extracts of the account books. Other financial documents produced in Jerusalem were rather intended for the commissary of Madrid and Propaganda Fide. The former was charged by the Crown to control the administration of Spanish alms.
As for Propaganda Fide, its intent to control the finances of the missionaries was part of the congregation’s global strategy, although the outcomes in this sense were in many cases ambiguous at best. In the specific case of the Custody, its interventions embedded, on the one hand, the normative role held since the Middle Ages by the papal bulls in defining the economic organization of the Custody and granting exemptions from the Rule. On the other hand, Propaganda Fide’s attempts to control the finances of the Custody reflected an increasing interest on the side of Rome toward the cash flow. In 1618, for example, Pope Paul V tried to centralise the collection of alms in Rome, triggering the hostile reaction of the Spanish king.Footnote 36
In fact, requests to provide economic information, particularly on cash flows, had already reached Jerusalem before the establishment of Propaganda Fide. During the general chapter held in 1601 in Rome, Cardinal Protector Girolamo Mattei (1546–1603), “certainly full of great zeal and a very ardent desire for the best administration of those alms,”Footnote 37 ordered Guardian Francesco Manerba to send a report of the most notable events that occurred during his guardianship, including financial information, such as the amount of alms received.Footnote 38 After 1622, the congregation frequently asked guardians to report on economic topics, such as: costs of monasteries’ maintenance, taxes due to the Ottoman authorities, and debts contracted by St. Saviour’s. Guardians’ letters usually provided an overview of the alms that had arrived and of their use, mentioning debts contracted and interest paid. For example, a letter sent in 1650 by the Observant Guardian Antonio da Gaeta (in office in 1648–1650 and 1650–1652) attests that during his guardianship the alms that arrived from Christendom amounted to 20,000 pieces of eight per year. One third of the sum was used to pay the Turks (“in avania”) and one third to pay usurers. This was because, according to the guardian, the Custody was back then indebted for 40,000 pieces of eight, with an interest rate of at least 24%. The last third of the alms received was devoted to the maintenance of the friars and the Holy Shrines and bestowed to poor local Catholics “to whom alms must be given, as is our custom.”Footnote 39
It is not easy to say to what extent the request for information was aimed at a real control of the figures, or rather was a way for the congregation to assert its jurisdiction. Regardless, an analysis of the supporting documents for the congregation’s meetings suggests that the information on the Custody’s finances shaped processes of decision-making and subsequent recommendations. This was the case with the large number of debts contracted by the friars, which were often the subject of Propaganda Fide’s interventions. In addition, on many occasions Propaganda tried to divert Spanish alms aimed to the Custody toward the financing of its missions in the Levant. Furthermore, as we shall see, the control of the alms administration paved the way for the Congregation’s interferences in the very governance of the Custody. Sometimes Propaganda Fide’s requests for information were not directly addressed to the guardian in office. In 1636, for example, the congregation asked a former one, Paolo da Lodi, and the commissaries of Rome and Naples at the time to provide an overview of the Custody’s financial situation. This was to specify the cost of the annual maintenance, and the amount needed to retrieve the Holy Shrines from the Greeks’ hands and to cover the debts.Footnote 40 Other reports were written by delegates sent by the congregation. In 1655, for example, the congregation asked Friar Giorgio di Santa Maria (Jorge de Santa María Luna Sesandres) to stop in Jerusalem, on his way to Goa. Named apostolic notary, he had to inquire about the accusations of mismanagement formulated in 1655 against the guardian, Mariano Morone da Maleo,Footnote 41 and more broadly about the Custody’s finances.Footnote 42
In fact, Propaganda Fide’s interference in the Custody’s financial administration were mostly set off by conflicts within the order, namely by allegations levelled by Reformed friars against Observant guardians – such as Morone – to whom the Custody had been entrusted since the fifteenth century. Propaganda Fide was often brought in to act like an arbiter of conflicts within religious orders, and especially those involving more spiritual branches who saw the newly established congregation as a potential ally.Footnote 43 As for the Custody, the conflict for its control between the two Franciscan families broke out in the late 1620s. Armstrong has already unearthed how this conflict and the role of arbiter undertaken by the curial congregation paved the way for the congregation’s interferences into the Custody’s governance more broadly.Footnote 44 Since the Reformed friars’ allegations were often centred on economic mismanagement, the conflict, and Propaganda Fide’s role of arbiter in it, facilitated the congregation’s interferences in the alms administration. This is in line with the idea that successful outcomes of centralisation processes depend in part on the will (and needs) of the periphery.Footnote 45 In the Custody’s case, during the 1630s and the 1650s, these coincided with the need for an arbiter to settle internal conflicts. This also explains the guardians’ general compliance with the congregation’s requests for information and uncovers the very purpose of the documents sent to the congregation.
Whereas financial reports by the missionaries were often aimed at requesting economic aid,Footnote 46 those written by the guardians were a means to prove their good administration and to defend their conduct against possible accusations from inside the order. An excellent example is represented by the accounting documents sent, of his own will, to the congregation by the Reformed Guardian Andrea d’Arco, who was in office from 1636 to 1642. According to a Spanish memorial stored in the Custody’s archive, d’Arco was accused of appropriating alms; therefore, extracts of his account books were presented to the definitory general in Toledo.Footnote 47 To defend himself against such allegations, d’Arco sent his accounting to Propaganda Fide, asking the congregation to certify his good administration.Footnote 48
Viewing centralisation as the increased interaction between a centre and its periphery,Footnote 49 the increasing production in Jerusalem of economic documents aimed at Propaganda Fide between the 1630s and mid 1650s suggests that a process of centralisation was going on during this time frame. As we shall see, in the mid 1650s the production of such documents peaked.
The Extracts and Account Books of Mariano Morone da Maleo
In the context of the abundant production of economic documents aimed at Propaganda Fide between the 1620s and the mid 1650s, the extract of the accounting of Mariano Morone da Maleo could be seen as one of the economic reports sent by the guardians in the previous decades, albeit more detailed. Nonetheless, the circumstances that led to its production, content, and overall meaning set it apart.
The extract was handed on 4 September 1656 to an envoy of Propaganda Fide in Jerusalem, Francesco Ripol, “minister et notarius apostolicus.” This is suggested by Ripol’s signature at the bottom of the document.Footnote 50 In a subsequent document, Ripol asks the congregation to certify that the guardian had given him an authentic account, signed by the members of the discretorium, of the events that occurred under his guardianship, including the alms received and the expenditures, and accompanied by numerous inventories.Footnote 51 The extracts of the account books of the Custody are presumably the report of incomes and expenditures mentioned by Ripol. If this is the occasion upon which the document was submitted, the reason underlying its production can be reconstructed through another document stored in the archive of Propaganda Fide: a letter written by the congregation to Morone on 15 September 1655. According to the letter, the congregation was willing to renew Morone’s office, on the condition that he would send the accounting of his first three years of guardianship, as required by a decree issued in 1654. A copy of the decree, the text states, was sent along with the letter.Footnote 52
The decree represents a pivotal moment in the congregations’ attempts to control the Custody’s economy, and more specifically the alms’ flow. Incorporating a previous decree, dating back to 1653, it obliged the Custody’s most prominent officials to send their accounting to the congregation.Footnote 53 Commissaries were required to send their accounting (“i conti della loro amministrazione”) every two years after Christmas, “together with an oath to the effect that those accounts were correct, accurate, and unaltered.”Footnote 54 As for St. Saviour’s, the decree stated that guardians were to send the accounts of their guardianship to Propaganda Fide three years after entering office.Footnote 55
In line with this, the extract handed to Ripol covers a bit more than three years from 1652 to 1655, the first term of guardianship of Morone. Unfortunately, we do not have the account books out of which it was taken. In the document, transactions are recorded per year. Yearly sections are divided in three parts, a division that is also often found in the account books of St. Saviour’s. The first is dedicated to cash flows, the second to in (and out) flows of textiles, and the third to sugar and candles bestowed upon local authorities. The three items played a crucial role in the Custody’s in-kind economy. Firstly, they were utilized by the friars for their daily necessities. Additionally, a portion of the taxes routinely paid by the friars to local authorities consisted of fabrics, particularly silk and cloth, as well as candles and sugar. The latter were also employed in liturgical ceremonies and sold to pilgrims. Furthermore, pieces of valuable fabrics were donated as gifts to cultivate and maintain personal relationships with Ottoman authorities and local elites.
The accounting is structured according to a simplified version of the charge and discharge system, similarly to the summaries that appear at the end of each month and year in most of the seventeenth-century account books of St. Saviour’s.Footnote 56 These summaries record the total amount of money spent during the relevant time frame and a breakdown of the expenditures, gathered per expenditure items or chapters. Chapters are not always the same; the most common are: money given to the “Turks,” cost of the maintenance of monasteries and hospices, repayment of the debts contracted (“capitale”) and the interest paid on it. Similarly, the extract sent to Propaganda Fide is organised in chapters, followed by the total amount of money spent each year. The expenditure items are: taxes and gifts to local authorities, expenditures for the maintenance of monasteries and hospices, money given to the friars coming and going to and from Europe, and interest paid on the money borrowed. The account of 1652 also lists the costs of building materials and refurbishment works, which were arguably particularly relevant that year. Its chapters mirror the monastery’s main expenditure items but also those the congregation was more concerned about. This is the case, for example, with the indebtedness and the costs of the transport to bring the friars to the Holy Land and back. The latter was a subject of contention between the Custody and Propaganda Fide, as testified by numerous sources. In his report, entitled Relazione sulla gestione della Custodia – 15 aprile 1655, for example, the above-mentioned Giorgio di Santa Maria points out that the continuous arrival of friars carrying alms was costly and raised the suspicions of the Turks.Footnote 57
Like expenditures, incomes are also organised in chapters: alms given by pilgrims, bequests, money borrowed locally, and alms that arrived from “Christendom.” These alms correspond to the arrival of cash recorded in the Registri delle Condotte in the same years.Footnote 58 In the Registri, sums were recorded in reals of eight, while in the extract they appear in piastres, which is the currency used through the document and predominantly in St. Saviour monastery’s account books. In the extracts, among the incomes there is no mention of the profits resulting from the friars’ involvement in the local economy. This indicates that the friars were bound (or assumed to be so) only to account for the alms received. Most of St. Saviour’s account books as well do not mention local incomes. While severely limiting their value as a source to study the monastery’s economy, this suggests that the account books themselves were primarily aimed at keeping track of the alms administration, and eventually at facilitating its control, either internally or by other actors. They also served as a base for the preparation of the accounting extracts aimed at the order,Footnote 59 and, as in the instance analysed here, at Propaganda Fide. In line with this, the extract handed to Ripol states that the document was the copy of the “Libros de recivos de esto nuestro convento de San Salbador de la entrada i escito che ha’ tinido el S. M. Sion.” The conformity to the monastery’s account books is also attested by Ripol, who also took note of what seems to have been the location of the book in the Custody’s archive.Footnote 60
The organisation of the accounting in a charge and discharge system facilitated the control of the expenditures.Footnote 61 Developed in the Middle Ages, the charge and discharge system was frequently used in accountability contexts. Due to its straightforward and logical nature, it facilitated decision-making and tracking of expenditures and of cash flows. The choice of this accounting model is therefore in line with the fact that the document was issued for monitoring purposes and could eventually be used in the framework of inspections and enquiries.Footnote 62 More detailed information, reported in the account books of the monastery, could be accessed, at least in theory, in case of an audit. This aligns with the presence of a second copy of the extract in a folder stored in the congregation’s archive and dedicated to a second inquiry into the administration of Morone da Maleo.Footnote 63 The inquiry was initiated by new accusations levelled against Morone during his second mandate, around 1658, and was conducted in Rome. The dedicated folder contains numerous documents, some of which were collected by Ripol during his stay in Jerusalem in 1656. Besides a copy of the extract of the account book of Morone for example, it contains numerous inventories of the objects, books, and documents stored in St. Saviour’s and the other Franciscan monasteries in the area.Footnote 64
As with previous financial documents aimed at the congregation, the extract handed over to Ripol was meant to prove the guardian’s good administration. This is suggested by the analysis of the figures and more specifically of the equivalence between yearly incomes and expenditures. This was obtained by adding to the final sum of expenditures a variable amount that represented what money was left in the chest. In this way the document accounts for all the money that had arrived and its usage, including that which had not yet been spent. The same mechanism is also employed to balance inflows and outflows of textiles, which are accounted for in piastre.
Read through the prism of the production of accounting documents, the mid 1650s seems to be characterised by Propaganda Fide’s attempts at tightening the control of cash inflows and outflows. This is suggested by the surge in the number of documents on the Custody’s finances connected to multiple inquiries into the administration of Morone and also by the increasingly detailed nature of some of these documents. When compared to those sent to Propaganda Fide previously, the extracts analysed represent a marked change, because of the way information is organised and the very kind of information delivered. They are more focused on the flow of alms and their administration, than on the Custody’s financial viability. They also allow for a stricter control of the uses of alms money. This is in line with a change in the normative framework represented by the issue of Propaganda Fide and the above-mentioned 1654 decree.
Standardisation and Formalisation of Information Gathering: The 1654 Decree
Rooted in the already existing practice of requesting and receiving information on the economic administration, the 1654 decree can be seen as a move to standardise and formalise this practice and, while doing so, tighten the control over the flow of alms.
From a temporal point of view, the decree made the practice of providing financial information on the alms administration regular and established a temporal framework for the submission of the reports, three years after the guardian’s entering office. The time frame the account had to cover is also well defined and reflects the duration of the office, making guardians easily accountable. Thus, whereas before 1654 Propaganda Fide had requested economic information from a variety of officials, with the decree the guardian was officially given the task of reporting to Rome on the alms administration. As for the information requested, previous documents had contained a general overview of the economic situation or answers to specific questions, for example on the tax paid to local authorities. In contrast, the decree requested proper accounts, “computa,” keeping track of inflows and outflows.
The 1654 decree does not add further details, for example, on the accounting system to be used. The use of the charge and discharge system in the extract handed to Ripol in 1656 was most likely a choice of the procurator, who was in charge of the financial administration and, starting in the 1620s, of recording the alms that had arrived.Footnote 65 Moreover, this choice is in line with the system adopted in the accounting reports handled to the order,Footnote 66 and the end-of-month summaries of the monastery’s account books. Another version of the same extract, probably also issued in compliance with the 1654 decree, is structured differently. It is written in the guardian’s first-person perspective. Contrary to the above-mentioned one, it is not organised in a charge and discharge system but in a more narrative form and it is overall less detailed. Nonetheless it contains information on cash flows and complies with the decree’s basic requirements.Footnote 67 It might be an initial version of the account document prepared after the congregation’s request, with the second, more detailed, version prepared afterwards, maybe after Ripol’s requests and suggestions. The preference of Propaganda Fide is clear, as only the latter is stored in the folder containing the commissariats’ accounting records issued in compliance with the 1654 decree.Footnote 68
At this stage of research, it is not possible to say whether following the issue of the decree the congregation gave more detailed information on how to prepare the accounting documents, or if such information were given by Ripol himself once he had arrived in Jerusalem. Nonetheless, the importance assigned by Propaganda Fide to the organisation and the quality of information is testified by a report, probably authored by the congregation’s accountant (“computista”). The document is undated, but was likely prepared around 1658, at the time of the second inquiry into Morone. It contains the computista’s comments and remarks on the extract sent from Jerusalem, highlighting inaccuracies and faults. The comments reveal the mechanisms of control the extract went under once in Rome. They also unearth how the congregation expected accounting documents to be prepared and what it wanted to be clarified and detailed.Footnote 69 Remarks are often related to the chapters in which expenditures are organised. These are often considered too broad and requiring further specifications. For example, the computista objects that the chapter on the expenditures incurred for the maintenance of the monasteries, in 1653, lacks relevant information such as the number of monasteries and hospices involved. Similarly, the chapter on the money paid to local authorities on different occasions (“mesade, pascade, usanze, cortesie, tirannie”) should have listed the amount of money spent for each category, rather than only a lump sum of 52,466.25 piastres.Footnote 70 Further faults are listed in another document, whose author laments that the extract did not mention the amount of money left by Maleo’s predecessor nor explain why payments are sometimes made in cash and some others in kind.Footnote 71 These remarks, together with those on numbers and sums, suggest that in Propaganda Fide’s intentions the accounting documents sent in compliance with the 1654 decree were meant to allow for a thorough control over the numbers.
The issuing of the 1654 decree and the increasing formalisation of the economic documents sent to Propaganda Fide are in line with analogous attempts carried out by the congregation to control the evangelisation activities of the missions.Footnote 72 More broadly they are in line with the findings of recent scholarship on information management and centre–periphery dynamicsFootnote 73 and on Iberian imperial networks. The latter strand, for example, has convincingly argued that the standardisation and formalisation of information gathering were processes connected to the imperial expansion and to the need to control global networks.Footnote 74 Similarly, in the case of Propaganda Fide, according to Pizzorusso,Footnote 75 attempts to standardise administrative procedures, especially regarding the collection of information, responded to the organisational needs brought up by the expansion of its authority worldwide. Shortly after its establishment, the congregation asked the apostolic vicars and generals of the religious orders to forward information regarding their missions: geographical distribution, personnel, etc. In 1660 Propaganda Fide tried to implement a more standardised model for the collection of information by issuing a printed questionnaire, “Dimande per le relationi dello stato delle missioni,” with which missionaries’ reports had to comply.Footnote 76 Similarly, Propaganda Fide’s claim to issue the patents of missionaries, who played a central role in information gathering, might be read as a move toward an increasing ‘professionalisation’ of this office. Even though it remained just a formality, and the congregation never managed to effectively control the choice of missionaries, these attempts resonate with analogous phenomena that involved those who collected information in other global networks, such as the formalisation of the profession of cartographers.Footnote 77
Going back to the Custody, an increasing standardisation of the information on evangelisation and pastoral care sent to Propaganda Fide happened alongside the Franciscans’ increasing commitment toward these in the second half of the century.Footnote 78 Since its establishment, the congregation had asked the guardians to send reports of their activities.Footnote 79 These contained information on the friars’ missionary efforts and their “successes.”Footnote 80 Starting in the 1660s, and upon Propaganda Fide’s request, the reports provided increasingly detailed information on the friars’ pastoral activities and on Franciscan parishes, listing, for example, numbers of parishioners, sacraments administered, and children attending Franciscan schools.Footnote 81 A pivotal moment in this trend was an instruction issued by the congregation in 1694. It compelled guardians to send an additional, annual report on the Custody’s missions, a Relazione sullo stato delle missioni. This had to be modelled on the above-mentioned questionnaire, Dimande per le relationi dello stato delle missioni.Footnote 82
The analysis of the friars’ reports on missionary activity confirms the entanglement between Propaganda Fide’s willingness to tighten its control over various domains of the Custody’s life and its attempts to standardise the procedures of information gathering. In the domain of evangelisation, these attempts were successful. This is reflected by the Custody’s production in the late 1690s of numerous Relazioni, modelled on the questionnaire, and which in the 1720s reached a further level of standardisation and formalisation.Footnote 83 It is also confirmed more broadly by the abundant correspondence between the custos and Propaganda Fide regarding evangelisation and connected topics, such as jus parochialis and rituals. In the case of the alms administration, the outcomes could not be more different. This is suggested by the lack of economic documents aimed at Propaganda Fide in the second half of the century.
Document Production after the 1650s: A Failed Centralisation?
Read from the perspective of the documents sent from Jerusalem to Propaganda Fide, the end of the 1650s represents an important watershed. While up until then guardians would normally comply with the congregation’s requests to provide information on the alms administration, they strongly resisted the enforcement of the 1654 decree. The extract of the account books compiled during the guardianship of Mariano da Maleo is the only accounting report produced in compliance with the decree.Footnote 84 Even among the commissaries, its enforcement was far from smooth. Most of the reports that reached Propaganda Fide came from Tuscany, Genoa, and Lombardy. Other Italian commissaries, such as the one located in Naples, sent theirs only occasionally, while others, such as those of Venice and the Kingdom of Sicily, sent only one or two reports in the whole century. Outside Italy, no accounting document was ever sent by the commissaries located in Spain or France; there were few from Vienna and Malta, and one from Portugal.Footnote 85
The strong and open opposition the decree met within the order and among the majority of the commissaries is amply testified by sources. Even the assimilation of the Custody to a mission, in which the control of Propaganda Fide was grounded, was itself questioned and rejected by the friars in an attempt to defend their autonomy. In the numerous “memoriali” against the decree, aimed at the cardinal protectors and the congregation, the friars consistently reminded their interlocutors that the Custody was not a mission under the jurisdiction of Propaganda Fide, but a custody with all the prerogatives of a Franciscan province, and that being located in a place under Muslim rule, its ability to follow the Rule relied on the alms sent by other custodies and provinces located in “Christendom.”Footnote 86
As for St. Saviour’s Monastery, not only was the decree not respected but after the 1650s the production of financial documents aimed at Propaganda Fide also plummeted. This suggests that the congregation not only failed to enforce more formalised procedures for the collection of economic information but also lost the control it had held in the previous decades. In keeping with this, Propaganda Fide’s numerous subsequent rulings and documents regarding the enforcement of the 1654 decree by the commissaries do not even mention St. Saviour’s.Footnote 87 Here are a few examples. During the general meeting held on 5 October 1694 and on 7 July 1698,Footnote 88 Propaganda Fide complained that the commissaries did not respect the decree. However, the lack of accounting on St. Saviour’s side is not mentioned or raised. When in 1690, the validity of the 1654 decree is reaffirmed, its text is copied without the parts regarding St. Saviour’s accounting.Footnote 89 Why did Propaganda Fide’s attempts to control the alms administration fail?
As Armstrong has argued, in the seventeenth century the extension of Propaganda Fide’s authority over the Custody was greatly facilitated by the role the congregation played in the conflicts that erupted within the order and between the Custody and other missionaries.Footnote 90 In the specific case of the alms administration, the arrival of missionaries from other orders was not a relevant factor. As for the conflict between the Reformed and Observants, it lost intensity in the second half of the century, and finally ended when Francesco Maria Rhini da Polizzi, general minister from 1670 to 1674, reaffirmed the Observants’ jurisdiction over the Custody.Footnote 91 Besides the lack of certain conditions that favoured the meddling and ensuing economic control of Propaganda Fide, another factor that explains the congregation’s failure to control the alms administration is the organisational change that took place within the Custody. The starting point was the expansion of the role played by the procurator in bookkeeping and alms administration, to the detriment of the guardian’s prerogatives. This process and its multiple implications for the production of documents and recording practices are unearthed by looking at St. Saviour’s seventeenth-century account books.
The process was probably encouraged by Propaganda Fide’s interferences in another aspect of the Custody’s life, that is, the election of the guardian, until then an exclusive prerogative of the order’s general minister. Starting in the late 1620s, the congregation tried to impose a reformed guardian and more broadly its control over the office.Footnote 92 These interferences were part of the congregation’s wider strategy to expand its authority over the Custody, and – due to the guardian’s role in the economic administration – specifically to control the flow of alms. They were thus mostly grounded in accusations of economic mismanagement.Footnote 93 In keeping with this, the 1654 decree intervened both on the obligation of the Custody’s officials to send accounting records and their election. In this respect, echoing previous interventions and decisions issued by Propaganda Fide,Footnote 94 the decree states that guardians and general commissaries both had to be appointed by the superiors of the orders with the participation of the cardinal protector of the order, once informed (and informing) Propaganda Fide, “Otherwise, such nominations are and will be regarded as invalid, inapplicable, and void.”
Propaganda Fide’s attempts were opposed on many occasions by the order and by the Spanish Crown. Even before Propaganda Fide had been established, the Crown and Rome’s jurisdiction had already conflicted, especially on the alms administration. When Paul V wanted to centralise the alms collection in Rome, the king expressed his disapproval in numerous letters addressed to cardinals and to his ambassador in Rome.Footnote 95 Eventually the arrival of Spanish alms was halted between 1619 and 1622. Following the establishment of Propaganda Fide, the Crown’s interest in the Custody, and particularly in the administration of alms, increased. Starting in the 1640s Spanish patronage started to be regularly invoked by the order to oppose Propaganda Fide’s interferences. In 1646, for example, it was invoked by the general minister, Giovanni da Napoli, against the congregation’s claims regarding the election of the guardian.Footnote 96
Meanwhile, since the 1620s, with the support of the Spanish Crown, the order had started to fight the implication of these interferences on an administrative and organisational level by securing control over the office of the procurator and, at the same time, withdrawing the alms administration from the guardian’s control. According to the Custody’s Statuta of 1377, the procurator was elected by the guardian and the discretorium. Initially, at least in theory, he was a laic who had the same tasks as the apostolic syndic in other Franciscan monasteries. However, the procurator was often chosen among the friars, a practice that was officially approved in 1458 by Callixtus III. According to Patrocinio García Barriuso, up to the seventeenth century there is no sign that the procurator’s office was entrusted to a Spanish friar. Things started to change in the 1620s under increasing pressure by the Spanish Crown.
In 1625 the king of Spain asked that in the four monasteries of the Holy Land there always be three Spanish friars.Footnote 97 Formally motivated by the need to furnish spiritual assistance to Spanish pilgrims, the request was aimed at ensuring that Spanish friars would be in charge of the administration of Spanish alms, a wish expressed time and time again by the king in the correspondence with his ambassador.Footnote 98 The first Spanish procurator, Friar Antonio Vásquez, arrived in Jerusalem in 1625.Footnote 99 In 1651 the procurator’s Spanish origin was enshrined in the Franciscan constitutions. The text also confirmed that he had to be elected by the general chapter and gave him the task of keeping a register of the alms that had arrived and their use.Footnote 100
It is not easy to determine the role the guardian and the procurator each had in the economic administration at this point. However, in the 1640s the increased power of Vásquez is testified by the complaints of the Guardian Verniero da Montepeloso. According to him, Vásquez controlled the administration of all the monasteries, kept the keys of boxes, pantries, and warehouses, and “handle[d] all things that for 300 years have been handled by the guardians.”Footnote 101 The consequences that this evolution had on recording and administrative practices emerge clearly from an analysis of the account books. Since the arrival of Vásquez, the account books, previously written by the guardians, started to be written by the procurator. The volumes dating back to the first decades of the seventeenth century still reflected the predominant role then played in the economic administration by the guardian; therefore, for example, the arrival of a new guardian opened a new accounting period. In the first account books of the seventeenth century, moreover, the procurator was hardly mentioned and mostly in relation to the arrival of alms. Starting in the 1630s (vol. 6, 1628–1636) the account books reflect a change.Footnote 102 They start to mention the arrival of a new procurator, the balance left at the end of his office,Footnote 103 and even when he left temporarily.Footnote 104 In the eighteenth century, the arrival of a new guardian was not even recorded in the account books. Volume 5 (01/1729- 05/1736) begins with a statement that the accounts presented in the book relate to the office of the procurator of the time and the name of the guardian in office is not even mentioned.Footnote 105
Around this point, an attempt to diminish the procurator’s power was reflected by the so-called Costituzioni Benedettine issued in 1746 by Benedict XIV, in the framework of his attempts to assert the papacy’s role in the government of the Church. In the seventeenth century, however, the increasing role played in bookkeeping by a procurator who answered to the Spanish Crown helps explain the lack of accounting reports sent to Propaganda Fide in the second half of this century. More broadly, together with the end of the conflicts between the Reformed and Observants after the 1650s, it contributed to Propaganda Fide’s loss of control over the flows of alms in the second half of the century.
Conclusions
In the seventeenth century, the accounting documents issued by St. Saviour’s Monastery and their production underwent numerous changes that this article has tried to unpack. These changes reflect the complex events that affected the life of the Franciscan community in Jerusalem over the century: the conflict between the Observants and Riformati for the control of the Custody that erupted in the 1620s; the establishment of Propaganda Fide aimed at asserting the papacy’s supremacy over missions; and the increasing interest shown by the Spanish Crown and the Franciscan order toward the alms administration in reaction to the interferences of the Roman Curia.
Between the 1620s and the 1650s, the abundant production of accounting documents aimed at Propaganda Fide reflects the congregation’s successful attempts at controlling the Custody’s finances, which peaked in the mid-1650s. Propaganda Fide’s requests for information and its interferences into the alms administration were mostly triggered by the conflict between the Observants and Riformati. However, for the congregation, acquiring information was also the basis for exerting its jurisdiction and supporting any decision-making. This materialised in Rome’s efforts to centralise and control the alms flow and validate the appointments of the Custody’s highest officials. For the friars, and particularly the guardians, accounting documents and broader economic reports were a means to prove their good administration and defend themselves from accusations levelled in the context of the above-mentioned internal conflict. In the mid 1650s, the congregation tried to take advantage of such conflicts to tighten the control over alms administration and to enforce more standardised procedures for information gathering. It did so by requesting that not only information but also proper accounting documents be checked thoroughly, as suggested by the comments of the congregation’s computista on the extract of Maleo’s account books. These account books, when compared to previous financial documents, convey this change.
The purpose of the documents also shaped (and is reflected by) the accounting’s recording, content, and organisation. In the extract of Maleo’s account books, the choice of the charge and discharge system is in line with the accounting being issued for monitoring purposes. More detailed information, if needed, could be obtained from the account books of St. Saviour’s, which were also the basis upon which the extract and similar accounting reports that were regularly sent to the order were prepared. The equivalence between outflows and inflows also conveys the authors’ wish to prove the sound administration of the alms received. As for the content, the lack of any mention of the incomes related to the friars’ investments in real estate and financial markets, either in the documents sent to Propaganda Fide or in the account books, suggests that both sets of documents were aimed at keeping track of the alms administration rather than reporting on the Custody’s financial situation in general. This is coherent with the issue of the 1654 decree and previous efforts to control the collection and arrival of alms by Propaganda Fide.
After the 1650s, the almost complete lack of financial reports from Jerusalem suggests that not only did Propaganda Fide’s attempts to enforce standardised procedures for information gathering fail, but its very capacity to obtain information on the alms administered and overall control over the Custody’s finances also dramatically diminished. These findings are in contrast with the successful outcomes of analogue processes in other domains of the Custody’s life, such as missionary activity and pastoral care. In the case of alms flow, Propaganda Fide’s failure is explained by different factors, both internal and external to the Custody. First, by the lack of those conditions that Armstrong has proposed to explain the expansion of the congregation’s authority over the Custody, that is, its role of arbiter in internal and external conflicts. Moreover, in the domain of alms administration, Propaganda Fide’s attempts to expand its control were affected by organisational changes within the Custody and weakened by the competing jurisdiction of the Spanish Crown. Despite the absence of a formal Spanish patronato in the seventeenth century, it is possible to spot the same radicalisation of the Iberian monarchy’s position, in response to Propaganda Fide’s interventions, that have been highlighted in other missionary contexts.Footnote 106 In the case of the Custody’s administration of alms, the Spanish intervention ignited the organisational changes that determined the failure of Propaganda Fide’s attempts to centralise the control of cash flows through the increasing power gained by the Spanish procurator in the administration of finances and bookkeeping to the detriment of the guardian’s.
In uncovering the friars’ strong and successful opposition to Propaganda Fide’s control over alms administration, this article depicts a more nuanced and complex picture of the congregation’s jurisdiction over the Custody. That said, despite this successful opposition, the normative role and the overall formal jurisdiction of the congregation over the Custody on the basis of the ius missionarium is not to be questioned. In fact, through the decades Propaganda Fide continued to rule on other economic matters, such as the use of alms, in addition to confessional ones.Footnote 107 As for the Custody, although it might have escaped Rome’s control, it lost its long-enjoyed autonomy over alms administration to the Franciscan order and the Spanish Crown, to the point that, during the second half of the seventeenth century, and when there were no ongoing internal conflicts, the friars occasionally advocated for Propaganda Fide against Madrid.Footnote 108
On the whole, the Custody’s case contributes to our understanding of centralisation processes connected to the global expansion of Catholicism, started by the papacy in general and Propaganda Fide in particular. First, while confirming the negotiated and localised nature of these processes, it shows that the degree of oversight achieved by Propaganda Fide could change from one domain to the other even within the same mission and provides further evidence for negotiations with imperial authority on the periphery. The analysis also suggests the existence of a link between centralisation and the implementation of standardised procedures of information gathering, and a correlation between the outcomes of the two processes. The global expansion of Catholicism, this article has argued, was entangled with increasing control over religious orders and the orders’ loss of autonomy, which were fought against especially when they were not compensated by other advantages or answering to specific needs. Finally, methodologically, the article has shown the importance of studying accounting documents and their production to understand and ‘measure’ centralisation processes and their outcomes.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank the editor, Cátia Antunes, the editorial assistant, and the anonymous reviewers for their help and suggestions, as well as the participants in the ERC conference “Accounting Practices and Religious Orders in Missionary Territories” and the members of the HOLYLAB project, in particular Rebecca Carnevali, for their valuable feedback.
Funding Statement
This article is the outcome of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, under grant agreement No 101001857.
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