The Transformation of a Religious Landscape

Medieval Southern Italy, 850–1150

Valerie Ramseyer

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780801444036
• eBook ISBN: 9781501702273
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

The Transformation of a Religious Landscape paints a detailed picture of the sheer variety of early medieval Christian practice and organization, as well as the diverse modes in which church reform manifested itself in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

From the rich archives of the abbey of the Holy Trinity of Cava, Valerie Ramseyer reconstructed the complex religious history of southern Italy. No single religious or political figure claimed authority in the region before the eleventh century, and pastoral care was provided by a wide variety of small religious houses. The line between the secular and the regular clergy was not well pronounced, nor was the boundary between the clergy and the laity or between eastern and western religious practices.

In the second half of the eleventh century, however, the archbishop of Salerno and the powerful abbey of Cava acted to transform the situation. Centralized and hierarchical ecclesiastical structures took shape, and an effort was made to standardize religious practices along the lines espoused by reform popes such as Leo IX and Gregory VII. Yet prelates in southern Italy did not accept all aspects of the reform program emanating from centers such as Rome and Cluny, and the region's religious life continued to differ in many respects from that in Francia: priests continued to marry and have children, laypeople to found and administer churches, and Greek clerics and religious practices to coexist with those sanctioned by Rome.

PART I

CHRISTIANITY IN THE LOMBARD ERA (c. 849–1077)

The Christian landscape of western Europe and the Mediterranean in the period before 1000 was extremely regionalized, prompting historians to utilize terms such as “micro-Christendoms” and “Christianities” when describing it.1 It was made up of various communities, in contact with one other and sharing certain core beliefs, but also displaying a high degree of variety in terms of practices, organization, and clerical lifestyle. Christians and local churches needed only to adhere to the creeds promulgated by ecumenical councils in order to be considered “catholic,” which meant that as a whole they were free to follow their own local customs.2 Moreover, in some places, such as southern Italy, where Christians lived side-by-side with Jews and Muslims, the line separating the three monotheistic religions was much less impermeable than would be true of a later time.3 Although Christianity certainly served as an important form of identity in the early Middle Ages, especially for the clerical elite, whose writings represent the majority of information we have for the period, no idea of Christendom as a well-defined institutional entity with precise boundaries and the ability to extend into all areas of life had yet emerged.4 People in the early Middle Ages did not belong to a religion as much as they practiced one.

The ecclesiastical system of early medieval Salerno depicts well the regionalism and diversity characteristic of Christianity in the early medieval period. It differed greatly from both the Carolingian Church that engulfed most of western Europe and the Catholic Church that would emerge in the eleventh century. For one thing, it had a decentralized ecclesiastical system, with no single political or religious leader overseeing church life or religious organization. Most religious houses were built by families or groups of citizens forming partnerships (“consortia”) who constructed churches to serve the needs of their local community. Neither the prince nor the bishop of Salerno took much interest in the foundation, administration, or supervision of these churches. Diverse religious practices also characterized the region; documents specifically stated that priests and abbots were to officiate in houses according to local custom. Religious practices not only differed from one town to another but also from one church to another within the same town or region. Moreover, the Principality of Salerno had both Latin and Greek ecclesiastical foundations, as well as religious houses that combined the two traditions. Other religious categories also merged and overlapped. Ecclesiastical foundations were often not devoted to one type of religious activity or lifestyle, and many houses contained priests, monks, and anchorites living side-by-side. The duties of the clergy varied from one ecclesiastical foundation to another, and clerical titles did not reflect precise functions or specific lifestyles. Clerics claimed no special status or legal rights as a result of their calling, and their lives differed little from laymen. There was, in fact, little distinction between the clergy and laity in early medieval Salerno. In many ways, the categories and vocabulary used to describe the Catholic Church today—or even the Catholic Church of the thirteenth century—do not apply well to the religious landscape of early medieval Salerno.

The ecclesiastical system of early medieval Salerno should not be viewed as decadent, chaotic, or impoverished, despite its uniqueness and divergence from later Catholic practice. Documents show that priests and clerics took their pastoral duties seriously; inventories from churches and monasteries reveal wealthy foundations with rich decorations and garments imported from as far away as Constantinople and Africa. Religious foundations were built not only in major towns and cities but also in rural areas. There is no evidence that the Principality of Salerno had a shortage of churches or priests. In fact, many participants in legal transactions held clerical titles, such as presbiter, sacerdos, clericus, diaconus, subdiaconus, monachus, abbas, ancilla dei, to name a few. Moreover, the laity participated intensely in the church organization and religious life of their communities, exercising roles that would later be reserved for the clergy alone. The ecclesiastical system of early medieval Salerno, although radically different from the Catholic church of the later Middle Ages, functioned satisfactorily and provided well for the religious needs of the population.

The ecclesiastical system of Salerno should also not be seen as an anomaly or exception, portraying a number of unusual characteristics on account of its being in a frontier region never formally integrated into the Carolingian or Byzantine worlds. While it is true that Salerno lacked many features typical of Carolingian church organization, such as a strong episcopal authority and a system of parish churches, recent studies have shown the pervasiveness of diverse religious practices and church organization even within the Carolingian empire itself. Local traditions rather than a Rome-centered ecclesiastical hierarchy guided religious practices, and questions regarding liturgy, canonization, clerical discipline, doctrine, and religious law were decided regionally.5 Prelates and rulers did not concern themselves too much with liturgical homogeneity.6 Conciliar legislation sought mainly to increase episcopal power over church organization and lay society, while rulers such as Charlemagne and Louis the Pious, although they promoted the spread of specific religious ceremonies designed to propagate a royal ideology, did not seek to thwart local traditions.7 In addition, the power of bishops differed from one location to another. In Brittany, for example, community churches similar to the ones found in Salerno were the norm.8 Village dwellers rather than bishops or powerful lay families built and supervised religious houses administered by clergy who lived locally. Bishops had little contact with these churches, and the reforms of the Carolingian bishops did not reach the area. Similarly, in the Abruzzi private churches built by consortia provided pastoral care in many rural areas in the ninth century, even after the region’s integration into the Carolingian empire.9 In both places, these types of community churches fulfilled not only religious functions, but also served as public spaces for a variety of activities, including feasts, ordeals, commercial transactions, and court cases.10

In southern Italy too church organization exhibited much variety. Naples, for example, had an ecclesiastical system that resembled Rome in many ways, with a well-organized hierarchy of clerics and churches within the city walls under the authority of the archbishop.11 Calabria and Sicily modeled their church organization on Constantinople rather than Rome. Their Sees were directly dependent on the patriarch of Constantinople from the eighth century onward, and their bishops attended councils held in Byzantine territories.12 In some regions, such as in Capua, bishops exercised strong authority over church organization and played an important role in political activities.13 In other areas, including Apulia, bishops were weak and had little power over religious or political life.14 In fact, most areas of southern Italy in the Lombard period lacked either a strong episcopal authority or a system of parish churches. In some areas, such as where the abbeys of Montecassino and San Vincenzo al Volturno arose, an episcopal power was completely absent. As a result, monasteries and private religious houses were generally the main source of pastoral care in Lombard southern Italy. Even in northern and central Italy, ecclesiastical organization in the Lombard period, before the Carolingian conquest, was often centered on religious foundations outside of episcopal control.15 The experience of Salerno was thus in many ways typical for Lombard regions of Italy in the early Middle Ages. Moreover, Salerno’s religious landscape exhibited many features characteristic of Christianity in the eastern Mediterranean in late antiquity, including a weakened episcopate, a lack of religious unity, a regionalized ecclesiastical network that lacked a pyramid structure, an emphasis on the holy ascetic as opposed to the saintly bishop, and a dichotomy between desert and world, or regular and secular clergy, rather than a distinction between laypeople and clerics.16 Even the traits unique to Salerno’s ecclesiastical organization can be seen as normal for the time since diversity was, in fact, the rule for Christian organization in the period from 500 to 1000.

1 See, for example, Peter Brown, part 2 in The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity AD: 200–1000 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996); Cristina La Rocca, “Cristianesimi,” in Storia Medievale (Rome: Conzelli, 1998), 113–39; and Claudio Azzara, “Ecclesiastical Institutions,” in Italy in the Early Middle Ages, 476–1000, ed. Cristina La Rocca (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 85–101.

2 Girolamo Arnaldi, “Profilo di storia della Chiesa e del papato fra tarda antichità e alto medioevo,” La Cultura 35/1 (1997): 8.

3 Giovanni Vitolo, “Vescovi e Diocesi,” in Storia del Mezzogiorno, ed. Giuseppe Galasso (Naples: Edizione del Sole, 1990), 3: 99–101.

4 On the switch from Christianity to Christendom in the High Middle Ages, see Dominique Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion: Cluny and Christendom Face Heresy, Judaism, and Islam (1000–1150), trans. Graham Robert Edwards (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998), 1–2.

5 J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Frankish Church (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 1, 110–12, 118–21; Yitzhak Hen, The Royal Patronage of Liturgy in Frankish Gaul to the Death of Charles the Bald (877) (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2001), 3–7.

6 Hen, The Royal Patronage, 7, 78–81; Wilfried Hartmann, Die Synoden der Karolingerzeit im Frankenreich und in Italien (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1989), 408–09.

7 See, in particular, the canons of the Council of Verneuil held in 755, the Council of Frankfurt held in 794, and the legislation of Louis the Pious issued in 818–19. Hartmann, Die Synoden, 68–72, 105–15, 415, 433–35; Hen, The Royal Patronage, 86–95; Wallace-Hadrill, The Frankish Church, 170–71; Michael McCormick, Eternal Victory. Triumphal Rulership in Late Antiquity, Byzantium and the Early Medieval West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 342–77.

8 Wendy Davies, Small Worlds: The Community in Early Medieval Brittany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 11–26.

9 Laurent Feller, Les Abruzzes médiévales: Territoire, économie, et société en Italie centrale du IXe au XIIe siècle (Rome: Ecole Française de Rome, 1998), 805–9.

10 Also in late Anglo-Saxon and early Norman England, churches were built and administered by groups of citizens, in particular, families and craftsmen. Although some were large and well-endowed, the majority were small and poor, with space for a limited number of worshipers. C. N. L. Brooke, “The Church in Towns, 1000–1250,” in The Mission of the Church and the Propagation of the Faith, vol. 6 of Studies i...

Table of contents

• List of Maps
• Introduction
• Part I. Christianity in the Lombard Era (c. 849–1077)
• Part II. Reorganization and Reform in the Norman Period (c. 1050–1130)
• Epilogue