The Spanish Church and the Papacy in the Thirteenth Century
Peter Linehan
Economic Problems of the Castilian Church, 2
[128] A few weeks after John of Abbeville had left Spain another Frenchman intervened in the history of the Spanish Church. He was the abbot of St Martin-les-Aires at Troyes, and on 16 December 1229 he wrote to Bishop Rodrigo of León and his officialis ordering them to excommunicate the abbot and convent of San Pedro 'de Alducia'.(1) In comparison with the effect of the recent legation the repercussions of this missive were negligible. But it does not follow that its importance was slight, for its despatch had been occasioned by what was for Spanish churchmen throughout the century a much more threatening reality than the spectre of moral reform: an unpaid debt. Having failed to meet the deadline set by their Sienese creditors, Leonardo Jordanis and his three companions, the abbot had then declined to put in an appearance at the hearing of the case against him and his convent at Troyes in the previous March.(2) Moreover, they remained unconcerned even after the bishop had published the sentence against them, so that the Italians petitioned the executors -- as the executors, concurring, informed Bishop Rodrigo in March 1230 -- 'ut sententiam aggravaremur secundum quod de iure esset aggravanda'.(3)
It is not known what impression this second commination, uttered with candles lit and bells tolling, made upon the abbot of 'Alducia'. But there can be little doubt that already, by 1229, [129] incidents such as this were common, and its various features -- loans from Italian bankers, summonses to hearings at the Champagne fairs, and indifference to ecclesiastical penalties -- typical. There is certainly ample evidence to show that, in general terms, the entire Peninsula was caught up in Italy's financial web by the end of the thirteenth century,(4) and some to indicate that this situation was by then long established.(5) Yet merely to glance at the work of the most distinguished modern writer on this subject provides sufficient proof that the Spanish manifestations of that most persistent feature of the system -- borrowing by individuals and communities -- have been studied hardly at all.(6) The subject could not be exhausted in an entire volume, and far less in a single chapter. Since, however, it has a direct bearing on the place of the Church in Spanish -- and particularly in Castilian -- society, some of the evidence must be considered as prelude to an account of the crisis by which that Church was overtaken at the end of the 1250s.
Although the letter to the bishop of León is silent on the matter, it may be assumed that Alducia's debt to the Sienese merchants had its origins in an abbatial visit to the Roman Curia. Throughout the century, Spanish churchmen frequented the papal court, and paid the price. A combination of lengthy lawsuits and a liking for the place involved them in considerable expenditure, and, as did others from elsewhere, they turned for ready cash to the agents of the great Italian banking companies. When, on 19 May 1250, Ramón de Liriis, proctor of the villainous Bishop Ponce of Urgel, borrowed 110 marks sterling from the Roman merchants, Petrus Cinchii de Turre and his two nephews, promising repayment at Michaelmas 'in nostra curia si fuerit citra montes, alioquin...apud Trecas',(7) the [130] circumstances of the transaction were precisely those in which his and his employer's compatriots acted similarly during the fifty years before and after. All that distinguished it from many other such deals was the location of the Curia at the time, the smallness of the sum involved, and the proctor's choice of creditors.
Being at Lyons, the pope was more than usually accessible to Bishop Ponce and his ilk,(8) while for both him and them 110 marks was very small beer.(9) Where Ramón departed most markedly from the norm, though, was in his choice of Roman creditors. For most Spaniards preferred to do business with larger concerns based further north -- with the merchants of Piacenza and Pisa, which both had the king of Aragon on their books;(10) of Lucca to whom in the late seventies and early eighties the popes entrusted the transmission from Portugal of the taxes authorised at the Second Lyons Council: a thankless task;(11) and of Siena where in 1298 (when on the brink of ruin, however) the Bonsignori Company could quite justifiably describe itself as 'the most honourable and noteworthy company in the whole world',(12) and whose Spanish clients by then had included the Order of Santiago and the churches of Ávila and Toledo,(13) apart from such smaller fry as the abbot of Alducia and those Spanish churchmen with whom their operations as campsores domini papae brought them into contact.(14)
[131] More widely favoured than any of these, however, were the banking houses of Florence and Pistoia, all of which had at their disposal an impressive international network of control and retrieval. In order to borrow from the Florentines it was not necessary, as Fidel Fita assumed, for Bishop Pedro Pascal of Jaén to visit Florence.(15) Like many other Spaniards before him he was able to avail himself of their services while at the Curia.(16) Almost forty years earlier, during a stay at Anagni which did him little credit, the archbishop-elect of Toledo, Sancho, had turned to Dulcis and Noccius de Burgo when Alexander IV had given him leave to borrow up to 800 marks 'pro expediendis ecclesie Toletane negotiis' and had raised that sum from them and their Florentine associates de societate Castri Gualfredi. It is an index of the wide-ranging competence of Sancho's creditors that their principal executor, who was to impose an interdict on the church of Toledo if he failed to meet the deadline for repayment and to cause both him and the maiores capituli to be summoned to the Curia if he held out for a further two months, was a Frenchman.(17) Even more impressive, though, is the fact that when these sanctions failed it was the company's own Italian agents who recovered the loan on 21 November 1262, at Burgos.(18)
But there was nothing exceptional about this settlement. Four years before, also at Burgos, two other Florentines de societate Octaviani had been repaid the sum that had been [132] borrowed from them at the Curia by the prior and chapter of Valladolid.(19) The Italians were no strangers at the Spanish fairs. When, in February 1256, the same Sancho borrowed £4,000 Tours from Petrus de Ysidolio, a merchant of St Jean d'Angely, it was arranged that his account should be cleared either at the Alcalá fair during the twenty days after Easter or else at the Pamplona fair on the feast of the Ascension.(20) Though not on the scale of the fairs of Champagne, these fairs were evidently coping with rather more than the barter of chickens and vegetables. In March 1288 Archbishop Gonzalo of Toledo was able to borrow 20,000 maravedís on the security of his receipts from the three annual fairs at Alcalá, and eleven years later the merchants of Montpellier thought it worth their while to send Guillelmus Dorna to represent them there and to act on their behalf.(21)
By then the Florentines had considerable experience of dealing with Spaniards, and their customers had had occasion to discover some of the hazards of international finance in a period of dear money. In 1266 a large group of Florentines of the Castro Valfrido connection, including Dulcis and Noccius de Burgo, declared themselves unable to meet their considerable debts to Cardinal Richard Annibaldi, and in lieu of cash made over to the cardinal their Spanish bonds.(22) Their debtors, both ecclesiastic and lay, whose obligations to the Florentines comprised quantities of grain, wine and wool as well as of money, were given two months in which to pay.(23) The executors appointed by Clement IV were the abbot and prior of Ste-Genevieve who, in turn, directed the abbots and priors of Poblet and Santas Creus to oblige the bishop of Lérida, Guillermo de Moncada, either [133] to settle his account with the cardinal or else to come to Paris to explain to them why he had not. The sum involved was only three hundred marks, which hardly justified the copying out of Clement's two lengthy letters, let alone a journey from Lérida to Paris and back.(24) Still, not even experiences of this sort weaned Spanish churchmen away from their dependence on the Florentines. Whether in credit or, which was more usual, in debt, it was to them that Spaniards turned. Before he died, Archbishop João of Braga deposited a tidy little sum, £1,000 Tours, with Dulcis de Burgo and his partners at the Curia,(25) and when, some thirty years later, Archbishop Gonzalo of Toledo authorised his proctors to borrow up to three times that amount he specified two individuals with whom he would prefer to do business (though, prudently, he left them free to raise the loan 'a quocumque mercatori seu alio homine layco vel clerico, seculari sive regulari' since beggars can't be choosers). One was Bocatinus Josepi, merchant of Florence.(26)
The other was Girardinus Donati, a member of the Ammanati Company of Pistoia which, together with the Chiarenti Company, vied with the Florentines for the lion's share of Spanish business at this period.(27) Their agents were in constant contact with the leaders of the Spanish Church, quite apart from acting in the capacity of collectors of papal taxes in the Peninsula. It was with a campsor of Pistoia, Johannes, that Juan de Parras, canon of Oviedo, who made a will at Viterbo in September 1267, was in credit to the tune of sixty duplas aureas.(28) By the same token, probably, Jacobo de Pistoia had secured a Toledo canonry by December 1263.(29) Archiepiscopal or capitular acquiescence in such an appointment is as natural an explanation as papal provision, and it would not be the only case of its kind.(30)[134] Meanwhile, at the end of the 1270s, we find the treasurer of Toledo, Pedro Roldán, appointing Maestro Chanob de Pistoya as one of his executors and Maestro Chanob doing his duty at Toledo itself.(31)
For elucidation of the circumstances in which these appointments could be made the archive of Toledo Cathedral contains material of considerable interest: the financial papers of Archbishop Gonzalo (1280-98). Similar records have survived from the first half of the century, but not in such profusion, and in order to understand the financial difficulties experienced by the majority of Castilian churchmen in the 1250s it may be useful to tell the story of Gonzalo's dealings with his Italian bankers.
When he was upgraded from the see of Burgos in May 1280(32) Gonzalo inherited not only the primatial see but also the various debts with which that church had been saddled by his ill-starred predecessor -- Fernán Rodríguez de Cabañas, whose election Nicholas III had declined to confirm on the grounds that he had bribed the electors.(33) It was therefore in Gonzalo's interest to establish at the outset what was his own personal property, and this he did at Viterbo at the end of that year, just as he had done at the time of his promotion to Cuenca seven years previously, by preparing an inventory of his own goods: an inventory which indicates that since 1273 he had acquired not only several accessions to his already remarkable library but also a taste for dressy garments and exotic nick-nacks.(34)
But this was not all he had acquired. For some of the property which he had brought with him to the Curia belonged not to him but to the church of Burgos, as the new bishop of Burgos, Fernando, lost no time in having recorded, insisting that the accumulated debts for which the church of Burgos was answerable be distinguished from those which were the archbishop's own personal responsibility. The settlement -- which, incidentally and valuably, provides information about the current exchange-rate for Spanish currency(35) -- was concluded [135] at the Curia on 6 November 1281 in the presence of a number of Spaniards, including the Dominican bishop-elect of Ávila, Ademar, and Miguel Pérez, a canon of Burgos who in the following years was to figure as one of the archbishop's principal financial agents.(36) Amongst the items recovered by Bishop Fernando (though not until almost five years had elapsed) were his church's vestments.(37)
In depriving the bishop of Burgos of anything ecclesiastical to stand up, Gonzalo was following an example set by his own immediate predecessor at Toledo, Fernán Rodríguez, who in his quest for the archbishopric had dilapidated that church by pawning not only the contents of Archbishop Sancho II's chapel in order to pay off that prelate's debts (which had amounted to almost ten thousand maravedís), but also various pontifical rings and books, the property of the cathedral church, as a means of reducing his own.(38) The only method of settling old debts was to raise new loans, as the new archbishop soon discovered. In his anxiety to recover the sacred objects surrendered by Fernán Rodríguez, he dragged the church of Toledo far deeper into the financial mire and incurred the sort of difficulties with which by the early 1280s Castilian churchmen had been grappling for several decades.
Already, before his translation, he had been in debt on his own account to the Chiarenti,(39) and it was to them that he again turned in 1281. Other companies also accommodated him: on 30 June 1281 the Ammanati extended the deadline for repayment of two debts, of £2,300 and £1,300 Tours, both of which were due on the following day;(40) and in the autumn the Riccardi Company of Lucca proved no less understanding, granting him a post-dated extension in respect of a [136] smaller sum which had been due in mid-July.(41) His main creditors, though, were the Chiarenti, and, in comparison with what he owed them, the sum saved him by the self-effacing curialist, Blaise of Anagni, who at this juncture waived his 100 maravedís pension from the archbishop,(42) hardly signified at all. By the end of 1281 they had advanced him £2,900.(43)
His removal to Avignon early in 1282(44) marked no upward turn in his fortunes. Caelum non animum mutant...-- though he did manage to retrieve the smaller of his debts to the Chiarenti and to repay something over one-third, £858, of what he owed the Ammanati in return for a second period of grace.(45) Meanwhile further debts were mounting up, and by the month of September, when he recovered the Toledo property for a mere £300,(46) he was worth almost £8,000 to the Chiarenti: a sum which he showed no sign of ever being able to raise.(47) Nor, during the winter of 1282-3, did he change his ways. His chaplain, Pedro Diego, and his chamberlain, Juan Martínez, were despatched to raise further loans wherever they could find credit;(48) and it is probably to this same period that we should ascribe the series of blank cheques which, because they were not cashed, still survive [137] with a number of other financial records in the Toledo archive.(49) Not unnaturally, therefore, the Chiarenti -- a company which showed quite exceptional patience in its dealings with Spanish churchmen(50) -- insisted on the most substantial security to hand: the archbishop himself. Until his debt was cleared Gonzalo undertook to remain at Nîmes, Montpellier, 'seu alia civitate vel terra illis propinqua'; and there he stayed until the spring of 1284 when he was granted permission to depart.(51)
Possibly he was in no hurry to leave anyway. The restriction on his movements may have seemed to him to have come as a godsend, for to have returned to Castile during the civil wars of 1282-4 would necessarily have involved him in choosing between Alfonso X and his rebel son Sancho; and the archbishop, with an eye to the future, may well have preferred to identify himself with neither side at this stage. He certainly resisted the blandishments of Sancho who, anxious for his support, wrote to him twice in 1282 offering to settle his debts for him if he would return.(52) [138] In this case, then, the primate of Spain's financial disasters were something of a boon. But such a situation was exceptional, and in normal circumstances the king had no need to bid for the support of the episcopate during the thirteenth century. Alfonso X held all the cards and invented the rules, as did Fernando III and Sancho IV. Moreover, he expressed for the benefit of posterity the view that it was the bishops themselves who, by remaining at the Curia for lengthy periods, were responsible for involving their churches in economic ruin. In the Primera Partida Alfonso inveighed against such prelates. At Rome, it was claimed, they ran up enormous debts 'which afterwards their churches cannot pay, so that the churches are reduced to great poverty from which it takes them much time to recover'. 'E algunas vegadas fican algunas dellas cuemo destroydas'.(53) The destruction of the church of Palencia might be seen as an example of this process, if indeed Alfonso's analysis is reliable.(54) But this, manifestly, it is not.
Debt, of course, is no sure sign of poverty. It may indeed indicate quite the reverse, and the willingness of the Chiarenti Company to continue supplying Archbishop Gonzalo with funds may suggest that they were satisfied with his credit-worthiness and no less confident than modern historians that, of all people, an archbishop of Toledo in the thirteenth century could not in reality fail to be prosperous. However, it is also possible to draw other conclusions from the account of Gonzalo's affairs during the early 1280s, conclusions which are endorsed by such evidence as has already been set against this belief. The Italians, like the historians, may have miscalculated.
Alfonso X, certainly, has misled historians with his account of episcopal mismanagement, by ascribing the temporal and spiritual malaise of the Castilian Church to the irresponsible action of wilful bishops. For the bishops were not bent upon self-slaughter. What dogged them abroad, by and large, were economic disabilities, not [139] personal waywardness, and these disabilities stemmed from the same source as those which crippled them at home their political defencelessness in a country hard put to finance its own expansion. It was the king who drove them into the hands of the bankers by refusing to allow them to take funds with them out of the country. In 1279 Nicholas III's nuncio, the bishop of Rieti, was instructed to broach the matter as one of the gravamina by which the Castilian episcopate was oppressed.(55) It was a restriction similar to, but harsher than that for which Afonso III of Portugal had been taken to task by Clement IV in 1268.(56) As it affected Spanish students at foreign Schools it casts an interesting light on Alfonso's expressions of concern about the spiritual consequences of episcopal indebtedness: educational reform had been one of John of Abbeville's main considerations.(57) But it was against the bishops and higher clergy that the measure was more particularly directed. Conceived in the same spirit as had produced the anti-inflationary legislation of the early fifties, it achieved (or, at least, was capable of achieving) the desirable end of keeping the bishops in leading-strings and at home. Alfonso's Visigothic predecessors had adopted similar policies for fear of clerical sedition operating from a foreign base,(58) and in the early fourteenth century the Castilian bishops themselves were suspected of using like tactics in order to prevent their critics reporting their enormities at the Curia.(59) That, though, does not exonerate Alfonso. Nor did his son's offer to bail out the archbishop mark any new departure. It was the exception that proved the rule.
This system of control was no novelty in 1279. Throughout the century bishops fell foul of a succession of kings with monarchical pretensions and were driven by royal persecution to seek sanctuary at the papal Curia. In the twenties and thirties Juan Pérez of Calahorra and Bernardo of Segovia were both victims of Fernando III who, [140] while the former was incurring debts which he was later to liquidate by selling land, purposefully devastated the diocese and crippled the spiritual administration by conniving at Jewish non-payment of tithes, 'propter quod plures parrochiales ecclesie fere ad nichilum sunt redacte'.(60) And during the seventies there were further casualties. One was Archbishop Gonzalvo of Compostela. Appointed in 1272 by Gregory X -- apparently in the hope that he might reform the province -- he was hounded out by Alfonso, to whose disappointment at seeing his imperial candidacy fading away had been added the irritation of having his choice for the archbishopric, archdeacon Juan Alfonso of Trastamar, dying on him at the crucial moment.(61) In exile at the Curia the archbishop was maintained by a combination of loans and a notional annual income of £1,500 from his province,(62) though it is not clear how the latter payment can have reached him. Certainly no diocesan funds were available to another refugee of that same decade, Bishop Rodrigo of Segovia, whose offence had been that of defying the king on the issue of the dynastic rights of the Infantes de la Cerda. He remained abroad for eleven years, went the way of all flesh by borrowing beyond his slender means and in February 1281, his creditors' patience exhausted and with the pope who had promoted him in the grave, was excommunicated 'pro eo quod...non solverat quandam quantitatem pecunie Ture et aliis sociis suis civibus et mercatoribus Senensibus in termino iam transacto'.(63) Bitter personal experience underlay his constitution for the province of Tarragona, whither Nicholas IV translated him in October 1288, which forbad ecclesiastics to associate permanently with any secular court.(64)
[141] Such extreme measures, however, were but rarely applied by the Italian bankers, as Master Sinibaldus de Labro and Master Miguel of Burgos, author and witness respectively of the sentence against the bishop of Segovia, were soon to discover in their capacity as agents of the archbishop of Toledo.(65) In that case, as in others, the alleged bogey-men showed surprising patience and moderation, sparing the Spaniards those ecclesiastical sanctions which, as bad payers, they indubitably merited. Nor was it necessarily their motive to encourage their quarry further to ensnare himself by even heavier borrowing before foreclosing, for they were even prepared to waive their profits and settle for the recovery of their original loan. Of the £1,000 lent to Juan Martínez on his promotion to the see of Lugo in March 1279, only £30 had been repaid by the time of the bishop's death, notwithstanding his having disowned all his predecessor's obligations. Yet in October 1282 the bankers of Pistoia were willing to renounce their claims to damages and expenses if only Bishop Alfonso would pay them a further instalment of the principal, of which they had so far received back less than half.(66) And in the same year the Florentines Lapus and Saxutius released the dean of Ávila, Alfonso Vidal, from the responsibility, which he had accepted at the instance of Fernán Rodríguez, elect of Toledo, of guaranteeing repayment of the £220 lent to Juan Ferrández, late treasurer of Salamanca, provided the dean pay them £85 owed on his own account.(67) Like Cardinal Richard Annibaldi fifteen years before,(68) they were prepared to cut [142] their Spanish losses, and even, in the case of one of the dean of Ávila's creditors, solemnly to renounce in advance all recourse to either canon or civil law as a means of recovery.(69)
In the 1240s, similarly, the Master of the Order of Santiago, Pelayo Pérez Correa, had delayed five years in repaying a loan provided at the Lyons Council by the Bonsignori family, and, despite various papal admonitions, nemesis had not followed.(70) The Italian bankers were a symptom, not a cause, of the economic problems of the Castilian Church. Still, for the light that they shed on the economic foundations of that Church during these years, their dealings with Spanish churchmen -- and, especially, the constant procrastination of their customers -- are essential to an understanding of the Church's position in society there.
The indebtedness of the church of Toledo was part of the legacy of Archbishop Rodrigo. It was from him that the Infante Sancho inherited the debt of 1,450 marks concerning which an amicabilis compositio was achieved in April 1255. The loan had been made to Rodrigo at the Curia (possibly on the occasion of his last visit to Lyons in summer of 1247, from which he returned a corpse) and through the good offices of the Spanish cardinal, Gil Torres.(71) The cardinal himself was also a creditor of the church of Toledo, and on his death in 1254 he bequeathed what was owed him to the Cistercians of San Marino del Monte, Viterbo. By the beginning of 1257 pressure was being applied to Sancho for the recovery of this too.(72) Meanwhile he was adding to the burden: he had already borrowed from the Italians before coming to the Curia in the winter of 1258-9,(73) and the expenses of his embassy to England in 1255 -- on his return from which, in February 1256, he borrowed £4,000 at St Jean d'Angely(74) -- were hardly offset by his brother's six thousand maravedís[143] subvention in the following October, however generous Henry III's gifts to him may have been.(75) On his death in November 1261 he left his successor, Domingo Pascal, to settle further accounts with merchants of Condom and Cádiz, which he did at Guadalajara on 27 April 1262.(76) Five days before, Alfonso had written to the archbishop-elect applauding his resolve not to go in person to the Curia to seek papal confirmation but to leave the matter to the king's own proctors there, despite the advice of those canons of Toledo who said that they had been at the Curia and had never known petitions of this nature from the kings of France and Germany to have received a favourable hearing from the pope and cardinals. Well might Alfonso welcome the old man's decision and further discourage him from making the journey at that, 'el mas fuerte tiempo del anno para andar a camino', but to take good care of himself, 'seyendo tan bon ome como vos sodes'.(77) For here was testimony to the effectiveness of the king's economic sanctions. Not even archbishops of Toledo who enjoyed the king's moral and financial support -- such as Domingo Pascal's predecessor and successor, Sancho of Castile and Sancho of Aragon, respectively brother and son of reigning monarchs -- could stave off financial disaster. Despite Alfonso X's lobbying and Jaime I's subsidies, Sancho of Aragon's chapel passed under the hammer.(78)
An earlier and far more serious casualty of the same process had been the ecclesiastical solidarity campaign which Archbishop Sancho of Castile had betrayed, at a price, in 1259. In the previous two years [144] churchmen had at last been stirred into action by the effects of an economic crisis which had been in preparation for at least a decade before that.(79) During those years quite small debts discovered bishops, who were further removed from the purple than either of the two Sanchos of Toledo, lacking the wherewithal and driven to the unhappy expedient of making inroads into their capital. In order to raise the 400 maravedís which his journeys to the royal and papal courts had cost him, Bishop Juan Díaz of Orense had to cancel arrangements which had previously been made for the establishment of an anniversary in honour of St John the Baptist and, in December 1255, recompense his chapter by transferring the charge to property at Sobrado which Innocent IV had permitted his predecessor to annex precisely for the purpose of relieving episcopal poverty.(80) Traveling expenses loomed large also in the financial statement which Bishop Pedro of Zamora presented to his chapter on the first day of 1255.(81) Apart from 200 maravedís borrowed from the Jews of Castrotoraf, Pedro owed various sums, none of them crippling, to sixteen individuals, most of them ecclesiastics. Other than Cardinal Gil Torres no one had lent him more than 200 maravedís. Yet the sum total was in excess of two thousand, and, of this, unpaid tercias accounted for almost one sixth.(82)
However, only one of these sixteen -- Arnaldo de Rexac -- could be regarded as a foreigner,(83) and Pedro was most scrupulous about settling [145] his accounts with the Florentines, Jacopo Bonacontri and partners, from whom (perhaps at I Lyons) he had borrowed 160 marks. Indeed his servant, R. Gonzálvez, presented himself at Provins on the very first day of the St-Ayoul fair -- 14 September 1247 -- six days before the Italians were ready to do business.(84) Other Spanish prelates, though, were rather more casual and considerably less solvent. Bishop Nuño of León was one. In the spring of 1247, when Fernando III was granted the tercias, both León and Oviedo were in debt. But whereas Innocent IV left Bishop Rodrigo Díaz of Oviedo to work out his own salvation he summoned Nuño to the Curia to give an account of his stewardship.(85) The outcome was disastrous. Possibly because he was short of ready money the bishop granted León benefices to curialists. One of the prebends which he had previously been permitted to establish extra numerum in order to accommodate unbeneficed local clergy was awarded to a Roman, Nicholas, 'clericus de Urbe'. A nephew of Cardinal Richard Annibaldi, 'Stephanus dictus Surdus', received various prestimonia of the late dean, Pedro Arias.(86) Thus the rents of a Spanish cardinal's relative were transferred to a total stranger;(87) and the process of erosion continued during the two-and-a-half-year vacancy which followed Nuño's death in April 1252, while a group of León canons campaigned, unsuccessfully, to exclude the royal candidate for the see, the royal notary, Martín Fernández. Consequently the church's financial position continued to deteriorate, despite the favours showered upon the new bishop by the king and, at the king's behest, by the pope.(88) Martín Fernández's proctors at the Curia, the archdeacon Pedro Núñez and the treasurer Fernando Abril, were driven to borrow from the Bonsignori, not [146] only for their own maintenance but also in order to pay the arrears of income awarded by the pope to William of Parma, vicechancellor of the Roman Church, and William's nephew, Hugolin. Repayment was due after only four montbs, at the beginning of 1255. So the church of León was in no condition to rally to the financial assistance of the king in the October of that year.(89)
León's easterly ecclesiastical neighbour was even less well equipped to bail out its 'amigo natural'. The history of the church of Palencia in the first half of the century -- and particularly in the decade after the capture of Seville -- provides, and was regarded by contemporaries as providing, a succinct account in miniature of the misfortunes of the Castilian Church, while its university, at which the youthful St Dominic had studied in the 1180s, serves in its decline as a barometer recording the pressures to which not only it but also the national Church at large was subject. Of these, episcopal extravagance during Roman holidays was one. But, the Primera Partida notwithstanding, it was very far from being the greatest.
Amid the already encircling gloom, the saint had been so affected by the extent of poverty there that he had sold his books in order that the poor might eat bread, having no wish to be nourished by dead skins while human beings suffered. 'Povres gens moroient de fain/Por defaute d'avoir don pain'.(90) But fondness of this order was rare at Palencia. Normally the weakest and poorest-represented went to the wall, and in 1225 the diocesan clergy were required both to contribute to the upkeep of the university with a quarter of their tercias for a further quinquennium,(91) and, from the same source, to provide Bishop Tello with a 'moderate subsidy' towards the expenses that he had incurred in the Reconquest.(92) Even if they had been in receipt of their entire tithe revenue their situation would have been difficult; but they were not. In that same year the pope acted on the bishop's complaint that the nobles of the diocese were withholding payment.(93) The reprimand was evidently ignored, however, for [147] in 1229 Gregory IX had to issue letters against both the predatory vassals of King Alfonso IX and their attacks on the church's property, 'Palentino episcopo intimante'(94) and also the Jews of those parts who, while refusing to pay tithes on property acquired from Christians (contrary to canon 67 of the Fourth Lateran Council), were able to build themselves ever more lavish synagogues and to emphasise their economic prosperity by establishing their cemeteries adjacent to those of the Christians, thus creating considerable scandal and disturbance.(95)
Gregory's informant, clearly, was John of Abbeville who, while at Palencia in the previous autumn, had experienced another pastoral manifestation of the church's economic infirmity: the rooted opposition of the bishop and chapter to the Dominican Order. Tello's much publicised enthusiasm for the cause of clerical education did not extend to patronage of the friars who were best able to raise standards, even at the founding father's alma mater. For in the estimation of the hard-pressed chapter the friars represented above all a further threat to their resources. In August 1231 the pope censured them for having refused to allow the newcomers to celebrate publicly and bury the dead, contrary to the legate's ordinance.(96) Thus, in Castile as elsewhere, unlike Aragon during Pedro de Albalat's pontificate, the group which even hidebound John of Abbeville had recognised as constituting the white hope for church reform was hampered at every turn, and the outbreak of the Albigensian heresy which affected those parts in the late 1230s could not easily be contained because the means of doing so had been rejected in advance.(97) In that sense, then, there was truth in the analysis of the Primera Partida concerning the spiritual consequences of economic regression, whatever its causes. Contemporaries noted the connexion, reversing cause [148] and effect. In the neighbouring diocese of León drought and famine were held to be a consequence of the toleration extended there to a clutch of heretics.(98)
A further charge levied on the church of Palencia -- and on the Castilian Church in general(99) -- during the thirties was that of supporting exiled Portuguese ecclesiastics. Bishop Martinho of Porto died there, sometime before April 1235,(100) and in the previous year the bishop-elect of Coimbra, Master Tiburcio, ex-sacrist of Palencia, was permitted to continue drawing income from that source.(101) But it was during the next decade, after the death of Bishop Tello in 1246 and in the shadow of the capture of Seville, that the affairs of the church entered their darkest phase. For the election was disputed by the cantor, Rodrigo Gonzálvez, and the archdeacon of Cerrato; the two candidates resigned their claims into the hands of the pope; and on 4 April 1247 Innocent IV rejected both and appointed the papal chaplain, Master Rodrigo.(102)
Probably Rodrigo was one of the Spanish clerks whose home at the Curia was the household of Cardinal Gil Torres. Possibly, like the cardinal, he had some connexion with Burgos.(103) And, although it is not certain that he was a royal nominee, it may be assumed that in 1247, of all years, any Castilian bishop appointed by the pope would have enjoyed at least the king's blessing. But, whatever his pedigree, Bishop Rodrigo was loth to leave the Curia. The letter which he sent to Archbishop Rodrigo of Toledo soon after his appointment -- a [149] letter which reveals a shaky mastery of Latin(104) -- implies that he regarded it as his proper habitat. It was there, at Lyons, that he swore allegiance as a suffragan of Toledo on 6 June 1247.(105) During the next two years he was entrusted several times with the task of assigning rents in Castilian churches to foreign clerks designated by Innocent, and of executing provisions in their favour.(106) But if these commissions took him to Castile he had returned to the Curia by May 1253 when he acted as auditor at Assisi of an appeal lodged by the church of Limoges,(107) was still absent from his diocese four months later,(108) and seems to have died there in September 1254 or shortly before.(109)
Innocent was evidently well disposed towards Bishop Rodrigo. But he was unable to provide him with any financial relief. In June 1247 Rodrigo was granted a half of the tercias of his diocese for a period of one year to alleviate his church's 'great burden of debt'.(110) However the bishop was made to take his place in the queue behind the king who had pre-empted him by two months, and in March 1253 he was still waiting(111) while Alfonso X tightened his hold on the church's revenue. It was this situation, superimposed upon Palencia's other earlier woes -- and not simply Rodrigo's taste for life at the Curia -- which drove him to the next stage of the episcopal rake's progress: failure to repay the loan advanced him by Folcarinus [150] Jacobi, Jacobus Scambii and their Florentine partners at the time agreed, the St-Ayoul fair at Provins in September 1248. Five months later he was issued with the inevitable solemn warning.(112) Yet even if the pope's attempt to set him on a sounder financial footing had borne fruit it would have been achieved only at the expense of the other churches of his diocese.(113) The papal practice of robbing Peter to pay Paul may have had scriptural authority but it was no solution, since Peter was on the bread-line too, as Innocent knew perfectly well.(114) Still, that practice -- of seeking to relieve ecclesiastical poverty by battening on other equally hard-pressed sectors, provincial, diocesan or capitular -- was characteristic of the thirteenth-century Castilian Church and, at once, both cause and effect of its weakness and divisions. So when Bishop Rodrigo was prevented from enjoying diocesan revenue which the king had appropriated, he naturally set about despoiling his own chapter.(115) And while the Church devoured herself it was the king and the nobles who scavenged to greatest effect. On the death of Archbishop João Egas of Braga in November 1255 Alfonso X seized property of his which had been deposited both at Palencia, 'dum esset in lecto egritudinis consitutus', and elsewhere throughout the kingdom.(116)
By then though there were signs that
the Castilian Church might be capable of some measure of common purpose.
A spirit of resistance was abroad and, significantly, it chose to defy
the pope by way of rehearsal for the more serious confrontation which lay
ahead, with the king. In the following month, December 1255, Alexander
IV's attention was drawn to 'quidam ecclesiarum prelati Yspanie ac aliunde'
who had refused to pay the pensions assigned by his predecessor to the
vice-chancellor of the Roman Church, William of Parma, and William's nephew
Hugolin. Alexander retaliated by threatening them with the ultimate deterrent:
exclusion from the [151] Curia and all its benefits.(117)
The sums of money at issue were trifling. None was greater than twenty
marks,(118) and the wherewithal for payment
of two years' arrears formed only a small proportion of the loan raised
at the Curia by the bishop of León's proctors in August 1254.(119)
There was as yet no such resistance to the much larger demand made by the
king that autumn. That, however, was to be the next step. For the autumn
of 1255 was the first of the seven lean years to which the Castilian bishops
would look back in the winter of 1262-3. And by then they had learnt the
truth about Seville. A hundred years before, Bishop Pedro of Porto had
inveigled the Jerusalem-bound English crusaders into joining the assault
on Lisbon instead, by arguing that the road was better than the inn.(120)
Even so it had proved necessary to allow them to sack the place. Now, though,
the Castilian bishops, having glimpsed the promised land of official propaganda,
had to conclude that what they had hankered after and beggared themselves
for was not an oasis but a mirage.
1. 'AC León, doc. 507. Alducia is not readily identifiable. Possibly Eslonza is meant; for which suggestion I am grateful to Dr Derek Lomax. Cf. Calvo, San Pedro de Eslonza, where the name appears under various forms: Aldonza (p. 314); Aslucie (p. 315); Aldoncia (p. 326). The abbot of another unidentifiable house, Martín of S. Petrus de Elisontia, was dismissed by John of Abbeville 'propter manifestos excessus': Reg. Greg. IX, 1949. The abbot of St Martin was Jean de Boulages: Defer, Histoire de l'abbaye de St-Martin-ès-Aires, 45.
2. On 16 December 'la foire froide' was in progress at Troyes: Bourquelot, Études sur les foires de Champagne, I, 83. For the activities of Sienese merchants there at this time, see Sayous, Annales d'histoire économique et sociale, III, 199.
4. Sayous, EUC, XVI, 155-98; Rau, Studi in onore di Armando Sapori, 717-18.
5. Verlinden, Nuova Rivista Storica, XXXVI, 254-70.
6. Sapori, Studi di storia economica medievale, 654-5. Similarly, there are hardly any references to Spain in the very thorough bibliographical section of his Le marchand italien, 43-58. Since then (1952) a single work on one aspect of the subject has been published: Benito Ruano, La banca toscana. Neither Espejo and Paz, Las antiguas ferias, nor Valdeavellano, AHDE, VIII, deal with the international questions.
7. AC Seo de Urgel, Colleccio Plandolit, d.s.n. For further details of this case, see VL, XI, 82-94; Linehan, AEM (forthcoming). The Curia was still at Lyons at the end of September 1250: the Troyes provision, therefore, did not become effective. Petrus Cinchii was one of thirty-six Roman merchants whom Innocent IV had assisted two years earlier in the recovery of money owed them at the Champagne fairs: AGN, caj. 4, no. 17 (reg. Castro, Catàlogo,263; publ. Cadier, Mél. d'arch. et d'hist, VII, 318-21).
9. In Oct. 1253 Bishop Ponce borrowed four times as much, J300: Reg. Inn. IV, 7044, 7062. His proctor, though, had promised his friend at the Curia, the pope's nephew, payment in kind for services rendered: a pair of fine horses: VL, XI, 222. The transportation of livestock was impracticable when the Curia was in central Italy.
10. ACA, Reg. 6, fos. 28r, 51v, 57r (Piacenza, 1257); Reg. 321, fo. 46v (Pisa, 1296).
11. Reg. Nich. III, 82; ADB, Gav. dos Quindénios, Decimas e Subsidios, 4 (Reg. Mart. IV, 242). Archdeacon Giraldo of Couto, the Portuguese collector, informed Nicholas III that the money of that kingdom was vilis. Payment, in consequence, was made in a variety of currencies and in precious trinkets, and for these the Italians -- the Bactoli and Orlandi Companies of Lucca and the Ammanati of Pistoia -- were responsible: Rius Serra, Rationes Decimarum Hispaniae, II, 285; ADB, Gav. dos Quindénios, 6, 7. For their further difficulties, see below, p. 215.
12. Chiaudano, Bull. Senese di St. Patria, n.s., VI, 135.
13. Benito Ruano, Banca toscana, 9-19; Reg. Clem. IV, 780; AC Toledo, A.7.C.2.13 (ante 1255).
14. In 1265-6 they were authorised to collect an unpaid debt of 100 marks due to the papal camera from the bishop of Palencia, and to take charge of the Spanish estate of the late Bishop Lope of Morocco: Reg. Clem. IV, 729, 789.
17. Two letters: Guns sicut (11 Jan. 1259); Significarunt nobis (1 Feb. 1259): AC Toledo, I.5.C.1.67; I.5.C.1.104. The executors appointed were the prior of St-Hilaire, Paris, and Alexander IV's nephew and chaplain, Blaise, canon of Cambrai. Sancho had previously, on 17 April 1255, undertaken to settle a debt with Florentine and Sienese merchants at the monastery of Ste-Genevieve, Paris, in the following November; and in 1266 the abbot and prior of Ste-Genevieve were made responsible for the collection of a whole host of Spanish debts: AC Toledo, A.7.C.2.13; AHN, 2263/12 (below, p. 132, n. 4). For Castro Valfrido, see Arias, Studi e documenti, 81-2.
18. AC Toledo, A.7.E.1.10. The document transcribes the letters of authority in favour of Senobaldus Fassol and Giambuonus Jacobi, dated Florence 21 April 1261, which charged them with the collection of all debts 'coram domino Alphonso dei gratia Romanorum, Castelle ac Legionis rege illustri et coram omnibus judicibus regie magestatis curie et coram quolibet altero officiali eiusdem curie' and revoked all previous letters of authorisation to their proctors 'in hyspaniarum partibus...et specialiter Tuacium Bernaldi eorum concivem'. Repayment of a further loan from the Florentines, contracted by Sancho while at the Curia, devolved upon his successor, Sancho II: AC Toledo, caj. E.6, d.s.n.
19. AC Valladolid, leg. XXIX-61, 11 July 1258. One of the two was Tuacius Bernaldi: publ. Mañueco Villalobos, Documentos, I, 331-3. For the dealings of Florentine campsores with Alfonso X, see Reg. Urb. IV, cam. 478 (above, Ch. 6).
20. AC Toledo, A.7.C.2.13bis. It is not clear whether Petrus was acting for an Italian company. The Sienese certainly had an agent there by 1293: Paoli and Piccolomini, Scelta di Curiosità, CXVI, 64.
21. AC Toledo, A.7.G.2.17: the fairs were held on the feasts of the Assumption, St John the Baptist and All Saints; A.7.G.1.28, 30 March 1299. Guillelmus was at Alcalá on 5 July.
22. Two rescripts, both beginning Cum Castra Gualfredi, 2 and 8 June 1266: copies in AHN, 2263/12.
23. Ibid.: 'Cum...nonnulli archiepiscopi et episcopi, abbates, priores, capitula, collegia et conventus, communitates, comites, barones, milites, burgenses et quidam alii clerici et laici regni Ispanie in quibusdam pecuniarum summis ac bladi, vini et lane quantitatibus et rebus aliis mercatoribus teneantur eisdem...'
24. Ibid. 22 Nov. 1267. The bishop had engaged in litigation at the Curia in 1264: Reg. Urb. IV, 1424, 2798. But his debt 'ex causa mutui' may equally well have been contracted at Lérida itself, which was a thriving commercial centre: Benito Ruano, Hispania, XXII, 31-3; Altisent, BRABL, XXXII, 45 ff.
25. ADB, Livro I dos Testamentos, fo. 10r (21 Oct. 1255).
26. AC Toledo, A.7.G.1.20 (16 April 1286).
27. For these two companies, see Herlihy, Medieval and Renaissance Pistoia, 165-6. The article by Zaccagnini, mentioned there, was not available to me.
28. AC Oviedo, B/5/12 (reg. García Larragueta, Catálogo, 412).
29. He was at Orvieto in that month with Cardinal Uberto of S. Eustacius: Reg. Urb. IV, 972.
30. For two other Toledo pensioners, Master Angelus and Master Sinibaldus de Labro, and for a third, Blaise of Anagni, see Ch. 12.
31. González Palencia, Los mozárabes de Toledo, II, 261.
32. AC Toledo, A.7.G.1.2a (Reg. Nich. III, 649).
33. Serrano, Cartulario de Covarrubias, LXVII, 119-20.
34. AC Toledo, A.7.G.1.12 (6 Dec. 1280), mentioning, among much else, a weatherproof of violet samite 'cum aurifrisio de Londoniis', a gold-inlaid razor, Greek tapestries and a quantity of ceramic, some of it Indian. The earlier inventory, of 3 May 1273, is in AC Toledo, A.7.G.1.1. The book-lists contained in each are publ. Alonso, Razón y Fe, CXXIII, 303-6, from BN, MS. 13022, fos. 162r-4r, 185r-7v.
35. AC Toledo, A.7.G.1.4. The abbot of Cardeña was owed 39 marks sterling 'que valuerunt tunc M.VI.XXXVIII morabutinos': i.e. one mark sterling = 42 maravedís.
36. Other Spaniards present were Master Alvaro, archdeacon of Ribadeo (Oviedo); Arias Pérez, archdeacon of Compostela; Rodrigo Velázquez, canon of Compostela; and Fernando Pérez, canon of Burgos. Sinibaldus de Labro, archdeacon of Bologna was also there.
37. AC Toledo, A.7.G.1.5 (1 Nov. 1285).
38. Fernán had surrendered 'las joyas que fueron de la capiella del arzobispo Don Sancho que Dios perdone' to his creditors' agent on 1 Sept. 1278. The agent was to sell them at Montpellier or Rome 'porque estas cosas...no se podien apreciar ciertament en esta tierra': AC Toledo, A.7.E.1.4 (publ. MHE, I, 330). The cathedral property is itemised in AC Toledo, A.7.G.2.18; A.7.G.1.32.
39. For £1,100: AC Toledo, A.7.G.1.4.
40. AC Toledo, A.7.G.2.16. He had repaid £700 of the smaller.
41. £200: AC Toledo, A.7.G.1.11.
42. AC Toledo, A.7.G.1.33 (14 Dec. 1281).
43. Made up of two loans, both advanced at Orvieto: £350 on 30 June, and £2,550 on 24 Sept: AC Toledo, A.7.G.1.27; A.7.G.1.11c.
44. He was there by 16 Feb: AC Toledo, A.7.G.1.26.
45. AC Toledo, A.7.G.1.27 (9 Feb. 1282); A.7.G.1.21 (26 March, six days before the deadline: he was given until 1 Aug. to find the rest of what he owed them - £1,442).
46. AC Toledo, A.7.G.1.32; A.7.G.2.18. He also recovered the container -- 'unum pannum de seda veterem cum opere auri in quo erant predicta omnia (scil. joye) plicata' -- from a representative of the Company's agent, Johannes Galandesch. The same Johannes had supplied the king of Aragon's nuncios at the Curia with funds in 1277-8, and on 17 Sept. 1281 had lent the dean of Ávila, Alfonso Vidal, £270 there: ACA, Reg. 22, fo. 77r; Wieruszowski, BRAH, CVII, 591; AC Salamanca, 39/1/19 (reg. Marcos Rodríguez, Catálogo, 383). He may therefore have been, like the Florentines Dulcis and Noccius de Burgo, his Company's Spanish specialist.
47. On 31 Aug. the Chiarenti agent at Avignon, Marsupinus Meliorati, granted Gonzalo an extension on two new loans, of £6,100 in all, and a third extension (till 8 March 1283) on the unpaid £1,500 of the previous £2,500 loan. The Company was hardly able to keep up with the archbishop, whose headlong flight into debt was testing even their highly sophisticated system. Marsupinus had not yet received instructions from his colleagues at the Curia about the terms of the most recent loan 'licet utraque pars crederet quod terminus solucionis esset in kalendis septembris vel in aliqua die mensis septembris': AC Toledo, A.7.G.1.11a-b-c.
48. AC Toledo, A.7.G.1.32 (28 Nov. 1282); A.7.G.1.26 (16 Feb. 1283).
49. AC Toledo, A.7.G.2.10: a roll of eight documents. The first is clearly a draft: 'Noverint universi quod cum nos G. et teneamur talibus mercatoribus talis societatis in tanta summa peccunie quam in tali termino tenebamur...' Some are made out in favour of Gonzalo's proctor, Miguel, canon of Burgos. One is a recognition of a debt of £3,100 to Johannes Galandesch and his partners. The whole deserves further study. It is very roughly written.
50. It was not until 6 Oct. 1301 that the Company received the last instalment, £210.17, of a loan originally advanced to the bishop of Valencia, Andrés de Albalat, at the Curia on 13 Nov. 1276: AC Valencia, doc. 795 (reg. Olmos Canalda, Inventario, 928). He had borrowed £1,250.
51. AC Toledo, A.7.G.1.8; A.7.G.1.20a. (17 March 1284). The Company had demanded the same security from the dean of Ávila two years before: AC Salamanca, 39/1/19 (reg. Marcos, 383). Still, they continued to allow the archbishop credit: on 5 Nov. 1283 he was advanced a further £3,100: AC Toledo, I.5.C.1.20. Miguel of Burgos, though, was fast losing credibility, his permanent task being that of seeking further extensions from the Chiarenti; and on 11 Dec. he was sent reinforcements in the shape of a fresh archiepiscopal proctor, Bertrando de Pradello, jurisperitus (as he needed to be): AC Toledo, A.7.G.2.12.
52. 'Presencia vestra tam nobis quam ipsi ecclesie quam etiam toti regno sit valde necessaria, set prout intelligimus propter obligationem debitorum que pro ipsius ecclesie utilitate contraxistis non est vobis ut expediret ad ipsam liber accessus': AC Toledo, A.7.G.1.6 (Toledo, 22 Feb. 1282); AC Toledo, A.7.G.1.6a (Córdoba, 13 Aug. 1282). Ballesteros, Alfonso X, 973, maintains that the archbishop abandoned Alfonso in May 1282, basing his case on a letter of that month (evidently, AHN, 3021/17) in which the Master-General of the Dominicans, at the Vienna General Chapter, thanked Gonzalo for his past kindness to the Order: an inference containing many curious assumptions, not least the view that the Dominicans were solidly pro-Sancho. Cf. below, p. 223, and, for a sounder estimate of Gonzalo's attitude, Sánchez Belda, AHDE, XXI-II, 175, note.
53. Tit. 5, ley 28: BM, Add. MS. 20787, fos. 22vb-3ra (corresponding to the variant to ley 29, Academy ed. I, 215). The law deplores especially the fact that the faithful are deprived of the sacraments, etc., when penalties of excommunication and interdict are imposed.
55. 'Liberum non est prelatis et clericis exeuntibus regnum ex causa studii vel peregrinationis aut alia justa causa extrahere pecuniam pro suis necessitatibus extra regnum': Reg. Nich. III,739. For these events, see below, Ch. 9.
56. Afonso imposed a punitive tax on 'aliqua persona ecclesiastica Parisius commorans vel alibi aut etiam in curia Romana': ADB, Gav. das Noticias Várias, 26: a fuller version of the articuli in Reg. Clem. IV, 669.
57. For loans raised by Spanish students at Bologna, see Chartularium Studii Bononiensis, vols. V, VII-XI, passim; Zaccagnini, Bull. Storico Pistoiese, XXXVI, 149-58.
58. Thompson, Nottingham Mediaeval Studies, VII, 26, n. 151.
59. Goñi Gaztambide, HS, VIII, 412.
60. Reg. Greg. IX, 594. This abuse continued well into the 1260s: AC Calahorra, docs 310, 337; Cantera, Sefarad, XVI, 75-6.
61. Reg. Greg. X, 110, 220; Reg. Nich. III, 5, 743; López Ferreiro, Historia, V, 239 ff. For the archdeacon of Trastamar, see Mondéjar, Memorias históricas, 173-4; below, p. 260.
62. Reg. Nich. III, 530; Reg. Mart. IV, 2.
63. At Viterbo: AC Toledo, X.2.B.2.2. Nicholas III's promotion of Rodrigo to Segovia in Jan. 1279, two years after he had taken the part of the Infantes, should be viewed in the light of the pope's new-found freedom vis-à-vis Alfonso: Reg. Nich. III, 399; Daumet, Mémoire, 48 ff.; The bishop was still at the Curia in 1284: AHN, 1874/4; Colmenares, Historia, 229.
64. Reg. Nich. IV, 348; Tejada, Colección de cánones, III, 427. Only in July 1288 had Sancho IV given him leave to return to Castile: Daumet, 185.
65. AC Toledo, X.2.B.2.2. Tura may have been Tura Bartholomei, an associate of the Bonsignori Company: Chiaudano in Bull. Senese di St. Patria, VI, 134.
66. Reg. Nich. III, 450; AC Lugo, letra B, no. 385 (copy in AHN, cod. 267B, fos. 257r-8r). By Oct. 1282 the Ammanti had recovered only £225 then demanded. 'Attendentes ad tenuitem mense nostre, attendentes etiam quod bona ad ipsam spectantia sunt dissipata, destructa et male peracta...et ad solvendum facilius debita ipsius ecclesie Lucensis que multis est debitis obligata', Jaun Martínez had renounced his predecessor's debts at Siena on 29 May 1279: AHN, 1331C/7. £250 was repais at La Rochelle on 3 Dec. 1280. Cf. ES, XLI (ed. Risco), 77.
67. AC Salamanca, 43/3/29;35 (reg. Marcos, 385, 384). Two months later, in April 1282, the dean's sureties for a further loan were Pascal Garcés, treasurer of Toledo, Rodrigo magister scolarum of Cádiz and canon of Ciudad Rodrigo, and Juan Pérez, succentor of Avila. Together with two canons of Plasencia, Juan Pérez and Domingo Ximénez, they were all present at Orvieto: AC Salamanca, 43/3/25 (reg. Marcos, 387).
68. 'Cum dictus cardinalis...exigi nollet expensas, interesse ac restaurationem dampnorum que dictis mercatoribus...forsitan deberentur': AHN, 2263/12.
69. '...et renuntiavit in hiis omni iuris canonici et civilis auxilio': AC Salamanca, 43/3/64 (reg. Marcos, 388).
70. Benito Ruano, Banca toscana, 9-16.
73. A papal letter transcribed in ASV, arm. XXXI 72, fo. 222v (Schillmann, Formularsammlung, 1787) refers to a loan made by 'B. et R. frater eius et alii socii sui cives et mercatores Senenses' to the proctor of an archbishop-elect of Toledo. It is post-Lyons I and almost certainly concerns Bonifazio and Riccomanno Bonsignori (see Chiaudano, Bull. Senese di St. Patria, VI, 132), though the archbishop-elect in question may have been Juan de Medina.
75. AC Toledo, A.7.C.2.10 (publ. MHE, I, 107-8). Sancho was expected by Henry III in July 1255 and arrived in early September, according to Matthew Paris, whose remarks on the subject are characteristically sour: Close Rolls, 1254-6, 114, 116, 212; Chronica Majora, V, 509-10, 521 (Sancho's receipt from Henry of 'redditum et thesaurum non modicum').
76. AC Toledo, A.7.C.1.8 (Guirault de Morgat 'mercadero de Sant Pedro de Condom', 700 maravedís); A.7.D.1.2 ('Don Pers de Ffriac, mercadero de Cadiz', 1,000 maravedís).
77. AC Toledo, A.7.D.1.1. (publ. MHE, I, 191-2). In the event the Spanish summer proved too much for him. He died on 2 June: Castejón, Primacía, 765-6. Fifty years before he had carried the cross at Las Navas: Rodericus Toletanus, De Rebus Hispaniae, 186.
78. For Alfonso's recommendation of Sancho of Aragon and Clement IV's misgivings about him, see Reg. Clem. IV, 954, 1036, 1108, 360; for Jaime's financial assistance, Miret y Sans, Itinerari de Jaime I, 388; MHE, I, 239 (= AC Toledo, A.7.E.1.7); Ballesteros, Alfonso X, 445-50.
80. Reg. Inn. IV, 1386; AC Orense, Escrituras, XII, 59. He had spent 100 maravedís in going to the royal court and another 300 at Rome, where he had been in July 1254: Reg. Inn. IV, 7875.
82. Ibid.: 'Debita autem que solvenda remanent sunt hec: debent solvi domino Egidio cardinali CCC minus X mor. quos de mandato suo debuimus distribuere inter quosdam pauperes consanguineos eius. Item eidem XC mor. de redditu hereditatis de La Franca; episcopo Astoricensi C mor; episcopo Salamanticensi CC mor; capitulo Zamorensi C et LII mor; abbati de Morerola C mor; magistro E. cantori Zamorensi C et XLVII mor; tercianiis P. Petri quondam cantoris CC mor; terciariis P.Johannis quondam thesaurarii Legionensis C mor; Fernando Ramiri C mor; Petro Johannis clerico abbatis Fusellensis C mor; domino Andree portario XC mor; Arnaldo de Rexac C mor; Garsie Munionis domini regis iudici L mor; domino Ganino L mor; Stephano de Gaiat XXXV mor...' Again in Nov. 1267 Pedro Pérez, by then dean of Zamora, was appointed to collect royal taxes in the kingdom of Leon: Ballesteros, BRAH, CIX, 452.
83. If it was he who, as sacrist of S. Pedro de Cereto (Elne), was provided to a Cartagena canonry at the instance of Bishop Andrés of Valencia in Dec. 1274, then it is hardly credible that he was the same Arnaldo 'de Rassaco' who died as archbishop of Monreale in 1324: AC Valencia, perg. 478, 'Lugduni, id. decembris, anno tertio' (reg. Olmos, 489, misdated 1273). Cf. Burns, Crusader Kingdom, II, 387, n. III.
84. AC Zamora, 13/48. Cf. Bourquelot, I, 82.
86. Ibid. 1735 (Oct. 1245), 4573 (April 1249), 5113 (Feb. 1251).
87. For Pedro Arias's uncle, Cardinal Pelayo, see below, Ch. 12.
88. ES, XXXV, 313 ff.; Reg. Inn. IV, 7919. On 20 Oct. 1255, at the king's request, Alexander IV canceled the debts which Martín had inherited 'nisi probatum fuerit legitime debita ipsa in utilitatem ipsius ecclesie fore versa', as Innocent IV had done fourteen months before: AC León, doc. 1299, inc. Tuis et karissimi; Reg. Inn. IV, 7923. This was repeated in Oct. 1256, and in the period 1255-9 Alfonso granted the bishop and church of León some twenty privileges: Reg. Alex. IV, 1637; García Villada, Catálogo, 142-4.
89. Reg. Inn. IV, 7861, 7909, 7980 above, Ch. 6. They owed 527 marks.
90. The Life of St Dominic in Old French Verse, ed. Manning, lines 1007-12. The Life is not contemporary, but it is supported by earlier evidence: Manning in Mediaeval Studies in Honor of J.D.M. Ford, 139 ff.; Jordan of Saxony, Libellus deprincipiis, 30-I.
91. Reg. Hon. III, 5273 (MDH, 533); Cf. ibid. 2742 (MDH, 331) '...cum in hoc modicum graventur ecclesie'.
93. AC Palencia, 3/8/7 = Reg. Hon. III, 5681 (MDH, 578).
94. AC Palencia, 2/1/46, Desideramus cum te, 8 June 1229.
95. '...et iuxta christianorum cimiteria sua faciunt ita vicina et cum quandoque christianum et judeum eadem terra sepelire contingat per clamores judeorum impediuntur exequiae christiani, et vitani non potest quin aqua benedicta qua ibidem christiani asperguntur de more perveniat ad judeos', RAH, MS. 9-24-5/4558, fo. 194v-5r (19 March 1229). Cf. Hefele-Leclercq, V, ii, 1385.
96. AHN, 1724/15 (Potthast, 8782).
97. Reg. Greg. IX, 3271; AC Palencia, 2/1/47, letter Antiquorum memorie, addressed to Fernando III, 21 March 1236, specifying that natives of Palencia were contaminated. Cf. Fernández del Pulgar, Historia de Palencia, II, 304, blaming interlopers from León since the local people were 'ocupados en obras de piedad y religión'.
98. Lucas of Túy, De altera vita, ed. Mariana, 170-1. The drought lasted ten months 'et arescebant omnia siccitate'. It ended (miraculously) on the expulsion of the heretics. See also Risco, Historia de León, I, 73-81.
99. Reg. Greg. IX, 4333, 6083; above, Ch. 6.
100. ADB, Gav. dos Arcebispos, 24, art, cxvii. Cf. Sousa Costa, Mestre Silvestre, 208.
101. Reg. Greg. IX, 2075. On 10 June 1229 Tiburcio had been at Perugia in the company of Cardinal Gil Torres and a group of ranking Portuguese churchmen: ibid. 307. Possibly he was Portuguese himself.
102. AC Palencia, 3/8/9 (publ. Fernández de Madrid, Silva Palentina, I, 244-5). On the following day the cantor, who in Sept. 1246 had been styling himself 'elect of Palencia', was consoled with a papal grant permitting him to retain his benefices in plurality: Serrano, Hispania, I, 30; Reg. Inn. IV, 2497.
103. For Cardinal Gil and his circle, see below, Ch. 12. The dorse of AC Palencia, 3/8/9 is marked 'Sanctorum Cosme et Damiani', which points to the cardinal's intervention. Since Rodrigo named the property granted him at Seville Palençiola, he may have been the archdeacon of Palenzuela of that name who was at Burgos in Sept. 1240. In that case he must have resigned the archdeaconry by Dec. 1246: González, Repartimiento, II, 28; AHN, 3020/3; Reg. Inn. IV, 2317.
104. AC Toledo, X.2.A.1.1, undated but evidently written April-May 1247. It may have been this letter, which warned the archbishop of certain archdeacons of Braga 'litteras ecclesie vestre derogantes potentie et nichilominus maiestatis vestri dignitati detrahentes', that provided Rodrigo with a motive for his final visit to the Curia.
105. AC Toledo, X.2.1.1.1d. On 17 June he was absolved from his promise to make a triennial visit ad limina: Reg. Inn. IV, 2809.
106. Ibid. 3938 (May 1248) for John of Parma, scriptor pape, 'in aliqua ecclesiarum cathedralium Yspanie' -- despite his assurances of the previous year to the archbishop ('Me siquidem a vestra utilitate et servicio nulla animadvertet occasio. Sed utpote ecclesie vestre humillissimum [sic] suffraganeum et servicio vestro per omnia appositum me proculdubio habere non ambigatis', AC Toledo, X.2.A.1.1) he lit upon Toledo: ibid. 7863. But this was equitable since John acted as Toledo proctor in the period Aug. 1252-Aug. 1254 (AC Toledo, A.7.C.1.3; 3a; 5; I.7.I.1.2c); ibid. 4167 (Sept. 1248) for Theobald, brother of Petrus Johannis de Lavania, senator; ibid. 6629 (Dec. 1248) for Petrus Gaietanus at Toledo (below, Ch. 12); ibid. 4573 (April 1249) for Nicholas 'clericus de Urbe' at León (above, Ch. 6).
109. On 29 Sept. the pope entrusted the late bishop's familia, 'clerici, laici et medici', to Cardinal Gil's care: Reg. Inn. IV,8079.
110. AC Palencia, 2/I/53 (= Reg. Inn. IV, 2775, publ. Mansilla, Iglesia, 339).
112. Reg. Inn. IV. 4642. See Arias, Studi e documenti, 82, n. 2.
113. 'Ita tamen quod ecclesiis civitatis et diocesis predictarum pro earum reparatione, libris et aliis ornamentis, quas his noveris indigene de medietate reliqua provideas competenter': AC Palencia, 2/I/53.
114. Similar grants were made to the bishops of Coria (Feb. 1241), León (Aug. 1254) and Osma (Jan. 1257) Reg. Greg. IX, 5408 Reg. Inn. IV, 7960; Reg. Alex. IV, 1899.
116. ADB, Gav. das Propriedades e Rendas da Mitra, 32: letter Sicut venerabilis, 24 May 1256. João had died at Valladolid on 16 Nov.: Ferreira, Fastos episcopaes, II, 46.
118. They affected the churches of Astorga, Compostela, Oviedo, Burgos, Cuenca, Segovia, León and Ávila: Reg. Inn. IV, 6615, 6623 (Feb. 1252).