Kirche und Macht im romischen Trecento: Die Colonna und ihre Klientel auf dem kurialen Pfrundenmarkt (1278-1378) (review)

Andreas Rehberg's study of the Colonna examines how three Colonna cardinals—Jacopo (1278-1318), Pietro (1288-1326), and Giovanni (1327-1348)—used their access to papal benefices to build a client network and to establish their family's position as one of the two most powerful baronial families in fourteenth-century Rome. This innovative study of the Colonna stands at the intersection of three historiographic themes, making this a useful book for scholars in several fields. First, as Rehberg acknowledges, this study of the Colonna finds inspiration in Wolfgang Reinhard's work on cathedral chapters in the Holy Roman Empire. Recognizing that ecclesiastical wealth formed the basis for relations between church and ruling class, Reinhard used chapter records as a way to reconstruct urban patron networks. In similar fashion, Rehberg reconstructs Colonna client networks by sifting through papal registers to identify those persons who obtained benefices through the assistance of Colonna cardinals. Second, Rehberg provides a prosopographical and structural analysis of the Colonna cardinal households, thus building on earlier groundbreaking studies of thirteenth-century cardinal households by Agostino Paravacini Bagliani and others. Finally, this study contributes to recent work on Roman baronial families and the transformation of fourteenth-century Roman politics and society by scholars such as Sandro Carocci. The result is a rich study that provides the reader with a tremendously helpful and detailed description of the institutional and social mechanisms—from the intricacies of the papal bureaucracy to the composition of a cardinal's household—that allowed the Colonna cardinals to transform their privileged access to benefices into the far-reaching network of clients that formed the basis of Colonna political power.

Papal provisions, or the grant of ecclesiastical benefices by the papacy, constitute the center around which practically everything in this study revolves. By the early fourteenth century the papacy had aggressively asserted its claim to collation rights—the right to appoint candidates to vacant ecclesiastical positions—over certain classes of benefices throughout Europe. During this same period, chancery officials began to record these provisions systematically in papal registers. Rehberg has worked through these registers and other sources to construct prosopographies of three groups that received benefices with the help of Colonna cardinals: clerics from the Colonna family, Colonna-cardinal familiars, and Colonna clients. A summary of this careful prosopographical work is included in several appendices, along with numerous tables and graphs that organize and quantify the results of Rehberg's prosopographical database. This is a methodologically innovative approach. Lacking many of the sources that have proven so helpful for reconstructing patron networks in other Italian cities, such as judicial records and city-council minutes recording mass exiles of aristocratic families and their dependents, Rehberg has demonstrated that in certain cases an examination of provisions in papal registers can go a long way toward compensating for such deficiencies.

The main body of the work is divided into three parts. Part One examines the structure and history of the Colonna family. This section establishes the framework for the entire study by tying the family's fluctuating fortunes to their access to papal provisions. Jacopo and Pietro benefited from the goodwill of Pope Nicholas IV (1288-1292) toward the Colonna. Pietro, whom Nicholas IV elevated to the cardinalate, held over 400 benefices. In 1297 the family's fortune plummeted when Boniface VIII declared a crusade against the Colonna, confiscated some of their most important properties, and deposed Jacopo and Pietro. In 1305 Pope Clement V restored Jacopo and Pietro to the cardinalate. The benefices placed at the disposal of Jacopo, Pietro, and Giovanni greatly facilitated the arduous process of rebuilding the family's wealth and power between 1305 and 1347. By mid-century the...