CHAPTER TWO
The Profession Defining Urban Identities
Notaries and Rome’s Governments
Roman notaries must have been there earlier, but we see them at their work for the first time only in the fourteenth century. This is late by Italian standards. It is also paradoxical in a place where Europe’s earliest corps of notaries was writing for the popes by the year 600.1 The elusiveness of Roman notaries does not end in the fourteenth century either but continues until the end of the sixteenth century. Why is this? Although scholars believe scribes (scrinarii), later called notaries, provided services to Romans from the eleventh century on, the first surviving notarial act dates from 1344.2 Perhaps eighty volumes of acts from seventeen notaries are all the trecento provides in toto, despite the importance of notaries in public life in that century and the towering figure of the notary Cola di Rienzo.3 In the fifteenth century, notarial protocols become more abundant, and we have the first fragmentary text of a set of rules or statutes for an association of city notaries.4 Yet close study of surviving acts reveals that a formal organization of notaries existed in Rome from at least 1297, and there may have been more than a hundred active notaries practicing there in the late fourteenth century.5 Notaries who wanted to exercise their trade in Rome had to matriculate or become a member registered with the so-called college of notaries from at least the fourteenth century. No matriculation lists have survived.6 Of other corporate records we have only one published edict in 1582 and a series of thirteen registers that begins in 1588.7 The first extant text of statutes for the notarial college that is complete dates from 1618.8 The absence of those usual sources which allow construction of notarial histories in so many other Italian towns, therefore, is a fact of the Roman archives, which we can hardly afford to ignore. But, then, medieval Rome itself mirrors this strange void, for of how many other Italian cities can it be said that there are no public deliberations, tax lists, judicial records, or family journals before 1500?9 The destinies of the city’s municipal structures and its notaries were tightly interwoven, as we shall see, and they share the same close encounter with oblivion.
The man whose occupational profile we draw in this chapter lived and worked in an urban community that itself changed dramatically in the period with which we are concerned. Between 1300 and 1700, its population grew fivefold. The Rome in which the notary Cola di Rienzo pored over his Livy and tried to inspire his neighbors with the hope of recapturing the greatness of the ancients had perhaps 30,000 inhabitants.10 Between 1550 and 1600, its population doubled to around 100,000 and, after that spurt, edged more slowly to around 140,000 by 1700.11 Such growth decade after decade arose from the arrival in Rome of “new men,” young men from the mountain districts around Rome, from the other Italian regions, and from the rest of Europe, some of whom became notaries.12 Slow social and economic change is also part of the story. A community whose liveliest entrepreneurs in the fourteenth century raised cattle and sheep was, by the seventeenth century, a leading center of European finance dominated by bankers from Florence and Genoa.13 An intensely local frame of reference—rustic, mercantile, and feudal all in one—gradually gave way to a cosmopolitan, refined, and increasingly hierarchical set of aristocratic ways and values. If demographic, social, and economic shifts unquestionably refashioned Rome between 1300 and 1700, what drove change was the expanding Italian power of the papacy.14 The major agents of transformation in this era, whose impact on the notarial profession would be dramatic, were unquestionably the popes.
The popes’ absence from Rome in the fourteenth century permitted the belated elaboration of municipal institutions and the earliest city statutes with their first specific directives to notaries.15 The return of papal attention and residence after 1400 led to the creation of an overlapping and competing set of state institutions and sources of law affecting the notarial profession in Rome. Papal presence also attracted notaries from all manner of lands to new jobs in the Curia, the papal bureaucracy, thus fracturing and complicating the formal organization of notaries into guild or corporation. The Renaissance popes made of Rome a jurisdictional landscape of extraordinary complexity in which notarial employment flourished. No one limited the number of notaries who could work in Rome, and the profession was open to all who were able to meet a set of basic qualifications. If the popes were not formally responsible for the open character of the notarial profession, they nevertheless profited from it and contributed to it by their needs. And in 1586 Sixtus V (1585–90) brought it to an end, converting the last and most numerous body of city notaries, the Capitoline notaries, into venal officeholders and limiting their number to thirty. By this decisive action the papacy completed its transformation of Rome’s notaries, ushering in a new era in which the social and institutional profile of the Capitoline notaries sharpened but internal divisions within the profession as a whole also widened. Whether by their absence or their presence, the popes between 1300 and 1700 played a major role in defining what it was to be a Roman notary.
The notaries with whom we are most concerned are easy to distinguish when we meet them in the world that came into being after 1586. They are the thirty Capitoline notaries, attached to the civil judges of the Capitoline curia, also known as the tribunal of the senator, which was historically the city’s secular tribunal for the laity. But when our sources begin in the mid-fourteenth century and throughout the fifteenth century, there are no Capitoline notaries; there are simply notaries—or, in the more precise Latin “notarii urbis,” notaries of the city of Rome. In 1507, when the popes created a separate organization for curial notaries, they introduced a new distinction into this hitherto undifferentiated professional community. The notaries of Rome were perforce divided. We hear for the first time the designation, “notaries of the Capitoline curia,” that is, notaries of the tribunal of the senator and the other smaller civic and guild courts on the Capitoline Hill, to distinguish them from the notaries of the papal Curia.16 Was there a difference, other than of employment, between Capitoline notaries and Roman notaries more generally in the sixteenth century? If there was, it is not one that available sources allow us to detect with any certainty. But even to use the phrase “Roman notaries more generally” is to beg the question of how one defined a Roman notary: by birth or by the acquisition of Roman citizenship and property, as the notarial statutes had allowed since at least 1446? Even where boundaries should have been quite clear, as between curial and Capitoline notaries, we find some sixteenth-century notaries who identified themselves as both.17 When I use the term Capitoline notaries in reference to the period before the Sistine intervention of 1586, therefore, I mean a broadly inclusive “notaries of Rome,” which after 1507 carries the added connotation of the city of Rome as opposed to the Roman Curia.
The framework of local government that conditioned the activity of Roman notaries changed profoundly but subtly over the period 1300 to 1700. It was a process marked more by accumulation and shifts of authority than by clean breaks and abrupt departures.18 When our sources begin in the 1360s, the municipality, if such a formal designation can be given that protean entity, was the de facto ruler of Rome, though the pope in Avignon maintained a presence through a deputy. The kaleidoscopic fourteenth-century civic regimes bequeathed to the city’s future government the tribunal of the senator, a foreign judge who dispensed justice from a court on the ancient Capitoline Hill, and three conservators who were elected local officials also based on the Capitol. Six judges assisted the senator, four with civil jurisdictions and two for criminal cases.19 In the Renaissance the municipal administration of Rome emphasized more insistently its ancient descent from the Senate and Roman People (senatus populusque romanus) and acquired a more stable and patrician character. By the sixteenth century it was common to refer to civic magistrates and councils as simply the Roman People, the Popolo Romano, as well as by the prestigious initials SPQR. The men who composed this People were landed gentlemen, cutting their former ties to local commerce in favor of investment in state office and finance, and the lay kinsmen of well-off, educated immigrants in the Curia.20 The complex of civic institutions and rights symbolized by the Senate and Roman People and by the Capitoline Hill, its seat, endured after the papacy reasserted its dominion in the late fourteenth century and once more resided in Rome after 1420. It received articulation in a series of partially revised city statutes in 1469, 1494, and 1521 and in a complete and final revision of 1580, as well as in numerous papal privileges. These laws in combination with the learned tradition of the jurists defined the civil and criminal procedure used in the senator’s court. Yet the Romans whose interests they protected found themselves over the next four centuries constantly renegotiating the meaning and reach of their institutions with the popes, with the new magistrates whom the pontiffs gradually added, and with powerful papal relatives.
Before 1586 Roman notaries shared the municipality’s political fate but with a twist. In the fourteenth century, they may have actually exercised more political influence than notaries elsewhere precisely because communal traditions were so weak in Rome.21 Once they had to contend with the increasing interference of active monarchs in the fifteenth century, however, they seem to have drawn, or been drawn, for the next two centuries more closely under the protection and control of the Senate and Roman People.22 In any case, historically attached to Capitoline institutions, a good many Roman notaries—we do not really know how many—worked for the senator’s court and for the municipality itself between 1300 and 1600. Notaries were prominent civic leaders in the early fifteenth century and continued to hold minor municipal offices into the sixteenth century.23 Only toward the end of our period did the sovereign’s pressure finally begin to loosen the former attachment.
The sovereign began pressing in the 1390s. Confronting a city that made its own rules and judged its own disputes, the papacy chose the domain of justice as the first over which to extend its lordly grasp. Notaries felt this at once, for in Rome they not only worked for private clients but also served as court clerks (attuarii) or what Italians call cancellieri. Several decades before Martin V actually returned the papal residence to Rome, his predecessors established three Roman tribunals with authority to try cases involving the clergy and papal courtiers, insisting that the tribunal of the senator had no jurisdiction over these categories of persons. Between 1391 and 1393, it was determined that the cardinal vicar would hear cases involving clerics, the auditor of the Camera those involving ecclesiastical courtiers, and the marshal of the Holy Roman Church those involving laymen who were papal courtiers.24 Like that of the senator, all these courts had criminal and civil jurisdiction, and their jurisdictions tended over time to expand at his expense. The cardinal vicar’s became the chief local court for spiritual matters, for the laity as well as the clergy; the auditor of the Camera’s tribunal grew into the most important Roman court for civil litigation, again for laymen as well as ecclesiastics.25
The division of justice seekers into laymen (and women) and clergy was the sharpest stake the popes drove into the heart of civic institutions, but dividing “courtiers,” that is, anyone employed by the papacy, from other citizens inflicted perhaps more insidious damage. In a dispute between two citizens, if one claimed a tie to the papal court, the conflict went before judges who were not, in theory, bound by city statutes. These steps in the 1390s initiated the process by which the popes over the next two centuries fragmented jurisdiction in order to protect those persons privileged by their clerical status or service to the papacy.26 Eventually new papal tribunals and officials not only circumscribed but competed directly with the senator’s tribunal, as the popes extended the powers of their judges over laymen while prohibiting laymen from ever judging clerics. A notable competitor was the tribunal of the governor of Rome, a papal magistracy created in 1436, which was given civil and criminal jurisdiction over anyone who lived in the city.27 At the same time, the popes moved to assert the prince’s monopoly of justice, and from 1404 appointed the senator to his post as the chief magistrate of the city’s main secular jurisdiction.28 Although the popes recognized the place of the Capitoline curia in the overall judicial apparatus of the city, they aimed to reposition it within a broader “state” system.29 The demand for actuary notaries increased overall with this proliferation of courts, but the notaries who served the senator and his corps of six Capitoline judges operated in an ever-more complex political universe.
If the popes thus intervened to create multiple new judicial identities and to layer many new “institutions of state” over older municipal institutions, they were not the only reason why there were many different courts with many attendant notaries operating in Rome. Like officials elsewhere in Europe, administrative officers in Rome, whether they served the municipality, the papal Curia, the Apostolic Camera, a cathedral chapter, or a merchant’s guild, all had some power to judge disputes and thus some form of jurisdiction. On the Capitoline Hill, for example, heads of guilds called consuls held courts (consolati) to hear cases connected with their trades. Also on the Capitol, the street masters settled conflicts over taxes for road repairs and the maestri giustizieri prosecuted those who damaged vineyards. Elsewhere in the city the great religious basilicas of Rome each had a jurisdiction of their own, and, of course, some wealthy immigrant communities, such as the Florentines, did too.30 In Rome, when acting in their capacity as judges, officials always had notaries by their side.
The Making of a Notary
Formal training in the ars notariae, the art of writing notarial documents, seems not to have been available in Rome; medieval schools for notaries, which existed elsewhere in Italy, have not turned up. Some learned their trade from family members, and others from more experienced notaries; in addition, the 1446 regulations of the notarial college expected candidates to have studied city law on their own while working for a notary or attorney.31 In the early sixteenth century, city statutes had increased the length of on-the-job training for notaries of the Capitoline curia from one year to three, although this was omitted in the final redaction of 1580.32 The 1580 legislation imposed no period of apprenticeship but did specify that candidates for matriculation know the ars notariae and the sections of the statutes relevant to notaries.33
In a situation where professional practice supplied instruction, young notaries must have depended heavily on special handbooks or formularies with sample contracts and examples of the legal clauses needed for drawing up wills and instruments. The production of such texts, known generically as the ars notariae, was the proud accomplishment of the Bolognese in the thirteenth century.34 The late medieval Curia strove consciously for a distinctive style (stilus) in its documents, however, and some of the very earliest legal works to be printed were formularies published in Rome for the use of curial notaries.35 These appeared in many editions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A related genre, manuals of the formulas to be used in judicial documents, also contained examples for notaries to follow.36 The Capitoline lawyer and jurist Luca Peto published such a formulary for use in the tribunal of the senator in 1567, and it ran to five editions before 1625.37 Although no direct evidence has yet come to light, Roman notaries’ libraries, as they did elsewhere, may also have included manuscript formularies.38 Formularies guided local contractual customs. Both the opinions of the jurists and the legislation of city and sovereign acknowledged the authority of custom, or what we might better term the local profession, regarding the technical formulas deployed in notarial documents. The jurists deferred on many counts to custom, and the legislators said virtually nothing about the wording of notarial acts. For the clauses and phrases preferred in Rome the notaries must have passed on their “style” from one generation to another in the informal manner of workshop practices.
Notaries had to know their trade, but knowledge was not enough; they also needed the power to perform their duties. Someone with the right to create notaries had to grant this authority to a would-be notary in order for him to become a bearer of public trust. In medieval Rome, the sources of such authority were pope, emperor, and (until 1435) “urban prefect,” a title based on a late antique Roman official, which notaries indicated by the use of such formulas of nomination as “by the authority of the sacred Roman prefect.”39 In practice, the power to create notaries was much more dispersed than this triad might suggest for the Holy Roman Emperor granted it to so-called counts palatine who exercised their “imperial authority” liberally. So numerous in fact were counts palatine, who could be ordinary citizens or even parish priests, that in their statutes of 1446 the notarial college warned their officers to check the credentials of counts palatine who claimed to possess this privilege.40
The popes in no way monopolized the creation of notaries, and some years after Martin V’s return in 1420 we even find the conservators, chief magistrates of the Senate and Roman People, cited as the authorizing officials for investing new notaries.41 In his 1507 legislation that endowed a new body, the College of Scriptors, with this power, Pope Julius II imagined that he was addressing some notaries elevated by imperial authority and others by papal or “apostolic” authority.42 Eighty years later, Pope Sixtus V was considerably more precise, naming, among those with the power to authorize new notaries in the Papal States, apostolic protonotaries, counts palatine, and cavalieri [sic], communities, corporate bodies, archives, and individuals possessed of what was turning out to be a not very rare privilege.43 Roman notarial records abundantly document the creation of notaries by apostolic protonotaries in the early decades of the seventeenth century, and this may have been the most common route into the profession in the capital at that date.44 In 1631 Pope Urban VIII, ever hopeful that he could bring the chaotic notarial profession under the control of his state officials, attempted new legislation in the Papal States, though not in Rome and Bologna. Seeking to overcome the historic division between the power to create notaries and the right to test their capacity to do their job, he assigned overall supervision of the process to the prefect of the archives, an official whom Sixtus V had put in place in 1588. The opposition of the privileged was so strident, however, that Urban had to retract his innovation the following year.45 Not until 1679 did his successors finally succeed, at least in Rome, in imposing a uniform procedure for creating notaries.46
In keeping with the feudal overtones of a grant of public authority to an individual, notaries received investiture from the counts palatine who created them. A notarial document recording the concession of “pen and inkwell” to a Capitoline notary in 1458 allows us a rare glimpse of this ritual.47 Acting on imperial authority, of which he had written proof, the count palatine symbolically struck, then kissed the notary. The notary promised to write on clean paper, to keep the contents of the acts he rogated secret until their publication, and not to write falsely. The count palatine then administered an oath sworn on the Bible.
The “pen and inkwell” ritual also included a test of the notary’s knowledge, for investiture was only the first of two essential steps in producing a valid practitioner. Counts palatine and other bearers of the authority to make new notaries gave ground to the profession itself when it came to evaluating the competence of would-be notaries. In Rome, the notarial college ordered its officers to ensure that counts palatine created notaries who did not engage in manual labor and who had been “examined and judged able in Latin and who had trained for at least a year with an attorney or someone knowledgeable in the notarial art.”48 Although customs varied from city to city, some form of registration or matriculation overseen by a formal association of notaries was common in late medieval Italy. By this process, the local profession judged the level of skill and the social suitability of those who would enter it.
A matriculation list of the “college of city notaries” is mentioned in the Roman statutes of 1363, although the college’s documentation itself is almost nonexistent, and the earliest description of the matriculation process dates from 1446.49 Those who wished to matriculate must have abandoned manual labor for at least four years and must conduct themselves decently and dress soberly.50 They must own—and have studied—a copy of the city statutes, for the officers of the notarial college expected to test candidates on local law.51 If they were judged suitable (idoneus) and approved by a two-thirds vote, they were entitled to pay a matriculation fee and to be entered in the membership rolls. The 1446 regulations make it clear that, while matriculation was required to exercise the notarial profession in Rome, it was not sufficient to work for the municipal government or as a court notary in the tribunal of the senator. For these duties a notary also had to be a Roman citizen or to have a residence in Rome.52 Although the evidence is from the sixteenth century, citizenship may not have been very difficult to acquire; unlike in other Italian cities, in Rome newcomers were expected, and accommodated.53 The 1446 notarial statutes sought to keep Capitoline posts in the hands of those whose property attached them to the community but, at a minimum, wanted all notaries who rogated in Rome to pass muster with college officers and know city laws.
This minimum was not easy to achieve in a city to which the papal court had returned with a seemingly insatiable appetite for notaries.54 Expanding curial employment in the later fifteenth century drew bureaucrats, secretaries, scribes, and notaries from all over Italy and from many parts of Europe to Rome; occasionally such men might also find their way to the Capitol.55 Not all of them expected to put down roots or even to stay for long; they came on the business of an international church, and many found work precisely because of their knowledge of the foreign tongues needed in the Curia or by foreign residents. The Roman notarial college may have intended to enroll them in its ranks, but it must have seemed apparent to the popes by at least the 1470s that large numbers of foreign notaries had managed to escape this corporate discipline.
Indeed, it was not obvious why curial notaries ought to be tested on their knowledge of the municipal statutes or matriculate with the Capitoline notaries, although Romans frequently resorted to curial notaries for their ordinary needs. Seeing an opportunity simultaneously to raise money and to impose order on this throng, Pope Sixtus IV attempted in 1483 to give a monopoly of curial business to seventy-two notaries who would purchase their offices.56 Curial notaries cut out by this limitation induced the next pope to cancel the monopoly the following year, but the Sistine mold was decidedly the shape of things to come. Over the next century, the papacy was slowly and inexorably to refashion the entire notarial profession, curial and Capitoline, into a group of haves and a group of have-nots, a small number of venal officeholders and everybody else.
Pressed for funds, Julius II, nephew to Sixtus IV, revived his uncle’s failed initiative in 1507. Establishing the College of Scriptors of the Roman Curia, a body of 101 venal officials, he placed the officers of the college, all prelates, in charge of a separate matriculation procedure for curial notaries.57 By his action he not only drew a new boundary between curial and Capitoline notaries and set up a rival notarial corporation to the college of “notarii urbis” but unwittingly provided historians with their first quantitative data about the profession, albeit its least Roman portion. Julius’s directives gave the auditor of the Camera and nine other so-called correctors (correctores), all qualified in canon law, the authority both to create notaries and to examine them. Those approved by the officers were registered in the matriculation list of the new Archive of the Roman Curia, which the pope set up in the same legislation.58 Henceforth, there were two distinct matriculation lists in Rome, at least until Sixtus V limited the number of Capitoline notaries in 1586. Julius II was considerably less specific about the criteria for admission than the Capitoline notaries were, leaving the matter in the capable hands of the prelates who reigned over the College of Scriptors, but his text did insist that notaries “from any nation” could matriculate. By any nation, of course, a sixteenth-century Italian would understand “from any city,” for a man from Genoa was as foreign in Rome as a native of Lyons. Matriculation did not mean entry into the College of Scriptors itself, into whose ranks only those able to purchase one of the 101 offices could ascend. Instead, it formalized access to the notariate for the foreigners from elsewhere in Italy and Europe in a way that had not previously been possible. Financially, the distinction between belonging to the College of Scriptors and matriculation in the Archive of the Roman Curia was vast, though contemporary usage sometimes conflated the two.59
Thousands of notaries from all over Europe matriculated in the Roman Curia in the sixteenth century and in ensuing centuries. Although the records are incomplete and perhaps not yet fully discovered, they spotlight a multinational array of notaries employed by countless foreigners doing business at the Curia.60 For the years for which we have data spanning the period 1507 to 1809, we find the names of almost ten thousand curial notaries.61 Extrapolating from the partial extant series, one scholar suggests that in the sixteenth century seven thousand curial notaries matriculated. To this number he adds five hundred or six hundred “true” curial notaries, that is, notaries who actually worked for officials of the Curia and “who were not required to submit to the formalities of matriculation.”62 The comment alerts us to the fact that venal officeholders did not need to matriculate and that matriculation in the Archive of the Roman Curia was the very lowest rung of the professional ladder for foreign notaries. Curial notaries without employment in papal bureaus or tribunals must have lived from their profession only partially and sporadically, finding work where they could among a varied lay and clerical, Roman and foreign clientele.63 It is tempting to imagine that the situation was similar for notaries matriculated in the Capitoline list before 1586.64 Perhaps they too numbered in the thousands over the century, and perhaps for many of them matriculation meant simply permission to work but did not guarantee a full-time career.
In other ways, matriculation was indubitably changing its significance for Capitoline notaries. One immediate effect of the sharpened boundary drawn by Julius II around curial notaries was a clearer definition of their civic counterparts. To be different quickly became to be privileged when, in his first act as pontiff in March 1513, Leo X restored the lost rights of the Senate and Roman People and exempted notaries on the Capitoline matriculation list from Julius II’s archival regulations.65 In a more gradual process, governmental authorities grew more interested in the matriculation registry as an instrument of control over the profession. It was not notarial college officers but civic officials, the conservators or their secretary, who kept the matriculation list from at least 1508 on, joined in 1562 by the archivist of the Archivio Capitolino, the civic notarial archive instituted that year on the Capitoline Hill. Now the volume was also to include the signature and professional symbol of the notary who had been admitted, to facilitate the authentication of his acts if doubts were ever raised about them.66
During the massive editorial revision of the Roman city statutes in the 1560s and 1570s, the criteria for matriculation underwent a notable shift, conveyed in the final edition published under Pope Gregory XIII in 1580. While the need to abstain from manual labor for four years and to know Latin remained from the 1446 regulations, the 1580 text added an age minimum of twenty years and demanded that notaries be sons of respectable parents who had trained them in proper behavior.67 The vexed status of notaries in a time of heightened sensitivity to aristocratic virtues may well have influenced some of the new language.68 Its insistence that to matriculate in the Capitoline list notaries must be Roman citizens or residents “considered Roman citizens according to the statutes,” however, bespeaks a response to the pope’s college for notaries from all nations.69 While residence or citizenship had been required to serve as a municipal notary or to write for the tribunal of the senator since 1446, it had not previously been necessary for matriculation.
Creating a professional identity for curial notaries promoted a new emphasis on Roman identity among notaries who worked for a city clientele. We should not overstate the ethnic character of Roman identity, of course. The 1580 statutes permitted foreigners who owned a house and vineyard in Rome and who lived there with their household for three-quarters of the year to apply for Roman citizenship, and evidence from the 1580s indicates that it was liberally granted.70 At least one notary serving the Capitoline judges had worked in Rome for decades before he bothered to go through the citizenship process.71 Yet the shift in the 1580 text registered the presence of a different and rival notarial identity, buttressed by its own institutions and regulations, which, however loose they were in reality, contributed to a stronger sense of what it meant to be a Capitoline notary—or perhaps it might be more accurate to say a more restricted sense of what it meant to be a Capitoline notary. By the late sixteenth century, the papacy had somehow, through its jurisdictional exclusions and financial ingenuity, managed to turn the notaries of Rome (notarii urbis) into Roman notaries (notarii romani). Fittingly, it was the popes who gave them their new title, notaries of the Capitoline curia (notarii curiae capitolii), when they terminated the matriculation process in 1586, limited their number to thirty, and sold their offices.
Within the broad context shaping their political and professional lives, the city notaries of Rome created institutions through which they defined themselves. These institutions tell us a good deal about the status and strength of notaries in Rome’s fluid and dynamic society, and they reflect faithfully the force of the alteration wrought by Sixtus V in 1586. We begin with the original college of self-employed notaries that preceded this great divide, before investigating the new college that emerged after 1586 as an organization of thirty venal officeholders, sharing little more with their forebears than the Capitoline Hill and the patronage of Saint Luke.
The College of City Notaries
By the early 1300s the notaries of Rome had forged a professional association, which they maintained until 1586. Yet the shape and texture of that late medieval association, which contemporary sources called the college of city notaries (collegium notarii urbis), wholly eludes us. This is not immediately apparent to the researcher who consults the inventories in Rome’s state archive and discovers a multivolume series of notarial protocols from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century entitled the “College of Capitoline Notaries.”72 In fact, these protocols have no special connection to the notarial college at all, having been part of a former archive established in 1562 as a repository for the papers of notaries who had died without heirs. The notaries’ organization itself never bore this title given it by modern archivists, although after 1586 it did become a college in the new sense favored by early modern popes, a body of venal officials known as the notaries of the Capitoline curia. By whatever title, before 1586 the professional organization of the city notaries walked with very light footsteps, leaving only the faintest traces in the documentary record.
References to specific officers of the notarial college like rector, corrector, and chamberlain (camerarius) next to signatures on acts dating from 1300, 1330, and 1348 are clues to the existence of a formal organization of which we have no other sign.73 More evidence comes from the new regime that drafted the city statutes of 1363, which granted the notarial college power to choose its officials and delegated specific tasks to these officers regarding the papers of dead notaries.74 The legislators closely guarded the process of copying documents from notarial protocols when, after the death of the rogating notary, they reverted to the possession of his heirs. These copies, transumpta or transunti as they were called in later centuries, were not simple transcriptions of the imbreviature in the notary’s protocol but extended versions in which all the proper legal formulas were fully written out and abbreviations were eliminated. The 1363 statutes put the Capitoline curia in charge of this procedure but gave the notarial college the task of designating eight notaries from whom the judge would select two to verify that the transunto was accurate.75 They also deputed college officials, on judge’s orders, to remove any forced contract from the protocol of a deceased notary.76 These fragments do not shed light on the inner workings of the notarial association in fourteenth-century Rome, but they take for granted that that there was such a body capable of work.
Our richest source before 1586 is another fragment. It describes itself as “other articles, orders, and revisions” to the statutes of the notarial college and follows the municipal statutes of 1469 in a unique manuscript transcribed at the city’s orders in 1486.77 This codex was the Senate and Roman People’s official copy of its laws until the printing of a new compilation between 1519 and 1523. Although the revisions to the notarial statutes are dated 1446, we do not know when the statutes that they purport to revise were written and no text of these statutes survives. This is not the only allusion to notarial college statutes; the 1580 city statutes also refer to this ghostly document or documents.78 The missing statutes may someday come to light, but their absence must be considered a part of the college’s pre-1586 history. In Rome, even before Julius II divided up the notarial profession in 1507, city notaries could not have found it easy to conceive, express, or impose their collective will. Although they contain four rubrics taken over from the 1363 city statutes, the 1446 revisions are the first, and last, that we have that originate from the college before the 1580s. It was government, city and papal, not the profession, that was largely responsible for the increasingly intensive regulation of notaries in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. And it is a fine point to determine how independent the 1446 revisions could have been if we know of them only through a copy preserved by municipal authorities.79
By comparison to organizations of notaries in places like Bologna, Florence, Milan, and Genoa, the Roman college was weak, even before the popes created a rival association in 1507.80 While there was no palace of notaries in Rome, and the city government obviously kept a close watch on the profession, organizational weakness was not necessarily an entirely bad thing for men who wanted to be notaries. The matriculation process, as we have seen, put only the modest social hurdle of not having done manual labor for four years in the path of aspirants and demanded no more training than one could acquire in a year’s apprenticeship. There were no limits on the numbers who could practice and no requirement that they be Romans. The notarial profession was open in Rome. Easy access did come at a price, however, which was the powerlessness of notaries to defend their collective interests when they were threatened. The fourteenth-century municipal regime, in which notaries rose to public prominence and received laws favorable to the profession, gave way in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to a civic administration and a monarch more concerned to police notaries than protect them.
Yet the admittedly fragile evidence of corporate self-government, the revisions to the lost statutes of the college, do allow a unique glimpse of what mattered to the college of city notaries in 1446, and perhaps in following decades. Five notarial officers and a local lawyer or consistorial advocate, Andrea Santacroce, authored the text, they said, because divine light diffused to men through the writers of the Gospels put notaries under a special obligation to produce trustworthy documents, and many neglected this duty.81 They wanted “to set in order the customary practices of the notarial office” so that anyone who intended to exercise that office would know how he must conduct himself, and so that their patron, the Gospel writer Saint Luke, would be honored and glorified.82 The first decree, therefore, was that every October all notaries, all holders of law degrees, and all Capitoline judges and procurators (attorneys) would celebrate mass together on the feast of Saint Luke in the Church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli, with the college providing the candles.
The selection of Saint Luke as protector was not unusual for notaries; Saint Luke was also the patron saint of the guild of judges and notaries in Florence.83 More informative perhaps was the choice of Santa Maria in Aracoeli for their yearly festivities. The Aracoeli was a Franciscan church and convent on the Capitoline Hill next to the palace where the senator held court and across from the Palace of the Conservators, the elected municipal magistrates. It was also the place where the fifteenth-century notarial college had its meetings, and where the notaries proposed to store the papers of their colleagues who had died without heirs. Because the Aracoeli was ritually associated with the Senate and Roman People, the notaries’ location there situated them at the symbolic center of civic representation. Hosting a compulsory feast for all municipal legal professionals showed that the notarial college identified itself very closely indeed with the judicial activity that went on next door in the halls of the senator’s palace.84
On Saint Luke’s holy day, the college assembled in the chapter room of the Aracoeli convent to elect new officers. The text does not go into electoral details but indicates that some kind of bussola, or scrutiny system, operated because what it does say is that electors called imbussolatori, chosen by the assembly for four-year terms, should organize the election.85 A bussola was the Roman term for a common electoral procedure in late medieval and early modern Italy in which designated electors drew up a list of approved candidates for office from which officeholders were then selected by lot. In Rome it was not unusual for collectivities, whether municipality, guild, or confraternity, to say very little about electoral procedures in their statutes, presumably so that they could be altered more freely. In its evasiveness about elections, the notarial college followed the codes of its broader community.
Although the statutes do not provide the number or titles of all the officials, they reveal that two “proconsuls,” voted only by the officers, headed the college. The proconsuls were to call a meeting of the notaries on the last Sunday of every month and read the statutes aloud to them.86 They had jurisdiction over “the men of the corporation” (homines universitatis)” and judged conflicts between them and outsiders in their tribunal in the senator’s palace.87 The proconsuls had the right to fine men of the corporation and also those who, like counts palatine, created notaries without the proper qualifications.88 Along with officials called correctors and other unnamed officers, they tested candidates for matriculation on their Latin grammar and knowledge of municipal law and decided whether to admit them to the exercise of the notariate in Rome.89 Together with the correctors, the proconsuls assisted the senator, whom we recall was a foreign magistrate appointed by the pope, in the delicate task of assigning specific notaries to the benches of Capitoline judges.90 In late spring, during the week of the feast of Corpus Christi, the proconsuls and officers reviewed the notaries’ annual volumes of acts to make sure they were put together properly and stamped them with the insignia of the college.91 The 1446 statute revisions gave the proconsuls, correctors, and scribe (scriptor) of the college the task of protecting the protocols of notaries who had died, with the correctors to hold one of the keys to the locked chests in which these volumes were now to be placed for safekeeping. The officers could be penalized for being negligent in this duty, but they could themselves levy heavy fines on heirs who presented them with incomplete volumes and could share in the proceeds.92
The 1446 legislation emphasized the notarial college’s determination to improve the writing and archival practices of notaries, both when they served a private clientele and when they sat in civil court. It contained important innovations, some of which admittedly were later abandoned and some probably not well enforced. The meager archival record makes it difficult to judge this effort to set the practices of the profession in order as a success. Yet the college’s failure was not in its vision but in its enforcement mechanisms, a sign of its deeper impotence to control the conditions of notarial labor in Rome.
The information that the text supplies about the governance of the college must be read against this underlying corporate weakness. This is an association of officers. Within the restricted circle of the officers, few offices or duties are depicted with any precision, and of course the manner of selecting the officials is passed over in silence. Although it provided candles on the feast of Saint Luke, the college seems to have had no revenues. The text makes no mention of a treasurer or chamberlain, although notaries who matriculated did have to pay a matriculation fee, and that money must have gone somewhere. The officers divide up the fines. The relationship of officials to the generality of notaries is sharply hierarchical. Members are summoned to monthly meetings to hear the rules read aloud, and they attend a church service together once a year. Otherwise, they go before college officials when they sit for the matriculation exam, when they submit their volumes to be stamped annually, and when they bring charges against another notary or defend charges against themselves. Although it is true that the 1446 revisions are a fragment of a lost set of statutes, the fragment points to an organization possessed of few resources and composed of a small group of active leaders and, not surprisingly, a loose, poorly disciplined body of followers. Such a description makes the Roman notaries quite different from those of Bologna or Milan, but it may not distinguish them much from other professional and artisan guilds in late medieval and early modern Rome.
Although the college of city notaries has not left any other documentation, or at least none yet discovered, city laws and papal edicts from the sixteenth century record traces of its officers.93 These are quite literally traces, perhaps a half-dozen individual names and a few miscellaneous references to titles. Two correctors participated in the city statute reforms of 1521, and two others emitted a printed edict in 1582.94 The office of proconsul, evidently still at the apex of the college, seems to have been elevated out of the notarial ranks altogether and filled by the upper branch of the legal profession, lawyers who called themselves advocatus, not procuratoris.
The proconsuls and correctors appear to have transformed their role in the approval of court notaries for the Capitoline curia from advisers of the senator to equal partners. A directive alleged to date from circa 1508 and published in 1521 insisted that no actuary notary could sit at the bench “unless delegated by the senator, proconsuls, and correctors and other pro tempore officials of the said college and without their written authorization.”95 Judicial reforms undertaken by Pius IV in 1562 referred obscurely to a continuing important role for the correctors, although they hint that a bussola or sortition process was involved in the assignments.96
The conservators took charge of the notarial archive created at civic initiative in 1562, and the founding legislation for this new Archivio Capitolino made no mention of the college of city notaries. Yet it did give tasks in the administration of the archive to college officers, notably the correctors and their notary, which suggest that they were perceived as dependable bureaucrats.97 They were to keep one of several registers of the fees paid for copies made of archive documents; they were to give receipts for any fees they collected; and they were to determine the fee to charge for it if the copy was very long. These archive regulations also required the notary of the correctors to sign the documentary inventories that heirs of notaries had to turn in and to record which instruments had been copied. It was a modest beginning to what would become over time a much closer connection to the archive.
In revisions to the city statutes in 1494, a significant alteration to the procedure for producing transunti, the extended copies of instruments in the protocols of deceased notaries, gave notarial officials a financial stake in this process for the first time. Since 1363 the college had been responsible for providing a list of eight notaries who could, under judicial supervision, verify that a document from a dead notary’s protocol had been properly copied. The owners of the protocol, the notary’s heirs, earned income from the transunto, as did the notary who actually made it, but the judge was explicitly prohibited from receiving anything for his role, and nothing was provided to the two notaries whom he had chosen to check the copy’s accuracy. The statute revision of 1494 cut the share of the transunto fee that went to the heirs by one-third, and ordered that the remaining third be divided among the notary who did the transunto, the correctors of the notarial college who verified it, and the judge who gave the order.98 Although the amounts might not seem significant to us, transunti fees loomed large in the post-1586 world of the Capitoline notaries. It seems likely that their interest can be traced back to this legislation of 1494, which placed them at odds with the heirs in a struggle that would go on for much of the next century.
The safeguards required for an authentic transunto must have seemed irksome to heirs and clients alike. After all, they interposed a judge and the notarial college between those who possessed the instruments and those who wanted copies, with all the attendant delays and expenses middlemen always caused. It was much simpler to locate and pay the owner of the protocol and hire a notary to make the transunto, although this meant no one checked its accuracy. Civic reformers fought this abuse, denouncing in legislation of 1521 “many who acquire the privilege of making transunti of instruments from the protocols of dead notaries without observing the necessary formalities.”99 Complaints obviously continued because in the 1550s Pope Julius III intervened in defense of the “jurisdictions” of the Capitoline notarial college in the face of heirs who ignored the statutory transunto procedure.100 This was an unusual example of papal support for the privileges of the college, that is, of its officers’ right to a percentage of the transunto fees.
It is true that in 1562 when the conservators, on behalf of the municipality, sought to take physical possession of the protocols of dead notaries from the heirs and place them in the Archivio Capitolino, they said nothing about a judge or notarial officials. Instead they permitted the archivist to make transunti and promised heirs “the whole fee” from copies.101 They did not maintain this posture, however, for the 1580 statutes upheld the meticulous observation of the transunto formalities dating back to 1363 and 1494. Not surprisingly a subsequent edict of the notarial college officers in 1582 did too.102 The 1580 statutes specified how the judge and officials would divide up their third of the transunto fee, which was the same price charged for a public copy from a living notary. The judge issuing the order and the scribe (or archivist) who actually made the copy each received fifteen bolenenos (baiocchi), the notary of the correctors received half that amount, and the “residuum” went to the correctors to be used for the “fees and expenses of the college.”103
The decade of the 1580s was a watershed for the Capitoline notaries, who found their traditional ways of working changed drastically by the introduction of venality by Sixtus V in 1586. Though there is no evidence to suggest that anyone knew what was coming before the papal election of 1585, something was stirring in the world of the Roman notaries in these years. The footprints deepen a bit, and we have a few more sources on the notarial college, even rare words from its officials. The edition of the city statutes published in 1580 broke sharply with legislative habit in Rome and provided a global revision of the laws that had accumulated since 1363. It also altered the composition of the tribunal of the senator, a focal point for the college of city notaries.104 The process of revising and publishing the statutes may have reflected a deeper activism on the part of the local landed classes, whose members identified themselves with the Senate and People of Rome, or it may have prompted greater civic and corporate self-awareness. Whatever the reason, in the early 1580s the notarial college took a few steps out of its almost complete obscurity.
The 1580 city statutes, in a logic prepared for centuries, contained a full range of rules for notaries, though some of these had first appeared as self-regulation by the college. Just as the 1446 legislation of the college had incorporated several provisions verbatim from the city statutes of 1363, the 1580 edition took over the text of 1446 with only a few, albeit significant, modifications. The new city laws retained the college governance, matriculation procedure, notarial dress, and forbidden recreations of old, adding a prohibition on carrying a sword.105 The notaries still hosted an annual mass on the feast of Saint Luke for the city’s legal profession. There was somewhat more precision about titles of officers, though not their mode of election; proconsuls, correctors, a notary of the correctors, and syndics would serve the college.106 As we have seen, the correctors now handled finances, keeping the college’s share of the transunti fees and spending them on gifts of wax for the eminent guests at the Saint Luke’s festival.
The 1580 legislation granted the notaries the power to draft their own statutes, subject to approval like other Roman guilds by the conservators and senator. It departed strikingly from those they had drafted in 1446, however, in adding judicial oversight where college officers had previously acted on their own. In the tribunal, where the proconsuls had enjoyed the right to pass judgment in conflicts within the profession and between notaries and outsiders, they could now hear cases only if a Capitoline judge also participated.107 The text indicates that proconsuls and correctors exercised this jurisdiction together but understates the legal presence because it does not say that by this time the proconsuls were in fact lawyers, not notaries. It was the custom in early modern Rome for guilds to have courts to decide controversies relating to their trade, but it was unique for lawyers and judges to play such a large role in them. Similarly, in matters that seemed strictly professional, for example, how much a lengthy court document would cost to copy, the correctors made the decision along with the judge in the case.108 Despite the fact that the fifteenth-century text was the first to give close attention to the writing notaries did in court, judges were not as pervasive in the 1446 statutes as they were in 1580. The new city laws leave the unmistakable impression that the judiciary was now more interested in what the Capitoline notaries were doing. Perhaps that was why they required the proconsuls, correctors, and senator to make a “rigorous” background check of “the way of life and morals” of any Roman notary wishing to serve in the Capitoline curia.109
The other notable difference from earlier regulations was the notarial college’s expanding role in the operations of the Archivio Capitolino. While the founding legislation gave the correctors little more to do than sign transunti receipts, the 1580 statutes record their supervision of the entire process by which the dead notary’s papers arrived safely in the archive.110 Clearly, the city magistrates had discovered that they could not make a notarial archive work without the participation of the notarial college. And the college, profiting from the greater certainty of collecting its portion of the income from copies kept in an archive, pitched in, a fact recognized in this legislation.
The most persuasive sign of the greater vigor of the college after the new city statutes is a printed edict from the proconsuls and correctors dated 16 December 1582, the only known edict they ever published.111 Because the action of emitting proclamations was in itself a well-recognized claim to authority in early modern politics, their published orders bespoke the officials’ stature within the Capitoline arena. If we were to judge what mattered most to college officers at this point in history from a unique document, and we have so few sources we can hardly do otherwise, it would be the archive and the court. With its half-dozen commands to archivists and heirs of notaries, the printed edict confirmed the notarial college’s de facto jurisdiction over the Archivio Capitolino. With an equal number of directives addressing the conduct of notaries and their staff in the senator’s tribunal, it proclaimed the college’s power to discipline judicial writing. Two duties added since 1580 made the correctors responsible for approving the sostituti, notarial employees often seen acting for their bosses in the Capitoline curia, and for checking annually the bound volumes of judicial documents notaries produced at the benches.112 At the same time, the college’s edict repeatedly invoked the authority of the city statutes, treating them as the final word on how Roman notaries behaved and wrote. The higher profile of notarial college officers meant not the independence of the professional body, therefore, but its dependence on the Senate and Roman People and its subordination within, and contribution to, the machinery of Capitoline justice.
If this hypothesis is correct, we can better understand how the college of city notaries had slowly become the college of Capitoline notaries. An article of the 1580 city statutes informed notaries that they had three choices if they wanted to work in their profession in Rome: to matriculate on the Capitol, to matriculate in the Curia, or to serve another Roman court.113 For those like Ottaviano Saravezzio, who in 1584 inscribed the initials O.S.N.C., “Ottaviano Saravezzio Capitoline Notary,” beneath his professional symbol at the beginning of his protocol, the choice of an identity was clear.114 In a city where jurisdiction was so fragmented, no professional body could monopolize employment. By the 1580s the college certainly understood that what strength it had lay in its relationship to the tribunal of the senator.
The Thirty Capitoline Notaries
Foundations, 1586–1612
On 29 December 1586 Sixtus V limited the number of notaries serving the two civil judges in the tribunal of the senator to thirty and announced the sale of these offices for five hundred scudi apiece. The pope’s legislation created a college, as the new corps of venal officeholders was called, of Capitoline notaries endowed with an array of privileges to entice buyers.115 With his one stroke, Sixtus set aside the centuries-old traditions of the city notaries and nullified those portions of the municipal statutes that supported them. The possibility of matriculating as a Roman notary vanished along with the former notarial college and its officers.116 Sixtus, a famously activist administrator, transformed the conditions of labor for the majority of city notaries and laid the foundations of a new identity for the fortunate few. Yet changes of the magnitude Sixtus envisioned could not be fully enacted overnight. It took more than twenty years for the market to absorb their implications, and during that period his successors in effect renegotiated their terms with the notaries. Only after two decades of testing by the new Capitoline notaries was the legal and economic infrastructure that would support their future existence completed.
Within two months of Sixtus V’s election on 24 April 1585, rumors began circulating that he was going to reduce the number of Capitoline notaries to twelve, but the Senate and Roman People seem not to have heard about it until early January 1586.117 Then they learned that the decision was a fait accompli, and the pope had already expedited the motu proprio that would result in the sale of all the notarial offices in their civil courts. Despite the bleak prospects, the conservators led a delegation of citizens to Sixtus to protest the interference and to induce him to cancel it in exchange for a financial contribution to the papal bread bank, the Annona. For almost eight months it looked as if their efforts had succeeded, but in August the conservators reported again to the civic councils that the pontiff wanted to turn the Capitoline notaries into twenty-six venal posts to be sold for five hundred scudi each. They hardly needed to add that they saw his action as harmful both to individual notaries and to the Roman People, that is, the municipality, but when it was not possible to halt it, they were more successful at cutting a deal for the latter than the former. In November the pope agreed to pocket only the initial proceeds himself and to donate subsequent sale revenues to the Roman People in order to reduce the civic debt. Municipal resistance overcome, the final orders for the sale of thirty offices were issued at the end of the following month.
Although there was no reason to predict the seizure of the Capitoline notarial offices by Sixtus V in 1586, it did not occur entirely in a vacuum. Venality in the Curia was a long established custom by this time, which peaked under Sixtus V.118 Moreover, the first papal attempts to sell non-notarial offices in the Capitoline administration went back at least to the pontificate of Sixtus IV.119 The Senate and Roman People resented such assaults and fought to get their offices back when a new pope was elected, but a pattern of papal depredation of the municipality certainly existed. Sales of notarial offices were also nothing new. Beginning with Sixtus IV the popes had put notarial offices in the Curia up for sale, as we have seen, and in what has been called the first major effort at reform of the notariate in 1556 Paul IV sold all the criminal notarial offices in the Papal States.120 Then, too, only a few years later Pius IV imposed a cap of twenty on the number of notaries serving the senator’s tribunal, though we lack evidence of its enforcement.121 Before Sixtus V, however, no pope had extended his reach so far and so decisively into the operations of the city notaries.
Like Julius, Sixtus V had tremendous ambitions for the papacy, which impelled him to search creatively for revenues and to ignore the protests of those reluctant to provide them. He was also an audacious governor on many fronts, not the least of which was his complete reorganization of the departments of the Curia, whose modern structure still owes much to his innovations.122 Although his motives in transforming the Capitoline notaries into venal officeholders were financial, Sixtus slammed his full apostolic power down on other notaries too, fearing that poorly drawn and badly kept notarial documents could unravel the fragile tissue of society. Having made several attempts to set up ecclesiastical archives, in September 1588 he instituted the first public notarial archives throughout the Papal States, except for Rome and Bologna.123 The new order that Sixtus imposed on the city notaries of Rome, therefore, participated in his broader vision of government and justice, and of the sacrifices he felt his subjects ought to make for it.
In certain key respects Sixtus’s intervention assimilated the Capitoline notaries to the notaries of the papal tribunals, redefining them essentially as writers of judicial acts, actuarii in the technical terminology, or court notaries. He declared that fifteen notaries would be assigned to each of the two civil judges of the Capitoline court.124 These judges were known as the first and second collaterali, and together they handled all the litigation before the senator’s tribunal. Their jurisdiction extended over all laymen resident in Rome who were not connected to the papal court and all civil matters, including dowry agreements, wills, and the guardianship of minors.125 In redefining the Capitoline notaries as court notaries, Sixtus did not assume they would only serve litigants, but undoubtedly expected that they would also rogate business acts, like contracts and wills, for a private clientele. His objective was to sell these notarial offices, so it was not at all in his interest to restrict their sources of income. Thus, the thirty Capitoline notaries could operate a normal nonjudicial notarial business and enjoy the exclusive right to produce the documents needed for lawsuits in the senator’s tribunal. He also permitted them to work for guild tribunals.
If these moves paralleled those of his predecessors long accustomed to selling curial offices, in some respects Sixtus preserved, and in fact solidified, the distinctiveness of the Capitoline notaries. Because the pope saw the thirty Capitoline notaries as so many investment units, he allowed purchasers to put in place substitutes capable of doing a notary’s work. In order to exercise some control over the skills of these substitutes, however, he had to give the profession a role, and for this purpose he established a formal association or college of the notaries actually exercising the thirty offices. The pontiff assigned them the task of examining, approving, and swearing in substitutes, that is, notaries like themselves. The college also had the right to decide on rules for its governance, subject to review by the collaterali judges, to have officers with new names like decano and mensario, to use an official seal, and to make records.126 A more robust association of Capitoline notaries than had ever previously existed would spring from these rudimentary beginnings in the Sistine legislation.
In an odd, and perhaps not entirely coincidental, reflection of precisely the two main interests of the old notarial college that he had abolished—tribunal and archive—Sixtus donated the Archivio Capitolino to the new college. To the chagrin of the city magistrates, he gave the notaries the “total care, rule, and administration” of the archive that had once belonged to the Roman People, and would again under later pontiffs.127 In place of the oversight of the abolished correctors, transunti from the archive would now need to be verified by two notaries in the college, one from each of the two collaterali. The pope also decreed that the documents of notaries who had lost their jobs because of his legislation go to the Archivio Capitolino after they died.128
Sixtus tried to drape the college in some of the trappings of prestige that were supposed to count for much in the public life of Rome. Like curial officials, the thirty Capitoline notaries would receive gifts of wax from the pope at the annual feast of the purification of the Virgin; they would enjoy the privileges of Roman citizens and a place in processions ahead of other notaries. More substantially, the pope gave the college an income, or rather several sources of revenue, to be pooled in a common fund (massa) and shared among members. The college had the right to collect from its thirty member notaries one-quarter of the fees they were paid for judicial acts and one-quarter of the transunti fees from instruments they held in their offices. It was also owed one-third of the transunti fees from instruments kept in the Archivio Capitolino, and the entire fee for transunti of judicial acts that had found their way to the Archivio Capitolino.129 In addition, Sixtus gave the college the proceeds of the office of notary of the maestri giustizieri, the civic vineyard tribunal.130 Each month a college officer was to distribute the combined total of massa equally among the thirty notaries. Finally, the pope bestowed two forms of judicial privilege upon the thirty Capitoline notaries. He promised the college the convenience of summary justice by the senator’s tribunal should it be sued, and he significantly raised the bar for removing a notary from a civil case from that specified in the 1580 city statutes.131
These trappings seasoned the goods to advance the pope’s financial goal of adding fifteen thousand scudi to his treasury. Once purchased from the papal Datary, buyers could treat Capitoline notarial offices as they treated other forms of nonmovable property, including leasing them, reselling them, or, in the famous Roman device of the società d’ufficio, breaking them up into portions and selling the portions to partners. Sixtus’s legislation explicitly permitted sales to foreigners and minors. Sales of offices in Rome took one of two forms: they were either vacabile, in which case the government had continuing rights to sell them once they had been vacated by death or resignation, or non vacabile, in which case they were fully the property of the purchaser, who could pass them on to his heirs at death. The complex politics of his seizure of this particular city asset, however, meant that Sixtus had to devise a more complicated ownership formula. He declared the thirty offices of the Capitoline notaries non vacabile for three years, and then partially vacabile after that.132
The motives for such a policy may be clearer than the mechanics. Buyers paid more for offices that were fully heritable, and initial sales by the Datary could be expected to be brisk. But the pope had promised the Roman People a share in the plunder of the Capitoline notaries. By making future sales of the offices, actually one-half of each office, vacabile, Sixtus intended to ensure a continuing revenue stream to the municipality. Perhaps without intending it, he had now also made shopping for notarial offices dependent on the favor of the conservators.133 Indeed, if we can trust the story told by the owners of office 18 in 1591, in the era before venality their grandfather had received his Capitoline notarial office from the pope.134 By selling them off, Sixtus may actually have shifted patronage resources from the papacy to civic officials.
In consequence, the pontiff was forced to treat the Capitoline notaries somewhat differently from the venal notaries in the papal and ecclesiastical courts, whose offices tended to end up as vacabile, meaning ownership reverted to the state treasury. This distinction deepened in October 1612 when, perhaps at the prodding of the Capitoline notaries themselves, Pope Paul V (1605–21) offered even more favorable terms to purchasers of Capitoline notarial offices. Paul declared the thirty offices fully non vacabile, that is, entirely the property of the purchaser or purchasers, to be sold, resigned, and bequeathed at will.135 Now the market, not patrons, would determine who acquired these posts. The pope ordered the conservators to grant letters patent for an office whenever they were asked, upon payment of “the usual regaliis,” and told the papal Datary to expedite the concession under the same conditions.136
If there were any doubts that after 1612 purchasers had complete liberty to do as they pleased with their Capitoline notarial offices, they were put to rest by a decision of the Papal State’s highest appellate court in 1620. The Roman Rota confirmed that not even the popes could interfere with the free exchange of this particular commodity.137 The papal concession of 1612 was a fateful turn of events for the Capitoline notaries. The freedom buyers now enjoyed to trade in Capitoline offices turned out to be a mixed blessing, if a blessing at all, for the notaries themselves. It challenged the cohesion of their nascent professional association and, in the long run, undermined their bargaining power with the papacy. But however ambiguous a privilege, it would condition their existence profoundly for the next 234 years.138
In early modern Rome even free property came with strings attached. Sixtus had promised the Roman People some of the income from office sales, and Paul V did not forget the city’s needs. He ordered the college to pay from the monthly massa 400 scudi a year to the municipality for the upkeep of the two Capitoline palaces, the senator’s palace where their court sessions were held, and the Palace of the Conservators where the archive was located.139 At the same time he confirmed a decision apparently made by the notaries in 1604 that required a minimum massa contribution of 1.50 scudi (15 giulii or 150 baiocchi) a month.140 The pope specified that if their individual judicial fees and transunti did not equal that amount, the Capitoline notaries had to provide it from their other income.141 Massa were in effect like feudal dues; they were charges upon the income of the offices, which owners had no choice but to pay, despite their full and free possession of their property. Investment in the Capitoline offices thus resembled investments not only in the countless venal offices of the Curia but also in Roman real estate, so frequently encumbered by censi or mortgages and dues of various sorts.
It did not take long for the market to respond to Paul V’s restructuring of the municipality’s share in the Capitoline offices, and within a few years it was clear that making them non vacabile had succeeded perhaps too well. Buyers and sellers behaved with such complete freedom that new papal orders in November 1617 complained that no one was bothering to notify officials when an office changed hands.142 There was also the small matter of those fees owed to the conservators and to the papal Datary for required paperwork that buyers and sellers were ignoring.
Paul V regarded the notarial college as the proper tool to enforce the mechanisms by which he had planned to keep civic and papal officials informed about who actually held title to the thirty Capitoline offices. So in this intervention of 1617 he required the college to pay for forty-six copies of his orders and to deliver them personally to twenty notaries, two-thirds of the membership, who had failed to go through the proper steps in gaining title.143 The pope gave purchasers of Capitoline notarial offices two weeks from the date of the instrument of sale to notify the college mensario and two months to pay what they owed to the conservators and the Datary or face a huge fine of three hundred gold ducats.144 The new regulations make quite clear therefore that neither the college nor the authorities exercised any control over the sale itself.
Because the premise of venality was that anyone could own an office regardless of whether he or she was capable of exercising it, it had surprised no one that many of the hundred posts in Julius II’s College of Scriptors, for example, ended up in the hands of institutions and women.145 Similarly, Sixtus had spoken openly of foreigners and minors acquiring the Capitoline offices. Having made the offices completely the property of their owners, Paul V confronted the fundamental contradiction of venality, that it was very difficult to keep track of owners, and even harder to know, let alone discipline, those to whom they contracted or subcontracted the duties of office. The pontiff understood this. In his massive reform of the papal and civic courts in 1612, he had commanded that anyone who wanted to lease, rent, or turn over a notarial office to an administrator must have written papal permission and the approval of the individual by the judges of the tribunal in question.146 Despite the language of buyers and sellers in his orders to the Capitoline notaries in 1617, therefore, Paul was more interested in identifying the notary in whose name the office was to operate, the titleholder, than the actual owner or owners.147 It was the titleholder who was of greatest interest to the notarial college, too, as it struggled to collect the money needed each year to ensure free sales of the thirty Capitoline offices. It was essential to know who owed contributions to the common fund, and the distribution among the colleagues of the new member’s fifteen-scudi entry fee was not unwelcome either.148
How much influence did the college exercise over the choice of suitable men? The Sistine legislation stated that it was to examine, approve, and swear in those presented by the owners. By contrast, Paul’s 1612 judicial reforms made the “superiors” in the relevant tribunals responsible for approving their own court notaries. The Capitoline notaries’ first extant statutes (1618) since Sixtus had imposed venality failed to mention the judges and implied that their own role was decisive.149 They listed four necessary steps for admission, the first of which was for the notary to gain the approval of the college for his “way of life, habits, trustworthiness, and suitability.”150 The insistence on this last point in their revised statutes of 1652 suggested that it may not have been happening, as did the new fines they threatened for signing a document in the name of a notary who had not been formally admitted.151 The text of 1652 emphasized that applicants must come in person and that the college could reject them, unless of course they were the sons or heirs of predecessors.152 While we lack the meeting minutes for the early seventeenth century that would allow us a glimpse of how the college vetted would-be titleholders, we do have evidence that some complied, at least with the last three steps in the procedure. They obtained letters patent from the conservators and apostolic letters from the Datary and submitted these documents to the college’s mensario.153 They also paid their admission fee.154 It must remain an open question, however, how much actual control the college exercised over who would become a Capitoline notary in the era of venal office holding.
Some of the men who belonged to the notarial college in the early seventeenth century owned their offices outright, but most probably did not. As we shall see in chapter 5, we find these thirty offices defined by every conceivable type of business arrangement, lease, partnership, salary, and hybrids of these. At times, the relationship between those who contracted to do the work of a Capitoline office and the notary in whose name it operated cannot even be determined. It was this diverse and shifting raw material that had to sustain a college of the notaries of the Capitoline curia in the new era of venality. Moreover, collegial life was not a luxury but a necessity, especially after 1612. The inexorable obligation to provide those four hundred scudi each year to the municipality gave the titleholders no other choice. But the Capitoline notaries had not needed the impulse of the liberation of their offices in 1612 to urge forward their professional association. The college’s documentary record, though thin, begins in 1588, just two years after Sixtus’s radical intervention, and, although no statutes of the fledgling association survive before 1618, that record leaves no doubt of their collective activity. The venal Capitoline notaries apparently lost no time in building up the structures they felt they needed to defend their professional interests.
Structures, 1586–1674
Not until 1652, when the thirty Capitoline notaries revised the rules of their common governance for the second time in forty years, did they show much interest in the records of their collegial life. At that time they ordered copies of the privileges and legislation of the college to be inventoried and deposited in a special locked chest.155 The gesture signaled that they knew they had a history, albeit one that began only in 1586, and that if they wished to have a future they would need the documents to prove it. It is puzzling that notaries, professionals who made their living by preserving memory, should have come so late to this awareness, which sank in slowly over their first six decades. How slowly is suggested by an archive, which, though admittedly richer than that left by the college of city notaries, is sparse. The first extant statutes of the new college (1618) survive in a unique and much damaged manuscript and the second set (1652) only in later editions, one from around 1711 and the other from 1831.156 In addition to the two statutes from the first half of the seventeenth century, we have thirteen other volumes dating from 1588 to 1833.157 The earliest are six registers of the collection of massa contributions, which with many lacunae begin in 1588 and cease in 1681.158 We know that the college’s secretary took down the resolutions of the monthly meetings in a separate volume, but we do not have these meeting records before 1667.159 To put it another way, from the first ninety years of the college’s life, we have only what amount to intermittent treasurer’s accounts and, of course, the statutes of 1618 and 1652.
Yet these sources do tell us something about the resources and vexations of the Capitoline notaries in the formative period of their association, their sense of identity, their relations with different centers of power in baroque Rome, and their collective direction. What they do not tell us is also instructive. Unlike those of their fifteenth-century forebears, the seventeenth-century statutes are silent about their members’ work. As we shall see in subsequent chapters, governments so thoroughly dominated public discourse about the Roman notaries’ two most important activities, writing and preserving records, that these texts had little to say about the documents their offices produced. The sources are eloquent, nonetheless, about what it took for the Capitoline notaries to survive, even as privileged notaries, in the complex interface they inhabited between tribunal and market, authorities and clients.
THE EARLIEST YEARS, 1586–1618
Sixtus V had told the notaries in 1586 that they could write statutes to govern their collective life, subject to approval by their judges.160 Is it possible that they waited thirty years to do so? I think not, though we do not have them, and we have only one or two oblique references gesturing to their existence.161 However, a close reading of the two earliest massa account books covering the period 1588 to 1607 leaves no doubt of a group that, though feeling its way in many respects, could act forcefully. The college of notaries of the Capitoline curia might be new, but it appears to have come into the world expecting combat and prepared to mobilize all the political resources available in early modern Rome to advance its agenda. If these resources did not include written rules for self-government, the notaries managed themselves with unusual discipline and effectiveness.
The thirty Capitoline notaries did not like something—unfortunately, we do not know exactly what—in the legislation that Sixtus had written establishing their venal offices. They may have begun agitating to change it while the pope was still alive, but they won their point almost immediately after he had died in August 1590. The official “correction” to the Sistine orders came within weeks of the election of the short-lived Pope Gregory XIV (1590–91).162
The common Roman political dynamic in which the legislation of one pontiff was undone by his successors worked to the disadvantage of the Capitoline notaries in the case of the Archivio Capitolino, however. The conservators, the civic officials who had originally set up the archive in 1562, saw its control wrested away by Sixtus’s decision in 1586 to give it to the new college. Biding their time they won their rights back under Pope Clement VIII (1592–1605) in 1594.163 At length, a compromise gave the conservators, on behalf of the Roman People, jurisdiction over the archive but conceded its actual management, expenses, and revenues to the Capitoline notaries. The college paid eighty scudi in 1602 to formalize this arrangement, but not before the conservators had posted an inscription over the entrance of the archive insisting on the public’s right to obtain copies at a reduced rate.164 The notaries would fight this injunction.
Although what was corrected in 1591 eludes us, the struggles with the conservators manifested the notaries’ anxiety in these early years over the extent of their powers and thus their ability to generate income. Jurisdiction, which may have been a purely symbolic good to some Roman contenders, meant the livelihood of court notaries.165 The question of which judges decided which cases had practical economic consequences for their notaries, and in a city of fractured judicial resources like Rome, few sparked more conflicts. Although by their nature the massa accounts reveal little about the content of these disputes, they show that the Capitoline notaries tangled with other courts over jurisdiction repeatedly, for example, in 1590, 1596, 1606, and 1607.166 In 1607 they even permit us to know who their adversaries were: the great papal civil justice court, the tribunal of the auditor of the Camera and, close to home on the Capitoline Hill, the protonotary of the senator.167 Litigation was the favored means of carrying on power struggles over jurisdiction, or indeed other issues, and these sources document regular retainers to attorneys, fees to lawyers for reviewing their arguments, payments to scribes for copying evidence and petitions, and payments to porters for delivering them.168 Hiring carriages for them, Capitoline notaries also mobilized the senator and the collaterali judges to intercede with the pope or influential cardinals on their behalf.169
The Capitoline notaries may or may not have had statutes in these early decades, but they certainly had officers and a regular means of electing them. Payment for a bussola or list of candidates for office in 1596 makes this plain.170 The mensario who kept the massa accounts on which we depend for the early history of the venal college may have been a post that rotated monthly. The term of the secretary appears to have been a year, with a replacement chosen annually in October on the feast day of the college’s patron saint.171 The office of decano, whom later statutes would identify as the most senior notary in the college, must have changed only on death or retirement.
Even more significant evidence of the Capitoline notaries’ robust association than having officers, however, was spending money. In 1602 they raised the funds necessary to regain control of the Archivio Capitolino by forgoing the monthly division of the massa payments that they had put into the common purse.172 But signs of a conscious policy of investing for the college’s future needs emerge in 1604, when, in tandem with imposing a minimum massa payment on each member of1.50 scudi a month, the notaries opened a bank account and began to purchase shares in the public bond market.173
Because the meeting minutes of the college are missing, the arguments that persuaded the majority to shift the basis of massa collection from a proportion of judicial fees to a flat rate remain a mystery. The new policy meant that in theory the mensario could count on collecting 45 scudi a month, a sum that generally exceeded the variable amounts the notaries were contributing a decade earlier.174 Instituting a minimum contribution increased their individual financial burden so they must have had good reasons for doing so. It also meant that eight years later, when Paul V freed up their offices in exchange for the annual provision of 400 scudi to the Roman People, the Capitoline notaries knew they could pay it. While we do not know whether they had their eye on that prize in 1604, they clearly had earmarked the money they were depositing in the local monte di pietà for purchases of bonds (luoghi di monte); they bought one for 120 scudi in November 1604 and four more in 1605.175 By passing up the monthly distribution of massa, as they had in 1602, they accumulated further funds in their bank account.176 Why? Tantalizing but enigmatic evidence that they purchased or redeemed an interest in one of the thirty Capitoline notarial offices between 1605 and 1607 does not really answer the question, and the massa records for the crucial period around 1612 are lost.177 What we can safely conclude, however, is that in their first twenty years the thirty venal officeholders who worked for the civil judges on the Capitol had fought quite a few battles and had won some victories. The Capitoline notaries had quickly forged a sense of collective purpose and a common strategy. Given this bond, it is not surprising also to find in 1606 the first payments for masses to be said for the souls of their deceased colleagues.178
The crucial turning point of 1612, when Paul V made the notaries’ offices fully heritable, may well count among the achievements of the new college, although we have no direct evidence. We do know that their acquisition of the municipality’s share in sales of their offices required the Capitoline notaries to commit themselves as a body to paying every year the sum of 400 scudi to the Roman People. The convergence of a free market in Capitoline notarial offices with a substantial regular financial burden, however, set contradictory pressures in motion for the college. Dependable massa collection was essential, for in theory, if all thirty titleholders paid the stipulated monthly minimum, the college would raise 540 scudi annually, more than enough for its obligation. But it was now more difficult to know who was responsible for making payments, because, as we recall, within a few years of the legislation two-thirds of the notaries had not completed the paperwork on their purchases. Despite repeated injunctions, the college still had not succeeded in tracking titleholders by 1674. Moreover, business trajectories varied considerably, and not all offices were equally profitable. Indeed, constant efforts to defend the jurisdiction of the Capitoline curia from competitors and to preserve the price structure of public instruments in the face of papal reforms suggest that thirty may have been too many notaries for all to prosper. Collectively, the Capitoline notaries had done well in their first twenty years, but over the next century some income sources declined, and others fluctuated worrisomely.
At the same time, subtle political processes gradually cut the venal Capitoline notaries off from their old civic patrons, the Roman People. In 1612, the same year in which their offices were freed, papal efforts to improve justice in the Roman civil courts led to landmark legislation disciplining notarial writing. Although Paul V’s reforms never denied the separate jurisdiction of the tribunal of the senator, the Capitoline notaries did not escape the long arm of his new documentary regime. Where power compelled, it also attracted, and over the course of the seventeenth century the political focus of the Capitoline notaries shifted slowly but inexorably away from the Capitol and toward the Vatican. In that magnetic field, they found themselves without strong protectors and with little bargaining power.
The two sets of statutes created by the college in the decades between 1618 and 1652 and the papal privileges they secured in 1674 testify to the efforts of the venal Capitoline notaries to adjust to the complex conditions in which they operated in baroque Rome. Only dimly grasping the forces that shaped these conditions, they struggled to keep their professional association viable. Their statutes illuminate the strategies and the strains of piloting a leaky vessel through the fierce crosscurrents and strong undertow that marked this formative period.
DEFINING THE TERMS, 1618–1652
Parchment cost them one scudo, illuminations of the crucifix and the notaries’ patron Saint Luke took another ten, and the scribe’s wages probably added around two scudi per copy more.179 The sum the Capitoline notaries spent on the first extant statutes of the college was about a third of their massa collection (forty-five scudi) in a good month. Elegant gold script on the title page and chapter titles of the sole surviving copy, though no illuminations, point to the special status of the manuscript, which bears the autograph approvals of the two collaterali judges in 1618.180 It is twenty-six folios with twenty-nine articles, covering patrons, officers, meetings, admission to the college, and, of course, the obligatory massa.
The Capitoline notaries held their meetings the first week of each month in the Archivio Capitolino, located near the courtyard in the Palace of the Conservators. There they sat together around a table, with the seating arrangement carefully fixed in the 1618 statutes and a little less rigid in those of 1652.181 Titleholders had to display the volume in which they entered judicial citations to the mensario before the meeting, and if they were up to date with their massa payments, they received a small “distribution” for attending, always exactly the same amount as everyone else.182 The massa registers show that, even with the incentive of the distribution, it was rare to find all thirty notaries in attendance.183 Yet, usually at least half were there, and the money was not unattractive; Erasto Spannocchia of office 15 protested when he missed a meeting because he had been told the wrong time.184
When the thirty Capitoline notaries looked around the table each month it was likely that the question on their minds was, Who had paid his massa and who had not? The question was complicated, as we have seen, by the fact that it was all too easy for the market in offices to ignore the formalities insisted upon by pope, city, and college and leave the colleagues in ignorance of precisely who should be at the table. But it was not just the owners or titleholders they did not know about who undermined the common fund but also negligent, tightfisted, or impoverished members they knew well. Each felt the failure to pay massa personally because those attending the meeting went home with a smaller distribution, and the collectivity also risked coming up short on its yearly obligation to the municipality. The college was not completely without remedies to compel massa contributions. In the 1630s it successfully sued at least two owners of Capitoline offices, neither of whom were titleholders, and received substantial back payments.185 Litigation was slow, however, too blunt an instrument for regular use. It was more efficient to create a sense of colleagueship, to invoke the Gospels and the traditions of Rome, and to set up as best they could an associational life that fostered the common good. This was the central task of the statutes the Capitoline notaries wrote and revised in the first half of the seventeenth century: to counter the centrifugal force of venality and a free market in offices by pressing home the imperative need to act as one.
The statutes of 1618 give the impression that men who routinely recorded the meetings of countless organizations in Rome did not themselves know how to conduct one. Apparently, they learned over the next several decades. In 1652 the articles instructing them to propose items for discussion one after another, to bring up a new topic only after the previous one had been settled, to delegate business that could not be expedited at one session to a committee, and to vote on a measure only after it had been thoroughly discussed were gone.186 The 1652 statutes worry more about discord than confusion at meetings, and especially about strong disagreements between members or with the college’s collective decisions.187 They dictate all kinds of measures to keep the peace, including elaborate protocols for showing respect to the most senior notary in the college, the decano, who ran the meetings and had the right to speak and vote before anyone else. So fulsome is the language about the reverence owed to the decano in the text of 1652 that it may be a clue to the motivation behind the statute’s revision, for Leonardo Bonanni assumed the decano’s position that year following sixteen years under the leadership of Tranquillo Scolocci.188
The statutes of 1618 set forth the duties of ten officers, a third of the total members. It must not have been easy to fill the posts because there were penalties for refusing office, and in 1652 the college dropped the minimum qualifications for officers from three years of membership to two and from twenty-five years of age to twenty.189 The decano served for life, but the other college officers were elected in various ways. The mensario was extracted during the monthly meeting to serve a one-month term, but because the extraction was to be made “one after another according to seniority among those present,” it was hardly left to chance.190 If the decano’s authority represented the college’s homage to hierarchy, the strict rotation of the mensario’s job signaled its commitment to collective governance. In addition to such mundane tasks as notifying members of the time of the meeting, the mensario had to settle disputes between colleagues and, with the judge’s blessing, between them and their clients.191 The treasurer, called the depositario, whose role grew more important over these decades, was the third major official.192 While before 1620 each mensario seems to have kept track of who paid in massa during his monthly term, the 1630s massa register shows that the depositario, whose term was open-ended, had taken over this responsibility.193 Reflecting the delicacy of his assignment, the members elected the depositario by a two-thirds vote.194 The mensario was paid 1.20 scudi for his monthly service, and the depositario 18 scudi per year.
Less important officers were chosen each October by lot for a one-year term.195 The college’s secretary was among these, as well as two syndics, who had the duty of reviewing the depositario’s accounts and making sure all officials had passed their records on to their successors.196 In a sign of the strong identification of the college with the Archivio Capitolino, four other elected officers had responsibilities for the traditionally lengthy and expensive process of authenticating transunti, which we have seen were the instruments copied from the protocols of deceased notaries. While this task might appear to have occupied almost half the college’s officers, it could not have been very onerous. A hired archivist took requests for transunti (and a deposit) from the public, made sure customers handed over the judge’s authorizing warrant, looked for the original on his shelves, made the actual copy, and collected fees for the whole process.197 Aided by helpful formulas written into the notarial statutes, the secretary formalized the procedure with considerably more dispatch, if no less expense, than in previous centuries.
The evidence of accounts and statutes shows that the Capitoline notaries were firmly embedded within the physical as well as legal space of the tribunal of the senator. The notaries apparently did not welcome the order that they pay the regular costs of sweeping their courtroom in the senator’s palace. Whether it was the conservators or the senator himself who made the assignment, the matter eventually fell to the senator as chief magistrate to enforce. After he threatened legal penalties and after six months of wrangling, the sweeper’s wages appear for the first time in the massa accounts of April 1595, a monthly entry that continues unflaggingly through the surviving volumes.198
In addition to cleaning their judges’ courtroom, the Capitoline notaries also paid for its repairs. In 1618 they donated four new doors and a spalliera behind the collaterale’s bench.199 Across the piazza in the Palace of the Conservators, they provided a welcome fund for building upkeep with their annual four-hundred-scudi payment, and they furnished and supplied the archive on its ground floor. This material connection to the Capitoline Hill had a ritual and political dimension, too. Although as individuals these notaries came from diverse locales and worked in offices scattered around the city, as a collectivity they linked themselves closely to Roman civic traditions.
Embracing their romanitas, they proudly described themselves in their statutes as keeping court records for the Senate and People of Rome and imitating the ancients in the respect they showed for the senior (playing on the root for the word senator) members of the college.200 The college took part in the new senator’s possesso or inauguration procession.201 Retaining Saint Luke, patron of their pre-1586 forebears, the thirty Capitoline notaries continued the custom of celebrating his feast day in October by hosting a solemn mass at the church next to the senator’s palace to which they invited their judges and the rest of the officialdom of the Roman People. The Latin sermon, the music and chant, the flowers and candles all came at a price, but the Capitoline notaries paid it so that they could demonstrate their profound gratitude not only to Saint Luke but to the municipality.202
When giving gifts of chickens, sugar loaves, and candles to the judges at Christmas and Ferragosto and calling on their aid when they needed favors, the Capitoline notaries behaved like proper clients in the civic patronage network.203 Nor were they just going through the motions when they spoke of thanking civic officials for their many “grazie,” which included Christmas presents of pepper, wax, sweetmeats, and gloves.204 The conservators helped obtain the release of their hired archivist Antonio Campora when he was imprisoned by order of the cardinal protector of the neofiti (new converts to Catholicism) in 1615, and the civic councils defended their privileges in 1608 and 1622.205 In 1616, as in 1596, 1606, 1607, and undoubtedly at other times, the collaterali judges interceded for them with papal officials.206 When the notaries presented extra Christmas capons to one of the judges for doing double duty while his colleague’s office was vacant, their gratitude was appropriate, for without his extra service half of their members would have lost their fees from judicial work.207
Admittedly, the course of patron-client relationships did not always run smoothly. The conservators’ attempts to make available cheap copies of the documents in the Archivio Capitolino ran into stout resistance, and they ignored the notaries’ request for a permanent room in their palace.208 For their part the senator and collaterali sometimes disciplined the Capitoline notaries, as a group or individually. We have seen that in 1617 the senator made them pay for the orders to their members that reminded them to expedite their titles to their offices properly, and the collaterali may have forced fraudulent notaries to sell their offices, as was rumored in one case.209 Papal policy increasingly pressed judges to stop abuses by their notaries. But for the most part the foreign-born magistrate who served as senator and the collaterali judges, drawn from those upwardly mobile lawyers of the peninsula seeking careers in the papal bureaucracy, resembled allies more than adversaries. Even the popes acknowledged this when, as a mark of special favor, they guaranteed the Capitoline notaries summary justice from the senator.210
The political realities of the papal capital taught the wisdom of having ecclesiastical as well as civic patrons, beginning with Saint Luke, of course, but moving swiftly to a cardinal protector. We catch only a few glimpses of these men, usually receiving Christmas gifts, but they were clearly chosen with an eye to influence and wealth. The Roman cardinal Girolamo Mattei (1547–1603), who had been auditor of the Camera before his elevation, may have been the Capitoline notaries’ first protector. They lobbied him to defend their jurisdiction in 1596.211 The noted art patron Cardinal Benedetto Giustiniani (1554–1621), from a fabulously rich Genoese banking family, was his successor.212 A 1618 petition from Marco Tullio dell’ Huomo of Capitoline notarial office 16, who was desperately trying to put together a legal defense team after spending several months in prison, illustrates the kind of aid a cardinal protector might be called on to provide.213 If their own collaterale judge Marco Antonio Gozzadini was the man Pope Gregory XV (1621–23) made a cardinal, the Capitoline notaries must have been overjoyed by the news and very likely chose him as protector after Giustiniani’s death in 1621.214 We lose the scent when Gozzadini died just two years later, but sometime between 1641 and 1652 they selected the great-nephew of Sixtus V, Cardinal Francesco Peretti (1595–1653).215 The 1652 statutes make clear that, on the politically sensitive question of who would be cardinal protector, the notaries must be in open and perfect accord.216
Apart from the protector, the only other cardinal to receive regular gifts from the Capitoline notaries over the years was the cardinal prefect of the tribunal of the Segnatura di Giustizia and his auditor.217 An enduring relationship with these officials began under Sixtus V. The pope, eager to send legal business to the newly venal Capitoline notaries but also to distribute it evenhandedly, specified that when the cardinal prefect remitted cases from the Segnatura to the Capitoline curia, they be assigned in rotation.218 The notaries welcomed the “commissioned cases,” as they were known, and their relationship with the Segnatura di Giustizia continued to expand. By the eighteenth century, and perhaps before, it was customary for them to read citations one day a week at the judicial audience held by the prefect’s auditor.219 The ritual gifts thus marked an important node in the patronage networks of the college.
As for the popes themselves, the sources are a bit too meager to assess how the thirty Capitoline notaries regarded their sovereigns, the rulers who dictated the very conditions of their professional existence and whose legislation we examine elsewhere. Zealous papal attention to notarial writing and archival practices over the period 1560 to 1630 certainly shifted the focus of the Capitoline notaries from the Capitol to the Vatican. Sixtus V and Paul V were undoubtedly perceived as benefactors to the men who purchased these offices, though Paul’s judicial reforms struck intrusively into their writing practices in ways that must have been trying. Urban VIII (1623–44) may also have annoyed them with his new archival demands in 1625, although we have only the evidence of silence, but relations with him and his Barberini relatives could not have been a simple matter. Signaling their awareness that civic power was not enough to protect their jurisdiction, the Capitoline notaries sought Urban’s guarantee that the caporioni, elected leaders of Rome’s fourteen districts (rioni), should choose as notaries only men from their ranks.220 It is likely that the special Christmas gift of twenty-eight scudi received by his agent on the Capitol had something to do with that favorable treatment.221
When it was his turn, Urban VIII asked the college to contribute the large sum of two hundred scudi to his unpopular war with the Duke of Parma in the 1640s, giving the notaries only ten days to collect the first installment.222 By small steps like these the Capitoline notaries were drawn inexorably into the papal judicial orbit, joining the notaries of the papal courts in what was becoming de facto, if not de jure, a single state system. Perhaps it was not a coincidence, therefore, when the Capitoline notaries allied with the notaries of the auditor of the Camera in a successful suit to defend their respective jurisdictions as courts of first instance in debt cases in a judgment handed down by the cardinal chamberlain in 1636.223
Because their college not only guaranteed the inheritability of their offices but also helped them to negotiate the status and power hierarchy of baroque Rome, the Capitoline notaries had an incentive to keep it solvent. In the first twenty years of venality, they succeeded in accumulating a small capital, as we have seen, by winning back from the Roman People the right to income from the Archivio Capitolino and by setting minimum massa contributions. By the middle decades of the seventeenth century, however, the confident financial trajectory of the early years wavered. Following the trail of revenues from archive and massa, we see that after 1612, instead of being able to put money away, the college had all it could do just to collect what it was owed.
Of all their links with the civic past, none was more material for the venal notaries than the Archivio Capitolino, which contained the protocols of Roman notaries going back to the fourteenth century. Willingly seeking responsibility for the upkeep and storage of these records, the Capitoline notaries clearly considered what remained to them after the share of the heirs, one-third of the fees from transunti, to be a valuable asset. To attract customers, the 1618 statutes stipulated that the archive was to be open in the morning while the Capitoline courts were in session.224 How well founded were these hopes? Early accounts do not record the new college’s income from the archive systematically, and amounts fluctuated widely from month to month. In June 1598, for example, transunti brought in eleven scudi and the next month twenty-five scudi.225 Yet a picture does emerge. The massa book of 1615–20 shows that copies netted on average ninety-seven scudi a year, probably somewhat less than in the 1590s but still significant for a group that had to find a minimum of four hundred scudi annually.226
This income did not come free, however, and in the decade after 1612 the Archivio Capitolino cost the notaries quite a bit.227 Surprisingly, because the archive had lost its main constituency when Sixtus V made the Capitoline offices venal, it needed more space.228 In 1614 the civic councils granted the college conditional use of a second room in the Palace of the Conservators for the protocols of the notaries who worked for the first collaterale.229 The college paid to make it suitable for an archive and asked unsuccessfully to keep it in perpetuity.230 In addition to the renovation, in 1616 the notaries covered the cost of binding fifty-one old protocols and buying a leather volume in which to inventory the archive’s contents. In 1618 they purchased new locks, and in 1619 more shelving. In 1637 the Archivio Capitolino again needed new keys and in 1638 a small ladder.231 Another expense was their hired archivist, whose position the 1652 statutes formalized, though in practice it had long predated them.232
The painful logic of a capital consisting of notarial records, however, as Romans had been realizing already for some time, was that its value tended to decrease over time.233 Fewer people needed copies of a will or a censo one hundred years after its rogation than fifty years and so on. The depositario’s accounts show that the college’s annual revenues from the Archivio Capitolino had declined to around sixty scudi by the 1640s and the figure was even lower by the 1670s.234 By the early eighteenth century, the Capitoline notaries regarded the archive as a useless burden, struggled to rid themselves of it, and failed only because of forceful papal intervention.235
Disappointing returns from transunti deepened the college’s dependence on regular massa contributions, which ought, if everyone had paid the minimum, to have provided 540 scudi a year. Because the amount of massa (above the minimum) owed by individual Capitoline notaries was based on their earnings from judicial acts and transunti, the college enforced collection by having the mensario review each office’s register of these documents (the liber expeditionum) monthly.236 The 1618 statutes instructed members to use a bound volume with numbered pages for this purpose.237 The massa records of the 1630s, the first we have from the hand of the more stable depositario rather than the rotating mensario, rarely show anyone paying more than the mandatory minimum of 1.5 scudi. Taddeo Raimondo of office 25, who contributed on average 4 scudi more each year than the minimum, was an exception, as was the depositario himself, Paolo Vespignani of office 28.238 Even those who eventually paid the minimum, however, did not necessarily pay it every month, and long arrears were registered for many Capitoline offices, especially those in the hands not of titleholders but of subcontracting lessors or administrators.
Fines might have been one way to compel timely massa payments, but the college accounts reveal only one such entry, in July 1616, when two notaries paid the very small penalty of ten baiocchi.239 By the 1630s the college seems to have abandoned fines in favor of denying delinquents the meeting distributions or Christmas gifts, or shaming them by making them ineligible for college offices.240 Litigation was the backup method of enforcement.241 While the accounts from the 1640s show less than a 5 percent shortfall in massa totals, the Capitoline notaries were alarmed.242 The 1652 statutes made significant changes to this crucial income source.
First, the college increased the fines it apparently did not levy to three scudi for incorrect or late payments and ten scudi for appealing against an order to pay.243 Then, to bolster income from massa, the 1652 statutes also added for the first time since 1586 a new type of document. Targeting an enthusiasm of Roman investors, the new charges fell on paperwork needed for trading shares in the public debt.244 Other measures increased the powers of the depositario to oversee the whole process of collection.245 They also demanded that the liber expeditionum record what massa were owed for each pertinent document and required signatures verifying compliance.246 Finally the statutes enhanced the college’s ability to force payment from delinquents by insisting that as part of admission formalities new notaries execute a public instrument obligating them to pay massa.247 The instrument’s purpose was to remind members that they might face legal action for failing to put in their monthly contributions. The 1652 statutes explicitly authorized the college to sue titleholders, owners, or administrators for massa debts before either Capitoline or curial judges. They also declared that judges in either jurisdiction had the right to place administrators in notarial offices in order to obtain back payments.
Tightening up its income, the college also wanted to use a revision of its statutes to strengthen bonds among its members. “It is fitting that the notaries of our college hold our writing and instruments in common.”248 Because notaries were of all people the most likely to seek individual profit from documents, the declaration introducing article 31 of the 1652 statutes seems somewhat surprising. The article bolstered esprit de corps, however, by confirming the long-standing custom by which Capitoline notaries and their children could obtain any business or judicial act they desired without charge, even after they had relinquished their offices.249
The ability to litigate for free was indeed a nice privilege in seventeenth-century Rome. The college built ties through aid to members too, setting aside time at each monthly meeting to listen to the needs of the indigent, sending loaves of sugar to a colleague who was ill, or making loans to the hapless Dell’Huomo in prison.250 The statutes expected Capitoline notaries to attend each other’s funerals, and the college paid the bills.251
Paul V’s 1612 judicial reforms had decisively ended any illusion that the notarial profession itself was responsible for seeing that judicial acts and business contracts were properly written and kept, although the pope had left the new college the former college’s right to inspect protocols annually.252 In their incarnation as venal officeholders, the Capitoline notaries showed no interest in monitoring production standards and generally avoided any role in disciplining each other’s writing practices. They defined professional misconduct now not as fraudulent instruments but quarrels; what mattered most to them was collegial harmony. Their fears were not without foundation if we look, for example, at contemporary France. The statutes prohibited words and deeds that injured colleagues in or out of the meeting, actions that jeopardized their common interests as a college, and protests over massa or meeting decisions.253 Insisting on respect for seniority, but not exclusively, they reminded members that no one’s vote was to be disdained.254 Thus, they punished infractions of collegiality less with derisory fines than loss of voice and vote, forfeiture of monthly distributions and Christmas gifts, and finally banishment from meetings.255
More artfully, however, the revised statutes of 1652 sought every means possible to remove the sources of internal strife. Because relocating might increase competition for notarial business in a specific area, they insisted that the Capitoline notaries not change their quarters without the concurrence of the whole college.256 The college’s successful efforts to gain a monopoly of notarial service to the fourteen district caporioni might have led to “avarice and ambition” among members. The 1652 statutes assigned notaries to rioni by a strict rotation, though they acknowledged that it might not always be easy to persuade the caporione to accept the notary they had selected for him.257
Sixtus V had made much of granting the venal Capitoline notaries the privilege of a higher standard of proof when litigants sought to remove them from a case “on suspicion.” Writing in the 1630s, the former senator Giovanni Battista Fenzonio emphasized that litigating parties had to give the judge explicit reasons, not just allegations, when seeking to dismiss one of the Capitoline notaries.258 The notaries looked at the matter differently. Whatever the reasons, one of them was going to lose the fees and another was going to gain them. To diminish the pain, the 1618 statutes gave one-third of the lost fees to the notary taken off the case.259 By 1652, “taught by experience” about the conflicts arising in these situations, they decree that both notaries would share the proceeds equally and that both would sign the official records.260
As this problem reveals, no threat to brotherly fellow feeling could compete with that posed by the Roman judicial system itself from which the Capitoline notaries drew their livelihood. The college’s many efforts to mitigate competition for the fees of litigants show how fiercely notaries fought for these fees. The 1652 statutes addressed in detail the question of how to decide which notary got the case when warrants had been issued in the acts of several.261 Another article, which might appear at first glance to be an attempt at judicial reform, was in fact motivated by the wish to keep members from trying to undercut each other. It specified that in cases where property had been seized or a person incarcerated, presumably for unpaid debts, only the notary who had provided the initial summons could write the ones for release.262
Given how much was at stake, the college eventually resigned itself to the prospect that there would be times when colleagues would sue each other over their court cases. The 1652 statutes supplemented the informal mechanisms by which the mensario or the meeting itself settled disputes with special procedures for litigation within their own ranks.263 These were all the more necessary because the judges, whom of course they knew intimately, liked to send these cases back to the college to resolve.
Keeping their own house in order was a priority for the thirty Capitoline notaries because they needed to stand together in the challenging Roman environment in which they worked. By indicating what they most wanted to control, the 1652 statutes hint at what they had the most trouble controlling. The real sore spots were admission to the college, approval of those who leased or administered offices for titleholders, disputes with clients (especially litigants), location of their offices, and assignment of notaries to the caporioni.264 They reserved their highest fines, twenty-five scudi, for infractions related to these issues, as well as for removing documents from the archive.265 In each of these domains, try as they might, the college of the notaries of the Capitoline curia did not have the last word. It had to bow to superior forces, whether in the form of the market for venal offices, patrician privilege, or judicial oversight.
THE CRISIS OF THE 1670S
Twenty years out, the new measures of 1652 designed to increase massa contributions and make them more reliable appear to have succeeded. The register begun in October 1667 recorded the unvarying entry of 540 scudi a year, just what it should have been if each notary had paid the annual minimum of 18 scudi.266 But other evidence belies the soothing figures. In 1670 college members hoped the Roman People would cut the annual payment in consideration of the lengthy vacant see, which had shut down the courts from 9 December 1669 to 11 May 1670.267 Along with venal notaries from other tribunals, the Capitoline notaries asked to have their numbers reduced early in the reign of Pope Clement X (1670–76).268 In September 1672 they deputed an attorney to attempt to collect massa arrears from someone who had not paid for ten years.269 At a meeting called by the pope, they sent delegates to complain about loss of judicial business that resulted from infractions of their jurisdiction.270 And finally, in April 1674, they sought papal help to confront the failure of titleholders to pay massa and, more profoundly, to inform them of who properly held title to the thirty Capitoline offices.271 By July the pope had complied with a chirograph granting them much stronger legal powers of compulsion and setting forth what must have been their own view of what was going wrong.
According to this text the college could not obtain the four hundred scudi required each year for the Roman People from its members and had to resort to borrowing.272 Structural problems long afflicting the Capitoline notarial offices were to blame. Because, like all venal offices, they circulated freely, they fell into the hands of clerics and ecclesiastical institutions that could not be sued in the tribunal of the senator or became the dotal property of daughters that was legally protected from creditors. Notwithstanding the threats to litigate in papal tribunals launched in the 1652 statutes, privileged persons in Rome apparently did not heed the regulations of a notarial college.
In addition, it had proved impossible for either the college or the papal and civic authorities to compel the buyers and sellers of Capitoline notarial offices to keep them perfectly informed of who held title to these posts.273 Even if owners sincerely urged the men whom they intended as titleholders of the offices to follow the cumbersome series of steps needed to register their titles and gain admission to the college, neither they nor anyone else knew whether the new titleholders had done so. No one oversaw the whole process, and notaries avoided delays and expense by ignoring it. By raising the bar in the 1652 statutes and demanding that new notaries legally obligate themselves and their heirs to pay massa, the college may even have added to the motives for evading title formalities. According to Clement X, who must have been speaking from the college’s own script, the organization was destitute because owners countered its attempts to litigate by waving their legal exemptions, and titleholders completely ignored its existence.274
Clement’s 1674 chirograph invalidated privileged exemptions and allowed the Capitoline notaries to proceed legally “manu regia et more camerali” against those who had not properly expedited their titles. The college now had the authority to seize the documents of anyone who had failed to complete admission formalities and take them into their own custody in the archive. With the senator’s approval, college officers could go even further, auctioning off the offender’s office, removing its records, and placing it under an administrator. The college was not required to make any formal accounting of its administration of the office in these circumstances, and if any litigation ensued, the senator, presumably sympathetic to his notaries, would be the ultimate arbiter.275
So pleased were the Capitoline notaries with their new legal powers that they ordered that the chirograph be printed and given to all thirty, with the original to be kept in the chest of their important documents in the archive.276 It was a victory, and one that allowed them finally to set all the structures of their professional association in place. Perhaps it was also effective; seven years later, the college managed a temporary increase in massa payments for nine months.277 But the negotiations with Clement X, whether over reducing their numbers or increasing the college’s legal clout, could not have made it clearer that in the post-1586 era the fortunes of the thirty Capitoline notaries were in the hands of the papacy.
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