Careers and Opportunities at the Roman Curia, 1300-1500

A Socio-Economic History of Papal Administration

Schwarz, Brigide
Mueller, Wolfgang (ed.)

Brigide Schwarz (1940–2019), a leading German historian of the Renaissance papacy, is presented here for the first time in a dossier of ten previously untranslated scholarly studies.
The volume brings the mechanisms of late medieval career building back to life. Success among churchmen was measured in access to ever more lucrative ecclesiastical endowments (or benefices). As the fifteenth century progressed, their treatment assumed highly monetized and abstract dimensions. Guided by Dr Schwarz, economic historians can discern many transactions that foreshadow the asset management of present-day Wall Street.
From the 1400s, administrative positions at the papal court (or Curia) were increasingly auctioned off. This created a marketplace for bidders expecting returns by way of ‘creative’ fee regulations or through the cornering of services in monopolies.
Only recently, scholarship has begun to question older depictions of the late medieval Church as one of decay and moral corruption. Dr Schwarz points to the ‘modernity’ of the fiscal arrangements which nation states like France soon copied as an efficient model of public financing.