Folia Canonica 5. (2002)
STUDIES - Kenneth Pennington: Bishops and their Dioceses
BISHOPS AND THEIR DIOCESES 9 which he ruled. We may make a comparison to the secular world. Princes ruled over people and regions rather than over territories, and bishops imitated secular rulers in their conceptions of their power and authority.5 Although we cannot imagine these “imagined communities” as territorial in its modern meaning, during the next three centuries, boundaries began to replace personal and familial relationships. In the secular world the names reflect the changes. The kings of France gradually evolved from the Rex Francorum to Rex Franciae. The kings of England from Rex Anglorum to Rex Angliáé. In the ecclesiastical world, papal titles reflected the popes’ gradual imperial dominance of the church with titles like vicarius Christi and the Roman Church assumed the title mater omnium ecclesiarum. Bishops just remained bishops as they gathered in the reins of authority and power within their dioceses. In the time of Burchard of Worms in the beginning of the eleventh century, bishoprics began to be called “patriae”. Clerics could be considered to be “citizens” of the patria by ordination; laymen by birth. Clerics could not or should not travel outside the diocese without litterae formatae that might be seen as a very early form of passport. During the same time, the civitas of the diocese, the episcopal see, became more and more like a capital city. Again a comparison to the secular world is instructive. In the tenth and eleventh centuries kings, princes, dukes, counts and other temporal rulers wandered about the countryside within their domains. Their territories were defined by the places where they exercised lordship and where their subjects owed them hospitality. There was little distinction made between the peripheries and the centers of power and authority. Bishops, however, were the first rulers in Europe to transform their sees into capital cities. The bishop occupied his sedes in a specific geographical location much earlier than any secular ruler identified his rule with a particular place within his domains. This happened primarily during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. There are stone and mortar witnesses to this development. It is not by chance that the great building projects of Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries were not secular princely palaces but great palaces of worship that represented Christian power, episcopal authority, and urban pride throughout Europe. Since episcopal power was secular and ecclesiastic, the centralization of a bishop’s authority brought them in conflict with secular rulers. This part of the story is well known. In Italy, Germany, France and England, bishops struggled with the nobility and the rising merchant classes to maintain their jurisdictional rights within the city and in the surrounding countryside. In the tenth and eleventh centuries bishops were successful in establishing a “sacral space” in which 5 Historians of early medieval Europe have emphasized this aspect of kingship in recent years. See, for example, J. Nelson’s remarks in Charles the Bald (The Medieval World), London-New York 1992, 41-74.
