The Church as a Governance Actor in a Period of Post-Imperial Transition: Delegation of Fiscal Rights and Legal Change in 10th-century Churraetia

Abstract

Taking the Alpine region of Churraetia as a case study, this paper investigates processes of fiscal delegation, their preconditions, their legal construction, and their consequences. As Churraetia maintained many features of Roman provincial administration and statehood well into the Carolingian period, the article’s first part traces how fiscal revenues and rights came to be delegated to the episcopal church of Chur via royal privilege from the mid-9th century until 960. The delegation of fiscal rights usually happened in special situations when kings and grantees agreed on a closer cooperation in the future. In the course of this process, which in the case of Churraetia eventually turned a former Roman province into an ecclesiastical principality, the episcopal church became a governance actor that would play a crucial rule in exercising public functions such as tax collection, jurisdiction and military recruitment. Ecclesiastical property (often deriving from royal munificence) and fiscal income became indispensable means for performing these functions. The article’s second part focuses on the situation of 912 when the newly elected East Frankish king Conrad I, the first ruler of non-Carolingian stock, conferred two special privileges on the episcopal church of Chur: Conrad’s grant of the right to conduct inquisition procedure by compulsory witness in order to protect ecclesiastical property effectively meant that procedural law typical for the »public sphere« now came into the hands of the bishop of Chur. Conrad’s second stipulation, that the thirty-year period of proscription should not to be applied against the interest of the bishop of Chur, has to be seen against the background of legal pluralism in this region, in which several legal traditions were in conflict: while Roman law allowed a slave to rid himself of his master after thirty years, Aleman law forbade this, just as the idea that ecclesiastical property was regarded as inalienable spoke against the application of the thirty-years rule to the detriment of the church. Responding to ecclesiastical networks supporting his rule, Conrad thus had the Roman legal rule of prescription branded as a »bad custom« (mala consuetudo). As is finally argued in a more general perspective, in historical situations of political transition legal pluralism and legal change could lead to a new qualification of what had formerly been seen in more positive terms as »custom«.