The Legal Pluralism of Early Modern Papacy: The Tribunals of the Papal Nuncios in the Portugal Empire and in the Republic of Venice (1650-1750)

• Applicant: Dr. Marco Cavarzere
• Subject Area: Early Modern History
• Term: from 2019 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 416417562

The research project aims to investigate the cross-cultural functions performed by the papal jurisdiction through a microhistorical analysis of the tribunals of the Nuncios. In this way, it intends to reconsider the role that the Papacy played as a political institution in the early modern world.On the one hand, the project will show that, until the enlightened reforms of the eighteenth century, the Papacy performed worldwide jurisdictional functions both in criminal and civil matters. Contrary to the opinion that the Papacy gave up its political prerogatives to the European monarchies during the 15th and 16th centuries, the project intends to demonstrate that the courts of the Nuncios continued to assert and enforce papal jurisdiction in Europe as well as in the non-European colonies of the Catholic state. On the other hand, it has the goal of showing that the jurisdictional power of the Papacy relied on layered legal arrangements with secular authorities and different components of the Catholic Church itself (religious orders, bishops, etc.), as well as on the participation of different social actors. In this view, the project will reveal that the Papacy was one of the very few institutions that exerted its jurisdictional power in different parts of the world in the course of the early modern period.In order to reach broad conclusions on the Papacy as a whole, this research project will focus on two contexts: that of the tribunal of the Nuncio in Lisbon and that of the Nuncio in Venice. Two considerations lay at the core of this comparative research. Firstly, the analysis of these two courts will make possible to see that the Papacy performed actual jurisdictional activities all over the world, from Brasil through different European regions to India. In the second place, it will show that, in doing so, the courts of the nuncios reflected a strongly decentralized structure of power. The courts of the papal nuncios were not only mostly presided over by local judges, chosen among local legal practitioners, but also acted only as appeal courts under the direct request of the petitioners. As a result, the courts of papal nuncios were also places of social and political negotiation, where local actors could internalize and manipulate Church norms.In this way, the research project will finally show how these papal tribunals provided justice to local, non-European populations.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants