Prebend itineraries in the Repertorium Germanicum

Last week on our blog we covered the payments of annates. Annates were paid to the Roman Curia after a claimant had obtained a prebend. This post will show various examples of the acquisition of prebends as well as the local concentration of prebends. Furthermore, the career paths of scholars who studied at the University of Erfurt in the late Middle Ages will be presented. The basis of this study is an extensive prosopographical investigation of more than 700 late medieval lawyers (Gramsch 2003), whose personal catalogue was transferred to a database within the framework of our project and further investigated with network-analytical methods.

Hauptknoten des Pfründenbesitzes

Image: MEPHISTO

Published: 5 November 2021, 22:31 | By: Robert Gramsch-Stehfest & Anja Rusche

Generating prebend itineraries

For the network-analytical modelling of the biographies of the Erfurt lawyers, we have implemented a new procedure - the generation of so-called "prebend itineraries". This is not an itinerary in the usual sense. It lists not the places where the jurists travelled, but the places where they worked, i.e., those ecclesiastical institutions for which exists evidence that they held sinecures. In the model, the places where a cleric was founded are connected in the chronological order of the acquisition of the benefices. For better comparability, the representation remains at the diocesan level (so that e.g. benefices in Thuringia or Hesse fall under the diocese of Mainz).

In the following example, the first known prebend. held by the curial Johannes Brun, is a chapel in the diocese of Mainz, which he held around 1411. Further prebends in the dioceses of Halberstadt, Hildesheim, Magdeburg and Lübeck are attested in his prebend portfolio in the same year - at this point it is not the exact order that is important, but the fact that all these dioceses are connected one after the other like on a string of pearls. From Lübeck, he returned to Magdeburg in 1413 and 1415, then to Schwerin and Brandenburg and finally back to Mainz, where Johannes Brun crowned his career as a benefice in 1420 with the acquisition of the deanship of the Marienstift in Erfurt. In this case, the circle is closed - in other cases, however, one sees how the focus of a prebendal career shifts, for example, from the west to the east of the empire, or how it is anchored in a core area, from which there are, for example, individual "side trips" to other regions.

If one compares Johannes Brun with other lawyers who studied in Erfurt, it is noticeable that most of them remained within one or at most two dioceses. However, there are also quite several cases that go to the other extreme.

Netzwerke Pfründenbesitz von Johannes Helling und Johannes Brun
Image: MEPHISTO

Johannes Helling of Münster, for example, sought a total of 48 prebends in 18 dioceses. The focus of his activities was on his native Westphalia, where he eventually rose to become dean of the cathedral of Osnabrück, but he also sought prebends in southern Germany, especially in Constance, which at the time was relatively open to outside influences due to its role as host to the famous church assembly in 1414-17. In the Bavarian dioceses, Helling was less successful despite many efforts. To compensate for this, however, he was able to acquire canonries in such remote cathedral chapters as Breslau and Trent. The zigzag of the lines back and forth between the north and south of Germany shows that Helling remained "on the go" throughout his life, seeking and finding opportunities everywhere - in his case, there was thus no directed shift in his centre of food or activity. This pattern is particularly common among the clerics working at the Curia, the curials - to which Helling also belonged - since they sat "at the source" in Rome and could cast their nets in many directions at once. It is also a curious observation that Helling had no benefices at all in the diocese with the most benefices in the German Church, the diocese of Mainz.

Thuringian Scholars

In a next step, let us look at the prebend itineraries of larger groups of scholars. For this purpose, the individual prebend itineraries are superimposed so that spatial patterns emerge which show how certain groups of people, defined for example by common spatial origins, were anchored in the late medieval German Church. Thus, for example, the scholars who came from Thuringia (88 in total) show a quite conspicuous They migrated predominantly to the south and southwest in their prebend activities. They largely avoided the East, the Baltic States and the Lower Saxony-Westphalia region, while conversely quite a few Lower Saxons "immigrated" to Central Germany. Here the Erfurt data show an occupational migration pattern that looks surprisingly similar to that of the present day - namely a certain east-west and north-south migration that was probably caused by the pull of the richly endowed prebend landscapes on the Rhine and Danube. Theses already formulated by Peter Moraw "On developmental differences and developmental equalisation in the German and European Middle Ages" can be better validated and perhaps formulated more precisely in the future based on these data.

Pfründen der Erfurter Juristen
Image: MEPHISTO

Masters of the prebend holders

Finally, we should take a look at some diagrams in which the prebends are filtered according to the prebends of the lawyers. In this approach, we can examine the extent to which certain princes, or even important cities, were anchored in Germany through their learned councillors - which can indicate both their possibilities of influence and the reach of their communication networks. It is particularly important to bear in mind here, that the view through Erfurt's glasses may be distorted, since only graduates of this university were considered. Nevertheless, we do receive quite plausible findings: while the archbishop of Mainz, for example, had learned councillors in his service who were practically anchored throughout the empire in terms of ecclesiastical institutions, the corresponding sphere of influence of the archbishop of Trier is limited practically exclusively to the far west of the empire. The network of relations of the royal councillors also extended across the empire - its similarity to that of the archbishop of Mainz shows the importance of the archbishop as chancellor of the Holy Roman Empire, which he was well able to fill thanks to "omnipresent" councillors. On the other hand, the supraregionality of the Count Palatine of the Rhine is considerably less, which is trumped in particular by the learned councillors of the Wettinian princes. Even the imperial city of Nuremberg, with its strong roots in eastern Germany, is somewhat better off. The relationship structure around the landgraves of Hesse is downright third-rate, while the margraves of Brandenburg from Hohenzollern very nicely illustrate their political double track (existing since 1415) in Franconia and in the Mark Brandenburg.

Summary and outlook

The above examples show that the new method of the prebend itineraries allows interesting conclusions to be drawn about the career paths of the learned clergy. The potential of data-driven research for prosopographical investigations is unmistakable; new hypotheses can be generated through network visualisations and analyses based on this. But of course, a look at the respective biographical sources and the literature remains the decisive prerequisite for any further analysis. "Analogue" and "digital" work complement each other and in combination can provide new insights.

Referenzen

zugrundeliegendes Datenmaterial aus

Robert Gramsch: Erfurter Juristen im Spätmittelalter. Die Karrieremuster und Tätigkeitsfelder einer gelehrten Elite des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts (Education and Society in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, 17), Leiden / Boston 2003 (Personenkatalog auf CD-ROM).

Robert Gramsch-Stehfest; Christian Knüpfer; Clemens Beck: „Information extraction from medieval sources and historical network analysis: Late medieval clerical networks in the Repertorium Germanicum“, Vortrag auf der 6th Historical Network Research conference „Historical Networks – Réseaux Historiques – Historische Netzwerke“ (online), 1.07.2021.

Robert Gramsch-Stehfest: „Prosopographie 2.0.: Digital gestützte Forschungen zu Gelehrtenbiographien im Spätmittelalter. Ein Werkstattbericht zu Fragen, Methoden und Erkenntnispotentialen“, Vortrag im Jenaer Mittelalterkolloquium, 1.7.2021.