Liber Censuum - History

History

The document has its roots in the Polyptique of Pope Gelasius I, created at the end of the 5th century and continued for the next four centuries. The Liber Censuum proper was assembled in 1192 by Cencius Camerarius (future Pope Honorius III), papal chamberlain to Pope Clement III and Pope Celestine II, and his assistant, William Rofio, the clerk of the papal camera, compliling information contained in the Collectio canonum of Cardinal Deusdedit (1087), the Liber politicus of the canon Benedict (c. 1140), dossiers of the former chamberlain Boson (1149–1178), and the Digesta of Cardinal Albinus (1188). Albinus' Digesta was the "most ambitious" of the Liber Censuum predecessor records, containing—according to Albiunus—"whatever I knew or found in books of antiquities or what I myself heard and saw concerning the rights of St. Peter". The Liber Censuum also incorporates information from a contemporary general census and rent table of church properties organized by diocese, the Ordo romanus (a description of religious ceremonies) —as it pertains to the distribution of payments to the curia during such ceremonies, and works of pontifical history such as the Liber pontificalis.

The earliest documentary evidence for the use of such a document of papal property rights goes back even earlier to an 1163/1164 letter from Pope Alexander III to the abbot of Lagny-sur-Marne requesting an annual payment of one ounce of gold, owed according to "a certain work among the books of the apostolic see". Although this specific claim dated to the time of Pope Urban II, the abbot rejected it and there is no evidence Alexander III pursued it further. Such incidences are likely what Cencius refers to in the preface of the Liber Censuum as the "no little damage and loss" incurred by the church as a result of earlier records being "incomplete and neither written nor arranged authentically". Furthermore, the Liber Censuum was compiled at a time when the papal patrimony was threatened by the Staufen emperor and individual payments from sources throughout the continent were being reduced by the evasiveness of payers and the inefficiency of the apostolic camera.