Chancery of Apostolic Briefs - History Until 1908

History Until 1908

It takes its name chancery from civil law and from the imperial chanceries, and is certainly of very ancient origin in its essence. The primacy of the Roman Pontiff made it necessary that the Pope should have in his service officers to write and to transmit his answers to the numerous petitions for favours and to the numerous consultations addressed to him. This office, in course of time, underwent many transformations, too many to treat in full.

After Pope Martin V had instituted a large number of offices in the Chancery, Pope Sixtus V placed many of them in the class of vacabili, as they were then called, i.e. venal (a practice also resorted to by secular court, e.g. in France even under the absolutist Louis XIV of France). The origin of this institution was as follows: The pope was often compelled, in defence of Christendom, to wage war, to fit out expeditions, or at least to give financial assistance to the princes who waged such wars at his exhortation. But the pontifical treasury was often without the means to defray even the expenses of the Pontifical States, so in order to raise funds. Accordingly, the popes resorted to the expedient of selling several lucrative offices of the Curia, as a rule to the highest bidder; however, that what was sold was not the office itself, but the receipts of the office, e.g., the taxes for the favours granted through the office in question. Some offices were sold with the right of succession by the heirs of the purchaser, but this could be done only in the case of an office of minor importance, in the exercise of which no special ability was required. Those offices which entailed grave responsibilities, and which could be filled only by pious and learned men, were sold on the condition that they should revert to the Curia at the death of the purchaser. An aleatory contract, therefore, was made, the uncertainties being the amount of the income of the office and the length of life of the purchaser. The prices of the offices, especially of the more desirable ones, were considerable: Lorenzo Corsini, afterwards Clement XII, bought the office of regent of the Chancery for 30,000 Roman scudi -- a large fortune for those times. The hazard was not necessarily confined to the life of the purchaser; he was free to establish it upon the life of another expressly designated person, the so-called the intestatary. The purchaser was also allowed to change the life hazard from one person to another, providing this were done forty days before the death of the last preceding intestatary.

The offices of the Chancery which were transformed into vacabili by Sixtus V included the regent, the twenty-five solicitors, the twelve notaries and the auditors of the causes of the Holy Palace. Sixtus V assigned the proceeds of these sales to the vice-chancellor (see below) as part his emoluments; but this too liberal prescription in favour of the cardinal who presided over the Chancery was revoked by Pope Innocent XI, who assigned the revenue in question to the Apostolic Camera. Pope Alexander VIII restored these revenues to the vice-chancellor, at that time the pope's nephew, Pietro Ottoboni.

Under Napoleon I of France the Government redeemed many of the vacabili, and but few remained. Pius VII, after his return to Rome, undertook a reform of the Chancery, and wisely reduced the number of the offices. But as he himself granted to the vacabili the privilege that, by a legal fiction, time should be regarded as not having transpired (quod tempus et tempera non currant), and many proprietors of vacabili having obtained grants of what was called sopravivevza by which deceased intestataries were considered to be living, certain offices remained vacabili in name, but not in fact. Finally, Pope Leo XIII (1901) suppressed all the vacabili offices, ordering his pro-datary to redeem them, when necessary, the datary's office being substituted for the proprietors.