In the Church State they have made arrests everywhere, without respecting any baronial lands, and they say that in the past few days the bargello di Campagna [chief constable of the countryside] has carried out his duties in Marino, a Colonna town, for the pope wishes to be recognized as the lord of all.¹

That is how, in October 1667, an attentive Roman diarist stressed his belief that papal justice could now control territory that for centuries had been under the jealous, obtrusive jurisdiction of barons. But he was overly optimistic, as we can see by what turns up later...

At the end of the fourteenth century, the geography of the pope’s domain was in constant evolution. Despite the great antiquity of its name, we can label the Renaissance Papal State, in Machiavelli’s words, a “new” principality. From decade to decade, its borders, and indeed the whole territory, kept swiftly changing shape. International affairs, the onset of the Italian Wars for instance, contributed to the frontiers’ continual shifting, as did dizzying changes in papal politics. So, for example, the Borgia project to build a “family state” was undone by Julius II (1503–1513), and then Leo X (1513–1521) waded...

Life, honor, and our capacity to act are all in the hands of judges: for, given that honorable conduct and charity are in short supply, violence is on the increase, as is the cupidity of men of ill will; and if judges do not defend us against them, our affairs will go badly . . . and what is more important, justice these days is never done without the help of hard cash.

That is how, at the end of the sixteenth century, the political theorist Giovanni Botero described the expectations, operations, and interests that converged on the administration of...

How to describe the relationship between the Inquisition, “faith’s tribunal,” and Rome’s other courts, central and peripheral? In Rome, as we have seen, the governor’s claims to primacy fostered endless tensions with other agencies. The Inquisition, with its own ambitions and sweeping prerogatives, stirred up the very same kind of troubles. In the state’s assorted districts, justice’s administrative realignment had to resolve simmering conflicts between the pope’s officials, on the one hand, and local courts on the other. These latter were linked, often, to bishops, who by 1600 or so had been bolstered in their powers by the Council of...

Inquisitorial procedure took firm hold, we know well, as the late Middle Ages shaded into early modern times.¹ It represented the triumph of an asymmetric model of procedure, hard on the defendant, where the judge himself, also an inquisitor, played an active role. He could start proceedings on mere shreds of evidence: a “notice of a crime” sufficed to launch a case ex officio, that is, on the court’s initiative, in the absence of a public complaint. To start rolling, the machinery of justice relied on the reports of the police and the “reports of barber surgeons” (relationes barbitonsorum), and...

In the middle of the sixteenth century, the pope’s territories were still racked by widespread internal instability and the final, tragic stages of the Wars of Italy, by communal revolts, and by untamable noble violence. In those years, the dramatic and often brutal intervention by Rome’s justice signaled its attempt to quell a pervasive habit of rebellion that threatened the political stability of a territory still neither thoroughly defined nor firmly led.¹

The popes had their hands full, striving to defeat heresy, to reorganize Catholicism’s central regime, and to master their own territories through a new, more robust machinery of...

From the second half of the Cinquecento, via the confessional and other devices, the Holy Office continued to extend its surveillance over illicit activities and overt or covert “bad” practices like magic, witchcraft, and divination.¹ This oversight had a tight-knit network of officials with internal synergies, or so Rome intended and hoped. In the pope’s domains in Italy, between the sixteenth century and the eighteenth, the Inquisitions were nine in number: Bologna, Ferrara, Faenza, Rimini, Ancona, Fermo, Gubbio, Perugia, and Spoleto. Some of these went back to the Middle Ages; others had been set up later to ease surveillance over...

I have been holding those women, Pontiana and Leontia, in jail for their love magic and witchcraft—a matter of deaths, abortions, inflictions of illness, breakings of peace pacts, and impediments of sexual intercourse—and for their adoration of demons and carnal commerce with them (and also with many banished men under capital sentence) and for their other enormous excesses, as you have already seen in their abjuration before Monsignore Cefalotto. This morning they were put to death and burned. Now that it is done, justice has been served, as I hope will be understood by Our Lord [the pope]...

At Rome and in the Papal State, the control of the family, of spousal relations, of violence and transgressions perpetrated inside domestic walls, and also of familial relations with society, fell to multiple and varied institutions. Ecclesiastical and “lay” tribunals—the distinction here is merely relative—plus bishops, inquisitors, parish priests, and confraternities all kept their eye on society’s basic cell. Via open repression and charitable aid, all aimed to discipline behavior and punish transgressions that clashed with the family model imposed and sacralized by the Council of Trent. Family life also fell under the inquisitive, not always benevolent, eyes...

A few nights ago [Monsignore] brought with him from Rapolano some young Sienese—two young women who have their mother in Siena, and put the younger one in a nunnery of the city. The other young woman is a widow and they say that it is certain that she is pregnant by Monsignore.

With these words, on 4 February 1568, Siena’s captain of justice furnished a short but telling notice of a suspected abduction said to have been perpetrated by Cardinal Ippolito Del Monte, the dissolute adoptive nephew of Julius III (1550–1555).¹ A few decades later, would such carryings-on...

Roman congregations, using every device at hand, aimed at forging something more than irreproachable ministers of God well adapted to Trent’s severe discipline and ready for their ordained labors. Churchmen, in the early modern age, were also to be the blood and sinews of temporal governance; in Rome, it was they who held power and went out to far places to represent the state. They were therefore the messengers and witnesses of the double authority upholding papal monarchy, an authority defined and defended in those years by every means at hand. Clergy, then, were first of all the bearers of...

Since most of the popular outcry and of the state’s disorders is born of ministers’ lacking clean hands, you should not only protect yourself from the least shadow of such a defect in your own person, but you should [also], particularly, keep it the main thing on your mind to ward off the extortions of your officials, who, generally setting themselves no other end than pecuniary gain, let pass no occasion to increase it, to the people’s detriment.

These were recommendations to the men about to take a government position far from Rome.¹ But the project to establish more efficient...

In the old regime’s society, the commonest means of communication between subjects and their sovereign was the petition. It was an instrument for modulating and adapting justice, a device to narrow the gap between sentence and punishment; it spoke to power and, by grace of communication, recognized it and bestowed legitimacy. Petitions (suppliche) and memorials (memoriali), as sources, are both fascinating and enigmatic.¹ Although prone to repetition, they are often quirky and captivating. They offer an image of daily life, of collective and individual behavior; though sieved through a mesh of commonplaces and formulae, they are a device for self-representation...

The campaign for effective justice had its own elaborate imagery, much of which can be traced to the sixteenth century. At midcentury, justice and buon governo confronted an infinite variety of situations and unforeseen problems. Good rule had to compromise with forces it would much rather have tamed or squelched outright. It had to make do with “ministers” who fell far short of treatises’ ideals and rules Trent set. Nevertheless, in this very era, in Rome, justice and buon governo were presented, and extolled, in a new way, in a variety of idioms—in ceremonies and painted picture cycles, and...

Sweeping across a span of more than two centuries, this study has tried to capture the fundamental traits of justice in the Papal State. The phenomenon took many forms and was riddled with contradictions; justice cut a splendid figure but had feet that sometimes looked like clay. So, on the one hand, one reading of the rules, institutions, tribunals, and men of law might portray sovereign justice as sitting easy in the saddle. Justice served the papal resolve to build and bolster an ever more cohesive, coherent, and unitary territorial state, in the face of geographic particularism, local patriotism, and...