A Milanes Lawyer in El Noble\'s Court: Arderico di Palacio of Palencia (r. 1178-1184/1184-1208) and the Castilian Church

A Milanese Lawyer in El Noble's Court: Arderico di Palacio of Palencia (r. 1178-1184/1184-1208) and the Castilian Church

In a place in Lombardy in 1178 whose name history has not since taken time to remember a bishop named Joscelmo died. He had journeyed far from his see in the Rioja to visit the Curia, but failed to reach the Roman pontiff. Word took a little time to reach the city of Sigüenza, whence don Joscelmo had left, but eventually the task of finding Joscelmo's successor began and resulted in what, to a non-specialist, might appear a strange choice. To replace Joscelmo of Sigüenza, the chapter, likely with royal encouragement, elected an archdeacon from the city of Burgos, more than 200km distant, who spoke with an accent and who had an education that betrayed him further as a foreigner.
We know sadly little about that pivotal moment in 1178, when the young Arderico di Palacio was made bishop of Sigüenza. He must have been consecrated by Archbishop Cerebruno of Toledo, who himself was what the Castilian natives would have called an ultra montano and who had himself previously been the bishop of Sigüenza. I like to imagine that there was some kind of pleasant paternal exchange between the elderly Poitevin archbishop and the young archdeacon, who had bought so many candles and endowed so many masses for his kinsman back in Milan, but no transcript of such an event exists. The transition was, however, normal enough in Castile in the period: many deacons and archdeacons were made bishops, and several of that number were from beyond the Pyrenees. Arderico himself would eventually secure a job for his nephew, Giraldo di Lombardo, in the chapter of Palencia. Although had been an archdeacon for at least a decade, Arderico's career was just beginning. For more than 30 years, he would serve as a bishop in the court of Alfonso VIII of Castile and as bishop witnessed some of the great tectonic political shifts in the peninsula's history. But these more grandiose events do not concern us here. In this paper, I wish to discuss, first, Arderico di Palacio's election as bishop of Sigüenza; second, his six years as bishop there; third, his transfer to the diocese of Palencia; fourth, his term as the Palentine prelate; and, finally, what his career—viewed through its highlights—says about the Castilian episcopate during the transition from Castile´s position as a power in the Iberian Peninsula to the power in the Christian north.
Far from being unqualified, the archdeacons of Burgos were likely candidates for the episcopates of Castile. Along with their Toledan rivals, the clergy of Burgos were some of the most visible and vibrant in the kingdom. While other sees might have nascent cathedral schools—like Palencia—or enormous numbers—like the six hundred canons of Segovia—the priests and deacons of Burgos were wealthy, powerful, and well-connected. Charters from the time of Arderico´s service as an archdeacon do not, unfortunately, preserve the name of which of Burgos´s many possession Arderico was the responsible party, but the notation that he was one of the archdeacons does narrow the list to Burgos most important properties. To select an archdeacon of Burgos was to select a capable administrator and an effective bureaucrat, if not necessarily the kind of learned theologians and pastoral preachers that Lateran III, a year after Arderico´s election, would require for episcopal candidates. The place of Burgos within the kingdom of Castile made it certain that any deacon from the city was used to operating around the royal curial apparatus and was in touch with the great magnates of the realm. For a border-diocese like Sigüenza, this was a crucial fact; even if relations with the Crown of Aragon were at a near-all-time high, the proximity of Navarre, with whom ties were preternaturally tense made the see an important bulwark against an incursions from Pamplona or the Pais de Vasco. The election of a capable outsider meant that Sigüenza's bishop could compete for prestigious royal patronage and the significant contacts bought by a Burgalese deacon would likely make his episcopate somewhat more fruitful.
The records of the diocese of Sigüenza from the medieval period are in a rather poor state. Most of the cathedral burned during the Battle of Guadalajara in 1936, and so only the records preserved in edited volumes or antiquarian texts from before that date survive. For our purposes, the best resource for the history of the diocese of Sigüenza is the all-too-aptly named Historia de la diocesis de Sigüenza y sus obispos of Toribio Minguella y Arnedo. The records preserved in the first of his three-volume texts contain several privileges from the period of Arderico's episcopate. Unfortunately, most of the records fall into the rather predictable royal and pontifical categories, but this is not a total loss.
The frequency of royal donations during Arderico's episcopate suggests that he was, as the chapter may have hoped, a successful obtainer of royal favor. Villages, estates, and monasteries were all given to the bishop and church of Sigüenza, and all of these gifts were relatively normal donations by the monarchy. The exceptional gifts of the 1/10 share in royal rents in the see of Sigüenza, and confirmation that the bishop owned the royal share of the salt mines in Santiuste were something more. The considerable incomes these represented were a boon to the bishops of Castile generally, and appear to have given Sigüenza an injection of needed capital. The dates of both of these donations, 1170 and 1175 respectively, place them at the very core of Arderico´s episcopate. No other bishop, at least during Alfonso´s reign as king, appears to have garnered as much financial attention from the king, and Arderico´s impact would likely be felt long after the Milanese cleric had occupied a different post altogether.
Pontifical letters to the see of Sigüenza suggest that Arderico was a respectable character in papal eyes. Most of the surviving letters directed to Arderico from the papal chancery were in response to lawsuits against other sees, usually Osma and Zaragoza, and those which survive were understandably successful, given that records of failed pleadings rarely exist in the records.
In the late eleventh century, the bishops of Palencia had occasionally styled themselves as archbishops, and not without good reason. The city´s position at the heart of the Castile that was pushing down on the taifa of Toledo made it a crucial cog in the Castilian machine. By the mid-twelfth century, the see was a prize enough that Alfonso VII appointed his brother-in-law, Ramón, to the see, and both Sancho III and Alfonso VIII would write of their maternal uncle and grand-uncle warmly in their charters. Whatever Arderico's opinion might have been of the prelate called "homo ignarus" by Alexander III, his election the see of Palencia can hardly have been a surprise. In a reform of the cathedral chapter of Palencia undertaken by Ramón, it is Arderico who confirmed the text and implementation of the reforms initiated by Ramón, suggesting that he had assisted in the reforms prior to the death of the incumbent bishop of Palencia. The election of the aging Milanese cleric seems to have been exactly what the doctor ordered: Arderico, following his election in 1184, would serve for nearly another quarter-century. He inherited a cathedral school which was, following the requirements of Lateran III, still in its infancy, but which had potential. The clergy of Palencia were wealthy, perhaps they brought in just a little less than the 10,000 maravedis per annum that a 1213 inventory would mark as the rents garnered by the cathedral. Arderico's move to the see of Palencia was, legally, a transfer, but to the average laymen it may well have seemed a big promotion to the heart of the Castilian ecclesiastical machine.
Upon his election to the see of Palencia, the diocesan administration appears to have caught a sort-of second wind. To take but the most interesting of examples, the number of clergy in the chapter who bore the title of magister doubled during Arderico's time as bishop, and there is now little doubt that the school of Palencia deserved the reputation which provoke Jordan of Saxony, second Master General of the Dominicans, to remark that the school "flowered with the arts." The school's later success notwithstanding, the growth of the cathedral chapter was commensurate with the kind of expansion which, if the records had not become casualties of la guerra civil, would be in evidence in the earlier case of Sigüenza. Indeed, patronage of Palencia during the days when Arderico sat in the episcopal cathedra was of near-superlative grade. In the earliest days of his episcopate, Arderico secured a privilege which expanded the already-extensive ownership rights over the Jewries of the Palentine diocese, gaining for the episcopal mitre the right to name and dismiss the royal aljama in 1185. Exchanges with the monarchy expanded the bishop's rights over neighboring in the Tierra de Campos, and additional revenues from the salt mines of Belinchon made the already substantial episcopal patrimony all the more flush. There was even enough wealth that Arderico's nephew, then a royal notary and future master of the school, Giraldo to hold a prebend, which would only grow with royal and episcopal patronage.
Yet it is the expansion of the reputation of the bishops of Palencia which so marks out the reign of Arderico as significant, rather than any economic success enjoyed by the bishop. The assignment of several terms as a papal judge-delegate, a position which suggests that both Casitlian episcopal and Roman curial confidence in Arderico ran high indeed, sets Arderico apart as a cleric of considerable prestige. The cases assigned to Arderico were numerous, but most required investigations into the nearby exempt diocese of Burgos, a place where the overlapping claims of many patrons and the jurisdictional complications of numerous exempt houses made any legal wranglings all the more messy. Brevity's sake precludes any extensive discussion of the cases or their details, but it should be noted that the parties involved in these suits were major power-brokers in the kingdom, and that their interests made the litigation that concerned them high-profile cases indeed. A brief list of the parties involved in the cases illustrates the point well: the bishop of Burgos, the bishop of Oviedo, the bishop of León, the bishop of Lugo, the bishop of Osma, the abbot of Santo Domingo de Silos, the abbot of San Facundo and the prior of San Juan de Burgos. Although these are only the cases which I have yet found, the judicial role played by Arderico in so many cases demonstrates that his education must have been held in high enough regard that he was assigned not only the high-profile cases, but also those which contained considerable complexities. Additional papal evidence suggests that the cathedral chapter of San Antolin was in need of significant reform prior to Arderico's accession, as an 1187 letter from Gregory VIII expressly commanded. The reform of the chapter, at least in its financial matters was begun by Arderico's predecessor, with the then-bishop of Sigüenza's help, but was not completed until sometime after 1192 when Arderico himself took over the see and received confirmation of his reforms from Archbishop Martín Lopez de Pisuerga.
Beyond even these most significant major points about Arderico and his terms as bishop of Sigüenza and Palencia, we can add a few more insights. First, it seems clear that, even among a usually-competent group of royal vassals, Arderico di Palacio was an important and capable prelate within the episcopal contingent at the court of Alfonso VIII. Second, his career tracks along similar lines with many of the other bishops of Castile during the period. These two trends deserve a little lasting attention.
Establishing the reputation of an individual among their peers is a difficult task, except when the facts are clear. In the case of Arderico di Palacio we can be quite certain that, among his peers, the Milanese deacon was more than accepted among his colleagues. As a judge-delegate, he appears to have had a strong reputation for fair reasoning and sound judgment, a fact in evidence by the wide number of important churchmen involved in the cases that Arderico was called to adjudicate. Similarly, the presence of many donations from the nobility of both Sigüenza and Palencia demonstrates that Arderico was not simply an excellent royal vassal but a cordial participant in the exchanges of the aristocratic class in Castile as well. When viewed from a wider angle, it is clear that Arderico was certainly a man of great esteem: his nephew Giraldo, who had been made a deacon of Palencia, was also, for a long time, one of the royal notaries. His acclamation as "magister" betrays his education, and Giraldo may have travelled to Castile at his uncle's insistence. Having a powerful position in medieval Castile was one thing, but literal nepotism betrays even more potency than we might anticipate from a casual reading of the episcopal sources. That such a trend was not enough to merit vociferous objection from the other clerics of the kingdom or from the papacy suggests how well-regarded Arderico must have been at the Cortes of Castile.
The rise of a young Milanese cleric through the ranks of a cathedral chapter, to an episcopal appointment, to being promoted to an even greater grade was, in fact, a quite normal occurrence in the church during the reign of Alfonso VIII. Brevity's sake dictates that too many examples be not offered here, but the career of Arderico's long-time metropolitan sovereign, Celebruno, is instructive. Celebruno himself started out as a deacon in the chapter of Toledo during the reign of Alfonso VII, was named bishop during the twilight of Alfonso VII's reign as el emperador, and was promoted to the metropolitancy of Toledo in 1166. Celebruno was from Poitou, and was a part of the general influx of foreign-born prelates in Castile during the mid-twelfth century. The majority of the bishops who held office in the reign of Alfonso VIII were deacons or office-holding canons in Castilian cathedral chapters prior to their election to the episcopate. As a result, the role of Arderico's background is more than instructive of the kinds of careers which can be expected of the bishops of Castile; thus, we can read his caareer as but one important and well-documented case study.
The careers of individual bishops are rarely given the broad and lasting treatment they deserve. There are the exceptions, of course, but these men are usually either the great champions of one cause or another—Thomas's a Becket, Otto's of Friesing, and Rodrigo's Ximenez de Radas—or they are figures of great moment in their times—Fulk's of Neuilly or William's of Tyre—and have about them something outstanding that recommends them for analysis. Exceptionally, the study of episcopal figures is related usually to the exceptions rather than the rules. The career of Arderico di Palencia—archdeacon of Burgos, bishop of Sigüenza, and bishop of Palencia—charts the tenure of a man who fits entirely within the mold of a traditional prelate. Men of Arderico's stripe may have been especially-able or particularly-gifted, but they were the norm in the churches of the kingdoms in the Latin West.