A global economic organization in the early modern period: The Custody of the Holy Land through its account books (1600-1800)

Project Information

HOLYLAB

Grant agreement ID: 101001857

DOI

10.3030/101001857

EC signature date 21 April 2021

Start date 1 November 2021

End date 31 October 2027

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 964 456,00

EU contribution

€ 1 964 456,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI ROMA TRE
Italy

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - HOLYLAB (A global economic organization in the early modern period: The Custody of the Holy Land through its account books (1600-1800))

Reporting period: 2023-05-01 to 2024-10-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Custody of the Holy Land (Custodia Terræ Sanctæ) is the name of the Franciscan province founded in 1217 by Saint Francis. Thanks to its organizational structure and religious legitimation, the Custody became a global economic organization based on alms gathering. It collected and administered large resources (people, money and goods) and exercised considerable political and religious influence that led to its survival to this day. Indeed, the Custody’s resilience over time, the role it played in the international arena and its very existence within the Franciscan order raise important questions: which economic structures and processes ensured its efficient operation? How were they influenced by the interplay between the global and the local? More broadly, which kind of organization did it develop?
Combining an analysis of economic and administrative/accounting practices with a study of organizational structures, HOLYLAB addresses such issues to shed light on the economic organization of the Custody in the 17th and 18th centuries at a local, regional and global level.
The project's objectives are:
- to reconstruct the Custody’s economy in the framework of Franciscans’ economic thought and practices, investigating, on the one hand, the bookkeeping, administrative practices and economy of the St. Savior monastery in Jerusalem (the Custody’s headquarters); on the other, the origin and functioning of commissariats, its fund-raising institutions in Franciscan provinces, and the circulation of money, objects and people through their network;
- to shed light on the organizational structures and mechanisms enabling the Custody to attain its goals and undergo organizational changes within wider historical events, such as the Counter Reformation and the globalizing processes denoting the period;
- to make freely available the data extracted from the commissariats' lists of incomes and expenses through an open-access online database.
To do so, the project’s analysis relies on 3 sets of rich, unstudied account documents issued by St. Saviour and the commissariats and Jerusalem court records. Methodologically, the project combines qualitative and quantitative approaches and bridges micro- and macro-levels of analysis by emphasising the meso-level of the organization. More broadly, HOLYLAB contributes to current research on issues such as the global circulation of people, money and objects, the organization of early modern institutions and the global expansion of Catholicism.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The work performed by the team has so far focussed on the collection and analysis of an unstudied corpus of sources, especially accounting records, moving into 3 main directions:
- Collection of primary sources, primarily through extensive archival research conducted at ASCPF (Vatican City); Franciscan institutions in Florence, Rome, Venice, Milan, Genoa, Lisbon; ASCTS (Jerusalem) and Haifa; AHN (Madrid).
- Close reading of the accounting documents issued by the St. Savior monastery and commissariats; analysis of their recording practices, accounting systems used, documents' formal characteristics and function, to contribute to the study of mendicant bookkeeping and of attempts to control them from Rome and the Order.
- Combined analysis of accounting documents and other sources to reconstruct the economic organization of the Custody at micro, meso and macro level: (a) Relying on different case studies, the team has analysed commissariats' functioning, that have never been comprehensively studied before, and their network. Specifically, the team has reconstructed their: normative framework, alms collection and financing system; relationship with local institutions; underlying institutional and communication network; circulation of people and objects, particularly books, devotional objects, and information. (b) Concerning the friars’ interactions with the local economy in Jerusalem, the analysis of the Ottoman court records has unearthed many documents enriching with a local, Palestinian, perspective the information provided by Franciscan sources.
- Design and population of the HOLYLAB database with data from alms (including food, books, devotional and daily objects) sent to Jerusalem from Franciscan provinces. The design entailed devising customized technical solutions for systematizing complex, unstructured historical accounting data. This made possible the subsequent collection, wrangling and entry of data from c.130 account books, as well as to carry out full-text searches and quantitative comprehensive analyses on the collected data.
Findings have been presented at international workshops and conferences. Due to the uncharted nature of the project, outputs have been planned for the 2nd reporting period, however several articles have been published or are forthcoming, with many others and a journal special issue in preparation. A boardgame inspired by HOLYLAB, where players act as commissariats' heads, is also under development.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Before HOLYLAB little was known of the economy of the Custody in the early modern period. The St. Savior’s account books had never been analysed before neither had been those of the Custody's commissariats. In fact, little was known of these institutions overall. Thanks to extensive archival research and the analysis of unstudied sources the team is reconstructing the origin and functioning of these institutions and of the overall economic organization of the Custody.

The research conducted has confirmed the key hypotheses flagged in the proposal, such as the abundance of unstudied sources and data on the Custody's account-keeping, which have gone beyond expectations also in terms of geographical scope; then, the presence among 17th and 18th century Jerusalem court records of documents related to the Custody’s economic activities, which now amount to over 100 unstudied documents involving friars. This has made possible for the first time a comparative analysis of the Ottoman and Franciscan sources that is providing crucial insight into the friars’ life in Jerusalem, their interactions with local authorities and economic activities. This analysis has also advanced current research in the fields of Arab linguistics and particularly on the use of Middle Arabic, and of Ottoman studies, and particularly research on religious minorities and Ottoman courts.

The work performed has also proven the fertility of the envisaged methodology and approaches. By freshly emphasizing the meso-level of analysis, research has reconstructed the Custody's organization in the light of other contemporary institutions. The crucial contribution of interactions with local and transregional, civic and religious, institutions and networks has been confirmed with respect to alms collections and the circulation of money, resources and information. The team's research has also unveiled the positive and negative effects of overlapping networks of early modern mobility and the costs and viability of networks. Lastly, the full global outreach and bearing of the Custody has been corroborated, both in connection with the circulation of credit through the Iberian Empire and with larger globalizing processes such as the worldwide expansion of Catholicism, thus shedding light on the development of global networks and centralization processes.

Entrance to the Custody of the Holy Land

logo and prototype of the boardgame inspired by HOLYLAB