Cardinal Giovanni Battista De Luca: Nepotism in the Seventeenth-century Catholic Church and De Luca's Efforts to Prohibit the Practice Page: 14
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his family approximately thirty-million scudi.14 Innocent Xl realized that this was
just one of many instances in which the past popes had given their families huge
sums of money. Historian Enrico Stumpo indicates that a policy followed by
various Pontiffs towards their respective families was to secure rich ecclesiastical
and secular pensions for all the immediate relatives.15 Innocent XI gathered data
that are more precise on the payments that had been made directly by the
camera to various relatives of the popes, without calculating ecclesiastical
pensions, datary,16 or financial profits on the monte or the offices. Innocent Xl's
data revealed the Pamphili received the most money with a total of 1.4 million
scudi, followed by the Chigi with 900,000 scudi, and the Borghese with 260,000,
excluding the Barberini.17 Other data are supplied by the papal historian von
14 The following compares the amount of money given to the Cardinal Nephews to other
jobs. The lowest social categories survived with twelve scudi of silver for the year, that
represented the earning of a worker either or a washerwomen; a ship's doctor of a papal galley
earned 216 scudi the year; a barber or a caulker sixty; a simple soldier forty-eight; a musician
eighty-four; a cavalryman ninety six. With one scudo, to middle of half of the seventeenth century,
one could acquired: 20 Kg of wheat, one liter of oil, three kg of mutton or four of lamb and five liter
of wine white. Stumpo, II Capitale finanziario a Roma fra cinque e seicento. Contributo alla storia
della fiscalita pontificia in eta moderna (1550-1660): 38; The ordinary confessor of the
Benedictine nuns of Field Marzio in Rome, received 150 scudi in a year, the lawyer received
twenty-four, and the prosecutor sixteen. The nuns of the Benedictine monastery of Saint Ambrose
in 1664 lived on about ninety scudi per capita year, Luigi Fioani, "Monache e monasteri Romani
nell'eta del quietismo," Ricereche per la storia religiosa di Roma (1977): 83; while around 1650
the annual expenditure per capita in the orders masculine monasteries in Italy, fluctuated
between eighty three and 134 Roman scudi. E. Boaga, La soppressione Innocenziana dei piccoli
conventi in Italia (Roma,1971), 56.
15 Stumpo, II capitale finanziario a Roma fra cinque e seicento: contributo alla storia della
fiscalita pontificia in eta moderna (1570-1660), 273.
16 Datary - Has been called by ancient authors the Eye of the Pope. He directs the
datarius and usually is a Cardinal. The datary became the papal pocketbook without
accountability. William Humphrey, Urbs et Orbis: The Pope as Bishop and as Pontiff (London:
Thomas Baker, 1899), 161.
17 Ludwig Pastor, Frederick Ignatius Antrobus, Ralph Francis Kerr, Ernest Graf, and E. F.
Peeler, The History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages. Drawn from the Secret
Archives of the Vatican and Other Original Sources, 14 vols. (St. Louis: Herder, 1898), XIV, 2, p.14
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Cowan, H. Lee. Cardinal Giovanni Battista De Luca: Nepotism in the Seventeenth-century Catholic Church and De Luca's Efforts to Prohibit the Practice, dissertation, August 2012; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc149577/m1/21/: accessed April 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .