appears again in our sources, it has become a pontifical office. The old
public distribution of provisions was replaced by the beneficial institutions
of the Roman Church, by her diaconates, shelters, hospitals, and her
magnificent charity organisation, through which money and provisions
were dealt out regularly to a large part of the population. The vast
granaries of the Roman Church received the corn brought from all the
patrimonies, especially from Sicily, for the purpose of feeding a population
whose regular sources of income were totally insufficient for their support.
The recognised superiority of the papal administration is also illustrated
by the fact that the State further felt induced to hand over to the
granaries of the Church the revenue paid in kind by Sicily, Sardinia, and
Corsica and set aside for the provisioning of Rome and its garrison, so
that the pope appears in many respects as the emperor’s paymaster
(dispensator) . But the pope becomes also the emperor’s banker when
Jhe funds for the payment of the army are made over to him, so that—for a time at least—the soldiers are paid through his offices. Thus the
organs of state administration were one by one rendered superfluous by
the development of a well-organised papal central government, whilst
the managers of the pontifical estates in the different provinces, the
octores patrimonii, who were entrusted with the representation of the
pope in all secular matters, had an ever-increasing number of duties
heaped upon them.
In proportion as the reinforcements of soldiers from Byzantium failed, Italy had to depend more upon her own resources, i.e. upon the soldiers who had been settled in Italy at the time when the inner boundaries were established—evidently in imitation of the old limitanei—and upon the native population, which latter being compelled to take its share in the watch-service (murorum vigiliae) and obliged to provide for their own up-keep, could soon no longer be distinguished from the former. For example, the castrum Squillace was erected on land belonging to the monastery of the same name, and for the allotments conceded to them the soldiers had to pay a ground-rent (solaticum) to the monastery. The castrum Callipolis had been built within the precincts of a manor owned by the Roman Church, and the coloni of the Church themselves formed its garrison. All those who were obliged to do military service in a fort under the command of the tribune formed the numerus or bandus, and being a corporation had the right to acquire landed property. The inhabitants of Comacchio, for instance, taken collectively, are called milites, and only in the large cities, such as Rome or Ravenna, the milites do not embrace the entire population. On the other hand we often find the inhabitants of a fort dependent upon a landlord. But though the power of a tribune and that of a landlord were originally derived from entirely different sources, they were naturally brought nearer to each other in the course of their development, for while it became more common for the tribunes to acquire landed property, the
