The Pope & the Pirates

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Provides remarkable insights into how the most extensive of medieval bureaucracies worked.

Over the course of almost fifty years, the editors have pieced together from 
the vast archive of the Avignonese papacy fifty-four documents that tell the 
story of a shipwrecked pirate ship carrying treasure of the papal Camera at 
Avignon from the estate of a worldly bishop of Lisbon.

Most of these documents are accounts and inventories. In them we can trace the 
activities on a daily basis of the papal collectors and learn about the stunning 
amount of �stuff� that the worldly bishop left behind at his death. Scattered 
throughout the inventories of goods are lists of manuscripts. A network of mercantile 
transactions can be traced as agents of the bishop admit to what they owe or argue 
that they are owed more than they owe. Pieces of the story can be filled in from 
papal and other official letters and from three sets of depositions. The documents 
not only tell this story, they also provide remarkable insights into how the most 
extensive of medieval bureaucracies worked.

The documents are edited in full in Latin, accompanied by English summaries. The 
editors have provided a brief introduction that tells the story more fully and gives 
guidance as to the many types of money that appear in the documents and to the different 
series of Vatican archives that they have used. There is a bibliography, an extensive 
index of persons and places, an index of topics, and a glossary.


 
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Price: $90.00
Item #: 1000434
Published: Cambridge; Ames Foundation; 2014.
Distributed: William S. Hein & Co., Inc.

This title will also be available as an e-book online through the Ames Foundation 
and in HeinOnline�s Selden Society Publications and the History of Early English Law.

               To order your copy of 
The Spoils of the Pope and the Pirates, 1357: 
The Complete Legal Dossier from the Vatican Archives,

from W. S. Hein, Company.
 
contact [email protected] or call 1-800-828-7571.