Spoils book publication

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The Right of Spoil
of the Popes of Avignon
1316-1415

by
Daniel Williman and Karen Corsano

The Popes in Avignon, no longer supplied from the wealth of their Italian lands, developed a method of taxation, a 100% death duty on the goods of deceased prelates, called spoils. The system grew and was perfected and lucrative through the years of the Black Death. But the plague's economic and social upheavals, the impact of the 100 Years War and, above-all, the success of the system itself, bleeding local dioceses dry, caused the system to collapse and ultimately to be forbidden by the Council of Constance.

Dan discovered and inventoried cases of spoils he found in the Vatican Archives and in 1988 published a first edition of a calendar of instances with a discussion of the system's origins, justifications, its development and decline, in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society.

No sooner was The Right of Spoil in print than previously unknown cases of spoils began to appear; this second edition has 1352 of them, against 1191 in the first edition. Helpful friends and reviewers favored the work with corrigenda and addenda. New studies enriched the prosopography of fourteenth- century Avignon. When Professor Charles Donahue brought the Ames Foundation to our attention, with its generous project of publishing legal records, even Latin records from the Middle Ages, it became clearly our duty, and promised to be our pleasure, to make a new edition.


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