At the end of the Middle Ages, the papal supreme court in Rome, the socalled Roman Rota (Sacra Romana Rota, also known as the Audientia sacri palatii), was the most important ecclesiastical tribunal in the world. Its twelve judges, the auditores sacri palatii, handled several thousand cases from all over Western Europe each year. Each auditor was assisted by four notaries who noted all legal actions taking place in the cases that they had been assigned in court books called manualia. When an auditor died or resigned his post, both his legal cases and his four notaries, with their manualia, were taken over by his successor, so that a continuous handling of the cases brought before the Rota was secured.

In principle this should mean that we would be able to find 48 parallel ‘series’ of manualia, one composed by each notary, from the late medieval and early modern period among the Rota holdings of the Vatican Archives. This is, however, not the case. Although the Rota was fully developed as a legal court at the beginning of the Avignon papacy in the fourteenth century, the actual repository of manualia only starts in 1464. It consists of considerably less than 48 series, and most of them have minor or major lacunae.

Scholarly research in the Rota manualia started with a 1908 case study by Nikolaus Hilling, the German historian of ecclesiastical law. It examined suits brought before the Rota from the diocese of Hildesheim from 1464 to 1513. The Rota dealt almost exclusively with litigation between ecclesiastical institutions or individual clergymen, and Hilling showed that in the case of Hildesheim, 75% of the around 100 cases he found concerned litigation about benefices. The material produced as proof in the suits showed that the litigating parties in most cases substantiated their claims to the disputed benefices with papal expectatives, provisions, and mandates. Hilling therefore saw the many benefice cases at the Rota as a direct consequence of the papal system of provisions.

In 2003 I published a book on the Rota and its handling of Danish cases in the Middle Ages. My case study of Denmark was inspired by Hilling’s pioneering study, but I broadened the perspective substantially.