For the whole Middle Ages, the economy of the Catholic Church and the functioning of the papal administration were dependent upon payments made to the papal curia. The amount of different kinds of payments to the papal curia increased considerably during the Avignon Papacy (1309-1377) together with quickly developing papal administration. The papal office responsible for handling the economy of the Church, the Apostolic Chamber (Camera Apostolica), became one of the central offices of the papacy. Its task was to take care of the bookkeeping of the Church as well as to receive and handle all different kinds of payments arriving to the curia through papal collectors, diocesan administration, or individual Christians.

The centre of the ecclesiastical administration, the papal curia and its numerous different offices, was considered as ‘a well of grace’, where Christians could obtain solutions to their various needs whether they wanted an ecclesiastical benefice, a dispensation for marrying a close relative, a licence to carry a portable altar, absolution from excommunication, or a letter of indulgence. Even if the papacy could not sell graces – that would have been considered simony – the papal curia did not grant letters of grace for free. Its clients had to pay for the services of the papal administration: fees for preparation of the letters of grace and salaries of the curia employees. These payments went typically through the hands of officials of the Apostolic Chamber, but there were a few exceptions to this rule.

One of these exceptions was the composition fee for certain kinds of graces granted by the Apostolic Penitentiary, which was a papal office responsible for absolving Christians from severe sins among other things. The composition fees related to Penitentiary graces were handled by another official within the papal curia, the datarius. This chapter analyses these payments, which until now have received very little attention in research, probably because the sources describing the payments are scarce. The medieval archives of the Apostolic Datary, an office which from the mid-fourteenth century began to receive more and more tasks and powers, include very little testimony about the composition fees. However, as this chapter will show, the Apostolic Penitentiary's archives do include information that supplements the meagre details.