This chapter addresses the question of why prominent nobles were so interested in being church advocates by examining the legitimate financial benefits that came with the position. Using sources from the period 1050 to 1250, it argues that advocates typically received one-third of the fines when they held court on ecclesiastical estates, and also received food and lodging in return for fulfilling their role as judge. It also demonstrates that many advocates received separate income for their responsibilities in providing protection. While all of these payments were initially in kind, by the thirteenth century it was increasingly common for advocates to receive a single lump-sum money payment for fulfilling all their advocatial responsibilities, which is evidence of the increasing commodification of local positions of authority in this period. This chapter also investigates the numismatic evidence for church advocates as additional source material for the economic dimensions of the role.

This chapter starts the transition to the period after 1250 and argues that advocacy remained important into the fifteenth century (and later), in part because it was central to debates about imperial and papal authority. Beginning in the twelfth century, both popes and emperors insisted that the German ruler was the special advocate of the Roman Church, but the two sides differed on what this title meant. While the popes asserted that it was the emperor’s responsibility to defend the Church from its enemies and that the popes therefore had a role to play in selecting an able defender, the emperors claimed that as advocates they could exert wide-ranging influence over the Church and even call Church councils when necessary. This conflict not only highlights the inherent fluidity of the role of the advocate centuries after it first appeared but also helps to explain why so many people would continue to want to call themselves advocate during the half-millennium after 1250.

This chapter analyzes the abundant sources that record accusations of violence and other abuses committed by advocates in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. While much of this evidence includes rhetorical flourishes that suggest advocates were barbaric tyrants, a close reading of the sources demonstrates that many advocates employed specific strategies to benefit in corrupt ways from their positions. These included abusing their judicial authority, making excessive demands for protection payments from churches’ dependents and treating ecclesiastical estates like their own property. This chapter also tracks disputes between monasteries and advocates that lasted multiple generations, in order to argue that advocates’ corrupt practices were deeply rooted in the challenges churches were continuously confronted with when they needed to grant someone else access to their property in order for that person to provide protection and exercise justice.

This chapter analyzes the earliest medieval evidence for the position of advocate. It argues that, rather than relying on top-down sources such as Frankish legal texts (capitularies) and the canons of Church councils, we need to focus on what named advocates are described as doing in eighth- and early ninth-century sources. Taking this approach, it demonstrates that advocates first emerged in the Frankish empire in the mid-eighth century and then proliferated rapidly under Charlemagne. Contrary to the standard argument that these Carolingian advocates were official, legal representatives for ecclesiastics at court, the chapter contends that – from the beginning – advocates were closely tied to the local territorial interests of monasteries and churches and frequently pushed the limits of their formal responsibilities.

This chapter focuses on the evidence for both continuity and change in the role of the advocate during the tenth century. Under the Ottonian rulers of the East Frankish Kingdom, the position of advocate acquired new prestige, as high-ranking nobles and even the rulers themselves claimed to be the advocates for individual monasteries and churches. As part of this trend, sources increasingly emphasized the advocate’s role as protector of ecclesiastical properties. At the same time, local evidence continues to show advocates closely overseeing the property interests of monasteries and churches in ways that have clear parallels with eighth- and ninth-century sources from the Carolingian empire. This chapter further argues that the position of advocate was developing organically in this period and that scholarly attempts to create different categories of advocates are misguided. It is precisely because the role of advocate was open to interpretation that advocates were increasingly able to abuse their positions for their own profit.

This chapter serves as a counterpoint to the previous chapter and frames the book’s arguments up to this point in very broad terms, looking back to corruption in the ancient Roman Empire and forward to the Sicilian mafia and other modern, nonstate actors. It argues that advocates’ corrupt practices of protection and justice ought to be understood as encompassing two main strategies: either extracting as much income as possible from regions that were peripheral to their own territorial interests or – in contrast – attempting to win the hearts and minds of churches’ dependents in order to convince them to abandon their allegiance to their landlords. Both of these strategies are commonplace ones across human history and highlight more general challenges tied to protection and justice. This chapter also contends that, precisely because these corrupt practices were so common, scholars’ arguments about the decline of advocatial abuses from the thirteenth century onward are misleading.

This chapter provides a cultural history of the wicked advocate from the tenth to the nineteenth centuries in order to argue that advocates’ corrupt practices of justice and protection reflect deep-rooted problems in the history of local administration. It starts with monasteries’ miracle stories about advocates suffering in death as punishment for their crimes in this life. It then turns to the Swiss legend of William Tell and analyzes the earliest versions of the legend in order to demonstrate that Tell’s rival, the wicked advocate Gessler, abused his position in ways similar to those of other advocates. This chapter then discusses Friedrich Schiller’s play Wilhelm Tell to show that concerns about corrupt practices of justice and protection extended into the early nineteenth century. Local legends about bad advocates, some of them preserved today on the Internet, provide additional evidence for the enduring value of stories about wicked advocates who are punished for their bad deeds.

This chapter argues that, especially in the East Frankish Kingdom, Carolingian advocates were operating as key local agents for churches on their estates by the mid-ninth century at the latest. While the sources from the West Frankish and Italian parts of the Carolingian empire suggest different trends, the East Frankish sources (especially royal grants of immunity) demonstrate that advocates acquired important policing powers and judicial authority on ecclesiastical properties during this period. This undermines the typical scholarly argument that Carolingian advocates were a different phenomenon than subsequent types of advocates, as these East Frankish advocates already had responsibilities that most later advocates would continue to have into the eighteenth century.

This chapter pushes the book’s argument beyond the traditional medieval/modern dividing line around the year 1500 by examining advocates’ corrupt practices of justice and protection in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While acknowledging that the volume of administrative evidence grows exponentially in this period and regional administrations became better developed, it nevertheless shows that various abuses that had been happening for centuries continued into this period. These abuses included local acts of violence that provide clear evidence for the ongoing difficulties that met attempts by imperial and princely authorities to govern effectively on the ground in their territories. This chapter, therefore, calls attention to the flaws in traditional historical narratives about a sharp dividing line between a medieval period of feudalism and lordship and a modern period of government, bureaucracy and strong states.

The Introduction argues that the common scholarly terms feudalism, lordship, state-building, bureaucracy, officeholding and government all promote a misleading narrative about Europe’s transition from the medieval to the modern period. To better understand how power and authority functioned at the local level, it is essential to focus on the people who provided protection and exercised justice – and to recognize how little their corrupt practices changed between 750 and 1800. At the center of this study is the position of advocate (Latin: advocatus; German: Vogt), which emerged in the Carolingian period. Advocates then proliferated, especially in the German-speaking lands, and were responsible for providing protection and exercising justice on ecclesiastical estates, in some towns and even for entire regions. Examining how advocates profited from their positions across a millennium offers the opportunity to reassess the standard narrative of European political progress and to rethink the concepts we rely on to tell that story.

This brief conclusion ties the arguments of this book to modern anticorruption campaigns and to ongoing challenges to good governance around the world. It argues that the standard narrative - of Europe transitioning from a dark and violent medieval period to a modern period of strong states and good government – is misleading because it downplays or ignores persistent challenges around local corrupt practices of justice and protection across the period 750 to 1800.