Inside The Vatican Archives
My experience as a research fellow at the Sangalli Institute of Florence's Winter Seminar on the Archives of the Vatican and the Holy See, January 2023
In January 2023, I had the tremendous opportunity to attend the Sangalli Institute of Florence’s Seminar on the Archive of the Holy See and study archiving for a week at the Vatican in Rome. In my time there, I was able to learn how to read ancient manuscripts, how to retrieve them from the archives, the history of the Vatican and Roman State Archives, and make connections with archivists and scholars from around the world. It was a truly wonderful experience to study under such brilliant experts in the field.
One of the first institutions we visited was the Archives of The Holy See, formerly known as the Vatican Secret Archives. This space houses collections of books and artifacts dating back to the early 1400s. Located within the walls of the Vatican, there are overwhelming amounts of records held there. Long ago, Cardinals began assigning schematics to these archives, and the inventory of the Positiones, a collection dating from 1564-1681, is currently in the slow but steady process of being digitized.
There is a viewable Vatican archives online, however, what has been uploaded is incredibly limited, according to Dr. Matteo Binasco who led the seminar. They are trying to create an archive that is as comprehensive as possible, and they are in the beta testing phase of digitally mapping the activities of the old Council Congregation in Rome, where the Cardinals once met.
There are multiple parts to the Archives of Rome, Dr. Serena di Nepi noted during the seminar. She gave us the history of the State Archives of Rome, stating that the secular affairs of the state of Rome had begun to separate from the religious affairs of the Papacy due to the archival reforms of Pope Benedict XIV in 1742.
Because of the sheer number of records housed in the archives built by the famed Renaissance architect Franceso Borromini, a second building had to be created to house the remainder of them. With notaries existing in every corner of the Papal States, correspondence and records were coming through the Vatican in such great quantities that Benedict created a motu proprio, a new way of keeping registers. Though it created considerable conflict, the breaking down of the State Archives into three camerales or subsections: Camerale I, that houses original records from before 1570-1870, and Camerale II and III, that house all records created after 1870. Camerale II houses 2184 units of “topics” ordered by subject, to be used in conjunction with Camerale III, which houses all records of “places.” (“Places” in this sense refers to all written communication that came from outside Rome, and later Unified Italy, that came through the Vatican.) These huge archives are broken down in a way Dr. di Nepi described as “complex but rational.”
Upon the physical visit to the State Archives of Rome, housed in the immaculate Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza, our tour guide showed us through the courtyard Borromini constructed in the mid-1600s and led us through the library Pope Alexander VII had him create. Split between this building and the Vatican, the archives of over 100 religious orders (including 30 female organizations) reside within the Sapienza. Today, every province and Papal state has its own archives in the wake of the unification of Italy in 1871, and a great number of their archives are digitized in online collections, including major collections of cartography, preziosi (“precious”) parchments.
The next lecture was given by Dr. Giorgio Caravale about the Archive of the Holy See and Roman Catholicism. He discussed the Archives of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith held within the Vatican, and noted the division of the Archives. There are two “separate but intertwining” archives within the Archive of the Holy See: the Congregation of the Inquisition and the Congregation of the Index.
The Congregation of the Inquisition was instituted by Pope Paul III in the 1500s to hold records of medieval inquisitions. The Roman Inquisition, beginning in 1478, predates the Spanish Inquisition, beginning in 1542, by nearly 100 years. The Roman Inquisition’s scope, because the Protestant Reformation had not yet happened, was to fight against “heresy” of all kinds.
Local production of “heretical” texts were popular in Italy beginning in the 1500s when Lutheran ideals made their way to the Papal States. There was a form of early Protestantism that viewed Catholicism through the lens of Roman Humanism. Their message was delivered a bit “softer” than the Roman Catholic Church’s message of fear and sorrow. This strain of Catholicism emphasized the benefit of salvation after Christ’s death– his sacrifice benefitted all Catholics, “not just the good ones.”
In 1543 during the Italian Reformation, an anonymous author in Venice published a book entitled “The Benefit of Christ” that quickly became very popular among the rich, the poor, and the clergy alike. In fact, a large part of the clergy adhered to this prospect without believing in or subscribing to Lutheran doctrine.
The Roman Inquisition began with these clergymen. Popes and Cardinals began using the Inquisition as a tool to rise up the ranks of the Vatican’s political power structure, accusing one another of heresy for even speaking these ideals. The Church quickly realized it had a powerful tool against the growing wave of Lutheran sympathizers, and the first inquisitions were the ones performed against ecclesiastics in the 1560s.
Some of the first archives ever created in the Catholic Church were those records of the inquisitions, and they make up the greatest number of objects in the archives of the Congregation of the Inquisition. There are 700 volumes of trials in the late 1500s, over 3,000 volumes from the 1600s, and over 5,000 volumes from the 1700s. One of the most famous of these is the record of Galileo Galilei’s trial for heresy in 1633. (An interesting history note: Isaac Newton was born on the day of Galileo’s death, January 8, 1642.)
There are thousands of records in the Archive of the Holy See, and in 1809 when Napoleon occupied Rome, he imprisoned Pope Pius VII and took thousands of volumes back with him to France, including most of the records of the Inquisition. He wanted to create an archive of every territory he conquered, and he took these records back to Paris with him. After Napoleon’s defeat, the Vatican attempted to get back what had been stolen, but several of the “non-important trials” had been sold off to pay debts. The most complete volumes of these trials are ones that are preserved in local archives in Venice.
The Roman Archives today are known as the Archives of the Holy Office, which holds “decrees” or records of meetings with selected Cardinals and the Pope where minutes are recorded. There is housed a rich collection of written communication and records from Catholic missionaries sent to all corners of the world. There were drawers and cabinets in the library filled with letters to the Pope written on fine red Chinese silk from missionaries sent to Asia, journals from Jesuits charged with converting native peoples in the frozen landscape of Nova Scotia, and even documents from Jewish ghettos in Italy before World War Two.
Created by Pope Gregory XIII in 1572, The Congress of the Index was a subsection of the archives that housed all books and parchments within the Archive of the Holy See, but was absorbed by the Congregation of the Inquisition in 1917.
The Congregation of the Index was led by members of the Dominican order at the Church of Santa Maria behind the Pantheon in Rome. In 1559, Pope Pius IV created the first and only official index of forbidden books put forth by the Inquisition, with subsequent indices being published by the Congregation of the Index. These “banned books” were broken into three categories: 1. Authors like Martin Luther (heretics); 2. Specific works by individual authors (who are not banned themselves); and 3. Anonymously published books (as a lack of responsibility seemed “suspicious”). Many of these books were based in science or literature, including works by authors such as Galileo and Copernicus.
As the centuries went on and the stances of the Church changed, the Congregation of the Inquisition changed its name to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which absorbed the Congregation of the Index. The documents of the Congregation of the Index now reside in the Vatican Archive, which was our final destination for the seminar.
In the early 1600s, Pope Paul V, Camilo Borghese, created the Vatican Secret Archives, now known as the Vatican Apostolic Archive. The Vatican Archive sits nestled up in the dome of the Basilica di San Pietro, high above the cathedral sculpted to perfection by Bernini, Michelangelo, and Raphael among others.
Dr. Simona Turriziani guided us through the Archives of the Fabbrica di San Pietro, showing us immaculately preserved hand drawn building plans of the Sistine Chapel and marble facades of the previous St. Peter’s Basilica that the current one was built upon, dating back to the time of Emperor Constantine. There are over one million files and artifacts held in the Vatican Apostolic Archives, documenting history from all parts of the Christian world.
The archives were opened to scholars by Pope Leo XIII in 1881, and The Vatican Apostolic Archives have been working with scholars and theologists closely since.
Our tour guide took us from the top of the duomo to the depths of the catacombs beneath it. We descended cobblestone and marble steps until we reached the lowest point of the church– the burial site of St. Peter.
His remains were removed in the 1950s and are in private care of the Pope, but the black brick wall where they unearthed his urn was symbolically illuminated by a single red light, strong and unblinking, placed in the excavated brick. His tomb is modest, meager, and surrounded by massive mausoleums of prominent, wealthy Roman families that date back over 2,000 years. Constantine had the original St. Peter’s Basilica built on the foundations of a small church placed over what would turn out to be St. Peter’s true burial site. Bernini’s Basilica was built on top of those remains, making the hill it sits atop even more striking. The Archives are now housed in the Basilica’s duomo that rises emphatically into the heavens, overlooking the cathedral, and even deeper, overlooking the grave of the first Pope.
Just before I left on the final day, I spoke to Dr. Turriziani, the head archivist at the Archives of San Pietro, who gave me the experience of a lifetime: she showed me a preserved handwritten letter from Michelangelo addressed to Pope Julius II, telling him that the budget for the Sistine Chapel wasn’t enough and that he could simply go home to Florence any time he liked. Serendipitously, I found the letter was written and dated on my birthday.
The information I learned and the experience I gathered from this seminar was positively invaluable. To read about archival history is fascinating on its own, but the experience of viewing the archives–even handling artifacts–that are so highly venerated. It puts into perspective the level of reverence humankind holds for the past and the experiences of those who came before us. These senior archivists were brilliant teachers and guides through the entire seminar, and the sheer amount of cultural history I was able to take in was overwhelming. This experience has opened my mind to not only fantastically intricate schematics of archival science, but the ways archives will grow and change, sometimes as organically as its people do.