A New Access System for the Vatican Archives

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538                                                American Archivist / Vol. 52 / Fall 1989

 The International Scene

A New Access System for the
Vatican Archives
LEONARD A. COOMBS

Abstract: The Vatican Archives, one of the major national and religious archives of the
world, contains records from as early as the ninth century and continuous documentation
of the church administration from trie twelfth century to the present. Although a variety
of specialized guides describe various parts of the archives, the lack of a comprehensive
inventory of holdings makes access difficult for researchers. A team of archivists from
the University of Michigan has begun a project to create a comprehensive, provenance-
based access system, working from existing guides and inventories. The author, who is a
member of the team, summarizes the history of the Vatican Archives and describes the
plan of work for the project.

About the author: Leonard A. Coombs is associate archivist at the Michigan Historical Collections,
Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. He has been associated since 1987 with the
University of Michigan project to create a new access system for the Vatican Archives. A slightly
different version of this paper was presented at the Midwest Archives Conference, Chicago, May
1989.
New Access System for the Vatican Archives                                                              539

THE VATICAN ARCHIVES, OFFICIALLY the                     the administration they served was formal-
Archivio Segreto Vaticano or Vatican Secret              ized in any continuing way.
Archives, is one of the major national and                  In the centuries following Innocent's re-
religious archives of the world. It contains             cord-keeping innovation, the archives suf-
some 50,000 linear feet of official records of           fered great losses, partly because the records
the popes and of the central administration              were packed up and moved with the pope
of the Catholic Church. Because of the con-              when he travelled outside of Rome. In the
tinuing role of the church and the popes over            fourteenth century alone, the archives were
the millennia—on the political stage as well             moved from Rome to Perugia, Assisi,
as in the life of faith—the archives is im-              Avignon, and later Geneva, with portions
portant not only for the study of religious              being left behind at each stop. Finally, at
history but also for the study of political,             the end of the Great Schism, most of the
economic, cultural, and social life through-             archives were moved from Geneva back to
out the world. Continuous documentation of               Rome between 1419 and 1422, by Pope
the church administration can be found in the            Martin V.
archives from the twelfth century to the pres-              Later in the fifteenth century a distinc-
ent, while the earliest documents date from              tion began to be drawn between the pope's
the ninth century.                                       library and the archives. The most precious
   Unfortunately, the access system at the               archival documents were moved to the Cas-
Vatican Archives is imperfect. There is no               tel Sant' Angelo, the papal castle near the
comprehensive inventory of holdings. The                 Vatican Palace. This move proved benefi-
organization and arrangement of the ar-                  cial to the archives in 1527. During the
chives' unpublished inventories, as well as              sack of Rome by the armies of the German
those of the records themselves, are not ap-             Emperor Charles V the papal library was
parent to the neophyte researcher. It was this           looted and the streets were strewn with pa-
less-than-perfect access system that led Fran-           pal documents and manuscripts, but the ar-
cis X. Blouin, Jr., director of the Bentley              chives in the Castel Sant' Angelo were
Historical Library, to propose a University              untouched.
of Michigan project to create a new, prove-                 The beginnings of the modern Vatican
nance-based access system for the archives.              Archives, along with the origins of the
   The checkered history of the archives has             church administration that it documents,
had a great effect on the development of the             came as part of the church reforms of the
current access system.1 Pope Innocent III, a             Counter-Reformation. In 1565 Pope Pius
lawyer who reigned at the end of the twelfth             IV set up a central church archives in the
century, was the first to regularize the church's        Vatican Palace, in order to make access
archival policy. The earliest extant registers           easier for administrators. His successor, Pius
of outgoing letters begin with his reign. The            V, decreed that private archives be searched
archives in this period were merely a part of            for registers and other papal documents, and
the pope's library. Neither the archives nor             that inventories be made of the archives in
                                                         their various storage places. The archives
                                                         in this era were seen as a source of the
    'The following summary of the history of the Vat-    pope's temporal power. As a Vatican ma-
ican Archives is based primarily on the brief history    jor-domo of the time pointed out, "Old
found in Leonard E. Boyle, A Survey of the Vatican
Archives and of its Medieval Holdings (Toronto: Pon-
                                                         documents are non-military weapons for
tifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1972), 7-12,     holding on to the property we have ac-
and the longer, but still relatively brief, history in   quired." 2
Owen Chadwick, Catholicism and History: The
Opening of the Vatican Archives (Cambridge: Gam-
bridge University Press, 1978).
                                                           2
                                                            Ludwig von Pastor, The History of the Popes, from
540                                                               American Archivist / Fall 1989

                                                         Because it was more convenient to have
                                                      his archives in the Vatican than in the nearby
                                                      castle, Pope Paul V built the present ar-
                                                      chives building in the Vatican Palace in
                                                      1610. The first records, transferred from
                                                      the Vatican Library, the Castel Sant' An-
                                                      gelo, and other places, were stored in spe-
                                                      cially designed cabinets, or armaria, where
                                                      they are still found today.
                                                         But all official records did not become
                                                      part of the archives. In spite of the formal
                                                      organization of the Curia, until 1692 the
                                                      administration of the Vatican was con-
                                                      ducted primarily by a relative of the pope,
                                                      known as the Cardinal nephew. When the
                                                      pope died and the nephew left office, his
                                                      papers remained with his family archives,
                                                      not with the Vatican Archives. As a result,
                                                      important administrative records are scat-
                                                      tered among the archives of the great Ro-
                                                      man families.
                                                         The Vatican Archives was considered
   Figure 1: Interior courtyard in the Archivo        strictly administrative in the early centu-
Segreto Vaticano (Courtesy of the Bentley His-        ries, open only to the pope, the Secretary
torical Library, University of Michigan)              of State, or someone acting on their orders.
                                                      Occasionally it was open to others. In 1737,
                                                      for instance, Cardinal Acquaviva, acting for
   In the same period, Pope Sixtus V de-              the king of Spain, saw the secret letters of
fined the modern administrative system of             the Secretary of State on payment of a suit-
the Roman Curia in the constitution Im-               able fee to the archives staff. The organi-
mensa Dei, issued in 1588. With this sys-             zation of the records was not well developed,
tem, consisting of congregations (similar to          due to the small size of the staff, which
executive departments), tribunals (similar            sometimes led to embarrassment for the ar-
to courts), and offices (especially secre-            chives. During the negotiations of the 1640s
taries), the cardinals were reduced in a way          leading to the Peace of Westphalia, the pa-
to agents of the popes, members of a bu-              pal envoy Chigi requested copies of docu-
reaucracy. By his action, Sixtus V made               ments relating to the papal protest against
the church a prototype of the modern con-             the terms of the 1555 Peace of Augsburg,
stitutional, bureaucratic state.3                     but the archivists could not find them. Be-
                                                      ginning in 1740 Pope Benedict XIV pro-
                                                      vided more support for the archives,
the Close of the Middle Ages (London: Hodges, 1891-   increasing the size of the staff and encour-
1953), 25:101-102, quoted in Chadwick, Catholicism    aging the development of indexes by ar-
and History, 9.
   3                                                  chivist Giuseppe Garampi.4
     H. Outram Evennett, The Spirit of the Counter-
Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1968), 114-115; Paolo Prodi, The Papal Prince: One
Body and Two Souls: The Papal Monarchy in Early
Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University          "The Vatican Archives uses the term index generi-
Press, 1987), 2-3.                                    cally to refer to its finding aids.
New Access System for the Vatican Archives                                                541

   Unfortunately for the archives, the inter-   brary were completely closed, and their
vention of Napoleon followed shortly after      doors walled up.
Garampi's work, leading to disruption of           The complete closure turned out to be
the archives and destruction of records. The    only a pause before a great liberalization.
bulk of the archives was removed to Paris       As part of a program of reconciling the
on the order of Napoleon in 1810 and 1811,      Vatican to European governments, the ar-
as part of a plan to create a consolidated      chives was opened to qualified researchers
central archives of Europe. French archi-       by Pope Leo XIII in 1881. The volume of
vists saw the archives as a powerful tool to    new accessions increased as a result of the
combat the religious and political power of     increased visibility of the archives after its
the pope. They began to reorganize the ar-      opening, but the staff could not keep pace
chives, but did not complete the task.          with the increase.
   Some records disappeared while the ar-          Since the archives was opened to schol-
chives remained in France, primarily those      ars, much of the work done to make ar-
relating to French history and those useful     chival material accessible has been through
for political attacks on the pope, such as      the work of the foreign schools in Rome.
the record of the trial of Galileo before the   The Ecole franchise de Rome began cal-
Inquisition. A much more significant loss       endaring papal letters even before the ar-
of records took place when the archives were    chives was officially open, and has been
returned to the Vatican after the Congress      responsible for the publication of a great
of Vienna. After having been reminded of        deal of other documentation. Schools and
the power of the records, the papal com-        institutes of other European countries have
missioners supervising their return to Rome     published series of edited documents, cal-
deliberately destroyed part of the archives     endars, and guides to resources relating to
of the Inquisition. Other records were lost     their countries. But these projects have never
in transit. Altogether perhaps a third of the   been coordinated, so there has been much
archives never returned to Rome.                overlap among the work of the various
   The French reorganization of the ar-
chives resulted in partial indexes to their
contents, and whetted historians' appetites
for access to the records. The archives re-
mained officially closed to researchers, un-
der threat of excommunication, after their
return to Rome. Even the indexes were
closed to outsiders. But some scholars gained
access to particular records through per-
sonal negotiation with the archivist, and
payment of a proper fee. Whether because
of the disorder introduced during the French
period or due to a lack of trained staff, the
organization of the records was poor in the
mid-nineteenth century.
   In 1870 Italian armies occupied Rome
and annexed the Papal States to Italy, end-
ing the pope's political power over the city.
                                                   Figure 2: Leonard Coombs examining docu-
The question then arose whether the ar-         ments in the Vatican Archives (Courtesy of the
chives would be nationalized. To forestall      Bentley Historical Library, University of Mich-
this, both the archives and the Vatican Li-     igan)
542                                                                American Archivist / Fall 1989

schools. In addition, their reliance on an           the record series inspected had not been
item-level approach to the description of            mentioned by Boyle.6 Many of these were
records has made the goal of a complete              recent accessions, but a major difficulty for
guide to the holdings of the Vatican Ar-             Boyle was that he never had access to the
chives seem extremely remote. Although               archives stacks. He had to base his guide
the specialized guides can be very useful,           on the existing inventories and on infor-
the lack of a comprehensive guide makes              mation gleaned from the staff.
access difficult for researchers.                       The best guide to the archives' modern
    One major caveat in using the archives           records is Lajos Pasztor's Guida delle fonti
is that records created after 1922 are cur-          per la storia dell' America Latina.1 Pasztor
rently closed to research. That date coin-           concentrated on records relating to Latin
cides with the end of the pontificate of             America, but he described all series that
Benedict XV. There is no set procedure for           include any information relating to his topic,
opening records. At the pope's discretion,           so this work provides much more detail than
the records of the reign of the following            Boyle about eighteenth- and nineteenth-
pope, Pius XI, from 1922 to 1939, will be            century records in general.
opened.                                                 A classic earlier guide is Karl August
    The most comprehensive English lan-              Fink's Das vatikanische Archiv.8 This work
guage guide to the archives is Leonard               is an attempt at a complete description of
Boyle's A Survey of the Vatican Archives             the holdings, but it was written at a time
and of its Medieval Holdings.5 Boyle con-            when all records created after 1846 were
centrated on describing the archives' me-            closed, so it does not describe records after
dieval records but he also provided an               that date.
overview of the entire holdings of the ar-              Many other guides have been published
chives. The format is typical of Vatican             to describe records dealing with particular
Archives guides. It is arranged roughly ac-          subjects, geographical areas, or time peri-
cording to provenance and includes brief             ods, but no other modern guides attempt to
record descriptions at the series level, with        cover the entire holdings of the Vatican Ar-
references to inventories and published de-          chives.
scriptions. The key parts of the description            Boyle, Pasztor, Fink, and the other pub-
are the correct name of the series, which is         lished guides lead the researcher to the in-
necessary for retrieval, inclusive dates, and        dex room of the archives, which contains
size. Boyle attempted at least to mention            various manuscript inventories, calendars,
all holdings, but since he was interested            and summaries of holdings. These vary
chiefly in medieval records, the largest part        greatly in quality and legibility. Some of
of the work is devoted to medieval registers         the indexes were prepared at the time of
and other early records. The guide includes          records creation, others were prepared by
little information on more recent material,          archivists or researchers at a later date.
and almost no information about nine-
teenth- and twentieth-century records. Dur-
ing a survey by the University of Michigan               6
                                                           During the pilot project, the University of Michi-
team of the records of the Vatican Secre-            gan team included Francis X. Blouin, Jr., Leonard A.
tary of State in the archives, almost half of         Coombs, and Thomas E. Powers.
                                                         7
                                                          Lajos Pasztor, Guida delle fonti per la storia dell'
                                                     America Latina: Negli archivi della Santa Sede e negli
                                                     archivi ecclesiastici d'ltalia (Vatican City: Archivio
                                                      Vaticano, 1970).
                                                         8
    'Leonard E. Boyle, A Survey of the Vatican Ar-         Karl August Fink, Das vatikanische Archiv: Ein-
chives and of its Medieval Holdings (Toronto: Pon-   fiihrung in die Bestdnde und ihre Erforschung, 2nd
tifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1972).        ed. (Rome: Regenberg, 1951).
New Access System for the Vatican Archives                                                 543

  Figure 3: The oldest stack in the Archivo Segreto Vaticano (Courtesy of the Bentley Historical
Library, University of Michigan)
544                                                           American Archivist / Fall 1989

                                                   century records which have not been
                                                   processed, but there are also many earlier
                                                   series, particularly smaller ones, without
                                                   indexes. In a survey by the University of
                                                   Michigan team of the Secretary of State
                                                   records in the archives, over one-third of
                                                   the series inspected had no inventories in
                                                   the index room.
                                                      Because of the lack of comprehensive
                                                   guides and inventories, researchers at the
                                                   Vatican Archives depend heavily on the help
                                                   of the staff. English-speaking researchers,
                                                   especially, depend on Vatican archivist
                                                   Monsignor Charles Burns. Burns has an
                                                   encyclopedic knowledge of the archives, but
                                                   of course he is most familiar with the most
                                                   heavily used series. This access system tends
      v                                            to limit researchers to following paths that
                                                   have been explored by others.
                                                      This uncoordinated system of access is
                                                   what led to the University of Michigan
                                                   project to develop a new access system for
  Figure 4: Francis X. Blouin in the Vatican       the archives. In several visits to the ar-
Archives (Courtesy of the Bentley Historical Li-
brary, University of Michigan)                     chives Francis Blouin was struck by the
                                                   richness of its holdings and the limitations
                                                   of the available finding aids for scholars.
   The largest unpublished inventory is the        While the archivists there believed it would
"Schedario Garampi," 124 volumes cre-              be the work of many lifetimes to gain con-
ated by the archivist Giuseppe Garampi in          trol over their complete holdings, they were
the 1700s. This is a partial item index to         thinking in terms of item level control. Re-
the archives as it existed at that time. Un-       lating the problem to modern archival prac-
fortunately, Garampi's private system of           tice, Blouin saw the more manageable task
abbreviations makes it somewhat hard to            of gaining control at the record group and
use.                                               series level.
   Many of the modern indexes, on the other           The church administration had possessed
hand, provide volume (or file) level access        some of the attributes of a modern bureau-
to record series in a format not completely        cratic state beginning with the reforms of
different from that of inventories found in        Sixtus V in the sixteenth century, and the
North American archives. They are not              provenance of the records had not been de-
regularly produced, however. About fifty           stroyed through the imposition of any ar-
indexes of this type have been added in the        tificial system of arrangement. As a result,
past eighteen years.                               Blouin concluded, it would be possible to
   A major limitation of the index system          describe the records of the church admin-
is that while some series have been inven-         istration using the methods of archival de-
toried in several indexes prepared at dif-         scription that had been developed for records
ferent times, many series have no inventories      of modern bureaucracies.
or only partial inventories. This is espe-             Blouin proposed the creation of a new,
cially true for nineteenth- and twentieth-         provenance-based system of access to Father
New Access System for the Vatican Archives                                               545

 Figure 5: Thomas Powers in the Vatican Archives (Courtesy of the Bentley Historical Library,
University of Michigan)

Josef Metzler, prefect of the archives. Met-    chiefly lacking in the current system is a
zler was interested in improving research       sense of the overall structure of the ar-
access to the archives. The prefect of the      chives, the relationships between one series
Vatican Library, Father Leonard Boyle (who      and another, between records and inven-
had written the major English guide to the      tories, and between records and the agen-
archives) was also committed to improving       cies that created them, along with
access to the library's collections, and was    information about records that have not been
in the process of installing a Geac inte-       inventoried. The team did not propose to
grated library system. Metzler gave Blouin's    relocate or change any records or invento-
proposal his complete support, going so far     ries in the archives or eliminate any exist-
as to promise unlimited access to the ar-       ing finding aids or indexes in the creation
chives' stacks, a privilege that had not been   of this new catalog, a factor that reassured
given to Boyle or earlier writers of guides     many who are familiar with the current ac-
to the archives' holdings.                      cess system.
   After reviewing the current means of ac-        The most efficient means of creating this
cess to the archives, the University of         new catalog was to divide the work into
Michigan team proposed that a comprehen-        two parts: first, by studying the adminis-
sive catalog of the holdings at the series      trative history of the Vatican, to develop
and record group level, based on the exist-     agency histories of all records-creating
ing system of guides and inventories could      agencies; and second, by studying the ex-
be created, saying that this could be done      isting guides and inventories, and later the
in a reasonable amount of time. What is         records themselves, to create series-level
546                                                        American Archivist / Fall 1989

record descriptions. The result of these two    prepare, for the first time, a comprehensive
activities would be two databases, which        inventory of the archives' holdings. Most
would then be matched and combined to           of this effort is concentrated on the records
create a comprehensive guide to the hold-       created since the Vatican's modern admin-
ings of the archives and of the agencies that   istrative system was developed by Sixtus V
had created the records.                        in the late sixteenth century. Yakel and Gill
   In order to test the plan, a pilot project   then create new catalog records for all new
was carried out in the fall of 1987. In that    record series they identify and revise the
project the team surveyed and created a         catalog records already in the Micro-
guide to the records of the pope's Secretary    MARC:amc database, adding detailed in-
of State, the chief foreign policy officer of   formation about organization and
the Vatican since the sixteenth century.        arrangement, scope and content, and find-
   The team first developed a preliminary       ing aids.
database of agency histories, based on              The database revisions are forwarded to
sources available at the University of Mich-    the University of Michigan, where Leonard
igan, and of series-level record descrip-       Coombs and Thomas Powers review them
tions, based on the published archives          for consistency and perform authority work
guides. The database was created with           on name headings and access points. At the
MicroMARC:amc software, utilizing the           same time, Sister Claudia Carlen works at
MARC Archival and Manuscripts Control           the University of Michigan to complete the
(AMC) format. The team then visited the         database of agency histories that was begun
Vatican Archives to survey the actual rec-      in the pilot project. Access will be provided
ords and match them with the unpublished        to the records through form and function
inventories. The database was revised and       terms as well as by agency names and geo-
updated to reflect the new information ob-      graphical names. Records will be trans-
tained in the survey. This pilot project con-   ferred from the MicroMARCramc database
firmed that the existing guides were terribly   into the Research Libraries Information
incomplete, that it was possible to locate,     Network (RLIN) database, and tapes will
inspect, and describe the records in a rea-     be furnished to the Vatican Library for
sonable amount of time, and that it was         loading into their Geac system. At this time
reasonable to apply the methods of modern       the archives has no automated system, but
archival description to the records of the      it is wired for Geac. In addition, the agency
Vatican administration.                         history database, the series descriptions, or
   Based on the results of the successful       both, may be published in book form.
pilot project, a proposal to complete the           When the project is completed in the fall
catalog of the archives was prepared, and       of 1990, access to records described in ex-
was funded by the Getty Grant Program           isting inventories will be enhanced through
and the National Endowment for the Hu-          expanded, consistent description and through
manities. The work began in September           the added context provided by the history
1989, after the archives reopened from its      of the agencies that created the records.
two-month summer holiday.                       Records that are not currently described
   At that time the project archivist, Eliz-    anywhere will become accessible for the
abeth Yakel, and the project historian,         first time. The project will provide re-
Katherine Gill, both based in Rome, began       searchers with the first comprehensive, in-
to work their way through the archives'         tegrated guide to the holdings of one of the
stacks, surveying each shelf and comparing      most important national and religious ar-
holdings with the existing inventories to       chives in the world.
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