On 10 March 2023 at 5:00 p.m., the second session of the Seminario permanente di Storia del Papato (Permanent Seminar on the History of the Papacy) was held, a new initiative jointly launched by the Pontifical Gregorian University and the Archivum Historiae Pontificiae. On this occasion, Caterina Capuccio, a medieval historian affiliated with the University of Wuppertal, delivered a lecture entitled La Cappella papale: origine e sviluppo di un’istituzione della Curia romana (12th–13th centuries). The Fraknói Research Group was represented at the event by its Vatican archival research resident, Katalin Nagy.
The seminar was opened by Andrea Verardi, Associate Professor at the Pontifical Gregorian University, who briefly introduced Caterina Capuccio’s academic background and the subject of her research, noting that the results of the dissertation presented would be published in monograph form in the near future.
In her lecture, Caterina Capuccio first outlined the papal chaplaincy as an institution in general terms. Papal chaplains (or subdeacons) were clerics closely attached to the person of the pope: they were ordained by him and could receive higher orders only with his explicit permission. Capuccio then presented the methodological framework of her research, emphasizing that many papal chaplains exercised their activities not only in Rome but also within other dioceses. In this sense, they constituted a kind of functional elite of the papacy. A significant number of them were later consecrated as bishops, created cardinals, or—most notably in the case of Pope Innocent III—even elected pope.
Capuccio stressed that her dissertation focuses on the formative phase of the papal chaplaincy, from its initial emergence in 1046 up to the end of Innocent III’s pontificate (1198–1216). The project concentrates primarily on the ecclesiastical provinces of Milan and Salzburg, and its core consists of a prosopographical analysis of the members of the papal chapel.
