THE ROMAN CHURCH AND ITS LANDS

His biographer described Gregory as a ‘kind of most bright-eyed Argus’, who, through his agents in the patrimonies ‘let the eyes of his pastoral care roam over the whole wide world’. A major instrument of this Argus-like thoroughness in Gregory's exercise of his pastoral solicitudo or cura was the machinery set up for the administration of the Roman Church's possessions. Since the time of Constantine churches had built up extensive land holdings. By the end of the sixth century they were the largest landowners in Italy. In Gregory's time the Roman Church must have been by far the richest. It had long had registers (polyptycha) of its lands and of the income it derived from them, which were kept up to date. Its possessions were concentrated in Sicily and in Campania; but the ‘patrimony (of St Peter)’, as these possessions were collectively known, included lands scattered over southern Italy (Bruttium-Lucania and Apulia-Calabria), Tuscany, and elsewhere in Italy, Corsica and Sardinia, Dalmatia, Gaul and North Africa. The job in Sicily seems to have been too demanding, and in the summer of 592 Gregory divided it into two, one centred in Palermo for the North-West, the other at Syracuse, in the South-East. The volume of Gregory's correspondence with his agents in these patrimonies, especially in Italy (where it constitutes over a quarter of his correspondence) reveals at a glance the importance that their affairs assumed in his time.