The pope did not differ from other rulers in being the recipient of numerous petitions and in devoting a substantial amount of his time to hearing petitions and to reaching decisions about them. The earliest period for which abundant evidence survives concerning the practice of submitting petitions to the pope and the treatment of those petitions in the papal curia is that of the papal residence at Avignon in the fourteenth century (John XXII to Gregory XI). This chapter will accordingly concentrate on this period, while paying some attention to the Great Schism (where the fullest evidence is again from curia of the Avignon popes), and with an occasional glance at the thirteenth century and the period following the re-establishment of unity in the Latin Church in 1417. The system of petitioning the pope operated in an extremely complex way, above all as far as petitions for provisions to ecclesiastical benefices were concerned, so that it is not possible to treat the subject exhaustively in the space of a short essay. My aim is rather to attempt to outline the main features of the system and to elucidate the value of petitions as a historical source.

A petition to the pope (in Latin petitio or supplicatio) was a written request for a favour or for the appointment of a judge or judges to hear a case; it therefore represents the first stage in an administrative or judicial process. The petition, if approved, generally resulted in the production of a papal letter in response. The vast majority of papal letters were issued in response to petitions, rather than on the initiative of the pope or the papal government. French scholars call such letters lettres communes; the equivalent of this term in English would be ‘common letters’. A comparable term is ‘rescript’, but its meaning is wider, for it describes a letter issued by a ruler in response to any written communication, and such communications were not invariably petitions. It is necessary to distinguish between several types of petitions addressed to the pope in the fourteenth century:

1. Petitions for graces or favours that required the pope's approval. Men known as referendarii or cubicularii read these aloud to the pope and also advised him about them. The pope signed those petitions that he wished to grant. Especially important petitions might be read before the pope and cardinals in consistory.