Curia Sentence Examples

Meaning in general the "king's court," it is difficult to define the curia regis with precision, but it is important and interesting because it is the germ from which the higher courts of law, the privy council and the cabinet, have sprung.

About the same time the curia undertook financial duties, and in.

Saxon Witenagemot and Norman Curia regis seem very much alike.

Thus the court of king's bench (curia regis de banco) was founded, and the foundation of the court of common pleas was provided for in one of the articles of Magna Carta.

The court of chancery is also an offshoot of the curia regis.

The naming of seven members of prominent Roman families, however, reversed the wise policy of his predecessor which had kept the dangerous factions of the city out of the curia.

The pope had repeatedly used the rich northern benefices to reward members of the Roman curia, and towards the close of the year 1516 he sent the grasping and impolitic Arcimboldi as papal nuncio to Denmark to collect money for St Peter's.

The pope preserved the right to nominate to vacant benefices in curia and to certain benefices of the chapters, but all the others were in the nomination of the bishops or other inferior collators.

Subsequently he was transferred, perhaps through Cromwell's influence, to the service of the king, and in January 15 3 2 he was sent to Rome to obstruct the judicial proceedings against Henry in the papal curia.

But neither the pope nor the Venetians would hear of such a transfer, and the negotiations on this subject greatly embittered Matthias against the Curia.

More important than all was the interest of the Roman curia, composed almost exclusively of Italians, to retain in its own hands the choice of the pontiff and to maintain the predominance 01 the Italian element and the Italian spirit in the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

In order to avoid this danger it was therefore necessary to refuse all compromise, and, by perpetual reiteration of a claim incompatible with Italian territorial unity, to prove to the church at large that the pope and the curia were more Catholic than Italian.

Miliukov, leader of the cadets, were both returned by the second curia of St Petersburg to the third Duma.

Cardinal Rampolla at once resigned his office as secretary of state, being succeeded by Cardinal Merry del Val, and ceased to play any conspicuous part in the Curia.

After this battle Poland-Lithuania began to be regarded in the west as a great power, and Witowt stood in high favour with the Roman curia.

At a council held in London on the 6th of April 1152 Stephen induced a small number of barons to do homage to Eustace as their future king; but the primate, Theobald, and the other bishops declined to perform the coronation ceremony on the ground that the Roman curia had declared against the claim of Eustace.

The high court is not a curia regis, but a curia baronum, in which the theory of judicium parium is fully realized.

Coluccio Salutati and Niccolo de' Niccoli befriended him, and in the year 1402 or 1403 he was received into the service of the Roman curia.

It is noticeable that, while he held his office in the curia through that momentous period of fifty years which witnessed the Councils of Constance and of Basel, and the final restoration of the papacy under Nicholas V., his sympathies were never attracted to ecclesiastical affairs.

The greater part of Poggio's long life was spent in attendance to his duties in the papal curia at Rome and elsewhere.

In rip he was sent to Rome by the archbishop with instructions to dissuade the Curia from sanctioning the coronation of Stephen's eldest son Eustace.

Paul III., who had begun his pontificate with the intention of purifying the curia, was unaware of the grave danger in which Fisher lay; and in the hope of reconciling the king with the bishop, created him (loth of May 1535) cardinal priest of St Vitalis.

He served in the Curia under five popes and acquired much administrative experience, influence and wealth, although no great power; he was economical in his habits; on occasion he displayed great splendour and lived in a fine palace.

At a later period there was an open and continuous sale of spiritual offices by the Roman curia which contemporary writers attacked in the spirit of Dante.

The marriage was zealously opposed by Archbishop Malger of Rouen and Lanfranc, the prior of Bec; but Lanfranc was persuaded to intercede with the Curia, and Pope Nicholas II.

Between 1312 and 1318 he practised in the papal curia at Avignon.

Its chief and almost only organ, for kingdom and barony alike, was the curia - a court formed of the vassals.

Almost all the institutions of modern states go back to the curia regis, branching off from it at different dates as the growing complexity of business forced differentiation of function and personnel.

To commemorate his Sicilian victory, he caused it to be pictorially represented on the wall of the Curia Hostilia, the first example of an historical fresco at Rome.

In practice the whole of western Europe was subject to the jurisdiction of one tribunal of last resort, the Roman Curia.

Thirdly, there was the inevitable jealousy between the secular and ecclesiastical courts and the serious problem of the exact extent of the original and appellate jurisdiction of the Roman Curia.

The fees of the Curia were raised for the numberless favours, dispensations, absolutions, and exemptions of all kinds which were sought by clerics and laymen.

From 1343 onward, statutes were passed by parliament forbidding any one to accept a papal provision, and cutting off all appeals to the papal curia or ecclesias tical courts in cases involving benefices.

There was an especially bitter denunciation of the Curia by some unknown writer.

The common man, to whom the diet of Augsburg alludes, had, long been raising his voice against the " parsons " (Pfaffen); the men of letters, Brand, Erasmus, Reuchlin, and above all Ulrich von Hutten, contributed, each in their way, to discredit the Roman Curia; and lastly, a new type of theology, represented chiefly by Martin Luther, threatened to sweep away the very foundations of the papal monarchy.

At the same time that the Neo-Platonists, like Ficino and Pico de la Mirandola, and the pantheists, whose God was little more than a reverential conception of the universe at large, and the purely worldly humanists, like Celtes and Bebel, were widely diverging each by his own particular path from the ecclesiastical Weltanschauung of the middle ages, Ulrich von Hutten was busy attacking the Curia in his witty Dialogues, in the name of German patriotism.

They soon reached Rome, and a Dominican monk, Prierius, wrote a reply in defence of the papal power, in an insolent tone which first served to rouse Luther's suspicion of the theology of the papal Curia.

They were glad to leave Luther unmolested in order to spite the " Curtizanen," as the adherents of the papal Curia were called.

The Curia, following its accustomed policy, rewarded his zeal with a pension of 50 gulden.

The papal curia had no wish to bring things to a quarrel with him.

This village was brought to light by excavation in 187 4, and its forum and curia are still visible.

The struggle between these two systems continued well into the 10th century; and, though episcopalism was not infrequently proscribed by the curia, it still survived, and till the year 1870 could boast that no ecumenical council had ventured to condemn it.

In the past this principle led to the erection of the Inquisition and, even at the present day, there exists in the Curia a special congregation charged with its application '(see' Curia Romana).

Even before this, the earliest germs can be traced back into the revolutionary period itself - the movement characterized above had begun working in France on the same lines; and, as it showed great zeal for the increase of the papal authority, it received the support of the Curia.

Just as the Curia was the supreme court of appeal in ecclesiastical causes, so also the pope threatened disobedient princes with deposition, e.g.

The reasons for this were numerous, first among them being the abuses of the papal system of finance, which had to provide funds for the vast administrative machinery of the Curia.

The theory of the papal supremacy held by the Curia was thus at least called in question.

The sole advantage which John Albert reaped from his championship of the Christian cause was the favour of the Curia, and the ascendancy which that favour gave him over the Teutonic Knights, whose new grand-master, Albert of Saxony, was reluctantly compelled to render due homage to the Polish king.

The chief abbot has the rank of a bishop, and is a member of the Upper House of the Hungarian parliament, while in spiritual matters he is subordinate immediately to the Roman curia.

The curia voted as a single unit and thus furnished the type for that system of group-voting which runs through all the later organization of the popular assemblies.

The local senate, or curia, always exercised an important influence on municipal politics.

We may still hold the opinion of Dollinger that it was intended to impress the barbarian Pippin and justify in his eyes the Frank intervention in favour of the pope in Italy; or we may share the view of Loening (rejected by Brunner, Rechtsgeschichte) that the forgery was a pious fraud on the part of a cleric of the Curia, committed under Adrian I., 4 with the idea of giving a legal basis to territorial dominion which that pope had succeeded in establishing in Italy.

He was made protector of England in the Roman curia; and in 1524 Henry VIII.

Urban was the first to proclaim with emphasis the necessity of a close association of the Curia with the religious orders, and this he made the essential basis of the theocratic government.

Dread of the Normans, too, explains the singular attitude of the Curia towards the Comneni, of whom it was alternately the enemy and the protector or ally.

The practice of the nomination of bishops by the Curia and of papal recommendation to prebends and benefices of every kind grew daily more general, and the number of appeals to Rome and exemptions granted to abbeys and even to simple churches increased continually.

Not until 1210, when Otto of Brunswick turned against the pope to whom he owed his crown, was Innocent compelled to open hostilities; and the struggle ended in a victory for the Curia.

Besides making laws for the Christendom of the present and the future, these popes employed themselves in giving a more regular form to their principal administrative organ, the offices of the Curia.

The hopes of the Curia were frustrated by the resistance of the Aragonese and Sicilians, and Charles of Valois, to whom the Curia eventually destined the crown of Aragon, had to resign it for that of Constantinople, which he also failed to secure.

Several of them thought of restoring the lost empire by force, and thus giving a pendant to the fourth crusade; but the Curia finally realized the enormous difficulties of such a project, and convinced themselves that the only practical solution of the difficulty was to come to an understanding with the Palaeologi and realize pacifically the long-dreamed Church.

But the control exercised by the Roman Curia over the episcopate had been realized by many other means.

The custom in force required bishops established by papal authority to take an oath of fidelity to the pope and the Roman Church, and this oath bound them in a particular fashion to the Curia.

The regular clergy, who were almost wholly sheltered from the power of the diocesan bishops, found themselves, even more than the secular priesthood, in a state of complete dependence on the Curia.

They were not invested with their office until they had been examined by a papal chaplain, or sometimes even by the vice-chancellor of the Curia.

Significant also is the foothold gained at this time in the Curia itself by the humanists - Poggio, Bruni and others.

The sequel was that seven of the cardinals attached to Gregory's Roman Curia withdrew to Pisa.

At Florence the pope came into closer contact with the humanists, and to this circumstance is due the gradual dominance which they attained in the Roman Curia - a dominance which, both in itself, and even more because of the frankly pagan leanings of many in that party, was bound to awaken serious misgivings.

The anti-pope - the last in the history of the papacy - made no headway, although the council invested him with the power of levying annates to a greater extent than had ever been claimed by the Roman Curia.

Rome became the scene of a chronique scandaleuse among these scholars, there was something unnatural in the predominance of the humanists in the Curia.

The College of Cardinals, and the Curia in general, grew more and more infected with worldliness during his pontificate.

During the last three decades of the 15th century the Roman Curia, and the College of Cardinals in particular, became increasingly worldly.

A main cause of the cleavage in Germany was the position of ecclesiastical affairs, which - though by no means hopeless - yet stood in urgent need of emendation, and, combined with this, the deeply resented financial system of the Curia.

The Curia, once so corrupt, was completely metamorphosed, and once more became a rallying point for men of stainless character, so that it produced a profound impression even on non-Catholics; while the original methods of St Philip Neri had a profound influence on the reform of popular morals.

It was soon to be perceived how carefully the Curia had made its calculations.

The educated bourgeoisie, which controls the fields of politics, science, finance, administration, art and literature, does not trouble itself about that great spiritual universal monarchy which Rome, as heir of the Caesars, claimed for the Vatican, and to which the Curia of to-day still clings.

This bourgeoisie and the modern state that it upholds stand and fall with the motion of a constitutional state, whose magna carta is municipal and spiritual liberty, institutions with which the ideas of the Curia are in direct conflict.

The more the hope of being able to regain these middle classes of society disappeared, the more decidedly did the Curia perceive that it must seek the support and the regeneration of its power in the steadily growing democracy, and endeavour through the medium of universal suffrage to secure the influence which this new alliance was able to offer.

There can also be little doubt - though the Curia itself would not admit it - that the spiritual power of the papacy has been greatly increased by the loss of the temporal power.

Rome is almost the only place where the word curia has preserved its ancient form; elsewhere it has been almost always replaced by the word court (cour, corte), which is etymologically the same.

The word curia is more particularly reserved to the tribunals and departments which actually deal with the general business of the Church.

In order to understand the organization of the various constituent parts of the Roman Curia, we must remember that the modern principle of the separation of powers is unknown to the Church; the functions of each department are limited solely by the extent of the powers delegated to it and the nature of the business entrusted to it; but each of them may have a share at the same time in the legislative, judicial and administrative power.

But on the whole, all sections of the Curia hold their powers direct from the pope, and exercise them in his name.

The pontifical "chapel" (capella) is the papal court for purposes of religious worship. In it the pope is surrounded by the cardinals according to their order; by the patriarchs, archbishops and bishops attending at the throne, and others; by the prelates of the Curia, and by all the clergy both secular and regular.

Before this is granted the candidate is submitted to a double examination as to his fitness, first by a papal delegate at his place of residence (processus informativus in partibus electi), and afterwards by the Roman Congregation of Cardinals assigned for this purpose (processus electionis definitivus in curia).

Urban was serious and humble, opposed to all nepotism, simony, and secular pomp. He was himself of blameless morality and reformed many abuses in the curia.

Smaller centres (the colonic - often formed in the remains of an ancient villa - the curtis or curia, the castrum, the casale) grew up later.

Scanty remains of a building on the south side of the forum, called the curia, but which may be a basilica, and of the theatre, on the east of the temple, still exist.

At the south end of the forum are three .halls side by side, similar in plan with a common façade-the central one, the curia or council chamber, the others the offices respectively of the duumvirs and aediles, the principal officials of the city; while the greater part of the west side is occupied by two large buildings-a basilica, which is the largest edifice in Pompeii, and the temple of Apollo, which presents its side to the forum, and hence fills up a large portion of the surrounding space.

The procedure at present followed at the Roman curia is either exceptional or common.

All the old categories of members were maintained, but a fifth curia was added, in which almost any one might vote who had resided six months in one place and was not in domestic service; in this way seventy-two would be added to the existing members.

Their main principles were the abolition of the curia or electoral class system and the establishment of the franchise on the basis of universal suffrage; and the division of Austria electorally into racial compartments within which each race would be assured against molestation from other races.

None of the representatives of the curia system fought so tenaciously for their privileges as did the German nominees of the curia of large landed proprietors.

But, though he treated the Church more like a foe than a friend and was constantly at war with the Curia, he retained the Catholic form of church worship and never seems to have questioned the papal supremacy.

This last was the collection first known and chiefly used in the West during the middle ages; and of its 134 only 97 have been written on by the glossatores or medieval commentators; these therefore alone have been received as binding in those countries which recognize and obey the Roman law, - according to the maxim Quicquid non agnoscit glossa, nec agnoscit curia.

The king's active and curious mind welcomed the learned; he maintained a complete toleration for the several creeds, races and languages of his realm; he was served by men of nationality so dissimilar as the Englishman Thomas Brun, a kaid of the Curia, and, in the fleet, by the renegade Moslem Christodoulos, and the Antiochene George, whom he made in 1132 "amiratus amiratorum," in effect prime vizier.

The progressive theologians and clergy, moreover, assumed a hostile attitude, and, in 1800, even the Curia omitted the Year of Jubilee.

At the time of the Servian reforms both branches of the plebs had a plausible claim to recognition as members of the state, the clients as already partial members of the curia and the gees, the unattached plebeians as equally free with the patricians and possessing clans of their own as solid and united as the recognized gentes.

In 1854 he was appointed secretary of legation; but the aggressive ultramontanism of the Curia became increasingly intolerable to his overwrought nature, and in 1856 he was transferred, at his own request, as secretary of legation to Dresden.

The effect of the controversy was a great decrease in the sale of Indulgences in Germany, and the Papal Curia saw with alarm a prolific source of revenue decaying.

His action compelled the Roman Curia to pause.

When Miltitz arrived in Germany he discovered that the movement was much more important than the Roman Curia had imagined.

A reconciliation might have taken place had the Roman Curia supported Miltitz.

But the Curia did not support Miltitz, and placed more faith in Eck, who was eager to extinguish Luther in a public discussion.

He was occupied in trying to unite firmly together the whole evangelical movement; he laboured to give his countrymen a good system of schools; he was on the watch to defeat any attempt of the Roman Curia to regain its hold over Germany; and he was the confidential adviser of a large number of the evangelical princes.

This was followed by La Nuova Italia ed i Vecchi Zelanti (1881), another attack on the Vatican policy; and by his Vaticano Regio (1883), in which he accuses the Vatican of trafficking in holy things and declares that the taint of worldliness came from the false principles accepted by the Curia.

Preparations were made for the coronation on the 12th of February 1111, but the Romans rose in revolt against the compact, and Henry retired taking with him pope and curia.

For the history of the papacy, and associated questions, see Papacy, Conclave, Curia Romana, Cardinal, &C.

At the Council of Basel he was one of the ablest supporters of the view of the Roman curia, and he was rewarded with a cardinal's hat in 1439.

By those of them who are members of the various Congregations and other offices of the Curia the greater part of the government of the Church is directed.

For, just as the Roman Church as a whole preserves in the spiritual sphere the spirit and much of the organization of the Roman Empire, so the administration of the Curia carries on the tradition of Roman government, with its reverence for precedent and its practice of deciding questions, not on their supposed abstract merits, but in accordance with the rules of law as defined in the codes or by previous decisions.

They were found in the chanceries of the republics, in the papal curia, in the council chambers of princes, at the headquarters of condottieri, wherever business had to be transacted, speeches to be made and the work of secretaries to be performed.

At the age of twenty-five he held several rich livings, had been notary and protonotary to the Curia, and was first secretary to the pope, in which capacity he conducted the correspondence with the nuncios (among them Pier Paolo Bergerio in Germany) and a host of other duties.

He was at the head of the curia regis, which was separating itself into the three historical courts of common law about the time when the justiciarship was falling from the supreme place.

The chancellor took the place of the justiciar in council, the treasurer in the exchequer, while the two offshoots from the curia regis, the common pleas and the exchequer, received chiefs of their own.

The king's bench represented the original stock of the curia regis, and its chief justice the great justiciar.

We may mention, as distinct from the above, the flamen curialis, who assisted the curio, the priest who attended to the religious affairs of each curia; the flamens of various sacerdotal corporations, such as the Arval Brothers; the flamen Augustalis, who superintended the worship of the emperor in the provinces.

He studied law in Rome and Naples, entered the Curia under Urban VIII.

The action of the Curia on this occasion was due to its conviction of the imminent triumph of Christian II.

It was a conviction shared by the rest of Europe; but, none the less, it was another of the many blunders of the Curia at this difficult period.

Arnold, after returning to Rome, immediately began a campaign of virulent denunciation against the Roman clergy, and, in particular, against the Curia, which he stigmatized as a " house of merchandise and den of thieves."

Fortunately, both in these quarrels and in all his difficulties with Stephen, he secured the strong and uniform support of the Roman Curia.

The transference of the Curia from Rome to Avignon (1309) had brought the papacy under the influence of the French crown; and this position Philip the Fair of France now endeavoured to utilize by demanding from the pope the dissolution of the powerful and wealthy order of the Temple, together with the introduction of a trial for heresy against the late Pope Boniface VIII.

This was the curia regis.

During the 12th and at the beginning of the 13th centuries the curia regis continued to discharge these functions, except that its importance and actual competence continued to increase, and that we frequently find in it, in addition to the vassals and prelates who formed the council, consiliarii, who are evidently men whom the king had in his entourage, as his ordinary and professional councillors.

But although in strict logic the feudal causes concerning them should have been judged by them alone, they could not maintain this right in the curia regis; the other persons sitting in it could also take part in judging causes which concerned the peers.

Originally there was only one Parlement, that of Paris, as was indeed logical, considering that the Parlement was simply a continuation of the curia regis, which, like the king, could only be one.

This was explained in theory by the principle that if the king himself held his court, it lost, by the fact of his presence, all the authority which he had delegated to it; for the moment the only authority existing in it was that of the king, just as in the ancient curia regis there was the principle that apparente rege cessat magistrates.

He served the Curia in many and important capacities, yet devoted his leisure time to theological and canonistic study.

He became a notary of the papal court of the rota at Avignon, and in 1376 went with the Curia to Rome.

He adhered to the pope elected by the council of Pisa (Alexander V.) and to his successor John XXIII., resuming his place at the Curia.

William of Occam was the most prominent intellectual leader in an age which witnessed the disintegration of the old scholastic realism, the rise of the theological scepticism of the later middle ages, the great contest between pope and emperor which laid the foundations of modern theories of government, and the quarrel between the Roman curia and the Franciscans which showed the long-concealed antagonism between the theories of Hildebrand and Francis of Assisi; and he shared in all these movements.

At the diet which opened in December 1522 at Nuremberg he was represented by Chieregati, whose instructions contain the frank admission that the whole disorder of the church had perchance proceeded from the Curia itself, and that there the reform should begin.

The intervention of the Curia, which hitherto had been hostile to Casimir because of his steady and patriotic resistance to papal aggression, was due to the permutations of European politics.

Disagreements and disputes were continual, and the easy expedient of rewarding the officials of the Curia and increasing the papal revenue by "reserving" more and more benefices was met by repeated protests, such as that of the bishops and barons of England (the chief sufferers), headed by Robert Grosseteste of Lincoln, at the council of Lyons in 1245.2 The subject, indeed, frequently became one of national interest, on account of the alarming amount of specie which was thus drained away, and hence numerous enactments exist in regard to it by the various national governments.

He favoured his own countrymen, and under him began that preponderance of the French in the curia which later led to the papal residence at Avignon, and indirectly to the Great Schism.

Around the sovereign was his Curia Regis or body of councillors, of whom the most important were the justiciar, the chancellor and the treasurer, though the feudal officers, the constable and marshal, were also to be found there.

The Curia, besides advising the king on ordinary matters of state, had two special functions.

But Henry, not contente4 with this, adopted the custom of sending forth certain members of the Curia throughout the realm at intervals, to sit in the shire court, along with or in place of the sheriff, and to hear and judge all the cases of which the court had cognizance.

But there were other developments of the Curia.

Under the superintendence of the Curia Regis and the exchequer, the sheriff still remained the kings factotum in local affairs.

The sentence was passed by the lay members of the Curia Regis alone, the bishops having been forbidden to sit, and threatened with excommunication if they did so, by the accused primate.

During that period the Curia Regis threw off three offshootsthe courts of exchequer, kings bench and common pleas; and records of their judicial proceedings survive in the Plea Rolls and Year Books, some of which have been edited for the Rolls series, the Selden and other societies.

Paul endeavoured to make drastic reforms in the curia, and abolished the college of abbreviators (1466), but this called forth violent protests from the historian Platina, one of their number and subsequently librarian under Sixtus IV., who is responsible for the fiction that Paul was an illiterate persecutor of learning.

The king then seized pope and curia and left the city.

The members of the curia who assisted the magistrates in the cities, crushed by the burden of taxes, now evaded as far as possible public office or senatorial honors.

The curia was thus emptied both from above and from below.

It was in vain that the emperors tried to rivet the chains of the curia in this hereditary bondage, by attaching the small proprietor to his glebe, like the artisan to his gild and the soldier to his legion.

The Rectores A postolici Patrimonii were clerics of the Roman Curia charged with the duty of looking after the interests of the patrimony of St Peter.

In 1178 he appointed five members of the curia to form a special court of justice, and these justices, unlike the other members of the curia, were not to follow the king's court from place to place, but were to remain in one place.

His cousin Giulio, who subsequently became Clement VII., he had made the most influential man in the curia, naming him archbishop of Florence, cardinal and vice-chancellor of the Holy See.

Conciliation with Italy would expose the pope and his Italian entourage to suspicion of being unduly subject to Italian political influence of being, in a word, more Italian than Catholic. Such a suspicion would inevitably lead to a movement in favor of the internationalization of the curia and of the papacy.

So it was in Sicily also; of all the tongues of Sicily French was the most needful in the king's court ("Francorum lingua quae maxime necessaria esset in curia," says Hugo Falcandus, 321); but it was not an official tongue.

The title is applied to numerous ecclesiastics attached by some dignity, active or honorary, to the Roman court (see Curia Romana).

Marius, having assured them that their lives would be spared, removed them to the Curia Hostilia, intending to proceed against them according to law.

The disorganization of the Curia was appalling, the sale of offices became a veritable scandal, the least opposition to the Borgia was punished with death, and even in that corrupt age the state of things shocked public opinion.

This instance, indeed, remained isolated; but the personal title of "count palatine," though honorary rather than official, was conferred on officials - especially by the popes on those of the Curia - had no territorial significance, and was to the last reminiscent of those early comites palatii whose relations to the sovereign had been purely personal and official (see Palatine).

The organs of this vast monarchy were the papal Curia, which first appears distinctly in the firth century (see Curia Rommana), 'See further, Innocent III.

After the disruption of the league of Cambray, Maximilian, like Louis XII., was thrown into a violent anti-curial reaction, and in 1510 he sent to the well-known humanist, Joseph Wimpheling, a copy of the French Pragmatic Sanction, asking his advice and stating that he had determined to free Germany from the yoke of the Curia and prevent the great sums of money from going to Rome.

This suggestion came from the curia, not the elector, whose representatives could not suppress the fear that the plan would arouse opposition and perhaps worse.

This comitia must originally have been composed exclusively of patricians; but there is reason to believe that, at an early period of the Republic, it had, in imitation of the centuriate organization, come to include plebeians (see Curia).

It is more particularly in the part of this programme that relates to the internal policy of the papacy, to the subjection of the Church to the Curia, and to the intensive concentration of the ecclesiastical forces in the hands of the leader of Christendom, that Gregory went farthest in the execution of his plan and approached nearest the goal.

In the registers of these popes, which are now being actively investigated and published, dispensations (licences to violate the laws of the Church); indulgences; imposts levied with increasing regularity on universal Christendom and, in particular, on the clerks; the settlement of questions relating to church debts; the granting of lucrative benefices to Roman functionaries; the divers processes by which the Curia acquired the immediate disposal of monastic, capitulary and episcopal revenues - in short, all financial matters are of the first importance.

For it is the essence of the matter that there were further considerations going far beyond the Roman question and forcing the Curia to adhere to the sovereignty of the people.

In 1904 a commission of cardinals was appointed to undertake the stupendous task of codifying the canon law (see Canon Law), and in 1908 an extensive reorganization of the Curia was x s of carried out, in order to conform its machinery more nearly to present-day needs (see Curia Romana).

At the south end of the forum are three .halls side by side, similar in plan with a common façade-the central one, the curia or council chamber, the others the offices respectively of the duumvirs and aediles, the principal officials of the city; while the greater part of the west side is occupied by two large buildings-a basilica, which is the largest edifice in Pompeii, and the temple of Apollo, which presents its side to the forum, and hence fills up a large portion of the surrounding space.

In the course of a visit which he made to Innocent in this year, the bishop laid before the pope and cardinals a written memorial in which he ascribed all the evils of the Church to the malignant influence of the Curia.