Beyond the Capital: A Survey of Charitable Institutions in the Kingdom of Naples

When Charles of Bourbon conquered the Kingdom of Naples in 1734, he set out to decrease the power of the Church and the privileges of the clergy. The Concordat between the Kingdom of Naples and the Holy See, signed in 1741, was designed to end the centuries-long jurisdictional disputes between the State and the Church. The Concordat established precise rules for the management and taxation of lay and mixed (secular and religious) pious associations. As stated in the preamble, the Concordat aimed at the proper administration of lay pious institutions through the definition of clear rules for the financial oversight of churches, estaurite, confraternities, hospitals, conservatori, and similar organizations founded and governed by the laity.1 The Monti frumentari were also included in the list. To achieve the Concordat's objectives, a tribunal called the Tribunale Misto was created, supported by an annual contribution of 10 carlini from the same pious institutions. Before their accounting and financial work could begin, however, it was necessary to conduct a census to determine the number of associations that had to be overseen. Thus, local governors were charged with drawing up, for tax purposes, a report on the number of secular and mixed pious institutions active in their territories. Our goal is to examine the data provided by these reports and study the distribution of confraternities and other pious associations in the Kingdom of Naples, a subject never wholly explored or only undertaken for a few areas before the unification of Italy in 1861. The essay is divided into two parts. In the first section, we show how, in the shifting political, economic, and socio-religious panorama of the sixteenth century, the kingdom's pious associations, including confraternities, responded to the needs of the poor and helped to address economic and social emergencies. The second part of the essay will analyze the information collected by the Tribunale Misto as one of the first "statistical" tools made available by the new Bourbon state, to track how many, what type, and where these entities were located. Utilizing the fiscal data from the survey, we have created a map of early modern lay and mixed pious associations in the Kingdom of Naples.