Liber Censuum

The Liber Censuum Romanæ Ecclesiæ (Latin for "Census Book of the Roman Church"; also referred to as the Codex of Cencius)[1] is an eighteen-volume (originally) financial record of the real estate revenues of the papacy from 492 to 1192.

[3] The work constitutes the "latest and most authoritative of a series of attempts, starting in the eleventh century, to keep an accurate record of the financial claims of the Roman church".

[3] Albinus' Gesta was the "most ambitious" of the Liber Censuum predecessor records, containing—according to Albinus—"whatever I knew or found in books of antiquities or what I myself heard and saw concerning the rights of St.

[7] The earliest documentary evidence for the use of such a document of papal property rights goes back even earlier to an 1163/1164 letter from Pope Alexander III to the abbot of Lagny-sur-Marne requesting an annual payment of one ounce of gold, owed according to "a certain work among the books of the apostolic see".

[4] Such incidences are likely what Cencius refers to in the preface of the Liber Censuum as the "no little damage and loss" incurred by the church as a result of earlier records being "incomplete and neither written nor arranged authentically".

[4] Furthermore, the Liber Censuum was compiled at a time when the papal patrimony was threatened by the Staufen emperor and individual payments from sources throughout the continent were being reduced by the evasiveness of payers and the inefficiency of the apostolic camera.

[13] V. Pfaff, estimating historical exchange rates, assessed the value of the revenue cited in the Liber Censuum as 1,214 gold ounces, a sum that would comprise less than 5% of Richard I of England's annual income.

[9] Modern, edited versions of the Liber Censuum, reconstructed as their editors thought the original codex of Cencius would have appeared, have been produced by Fabre and Louis Duchesne (1910).