This chapter addresses the question of why prominent nobles were so interested in being church advocates by examining the legitimate financial benefits that came with the position. Using sources from the period 1050 to 1250, it argues that advocates typically received one-third of the fines when they held court on ecclesiastical estates, and also received food and lodging in return for fulfilling their role as judge. It also demonstrates that many advocates received separate income for their responsibilities in providing protection. While all of these payments were initially in kind, by the thirteenth century it was increasingly common for advocates to receive a single lump-sum money payment for fulfilling all their advocatial responsibilities, which is evidence of the increasing commodification of local positions of authority in this period. This chapter also investigates the numismatic evidence for church advocates as additional source material for the economic dimensions of the role.

This chapter analyzes the earliest medieval evidence for the position of advocate. It argues that, rather than relying on top-down sources such as Frankish legal texts (capitularies) and the canons of Church councils, we need to focus on what named advocates are described as doing in eighth- and early ninth-century sources. Taking this approach, it demonstrates that advocates first emerged in the Frankish empire in the mid-eighth century and then proliferated rapidly under Charlemagne. Contrary to the standard argument that these Carolingian advocates were official, legal representatives for ecclesiastics at court, the chapter contends that – from the beginning – advocates were closely tied to the local territorial interests of monasteries and churches and frequently pushed the limits of their formal responsibilities.

This chapter focuses on the evidence for both continuity and change in the role of the advocate during the tenth century. Under the Ottonian rulers of the East Frankish Kingdom, the position of advocate acquired new prestige, as high-ranking nobles and even the rulers themselves claimed to be the advocates for individual monasteries and churches. As part of this trend, sources increasingly emphasized the advocate’s role as protector of ecclesiastical properties. At the same time, local evidence continues to show advocates closely overseeing the property interests of monasteries and churches in ways that have clear parallels with eighth- and ninth-century sources from the Carolingian empire. This chapter further argues that the position of advocate was developing organically in this period and that scholarly attempts to create different categories of advocates are misguided. It is precisely because the role of advocate was open to interpretation that advocates were increasingly able to abuse their positions for their own profit.

This chapter argues that, especially in the East Frankish Kingdom, Carolingian advocates were operating as key local agents for churches on their estates by the mid-ninth century at the latest. While the sources from the West Frankish and Italian parts of the Carolingian empire suggest different trends, the East Frankish sources (especially royal grants of immunity) demonstrate that advocates acquired important policing powers and judicial authority on ecclesiastical properties during this period. This undermines the typical scholarly argument that Carolingian advocates were a different phenomenon than subsequent types of advocates, as these East Frankish advocates already had responsibilities that most later advocates would continue to have into the eighteenth century.

The Introduction argues that the common scholarly terms feudalism, lordship, state-building, bureaucracy, officeholding and government all promote a misleading narrative about Europe’s transition from the medieval to the modern period. To better understand how power and authority functioned at the local level, it is essential to focus on the people who provided protection and exercised justice – and to recognize how little their corrupt practices changed between 750 and 1800. At the center of this study is the position of advocate (Latin: advocatus; German: Vogt), which emerged in the Carolingian period. Advocates then proliferated, especially in the German-speaking lands, and were responsible for providing protection and exercising justice on ecclesiastical estates, in some towns and even for entire regions. Examining how advocates profited from their positions across a millennium offers the opportunity to reassess the standard narrative of European political progress and to rethink the concepts we rely on to tell that story.

This chapter focuses on the period between roughly 1050 and 1150, when calls to reform the Church and religious life swept across Europe. The new religious orders that emerged in this period, including the Cistercians, Premonstratensians and Augustinian canons, all sought to limit the influence of secular authorities over their communities. Nevertheless, this chapter argues that – especially in the German-speaking lands – church advocacy was already too entrenched a feature of society for these new orders to ignore it or effectively control it. Someone needed to provide protection and exercise justice over the numerous estates these new foundations were receiving, and nobles had already come to rely on the position of advocate as an effective means of asserting their influence over monasteries and churches. As a result, while Church reformers increasingly sought in this period to regulate and place limits on advocates’ responsibilities, they were unable to prevent high-ranking nobles from accumulating large numbers of church advocacies in their own hands.

This chapter offers a case study of a single dispute over a church advocacy. In 1225, members of the entourage of Count Frederick of Isenberg attacked and killed Archbishop Engelbert of Cologne. Sources written at the time all agree that the reason for this assassination was a dispute between the count and the archbishop over the advocacy for the convent of Essen. Count Frederick had inherited the advocacy and considered it an important source of income and prestige, but Archbishop Engelbert – in whose archdiocese Essen was located – also sought control of the advocacy. The conflict between them ties together many of the themes of the preceding four chapters, including the issues of advocatial violence, forgery, royal and papal intervention in disputes and the importance of the profits accrued from holding an advocacy.

This chapter argues that, starting around the year 1000, evidence for monasteries and churches complaining about their advocates’ bad behavior steadily grows. While much of the most dramatic rhetoric about advocates’ abuses comes from the West Frankish Kingdom, there is also evidence that East Frankish ecclesiastics began to have problems with their advocates during the same period. As a result, this chapter does not frame advocates’ abuses in terms of the debate around the Feudal Revolution/Mutation/Transformation of the year 1000 (which mostly focuses on West Francia). Instead, it argues that, as high-ranking nobles (especially counts and dukes) increasingly acquired church advocacies, they used their local power and authority to push the limits of their responsibilities as advocates, sometimes coming into conflict with monasteries and churches in the process. This was not a form of violent or anarchic lordship, but a strategy to use the well-established responsibilities of advocates on ecclesiastical estates to their own advantage.