Were the abbots of monasteries also lords who owned land and collected taxes?

by krampster2

I'm playing Pentiment at the moment, a game set in Bavaria in the 16th century.

One of the main gripes that the villagers in the game have is that the abbot of the local monastery has raised their taxes. Once or twice a character refers to him as the lord of the land and says that if he wants to raise the taxes then he is entitled to. Also, a woman has her farmland seized by the church after her husband dies.

Is this accurate? I did not know that the church owned land other than the land on which church buildings stood.

TywinDeVillena

Kind of.

They did not necessarily own land, but they also owned some lands. Throughout the Middle Ages and early Modern period, plenty of lords and some rich people donated lands to churches and monasteries as works of piety to ensure they would go to heaven. In some cases, those land donations were made in order to provide income for a given church or monastery so that the priests, monks, or nuns would carry out the last will and testament of those lords of rich people who instituted the obligation of officiating a certain number of masses in perpetuity on certain days.

Besides this, bishops or archbishops were lords in their own right, with jurisdiction over an inordinate amount of territories, making the cathedrals and office holders extremely rich. The archbishopric of Toledo, the most important one in Spain, had jurisdiction, civil and criminal, low and high, over more than 50 towns and 200 villages, making the archbishops awfully rich. The abbess of Las Huelgas, close to the city of Burgos, was also formidably rich and influential, as the monastery had jurisdiction over 60 towns or villages, a reason why the Crown always tried to secure that position to a woman of the royal family.

In some cases, when the archbishop of Toledo was a person of such importance that prevarication was fairly common. My lord Pedro González de Mendoza, the Great Cardinal of Spain, at some point held several church offices simultaneously even though it would have been unlawful, but he was so powerful that could do just that. In the year 1492 he was archbishop of Toledo, bishop of Calahorra, and apostolic administrator of the Archdiocese of Seville, abbott of Valladolid, and abbott of Fécamp (in France), something that meant he had a monstruously large income. Had he cared enough to attend the Conclave of 1492, he would have been either the richest or second richest cardinal in there, more or less on par with the Portuguese cardinal Jorge da Costa, archbishop of Coimbra.