Archdeaconships and archpriesthoods as instruments for the consolidation of episcopal power and territory in the diocese of Burgos (11th-14th centuries)

Abstract

The episcopal see of Burgos, which would become the de facto political capital of the new kingdom of Castile, provides a model for the formation by royal command of a new diocese out of several earlier sees. In the 11th and 12th centuries, bishops acted both as royal agents in the pursuit of the religious policies of the Castilian monarchs and as lords who gradually accumulated the territories that would come to form the boundaries of the diocese. This paper sheds light on the emergence and development of intra-diocesan circumscriptions (archdeaconries and archpresbyterate) that contributed to the territorial and institutional establishment of the bishop and his clerical college. It reviews the chronology and defines the changes in the significance of the figures of the archdeacon and the archpriest, who appear in the documentary record before the delineation of their spheres of action in the late 11th century. Only from this starting point can we progress in our understanding of the role that these figures played in the construction of the diocese of Burgos.