La diocesi Gabii e i Crescenzi: un possesso fondiario laico nella Campagna romana

Abstract

The suburbicarian diocese of Gabii, which included indicatively the territory between the VII and XIII miles of the via Prenestina, was located on the eastern border of the Agro Romano, close to the embedded territories of Tivoli and Praeneste. I say ‘indicatively’ because, to date, very little is known of this reality that gravitated around the Urbe, and the few studies conducted in this regard, partial and outdated, cannot shed clear light on it. This in contrast to the wealth of data provided by documentary sources and available for that sector of the Agro Romano, whose critical reading (of the sources) allows to reconstruct the picture of a territory at the center of conflicting interests: on the first hand the interference of the clan crescenziano - by now master of the prenestine comitatus - pushes to broaden its land interests in the Agro; on the other hand, the claims of the most influential monasteries in Lazio (Subiaco and Grottaferrata in primis), eager to acquire more power and in an area of high strategic and economic value. The diocese of Gabii ended up being squeezed between these two forces, and, despite its disappearance, datable with relative accuracy to 964 A.D. - the date on which a Gabinense bishop is attested for the last time – results to be the direct consequence of this political process. All this contradicts the historiographic tradition, which tended to trace back the oblivion of the diocese of Gabii to the end of the ninth century, the period in which the phenomenon of the Saracen pirates reached its maximum intensity, apparently being recycled as a historiographic topos uselful in the absence of alternative explanations.