Liber Censuum

The Liber Censuum Romanæ Ecclesiæ (Latin for "Census Book of the Roman Church"; also referred to as the Codex of Cencius) is an eighteen-volume (originally) financial record of the real estate revenues of the papacy from 492 to 1192. The span of the record includes the creation of the Apostolic Camera and the effects of the Gregorian Reform. 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". According to historian J. Rousset de Pina, the book was "the most effective instrument and [...] the most significant document of ecclesiastical centralization" in the central Middle Ages.

Michael Ott considers the Liber Censuum "perhaps the most valuable source for the history of papal economics during the Middle Ages".

The document has its roots in the Polyptych of Pope Gelasius I, created at the end of the 5th century and continued for the next four centuries. The Liber Censuum proper was assembled in 1192 by Cencius Camerarius (future Pope Honorius III), papal chamberlain to Pope Clement III and Pope Celestine II, and his assistant, William Rofio, the clerk of the papal camera, compliling information contained in the Collectio canonum of Cardinal Deusdedit (1087), the Liber politicus of the canon Benedict (c. 1140), dossiers of the former chamberlain Boson (1149–1178), and the Gesta pauperis scolaris of Cardinal Albinus (1188). 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. Peter". The Liber Censuum also incorporates information from a contemporary general census and rent table of church properties organized by diocese, the Ordo romanus (a description of religious ceremonies) —as it pertains to the distribution of payments to the curia during such ceremonies, and works of pontifical history such as the Liber pontificalis.

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