Giulio de' Medici's music books

Abstract

David S. Chambers's provocative study of the cardinalate in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries is rich in implications for music historians. A document of December 1509 suggests that at that time a cardinal's household averaged 144familiares, and the 1526 census revealed similar figures. Moreover, the corporate income of the College of Cardinals had been regulated since 1289 by a Bull of that year that decreed that a half of certain items of papal revenue was to be divided among cardinals resident in Rome, although the actual amounts that individual cardinals received fluctuated in response to changes in the size of the college. There were other sources of income: Roman residents were entitled to the revenue of their ‘title’ church, and those few who held office in the Roman bureaucracy commanded extraordinary salaries. For cardinals with musical interests, the institutional and economic conditions necessary to sustain a musical establishment therefore existed, and despite the relative absence of information on such establishments, we may assume that there were singers and instrumentalists among thefamiliaresof many cardinals' households.

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