Esclavos, dependientes y alienación de la propiedad en la Iglesia visigoda

This paper will review the situation of ecclesiastical dependents (servi, mancipia, ancillae, liberti) in the Visigothic kingdom. In the main normative sources on these groups (conciliar canons, monastic rules, civil legislation), their insertion in the broader scheme of ecclesiastical property, in the moral and regulatory scheme of the Church's conduct and, above all, their regulation under the omnipresent principle of inalienability, whose objective was to avoid the subtraction of slaves or freedmen to the domestic structure of each church and especially to the patronage of the Church –the patroness that "never dies"– as an institution, becomes evident. This feature, increasingly, made it difficult for these groups of people to escape the networks of servitude and patronage of their sees. In spite of this, the sources attest that certain members of the clergy wished to grant greater freedoms to their subordinates, sometimes through actions that went beyond what was permitted by canon law, thereby realizing an illegitimate alienation of the res ecclesiae. These episodes created tensions that have already been pointed out, but, to conclude, we will outline another point of view from which we can perhaps better understand the ambiguities of the sources regarding what was an admissible alienation and the different treatment that these events and their resolutions had in the sources.