Diplomatics as a discipline begins in the seventeenth century with an argument between a Jesuit and a Benedictine monk about the authenticity of charters. The Benedictine’s seminal treatise De Re Diplomatica gave the discipline an identity, the core of which is preserved in treatises on ‘pure’ Diplomatics, and also specifically on papal Diplomatics, up to the present day. The discipline’s boundaries did not remain static, however, and already in the eighteenth century a tradition of applying Diplomatics to substantive historical problems had begun. After World War II Heinrich Fichtenau defined the contours of applied Diplomatics.

Some continuities run through the long period from the late Roman empire to the Counter Reformation. An archive existed well before the empire in the West collapsed. Throughout the period papal government was largely demand driven. To settle disputes in far-away localities of which the popes knew little, they delegated authority to men on the spot who were not paid for their services. The papacy lacked the resources to fund a ‘Weberian’ bureaucracy, but was adept at devising rules to run systems that circumvented its own shortcomings, and thus it was able to meet the expanding demand for its services.