While Late Antique decretals were being transmitted to new generations, popes corresponded with kings and emperors, by the mid-to-late eighth century at times in surprisingly faulty Latin, and a new genre of papal document appeared alongside them, solemn privileges, written on papyrus, two or three meters long, mostly for monasteries. Not much thought was required to compose them, as beneficiaries brought drafts of the substantive part and a formulary supplied the top and the tail. What exactly these privileges granted is a matter of debate. They were written in a script descended from late Roman cursive and hard to read. This was probably an advantage. The archaic script concealed bad Latin. And the appearance would have inspired awe. In the eleventh century the late Roman script and the long papyrus format were abandoned, to be replaced by new devices to make the document impressive. What exactly they were granting to monasteries became clearer in the twelfth century.

‘Governing the world by writing’ is the intriguing title of a recent book about the late antique and medieval papacy. The subtitle reveals it to be about relations with Dalmatia only,1 but the concept is applicable to the present work, which tries to explain how the papacy governed the world, in its religious aspects at least, by means of documents. The ‘power’ with which the book is concerned is ‘power to’ more than ‘power over’.2 ‘Protocol’ in the title is understood in a sense transferred from the world of computing as ‘A (usually standardised) set of rules governing the exchange of data’ (Oxford English Dictionary). The implicit analogy with software is not inappropriate, since an argument running through the book will be that cleverly designed systems compensated for the inadequacies of the ‘hardware’ of papal government – for its lack of a properly financed bureaucratic infrastructure.