Commemoratorium de Casis Dei

Composed by an anonymous author in 808 CE and transmitted to Charlemagne , the Commemoratorium de Casis Dei vel Monasteriis offers a concise survey of the churches, monasteries, hospices, personnel, and needs of the Jerusalem patriarchate and wider Palestine. Its purpose was practical: to allocate imperial alms efficiently for clergy support and for the repair of buildings that sustained pilgrimage and local worship. The report’s matter-of-fact tone and itemized content suggest direct inquiry on the ground rather than a compilation from older written lists.

The text survives as part of the so-called Basel Roll, a ninth-century copy of three Carolingian administrative documents now at the Öffentliche Bibliothek der Universität Basel. The roll was probably copied in the Upper Rhineland during the second quarter of the ninth century and rediscovered in the nineteenth century after having been recycled into a book binding. Its inclusion in an official dossier underscores the survey’s status as an instrument of Carolingian governance and as evidence for Abbasid–Carolingian contact concerning the Holy Land.

What the Commemoratorium records is a snapshot of the Holy Land’s ecclesiastical infrastructure on the eve of the early ninth century: the distribution of sacred sites, the communities serving them, and the resources required to maintain both pastoral care and hospitality. In later centuries this brief survey became a key reference for historians reconstructing the topography of Christian institutions in and around Jerusalem.

Modern scholarship has approached the text both as a primary source for sacred geography and as a window onto Carolingian statecraft. A series of nineteenth-century editions—first by Giovanni Battista de Rossi, then by Titus Tobler (with Auguste Molinier)—made the roll widely available; in the twenty-first century, Michael McCormick produced a critical edition and translation. The document is also available in English translation by C. M. Watson (1913).