Aquileian Rite

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At the head of the Adriatic, where the Roman road-net of the northeast once converged on a great frontier city, the church of Aquileia kept for centuries an order of worship recognizably its own. It was the same Mass said in Rome and the same daily round of prayer; but the texts fell in a slightly different sequence, certain feasts were weighted differently, and a body of local chant and ceremonial gave the celebration a flavor that a cleric trained at the papal court would have noticed at once. This was the Aquileian Rite — in its own books the ritus patriarchinus, the patriarchine use — the regional recension of the Western liturgy belonging to the Patriarchate of Aquileia and the wide territory it governed.

The patriarchal basilica of Santa Maria Assunta at Aquileia, the mother church whose order of worship the patriarchine use preserved, with the campanile raised under Patriarch Poppo. — Il Faentino, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

A regional use, not a separate church

The first thing to grasp about the Aquileian Rite is what it was not. It was not a separate religion, nor a separate liturgy in the strict sense, nor a mark of doctrinal difference from the rest of Latin Christendom. It belonged to the family of medieval Western “uses” — local recensions of the same underlying Roman Rite, the same Mass and the same Liturgy of the Hours, differing in arrangement, calendar, chant, and ceremonial detail rather than in the faith they carried. Set beside it the Ambrosian use of Milan, the Mozarabic use of the Spanish church, and the English Use of Sarum that grew up at Salisbury, and the pattern is clear: across the medieval West a single liturgy lived in many local dialects, each shaped by the history and saints of its own great church. The Use of Sarum and the Celtic rite of the Insular world are its nearest kin in kind, regional customs that diverged from the Roman books in detail and not in creed. To celebrate the patriarchine rite was to do what every Latin Christian did, in the particular order that the cathedral of Aquileia and its suffragans had received and handed down.

What gave Aquileia the standing to keep its own order so long was the exceptional dignity of the see. Tradition traced its founding to the evangelist Mark, sent (in the local memory) by Peter; whatever weight one gives the legend, Aquileia was historically one of the oldest and greatest metropolitan churches of the West, mother-see of a vast province reaching from the Veneto across Istria and Carniola into the eastern Alpine lands. Its fourth-century basilica, with the largest early-Christian mosaic floor in the Western world, survives as the visible token of that antiquity; the archaeological area and the patriarchal basilica were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1998.

A panel from the fourth-century floor of the Aquileian basilica, the largest early-Christian mosaic in the Western world, a stone witness to the see’s antiquity. — Sailko, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

From the mid-sixth century the heads of this church bore the rare and resonant title of patriarch — a dignity shared in the Latin West only with Rome itself and, later, the daughter-see of Grado and the patriarch of Venice. A church of that rank did not simply adopt whatever service-books arrived from elsewhere; it had the prestige, and the self-consciousness, to keep its own.

The patriarch title and the long schism

The patriarchal title was forged in conflict, and the conflict is part of the rite’s history. In 553 the Second Council of Constantinople condemned the so-called Three Chapters — certain writings of three earlier theologians — and when Pope Vigilius came round to accepting that condemnation, a bloc of north-Italian bishops led by Aquileia refused. Around 560 the bishop of Aquileia (Paulinus I in the usual reckoning) began styling himself patriarch, as head of this dissenting communion, and the see passed into the schism of the Three Chapters. When the Lombards swept into northern Italy in 568, Paulinus carried the relics and the title to the island of Grado, under Byzantine protection. From 606–607 the line split: a patriarch at Grado returned to Roman communion, while the mainland see, soon re-established at Aquileia under Lombard rule, held to the schism. Communion was finally restored only at the synod of Pavia around 698–700, with the consent of the Lombard king Cunipert, ending nearly a century and a half of separation.

This is documentary history, and it matters for the liturgy in two ways. The schism preserved Aquileia’s habit of going its own way; and the rivalry of the two patriarchates — old Aquileia and new Aquileia at Grado, the latter the ancestor of the patriarchate of Venice — embedded liturgical custom in the politics of the northern Adriatic for centuries. The patriarchine use, when it finally surfaces in the surviving books, is the use of a church long practiced in distinctiveness.

What the surviving books show

The Aquileian Rite is known only at second hand, through the service-books copied for the cathedral and the churches under its jurisdiction. There is no single founding text, no liturgist’s treatise setting out the rite whole; it must be reconstructed by patient comparison of missals, breviaries, sacramentaries, and ritual books, set against the Roman books spreading from the papal court. What such manuscripts establish is real but bounded: they show a recognizable local tradition, not a wholly independent liturgy, and much of the rite’s finer texture is recoverable only by collation.

The earliest and most instructive witness is a capitulare — a list of the gospel and epistle readings appointed through the church year — added in the eighth century by a Lombard hand to the Codex Rehdigeranus, an Old-Latin gospel-book itself written in the Aquileian region in the first half of the eighth century (and now in Berlin). This reading-list is the oldest clear map of how the Aquileian church ordered its liturgical year, and it preserves older usages: the feast of St. Stephen, for instance, falls on December 27 in the Antiochene reckoning rather than the Roman December 26 — a small but telling sign of eastern-Mediterranean coloring in a church that faced the Adriatic and looked toward Byzantium. Alongside such calendar features the books carry proper offices for saints venerated in the region — Hermagoras and Fortunatus, the patron martyrs whom Aquileia counted as Mark’s own appointees, chief among them — together with distinctive prayers, chant melodies, and an ordering of feasts and seasons that diverged in detail from Rome.

A twelfth-century crypt fresco of the Deposition from the Cross; the crypt cycle below the high altar narrates the legend of St. Mark and the regional martyrs Hermagoras and Fortunatus. — Wolfgang Sauber, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

By the time the rite reaches print the divergences had already worn thin. A Missale for the Aquileian use was printed at Augsburg in 1494, and breviaries and ritual books appeared for Aquileia and several of its old suffragans; but the last Aquileian Missal, of 1519, retained few features that a Roman cleric would have called peculiar. The printed books still bore the proud name ritus patriarchinus, yet by then they were in substance local editions of the Roman Rite with a regional calendar — the rite surviving as a label and a calendar more than as a fully distinct liturgy.

Decline and suppression

The history of the use is the history of the see, and both bend along the same arc of contraction. The Patriarchate of Aquileia reached its widest sway in the central Middle Ages, when its patriarchs were not only metropolitans of a great ecclesiastical province but temporal princes of the Patria del Friuli, a state of the Holy Roman Empire with its own parliament from the fourteenth century — among the earliest representative assemblies of medieval Europe. That princely power was broken in 1420, when the Republic of Venice annexed Friuli and stripped the patriarch of his temporal dominion, leaving him a spiritual lord in a land governed from Venice.

The temporal state of the Patria del Friuli (in red) within the Holy Roman Empire around 1250, the territory the patriarch ruled as a prince until Venice annexed it in 1420. — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The liturgical contraction came in step. Already in the Carolingian period the Roman books had gained ground, and the spread of the Franciscan-mediated Roman office in the later Middle Ages eroded local uses everywhere. The decisive pressure was the standardization that gathered force after the Council of Trent (1545–1563), whose reform produced a uniform Roman breviary (1568) and missal (1570) and granted continued life only to uses able to show a long, unbroken antiquity. Aquileia’s diluted printed books made a weak case for exemption, and the old use was given up piecemeal across the patriarchate and its former suffragans — at Monza by 1578, at Trieste by 1586, in the mother church of Aquileia itself by the 1590s. The diocese of Como, an old suffragan, held out longest: its synods of 1565 and 1579 still insisted on the patriarchine use, until Clement VIII pressed Roman conformity there too in 1597. Faint survivals lingered where local pride and ancient privilege were strongest — patriarchine ceremonial persisted at St. Mark’s in Venice, the doge’s own basilica, into the opening years of the nineteenth century, fading there around 1807; and traces of the old Como chant outlived even that in particular observances.

The see itself was the last thing to go. The town of Aquileia had long since dwindled to a village amid its ruins, and the patriarchal residence had shifted inland to Udine; the title had become a prize contested between Venice and the Habsburg lands that straddled the patriarch’s old territory. Under Austrian pressure Pope Benedict XIV suppressed the Patriarchate of Aquileia by the bull Iniuncta nobis on July 6, 1751, dividing its remaining jurisdiction between two new archbishoprics — Udine, on the Venetian side, and Gorizia, on the Habsburg side. With the institution that had carried it now formally dissolved, the rite that had depended on the patriarch’s church passed wholly into the general Roman use, surviving thereafter only as an object of study.

Scholarship and the surviving record

Because the Aquileian Rite left no living practice and no single authoritative book, modern knowledge of it rests on the manuscripts and early prints and on the liturgists and musicologists who have collated them. The standard older account in English is the article by Adrian Fortescue in the Catholic Encyclopedia (volume 16, 1914), which assembled the witnesses — the eighth-century capitulare of the Codex Rehdigeranus, the medieval and printed missals and breviaries, the suppression dates — into the reconstruction still cited today; it is freely readable in a Wikisource transcription. The institutional frame — the patriarchal title, the Three Chapters schism, the synods that mark the rite’s retreat — is set out in the older reference literature on the see, among them the Schaff-Herzog treatment of the patriarchate and its synods.

The most active recent work has been musicological. The chant of the patriarchine rite survives chiefly in notated books from Como, and the preliminary study of that written tradition by Angelo Rusconi, Il canto rito “patriarchino” nell’antica diocesi di Como, is among the careful modern attempts to recover what the Roman standardization displaced; it circulates among specialists in late-medieval liturgical music. The basilica that anchored the whole tradition is itself a primary document: its fourth-century mosaic floor, its eleventh-century campanile raised under the patriarch Poppo, and its crypt frescoes are cataloged in the UNESCO World Heritage dossier for Aquileia, a stone record of the church whose order of worship the books only partly preserve.

Wall painting in the apse of the Aquileian basilica, part of the decoration that, with the mosaic floor and crypt cycle, makes the building itself a primary witness to the patriarchine church. — Wolfgang Sauber, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

These three registers should be kept distinct. That Aquileia had a recognizably local use, attested from the eighth-century capitulare and surviving in service-books down to the printed missals, is the secure ground of scholarly consensus. How much of the deep medieval rite — its chant, its proper ceremonies, its full calendar — can be confidently reconstructed from the thin and late witnesses is genuinely debated among liturgists, who agree that the printed books show a rite already largely Romanized. And the tradition-internal self-understanding — Aquileia as Mark’s see, mother of Hermagoras, a patriarchate ranking with the greatest — is the church’s own memory of itself, reported as such and not to be confused with the documentary record of dates and manuscripts.

A church of regional customs

The patriarchine rite belongs, then, with the Ambrosian, the Mozarabic, the Sarum, and the other local uses, to a Latin Christianity that for most of its history was not a single book but a confederation of regional customs — each great see ordering the common Mass and office in its own received way, bound by one faith and divided by ten thousand details of calendar and chant and ceremony. Aquileia’s distinction is the scale and longevity of the case: a see old enough to claim an apostle, proud enough to take the patriarch’s title in schism and keep it through reconciliation, powerful enough to rule Friuli as a prince and to hold its own order of worship for a thousand years after the Roman books began their spread. When the patriarchate was at last dissolved in 1751, what ended was not a heresy and not a separate liturgy, but one long local voice in the worship of the Latin West — the order of prayer of a church that had stood at the head of the Adriatic since the empire it was born under still ruled the world.

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