papal administration and the rights of clergymen to make a last will and testifies that Pope Innocent VIII(r. 1484–1492) granted alicentia testandi for the bishop of Turku and the members of the cathedral chapter. The document was not edited in the source edition series Finlands Medeltidsurkunder, including medieval Finnish documents from c. 1000 up to the time of the Reformation in the 1530s; but Aino Liira and I have recently edited it.24 What, then, does this document concern? As mentioned, popes had the authority to grant licences to clergymen allowing them to bequeath their property to whomever they wanted. Such a practice was possible because, due to their general powers, popes could grant to Christians dispensations, absolutions, and licences covering a broad spectrum of different matters stipulated in canon law – as long as the graces did not violate Holy Script or the general principles of the Church. Thanks to their enormous power, medieval popes granted what must have been thousands of licentia testandi, although there has been no closer study of them. These licences were usually personal favours for clergymen and typically valid for the entire life of the recipient of the grace (unlike many other types of papal dispensations or licences that were valid only until the death of the pope who had granted them – after that, they needed to be renewed by the new pontiff).25 Let us now study more closely the licentia testandi granted to the clergymen from Turku.26 The surviving document is a copy of a petition made by Bishop Conradus Bitz of Turku together with the members of the Turku cathedral chapter as well as the clergy of the diocese of Turku (Conradus Episcopus ac … capitulum ecclesie Aboensis necnon clerus Civitatis et diocesis predictarum). In the petition, they explain to Pope Innocent VIII that according to an old and accepted custom in the ecclesiastical province of Uppsala – to which the town and diocese of Turku belonged – priests have been able to bequeath their property, no matter whether they had accumulated it by their own work or from their office. Now, how24 Liira – Salonen 2023. 25 Paravicini Bagliani 1980, pp. 42–46; Nicolai 2020, pp. 294–295. 26 The analysis below follows the argumentation in Liira – Salonen 2023. The Latin text of the document can be found in the Appendix. 174
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