"203 x 305 mm. (8 x 12"), with pendant seal (55 mm. in diameter) attached to the bottom, folded over, portion. Single column, 19 lines of text in a very small regular gothic book hand. The seal in its original round wooden encasement. With a large and flamboyant calligraphic "Franciscus" at the beginning of the text. Rome.
The usual soft folds in the vellum, two small holes in the upper margin, four insignificant round wormholes in the text (three letters touched), small portion (3 mm. deep) at the top of the seal missing and two tiny chips rubbed off at the bottom (image and lettering in the wax rather muted), but the document extremely pleasing in general nevertheless, the vellum clean and fresh, and with the text all very clearly legible.
This document, originating from the papal curia of Julius II (pope from 1503-13), confirms that a Spanish student living in Rome, Franciscus of Salamanca, has been granted clerical status. The document indicates that Franciscus had sought a bishop resident in the Roman curia to tonsure him as a cleric, most likely with the aim of securing employment in the papal bureaucracy. the initial petition from Franciscus had resulted in the pope's ordering "G Cardinal of San Pietro in Vincoli" (that is, Cardinal Galeotto della Rovere, the pope's nephew) to select a curial bishop as the student's sponsor. The cardinal's choice fell on Franciscus, bishop of Milopotamos (a titular see in Crete), who is the originator of our document. In it, after summarizing the case as outline above, he says that by papal mandate he tonsured and conferred clerical status on Franciscus on Sunday, June 21, in St. Peter's basilica, and on the same day in the same place in the year 1506 he attached his seal to the present document prepared by a notary and witnessed by two clerics from Cordoba, Johannes de Angulo and Petrus de Angulo (perhaps brothers and apparently friends of Franciscus), attending the ceremony. First tonsure consisted of a ceremonial haircut, with small locks taken from the front, back, sides, and top of the head by an officiating bishop. Once shorn, the tonsured individual would acquire juridical status as a cleric, which removed him from the jurisdiction of secular courts and entitled him to revenues from an ecclesiastical benefice, provided he eventually obtained such a living. First tonsure did not necessarily imply the candidate would continue on to ordination as a priest. A simple cleric could marry and still maintain his clerical status in the late Middle Ages, and some clerics continued to live essentially lay lives. Petrarch, for example, supported himself as a cleric in considerable style with revenues from church livings. (Early printers, too, often enjoyed clerical status: Sweynheym and Pannartz were clerics, respectively, if the dioceses of Mainz and Cologne, and Sweynheym is known to have had an ecclesiastical living.) It seems surprising that Julius II was personally involved in this case, as the document indicates. By 1506, the third year of his pontificate, Julius had a great deal on his papal plate. His artistic projects for Michelangelo were already well underway; in the year of our document Bramante presented the pope with the initial plans for the new St. Peter's; and 1506 was also the year of the pope's famous military campaigns - which he led wearing full armor - that regained control of Perugia and Bologna for the papacy."
Full pdf available, https://dl.mospace.umsystem.edu/mu/islandora/object/mu%3A439368/datastre...