The Fate of the Pupils of the Holy Ghost Hospital in Rome in the 13th Century

Abstract

The fate of the unwanted and abandoned children, similarly as the sick people and the poor, have from time immemorial always been a current, drastic and difficult problem, both moral and ethical. There were many abandoned children in Rome and in its vicinity, a phenomenon that decidedly influenced Innocent III’s decision to found in 1198 a hospital-poor-house in Rome. The hospital was run by the Holy Ghost Fathers. Its principal function, from the time of its foundation onwards, was to take care about the children forsaken by their mothers or families.

To abandon a child at the poor-house did not always mean that the child had to stay long there. The hospital personnel made efforts to give as many foundlings as possible to women in Rome or its vicinity to feed and bring them up. After about eleven- (girls) or twelve-year stay (boys) at wet nurses’, the forsaken children would return to the poor-house. Most of them, however, again left the hospital. The girls would get married or were given in service with other people. Generally speaking, they would never return from that service to the hospital. Now the boys, almost all of them, were taken by craftsmen as apprentices. Some foundlings, male and female alike, were given into adoption.

It is characteristic that, generally, the hospital foundlings given into adoption, service or apprenticeship, usually came to the same families or persons who had prior taken care of them in the period until they became eleven or twelve years old. The persons who hosted the hospital charges lived, as rule, not farther than 100 km away from Rome. The carers of the foundlings belonged to the lower social classes. The most numerous group consisted of peasants and poor craftsmen.