Suburbicarian

Suburbicarian an epithet applied to those provinces of Italy which composed the ancient diocese of Rome. Concerning this, two questions arise:

1. What was the extent of this district?

2. Whether it was the limit of the metro political or patriarchal power? Dr. Cave and others think that the notion of suburbicary churches ought not to be extended beyond the limits of the prefectus urbis, viz., a hundred miles about Rome, or, at most, not beyond the limits of those ten provinces which were immediately subject to the civil disposition and jurisdiction of the vicarius unrbis— viz. Campania, Tuscia and Umbria, Picenum Suburbicarium, Valeria, Samnium, Apulia and Calabria, Lucania and Brutii, Sicilia, Sardinia and Corsica— which Dr. Cave supposes to have been the exact and proper limits of the pope's patriarchal power, as he thinks the others were the bounds of his metropolitan jurisdiction. —See Bingham, Christ. Antiq. bk. 9, ch. 1, § 347.