Rogare’s history of fundraising timelines are supported by Bluefrog.
History of fundraising 4
Timeline 4: Antiquity/classical (1000BCE-475CE)
This is the fourth, and final, timeline from Rogare’s history and historiography of fundraising project covering the general history of fundraising (future timelines will look at specific themes or topics). This is the longest one, spanning 1,400 years of antiquity and the classical period.
Most scholarship and writing focuses on philanthropy (the act of giving), rather than of asking people to give, and that seems especially true when looking at charity and benevolence so far in the past. But we think we’ve found some interesting nuggets and we’ve tried to relate insights about classical philanthropy to both contemporaneous and modern fundraising.
This is not a definitive history of fundraising over this timespan and is even more weighted towards social and cultural history, rather than details of fundraising practice (not least because such examples are hard to find).
For more information about how the timeline was put together (such as criteria for inclusion) and to suggest inclusions for the timeline, please visit our project page – https://www.rogare.net/history.
View the other timelines:
200-600CE
Social and cultural history of fundraising
Giving anonymously receives the highest praise
Jewish lands in Amoraic rabbinical era
Jewish donors who give anonymously and succeed in organising others in systems of mutual aid receive the highest praise in Jewish scholarly literature. This thinking contains implicit moral disapproval of giving for personal recognition, but also praises organised fundraising.
- See also Maimonides 1138-1205 in the Timeline 3 (Middle Ages).
Source
- Robbins. K.C. (2006) The nonprofit sector in historical perspective: Traditions of philanthropy in the West, p15. In, The Nonprofit Sector – A Research Handbook.
- We’re going to rely a lot on Kevin C. Robbins for this timeline!
350-550CE
Ruins of a Byzantine hospital, somewhere in mondern Turkey.
First use or early example
The birth of the modern hospital in the Byzantine Empire also leads to the development of modern fundraising techniques
(or so it is said)
Byzantine Empire (which encompassed most of the coastal areas bordering the Mediterranean and Aegean – Italy, Turkey, Egypt and the Balkans)
This claim is made on p22 of Kevin Robbins’ article, citing a 1985 book by Timothy Miller – The Birth of the Hospital in the Byzantine Empire. However, we’ve looked through this book and we can’t find much description of the fundraising methods employed. There is a lot about philanthropic activities by the church and hospices (it’s a bugbear of ours that so much historical writing focuses on philanthropic activity while ignoring how this activity was organised).
Miller talks about church collections to support a hospice. And that some donors left legacies, but restricted these for particular purposes and left conditions to exclude bishops from having any influence over how the legacy was used (p102). If anyone can shed more light on how the hospital movement birthed many modern fundraising techniques, we’d like to hear from you.
We can also supply a PDF of Miller’s book to anyone who wants to read it thoroughly and find the stuff we might have missed.
200-400CE
Social and cultural history of fundraising
Christian sects cultivate mass philanthropy
Roman Empire (come on, you know where that used to be)
Concerted attempt to break the monopoly on major public gifts by “pagan elites” (Greek and Roman). Competing Christian sects use “calculated acts of generosity” to achieve more influence on civic politics. To spiritually nurture and “discipline their flocks” (Robbins’ words) clergy develop a theology of sin and atonement with an emphasis on almsgiving as the way to atone for sins.
- See also entry for 30-33CE on Jesus as a fundraising thought leader.
Source
- Robbins. K.C. (2006) The nonprofit sector in historical perspective: Traditions of philanthropy in the West, p15. In, The Nonprofit Sector – A Research Handbook.
c100CE
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Pliny the Younger – philanthropist, decent bloke, and author of the first peer-to-peer matching ask. Probably. Possibly.
First use or early example
First (?) peer-to-peer matching asking
Roman Empire (still where you know it to have been)
On discovering that a boy from Novum Comum (now Como in Northern Italy) has to be sent to school in Mediolanum (Milan) because there are no teachers in his home town, lawyer, author, magistrate, philanthropist, and all-round good bloke Pliny the Younger (61-c113) – who was born in Novum Comum – writes to the town’s leading figures and offers to donate a third of any sum they can raise themselves.
Source – SOFII (see separate link)
50-60CE
Great contribution/person
St Paul – the “first career fundraiser” (and perhaps the first philanthropic psychologist!?)
Ancient Greece
That’s how St Paul is described – as the first career fundraising – on SOFII. St Paul (Saul of Tarsus) is well known in fundraising circles (and of course, elsewhere) for his two letters to the Corinthian church, in which he promoted regular giving rather than one-off appeals (and pointed out that far less well off donors were already doing a lot more).
Our go-to source for the history of ancient philanthropy, Kevin C. Robbins, says that Paul’s letters can be “read as primers on a radical social ethics, demanding that all Christians become tireless benefactors”. Robbins also says that Paul “worked diligently to institutionalise effective Christian giving” by instituting weekly church collections and orchestrating international fundraising campaigns for the poorer churches in Jerusalem.
According to Paul, donors would “gain a greater sense of personal agency and moral power through material support of collective good works” – a very modern take on fundraising similar to philanthropic psychology (which is arguably an idea rooted in a Christian philosophy of fundraising and giving).
Sources
- SOFII has an accessible account of St Paul’s letters, as well as providing links to the letters’ full texts.
- Robbins. K.C. (2006) The nonprofit sector in historical perspective: Traditions of philanthropy in the West, p20. In, The Nonprofit Sector – A Research Handbook.
- Marc Pitman’s blog about fundraising in The Bible contains a section on St Paul’s teachings.
- See also Redmond Mullins’ essay ‘Two thousand years of disreputable history’, p9, which you can find in either Thoughtful Fundraising, edited by Jill Mordaunt and Rob Payton, or 2022’s Fundraising Reader.
- St Paul’s approach regularly forms the basis for ideas about fundraising in faith/religious circles. Here’s just one example.
- For more on philanthropic psychology, see Institute for Sustainable Philanthropy.
St Paul, as painted by Rubens. There were some online images online of St Paul writing one of his letters, but they weren’t copyright free.