THE APPROACH TO THE CHURCH of the Santi Quattro Coronati (Four Crowned Saints) ascends from below, along the Via dei Querceti. As soon as you turn left at the corner of the Via dei Santi Quattro a gigantic fortress appears; powerful, ancient walls rise before you, inspiring the immediate impression that you’re standing before something truly exceptional—and that’s precisely what this out-of-the-way, little-known corner of Rome, the church of the Santi Quattro, is. According to one legend the four saints were legionaries (with the names of Severus, Severianus, Carpoforus, and Vittorinus) who were martyred because they refused to worship the statue of a false god. Yet another legend says they were four Dalmatian artists killed by Diocletian because they refused to sculpt that same statue. Their remains, whoever they may have been, are buried in a crypt of the church. What really counts is the building itself, a fundamental testament of the distant past, laden with messages and news, much like a time capsule.
The church was first built in the fourth century, and was constructed on the foundations of a pre-existing Roman building, as was typical of that era. The earlier structure must have been usually impressive, given the size of the surviving vaulted apse, which is enormous when compared to the rest of the building. The original church was much larger, as can easily be seen by the partially walled-in columns between the nave and side aisles. After Robert of Guiscard’s Norman troops sacked the city in 1084 Santi Quattro Coronati was rebuilt, and today all that remains of the first church is its apse. There is a semicircular crypt under the high altar, and the reliquaries of the martyred saints so venerated by the pilgrims were placed at its center. From the left aisle of the church a door opens (after ringing a bell) onto a beautifully decorated cloister with a twelfth-century fountain at its center for ritual ablutions, a portico of paired colonnettes, and capitals decorated with aquatic foliage. Recent excavations revealed an underground passage that connects this fortified basilica with the cathedral church of Saint John Lateran. This tunnel was an escape route for popes who would have found a secure refuge at Santi Quattro Coronati if they needed it. All of the many magnificent columns here, with both smooth and fluted shafts, obviously came from older temples and other Roman buildings. There are two courtyards in front of the church, and the second was originally part of the first basilica. The impressive tower dates to the ninth century, and served the purpose of both observation platform and defensive keep.
This brief description provides a basic idea of the church complex and its buildings, but much more can be said about their frescoes, decorations, and furnishings. The most striking aspect of Santi Quattro Coronati is the atmosphere of the place as a whole and the evident strength of its venerable walls, which would survive even if they were reduced to bare stone. Two convents are housed within: the first belongs to an order called the Little Sisters of the Lamb, and the other to cloistered Augustinian nuns. Father Paul Lawlor, an Irish Dominican and archaeologist of the church of San Clemente with whom I visited the complex, brought these details to my attention.
On the left side of the portico of the first courtyard there is a heavy iron grate over a small window next to a ruota—a sort of spinning table or lazy Susan where unwanted newborns were left to be cared for by the nuns. At the sound of a bell the fleeting shadow of a female figure appeared in the half-light. In exchange for a Euro she gave us the key to the door leading to the Oratory of Saint Sylvester, an extraordinary place for two reasons. Its first treasure is the series of frescoes, executed by Byzantine masters in the thirteenth century, representing the Constitutum Constantini—the famous donation in which Emperor Constantine ceded his supremacy over Rome, Italy, and the whole of the West to the Pope. Innocent IV commissioned these frescoes at the same time he was struggling with Emperor Frederick II. Today we’d deem them propaganda, and I’ll explain later on exactly why.
There is a scene of the Last Judgment above the entrance door showing Christ enthroned between the Madonna and Saint John the Baptist. Two angels hover above Christ—one sounds the trumpet calling all souls to judgment, and the other rolls up the starry firmament as confirmation that everything, including time, has come to an end. This is one of the few surviving examples of this evocative medieval iconography inspired by the Book of the Apocalypse; Giotto’s frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua are another important example. There are shell-shaped openings at the top of the walls that allowed the cloistered nuns to carry out the holy offices without being seen.
Upon leaving this complex we go back down the hill along the Via dei Santi Quattro toward the Via di San Giovanni in Laterano. At the corner of the Via dei Querceti is an ancient aedicule, almost reduced to mere ruins, whose history through the centuries has been documented by the archaeologist Rodolfo Lanciani. It is tied to the legend of Pope Joan, but we’ll come back to her later on; just a few meters beyond this niche we come to the Basilica of San Clemente. Of all the Roman churches and basilicas, this one, at least from a historical point of view, is the most amazing. The sheer fact that it consists of at least three buildings, constructed one atop the other over the course of several centuries, is enough to get a sense of its singularity. The first structures on the site were built in Roman times, before the great fire of Nero’s reign in 64 AD. In the second century a private house, or domus, was built here, and had a Mithreum in its courtyard. The ancient subterranean temple is still there today, and was constructed according to a standard plan, with a pair of facing benches for the faithful and the altar with an image of the sacrificial bull bending its head low to the ground. Mithraic beliefs were tied to the cosmos and the seasons, and its rituals were celebrated in caverns. The hypogeum here is an artificial cave with stucco stars and eleven openings on the ceiling—the smaller ones represent the principal constellations, and the four larger ones the seasons.
A basilica was built over the house and Mithreum in the fourth century, and later damaged during the devastating Norman sack of the city in 1084. The partially destroyed buildings were filled in to then serve as the foundations of a new basilica. This brief outline of the site’s history is necessary in order to truly “see,” through the intervening layers, the original spaces. Visitors are also immediately struck by the sound of rushing water beneath the floor of the church’s lowest level; it’s a small branch of the stream that runs down the side of the Lateran Hill toward the Coliseum. Father Lawlor’s excavations have unearthed evidence of a Roman conduit, and it seems likely that it was part of the hydraulic system that fed the lake in the gardens of the Domus Aurea.
The right wall of the lower church has a very important fresco cycle that dates back to about 1080. It tells the curious story of Sissinius, who one day discovered that his wife, Theodora, of whom he was very jealous, had gone to a place where Christians secretly gathered. He was filled with such ire that he became both deaf and blind. Some time later Clement, one of the Christians, met and healed him. The experience did little to mollify Sissinius, who ordered his servants to bind the holy man and take him away. The servants, however, as if driven out of their senses, bound and carried off a column rather than Clement. What’s particularly interesting here is that in painting this scene the artists added little cartoonlike bubbles with explanatory texts; these passages are among the first written examples of the transition from Latin to Italian, in a language we now call the vulgate.
In one of the main scenes Sissinius gives orders, and the servants hurriedly get to work under their master’s shouted commands, “Falite dereto colo palo, Carvoncelle, Gosmari, Albertel traite. Fili dele pute traite” (“Forward with that lever, Carvoncello, Gosmari, Albertel—pull, pull, you sons-of-bitches!”). There is an inscription at the center of the scene that sums up the moral of the story, “Duritiam cordis vestries saxa traere meruisti” (“For your cruelty you deserved to drag stones”).
These sacred buildings I’ve concisely described take us back to the high Middle Ages, a period that unfolded around the year 1000, give or take a century. This was one of the densest, most tragic, and decisive periods in the city’s history. It was a major period of transition, as the last traces of ancient Rome’s glory disappeared. Rome became a holy city, and as such it became a pilgrimage destination as well, but it also remained in a constant state of civic unrest stoked by the bloody rivalries between the baronial families that held the city in a tight vise of violence. Let’s enter this medieval city, have a look around, and try to understand what it meant to spend a lifetime, often running some risk, in such a place.
“I really believe that one must admire with great enthusiasm the entire panorama of a city in which so many towers rise that they seem like stalks of grain, and there are so many palaces and buildings that no one has been able ever to count them.… After admiring this infinite beauty for a long time, I realized in my heart, thanks to God, that I wanted to describe these magnificent works of men in this book.” These moving words were written, in Latin originally, by someone who signed himself “Magister Gregorius.” According to scholars he was most likely a learned Englishman who visited Rome at the end of the twelfth or beginning of the thirteenth century. He was so struck by what he saw that he wrote a short book about the surviving wonders of ancient Rome, describing “de mirabilibus quae Rome quondam fuerunt vel adhuc sunt,” or “the marvels that were once upon a time in Rome and still exist today.”
One of the first wonders—or rather the absolute first wonder—that struck the visitor was the panorama. Most pilgrims who came to Rome traveled by way of the Via Francigena. After a last stop at Sutri before they entered the city, they found themselves at the top of Monte Mario, which was then called the Mons Gaudii, or Mountain of Joy, because of the profound emotion provoked upon first glimpsing the city. The splendid view also meant that the long, arduous, often dangerous journey had come to an end.
Until the year 1000 guidebooks, or what might pass for early written guides, limited themselves to describing the principal monuments and how to reach them. One of the most famous, the Einsiedeln Itinerary, dates to about the ninth century and is named after the Swiss monastery where it is preserved. This type of guidebook developed into something more elaborate, and beginning in the twelfth century scholars note the appearance of a large number of descriptive texts generally referred to as Mirabilia urbis Romae (The Marvels of the City of Rome). They include the Graphia aurea urbis Romae and also the Liber pontificalis, which offer us valuable information about the lives of the early popes and thus the history of the city as well.
The principal purpose of Master Gregorius’s short book was to look at the surviving monuments of classical Rome, and he did so almost with the eye of a humanist, considering them regardless of any symbolic or religious value they might have. He almost completely ignores Christian Rome, mentioning only one basilica, and including that merely as a point of reference. When he refers to the Church as a community of the faithful, it was to criticize those who were responsible for ruining the marvels of antiquity because they encouraged, or at least tolerated, the rampant despoiling: “This all-marble palace [of Augustus] offered abundant and precious materials to build the churches of Rome. Since so little remains, there is little to say.” Master Gregorius accused the papacy, including famous popes like Gregory the Great, of leading the destruction of temples and statues, stating that in its desire to stamp out the pagan religion it also destroyed a civilization.
He accuses the people of Rome, judging them guilty of scraping every trace of gold from the statues and stripping every ancient monument of anything that had any value, either in itself or as reusable building material. Yet in spite of all the ruins, despoiling, and carelessness, the Rome that Master Greogorius related remained a city of marvelous monuments. He often wrote things such as, “Par tibi, Roma, nihil, cum sis prope tota ruina” (“There is nothing comparable to you, Rome, even though you are [reduced to] an almost total ruin”); or, “Roma quanta fuit, ipsa ruina docet” (The selfsame ruins attest how great Rome once was”).
Gregorius’s book contains a wealth of information, but also has some amusing misunderstandings; one has to do with the bronze statue of a seated boy intent on pulling a thorn from his foot (today it is in the Capitoline Museum). Placed on an elevated spot, such as on top of a column, the statue’s height created a sort of curious misinterpretation. The boy’s testicles, visible between his legs, were confused for his glans, creating the impression of a member quite out of proportion with the rest of the figure. Gregorius’s chapter about this statue is called “De ridiculoso simulacro Priapi”—“On the ridiculous simulacrum of Priapus”—and the text states, “There is another ridiculous bronze statue, which is said to be a Priapus. His head is lowered as if he is trying to pull a thorn he has just stepped on from his foot, and he looks like he is suffering from some painful wound. If you look up at it from below to try to understand what is happening, you will see a sexual organ of extraordinary size.”
Another statue noted in his book, said to have exercised a “magical seduction” on the viewer, was a Venus identical to the Capitoline Venus, if not the famous sculpture itself. Master Gregorius described it like this: “This image is made of Parian marble with such marvelous skill that it seems a living creature rather than a statue, similar to a woman who is blushing because of her nudity. Her face seems suffused with a red tone. Whoever sees it has the real impression that the statue’s face, white as snow, actually flows with blood. For its marvelous face, as well as some magical seductive power it had, I was compelled to come back thrice to look at it.” (This Venus is now housed in the Capitoline Museum.)
Leaving Gregorius’s very “English” discoveries and preoccupations, let’s return to the view of Rome I mentioned earlier, the one where “so many towers rise that they seem like stalks of grain.” In the first centuries of the second millennium, Rome offered the visitor a panorama of towers not unlike what we see today, for example, in the famous town of San Gimignano. Many of Rome’s towers remain, although they have since been remodeled, restored, or reconceived, and their presence on the city’s horizon is camouflaged.
The two most impressive towers are the Torre dei Conti and the nearby Torre delle Milizie. The Torre dei Conti stands at the intersection of the Via dei Fori Imperiali and the Via Cavour, and was built as part of a fortified precinct in 1200. What’s now left of it, including an enormous basement, gives a good sense of its original dimensions. The Torre delle Milizie, on the Largo Magnanapoli, is also massive and was purchased at the beginning of the fourteenth century by Pope Boniface VIII who fortified it to protect himself from attacks by the Colonna family, his enemy. In the mid-fourteenth century an earthquake caused the ground to shift and the tower to lean slightly, an effect still visible today. Many towers were eventually subsumed into later buildings, and the tower in the Piazza Tor Sanguigna is one example. It was built by the family of the same name, rivals of the Orsini family, and was part of a fortress. The tower was later enclosed in another building. One of the loveliest towers is the Torre dei Frangipane, also called Torre della Scimmia, or Tower of the Monkey, which is also now encased in a more recent building. A lamp burns at its top, in front of the image of a Madonna, and according to ancient legend the lamp was lit as a votive offering for the safety of a young girl who had been dragged up the tower by a monkey. The Piazza Margana, itself one of the smallest and most fascinating squares in the city, boasts the Torre dei Margani, a lovely example of a fortified medieval residence. Its portal was made with marble fragments from the late Imperial period, and it is one of many medieval houses in which classical building materials were reused. Another Margani tower, in the Piazza di San Pietro in Vincoli, underwent a similar transformation, and was turned into the bell tower for the church of San Francesco di Paola.
I could go on, as there’s no shortage of towers, but the real attraction of these towers poses a question: why were so many built in the period around the year 1000? The answer is in the title of this chapter—fear. Towers were a type of building, sometimes used for military purposes, but most often intended as residences, dictated by the critical and continually dangerous conditions that prevailed in Rome. Whoever could, whoever wanted to exercise some authority, whoever wanted visibility and prestige, or whoever feared an attack built a fortified residence, the tower of which was most useful for observation and defense. Even the Coliseum was used as the fortified perimeter of a castle built within its walls. The same was true of the Tomb of Cecilia Metella on the Via Appia. The counts of Tusculum built a fortress next to it in the eleventh century and used the ruins of the tomb as its tower. But why was there so much fear? What terrible things made medieval Rome such a dangerous place?
The era we now call medieval lasted some ten centuries, from the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in 476 to the discovery of America in 1492. Even if historians have taken a more nuanced view of this period for some time now, many people continue to imagine it as a savage time—dark years of deep shadow, crime, and bloody love affairs. We still often think of it as a wild and barbaric period, one which, significantly, existed in complete ignorance and indifference to the splendor of classical antiquity. The fact that Jacopone da Todi, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio all lived in the Middle Ages counts for little, as does the fact that the remarkable system of Scholastic philosophy, championed by Saint Thomas Aquinas, was also a product of this era. The idea of a dark age between the two shining lights of antiquity and the Renaissance is a persistent one. This notion was especially strong in the Romantic period, when it was sustained in popular literature, lyric opera, genre paintings, and by the strength of contemporary legend.
Jacob Burckhardt, the Swiss historian who wrote The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy in 1860, accepted this idea of the Middle Ages. He turned the Renaissance into a separate culture, one that finally recognized the value of the individual. The same idea of a period of dark decadence permeates the German historian Ferdinand Gregorovius’s monumental History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages. Written between 1859 and 1872, its vision of the Middle Ages was reinforced by a liberal ideology that exaggerated the instances (remarkable enough in and of themselves) of popes who were unworthy of office. Gregorovius saw the papacy as a completely political institution, product of a Latin idea much like the idea of empire, and removed from any religiosity. The Italian author Giosuè Carducci adopted this same notion, including its antipapal position, and helped reinforce it. Not until 1919, with the Dutch writer Johan Huizinga’s book Autumn of the Middle Ages, did a more nuanced view of the period begin to take hold.
That said, if there were anywhere in the world where such a dark vision of the Middle Ages seems justified by the facts, that place was Rome. For centuries the former caput mundi continued to decline, and the relics of its extraordinary past were left to decay or be pillaged. For two or three centuries the throne of Saint Peter’s was held by popes from Roman families in perpetual struggle with one another for power. Their only concern was the quest for authority, and the towers, these “stalks of grain,” rose up to defend the temporary victors, and were also arrogant symbols of recently acquired power. They were the result of fear and the desire to hold on to past conquests. Behind every arrow-slit was a weapon ready to strike at anyone who approached with hostile intentions.
During the millennium Rome’s Aurelian walls, originally built in the third century, were strengthened to make them a more effective defense. Nonetheless, they weren’t enough to protect the city in 1084 from the Norman onslaught, one of the most devastating invasions in Rome’s history. The Leonine walls around the Vatican and Saint Peter’s were built in the ninth century. (The famous elevated passageway from the papal palace to the fortress of Castel Sant’Angelo was added four centuries later.)
The city’s situation was one of complete decay. Abandoned and exposed to the travails of time and the elements, the imperial buildings collapsed. At the same time the Tiber continuously flooded the central area around the river bend. When the waters receded, they left behind an insalubrious muck that worsened health conditions in the city. Only a few streets and passageways were able to maintain any semblance of stability and decorum, and they were used for Rome’s most important ceremonies, solemnities, and processions. Furthermore, an ailing economy and the almost total absence of an entrepreneurial class meant that the most common activity was the exploitation of the city’s classical patrimony. Over periods of months and years swarms of workmen pried loose marble facades, smashed statues into bits and pieces, and melted down bronzes to make valuable new raw materials. Among these ruins there were occasional bubbling cauldrons in which the most admired fragments of ancient marble sculpture were reduced to simple lime. Everyone stole—the Romans did so to survive, and foreign visitors to bring home souvenirs—many souvenirs, cartloads of souvenirs. Even Charlemagne, who came to Rome to receive his imperial crown from Leo III on Christmas Day in 800, left with a caravan of carts packed with statues, bronzes, columns, and art objects. He wanted his royal residence at Aachen to look as much as possible like a new Rome. A thousand years later Napoleon did the same thing, but extended his plundering to all of Italy.
Life in this despoiled city was resilient. Parts of Rome teemed with a sort of instinctive vitality stronger than any misfortune. The Suburra, the old plebian neighborhood that stretched from the Coliseum to the slopes of the Esquiline Hill, was packed with people. The same is true of the areas near the Theatre of Marcellus, now the quarter around Piazza Campitelli and the Via delle Botteghe Oscure. The Isola Tiberina—also called the Isola di San Bartolomeo—was also densely populated. Five bridges spanned the river—the northernmost was the Ponte Nomentano (which crossed the Aniene, not the Tiber), then the fortified Ponte Milvio, the Ponte Sant’Angelo, and the two bridges on the Isola Tiberina. The remains of the Pons Aemilia stood downriver; built in the second century, and the Romans called it the Ponte Rotto, the Broken Bridge, and this curious fragment can still be seen today, stranded in the middle of the river. In a city where no one worried about anything but himself and the present day, the construction of new bridges was never discussed. The languishing economy, moreover, made them unnecessary.
How did the Romans survive? One might ask, too, what vision of reality existed among these malnourished people who lived in deplorable hygienic conditions, were afflicted by diseases that almost no one knew how to cure, and believed in a religion shot through with superstition and a strong inclination toward idolatry. I use the term “vision of reality” because such circumstances favored the kind of talk in which magic, illusion, credulity, and stupor were all mixed together. Piero Camporesi, one of the great twentieth-century scholars of popular mythology, used documents and firsthand accounts to aim at a reconstruction of the conditions in which many of these people lived. In his book Bread of Dreams, he described immoderate excesses at the table, and even consumption of food that could provoke hallucinations:
The cuisine of the imaginary, dream-inducing diet, sacrilegious gastronomy (cannibalistic, vampirical and dung-eating), human ointments and plasters, profane oils and sacred unctions, “mummy” fragments and cranial dust, medicinal powers de sanguinibus, breads filled with seeds and powders bestowing oblivion, expansive and euphoria-producing herbs, narcotic cakes, stimulating roots and aphrodisiacal flours, aromas and effluvia of devil-chasing plants and antidotes for melancholy (balneum diaboli), and “seasoned” and “fostered” spells created by a network of dreams, hallucinations and permanent visions. By altering measures, relations, proportions and backgrounds, they made “three fingers seem like six, boys armed men, and men giants … everything much bigger than usual and the whole world turned upside down.”1
This delirious world made miraculous and inexplicable events seem plausible—and not just among the most backward segments of peasant society. Camporesi continued, “the people of the town and city … lived immersed in a world of expectation, in a suspended and bewitched condition, where portent, miracle and the unusual belonged to the realm of the possible and the everyday: the saint and the witch (in her own way a saint of a different type) reflected the two ambiguous faces, the face side and reverse of the same neurotic tendency toward the separation from reality, the voyage into the imaginary and the leap into the fantastic.”2 In such a society the boundaries between reality and unreality, possible and impossible, sacred and profane, abstract and concrete, holy and damned, purity and filthiness, indecency and sublimity became even less certain. In compensation, the city swarmed with churches; there were more than three hundred of them, many of which either adapted extant ancient temples or were built on their remains.
Many areas of the ancient city that had been built up with dense construction reverted to arable land. Even Garibaldi’s troops, the famous bersaglieri who entered Rome in 1870, found vast plots of open land within the walls that had been transformed into gardens and vineyards or had simply been abandoned. (This prepared the way for the boom of building speculation right after unification that gobbled up every open space as quickly as possible.)
The majority of the population lived in miserable conditions. Because the influx of pilgrims and romei, or people going to Rome, was so great, money changing, often combined with pawn brokering, was one of the most common jobs in the city. The Church forbade Christians from loaning money with interest, and thus it was almost always the Jews who performed this service. The most skilled of them even helped finance papal undertakings. Then there were the craftsmen, whose presence is still evident in the names of some of the medieval streets—the Via dei Chiavari (locksmiths), Via dei Librai (booksellers), Via dei Giubbonari (coat tailors), Via dei Coronari (rosary makers), Via dei Pettinari (barbers), and Via dei Banchi (both Vecchi and Nuovi, banks or moneychangers, old and new). Then there were the tabernarii, the innkeepers, who were indispensable in a city frequented by foreigners. They served wine accompanied by simple food, and even in the early twentieth century it was not unusual to see shop signs that advertised “Vino con cucina,” wine with food.
Houses were constructed with the spoils of older buildings, health was precarious, and hygienic services were nonexistent. Many of the old water pipes (once the pride of Rome) and sewers of the ancient city were either broken or diverted, causing every sort of health and safety consequences you can imagine. Most buildings were only two stories, and it was not unusual to use some preexisting Roman construction used as a foundation. And yet there were also magnificent and luxurious houses, their interior furnishings were those of the imperial era simply removed from their original location—columns, portals, windows, candelabra, mosaics, and marble intarsia. There were also jewels, gems, precious cloths, rugs, tableware, and glassware. The privileged people who enjoyed this splendor were abbots and prelates, magistrates and members of families competing to control the ultimate source of power—the papacy.
As is always the case, the value of land varied over time and depended on location. We know that until the year 1000 the areas around the Lateran neighborhood, close to the papal residence, were especially desirable. When the papacy moved across town to Saint Peter’s, the Vatican and surrounding areas rose in value. The streets around what is now the Piazza Santi Apostoli and the Column of Trajan, at the bottom of the Quirinal Hill, have always been considered elegant. It was no accident that Michelangelo chose to live in that area, on a street called Macel de’ Corvi; his house may have been modest, but he certainly had a good address.
Why did the popes move their seat from Saint John Lateran to the Vatican? There were important and complicated questions behind the move, including the centuries-old debate over which of the two ancient basilicas was built first. In 1569 Pius V issued a bull that put an end to the controversy of which came first, giving primacy to the Lateran, seat of the bishop of Rome. Polemics aside, the transfer to Saint Peter’s was motivated by the simple fact that the area around the Vatican was easier to defend, especially after the construction of the Leonine walls at the end of the ninth century. In a city torn by internal conflicts and threatened from the outside, security became an essential issue. The Vatican complex, with the addition of the Borgo and Hadrian’s Mausoleum (Castel Sant’Angelo) offered an existing configuration that could be transformed into a fortified citadel. In the end the decision of where to place the papacy was based on the same emotion that led to the building of the towers—fear. The climate was such that Pope Gregory XI agreed to return to Rome in 1378, ending the exile of the papacy in Avignon, only when ownership of Hadrian’s Mausoleum was given in perpetuity to the papacy.
The basilica of Saint John Lateran has so few traces of the original building complex left that it’s not easy to remember the various dates of each part. The first structural nucleus was commissioned by Emperor Constantine in the fourth century. The Lateran Palace, so skillfully added along the church’s right side, dates to the end of the sixteenth century. Sixtus V had the crumbling old buildings of the Patriarchìo (the papal residence) torn down, and commissioned Domenico Fontana to design a new palace—only a few steps away lies a street named for the architect. For many centuries both basilicas, Saint John and Saint Peter’s, played important roles in the inaugural ceremonies for new popes. The election itself took place in the former, and the coronation in the latter. This double location required a procession, moving across the city twice as it traveled to and from Saint Peter’s. In Roma dal cielo, one of his many well-researched books on the city’s history, Cesare D’Onofrio reconstructed the itinerary of these papal processions. Walking the same streets today is still a meaningful experience for anyone who wants to really understand the ancient layout of the city, so it’s by traveling these streets that we’ll rediscover ancient Rome.
When a new pope was named, the bishops who elected him went to call the pope-designate, who then had to pretend he didn’t want the high office and was supposed to hide from his electors. Once the ritual of refusal was complete, the newly elected pope made a solemn entrance into the Lateran, where he sat in the stercoraria. Around him were churchmen intoning a psalm to remind him that God had elevated him to his new office, raising him up from the dust and filth of the human condition. He then went to the second floor of the Patriarchìo, where he was again seated, this time in a marble chair with a hole at the center of the seat. The pope sat in the almost unseemly, semi-reclining position used by women during childbirth, with a basin placed in front of the chair to facilitate the symbolic birth. At that moment the pope represented, and indeed incarnated, Ecclesia Mater, Mother Church. To cement the significance of this moment, a sella obstetrica, or gynecological chair, was used. Over time, this ritual assumed a completely different meaning tied to strange and legendary circumstances I will return to later.
The newly elected pope blessed the crowd from the Benediction Loggia, which looked out over the basilica’s main entrance and faced the obelisk (the oldest and the tallest in Rome). The people were excited, and raucously packed around the equestrian monument of Constantine, anxious to follow the procession, not least for the practical benefits they might earn. I mention the equestrian monument of Constantine because that was the identification of the statue we now know is really Marcus Aurelius, visible today in the Capitoline Museum. Bernini later made a statue of Constantine (now in the Vatican Palace), but that only came five centuries later. So why was the Marcus Aurelius at Saint John Lateran rather than the Capitoline, where we are accustomed to seeing it?
The future emperor Marcus Aurelius was born in a patrician house surrounded by gardens that once stood where the hospital of San Giovanni is today, with its sixteenth-century facade. For centuries the great bronze equestrian statue of the emperor stood in those gardens, protected by their high walls. It was later moved to the middle, more or less, of the Campus Lateranensis, the open yard in front of the Lateran basilica. The figure was erroneously identified as Constantine, the emperor who first tolerated Christianity, a misidentification that ultimately helped save it from destruction. Constantine had lived for a few years in the residence at the Lateran, so it wasn’t unlikely that his statue might be found in the area. To add some color to our sense of his personality, note that after his victory over Maxentius in the famous battle at the Milvian Bridge, in October of 312, Constantine quickly had a triumphal arch built (it still stands next to the Coliseum), sped along by the snatching of sculptures and friezes from other monuments. He was a politician of great stature and equally great contradictions. The historian Santo Mazzarino wrote that he was the most revolutionary politician in European history. He handled the novelty of Christianity, which had fused with the pagan cult of sol invictus (the invincible sun) and some elements of Mithraism, with remarkable wisdom. He convened the Council of Nicea in 325 and dealt harshly with the Arian heresy, yet the emperor himself was not baptized until just before he died in 337. He’d never much liked Rome, and as soon as he had the chance he moved East to found his own capital, Constantinople, at the junction between the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmara.
Constantine was the son of Helena, a resourceful woman who’d started out as a stabularia (a stable girl) and worked her way up to concubine of the Emperor Constantius, who was called Chlorus, or Pale One, because of his greenish complexion. Helena was repudiated when she was only thirty-six, but she continued to exercise an enormous influence over her adolescent son. When she was about seventy, she converted to Christianity and went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. According to legend, she brought back several pieces of Christ’s cross and founded the church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme in Rome to house these relics.
But let’s get back to the papal court. Once the new pope had received the crowd’s acclaim he left the basilica and proceeded along what is now the Via San Giovanni in Laterano—the Romans called it the stradone, or big street—toward the Coliseum. The final section of the street was blocked by the Ludus Magnus, ruins of the old gladiators’ barracks, and a detour had to be made around it. Thus the procession turned onto the Via dei Querceti, and then almost immediately onto the Via dei Santi Quattro Coronati. I mentioned earlier that the thirteenth-century frescoes in this church were intended to confirm the supremacy of religious authority over civil powers, and you’ll now see how.
About four centuries after Constantine’s death a document called the Constitutum Constantini (which can be translated, rather freely, as the Imperial Constitution) began to circulate in European courts. The text of the document confirmed that the first Christian emperor had given the Lateran basilica, the city of Rome, and the whole of the Western Empire to Pope Sylvester and his successors. The impetus for the Emperor’s spectacular gift was his miraculous recovery from leprosy. When he first showed evidence of the disease, evil priests had prescribed a bath in the blood of innocent children. His mind still clouded by paganism, the Emperor was preparing to commit this sacrilege when the sight of the weeping mothers moved him to mercy. The following night two holy figures came to him in a dream. They directed him to the pious bishop, Sylvester, who was living in a hermitage on Mount Soracte and would show him the true cure. After a judicial inquiry in which the emperor recognized his holy visitors in portraits of the apostles Peter and Paul, Sylvester immersed him three times in water in the Lateran baptistery. At the end of this purification ritual the foul symptoms of his disease had disappeared, and the miracle was followed by prayers of thanksgiving and general rejoicing.
In the introduction to the document, which is also known as the Donation of Constantine, the Emperor recognized the supremacy of the Apostle Peter: “You are Peter (Petrus), and on this rock (petrus) I will found my church,” Matthew 16:18). This is the basis for later papal claims to imperial status. “And, to the extent of our earthly imperial power, we decree that his holy Roman church shall be honoured with veneration; and that, more than our empire and earthly throne, the most sacred seat of Saint Peter shall be gloriously exalted; we giving to it the imperial power, and dignity of glory, and vigour and honour.”3 Having established the supremacy of the Roman pope over all earthly rulers, Constantine then gave him and his successors in perpetuity the Lateran Palace, the city of Rome, the province of Italia and the western regions of the empire. In the past canon lawyers have suggested that the pope, as universal monarch, was Lord of the earth and thus had the right to assign portions of his territory to one terrestrial state or another.
In reality this document was a skilled forgery fabricated by the Vatican chancery. It served, though, as the judicial basis for the claim of papal supremacy during the long struggles between the pope and emperor. The implications of this forgery lasted for centuries, conditioning the political situation of Rome and even Italy (the famous “Italian question”). It also lent the weight of tradition, if not authenticity, to the temporal power of the Church, the traces of which even survived in the 1948 constitution of the Italian Republic.
Ariosto, Machiavelli, and Guicciardini all viewed the papacy as the chief cause of great woes, and blamed many of Italy’s troubles on the papacy’s political power. Dante and Petrarch, on the other hand, praised the “Roman-ness” of the papacy, although the former launched this harsh invective against Constantine’s donation in Canto XIX of the Inferno:
‘Ah, Constantine, to what evil you gave birth,
Not by your conversion, but by the dowry
that the first rich Father had from you!’4
In more recent times the writer Alessandro Manzoni, a distinguished exponent of liberal Catholicism, was enthusiastic when the Piedmont army occupied the Papal States in 1860. His daughter, Vittoria, vividly remembered her father’s reaction; “When the news came in September of the expedition in Romagna, father was beside himself with happiness. He cried, laughed and clapped his hands yelling, ‘long live Garibaldi!’.… Father was convinced that the loss of its temporal power was providential for the Church. Once freed of all earthly concerns, it might better govern its spiritual domain.” Manzoni and others, like the Catholic philosopher Antonio Rosmini, turned out to be right. At the beginning of the twenty-first century a defender of the “doctrine of faith” like Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, also admitted the enormous advantage to the church in the loss of its territorial power. It demonstrates the vitality of Catholicism that, in places far from the environment of the Roman Curia, and without any hint of temporality, the Church built its authority on spirituality and the relief it brought to the poorest people.
The frescoes in Santi Quattro Coronati illustrate this story, from Constantine’s illness to his final donation. Much like the stained-glass windows of other great cathedrals, this decoration of figures was intended to explain, even to those who couldn’t read, the history and remote tradition on which the papacy based its “imperial” legitimacy. It is only a shame that they illustrate one of the most sensational forgeries in the history of the West, on par with the famous anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion published in early-twentieth-century Russia.
The Via dei Santi Quattro has yet another surprise in store, because it was here, at the corner of the Via dei Querceti, that another famous and heavily symbolic event took place. According to legend, in the early ninth century an attractive and intelligent young man arrived in Rome. His ecclesiastical career was brilliant, and took him all the way to the papacy upon his election as Pope John VIII. This young man held the office for more than two years, until a sensational incident occurred. One day while riding the papal mule along the Via dei Santi Quattro on his way to Saint Peter’s, the Pope, surrounded by a boisterous crowd, fell to the ground from the saddle and, to the amazement of the crowd, gave birth to a child. Thus the legend of Pope Joan was born. No one knows whether it is true or if it refers to some fertility ritual, or perhaps to the influence women had in the early Church. Yet the consequences—again, according to rumor—were important. From then on the ritual of the sella obstetrica assumed a completely different significance from what I described earlier. After the newly elected pope had been seated in it, a priest approached and felt beneath the opening in the seat to ascertain the sex of the pope-elect. Having verified that he was a man, he announced to those waiting anxiously, “Habet testes!” (He has testes.) For some time after the Via dei Querceti was also known as the Vicus papissae, or the Street of the Lady Pope.
The festive procession that marked the installation of the new pope then circled the Coliseum and proceeded up the hill, on streets that no longer exist, and back down toward the Torre dei Conti, crossing the evocative Via del Colosseo. The tower was named for the family of the Counts of Segni, who saw one of their kinsmen, Lotario dei Conti, elected Pope Innocent III in 1198. The procession would then have continued along what is today the Via Tor de’ Conti, skirting the Suburra neighborhood along the Via Baccina, and passing under the Arco del Grillo, next to the tower of the same name. It then made the arduous ascent up the steep slope of the Quirinal Hill arriving, at the top, at the Torre delle Milizie, which is still one of the city’s most impressive towers. Followed by a jubilant crowd, the papal procession then descended the Via della Pilotta to the basilica of the Santi Apostoli, where it paused for a break. When it resumed, it briefly followed the Via Lata (now the Via del Corso), passing several small streets and then turning onto the Via dei Coronari, which followed the winding course of an old Roman street. Finally it came to the Ponte Sant’Angelo and the impressive fortress of Castel Sant’Angelo. Beyond the labyrinth of the Borgo neighborhood the basilica of Saint Peter’s was visible. This was quite a long route, and crossed the whole city from southeast to northwest.
The pope took a different route back to the Lateran, allowing as many people as possible to participate in events of his inauguration. Before the procession departed again, coins were thrown to the crowd in the courtyard of Saint Peter’s. We can only imagine how eagerly awaited this was, and then how hard fought the struggle for the coins must have been. The tumult surrounding the transition from one pope to the next wasn’t limited to fighting for tossed coins. Gaspare Pontani noted in his Diario romano that, as soon as the news of the death of Sixtus IV (Francesco Della Rovere) spread through the city, “Rome fell into an uproar.” Groups of hotheads congregated at the palace of one of the pope’s nephews and sacked it, “leaving not a single door or window intact.” Others hurried to a farm belonging to another family member where “they stole a hundred cows and all the goats, as well as many pigs, donkeys, geese, and lots of round cheeses from Parma.” When Paul IV (Gian Pietro Carafa) died in 1559, the Romans “ran to the prisons and broke down their doors, freeing everyone inside.” As soon as news of the death of Sixtus V (Felice Peretti) spread in 1590, the Jews who had money-changing stalls in Piazza Navona packed up and fled, for fear of being sacked. It was a long time before this “most wicked of customs” came to an end.
Let’s return to the papal procession; once it had crossed the Ponte Sant’Angelo again, it continued along the Via del Banco di Santo Spirito and then the Via dei Banchi Nuovi. The pope received the homage of the city’s Jewish community in the Piazza dell’Orologio. Rome’s chief rabbi gave him a Bible and, in Hebrew, urged him to venerate it as the word of God according to the laws of Moses. The pope agreed, but also condemned the Jewish interpretation of the scriptures, since the messiah had already come in the person of Jesus Christ. Sometimes the Roman people demonstrated against the Jews, shouting insults at them and making hostile gestures. For the most part, that behavior was the result of a hatred for Jews systematically encouraged by the Church, which considered them guilty of deicide. Saint John Chrysostom was one of the first to suggest that it is the duty of Christians to hate Jews because even God hated them. Saint Augustine taught that the Jewish people cannot disappear, but survive and suffer as evidence of their guilt. Even the great philosopher Saint Thomas Aquinas claimed that, because of their crimes, the Jews would be held in eternal servitude. It took the vision of Pope John XXIII to cancel the curse of the perfidies judaeis (the idea of the treacherous Jews), which had for centuries afflicted a whole people.
Coins were again thrown to the crowd at the Piazza dell’Orologio, and again at the site of what is now Palazzo Braschi. From there the procession continued along the Via della Botteghe Oscure (ad Apothecas Obscuras, named for the sooty workshops where ancient marbles were burned to obtain lime), skirting the edge of the Theatre of Balbo, a monument whose history is interesting enough to merit a brief digression.
Lucius Cornelius Balbo distinguished himself in several battles, siding first with Caesar and then Augustus. As is always the case with unscrupulous politicians, he grew immensely rich. In 14 BC, with war booty from Africa, he decided to build a theatre in one of the most desirable parts of the city, the plain between the Capitoline and the Tiber. His theater, the third largest in Rome after the theaters of Pompey and Marcellus, was richly decorated and, including the backstage area, occupied a large portico-lined spot. During the medieval period its perimeter walls were used as foundations for new constructions. An exedra on its eastern side was used in the seventh century as a dumping site for household garbage (amphorae, pottery, and broken or unused things) and as a workshop which produced what we would today call luxury items. It’s an archaeological treasure trove, and many casting rejects, unusable molds, jewelry seconds, fibulae, and small bottles have been unearthed there.
The site where the remains of the Crypta Balbi lie is perhaps the best and most moving place to observe how Rome was rebuilt upon its own bones—slowly changing from a city of emperors to one of popes. Examples abound: the floor in a sixteenth-century shop was laid directly over Roman pavement; and the original ancient portico became the foundation for a palace in the high Middle Ages. The Crypta Balbi makes clear to modern visitors that, despite the barbarian invasions, the ancient city persisted all the way up to the end of the seventh century. Foodstuffs, raw materials, and oil continued to arrive here from all over the Mediterranean world—from as far as Palestine and Byzantium—much as it had during the imperial period. The city’s real decline only began some decades later.
But let’s return once again to the papal procession; coins were tossed for a fourth time to the crowd at the church of San Marco, located in the maze of alleyways that crisscrossed one another at the foot of the Capitoline Hill before the Fascists gutted the area. Traversing what is now the Piazza Venezia, the tumultuous procession then passed through the arch of Septimius Severus and into the fantastical landscape of the Roman Forum. The new pope and his noisy entourage followed along the ancient Via Sacra, passing the Arch of Titus, the Meta Sudans (a fountain constructed by Titus and demolished during the Fascist period), and the Arch of Constantine. It crossed the Via Labicana and came, finally, to the intersection now at the Piazza San Clemente, named for the second church mentioned at the beginning of the chapter.
The procession paused in front of the church to allow the pope to change conveyances. We know this from a document published by Jacob Burckhardt who, referring to Pope Innocent VIII in 1488, recounts this episode in his Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy: “Once he arrived at the church of San Clemente, the pope dismounted from his horse and left the baldachin behind. He got into a sedan chair in which he would be carried to the door of the Lateran Palace. He made the change because the people at the Lateran would try to take the horse and baldachin, which they claimed was their right. In doing so they would set off such a furious scuffle that the pope himself would be put in danger.”
Such was the greed of the people who followed the procession, noisily demanding a reward. They were encouraged by their own extreme misery, as well as widespread fanatical rants; their brand of religion wasn’t too different from paganism. The crowd, however, represented only the vociferous and popular fringe of Roman spiritual life—other issues and passions were at work at the center of the church in Rome. The powerful, driven by their own interests and ambitions, were also motivated by a struggle for dominance and the accumulation of wealth. Supremacy, once acquired, sometimes legitimated the use of violence. For centuries certain Roman families had sought and obtained power by fighting amongst themselves, siding sometimes with the pope and sometimes with the emperor, depending on how they judged their interests. They might unite against the papacy, only to immediately break that alliance and resume their endless fighting. These men were blinded by their own ambitions, and deaf to any inkling of mercy. They lacked even the vaguest sense of religion or, it seems to me, any human feeling. Members of these families committed murder, assault, and theft, obeying only the ruthless brutality of their own plans.
The chronicles of the period are full of names like the Crescenzi, the Counts of Tusculum, and the Frangipane. The truncated remains of a Crescenzi house still stand at the corner of the Via Petroselli and the Via del Foro Olitorio, a rare example of domestic architecture from the period just after 1000. The house makes extensive use of salvaged Roman building materials, and it was located here to guard the ford across the Tiber. The fortified residence of the Pierleoni was built on the ruins of the Theater of Marcellus; it then passed to the Savelli, and is known today, after many alterations, as the Palazzo Orsini. The fortress, also built on the strong foundations of the theatre, was meant to control the river crossing at the Isola Tiberina. Another contemporary fortress was built at the end of the Ponte Fabricio, also called the Bridge of the Four Heads and, in the Middle Ages, the Pons Judaeorum because of its proximity to the Jewish ghetto. The Torre Caetani is all that is left now of that construction, and it, too, stands strategically near the river.
The arrogant and unscrupulous Crescenzi family was able, at the end of the tenth century, to put one of their own on the papal throne with the name of John XIII, and he succeeded in solidifying the family’s fortune. Holding the papacy was a key move in the game of wealth accrual for oneself and one’s family, since it permitted the appropriation of the goods and property of less fortunate rivals. When John XIII died, Emperor Otto I “favored” the election of a pope loyal to him and therefore supported Benedict VI, the Roman-born son of a German called Hildebrand. A member of the Crescenzi family, not yet satisfied with the riches he’d accumulated thus far, imprisoned Benedict in Castel Sant’Angelo and put Cardinal Francone on the throne of Saint Peter as the antipope Boniface VII. Boniface’s papacy was brutally ferocious, and his own contemporaries even called him the Monster. One of his first acts was to have his predecessor, Benedict VI, strangled in the prison at Castel Sant’Angelo. When the troops of Otto II approached Rome, Boniface fled to Constantinople, taking the church treasury with him. In the meantime, the Crescenzi family again manipulated the papal election, seeing that the son of a favored priest became John XV. When he too died, Otto III, son and successor of Otto II, put one of his own relatives, Bruno of Carinthia, on the papal throne as Gregory V, the first German pope. This choice did not please the Crescenzi, and as soon as Otto had departed they dethroned him by fomenting a popular revolt, and then replaced him with another antipope, Giovanni Filagato, Bishop of Piacenza, who came to the throne as John XVI. To insure his election Crescenzio Nomentano asked the Byzantine Emperor Basil II for assistance. Basil was an efficient solider and extremely cruel man (one need only know that after his victory over the Bulgarians at the Battle of Kleidion he had fourteen thousand prisoners blinded in retaliation). Otto III was not pleased by this move and swooped down on Rome. The authors of the coup sought to flee, but John XVI was caught at Torre Astura, near present-day Nettuno, mutilated, blinded, and dragged back to Rome, where he was pilloried and finally killed. Crescenzio Nomentano, supposedly betrayed by his own wife, was decapitated in Castel Sant’Angelo.
I have no historical pretensions, so will stop here with examples, as the ones given so far provide an adequate sketch of the atrocious demeanor of those centuries, as well as the frightful decadence of the Church. Torn apart by the greed of families vying to dominate it, it rapidly become an outlet and instrument of savagery, corruption, and simony.
One last curious and macabre episode to illustrate the abyss into which the Church had fallen is the lugubrious story of Pope Formosus, who reigned from 891 to 896. When the attempt to reunite the Holy Roman Empire collapsed at the end of the ninth century, Guido, Duke of Spoleto, was annoyed at the partitioning of his territory. He convinced Pope Stephen V, a noble Roman, to crown him emperor, even though, as Gregorovius pointed out, his crown was merely of papier-mâché. A few months later, in 891, Formosus, Bishop of Porto, became pope. He reconfirmed Guido’s coronation as emperor and extended it by heredity to his son, Lamberto. At the same time, however, he complained to Arnulf of Carinthia, King of the Germans, that the pressure exerted by Guido was intolerable. Arnulf rushed to help the pope, and was acclaimed emperor in every city he passed through. Upon Guido’s death his son claimed the crown for himself and called on the people of Rome to help him. The anti-German revolt spread, and the pope had to take refuge in Castel Sant’Angelo. The city was in chaos, and riots and bloody battles broke out between rival factions. A few weeks later Formosus died, perhaps after having been poisoned. He was succeeded by Boniface VI, the priest who set the record for the shortest pontificate, as it lasted a mere twelve days. Lamberto and his mother, the terrible Duchess Agiltrude, manipulated events so that the Roman bishop of Anagni, their man, was elected Pope Stephen VI. They then insisted that the dead Formosus be tried for treason.
According to Gregorovius, “The corpse of the Pope, taken from the grave where it had lain for eight months, and clad in pontifical vestments, was placed upon a throne in the council chambers. The advocate of Pope Stephen arose, and, turning to the ghastly mummy, beside which a trembling deacon stood as counsel, brought forward the accusations; and the living Pope, in his insane fury, asked the dead: ‘Why hast thou in thy ambition usurped the Apostolic seat, thou who wast previously only Bishop of Portus?’ The counsel of Formosus, if terror allowed him to speak, advanced no defense. The dead was judged and convicted; the Synod signed the act of his deposition, pronounced sentence of the condemnation upon him, and decreed that all the clergy ordained by Formosus should be ordained anew. The Papal vestments were torn from the mummy; the three fingers of the right hand, with which the Latins bestowed the benediction, were cut off; with barbarous shrieks the dead man was dragged from the hall through the streets, and amid the rush of the yelling rabble was thrown into the Tiber.”5 This happened in February of 897, and a year later Pope Theodore II gave the remains of poor Formosus a decent burial in the basilica of Saint Peter.
It would take a politically strong pope, one conscious of his office as well as gifted with broad vision and great energy, for this undignified situation to change. Such a pope finally arrived on the scene in 1073, when Hildebrand of Savona was elected to the papacy as Gregory VII. Gregorovius wrote, “[m]arvelous was the strength with which he won the freedom of the church, and founded the dominion of the hierarchy.”6
His pontificate, from 1073 to 1085, would leave a profound mark on the Church regardless of the fact that it coincided with the investiture controversy and the period famed for major papal schisms. The Dictatus that said that the pope is the universal bishop—with the power to judge anyone without being subject to anyone else’s judgment and able, as a result, to depose the emperor—was penned by his hand. Gregory VII also harshly increased the punishments for simony and marriage of priests. When in 1075 Emperor Henry IV (the previous emperor had been the pope’s mortal enemy) appointed several bishops and abbots, Gregory rebuked him for having violated both divine and canonical law. A furious struggle ensued, in which the emperor declared that the pope was deposed, and the pontiff, with the support of many German princes, excommunicated the emperor. Henry was forced to humiliate himself, famously going as a penitent to Canossa, where Gregory was a guest of the Countess Matilda. He obtained a pardon, but the emperor was not placated; his desire for revenge was only sharpened by the humiliation he’d suffered. As soon as the political situation allowed it, he returned to the position from which he had the right to appoint church officials as he saw fit, and Gregory excommunicated him a second time. Henry then nominated an antipope, Clement III, and occupied Rome.
The incursion of Imperial troops into Rome forced Gregory to barricade himself inside Castel Sant’Angelo. The Romans begged him to recognize the imperial title granted to Henry IV, but in vain—the pope didn’t budge. The most he would concede to the emperor, he said, was to lower his crown on a rope to him from the castle’s terrace. Henry obviously refused, and on Easter Sunday of 1084 was crowned emperor by Clement III. The city was almost entirely in his hands, with the exception of Castel Sant’Angelo and the Isola Tiberina, residence of the Pierleoni family. Fearing complete defeat, Gregory VII sent word to the Duke of Normandy, Robert Guiscard, who was then campaigning in the south of Italy, requesting assistance.
Guiscard’s troops arrived in Rome at the Porta Asinaria (now the Porta San Giovanni), which had been barricaded by the people, necessitating negotiation for his entry. The omnipresent Frangipane family found a compromise, and the gates were opened. The duke had 30,000 troops, including Calabrians keen to plunder all they could, as well as battle-hardened Saracens from Sicily, and they spread out through the city sowing destruction and violence as they went. The pope was freed and brought to the Lateran while the city was left prey to ruthless devastation. Before he abandoned the city, on May 21 in the terrible year of 1084, Henry demolished the towers of the Campidoglio and the Leonine walls, and destroyed the Septizonium, the part of the Palatine that faced the Circus Maximus. Gregorovius wrote, “The unhappy city, however, which was surrendered to his soldiers for plunder, became the scene of more than Vandal horrors.… The city fought valiantly but in vain; the despair of the people was stifled in blood and flames …”7
The fire swallowed up the densely populated area between the Lateran and the Coliseum, including the streets through which we followed the papal procession. Nor were the Coliseum, the triumphal arches, or the remains of the Circus Maximus spared. Contemporary chroniclers agree, even without factoring in the stealing and violence committed by individuals, that the catastrophe devastated the vast majority of the city; the streets were strewn with debris, statues were smashed, arches violently broken apart, and for days there were lines of unfortunate Romans sold into slavery by the Normans. Rome hadn’t suffered such a disaster for centuries, and it was the first time it had been destroyed by an enemy since Totila had dismantled the city walls. Several decades later the still-visible ruins of the city moved Bishop Hildebert of Tours to tears, and he recorded the experience in his collection of poetry.
When discussing the invasions of Rome scholars inevitably point to May of 1527, when the Imperial troops of Charles V entered the city and committed every sort of violence and plundering. It was without doubt an atrocious event, especially in terms of lives lost. Nonetheless, considering the broader point of view of the ancient city and what survived of the imperial capital’s greatness, May of 1084 was immeasurably worse. In 1527 the new Rome, tied to the splendor of the Vatican and the magnificence of the Renaissance artists, had already been born and was flourishing. In the abysmal darkness of 1084, on the other hand, all that existed were the faintest traces of a glorious past. There was nothing but the relatively new temples of Christianity and a few wealthy residences amongst a sea of hovels and ruins. The Norman occupation of Rome inflicted the worst outrage the city had ever suffered. When the Lutheran reform began to spread through Europe, five centuries after Guiscard’s devastation, the Protestants still remembered those horrible facts, summarizing them in the brutal judgment that Gregory I had saved Rome from the Longobards and Gregory VII allowed its destruction by the Normans.
The exercise of power knows no mercy and focuses only on results. Gregory VII, political pope par excellence, chose to put his own salvation and that of his throne before that of the city. The Romans of the time never forgave him, and the pope, once the sack was finished, was forced to leave Rome with Guiscard. He died a year later, at the age of sixty in Salerno, reading some verses from the Psalms to excuse his culpability: “Dilexi justitiam et odivi iniquitatem, propterea morior in exilio.” (I loved justice and hated iniquity, and thus I die in exile.) His reform of the church, however, survived almost to the present day. A final, brief passage from Gregorovius’s History puts the strength of that papacy and the tragedy of 1084 into perspective:
The sack of Rome remains a dark stain on Gregory’s history, as also on that of Guiscard. It was Nemesis that compelled the pope, however hesitantly and reluctantly, to gaze upon the flames of Rome. Was not Gregory VII in the burning city (and it burned on his account) as terrible a man of destiny as Napoleon calmly riding over bloody fields of battle? Leo the Great, who preserved the sacred city from Attila and obtained alleviation for her fate from the anger of Genseric, forms a glorious contrast to Gregory, not one of whose contemporaries has recorded that he made any attempt to save Rome from the sack, or ever shed a tear of compassion for her fall.8
1. Piero Camporesi, Bread of Dreams. Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe, trans. David Gentilcore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 20.
2. Ibid., 21.
3. Ernest F. Henderson, Select Historical Documents of the Middle Ages (London: George Bell, 1910), 319–329.
4. Dante Alighieri, Inferno, trans. Robert and Jean Hollander (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 321, lines 115–17.
5. Ferdinand Gregorovius, History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages, trans. Mrs. G. W. Hamilton (London: George Bell, 1900), v.3, 225–26.
6. Ibid., 257.
7. Ibid., 246.
8. Ibid., 247–48.