Rome

by Matthew Kneale

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  CONTENTS

  List of illustrations and maps

  Note on names

  Introduction

  Chapter One Gauls

  Chapter Two Goths

  Chapter Three More Goths

  Chapter Four Normans

  Chapter Five Spanish and Lutherans

  Chapter Six French

  Chapter Seven Nazis

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  A Note About the Author

  Notes

  Sources and Bibliography

  Index

  For Alexander and Tatiana – our two young Romans

  ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAPS

  Black and white illustrations

  p. 21 Brennus puts his sword on the weighing pan (Ullstein Bild/Getty Images)

  p. 33 Forces under Alaric in battle (Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images)

  p. 73 Alaric’s entrance into Rome (Bettman/Getty Images)

  p. 88 Belisarius enters Rome, from Cassell’s Illustrated Universal History by Edward Ollier, 1890 (Mary Evans Picture Library)

  p. 102 Pope Vigilius, engraving in the National Library, Rome (Prisma/UIG/Getty Images)

  p. 115 The meeting at Canossa, eleventh-century illumination (Archiv Gerstenberg/Ullstein Bild/Getty Images)

  p. 150 Drawings from the Chronicles of Otto Freising, twelfth century (DeAgostini/Getty Images)

  p. 196 The troops of Charles V storm the walls of Rome, sixteenth-century engraving (Private Collection/Bridgeman Images)

  p. 200 The Germans plunder Rome, engraving by Hermann Vogel in Spamer’s Illustrirte Weltgeschichte, 1896 (Mary Evans Picture Library)

  p. 202 German Landsknechte ridiculing the pope, engraving from Gottfried’s Chronicle, 1619 (Interfoto/Sammlung Rauch/Mary Evans Picture Library)

  p. 208 Landsknechte mercenaries besieging Castel Sant’Angelo, sixteenth-century engraving (DeAgostini/Getty Images)

  p. 225 The Quirinal Palace under siege, contemporary engraving (Interfoto/Sammlung Rauch/Mary Evans Picture Library)

  p. 226 Proclamation of the Second Republic (DeAgostini/A. De Gregorio/Getty Images)

  p. 261 Garibaldi in Rome (Corbis/Getty Images)

  p. 263 French troops make their first attack on Rome, engraving from Illustrated London News, 19 May 1849 (Illustrated London News/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

  p. 270 French citizens in Rome, engraving from Illustrated London News, 6 October 1849 (Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans Picture Library)

  p. 289 Satirical cartoon from Il Becco Giallo (DeAgostini/Getty Images)

  p. 297 Benito Mussolini propaganda poster (Universal History Archive/UIG/Getty Images)

  p. 310 Illustration from La Difesa della Razza, 5 November 1938 (Fototeca Gilardi/Getty Images)

  p. 325 Allied propaganda poster urging Italians to join them (Author’s collection)

  p. 325 Allied propaganda poster against the Social Italian Republic (Author’s collection)

  Colour section

  Brennus and his share of the spoils, or Spoils of Battle by Paul Joseph Jamin, oil on canvas, 1893 (DeAgostini/Getty Images)

  She-wolf statue (Photo by author)

  Aurelian Walls (Photo by author)

  Fabricius Bridge (Photo by author)

  Ivory diptych of Stilicho, c. AD 395 (Archiv Gerstenberg/Ullstein Bild/Getty Images)

  Depiction of classical Rome (Photo by author)

  Colosseum (Photo by author)

  Interior of the Pantheon (Photo by author)

  Trajan’s market (Photo by author)

  Porta Salaria (Photo by author)

  Mosaic depicting Emperor Justinian and his retinue, Basilica of San Vitale, Ravenna (Christine Webb/Alamy Stock Photo)

  Santo Stefano Rotondo (Photo by author)

  Asinaria Gate (Photo by author)

  Robert Guiscard invested by Pope Nicholas II, detail from a miniature (Granger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy Stock Photo)

  Leonine Wall (Photo by author)

  Porta Latina (Photo by author)

  San Giovanni a Porta Latina (Photo by author)

  Santa Maria in Trastevere (Photo by author)

  View of Rome from ‘De Civitate Dei’ by St Augustine of Hippo (354–430), 1459 (Bibliotheque Sainte-Genevieve, Paris, France/Bridgeman Images)

  View of Rome from the Nuremberg Chronicle by Hartmann Schedel, 1493 (Private Collection/The Stapleton Collection/Bridgeman Images)

  Pope Julius II ordering work on the Vatican and St Peter’s Basilica. Painting by Emile Jean Horace Vernet (1789–1863), Louvre Museum, Paris (Leemage/Corbis/Getty Images)

  Pasquino statue (Photo by author)

  Castle of San Angelo, painting by J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) (Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK/Bridgeman Images)

  The sack of Rome, 1527, painting attributed to Pieter Brueghel the Elder, sixteenth century (Granger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy Stock Photography)

  Porta Santo Spirito (Photo by author)

  Medieval tower (Photo by author)

  View of the Piazza Navona, painting by Canaletto (1697–1768) (Hospital Tavera, Toledo, Spain/Bridgeman Images)

  Festivals of moccoletti (tapers) (Carnival in Rome), painting by Ippolito Caffi (1809–1866), 1852 (Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome, Italy/De Agostini Picture Library/A. Dagli Orti/Bridgeman Images)

  St Peter’s Dome at dusk (Photo by author)

  Fountain of the Four Rivers, Piazza Navona (Photo by author)

  Bernini’s arcade columns at St Peter’s (Photo by author)

  Street corner religious image (Photo by author)

  Garibaldi statue (Photo by author)

  View from St Peter’s dome (Photo by author)

  The Square Colosseum (Photo by author)

  Obelisk at the Foro Mussolini (Photo by author)

  Fascist mural depicting Mussolini (Photo by author)

  American officers lined up for a lowering of the flag ceremony in the Piazza Venezia, 4 July 1944 (Carl Mydans/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

  Italian civilians shortly after the liberation of Rome (Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis/Getty Images)

  MAPS

  p. 4 Rome, 387 BC

  p. 28 Rome, AD 410

  p. 82 Rome, 546

  p. 112 Rome, 1084

  p. 156 Rome, 1527

  p. 218 Rome, 1849

  p. 278 Rome, 1930s

  NOTE ON NAMES

  For the sake of clarity and continuity I have referred to Rome’s hills and churches by their modern, Italian names, even when looking at early centuries when Latin would have been used. I have made one exception: St Peter’s is so well known by its English title that it seemed wrong to refer to it as San Pietro.

  INTRODUCTION

  THERE IS NO city like Rome. No other great metropolis has preserved its past so well. In Rome you can cross bridges that were crossed by Cicero and Julius Caesar, you can stand in a temple nineteen centuries old or walk into a church where a hundred popes have celebrated mass. As well as the city’s famous sights – the fountains, the Pantheon, the Colosseum, St Peter’s, the Sistine Chapel – you can also see Mussolini’s Fascist propaganda, much of it still intact. The Romans have even kept the city’s Gestapo headquarters from the Nazi occupation. That so much has survived is
all the more remarkable considering what Rome has endured over the centuries: dozens of catastrophic floods, fires, earthquakes, plagues and, most of all, attacks by enemy armies.

  When I first came to Rome at the age of eight I had never seen a city that had so much of its past on show. My fascination grew and as I became older I returned many times. For the last fifteen years I have lived in Rome, studying it and getting to know every stone of the city. I realized I wanted to write about Rome’s past and show how it has become the city it is today: to tell the city’s whole story from three thousand years ago to present times.

  There was a problem. Rome’s past is a vast subject. The city has changed so greatly that there have been many Romes, each of which would be largely unrecognizable to Romans of other times. Books that try to recount the city’s entire history tend to suffer from being too long, and yet also too hurried, as they struggle to race through events. Much of my writing has been fiction, and novels, among many other things, require a strong, clear structure. I began wondering what structure could be used to frame Rome’s history while avoiding an endless stream of and thens. An idea came to me: focusing on a handful of moments throughout the city’s existence – moments that changed the city and set it on a new direction. Sackings were the obvious choice. As Romans ruefully observe, Rome has had no shortage of them.

  Seven seemed a good number. Seven hills, seven sackings. I found the ones that were most important to Rome’s history, and which also fell at moments when the city had a character wholly distinct from other eras. I began to envisage how each chapter could be told, like a story. First, we would see the enemy advancing on the city and we would learn who they were and what had brought them. Next, we would pause and look at what the city had been like before the crisis had begun, when it still enjoyed a sense of normality. We would be presented with a kind of vast postcard from Rome describing what it looked like, felt like and smelt like; what Romans – rich and poor – owned; what united and divided them; what their homes were like; what they ate; what they believed; how clean they were; how cosmopolitan; how they amused themselves; what they thought about sex; how their men and women treated one another; and how long they could expect to live. Along the way we would see how Rome had changed since the last postcard and so – like joining the dots in a puzzle – we would glimpse the city’s whole history. Finally, we would return to the drama of the sacking, discovering how the enemy broke into the city, what they did there and how Rome was changed by what took place.

  I have been researching this book for fifteen years. It has been a pleasure to write as it has allowed me better to understand a city which, for all its flaws, I greatly love, and which I find no less fascinating now than I did when I first came here as a child. In these strange days when our world can seem fragile I have also found something rather reassuring in Rome’s past. Romans repeatedly shrugged off catastrophes and made their city anew, adding a new generation of great monuments. Both peace and war have played their part in making Rome the extraordinary place it is today.

  Rome, 2017

  CHAPTER ONE

  GAULS

  I

  FOURTEEN KILOMETRES NORTH of Rome where the river Tiber winds and turns through a small plain, it is joined by a tiny tributary – no more than a brook – called the Allia. These days it is a hard spot to notice. Beyond the Tiber trucks roar down the A1 motorway and high-speed trains hurry north to Florence and Milan. A dose of imagination – and probably a set of earplugs, too – is required to see this for what it once was: a battlefield. Here, in the year 387 BC on the 18th of July, a day the Romans would long consider unlucky, the full army of the Roman Republic, of between six and a half and nine thousand men, drew up to fight. Before them advanced an army of Gauls.

  The Romans would have looked more impressive. Their soldiers were in formation and equipped with metal helmets, armour, long spears and large round shields. They used tactics invented by the Greeks, in which shields and spears formed a formidable barrier. As the enemy struggled to break through, the Romans would strike low with their spears, jabbing at legs, stomachs and groins, and then stab from up high, at necks and faces. Warfare two and a half thousand years ago was brutally up close.

  By comparison, the Gauls were an undisciplined horde. Few, if any, women and children would have held back to watch the battle. This was not a tribe on the move but a war band looking for trouble, glory and treasure. Like any wandering army of this time its warriors would have stunk and been infested with lice. Though little can be said with absolute certainty about this early period, we can surmise a good deal about them. Some would have been on foot, some on horseback and others would have ridden two-man chariots that could whisk them to a key part of the battlefield. They would have been armed with small rectangular shields, swords and spears, and worn finely crafted helmets. They would have had long hair, moustaches and worn torques around their necks. Yet more noticeable was what they were not wearing. While some would have been clothed, others probably wore nothing but a belt or cloak. Later sources confirm that Gauls sometimes fought naked as they believed that this would make them more terrifying to the enemy.

  Finally, they would have been confident. At this moment Celtic-speaking Gauls dominated Europe. To get an idea of the extent of their territories one has only to look to regions named Galicia, meaning land of the Gauls. One Galicia can be found in north-western Spain, a second in the Ukraine and a third in Turkey. And, of course, there is Wales, whose French name is the same again: Pays des Galles. During the two centuries before the battle on the Allia, Gallic peoples had seized northern Italy’s Po valley from the Etruscans. Around 391 BC one of these peoples, the Senones, who had settled along Italy’s Adriatic coast close to the modern seaside resort of Rimini – less than 200 kilometres from Rome – crossed the Apennines and raided the Etruscan city of Clusium. Four years later they were back. It was Rome’s turn.

  The Gauls’ successes owed much to two skills in which they excelled. As the smiths of Europe, they were famous for their ironworking, and produced beautiful ornaments with complex geometrical patterns, often intertwined with animals. They were also renowned for their wheeled vehicles and the few Celtic words that managed to infiltrate Latin were mostly terms for these, from handcarts to carriages. War chariots and finely crafted weapons had carried the Celts across Europe.

  When it comes to everyday life among the Senones, we rely on written sources that date from several centuries after the battle on the Allia, yet these offer some intriguing clues. Later Celtic peoples were far less male-dominated than the Romans. Female rulers were relatively common and there were even female druids. The Celts also had a certain amount in common with their distant cousins in India. They had a caste system which, like that of early Hinduism, included separate classes of priests, warriors, artisans and poor farmers. Celtic druids, who were not magician healers but priest judges and royal advisors, enjoyed the same high status as Indian Brahmins. Celts also believed in reincarnation. Julius Caesar – who became something of an expert during his years conquering them – tells us so, while early Irish legends have stories of butterflies and mayflies that are reborn as humans.

  It is doubtful that any of this would have impressed the Romans. Once again our knowledge of what the Romans thought of Gauls comes from later centuries, but there is no particular reason to believe that their prejudices did not already exist in 387 BC. Later Romans saw the Celts as eloquent speakers but as primitive, woefully lacking in self-control, obsessed with war, feckless, drunken and greedy for gold. Scathing though these views were, some had an element of truth. The Gauls enjoyed a drink and their graves in northern Italy were filled with sophisticated wine-serving vessels. They had a strong liking for both fighting and gold and when possible they combined the two. They were probably doing precisely this when they marched on Rome. Just a few months after the battle on the Allia, a group of Gauls appeared in Sicily, where they fought as mercenaries for the Greek ruler of Syracuse, Dionys
ius, and it seems highly likely that this was the same war band who charged at the Romans on 18 July. Rome was not the Gauls’ intended destination, it seems, but it offered a chance to break a long journey with a little profitable violence.

  Although later Romans may have felt superior to the Gauls they had rather more in common with them than they knew. The early Gallic and Latin languages were extremely similar, so much so that it is thought that they had a common origin around sixty generations earlier. In other words, only 1,500 years before they met by the Allia the Celts and Romans had been a single people.

  But now they were strangers and enemies, embroiled in a furious battle. One would have expected the Romans to do well. Their army was at its best on flat, open ground where they could keep formation: exactly the kind of place where they now found themselves. Their tactics were far more sophisticated than those of the Gauls, who relied on the shock of a sudden charge. Yet everything went wrong for the Romans that day. The fullest account comes from the Roman historian Livy. Livy was not a dispassionate narrator. He wrote three and a half centuries after the battle, by which time Rome ruled the whole Mediterranean world, yet he felt that much had been lost during the city’s extraordinary rise. He looked back with nostalgia to an era when, as he believed, Romans had been tougher, plainer, more frugal, moral and selfless. He sought to inspire contemporary Romans with stirring tales of their ancestors’ courage.

  Unfortunately, the battle of the Allia offered little in the way of inspiration. Livy did the best of a bad job and tried to find some excuses. He wrote that the Romans were greatly outnumbered, though, as we have seen, the Roman army was far from small. He may have been closer to the mark when he suggested the Romans were shocked by the strangeness of the Gauls. The two appear never to have met in battle before. The Romans may have been shaken by the speed and mobility of the Gauls hurtling towards them on horses and in chariots with their long, razor-sharp swords. And there was their nakedness. One could hardly blame the Romans for feeling intimidated by the sight of a horde of huge, mustachioed, barely clothed warriors, yelling and gesticulating and filling the air with the strange sound of their war horns.