Rome
Page 12
The Ostrogoths, intoxicated by their having got into the city after eight years of trying, killed any Romans they found, till a churchman, Pelagius, convinced Totila to make them stop, and they turned to plunder instead: ‘Now he [Totila] found much of value in the houses of the patricians, but most of all in the house where Bessas had lodged. For that ill-starred wretch had been collecting for Totila the outrageous sums which, as set forth above, he had charged for the grain.’12
In 1,500 years and three sackings the Romans had never reached the depths they did now: ‘They found themselves reduced to such straits that they clothed themselves in the garments of slaves and rustics, and lived by begging bread or any other food from their enemies.’ Totila protected the women of the city from his soldiers, so that ‘not one of them had the ill fortune to suffer personal insult, whether married, unwed, or widow’, but he felt no pity for the city itself. Fires broke out and the whole district of Trans Tiberina, on the far bank of the river, went up in flames. Totila prepared to destroy the remainder. After rebuking the few senators he had caught for their ingratitude to the Goths, he ‘tore down the fortifications in many places so that about one third of the defences were destroyed. And he was on the point of burning the finest and most noteworthy of the buildings and making Rome a sheep-pasture.’13
That he changed his mind, so Procopius tells us, was thanks to Belisarius. Having learned of Totila’s intentions he sent him a letter, which Procopius quotes in full. This is almost certainly the work not of Belisarius but Procopius; however, it is a remarkable text. Procopius, as we have seen, had spent time in Rome during the first siege and it had clearly made a great impression on him. His words are far truer of the city today than when they were written, fifteen centuries ago:
Now among all the cities under the sun, Rome is agreed to be the greatest and most noteworthy. For it has not been created by the ability of one man, nor has it attained such greatness and beauty by a power of short duration, but a multitude of monarchs, many companies of the best men, a great lapse of time, and an extraordinary abundance of wealth have availed to bring together in that city all other things that are in the world, and skilled workers besides. Thus, little by little, have they built the city, such as you behold it, thereby leaving to future generations memorials of the ability of them all, so that insult to these monuments would properly be considered a great crime against the men of all time.14
After reading the letter several times, so Procopius tells us, Totila relented and agreed not to burn the city after all. Rome had been saved. Still it was a nadir moment:
As for the Romans, however, he kept all the members of the Senate with him while all the others, together with their wives and children he sent into Campania, refusing to allow a single soul into Rome, but leaving it entirely deserted.15
For the first time in its existence, Rome, which a century and a half earlier had been the largest and greatest city on earth, with close to a million inhabitants, was empty.
The sources report that it remained so for forty days. Even then its traumas were not over and during the next five years it changed hands no fewer than three times. Totila, having spent years capturing the city, then abandoned it, marching away to campaign in the south. Seeing his chance Belisarius hurried up from Portus, enticed a few inhabitants back with offers of food and had his troops pile stones back into the walls’ breaches. Totila, realizing his mistake, thundered back but Belisarius managed to hold off his Ostrogoths, despite the fact that the city’s gates had no doors, by packing them with soldiers and scattering four-pronged caltrops to thwart the Gothic cavalry. It was a short-lived victory. Two years later, in 549, Totila again besieged the city for a year and again he broke in thanks to treachery, when some more Isaurians, impressed by how rich their compatriots had become from their betrayal, decided to follow their example.
This time at least, Totila had no thoughts of destroying Rome. Instead he made it his capital. Eager to impress a Frankish princess whom he hoped to marry, he gave orders that all damage was to be repaired without delay, though it seems hard to believe much was accomplished in a city that was barely inhabited. Totila summoned all members of the Senate he could find and had them meet. He even organized horse races in the Circus Maximus.
At this moment of triumph, the Ostrogoths would never have guessed that their days were almost over. The Byzantine Empire’s eastern war with the Persians finally went better, and in 551 Justinian sent out a new and comparatively large army to Italy under the command of an ageing eunuch named Narses. After two decades of fighting the Ostrogoths had become so reduced in number that, for once, they were outnumbered by imperial forces. Worse, Totila had forgotten how to ambush. In early 552 at Taginae in Umbria, his cavalry tried and failed to catch Narses’ army by surprise. Narses’ mounted archers overwhelmed them and Totila himself was killed. After several further struggles the elite, free Ostrogoths became too few to sustain their tribe and in 561 their nation imploded, ceasing to exist as a political force. Over the next centuries Gothic names occasionally appear in the Italian records, but ever less frequently. After a few generations they vanish altogether.
Rome had survived, yet it was profoundly changed by the Gothic War, and far more so than it had been by the sackings by Alaric’s Visigoths or the Vandals. As far as is known, Totila’s horse races were the last ever held in the Circus Maximus and within decades it had become a grassy wasteland. Justinian, who had intended to bring the city gloriously back within the folds of the Empire, had instead accelerated its decline. During and after the wars the last of the city’s old ways died away. Justinian, in his Pragmatic Sanction, which outlined his plans for the new imperial province of Italy, announced that he would repair the main Forum, the city’s river embankments, its port and its aqueducts, but little if anything was done.
One casualty of the wars was cleanliness. The final mention we have of functioning public baths, of which Rome had once possessed more than eight hundred, is from just a few decades later. This change was not only the result of a lack of resources. Public bathing was becoming ideologically unfashionable. In Christian eyes water was for drinking, not bathing, while it was certainly not for pleasure bathing, which smacked of licentiousness. Two centuries after the Gothic War a couple of aqueducts were restored and their waters were diverted to simple baths outside St Peter’s and San Lorenzo, for use by clergy and also recently arrived pilgrims – who would have needed a thorough wash – but soap was rarely provided. Dirt was the new clean. As to private baths, only a single one remained in working order after the Gothic War. Alone and unique, it continued to function for centuries. It was in the Lateran Palace, home of the popes.
As public baths disappeared so did the state food dole. In the decades after the Gothic War what remained of the old system was replaced by Church distributions to the poor. In some cases Church handouts were organized in the old state granaries. It was a sign of the times: Church was replacing state. Despite its defeat of the Ostrogoths, the Byzantine Empire’s hold on Italy proved fleeting. In 568, only seven years after the last Ostrogoth holdouts had been defeated, a new Germanic people swept into the country. These were the Lombards, who had first been introduced to Italy when serving in the Byzantine Empire’s armies. Imperial rule became reduced to a handful of areas close to the sea. As Byzantine control faded, power shifted to the Church. Popes had no interest in preserving the imperial, pagan past and, free of political authority, they actively erased it. At the end of the sixth century Pope Gregory embarked on a thorough purge of the city’s pagan statues. Shaken by earthquakes and with no King Theodoric or Emperor Majorian to keep an eye on them, Rome’s great pagan monuments suffered from decay and pilfering. In the lower parts of the city they were also damaged by floods. As the Tiber embankments rotted, the city suffered devastating inundations two or three times each century. One of the worst occurred in 589 and was described two centuries after the event by Paul the Deacon, whose account reveals yet another casua
lty of this era, reliable reporting:
In this outpouring of the flood the river Tiber at the city of Rome rose so much that its waters flowed in over the walls of the city and filled great regions of it. Then through the bed of the same stream a great multitude of serpents and a dragon of astonishing size passed by the city and descended to the sea.16
Yet some of Rome’s monuments were actually preserved thanks to the tough times. The century and a half that followed the Gothic War saw, unusually, almost no new churches built in Rome, at least of any size, as the popes struggled to maintain those already built. Vast St Peter’s was a particular headache and required constant repair. Unable to construct new buildings, the papacy resorted to reusing the old. In the late sixth century a vestibule of the old Imperial Palace was remade as the church of Santa Maria in Antiqua and the old office of the city prefect in the Forum became the church of Santi Cosma e Damiano. In the eighth century the former office of the Senate became the church of Santi Martino e Luca. Best of all, in the early seventh century Rome’s most beautiful pagan temple, the Pantheon, became the church of Santa Maria ad Martyres, and so was saved from the slow ruin of other great temples.
The institutions of Rome were not so lucky. As we have seen, republican posts died away before the Gothic War began, but one ancient body had endured: the Senate. In 554 Justinian had it reconstituted, reducing the property qualification from 100 to 30 pounds of gold. He was obliged to do so, as by this time wealthy Roman landowners were an endangered species: most had fled to Sicily or Constantinople, while others lost the last of their fortunes paying ransoms to rescue relatives seized by the Lombards. Even Justinian’s compromises, though, were not enough to stem the rot. The Senate died so quietly that we do not know exactly how or when it met its end. In the late 570s it was still sending embassies to Constantinople, begging the Eastern Emperor of the time for help against the Lombards. In 603 senators, along with the pope and the city’s clergy, are said to have greeted the Byzantine emperor Phocas when he paid a brief visit to Rome, though the claim is questionable. Pope Gregory, who died the very next year, is said to have declared that ‘The Senate is no more.’ There is no question that the Senate had vanished by the time of Pope Honorius, who reigned from 625 to 638, as he transformed the old Senate House into the church of Sant’Adriano. An assembly that had once ruled the Mediterranean world, and had existed since the time of Rome’s kings, 1,200 years ago, was gone.
Yet, as one set of institutions vanished, another rose to take their place. Ambitious, well-connected Romans followed the money. For a time they sought posts as officials or soldiers for the Eastern Empire. Then, as the Empire’s influence faded, they turned to the Church, which, thanks to donations by wealthy Christians hoping to secure their places in paradise, was fast becoming Europe’s greatest landowner. Within a century of the Gothic War Rome was ruled by a power order that was at once new and also rather familiar. At its summit, employing the title that emperors had done since the time of Julius Caesar – chief priest, or Pontifex Maximus – was the pope. Beneath were his high clergy, who wore silk slippers, just as had Rome’s senators.
Not for the last time, when it seemed that things could get no worse, Rome was helped by the misfortunes of others. The Lombard invasions of Italy caused such havoc that people flocked to the safety of its walls, repopulating the city, and by the end of sixth century the number of Rome’s inhabitants is estimated to have swollen to between forty and fifty thousand. Four decades later the Byzantine Empire became a shadow of its former self as Muslim armies from Arabia snatched away half its territory, seizing lands from Tunisia to Syria. Around 636 Jerusalem fell and became all but unreachable to pilgrims. It was at this time that Rome’s first guidebook for pilgrims appeared: De Locis Sanctis Martyrum, and Romans began to sell little phials of holy oil that had previously been a religious souvenir exclusive to Jerusalem. With its chief rival knocked out of the ring, Rome found itself Christendom’s number one pilgrimage destination.
CHAPTER FOUR
NORMANS
I
CANOSSA CASTLE, which sits on a rocky crag in the beautiful, rolling hills of Emilia Romagna in northern Italy, is a popular spot with visitors. Though most are local, some come from as far away as Germany, where, as we will see, the castle holds a special interest. In truth there is not that much to see. The summit of the crag was never large and has been further reduced by landslides. Part of a tower and the curved wall of a chapel survive but visitors spend most of their time in the modern museum building. Here they look at objects found at the site, dummies of historical figures and a large plaster model of the castle, which is dramatically shown off by the custodian. At the press of a button church music rings out and a section of the castle slides away in a mechanical landslip.
The castle has been destroyed and remade at least once, and little if anything remains from its moment of greatest fame, in the eleventh century. Then it was one of the strongest fortresses in this region of Italy and overlooked the main route to north-western Europe. It was the property of a formidable local ruler, Matilda of Tuscany, who was renowned for personally leading her troops into battle.
During the icy winter of 1077 Matilda had a house guest at Canossa: Pope Gregory VII, of whom she was such a strong supporter that their enemies maliciously claimed that they were lovers. And on 25 January 1077 Pope Gregory received a visitor, who had been so anxious to waylay Gregory that he had spent the previous weeks hurrying across frozen Europe. A chronicler of the time, Lambert of Hersfeld, describes how he and his little band of followers struggled over the ice-covered Alps:
The men in the party did their very best to overcome this dangerous situation, now scrambling on their hands and feet, now leaning on the shoulders of their guides, sometimes slipping on the treacherous surface, falling over and rolling some way … The guides sat the queen and the ladies of her household on oxhides, led the way themselves and dragged them down behind them. They placed some of the horses on sleds, and led others with their feet hobbled, but many of these died as they were being dragged, and most of the others were in a very bad state …1
The party was led by King Henry IV of Germany, Burgundy and of Italy, and he had good reason to be in a hurry. Pope Gregory had excommunicated him, had orchestrated a revolt against him by his barons and churchmen, and was now on his way to Germany to preside over a council to depose him. Henry was fighting to save his throne. Gregory enjoyed the strong position he was in. Lambert of Hersfeld describes how he sat comfortably in the warm in Canossa Castle when Henry arrived,
and since the castle was surrounded by a triple wall, he [Henry] was allowed within the second of these walls, leaving all his attendants outside, and there, stripped of his royal robes, with nothing kingly about him, entirely without ceremonial, and with his feet bare, he stood, fasting, from morning until evening while he waited for the pope’s sentence. He did this for a second, and then a third day. Finally, on the fourth day he was admitted to the pope’s presence …2
A contemporary illumination that depicts Henry IV asking Matilda of Tuscany and the Abbot of Cluny to intercede for him with the pope at the St Nicholas’ Chapel at Canossa.
Lambert of Hersfeld, who was a staunch opponent of Henry and wanted to show him humiliated, probably exaggerates. Henry would have been unlikely to survive three days and nights outside, barefoot in the cold. Local people think it more likely that he spent the time negotiating from the nearby castle of Bianello and then came when Gregory had agreed to see him. Still, it was a remarkable event and one of the great shock moments of the central Middle Ages. Nobody had imagined a pope could wield power in this way, humbling Europe’s most powerful monarch. Pope Gregory’s triumph, though, would be short-lived. Four years later, in May 1081, King Henry appeared outside Rome at the head of an army, keen to enjoy a little revenge.
Yet something does not seem quite right here. The title of this chapter is Normans not Germans, Henricians or Imperialists. As we will see,
this was a complex, three-cornered crisis involving three individuals whose characters could hardly have been more different. As well as puzzling, difficult Henry IV and controlling purist Gregory VII, the fate of the Romans lay also with Duke Robert Guiscard: a larger than life Norman military adventurer, as shameless as he was successful.
First the purist pope. Hildebrand, as he was known before assuming the papacy, was born in southern Tuscany and first came to Rome as a boy, probably at the invitation of his uncle, who ran a monastery on the Aventine Hill. He soon became a keen supporter of a new movement that was sweeping across Europe from France at this time and which sought to reform the Church. There was no question that the Church needed some shaking up as it had drifted far from early Christianity’s ideals of humility, poverty and chastity. As Western Europe’s greatest landowner it had become a magnet for those seeking wealth and power. Bishops were political players and simony – the sale of church positions – was common. Priests and monks enjoyed a much more comfortable lifestyle than the peasants whose tithes fed and clothed them. Nor did they deny themselves bedroom pleasures. By the ninth century married priests with large families were commonplace, and though in the early eleventh century, under the pressure of the Church reform movement, their marriages were less openly acknowledged than before, the change was largely cosmetic.
Nowhere was such unclergylike behaviour more evident than in Rome. Hildebrand arrived in the city at a low moment for the Roman Church, under Pope Benedict IX, whom chroniclers accused of every kind of monstrosity, from rape and murder to black magic. Medieval writers were often less interested in truth than in putting their patrons in the best light and assassinating the reputations of their enemies, so one frequently has to take their claims with a pinch of salt, but in Benedict IX’s case there are signs that something really was badly amiss.