Rome

by Matthew Kneale

  He often needed to pay to get power. As in earlier times, papal elections were frequently contested. In 1058 the old guard of Rome’s elite families, who had dominated the city before the revolt against murderous Benedict IX, attempted a comeback, thwarting the reformists and installing their papal candidate as Benedict X. It was a testing moment. Many would have resented the new non-Roman Church hierarchy and lower ranking churchmen were probably angry at the loss of their domestic and bedroom pleasures. Hildebrand, the future Pope Gregory VII, organized an energetic fightback. He persuaded the Norman prince Richard of Capua to lend him 300 knights and with the help of one of the city’s leading moneymen, Leone di Benedetto Cristiano, he distributed extensive bribes to the Romans. Hildebrand’s stick and carrot campaign succeeded. Benedict X was expelled from the city and replaced by the reform movement’s man, Nicholas II.

  It was the last gasp of Rome’s old guard families but not the end of papal schism and, just four years later, on Nicholas II’s death, another crisis arose. This time trouble sprang not from Rome’s former aristocrats but from the royal court in Germany, which was then under the thumb of the young Henry IV’s riverboat kidnapper, Archbishop Anno of Cologne, and which decided to put forward its own papal nominee, Bishop Cadalo of Parma. Hildebrand distributed money all through the night to set Romans against the German candidate, and again his efforts succeeded. When Cadalo was the first to run out of money his Roman supporters abandoned him and the reformists’ man was crowned pope as Alexander II. Hildebrand’s behaviour may seem surprising for a man determined to end the sale of Church offices yet he would have seen bribery as a justifiable means to an end. If reformists lost control of the papacy they would lose all hope of remaking the Church.

  Besides, Gregory had little else to offer except cash. Europe’s other monarchs won supporters by giving out grants of land or feudal titles, but though the Church of Rome owned plenty of land – both within the city and for 25 kilometres all around it – popes had no wish to give an inch of it away. They needed it. Like emperors in the past, medieval popes assumed responsibility for feeding Rome. Where emperors had arranged transport of food to Rome from all across the Mediterranean, diminished medieval Rome could be fed largely from the farmland immediately round about, just as it had been when Brennus and his Gauls attacked, a millennium and a half earlier.

  Bribery was also an easy option for popes, who were cash rich. Money flowed to them from tolls charged at the city’s gates, at the river ports, and at the market. It came from taxes, known as Peter’s Pence, paid by Europeans to the papacy. It came from gifts given by monasteries or devout individuals. It came from the fees and bribes paid to international Church courts that Gregory had recently set up. It came from friendly rulers such as Robert Guiscard who, as we saw, handed over gold to seal his peace deal with Gregory VII. It came from German rulers who journeyed south, like Henry IV, to be crowned Holy Roman Emperor. But most of all it came from Rome’s greatest money-spinner: pilgrims.

  Under Gregory VII the city’s pilgrim trade was booming. That Rome was enjoying a clean hands moment under the reformist popes doubtless added to the city’s appeal. Pilgrims by the thousand came in the hope that Rome’s famous saints would cure them of blindness, deafness or childlessness. Most of all they hoped the saints would intercede with God to forgive them their sins and award them a place in paradise. Saint Peter’s key to heaven appealed as strongly as ever. Pilgrims to Rome, who were known as Romipetae, needed only to gain permission from their local church and to buy their scrip (a leather purse) and their staff, and they could set out on the long and sometimes dangerous journey to Rome. Devout pilgrims, who believed that suffering would help annul their sins, walked barefoot, but most travelled more comfortably on horseback. Along the way they could add to their heavenly credit by calling in at other holy shrines, such as that of the Tunic of the Virgin at Chartres, or of the Finger of John the Baptist at Maurienne.

  When they finally reached Rome pilgrims did not only visit the city’s great churches. They also played tourist and saw its classical remains. Though, as we saw with Marcus Aurelius’ statue, these were not always remembered very precisely. Along with the supposed statue of Samson, highlights included Romulus’ tomb, the remains of Julius Caesar’s palace – on which, it was claimed, St Peter’s had been built – and an old heap of stones that was said to have been Saint Peter’s personal stash of grain, and which had become petrified when the emperor Nero inadvisedly tried to steal it away from him. The Colosseum was claimed to be a temple to the sun that had once been topped by a vast dome.

  Popes, and especially reform popes, squeezed every penny they could from pilgrims. The Church charged taxes on the lodging houses where pilgrims stayed. It taxed the shops which now crammed the great portico that led them to St Peter’s – which we last saw being used as cover by the Ostrogoths as they attacked Belisarius’ troops on Hadrian’s tomb – and where pilgrims could find every kind of service from boot repair to tooth-pulling, and could buy anything from straw for their beds and horses, to souvenir rosaries, and phials of oil from the lamps that burned above Saint Peter’s tomb. Most of all, the papacy took the coins pilgrims threw on to the altar of St Peter’s: a vast source of income, of which the reform popes greatly increased their own share, by sacking middlemen collectors who had filched half the proceeds.

  The popes even made money from dead pilgrims. The Church claimed ownership of all property belonging to anyone who died during their pilgrimage. After a long and gruelling journey and with the city rife with malaria in the summertime these would have been plentiful. The reform popes took care to maximize income in this area and in 1053 Leo IX produced a papal bull that prohibited Romans from hiding the sick, hiding their possessions, or from advising them to leave the city. It was just such behaviour that gave Rome a reputation for being grasping and corrupt. By one account the very word Roman was a term of abuse in Europe and Geoffrey of Malaterra, the biographer of Robert Guiscard, was not unusual in his scathing view of the Romans.

  Your laws are wicked, full of falsehoods.

  In you all depraved things flourish: lust, avarice,

  The lack of fidelity, the absence of order, the disease of simony,

  All these weigh upon your territory and everything is for sale.

  Formerly the sacred order – like water pouring forth – rushed through you.

  Now one pope is not enough; you enjoy having two of such distinction.

  Your fidelity is purchased with sumptuous displays.

  When this one gives to you, you strike the other,

  When this one stops giving to you, you invite the other one back.

  You threaten this one with that one, and thus you fill your purse.5

  In many ways it was an accurate assessment. Yet in Romans’ eyes they were doing nothing wrong. They were simply trying to survive and to lead tolerable lives in the way they always had, by carefully harvesting the pickings that their city and its rulers offered them. One could hardly expect them to change their ways now, when Rome had existed parasitically for more than a thousand years. Rome was a city built from handouts and its architecture in 1081 exactly reflected when the tap of gold had flowed or run dry.

  Of the two lean centuries following the Gothic War, when the tap had slowed to a drip, there was little to show, and the main vestiges of this bleak time were classical buildings that had been converted into churches, such as the Pantheon, and buildings that had collapsed through neglect. These included one of Rome’s bridges, the Pons Agrippae, which fell down in the eighth century. Another casualty was the Colosseum, half of whose outer shell collapsed around the same time, leaving a vast heap of rubble. It used to be thought that this disaster was the result of an earthquake but it now seems likely that the Colosseum fell apart unaided. It had been built on two different kinds of sediment and as the building gradually settled under its own vast weight – and with many of the metal clamps holding the stones together stolen – it simply
cracked apart.

  The late eighth and early ninth century had left far more. It left Rome with churches, either new or rebuilt. Most were in the city centre, and were created to house martyrs’ remains that were moved from the catacombs for greater safety. They included Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, San Marco below the Capitoline and Santa Prassede with its fine Byzantine style mosaics. Even some of the city’s aqueducts were brought back to life at this time: the Acqua Virgo and probably three others. These were good times all across Europe, which was finally enjoying green shoots of recovery after the great collapse of the Germanic invasions, while Rome particularly benefited thanks to an alliance between popes and the powerful Frankish Empire: a special relationship that reached its zenith on Christmas Day 800, when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne the first Holy Roman Emperor.

  The second half of the ninth century, though, had left Rome with hardly a single new building. The tap of gold had again slowed to a dribble. The reason why lay on the far side of the river in the Vatican, where a Roman transported across the centuries from the 530s would find the greatest single change to their city. The district around St Peter’s was now enclosed by a new stretch of city wall, Rome’s first since the Aurelian. It had been built in a hurry, and with good reason. On 23 August 846, a force from Arab Sicily landed at the mouth of the Tiber. Roman militiamen and foreign residents sent against them were quickly beaten back, and though the main part of Rome was safe behind its walls, St Peter’s was not. The Arabs seized the basilica’s many treasures and even took its bronze doors. Pope Leo IV began work on the new wall just two months later. This was Rome’s greatest building project for centuries and the Frankish ruler Lothair lent a hand, calling for a special tax to be raised throughout his empire. Work gangs of Romans were employed, along with Muslim prisoners from a second fleet of raiders that was sunk in a storm, and the city’s lime kilns were kept busy baking ancient pieces of marble into plaster. Finally, after four years, the new Leonine Wall was complete. Shaped like a narrow horseshoe, it was three kilometres long and had three gates. It also revealed how building standards had fallen during the previous four centuries: it was only half the height of the 22-kilometre Aurelian Walls. As will be seen, on a number of occasions it would be Rome’s weak spot.

  It was not only Rome that was struggling at this time. Most of Europe was assailed by a new trio of raiders – Arabs, Vikings and Hungarian horsemen – and rulers endeavouring to save their kingdoms from collapse had little gold to spare for Rome. As Rome’s income dried up, Roman families fought over the little that remained, taking the city into mean, lawless days. For the first time it became acceptable – even commonplace – for popes to be murdered. A low point was reached in 897, when Pope Stephen VI organized a show trial for his dead predecessor, Pope Formosus. Stephen had Formosus’ remains disinterred, dressed in full papal regalia and then placed on a chair so they could be tried by a Church synod. When Formosus’ corpse failed to answer accusations that it had gained office illegally, three fingers were cut from its right, benediction hand and it was stripped naked and then thrown into the Tiber. Yet Formosus’ bones soon had their revenge. Within months Stephen VI had been deposed and strangled.

  The next era, the first half of the tenth century, would leave Rome a number of souvenirs, which included several monasteries and a new palace north of the Pantheon, built from the ruins of the temple of Serapis. This fresh spate of construction was the work of a power-playing dynasty, the Teofilatti, who employed an impressive variety of means to keep control of the city. The dynasty’s founder, Teofilatto, a leading figure in Roman politics, strengthened his position by installing an ally as pope, John VIII. A fighting cleric, who personally led his troops in battle and permanently expelled Arab raiders from central Italy, John VIII assumed, when Teofilatto died, that Rome would be his, but he had not reckoned on Teofilatto’s daughter, Marozia. Marozia had him suffocated and then augmented her power by marrying, in succession, two of southern Europe’s strongest monarchs. The only one able to unseat her was her own son, Alberic, who locked her up in the fortress of Hadrian’s tomb, ruled as king of Rome for twenty years, built the new palace in the old temple of Serapis, and then installed his son as pope. The Teofilatti may not have been gentle rulers yet under their reign Rome sparkled as Western Europe’s greatest city.

  Their glory days finally came to an end in 963 when the king of a newly powerful German state, Otto I, marched south to have himself crowned Holy Roman Emperor. So began a new era of interference in Roman politics by increasingly idealistic German rulers, thanks to whom, as has been seen, the papacy came into the hands of the reformers. The reformist popes were more interested in moral change than building churches and in 1081 they had left little mark on Rome’s architecture, yet many new buildings appeared during the thirty-five years of their rule. These were part of a fashion that began to spread across Europe in the eleventh century, and which offered both status and protection from one’s neighbours: fortress towers. By 1081 Rome’s thirteen leading families had constructed a number of these, including several across the river in Trastevere. They also built fortresses in the city’s ancient ruins, whose thick walls made them even more formidable than the towers. The Frangipani family, whose power centre was the old Forum area, had a fortress in the eastern part of the Colosseum. The Corsi had a fortified home built out of the old Roman records office on the Capitoline Hill. The family of moneyman Leone di Benedetto Cristiano, the Pierleoni, who were based on the Tiber Island, made a fortress of the old Theatre of Marcellus. An extension spur of the Palatine Hill, the Septizonium was fortified. The city’s greatest strongpoint, though, was Hadrian’s tomb – today’s Castel Sant’Angelo – which in 1081 was known as the Castel dei Crescentii.

  What was life like for members of Rome’s thirteen leading families in their towers and fortified classical ruins? Evidence from archaeological work and studies of legal documents paints a picture of a city that a visitor from the 530s would have found dismal. Long gone were the delights of late antique Rome. Though it is not easy to know precisely what functioned when, in 1081 it appears that only one of the city’s original eleven aqueducts was still operating: the Acqua Vergine, that brought water to today’s Trevi Fountain area. The Vatican was supplied by the smaller fourth-century Acqua Damasiana. For washing and drinking most Romans relied on wells, small springs that flowed only in rainier seasons, or the Tiber. Pleasure bathing was a distant memory.

  Compared to earlier eras, even wealthy Romans led a simple existence in the eleventh century. The city’s housing was the best in Europe yet compared to the housing of classical times it was very basic. One of the most desirable residential locations was in the ruins of the Baths of Alexander just west of the Pantheon, that had homes with marble staircases and little gardens with apple and fig trees, but even here houses were poky and shoddily built from reused brick and stone. Further out, in the suburban hamlets around the centre, well-off Romans lived like farmers. They tended vegetables in their gardens and made their homes in upstairs rooms that were reached by a wooden outside staircase, while their animals lived below them. It was a state of affairs that aristocrats of the Empire would have found inconceivable. As for poor Romans, they lived in tiny, flimsy wooden dwellings just two or three metres across that would have been little more comfortable than the huts where the very first Romans had lived, two thousand years earlier.

  Yet there had been some improvements. A document from 1127 describes a house with a new medieval invention that probably already existed in homes in the city in 1081: a cosy fireplace. And if Romans’ homes were basic, they could be well furnished. Dowries and wills of the time list kitchenware, trousseaus of clothes, beds, bedding, elaborate hangings, and walnut letter-holders. They also mention parchment books (paper had yet to arrive from the East). Here was another area where Romans were ahead of most Europeans. In the eleventh century, when literacy outside the Church was very rare in Europe, many leading Romans could read.

/>   And their health will have been a little better than in earlier times. Annoyances were worse than ever, and with the routine of daily bathing gone Romans would have been constantly scratching flea and lice bites, but the city’s shrunken population was too small for diseases such as measles to be endemic. Romans in 1081 probably lived longer than they had done five or ten centuries earlier. As always, they lived longest if they were rich enough to escape the city during the malaria season.

  If they did get sick, eleventh-century Romans’ first response was likely to be a guilty conscience. Christian medical thinking, which was strongly accusatory, viewed plagues and madness as evidence of sin, and leprosy as proof of sexual misbehaviour. Yet, in many ways, the rise of Christianity had changed matters less than one might expect, and Romans’ health options were fundamentally no different than they had been in pagan times. Like their sick ancestors, sick medieval Romans could seek either a religious or a professional cure. Though Rome now had several hospitals these were on the prayer side of the spectrum and were staffed by churchmen. As hospitals were also centres of infection, devout Romans would have been wiser to avoid them altogether and go to a church. A leading choice was that of the two curing saints Cosma e Damiano in the Forum, which was built on top of the old healing temple of pagan deities Castor and Pollux. Medieval saints, like pagan Asclepius, proudly advertised how they had saved sufferers whose ailments had confounded every doctor.

  If Romans did go to a professional they had better options than most Europeans. Much had been lost and forgotten since the Germanic invasions and European medicine had greatly declined since classical times, but it had declined less markedly in Rome and southern Italy, where doctors probably did little more harm, and almost as much good in 1081 as they had done a thousand years earlier. Many of the best Italian doctors at this time were Jews, who had greater contact with medical knowledge preserved in the Islamic world, where faith and medical practice had been kept more distinct.