FOUR
One Sunday afternoon towards the middle of the fourth century a group of Roman schoolboys went out through a gate in the Aurelian Wall and walked along the Via Appia. ‘We went down into the catacombs,’ one of them, Eusebius Hieronymus, recorded. ‘These are caves excavated deep in the earth, and contain, on either hand as you enter, the bodies of the dead buried in the walls. It is all so dark there… Only occasionally is light let in to mitigate the horror of the gloom, and then not so much through a window as through a hole. You take each step with caution, as though surrounded by deep night.’
For generations these mazelike, subterranean galleries and passages, dug out of the soft tufa rock around Rome, had been used by a religious sect which, in Tacitus's words, ‘were detested for their abominations and popularly known by the name of Christians after one Christus who was put to death in the reign of Tiberius by the Procurator, Pontius Pilate’. The Christians had at first interred their dead in tombs above ground as well as below, but as land for burial became scarce and expensive and as persecution increased, they had taken to excavating cemeteries below ground where burials could take place without so much notice by the authorities or interference from hostile pagan crowds. The largest of them were dug on land belonging to such well-to-do converts as the Flavian relatives of the Emperor Domitian who gave permission to their fellow-Christians to use their villas for meetings and worship and their gardens as burial grounds. And so beneath the cypress trees along the Via Appia, and on other roads leading out of the city, warrens of dark tunnels were dug through the rock, some of them on four different levels like the Catacombs of St Calixtus, named after a former slave who, having served a sentence of hard labour in the Sardinian quarries, had been placed in charge of them before becoming leader of his sect. On the walls of the chambers were painted Christian symbols – the fish, the lamb, the shepherd – and scenes from the Bible, and in the recesses were placed not only the bodies of the dead, wrapped in lime-coated shrouds, but also precious objects such as lamps and vessels of golden glass, and relics of holy men, martyrs and saints.1
Among the bodies of saints placed here were, it is believed, that of St Sebastian, traditionally said to be a member of Diocletian's bodyguard who was condemned to be shot to death with arrows when his religion became known, and, for a time, those of two earlier saints, Paul, the great Jewish missionary from the Greek city of Tarsus, and Simon, the fisherman from the shores of the Sea of Galilee whose
15. Part of the catacombs on the Via Appia dating from the reign of the Emperor Tiberius.
16. Michelangelo's ‘Crucifixion of St Peter’. According to tradition the saint asked to be nailed to the cross head-down so that his execution would not resemble too closely that of Christ.
Aramaic title Kepha (Peter), meaning rock, was given to him by Christ himself with the words, ‘And on this rock I will build my Church, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven.’ In fulfilment of this mission Peter is believed to have come to Rome where both he and Paul were executed in the persecutions ordered by Nero.
These persecutions followed the fire of 64 for which the Emperor himself was widely held to be responsible and for which scapegoats were consequently needed.
To put an end to the rumours he shifted the charge on to others [Tacitus recorded]. First those who acknowledged themselves of the [Christian] persuasion were arrested; and upon their testimony a vast number were condemned… Their death was turned into a diversion. They were clothed in the dress of wild beasts, and torn to pieces by wild dogs; they were fastened to crosses, or set up to be burned, so as to serve the purpose of lamps when daylight failed. Nero gave up his own gardens for this spectacle.
As it was in Nero's time, so it was in the reigns of Domitian and Marcus Aurelius, of Decius and Valerian. There were emperors who were more merciful. Trajan, for instance, ordered, ‘Christians are not to be hunted out. Any who are accused and convicted must be punished. Yet if a man denies being a Christian and corroborates his denial by such acts as worshipping our gods, he should be pardoned, however suspect he may have been in the past.’ But throughout the second and third centuries the Christians were more often persecuted than not; and, even when the authorities were prepared to tolerate them, the common people suspicious of their exclusiveness, their rites and their supposed ‘abominations’ which included cannibalism – regarded them as alien troublemakers and revolutionaries, a danger to the state and a blasphemy against the ancient gods of Rome. Their deaths in the amphitheatre accordingly became one of the fiercest thrills that the shows there could afford. Christians were eaten by half-starved lions, burned alive before images of the sun-god, shot down by flights of arrows, hacked to death with axes and swords. In the reign of Diocletian alone, when the congregation of Christians was forbidden, when their clergy were arrested unless they sacrificed to the recognized gods, and their places of worship destroyed together with their sacred objects and holy books, there were probably as many as three thousand martyrs. Yet their religion could not be suppressed; and while those arrested were torn to pieces in the Colosseum, the survivors were joined by convert after convert until by the time of Diocletian's death there were perhaps thirty thousand Christians in Rome, meeting together for worship, occasionally in halls reserved especially for the purpose but usually in villas or ‘houses of the Church’ known as tituli after the original title holders of the building.
By then there had already been thirty-three bishops, or popes, in Rome, all holding that position of divine, unique authority within the Christian community which, so they believed, had been granted to St Peter by Christ. A minority of them had been born in Rome; several came from the East; one at least from Africa. Some were of humble birth, others noblemen. This evident capacity of Christianity to attract converts from all peoples and classes in the Empire was one of the main reasons why it appealed to the man who emerged as the strongest contender for the imperial throne after the confusion caused by the abdication of Diocletian.
This man was Constantine. The son of an army officer and an experienced officer himself, Constantine had been born in about 285 in what is now Yugoslavia and had spent most of his youth in the eastern part of the Empire which Diocletian had divided to protect its borders. His mother, Helena, a former serving-girl from Asia Minor, was at some uncertain date converted to Christianity and, on a visit to the Holy Land, was credited with having discovered the cross upon which Christ was crucified. Her son, so it was alleged, had the nails melted down and made into a charmed bit for the bridle of his horse. Having married the stepdaughter of one of Diocletian's fellow-Emperors, Maximian I, Constantine had invaded Italy in 312 and at the Mulvian Bridge near Rome had defeated his brother-in-law, Maxentius, Maximian's son, to become undisputed ruler of the Empire in the West. At this battle he had fought under a banner bearing the insignia of the faith to which he had been converted from sun-worship and to which he was drawn not only by political considerations but also by his own need for a personal, divine intercessor. Thereafter, in those battles in which he won and consolidated his rule over the whole of the Empire, East and West, he claimed to be fighting in Jesus's name and to be the champion of His faith against the forces of evil. By imperial edicts he granted freedom of worship to all Christians and restored to them the property, both personal and corporate, of which they had been deprived during the persecutions.
In Rome, Constantine contrived to benefit the Christian community without giving too much offence to the rich and influential classes who were still mostly, and in many cases devoutly, pagan. He gave the Christians buildings in which they could meet and worship their God, bury their dead and revere their saints and martyrs. But he ensured that the sites were well away from the centre of the city and that, while the interiors of the buildings might be splendid, they displayed little of this splendour to the passers-by in the streets outside.
South-west of the Porta Maggiore2 stood a palace which had formerly belonged to the rich Laterani family and which had formed part of his wife's dowry.3 This he gave to the Pope who established in it the surviving private chapel, the Sancta Sanctorum,4 now approached by the Scala Sancta, the holy stairs which, so tradition firmly held, Jesus ascended in Pontius Pilate's palace in Jerusalem and which were brought to Rome by Constantine's mother.5 Helena, as Empress-Dowager, had a palace near to the Lateran, the Palatium Sessorianum; and here the great hall was converted into a basilica which became known as S. Croce in Gerusalemme in commemoration of the holy Cross, its most precious relic.6 North of S. Croce in Gerusalemme, Constantine himself is believed to have built a basilica, the first Basilica di S. Lorenzo fuori le Mura.7 This was constructed over the catacomb where lay the bones of St Laurence, one of the deacons of the early Christian community in Rome. St Laurence, it is said, was burnt to death on a grill in 258 when, having been ordered to hand over the sect's valuables, he collected together the city's destitute and sick and presented them to the authorities with the words, ‘Here is the Church's treasure.’ Certainly, beside the Lateran Palace on the site of what is now St John Lateran, Constantine did build the Constantinian basilica which, since it contained the cathedra, or official seat of the bishop, became and has always since remained Rome's cathedral.8 A large rectangular hall with a nave flanked by double aisles and terminating in an apse, this basilica seems to have been conceived by Constantine, internally at least, as a splendid Christian rival to the monumental public meeting-halls of the imperial city.
The same inspiration is evident also in the other great basilica which Constantine built on the slopes of an imperial estate on the Vatican hill. This basilica was as massive as the Constantinian basilica; but between the apse and the nave, which was covered with graves, a transept changed the longitudinal shape into that of a cross. Beneath this crossing, surmounted by a baldacchino supported on twisted marble columns, was the shrine of St Peter whose remains, brought here from the catacombs, were reburied in the basilica which was for ever to bear his name.9 At about the same time, above the catacombs, yet another large basilica was built as a kind of enclosed and roofed-in cemetery, its floor, like that of St Peter's, covered with graves. Dedicated to the Apostles, it was later known as the Basilica of San Sebastian in honour of the Christian soldier who, his body pierced by arrow shafts, survived death only to be executed.10
Basilicas, churches, covered cemeteries and mausolea were not the only fine buildings to be erected in Rome in the time of Constantine. In the Forum he completed, to modified designs, a secular basilica begun by Maxentius, the Basilica Nova, an immense structure, the last of ancient Rome's law courts and meeting-places, three of whose huge coffered vaults still remain.11 In one of its apses Constantine had placed an immense seated statue of himself, the body of wood, the robe of gilded bronze and the head of marble. This colossal head, six feet high and weighing nine tons, can still be seen in the courtyard of the Palazzo dei Conservatori on the Capitoline hill where the deeply cut pupils of the large and penetrating eyes stare out, above the huge hooked nose, like those of a commanding god.
Like most of his great predecessors, the Emperor Constantine built baths for the city. He may well have been responsible for the Arch of Janus Quadrifons,12 the huge structure in the Forum Boarium, the ancient cattle market by the banks of the Tiber.13 And he was, of course, the inspiration for the Arch of Constantine which was erected in 315 by the Senate and people of Rome to commemorate the Emperor's triumph over Maxentius at the Mulvian Bridge.14
Splendid as Constantine found Rome, however, and magnificent as were the new buildings he gave to the city, he had to accept Diocletian's view that it could no longer serve as the Empire's capital, being too far removed from the northern and eastern frontiers. He had also to recognize that he had failed to make Rome fully Christian, that the deep-rooted pagan beliefs of most families were as strong as ever. So the Emperor removed his court to Byzantium on the Bosphorus strait and there founded the new Christian capital which was to become known as Constantinople.
Yet, although Rome was no longer the seat of imperial power, the city remained the caput mundi, ‘Invicta Roma Aeterna’, as its coins declared. The centre and showplace of the civilized world, with a population of about 800,000, it was still the home of those incalculably rich families whose political influence was still paramount in the Senate, whose members still filled many of the most important posts in Italy and the Empire, whose businesses were still run from Rome, whose villas still stood beyond its walls and whose ancestors’ mausolea lined the roads leading out of it. Visitors to the city still stood in awestruck admiration as they looked across the Forum to the Colosseum, or gazed up at the temples, tiled with gilded bronze, on the Capitoline hill, or wondered at the number and size of the basilicas and triumphal arches, the statues, obelisks and fountains, the baths and libraries, the circuses and theatres.
Eight bridges crossed the river.15 Nineteen aqueducts carried water to the city on row upon row of arches stretching in seemingly endless lines across the countryside beyond the walls.16 The Roman poet, Rutilius Namatianus, expressed his pride in the indestructible glory of his city:
No man will ever be safe if he forgets you;
May I praise you still when the sun is dark.
To count up the glories of Rome is like counting
The stars in the sky.
There were still many powerful men in Rome who believed that this glory could only be preserved by a return to the old traditions and the old gods, by a rejection of the new Christianity with its foreign, plebeian origins, its internal feuds and its unfamiliar art. There were men like Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, the noble, upright, rich and cultivated leader of the Senate who, while numbering many Christians among his friends, constantly upheld the superior virtues of the pagan tradition and even supported the gladiatorial games, arranging for lavish entertainments to be given when his son was appointed Praetor and expressing disappointment when the German prisoners he had imported chose to strangle each other in their chains rather than fight before a Roman crowd. Symmachus was naturally appalled by an imperial order from Constantinople that the winged statue of Victory should be removed from the Senate House. ‘The Great Mystery cannot be approached by one avenue alone,’ he protested on behalf of his fellow-Senators. ‘Leave us the symbol on which our oaths of allegiance have been sworn for so many generations. Leave us the system that has given prosperity to the State.’ But his words were in vain; in 382 the statue was taken away. And a few years later in 392, shortly before Symmachus's death, an imperial decree, sterner and more effective than previous edicts, forbade all forms of pagan sacrifice and banished flowers and incense from the altars of the household gods. ‘They who were once the gods of the nation,’ wrote St Jerome, ‘dwell now with the owls and bats under their lonely roofs.’ In 408 a further decree provided that all temples should be put to other than religious uses. The gladiatorial games had already been abolished in 404 by imperial decree after a Christian monk, Telemachus, had been stoned to death by furious spectators in the arena of the Colosseum when he had tried to separate two fighting gladiators.
Up till the close of the fourth century, pagan shrines had been restored and kept in repair and use beside the places of Christian worship. A few years after Constantine's death in 337, new pagan statues had been erected along the Sacra Via; and since then the Temple of Vesta had been renovated. But now the struggle was over. Christianity had triumphed and Christian buildings were to dominate the city. No longer were they to be relegated to the outskirts of Rome and made as discreet as their size would allow. They were henceforth to appear as conspicuous and monumental witnesses to the faith, some of them being built in the very heart of the city and most, displaying increasingly classical emphasis, designed with high naves, approached through a porch or narthex, flanked by aisles and terminating in semicircular apses.
Powerful support for this new style of church building came from St Damasus, a rich and well-born prelate of strong Roman sympathies who was elected Pope in 366 and strove hard to identify the Christian Church more closely with Rome's long classical past. He and his immediate successors, many of them Roman and most of them upper class, treasured their classical heritage, revered the great Latin writers, admired the architecture which had developed in their times and saw the Kingdom of God as a sanctified successor to the Empire of the Caesars. The religious buildings which now appeared in Rome clearly reflected both this new philosophy and the growing confidence of the Church. Among these buildings, in which columns and other features from classical buildings were incorporated, were the grandly imposing S. Paolo fuori le Mura, begun in 384, to replace the modest basilica that Constantine had built over the grave of St Paul;17 the church of San Lorenzo in Damaso, now part of the fabric of the Palazzo della Cancelleria;18and the church of S. Pudenziana which is dedicated to the daughter of the Senator who was believed to have been one of St Peter's first converts in Rome and in which the magnificent mosaic in the apse depicts Christ surrounded by the Apostles wearing the togas of Roman Senators.19 In about 400 building began north of the Colosseum upon the church of S. Pietro in Vincoli as a shrine for the chains which had bound St Peter.20 Soon afterwards work started to the south of the Colosseum on the basilica of SS. Giovanni e Paolo which was dedicated to the two Christian martyrs who were beheaded in 361 for refusing to sacrifice to pagan gods.21
But while all this building was in progress within the city, beyond its walls the Roman Empire was crumbling into ruins. Invasion succeeded invasion, defeat followed defeat. In 378 the German people known as Visigoths overwhelmed an imperial army at Adrianople; and in 408 they invaded Italy and marched south upon Rome under their leader Alaric, a nobleman by birth who had once commanded the Gothic troops in the Roman army. When the Visigoths first appeared before the Aurelian Walls, which had recently been strengthened and raised to almost twice their original height, they were kept at bay with payments of money. But in 410 when they reappeared, the gates were opened by traitors within the city, and for the first time in eight hundred years a foreign force occupied Rome.
A ferocious sack had been expected when the fearful sound of the Gothic war trumpets had been heard; but the tall, rough-looking troops of Alaric, mostly Arian Christians like their commander, were not malevolent. Some building's were burned down, including the Palace of Sallust,22 many houses and churches were plundered, a few citizens were roughly treated, and pagan temples were ransacked with exceptional venom. But after three days, the Visigoths withdrew, having respected the sanctity both of St Peter's and of St Paul's. Yet, while the fabric of the city had not been badly damaged, the people of Rome had suffered a deep emotional shock. ‘It is the end of the world,’ lamented St Jerome, as Christians blamed pagans for their humiliation and disgrace, and pagans blamed Christians for having deserted the gods who had in the past afforded the city protection. ‘Words fail me. My sobs break in… The city which took captive the whole world has itself been captured.’
Confidence soon returned, however. The Pope at the time of Alaric's invasion was Innocent I, a man of strong will and high ability who at every opportunity stressed the supreme authority of the papacy and its importance as a political and spiritual force. And in 440 a man of like determination, energy and force of character was elected Pope. This was the Roman-born Leo I who insisted that the powers which he had inherited had come to him through his predecessors directly from St Peter and that Peter alone had been granted that power by Christ.
Fortified by the faith, Pope Leo went out himself when Rome was next endangered to confront the barbarians in the north. The enemy now was the restless, savage-tempered Attila, the squat and swarthy leader of the Huns, who ‘felt himself lord of all’ and took pride in the title that had been bestowed upon him, ‘the Scourge of God’. In 452 Attila's forces crossed the Alps and, having sacked and pillaged various northern towns including Milan, Padua and Verona, were preparing to advance south when Pope Leo arrived at his headquarters. He demanded and obtained a meeting with Attila and, while no one knew what passed between them, the Huns soon withdrew, persuaded perhaps that famine and pestilence in Italy would destroy them should they move south towards Rome.
A few years later Pope Leo was faced with another threat, this time from the Vandals, fierce Germanic warriors who attacked by night, blackening their faces and their shields. In 455, having poured across Spain and ravaged north Africa, they invaded Italy and, led by their gifted chieftain, Gaiseric, they advanced upon Rome. Leo could not prevent them breaking into the city which they pillaged far more thoroughly than Alaric's men had done. They remained for two weeks during which they stripped most of the gilded tiles from the roof of the Temple of Capitoline Jupiter, rampaged through the mansions of the rich, invaded the Christian churches, and then marched down to their ships at Ostia with thousands of captives and wagons piled high with plunder, including the menorah and other sacred objects which the Emperor Titus had brought to Rome from Jerusalem.
Yet brutal and rapacious as the Vandals had proved to be, the damage they did to Rome was not as widespread as it would have been had not Pope Leo interceded so forcefully for the city and obtained undertakings from Gaiseric to restrain his men from murder, rape and indiscriminate incendiarism. Gaiseric did not keep all his promises, but at least the ancient basilicas were spared; and life in Rome was soon restored to normal. Indeed, in the years that had passed since the first barbarian incursion into the city, the moral force of the Christian faith had grown ever stronger. The Church was still rich, and the papacy had become recognized as a decisive factor in European affairs. In the proud words of Pope Leo, Rome was once more ‘the head of the world through the Holy See of St Peter’.
Interrupted though it had been, the building of churches in Rome continued apace, as thousands of converts were admitted into the faith. The most magnificent of all early Christian churches in Rome and one that most clearly exemplifies the continuing taste for classical forms so evident in the late fourth century was, indeed, started soon after the invasion of Alaric and finished in 432. This is S. Sabina on the Aventine which has survived largely unchanged to this day.23 In the year of its completion the church of S. Maria Maggiore had been begun on the Esquiline and had been decorated with some of the most beautiful fifth-century mosaics that have come down to us.24 Soon afterwards Pope Sixtus III, who took a deep interest in the architecture of the city, had undertaken a reconstruction of the Lateran Baptistery as well as of San Lorenzo fuori le Mura. And one of Sixtus III's successors, Simplicius, who was chosen Pope in 468, built the lovely S. Stefano Rotondo on the Caelian hill whose unusual circular design may have been inspired by the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.25
During the papacy of Simplicius, while bitter doctrinal disputes divided Christendom in the East, the Roman Empire in the West approached its final disintegration. When the boy Emperor Romulus Augustulus was deposed in 476 by the German warrior Odoacer, no successor was appointed and Odoacer became ruler of Italy. Yet building continued in Rome as though these events in the outside world were of little concern to a city whose prestige as the home of the papacy had been much enhanced by the death of imperial power in the West. Old structures were renovated and extended, while new ones – monasteries, mausolea, chapels, shrines and baptisteries – appeared both inside the walls and beyond them where suburbs were developing beside the graves of the martyrs and where hostels, shops and taverns catered for the ever-growing number of pilgrims who flocked to Rome from all over the Christian world.
Pilgrims to Rome in these years discovered a city surprisingly little changed by the passing troubled years. In 467 the Bishop of the Auvergne described the jostling, affable crowds and the convivial atmosphere in the circus and the markets. The rich still entertained visitors with traditional Roman hospitality in their houses; orators still practised their art in the Forum; wrestling matches and wild beast shows were still held in the Colosseum, whose massive walls remained untouched by building contractors who were later to use it as a quarry; chariots still careered in clouds of dust around the Circus Maximus to the roars of the excited crowd; statues were still to be found in all quarters of the city. Indeed, Odoacer's successor as King of Italy, the Ostrogoth Theodoric maintained that the bronze and marble population of Rome was almost equal to its natural one: ten years after his death there were an estimated 3,785 statues still standing in the city. Anxious to preserve these ‘precious monuments left in the streets and the open spaces of Rome’, Theodoric, a persistent advocate of racial harmony, instructed his representatives in Rome to guard them carefully and at night to listen for the ringing sound which should warn the watchmen that a thief might be attempting to remove an arm or leg. Theodoric also gave orders for the repair of the Colosseum after it had been damaged by an earthquake in 508 and for the restoration of the imperial palaces on the Palatine, setting aside for the purpose the proceeds of a tax on wine.
But after the death of Theodoric in 526, there were further catastrophic upheavals in Italy which were to precipitate ancient Rome's decay. The Byzantine Emperor Justinian I determined to drive the Arian Ostrogoths out of the peninsula and to re-establish direct imperial rule and the true faith. During the war that followed, Justinian's general Belisarius occupied Rome, which was three times besieged, its defenders on one occasion smashing the statues on Hadrian's mausoleum and catapulting the fragments at the enemy. The city was eventually captured by the new Ostrogothic leader, Totila, who demolished long sections of the Aurelian Wall, burned the Trasteverine district and threatened to raze the rest of the city as a pasture for cattle. Belisarius addressed a passionate appeal to him to remember that ‘trespass against Rome's greatness would be justly regarded as an outrage’:
Beyond all cities on earth Rome is the greatest and most wonderful. For neither has she been built by the energy of a single man, nor has she attained to such greatness and beauty in a short time. On the contrary, a long succession of emperors, many associations of illustrious men, countless years and wealth… have been required to gather together all the treasures she contains. She remains a monument to the virtues of the world… Destroying Rome, you will lose not the city of another but your own. Preserving her you will enrich yourself with the most splendid possessions of the earth.
Influenced by such pleas as this, Totila held his hand in Rome where the population had been reduced by the sieges to perhaps as few as 30,000. But the city was not long to remain his capital. In 552 he was defeated and killed in a battle in the Apennines against the eunuch Narses, formerly commander of the imperial bodyguard, who had succeeded Belisarius as general of the Byzantine forces.
Once the Ostrogoths had been finally defeated, however, Italy had other invaders. The Lombards, a Germanic people, began to move down from the north in 568 and then to lay waste the countryside outside Rome, driving farmers and peasants, monks and clergy to seek safety in the city where a series of disasters – fires, floods, food shortages and plague – made life miserable for all those inside the walls.
As the sixth century drew to its close, Rome's decay was pitiable. Eyewitnesses painted a desolate picture of a city in which buildings were crumbling into ruins; aqueducts and sewers were in urgent need of repair; public granaries had long since collapsed; monuments were dismembered, legally if deemed to be ‘beyond repair’; statues were looted and violated; the Tiber carried along in its swollen, yellow waters dead cattle and snakes; people were dying of starvation in hundreds and the whole population went about in dread of infection. Those with sufficient money had forsaken their city for the relative comforts of Constantinople. Their large country villas had been abandoned for use as quarries or as living quarters for poor monks. The surrounding fields, undrained, had degenerated into swamps, and mosquitoes infested the plain of the Campagna.
In 590 a long procession of supplicants and penitents, numbering almost the entire population of Rome, could have been seen walking with bowed heads through the streets of the city. Some, already dying, fell down and expired by the way. The survivors marched slowly on until they came to the Mausoleum of Hadrian where, so the faithful reported, the Archangel Michael, captain of the heavenly host and guardian of the sick, appeared in the sky sheathing his sword as a sign that the plague would soon be over. In gratitude for this heavenly deliverance, a chapel was afterwards built above the mausoleum and dedicated to St Michael, and thereafter the fortress which the mausoleum had already become was to be known for all time as the Castel Sant' Angelo.
Leading the penitents that day in 590 was a man from a rich patrician family who had been born in Rome some fifty years before, the great-grandson of Pope Felix III. Strongly drawn to monasticism, he had resigned his position as Prefect of the city, had converted his family's palace on the Caelian hill into St Andrew's Monastery, and had sold the rest of his estate for the foundation of other monasteries elsewhere, all of them, like St Andrew's, governed by rules similar to those established by St Benedict. After taking Holy Orders he had gone to Constantinople as papal nuncio and, a few weeks before the march of the penitents, he had been elected Pope. Complaining that he had never wanted such preferment, Pope Gregory I proved himself not only one of the most saintly men who had held this high office but also an administrator, statesman and diplomat of exceptional gifts, the creator of the medieval papacy. Declaring that he did not intend to have ‘the treasury of the Church defiled by disreputable gain’, he devoted himself to the relief of the poor, reorganizing the system of food distribution which the papacy had taken over from the imperial authorities, and establishing or improving several relief centres, known as diaconiae, which were later to be converted into churches as, for example S. Giorgio in Velabro26 and S. Maria in Via Lata.27 He also took care of the needy among the pilgrims whose numbers were constantly increasing throughout his pontificate.
Dedicated to the conversion of unbelievers, Pope Gregory sent missions from Rome in every direction, into Lombardy, Spain and England, then into Germany, the coastlands of France and the Low Countries. Before long, Christian pilgrims from all these places were arriving in Rome, some of them bringing great wealth, others walking in penniless, several with iron collars round their necks or arms indicating that they were criminals upon whom a pilgrimage to Rome had been imposed as an expiation of their misdemeanours. They crowded into the basilicas, filed through the catacombs, worshipped at the shrines, deposited gifts, made endowments, dropped coins in the bowls of mendicants, or flocked to the diaconiae for food and shelter. Soon guidebooks were provided for them, instructing them what routes to follow, what to look out for, where to see the grill upon which St Laurence had been burnt, or the arrows which had pierced the body of St Sebastian, or the chains with which St Peter had been bound. Pope Gregory himself found the trade in relics distasteful and absurd. He had once discovered some Greek monks digging up ‘martyrs’ bones' in a graveyard where most burials had, in any case, been pagan; and he warned those anxious to purchase relics, like the Byzantine empress who had made inquiries about the head of St Paul, that removing sacred objects and disturbing bones were highly dangerous activities, adding that a group of workmen who had broken into St Laurence's tomb accidantally during building operations had all died within days. Pope Gregory insisted that the strips of linen lowered into graves were as worthy of veneration as the bones they contained.
During St Gregory's pontificate no new churches were built in Rome for the crowds of visitors to the city and its growing resident population. But several existing buildings had already been, or were soon to be, appropriated for Christian use, and others were reconstructed so as to admit more worshippers, to facilitate their movement past the holy places or to keep them at a safe distance from valuable relics. In the days of Felix IV (526–30), the audience hall of the city Prefect on the Via Sacra had been converted into the church of SS. Cosma e Damiano and decorated with mosaics;28 about half a century later, probably in the pontificate of Benedict I (575–9), a former ceremonial hall at the foot of the Palatine, had been transformed into the church of S. Maria Antiqua;29in the time of Boniface IV (608–15), for the first time a pagan temple was made over to the Christians when the Pantheon became the church of S. Maria ad Martyres;30 and in 625 Pope Honorius I turned the Senate House in the Forum into the church of S. Adriano.31 Pope Gregory's predecessor Pelagius I (556–61) had reconstructed S. Lorenzo fuori le Mura so that the martyr's grave could be seen by pilgrims; and, perhaps at Gregory's own suggestion, an annular crypt, one of the earliest of many, was constructed in St Peter's to ease the flow of pilgrims and to allow them to see relics without being close enough to touch or damage them.
The flood of pilgrims into Rome from Europe, Asia Minor and north Africa was soon to be much increased by thousands of refugees from the Muslim Arabs who were carrying the banner of the Prophet far north and west from their homelands into Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Mesopotamia and Persia, into eastern Europe and across the southern shores of the Mediterranean and into Spain. These refugees settled in Rome where they established their own communities: Greeks, for example, in the area between the Circus Maximus and the Tiber where they built a church, later to be known as S. Maria in Cosmedin but then called S. Maria de Schola [or foreign colony] Graeca.32
In the years to come, refugees from the east and their descendants, several of whom, Greeks and Syrians, were elected Pope, were to exercise a profound influence over the Roman Church. They established monasteries in and around Rome of which there were no less than twenty-four by 680. And they brought to Rome their sacred relics, including the head of the Persian martyr, Anastasius, and the manger of the baby Jesus which, from the time of the Palestinian Pope Theodore, could be seen in the church of S. Maria Maggiore. They helped to ensure that icons became commonplace in Rome, that the decoration and furnishing of many Roman churches followed eastern patterns and that the eastern practice of moving martyrs' bones from one place to another, so strongly resisted by Pope Gregory I, became generally accepted.
17. A portrait from a twelfth-century manuscript of Pope Gregory the Great, who was born in Rome in about 540 and died there in 604.
Pope Gregory died in 604. He left the papacy efficiently administered, fully capable of managing its own affairs as well as those of the temporal government, rich enough not only to maintain its buildings and to see to the wants of the clergy but also to care for the poor, to pay officials to govern the State and for troops to defend it, and to represent Rome in her uneasy relations with Byzantium, still theoretically her overlord.
Long after Gregory's death the influence and authority of Constantinople and of the Hellenistic world was still felt in Rome. In 667 the disagreeable Byzantine Emperor Constans II came on a state visit to the city, was received with punctilious ceremony by Pope Vitalian, by the clergy and notables, and behaved as though Rome were his own personal property. He removed many of its bronze statues, stripped the gilded bronze tiles from the roof of the Pantheon and left behind his name scratched on both the Janus Quadrifons and inside the Column of Trajan.
During his stay Constans occupied rooms in one of the old imperial palaces on the Palatine hill where most of the buildings were now in ruins, roofless and with grass and weeds growing between the cracks in walls and pavements. Much of imperial Rome below the Palatine was in the same forlorn state. But, since Pope Gregory's time, Christian Rome had been much embellished. Honorius I, a member of a noble family long settled in the Roman Campagna, who had been Pope from 625 to 638, had spent a great deal of money on restoring and converting old buildings, and in constructing new ones. On the southern outskirts of the city, he is thought to have rebuilt the church of SS. Vincenzo e Anastasio;33 near the Porta S. Pancrazio on the Janiculum he had been responsible for the restoration of the splendidly decorated S. Pancrazio;34 and on the site of the grave of the martyr, St Agnes, he had completely reconstructed the basilica of S. Agnese fuori le Mura35 which the Emperor Constantine the Great's granddaughter, Constantia, had raised to the young Christian girl who, consecrating her virginity to Christ, had offered herself to martyrdom when she was no more than twelve years old.
When the Emperor Constans came down from the Palatine on the last day of his visit and sailed away with his plunder to Sicily, he had only a few months left to live. In September 668 he was murdered by a slave in Syracuse. After his death, Rome grew increasingly independent of Byzantium – itself beleaguered by the Arabs and later, once more, by the Lombards – and, while certain papal patrons still displayed a taste for eastern forms of art, these forms were absorbed into those traditionally associated with Rome which remained, as it always essentially had been, a city of the West.
Rome's independence was sharply demonstrated in the early eighth century during a heated controversy over iconoclasm. The Byzantine Emperor, the Syrian Leo III, condemned the veneration of religious pictures and relics as sacrilegious and ordered their removal and destruction. Immediately the Romans, led by Pope Gregory II and then by Gregory III, rose up in determined resistance. Gregory II, whom Byzantine agents in Rome attempted to murder, warned the Emperor: ‘The whole West has its eyes on us… and on St Peter… whom all the kingdoms of the West revere… We go out to the most distant corners of the West to seek those who desire baptism… and they and their princes wish to receive it from ourselves alone.’
In 753, when the Lombards, having captured Ravenna, capital of the Byzantine governors of Italy, laid siege to Rome, the Pope, Stephen II, ignoring Byzantine instructions and advice, entered into negotiations with the enemy on his own account. Having persuaded them to lift the siege, he travelled north across the Alps and made his way to Saint-Denis near Paris to the Christian ruler of the Franks, a Germanic people who had invaded the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century and had now established their rule over a vast territory between the Pyrenees and the Rhine, including the land to which they were to give their name, France. Their king was Pepin the Short, last of a line of hereditary officials whose supreme influence over the corrupt and degenerate Frankish monarchs of the Merovingian dynasty had passed from father to son, generation after generation. Pepin had deposed the weak and sickly Merovingian King, Childeric III, and, with papal acquiescence, had packed him off to a monastery, having cut off his long, flowing hair, the age-old symbol of royalty among the Franks. At Saint-Denis, Pope Stephen confirmed his predecessor's approval of Pepin's usurpation, and on the understanding that the Romans would be granted Frankish support against the Lombards, anointed him in the abbey as King of the Franks and ‘Patrician of the Romans’. Soon afterwards, the Lombards were defeated and forced to restore to Rome the Patrimony of St Peter, those large tracts of land acquired by the Church, which they had seized in central Italy and which, together with former Byzantine territory, were collectively to be known as the Papal States.
In 774 Pepin's son and successor, Charlemagne, came to Rome. A tall, fair, masterful young man, he was met outside the city by a delegation of magistrates and nobles sent to welcome him by Pope Hadrian I. The processional route along the Flaminian Way was lined with young Romans under arms, with children carrying palms and olive branches and chanting the praises of the Deliverer and Protector of Rome. Representatives of the national communities stood under their banners, among them the Saxons, the name of whose schola, the burgus Saxonum, survives in Rome today as the Borgo, the quarter around Castel Sant' Angelo. At the sight of the holy crosses and the emblems of the saints, Charlemagne dismounted from his horse, and proceeded the rest of the way to St Peter's on foot, kissing the ground before entering the Basilica.
Already overlord of nearly all that is now France, Belgium and the Netherlands, as well as parts of Germany and Switzerland, Charlemagne was inspired by this visit to Rome to conceive of an even greater empire, a Christian empire to replace that of the Caesars, an empire which would stretch beyond the Rhine to the Vistula, and south of the Alps to encompass Italy.
A quarter of a century later, Charlemagne, Rex Pater Europae, set out upon a lengthy progress of his dominions, a progress which was to culminate in another visit to Rome and the realization of his long-cherished ambition. Grieving at the loss of the last of his five wives, the beautiful Liutgard, who had died on the way, he arrived in the city in November 800. At Christmas Mass in St Peter's, where Pope Leo III placed the imperial crown upon his now grey-haired head, the congregation rose to acclaim him with shouts that rang round the walls: ‘Long life and victory to Charles Augustus, crowned by God, the great and pacific Emperor of the Romans!’ The Roman Empire of the West had been revived.