FIVE

INFAMY AND ANARCHY

During the Lombard invasions, aqueducts had been destroyed, churches had been looted, and catacombs had been broken into and bones and sacred relics carried off. Several times the Tiber had burst its banks and the swirling waters had flooded over the fields and into the streets. Pope Hadrian I, a Roman aristocrat by birth, had raised a large labour force in the countryside and had set about repairing the damage, restoring Rome's water supply, extending the city's welfare system, rebuilding the Aurelian Walls and their fortified towers, improving agriculture on the large estates of the Church beyond them, and clearing the debris out of the catacombs from which cartloads of bones and relics were drawn into Rome to be re-buried in consecrated ground. Numerous churches were renovated and several were adorned with rich furnishings, curtains and candelabra; silver paving was installed at St Peter's, together with a chandelier with over a thousand lights.

Helped by generous gifts from Charlemagne and by the increased landed wealth of the Church, Pope Leo III, a Roman priest of humble stock, was able to continue the work undertaken by his predecessor, and add to the glories of the city, now once again an imperial capital. At the Lateran Palace a grand dining-hall was constructed which rivalled the Hall of the Nineteen Divans in the great palace of the Emperors in Constantinople. Around St Peter's, a wall, to be known as the Leonine Wall,¹ was begun by Leo III and completed in 854 by Leo IV, also a Roman, who, attended by barefoot, chanting clergy with ashes strewn in their hair, consecrated it with prayers and holy water. By the time of Paschal I, yet another native of Rome, the concern of church builders to make the new imperial city a noble reflection of both the early Christian Rome of the Emperor Constantine and of the Rome of classical antiquity had become apparent. Exemplified in S. Prassede² and its annexed Chapel of St Zeno,³ both of which contain magnificent mosaics, this intention is also apparent in the splendid churches of SS. Quattro Coronati,⁴ S. Martino ai Monti,⁵ S. Maria Nova (now S. Francesca Romana),⁶ S. Maria in Domnica⁷ and in the rebuilt S. Cecilia in Trastevere⁸ to which were brought from the catacombs the bones of the virgin martyr who is said to have been sentenced to death by suffocation in the steam of her own bathroom and, surviving both this and attempts at decapitation by a soldier, to have lingered for three days, softly singing hymns to the glory of God and converting many by her example.

When Pope Leo IV died in 855, however, this brief Carolingian renaissance in

18. A bronze statuette of Charlemagne, first Holy Roman Emperor, believed to be a contemporary likeness.

Rome was already at an end. Charlemagne himself had died forty years before and his successors had found their involvement with Rome as complicated and often as unwelcome as the papacy and the Romans had found their subjection to the Empire. Disagreements and quarrels over the relative authority of Pope and Emperor had been exacerbated not only by the interference of influential Roman families but also by the failure of the imperial forces to protect Rome adequately against Saracen pirates, who came up the Tiber in 846 and plundered both St Peter's and S. Paoli fuori le Mura. As the alliance between the Carolingian dynasty and the papacy disintegrated, these rich families and their supporters became ever more powerful, making and breaking popes at will and presuming to speak for the city as the patricians of the ancient past had done. Theophylactus, one of the richest and most masterful of the aristocrats, assumed full control of Rome at the beginning of the tenth century, styling himself Senator and Consul and considering himself ruler of the papacy as well as of the city. His daughter, Marozia, became the wife of Prince Alberic of Spoleto; and their son, Alberic the Younger, ruled Rome for over twenty years as Princeps atque omnium Romanorum Senator. On his deathbed in 954 he made arrangements for his dissolute 18-year-old son, who had been christened Octavian after the Roman emperor, to be elected Pope as John XII.

John XII's pontificate was disastrous. Having summoned King Otto I from Germany to support him against Berengar, the ruler of northern Italy, and having crowned Otto as Emperor in St Peter's, John immediately regretted his action and, upon the new Emperor's departure, opened negotiations with Berengar instead. Otto then returned to Rome, deposed John XII, appointed his own nominee, a layman, as Pope Leo VIII, and made it clear to the Romans that he regarded both the city and the papacy as his to have and to hold. Deeply resentful of this, the Roman aristocracy, who had long since regarded the papacy as theirs, refused to submit and, appealing to the people to support them, time and again rose up in revolt.

The first of these revolts erupted in January 964 when at the sudden ringing of the alarm bells, the Romans flew to arms and attacked the German Emperor Otto's forces in the Borgo, the area enclosed by the Leonine Wall across the river. Repulsed, they fled to Castel Sant’ Angelo where the imperialists broke down the barricades, and would have slaughtered all the fugitives had not Otto himself intervened. The next day the Roman leaders of the rebellion appeared before the Emperor to beg for mercy. They were required to swear allegiance both to him and to Pope Leo. A hundred of them were kept as hostages; the rest, humiliated, were permitted to depart. ‘Otto left the city in anger, leaving the Pope like a lamb amongst wolves,’ in the words of Ferdinand Gregorovius. ‘The blood which had been shed on 3 January never dried in Rome. Hatred of the foreigner found nourishment therefrom, and the Romans who had been repressed by force, scarcely saw their prisoners at liberty and the Emperor at a distance, when they hastened to give vent to their desire for revenge.’

They recalled the deposed Pope, John XII, who arrived back in the city with a host of friends and vassals to drive his rival out of it. Excommunicating Leo VIII, Pope John took a savage revenge upon those clergy who had supported him, ordering one to be flogged, another to lose a hand, a third to have two fingers and his nose cut off and his tongue torn out. He would, no doubt, have ordered further punishments had not he died on 14 May, murdered, so it was reported, by the enraged husband of his mistress.

In his place the Romans, without reference to the Emperor whom they had sworn to obey, elected the learned Benedict V, an impertinent presumption which aroused the fury of Otto I who descended once more upon Rome to ensure the reinstatement of his creature, Leo VIII. The imperial army arrived before the walls at the beginning of June. The surrender of Benedict was peremptorily demanded. It was immediately refused, and the first assault upon the city was launched. At the beginning resistance was stubborn. Benedict was persuaded to mount the walls to encourage the defenders by his presence. But plague broke out in the city, and food supplies ran low. The gates were opened on 23 June. Benedict was handed over, his vestments were torn off by Leo VIII, his pallium was cut in two, his ferule broken in half, and he was sentenced to perpetual exile. The leaders of the resistance again swore obedience to the Emperor beside St Peter's grave and undertook never again to interfere in papal elections.

For the moment, the Romans were spared further punishment. But upon the death of Leo VIII, and the nomination by the Emperor of John XIII as his successor, they rebelled once more; and this time the Emperor was merciless. He banished to Germany several leading citizens who had assumed the title of Consul; twelve decarones, representatives of the districts or rioni⁹ into which the early-medieval city was divided, were hanged or blinded; the city Prefect was handed over by the Emperor to Pope John XIII who ordered that he be hanged by his hair from the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, stripped naked, placed backwards upon an ass whose tail, furnished with a bell, he had to grasp as reins, and then driven through the streets with a sack of feathers on his head and other sacks fastened to his thighs, before being exiled beyond the Alps. The bodies of two other rebels who had died were dug up and thrown outside the city walls.

The Romans were provoked rather than subdued by these humiliations. And for the rest of the century and well into the next the disturbances and intermittent violence in the city continued unabated, while the papacy was beset by repeated scandals and the rivalry of anti-popes. Already one pope, Stephen VI, had ordered the exhumation of the body of Pope Formosus, a predecessor who had offended him. The corpse was clothed in pontifical vestments, seated upon a throne and put on trial. Found guilty of all the offences with which it was charged, it was stripped of its vestments; the three fingers of the right hand with which papal benediction was customarily bestowed were torn off; and the remains were then thrown into the Tiber. Some months later the pope who had presided over this gruesome tribunal was thrown into prison and strangled. His successor was violently deposed, the next pope murdered, and by 904 when Pope Christopher was executed, having murdered his predecessor, Leo V, there had been eight popes in as many years. Ithad long since become customary for the servants of a dead or deposed pontiff to overrun his private apartments and the public rooms in the Lateran Palace, with as many of the populace as could gain admittance, and for them to carry off everything that came to hand, clothes and money, furniture and hangings, pictures, gold and silver. Yet the Lateran was soon filled with treasures once more, since popes who did not find means to enrich themselves were few. So were lesser prelates whose pleasure-bent lives were passed in what Gregorovius described as ‘sumptuous dwellings, resplendent in gold, purple and velvet’.

They dined like princes on vessels of gold. They sipped their wine out of costly goblets or drinking horns. Their basilicas were smothered in dust, but their commodious wine goblets were resplendent with decoration. As at the banquet of Trimalchio, their senses were gratified with the spectacle of beautiful dancing girls and the ‘symphonies’ of musicians. They slept on silken pillows and on beds artificially inlaid with gold, in the arms of their paramours, leaving their vassals, servants and slaves to look after the requirements of their court. They played at dice, hunted and shot with the bow. They left the altar, after celebrating Mass, with spurs at their ankles, daggers at their sides to mount their horses – furnished with gold bridles – and to fly their falcons. They travelled surrounded by swarms of parasites, and drove in luxurious carriages which no king would have scorned to possess.

The death of Pope John XIII in 972 and that of his protector, the Emperor Otto I, the next year did nothing to end the rivalry between the Roman nationalists and the imperialists. John XIII's successor, an imperial nominee, Benedict VI, was dragged into Castel Sant' Angelo and strangled in 974 in an insurrection led by the powerful Roman family, the Crescenzi, who installed Boniface VII, a Roman, in his place. The anti-Pope Boniface VII was then expelled from Rome by the Emperor's young heir, Otto II, and replaced by Benedict VII; and the Roman, led by the Crescenzi, were thereafter continually at odds with successive emperors. Otto II died in 983, and since his heir, Otto III, was a child of three whose throne was in danger of usurpation, Boniface VII thought it safe to return to Rome from Constantinople where he had fled with the papal treasury. In Rome he had Pope Benedict's successor, John XIV, arrested, imprisoned and killed, either by starvation or poisoning. Boniface himself was then murdered by the fickle mob and his corpse was thrown under the statue of Marcus Aurelius. Thus it went on. Boniface's successor, a Roman antagonistic to the Crescenzi, was followed by a pope of pure German descent, Gregory V, whom the Crescenzi and their adherents drove out of Rome, offering the papal tiara for a large sum of money to a rich Greek who accepted it and thus became the anti-Pope, John XVI. As soon as he heard of these insults to his imperial authority, Otto III, now seventeen, marched south upon Rome with a large army and discovered the anti-Pope hiding in the Campagna. He cut off his nose, tongue and ears, tore out his eyes, and dragged him back to Rome where he was thrown into the cell of a monastery to die. The Emperor then advanced towards Castel Sant' Angelo where the Romans were holding out, took it by assault on 29 April 998, and captured the head of the Crescenzi family whose eyes were snatched from his skull and whose limbs were mutilated before he was dragged through the streets on the skin of a cow, decapitated on the battlements and finally displayed on a gallows on the Monte Mario beside the corpses of twelve other leading Romans who had taken part in the revolt.

‘Woe to Rome!’ lamented a monkish chronicler at about this time. ‘Oppressed and downtrodden by so many nations! Thou art taken captive; thy people are ruled by the sword. Thy strength is become as naught… Thou wert too beautiful… Thy gold and thy silver are carried away in the sacks of thine enemies. What thou didst possess thou hast lost!’

Yet there were even worse times still to come. Power in Rome now passed from the Crescenzi to another influential family whose estates looked down upon Rome from the heights of Tusculum. In 1032, the Tuscolani, several members of whose family had already held the office, arranged for another of their kin, though a mere boy, to be elected Pope Benedict IX; and in his time the papacy reached the utmost depth of moral degradation. The young Pope lived like a Turkish sultan in the palace of the Lateran, while his brother ruled the city as ‘Senator of the Romans. Their family filled Rome with robbery and murder, according to Gregorovius whose lurid account does not seem to have been unduly exaggerated. ‘All lawful conditions had ceased… Only an uncertain glimmer, however, falls on these days when the Vicar of Christ was a pope… more criminal than Heliogabalus. We dimly see the leaders of Rome conspiring to strangle the youthful delinquent at the altar on the feast of the Apostles, until terror, produced perhaps by an eclipse of the sun, allowed Benedict time to escape.’

In 1044 a conspiracy to rid Rome of Benedict IX was more successful. But the anti-Pope who bribed his way to the succession, after savage fighting during an earthquake, was scarcely an improvement. Grossly sensual and corrupt, he was said to be closer to Satan than to Christ, to consort with devils in the woods, to attract women to his bed by spells, to conjure up demons with the help of books of magic which were afterwards found in the Lateran. He occupied the palace for less than two months. Driven out by the Tuscolani, he sought safety in the Sabine hills; and Benedict IX returned to the palace, only to sell his holy office to his godfather.

It seemed by now that the whole structure of the papacy was in danger of dissolution. But as at other times in its history when it seemed in the greatest peril, a man was found to save it. On this occasion its saviour was an obscure monk from the Cluniac monastery of St Mary on the Aventine hill.

Hildebrand, the son of a Tuscan labourer, had left his monastery to continue his education at the Schola Cantorum at the Lateran. Here his character earned him the high regard of one of the masters, the future Pope Gregory VI, who took him into his service. He later worked for Leo IX and Alexander II, two popes who in the middle part of the eleventh century concerned themselves with the reform of the medieval Church. The reform movement had begun in the monasteries of northern Italy and France from which attacks had been made on all manner of abuses in the Church from the sale of offices to the concubinage of the clergy. The reformers had then extended their programme to demand freedom from political and foreign interference and the right of the Church to be solely responsible for the election of popes and the investiture of bishops.

As papal adviser, Hildebrand was closely identified with the formulation of the Church's demands, and in 1073 he was elected by acclamation to succeed his former master, Alexander II, as Pope Gregory VII. Stern and autocratic, Gregory was determined to maintain the momentum of the reformist movement. Emphasizing the need for ecclesiastical and spiritual renewal, he made it clear that he would brook no opposition from either the Emperor or the aristocracy of Rome. He was soon in trouble with both. At Christmas 1075 he was reading midnight Mass in the crypt of S. Maria Maggiore when shouts and the clash of arms were heard outside and a party of men broke into the church brandishing arms. One of them seized the Pope by the hair and, dragging him wounded from the altar, threw him on to a horse and galloped off with him through the dark streets to a fortified tower belonging to a nobleman, Cencius de Praefecto. The city was soon in uproar. Alarm bells clanged, militia barred the gates, men paraded with torches throughout the rioni and priests veiled their altars. The next day, when it became known where the Pope was held, the tower of Cencius was stoned by the populace and the prisoner was released. He returned immediately to complete the interrupted Mass at S. Maria Maggiore.

Not in the least intimidated by this episode, Pope Gregory now repeated in even stronger terms his demands for a more powerful and autonomous Church, going so far as to claim that the Pope had not only the right to overrule Church councils and to dethrone bishops, but to depose emperors and to wear a red cloak as a sign of imperial rank as well as a high papal tiara as symbolic of his government of the world by ordinance of God. These assertions of the Church's authority naturally led to a fierce quarrel with the German Emperor, Henry IV, who, as self-styled ‘Emperor by the pious ordination of God’, took to addressing Gregory as ‘no longer Pope but false monk’. Gregory quickly responded by excommunicating Henry and declaring him deposed. The excommunication was so effective in depriving the Emperor of support north of the Alps that he felt obliged to come sough as a penitent, to beg for forgiveness and for reacceptance into the Church. On hearing of his approach, and not yet knowing its purpose, the Pope, who was on his way to Germany for a conference at Augsberg, withdrew to Canossa, the fortress home of his friend and supporter, the Countess of Tuscany. Outside the triple walls of the fortress the Emperor begged for forgiveness, clothed in a penitential shirt. For three cold January days the Pope kept him waiting. Then the gates of the castle were opened and the Emperor, after receiving absolution, was required to give up his crown into the Pope's hands, to agree that he would remain a private person until the decision of a council was made known and that, if he were to be restored to the throne, he would swear obedience to the Pope's will.

This humiliating submission was, however, not a lasting one. By virtue of his absolution, Henry regarded himself once more the rightful King of Germany with his authority undiminished. And so the quarrel flared up afresh. Henry, excommunicated and deposed for the second time, refused to accept the verdict; and, marching south, he laid siege to Rome. He persuaded his German bishops to depose Gregory in turn and to replace him by the Archbishop of Ravenna who took the title of Clement III. Set upon resistance, Gregory appealed for help to Robert Guiscard, the Norman Duke of Apulia and Calabria, and prepared for war.

Rome paid a dreadful price. In June 1083 Henry's troops broke through the Leonine Wall and, after fierce fighting, took possession of St Peter's. Gregory occupied Castel Sant' Angelo and from this commanding stronghold succeeded in preventing the Germans from crossing the Tiber into the city. But over the next few months the Pope lost the support of most of the Roman people who, tired of war and unwilling to have their homes destroyed in a fight between the opposing factions, agreed to open the gates. On 21 March 1084, therefore, several regiments of German soldiers marched through the gate of St John, and surrounded the Lateran Palace, where Henry took up residence with his anti-Pope, Clement III, who later crowned him in St Peter's. Gregory, still holding out in Castel Sant' Angelo, refused to submit. And a large proportion of the noble families of Rome and their vassals, including the Corsi and the Pierleoni, continued to support him against the foreign interloper. So, too, did the Normans under Robert Guiscard.

When the mansions of the Corsi and Pierleoni had been stormed and reduced to ruins, and when Septimius Severus's colonnaded Septizonium¹⁰ on the Palatine, which Gregory's nephew, Rusticus, bravely defended, had also been shattered by the German siege machines, the Normans, accompanied by thousands of Saracens from Sicily and gangs of rapacious Calabrian peasants, advanced to Gregory's relief in Castel Sant' Angelo. At news of their approach the Emperor hastily decamped along the Via Flaminia with his outnumbered forces, taking his anti-Pope with him. A week later, the vanguard of Robert Guiscard's forces entered the Flaminian gate and advanced across the Campo Marzio towards Castel Sant' Angelo, brushing aside the resistance of those Romans who still supported the Emperor. Having released the Pope, whom they escorted to the Lateran, they then inaugurated a pillage of the city which was to last for several days.

The Romans, sinking their differences, made repeated attacks upon the common enemy, but their leaders were cut down mercilessly. Those who sought safety in flight were captured and held to ransom, their houses looted and then set on fire. Medieval chroniclers depict a fearful scene of sack and rape, of robbery and murder, of huge areas of the city laid to waste or destroyed by fire. And while due allowance must be made for the woeful exaggeration of such disasters by imaginative monks, the reality was appalling enough. Men, women and children were carried off into captivity and slavery with ropes round their necks; many churches were wrecked and some, like those of the Quattro Coronati, S. Clemente, S. Silvestro and S. Lorenzo in Lucina, were burned to the ground. Whole districts in the most densely populated parts of the city were reduced to rubble, numerous monuments were damaged beyond repair, and if little was plundered this was because previous pillagers had left little which was considered worth the trouble of carrying off.

Pope Gregory, now hated by the Romans who blamed him for the catastrophe, went wearily away with his deliverers. Although he retained his breadth of vision, he never recovered from his ordeal and within a few months, on 25 March 1085, he died at Salerno.

For the whole of the next century, Rome remained intermittently a battleground over which popes fought anti-popes, supporters of the papacy attacked adherents of the Emperor, while both sides hired mercenaries and bribed their rivals' retainers and vassals. Popes were kidnapped, denied admission to the city, like Urban II, driven out of it, as Paschal II was by the Emperor Henry IV, forced to flee from it for their lives, like Gelasius II. And all the time the arguments about the relationship between the temporal and the spiritual power raged unabated,

19. In this early drawing of the city, the Colosseum can be distinguished on the far left, the Pantheon in the centre, Castel Sant' Angelo on the far right and beyond it the Borgo leading to St Peter's.

from time to time changing emphasis, once seeming to be partially resolved by the agreement known as the Concordat of Worms, by which Pope Calixtus II and the Emperor Henry V came to an uneasy compromise over the investiture of bishops and abbots, only to flare up again, intensified and complicated by the eternal concept of Rome as ‘queen of all other cities’ and ‘head of the world’, and by the refusal of the Roman people to accept either Pope or Emperor as master of their affairs.

The Romans had been dominated for a long time by the mighty families whose castellated and battlemented mansions, many of them built into and over the city's ancient monuments, towered above the roofs of every rione: the Corsi, the Crescenzi and the Pierleoni, the Tuscolani and the Frangipani, the Colonna, the Normanni and the Papareschi, the Tebaldi, the Savelli, the Caetani, the Annibaldi and the Orsini. All of them were rich; many of them claimed descent from the great families of imperial Rome; and several had recently provided or were soon to provide candidates for the papacy. Innocent II, for example, was a Papareschi, Anaclete II a Pierleoni, Clement III an Orsini. Yet these families no longer indisputably controlled the rioni. For in Roman society a new force was developing, composed of craftsmen and skilled artisans, now organized into guilds, of entrepreneurs, financiers and traders, of lawyers, lesser clergy and officials employed in the administration of the Church. And it was largely due to the growing influence of such groups as these that in 1143, during the pontificate of the Papareschi Pope, Innocent II, the Roman people rose in revolt, demanding the banishment of all nobles from the city, looting their palaces as well as those of the cardinals, and proclaiming the establishment of a Republic, the restoration of the Senate and the appointment of a head of government known as the Patricius. Encouraged by the revolutionary fervour of Arnaldo da Brescia, the austere radical religious reformer who came to Rome soon afterwards, the Senate pursued their demands for the Pope's abdication to the Patricius of his temporal power and for his income to be limited to those tithes and gifts which had satisfied the priests of Rome in the distant past.

At the height of the dispute between the Senate and the papacy, Innocent II died. His successor, Celestine II, unable to come to terms with the Republicans, also died within five months. Lucius II, equally unsuccessful, resolved to suppress them by force, launched an attack upon their stronghold on the Capitol, was apparently wounded in this assault by a rock that struck him on the head, and died as his predecessors had done with the argument unresolved. It was now left to Eugenius III, the first Cistercian pope, to attempt to settle the crisis. Denounced by Arnaldo da Brescia as ‘a man of blood’ whose Curia was ‘a den of thieves’, and barred from entering St Peter's for his consecration by lines of unyielding Republican Senators, Eugenius was driven out of Rome in February 1145 when he declined to renounce the civil power of the papacy. He fled to Viterbo where he set about collecting troops for the suppression of the Republic. But both sides,

20. The cloister of S. Paolo fuori le Mura, which was begun at the end of the twelfth century and completed in 1214.

exhausted by the struggle, were now prepared to compromise; the Republicans agreed to dismiss the Patricius, while the Pope undertook to recognize the Republic.

It was an unsatisfactory compromise which could not last. And the arguments, occasionally breaking into violence, continued for a further forty years, during which time both parties invoked the help of the Germans; and the Emperor, having decided to support the Pope, immediately afterwards resumed the old disputes, while joining with him in denying the demands of the Roman citizens. At last, in 1188 a final solution was achieved by Pope Clement III, who had been born in Rome. He agreed to recognize the city as a commune with rights to declare war and make peace, to appoint Senators and a Prefect. He also undertook to make over a proportion of the papal income for the maintenance of the city walls and the payment of officials. In exchange, the Senators, among whom members of great families rubbed shoulders with those less nobly born, swore loyalty to the Pope, recognized his temporal powers and restored to him the property of the Church which had been seized in the troubles. Thereafter, while the aspirations of the citizens had been largely satisfied, the popes gradually regained and extended the influence which they had enjoyed in the days of Gregory the Great. Under Innocent III and his successor, Honorius III, from 1198 to 1227, the medieval papacy, having for the time being thrown off the claims of the German Empire and become master of its own affairs, was the ultimate spiritual authority in Europe and a force which had to be respected in the continent's political and international affairs. In spite of recurrent moral weakness and almost constant lack of physical force, it was now a dominant force in western Europe.

With stability restored to the city, the popes turned their attention to its material improvement. Church building had not been entirely suspended in the previous troubled century. In its first decades the grandly ornate new churches of Quattro Coronati, S. Clemente,¹¹ S. Maria in Trastevere,¹² S. Bartolomeo in Isola¹³ and S. Crisogno¹⁴ had all been completed, and others had been rebuilt, several of them with tall campanili as at S. Maria in Cosmedin. Later, S. Giovanni a Porta Latina¹⁵ and SS. Bonifacio e Alessio¹⁶had been consecrated; and at the end of the century a large new basilica had been started at S. Lorenzo fuori le Mura. Innocent III, however, was less concerned with ecclesiastical than with secular buildings. He renovated the Lateran Palace; he began the construction of a large fortified mansion for the papacy on the site of the present Vatican;¹⁷ he and his brother, Riccardo, built an immense tower, the Tor de' Conti near the Forum of Nerva, as a fortification for this part of the city,¹⁸ and, as though in extenuation of such a display of pride and extravagance, he commissioned and endowed S. Spirito in Sassia as a hospital and hostel for poor pilgrims across the river in the Borgo between St Peter's and Castel Sant' Angelo.¹⁹

This part of Rome within the Leonine Wall had by now become as crowded with buildings as the rioni on the other bank of the Tiber and contained a large proportion of the city's 35,000 or so inhabitants. Around St Peter's, the magnet of Christianity, were huddled monasteries and lodging-houses, small churches and oratories, the houses of clergy, taverns and hermits' cells, a foundlings' home, an orphanage and a poor-house, a home for penitent prostitutes and all kinds of shops that made the civitas Leonina a city in its own right, a community at once part of and separate from Rome, regina urbium. Money changers thronged beneath the walls of the basilica, calling the rates of exchange and ringing coins on the tops of their tables. Standing before their booths or crying their wares in the streets were vendors of candles, of souvenirs and bits of relics, of rosaries and icons, of phials of oil and holy water, of strips of linen that had touched the tomb of St Laurence and of dried flowers that had grown near the grave of St Sebastian. Men sold straw for bedding; cobblers repaired the soles of shoes worn into holes by long pilgrimages; fishmongers and fruiterers shouted above the din of the crowds; and booksellers, renting space from the canons, offered their goods for sale within the walls of the basilica where mendicants and would-be guides wandered about in search of the charitable, the curious and the gullible.

Below them the Tiber wound its way beneath the Ponte Sant’ Angelo, its banks littered with nets and pots and fishing-baskets, ancient grain mills floating on the surface, water-carriers lowering their buckets at the river's edge. Beyond the river bank, through the gloomy tortuous streets, past the outside staircases of the cramped houses, beneath overhanging balconies and brick arches just high enough to admit the passage of a woman with a bundle on her head, the Romans strolled and pushed and jostled, avoiding as best they could the beasts of burden and the laden porters, stepping over the rubbish and ordure flung upon the earth and the cobblestones, and jumping across the streams of blood and filthy water from the butchers’ and tanners' shops which flowed unchecked despite the authorities’ ordinances. The houses on either side were constructed of brick and other materials usually plundered from ancient ruins, their roofs sometimes tiled or shingled, more often thatched. Their occupants spent much of the day in the streets, sitting in front of the doors or on the lower steps of the exterior staircases, working at some craft, cooking, washing clothes or talking to each other as though oblivious of the busy yet familiar scene. High above their heads loomed the numerous campanili and the burnt-brick fortified towers of the mansions of the rich which could be seen rising as though in threatening menace in every rione and clustering together closely on the higher ground of the Esquiline, Caelian and Aventine hills. Near at hand were the markets – the meat market at the Theatre of Marcellus, the fish market at S. Angelo in Pescheria,²⁰ and the market on the Capitol. And beyond them to the east and north and south, stretched the disabitato, that expanse of open land, of fields and vineyards, farms and ruins, scrub and pasture between the built-up areas and the Aurelian Walls. On the inner edge of it, the houses were more spacious, with gardens in which fig trees and vines cast a welcome shade, seeming a world away from the dark, cramped dwellings of the teeming, dirty Trastevere; and in the distance to the west, near the place where the Porta S. Giovanni now stands, were the groups of buildings lying in the shadow of the renovated Laterann.

Many of the monuments of imperial Rome lay crumbling and apparently disregarded, a tempting invitation to foreign princes, bishops and other rich visitors who went about the city, collecting interesting pieces, as the half-brother of King Henry IV of England did in 1430 when he visited Rome as Bishop of Winchester. Other ancient monuments had, however, been preserved by their being made over to churches or private individuals by the popes. In this way, the Triumphal Arch of Septimius Severus, for example, was saved by its being allocated to two proprietors, one of them the Church of SS. Sergio e Bacco, whose priests built beside and over it.²¹ Both the Arch of Titus and the Arch of Constantine had been appropriated by the Frangipani family who, confirmed in possession of them, assured them a kind of rough protection by turning them into fortresses. This family also built a series of bristling towers around the Circus Maximus.

Yet, despite the casual manner in which the inhabitants treated a large part of their heritage, no visitor to Rome could be unaware of the influence which the ancient city had had upon the medieval, nor, despite depredation and neglect, how much of imperial Rome remained. A celebrated guidebook, the Mirabilia, written in these years by a canon of St Peter's, draws the stranger's attention not only to the Christian treasures of the city but also, with a sense of awe and wonder, to its pagan antiquities. A number of these were displayed outside the Lateran Palace where, beside groups of now unidentifiable classical bronzes, could be seen the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius; the head and hand of the colossal image of Constantine placed upon high columns,²² a bronze tablet upon which was incribed part of a decree by which the Roman people transferred Augustus's imperial authority to Vespasian;²³ the bronze sculpture of a boy picking a thorn from his foot;²⁴ and the lupa, the she-wolf, symbol of early Rome, which had been struck by lightning in 65 B.C. when it stood on the Capitol.²⁵ Moreover, while most ancient monuments had been pilfered for building materials, and while parts of others, including even statues, had been thrown into the lime kilns, many antiquities had been saved by the Church or the Senate from further damage or appropriation. Trajan's Column, for example, had been preserved by the Senate who decreed that it should ‘never be mutilated or destroyed, but should remain as it stands to the honour of the Roman people, as long as the world endures. Anyone daring to injure it shall be punished by death and his property shall fall to the Treasury.’ Similarly, the monks of S. Silvestro in Capite,²⁶ who had acquired the Column of Marcus Aurelius, declared that ‘anyone taking the column by force from our convent shall be eternally damned as a spoiler of the Temple, and shall be encompassed by the everlasting anathema. So be it.’

Other monuments, dilapidated and collapsed, had been repaired and re-erected, like the obelisk which is now at the Villa Mattei on the Caelian.²⁷ This was restored and placed on the Capitol near the Palazzo del Senatore²⁸ which itself, like the earlier Casa di Crescenzio,²⁹ was a medieval structure reflecting a deep reverence for classical antiquity. And those responsible for these repairs were proud to inscribe their names, in the manner of their ancient forebears, upon the works for which they had been responsible: on walls and bridges can still be read such inscriptions as that of 1191–3 on the Pons Cestius, ‘Benedictus [Benedict Carushomo], Chief Senator of the Illustrious City, restored this almost entirely ruined bridge.’

When Honorius III died in 1227 to be succeeded by Francis of Assisi's friend, Gregory IX, the quarrel with the German Emperor, now Frederick II, over papal authority broke out afresh and was still unresolved on the death of the Emperor in 1250. At the same time, the city of Rome became more aggressive in its demands, particularly its financial demands, upon the papacy. These were most forcefully and successfully expressed after the appointment of the Bolognese Brancaleone di Andalò as a professional and highly paid Senator in 1252. Brancaleone, a tough and resolute personality, as well as subduing the power of the papacy in the city, also succeeded in keeping the meddlesome Roman families in order, demolishing no fewer than 140 of their fortified towers and hanging two pugnacious Annibaldi. But after the death of Brancaleone, whose head was placed in an antique vase and displayed as a valuable relic on a marble pillar on the Capitol until removed by the Church, Rome once again became an intermittent battleground with the Pope's supporters fighting his rivals in the streets, and the controversy over papal supremacy raging more fiercely than ever. And it was not until Charles of Anjou, a grim younger brother of the King of France and since 1283 himself King of Naples and Sicily, came to the protection of the Pope that some sort of order was restored. For the papacy, however, and ultimately for Rome, order was bought at a high price. Once the authority of the French king was established in Rome, Charles, who had had himself appointed Senator, tried to ensure that the popes thereafter elected were either sympathetic to France or, like Innocent V, were actually French. But the consequences of this foreign dominance did not at first become apparent. In 1277 an Italian of noble birth, Giovanni Gaetano Orsini, was elected; and although he was followed by a Frenchman, his subsequent successors, up till Boniface VIII, were all Italian: Honorius IV was a Savelli, Nicholas IV a Masci of Ascoli and Boniface VIII a Caetani of Anagni.

Under these Italian popes the Church increased its wealth, as legal fees and bribes, payments for benefices and offices, tithes and donations poured into Rome, and as pilgrims showered handfuls of money upon the holy shrines. Bankers, innkeepers and traders prospered too, particularly in 1300, which Boniface VIII proclaimed the first Holy Year.

The profits made by the people of Rome that year were incalculable. One visitor ‘saw so large a party of pilgrims depart on Christmas Eve that no one could count the numbers. The Romans reckon,’ he continued, ‘that altogether they have had two millions of men and women. I frequently saw both sexes trodden underfoot, and it was sometimes with difficulty that I escaped the same danger myself.’ Day and night the streets were packed with people, lining up to pass through the churches; to see the shrines and the most famous relics; to gaze with reverence upon the handkerchief with which St Veronica wiped the sweat from Christ's face on his way to Calvary and which still bore the image of his features; to throw coins upon the altar of S. Paolo fuori le Mura, where two priests remained constantly on duty with rakes in hand to gather up the scattered offerings; to buy the relics, amulets, mementoes and pictures of saints whose sale brought such profits to the street-vendors of Rome.

Also prospering in these last decades of the thirteenth century were the artists and craftsmen at work in the city, helping to fulfil the ambitions of the popes and their families who hoped to make Rome worthy of her past, a place which would rival and even surpass in beauty Florence and the other cities of Tuscany, while remaining within a conservative tradition that looked warily upon the Gothic innovations in architecture spreading south from beyond the Alps. Numerous churches were completely redecorated at this time. St Peter's, S. Paolo fuori le Mura and S. Maria Maggiore were remodelled and the Lateran Palace and Basilica reconstructed. Splendid tombs and sepulchral monuments were created. Painters, sculptors, jewellers, goldsmiths and workers in mosaics and marble were all kept busy, as clergy and laity alike displayed their taste in extravagant and ostentatious rivalry. Cimabue and Arnolfo di Cambio came down from Florence. Giotto was sent for to work at St Peter's and at the opulent new palace at the Vatican which took the place of the more modest residence built by Innocent III. Artists born or long resident in Rome were fully employed as well. Pietro Cavallini worked at the Lateran and St Peter's, at S. Paolo fuori le Mura, S. Cecilia, S. Giorgio in Velabro and S. Maria in Trastevere. Jacopo Torriti was employed on the mosaics at the Lateran Basilica and at S. Maria Maggiore where he was helped by Filippo Rusuti.

But soon this brief flurry of artistic activity came to an abrupt halt, for the supposed financial and political security of Rome proved to be illusory. Charles of Anjou was dead and the Angevin influence in Rome eliminated. Yet France was still unwilling to accept the claims made for the papacy by Boniface VIII who, repeating those of Innocent III, declared in his bull Unam Sanctam that ‘if the earthly power err it shall be judged by the spiritual power’. Dispensing excommunication after excommunication to gain obedience to his demands, Boniface enraged the monarchs of the West, and in particular King Philip IV of France. He was about to excommunicate Philip when the French legate in Italy, abetted by the Colonna family whose estates the Pope had appropriated, invaded the papal palace at Anagni and carried him off into captivity. Humiliated and ill treated, Boniface was allowed to return to Rome where he died soon afterwards. He was briefly succeeded by the inadequate Italian, Benedict XI, but in 1305, through the manipulation of the French king, the Frenchman Bertrand de Got became Pope as Clement V and secured a succession of subsequent French popes by creating a majority of French cardinals. Required by his master, Philip, to annul Boniface's bull Unam Sanctam, Clement abandoned Rome in 1308 and moved the papal residence to Avignon. For sixty-eight years French popes were to conduct the affairs of the Church from their new centre in the south of France, in what became known as the Babylonian Captivity; and Rome, abandoned also by the artists whose patrons had deserted them, sank once more into anarchy.