Rome too often hides under the light. Its past lies about you as you walk its streets; its imperial traditions and papal centrality are too obvious to develop, and often seem too obvious for hard scrutiny to be needed. As a result, the city seems to many to have a destiny far greater than a mere local politics. Paolo Brezzi, author in 1947 of the most acute and deft of the traditional narratives of the medieval city, could write ‘Roma e tale solo quando si alimenta ad un’idea universale’, Rome is fully itself only when it nourishes itself with a universal idea—in this case the eleventh-century papal ‘reform’ movement. Brezzi was in fact here seeking to combat the idea that the reform papacy was antithetical to a ‘real’ Romanness; in a delicate argument, he managed to claim that the former in fact underlay the key secular change of the immediately succeeding period, the autonomous city commune, itself.1 But in Brezzi, quite as much as in the historians he was criticizing, we find a recurrent opposition, in which Rome as a city is simply seen as a constraint. Generations of historians have claimed or assumed that, for popes (in particular) to gain their ‘natural’ international role, they had to subdue or reject or ignore the city they were actually bishops of. For some, the Romans were simply too corrupt, too factional, too spiritually impoverished to be worthy of the destiny of the city (this was also, of course, the view of any number of medieval writers, particularly non-Romans); for others, including Brezzi, the Romans had it in them to rise to that destiny, but they often did not manage to do so and had to be coerced from outside.
This debate has been pushed in different ways in the past 150 years, with different shades of Catholic historiography fighting against a Protestant tradition more critical of papal power (though just as romantic about Gregory VII or Innocent III2), and an often anticlerical Roman tradition (strongest in the period 1870-1929, when the popes rejected the legitimacy of the Italian state) which argued for the ‘Roman revolution’ that established the Senate in 1143-4 in the teeth of papal opposition as the real turning-point in the city’s history. But the majority of writers, from whichever tradition, have posited Rome as somehow special, whether especially good or especially bad (or often both), and anyway different—and separable, in particular, from the history of the rest of Italy. People write about Rome in a different way to that in which they write about Florence or Milan, as we shall see in a moment; this seems to me pointless. And Rome is seldom prominent as a case study in surveys of Italian social or political development, for it is seen as too atypical to contribute much to a specifically Italian history; this seems to me simply mistaken.
I wish in this book to face squarely the problems of these assumptions. I have a twofold aim in writing it. The first is simply to take up the challenge of writing a structural urban history. I want to approach the problem of the history of Rome as a city, across a longish period—the 250 years between the end of Carolingian rule in the ninth century and the bedding-down of the commune of Rome, the Senate, in the second half of the twelfth—so as to see how economic, social, and religious/ cultural structures intermeshed and acted on each other in a period of substantial political change. Rome was in demographic terms the largest city in Latin Europe, and (for most of the period) second only to Constantinople in Europe as a whole, before it was overtaken by Milan, perhaps around 1100 (below, p. 112); and in spatial terms it was and remained far larger than anywhere else, with a complicated urban geography which writers in both the twelfth century and the twentieth have spent some time unpicking: it was a complex stage for the structural interplay I wish to describe, and was entirely absorbing for the Romans, as we shall see. I want to reconstruct the changing parameters of that absorption.
In so doing, I will consistently focus on the aims and strategies, needs and constraints, of the Romans. And not, it must be stressed, of the various external figures who sought to control the city—whether German emperors, or the various German, French, or north Italian ecclesiastics who were prominent in the papal Curia after the mid-eleventh century. This is not because I wish to minimize, or polemicize against, the considerable changes in ecclesiastical government, both in Rome and in the whole of Latin Europe, that took place after 1050; but, rather, because the way those changes played out in the city was quite different to the way they played out in Canossa, or Clermont, or Clairvaux. I am personally pretty neutral about the advantages and disadvantages of these changes (in the charged atmosphere of ‘reform’ historiography, neutrality is already a political stance, but there is no help for that), but the important issue for the book is what they, and their bearers, meant for the Romans themselves, and this is the direction the argument will focus on. Some well-known popes will therefore vanish from the book, or nearly (Urban II, most notably), some less well-known ones will be more prominent than usual (Benedict VIII, the eleventh-century Clement III, Innocent II)—though Gregory VII will retain his traditional centrality. This seems to me to reflect the purchase each of them had on the city.
My second aim is to situate, as much as possible, the history of Rome inside that of Italy. Here, I wish to explore both similarity and difference. Rome is, as already noted, assumed to be different without sufficient attention; what has often been missing is any sort of approach linked to systematic, interregional, comparison. This is not really an Italian strength, it has to be recognized. The regional fragmentation of scholarship in the peninsula produces many strong scholars whose research experience hardly goes outside a single city territory. It is also the case that the period I am focusing on is not one in which there have been very many detailed monographic studies on other Italian cities either, so there are few interpretative models (though exception should always be made for the various collective histories, such as Storia di Milano, Napoli, Venezia, Bergamo, some of which are of good quality, and a few of which are recent enough to be good guides to current scholarship). Rome is not, in fact, at all badly off in its local historiography, even when set against other relatively well-studied cities such as Milan and Florence. The context from which Rome is missing is, rather, the general narrative which culminates in the early city communes as a whole. This narrative has as its basic underpinning a history of the failure of the Kingdom of Italy, that is to say northern and north-central Italy; Rome was outside that kingdom, so its parallel development tends to remain unconsidered. It may be added that the history of the southern Italian principalities (itself lacking a good monographic synthesis) has seldom recognized the strong similarities that the Roman region—roughly present-day Lazio, then somewhat generically called the Patrimonium or territorium S. Petri—had with Benevento, Naples, Capua, or Salerno, at least in the first half of the period covered by this book.
I am conscious of these southern comparators, and I will use them on occasion (see e. g. below, pp. 455-7). But one of the main turning points in this book will be the breakdown of traditional government in the wars of the late eleventh century, and its substitution at a local level by new political structures which were invented locally; and this means that the main points of comparison have to be northwards, with the larger cities of communal Italy—‘larger’, because it seems to me that only cities of a reasonably substantial size and complexity are proper comparators here. I shall focus when making such comparisons on two modern regions, Lombardy and Tuscany: the former because of a particularly strong post-war historiography (headed by but by no means restricted to Cinzio Violante, Hagen Keller, and Francois Menant, and for a slightly later period Paolo Grillo), the latter for similar reasons, but also because I myself know it best.3 I shall range wider in comparison than this, when it seems relevant and helpful, ofcourse. Conversely, though, it does also have to be said that this is a study of Rome, not of Italy as a whole. Rome cannot be understood except comparatively, but the other cities will appear as comparators, not as free-standing actors.
Rome is thought to be different because of its unique status as the ‘papal city’. Its sovereigns were not kings or dukes or princes, as in other Italian cities, but bishops, who were, furthermore, not hereditary: there were only a few exceptions to these statements in our period, most importantly the rule of Marozia senatrix and
Alberico princeps in c.925-54 and the hereditary succession of three successive Tuscolano popes, Alberico’s second cousins, in 1012-44/46. Rome is also seen as different in that, as I have already said, it was a supposed drag on the attainment by the popes oftheir world-historical role as the leaders ofthe western church. This has produced a curious double vision in Italian historiography: whereas the eleventh-century uprisings against—say—the archbishops of Milan tend to be seen in a positive light as harbingers of the moment in which the Milanesi took over their rightful rule in the city in the primo comune, similar uprisings in Rome against eleventh - and twelfth-century popes are seen as selfish and localist moves against the achievement by popes of their international role. Even the anticlerical strands of the historiography of Rome, which have often been strong, have seldom sought to rehabilitate any of those moments, except the dramatic foundation of the Senate itself in 1143-4.
These do not seem to me to be helpful historical viewpoints; and they also seem to me to misrepresent what actually made Rome different. That Rome was ruled by bishops was not particularly unusual; in the eleventh century, Milan, Cremona, Ravenna, and any number of other northern cities were as well. The latter were, of course, not fully autonomous, unlike popes—they were the local representatives of the king/emperor. But it cannot be said that the emperors actually intervened in the local affairs of most northern cities all that often; and they intervened, often choosing popes, quite as often in Rome too, even though the latter was not technically part of their kingdom. The common travails of an episcopal politics, in particular at the moments of the selection of new bishops, link Rome to the north of Italy quite closely.
More important as a difference was that the governmental infrastructure that ruled Rome was remarkably complex. At times it included three separate official hierarchies, military, judicial, and clerical, as we shall see in Chapter 4. This complexity, inherited from the Byzantine empire (and the Roman empire before that), was greater than that found in the governing hierarchy of any other western polity, including that of Carolingian Francia at its height. This alone was enough to make the politics of Rome compelling to insiders, and also incomprehensible to outsiders. It contributed very greatly, too, to the institutional solidity of Rome, including in the time of its greatest political crisis in our period (and for a long time before and after), the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, as we shall see in Chapter 7. It was backed up by a notably dense ritual and processional landscape, which potentially involved, as it appears, the entire urban population, and which united a physically sprawling city into a cohesive whole, as we shall see in Chapter 6.
The second main way in which Rome was atypical is still more important: in its wealth. Rome was unusually large and unusually economically active by all western standards before the twelfth century, and by the standards of all but a few Italian boom towns well into the thirteenth. It was full of artisans, who are better documented in our period in Rome than anywhere else, as we shall see in Chapter 3. It also took a higher percentage of the agricultural surplus of the countryside around it than any other city did, and developed a set of agrarian specialisms in that countryside earlier than almost any other city, too: this agrarian dominance seems to me the fundamental underpinning of Rome’s economic exceptionality, and it is why Chapter 2, on the countryside, is the first of my main monographic chapters. Except in some very recent works by historians in Rome, this wealth has been misunderstood, and sometimes even denied, but it is clear to any reader of the sources who has an eye to a comparative perspective.
Rome was big, rich, and politically complex, then. But it was also inhabited by people who were not, economically or socially or culturally, all that different from the inhabitants of the rest of Italy. The overall changes in the economic history of the city from a tenth-century baseline have close parallels elsewhere, apart from the fact that Rome was initially more precocious. Changes in aristocratic and nonaristocratic society, which were considerable from the eleventh century onwards, as we shall see in Chapters 4 and 5, also had considerable analogies to those of other Italian cities. Here, we have to articulate the similarity of the history of elites, for example, against Roman difference: the unusual complexity of the political structures that they operated (or sought to operate) inside. The same is true for the greater complexity in Rome of its artisanal structures, or its processional practices, even though equivalent artisans and processions existed everywhere. And it is, overall, my aim in this book to set out that articulation—between similarity and difference—more widely. It is not my aim at all to make Rome seem just the same as Milan, or any other northern city, or for that matter Naples, which had certain elements in common with it too. Rather, it is to explore how its differences can really be understood. Italy is always made up of differences; its unity is always a patchwork of diversity. To get Italy’s history straight in any period, we must get the nature of those differences right, and also the parallels which are always there, and not get trapped in false or rhetorical oppositions, as regionalist politicians did in our period, and still do today. I hope this book will contribute to that.
Historians of Rome in our period, 900-1150, are accustomed to lament the poverty of its narratives, so inferior in quantity and quality as they are to the dense papal biographies in the eighth - and ninth-century sections of the Liber Pontificalis, or to the detailed chronicles of the eleventh-century South. That is indeed so, even if it is equally the case that other Italian cities are even more devoid of good accounts before the twelfth century, with the single and important exception of Milan. Rome has one chronicle, the sketchy and incoherent work of Benedetto of Monte Soratte, which focuses on the early tenth century; it has a fragmentary and heterogeneous set of annals, the Annales Romani, for the years 1044-73, 1100-21, and (after our period) 1182-7; it also has a revived set of papal biographies written by two cardinals, Pandolfo in the 1130s and Bosone in the 1160s-70s, which are extensive for the twelfth century only: not a lot, indeed.4
These texts are backed up, it is true, by a remarkably long list of non-Roman sources, some of which appear very immediate, from Liutprando of Cremona at the start of our period to John of Salisbury at the end. Events in Rome seemed important to much of Latin Europe, in particular from Leo IX onwards, but often before as well.5 These, however, were written by men who were (with few exceptions) ill-informed about the wider context of either papal politics or the city of Rome, and were (with no exceptions) concerned above all to moralize; the city, in particular, is almost never seen except in the most negative light. They have to be used with considerable caution.
Recent decades of historical scholarship have, of course, taught us that even the best-informed and most detailed narratives are problematic guides to ‘the truth’. The open prejudice and disregard for context of a Liutprando or a Benzone of Alba or a Bonizone of Sutri would not necessarily mean that their works were less useful than the apparently more circumstantial accounts of the Annales Romani or Pandolfo. They are guides to rhetorical strategies in the framework of circumscribed genres, as much as or more than to what we would call reportage. But this does not mean we should trust Benzone more; it means we should trust Pandolfo less. The latter’s careful account of the degrading travails of Gelasius II, who was taken prisoner by the Frangipane family in 1118 and in the end fled Rome in despair, or of the fixed election of Honorius II in 1124,6 are no less constructed, for all their informative details about local alliances, than are the most cliched denunciations by outsiders like Bernard of Clairvaux.
Which is to say: I do not base this book very tightly on the surviving narratives. They can be mined for prosopographical detail (again with care); they are valuable for the mindsets of writers, and for guides to the way that Rome (and, especially, the aspects of Rome relevant for papal politics) was understood and could be written about. Sometimes their collective voice, despite their extreme heterogeneity, is so consistent that their presuppositions seem trustworthy: the unusually prominent role of money and treasure in Roman politics is an example.7 But a narrative-based account risks taking us straight back to the heightened and moralistic historiography I complained about at the start of this chapter, which is, indeed, focused on those narratives, and borrows their censoriousness, often pretty uncritically.
It is also a striking feature of all these narratives that they home in on only a few events. The pontificate of Gregory VII (1073-85), for example, was unusually a better and fuller version of Pandolfo on Paschal II, Gelasius II, Calixtus II, and Honorius II, discovered after Duchesne did his edition, is ed. in Liberpontificalis Dertusensis, ed. March and Liber pontificalis, ed. Prerovsky; for those popes I will cite him in the latter, the latest, edition. Note that March, pp. 41-60, did not consider Pandolfo to be the author of the lives; the argument for Pandolfo seems more plausible to Prerovsky, I, pp. 111 ff., and to me. The basic critical commentary on the Annales is Whitton, ‘The Annales Romani.
5 Liutprando, Antapodosis and Historia Ottonis John of Salisbury, Historia pontificalis. The complete list of non-Roman sources is vast; see the bibliography for those used here.
6 Liber pontificalis, ed. Prerovsky, II, pp. 731-41, 750-4.
7 See Wickham, ‘The financing’, and below, pp. 172-4.
Momentous, and nearly every chronicle in Europe paid attention to it. It is therefore curious that, before the emperor Henry IV took Rome in 1084, our narratives tell us nothing about Gregory’s Roman experiences except his poor relations with a Roman aristocrat named Cencio di Stefano, who briefly kidnapped Gregory during Christmas 1075, and whose brother Stefano killed Gregory’s urban prefect Cencio di Giovanni in 1077 (see below, pp. 233, 422).5 Even the Monte-cassino chronicle, which is a long text written by three authors between the 1100s and the 1150s, and which is attentive to Rome (only some 120 km away) and its politics, only tells us about a set of standard events. For the period after 1060, besides papal elections, it only discusses Gregory VII’s imprisonment by Cencio, the attacks on Rome by Henry IV and the Normans in 1084, the failed attempt by Pope Victor III (Abbot Desiderio of Montecassino itself) to hold Rome in 1087, Henry V’s capture of Paschal II in 1111, and the disputed election of the urban prefect Pietro in 1116—except for Victor’s career, which the Cassinesi had a special interest in, these are the same events that every other chronicle relates.6 It is as if the narrative history of Rome consisted of isolated blocks of data, which were told to and chewed over by half of Europe, but which are separated from a wider narrative context in every source, even those from Rome itself. Rome’s internal political history is reduced in these texts to a set of exempla, valuable in their own terms but limited—and not to be taken too seriously—as a guiding framework.7
The core of the evidence-base for this book is therefore documents. This has been my major evidence in my other Italian studies, too;8 and I have offered defences of the use and validity (and problems) of this sort of source elsewhere.9 Roman documents survive from the period of this study from around thirty ecclesiastical archives, to which must be added the multifarious locations of later copies of individual papal bulls to Roman churches, almost all of them tracked down at the start of the last century by Paul Kehr. The archives are fully listed in three of the most significant Roman studies of the last forty years, by Pierre Toubert, Etienne Hubert, and Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri. They are also almost all edited, mostly in the two great periods for Roman document editing, 1885-1925 and 1980 to the present.10 Of the inedito, there survive before 1200 not so many: the twelfth-century documents for SS. Cosma e Damiano in Traste-vere, around eighty in number, are the largest group, plus around twenty texts for S. Maria in Trastevere, a dozen more from the eighteenth-century Galletti manuscripts in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, around twenty-five originals and copies in the Archivio Segreto Vaticano, and a rather smaller number of charters surviving in the Archivio di Stato di Firenze (for S. Giovanni in Laterano), the Archivio Storico Capitolino in Rome (a few texts from the Orsini archive), and the Archivio di Stato di Roma (isolated texts for several churches).11 If there are other such documents remaining to be found, which is certainly likely enough—particularly in the trackless archives of pre-1870 eruditi preserved in the Archivio Segreto, who recorded many texts now lost to us—I am hopeful that there must by now be relatively few.
There are around 1300 documents for tenth - to twelfth-century Rome, of which two-thirds are for the period up to 1150. Roman documents hardly exist for the eighth and ninth centuries;12 but they get off the ground in the tenth, and are reasonably generous in number from around 950 onwards. They cover both the city of Rome and its immediate hinterland, the Agro romano (see Chapter 2); about 40 per cent are for the city itself, a high percentage by Italian standards, and those for the countryside overwhelmingly involve city churches, and often lay citizens as well, which is also unusual in Italy. This gives us material to deal with; there is quite a lot that one can say about Rome as a result. (I only discuss the period up to 1150 here, but I looked at documents systematically up to 1200, and even later in the case of one or two collections, to get a sense of subsequent developments.) But it has to be recognized from the outset that Rome is not as well provided with documents as some other cities are. For the same three centuries, Lucca has some 6000 documents, and Milan has nearly 3000. Rome has enough documents for quite an extensive analysis of the socio-economic structures of the city after 950 or so, in a way that is not possible earlier on the basis of written evidence (the Liber Pontificalis of the Carolingian period is a marvellous resource, but it only offers us a very limited range of data). But restrictions in its evidence-base must be reckoned with all the same.
Roman documents in our period are almost all single-sheet parchment originals. The main exceptions are most papal documents, which overwhelmingly survive only in later copies (including the Liber Censuum cartulary of 1192), and three other cartularies: from the rural monasteries of Subiaco and Farfa, each of which has numerous documents for the city, and from the urban monastery of S. Gregorio sul
Cello. The single-sheet documents almost all survived in the archives of Roman churches and monasteries; the only lay archive that begins before 1200, of the Orsini family, is very small for this period. This is typical for Italy. No serial sets of documents exist in Italy before the notarial registers of Genoa start in 1154, and five Genoese registers are the only ones surviving in more than fragmentary form anywhere in the peninsula before the thirteenth century. This means, however, that our Roman source-base depends on the archival strategies of those thirty churches; what was not in the field of interest of those establishments does not survive. Furthermore, it must be added, any type of activity that was not regarded as important enough to pay a scriniarius (the commonest word for notary in Rome in our period) to record in full on a parchment will also not survive. Notarial registers, once they begin to be preserved, document, in highly abbreviated form, very many ephemeral transactions, such as sales of movable goods and short-term credit deals, which were not significant enough to set out at length in a more permanent take-home version; full records on parchment were reserved for relatively important agreements, nearly all of them involving land—the sale, lease, pledge, or gift to the church of urban house-plots and rural estates, or disputes about their rightful possession. Parchment collections thus only illuminate a part of the economic and social activities ofthe people who made them; an important part, but—particularly in a city, where economic activity was artisanal or commercial, not agrarian—not always the most important part. And they overwhelmingly privilege ecclesiastical involvement; lay men and women who did not transact with churches mostly do not get recorded.13
If there was one city where an ecclesiastical bias to our evidence might not matter, it is Rome. Indeed, quite apart from the political importance of church institutions there, Rome was the only city in Italy in which virtually all land, both urban and rural, seems to have belonged to churches (see below, pp. 53-9), so that everyone, rich or poor, had potentially to deal with ecclesiastical landlords, who could sometimes keep apparently extraneous documents as a result. But, although thirty separate ecclesiastical archives might seem a wide range, there were over three hundred churches (plus dozens of monasteries and hospitals) in the twelfth-century city,14 most of which are hardly documented at all, so substantial swathes ofthe city remain outside any possible analysis; and most ofthose thirty archives give us only small handfuls of texts. It is also the case that 1300 documents cover the ground rather sparsely. In Lucca or Milan, the scale of our documentation means that separate archives overlap; the same lay person may appear in several different collections, gaining depth of focus as he (or, more rarely, she) does. This is less common in Rome, where the micro-geographical fields of the major document collections are more focused, and do not overlap very much—a problem exacerbated by the physical size of the city’s landscape. Roman material lacks a certain density as a result.
The result of all this is that in Rome, more than in some other cities, our clearest knowledge is restricted to particular urban regions. These regions are seven in all: the Celio hill, illuminated by the documents of the monastery of S. Erasmo sul Celio, a dependency of Subiaco (these texts run out after around 1020); western Trastevere, illuminated by SS. Cosma e Damiano in Trastevere, and to a lesser extent by S. Maria in Trastevere; the Civitas Leoniana, illuminated by S. Pietro in Vaticano; the regio of Scorteclari north and east of piazza Navona, illuminated by Farfa (these texts run out around 1090); that of Campo Marzio to its north-east, illuminated by S. Maria in Campo Marzio and to a lesser extent S. Silvestro in Capite; that of Pigna to the south of Campo Marzio, illuminated by SS. Ciriaco e Nicola in Via Lata (these are the only three documented regions even to touch each other physically); and finally the area between the Palatino and the Colosseo, illuminated by S. Maria Nova.15 These are the richest archives we have for the city (the richest three by far are SS. Cosma e Damiano, S. Maria Nova, and SS. Ciriaco e Nicola), but they only cover around half its inhabited area. In particular, most of the area of the Tiber bend, the heart of the later medieval city, and also the politically important market and river-port area between the Teatro di Marcello, the Capitolio, and the Aventino, the old Foro Boario, are almost wholly undocumented: a chance-surviving papal privilege to the important super-parish church of S. Lorenzo in Damaso in 1186, in the middle of the Tiber bend, lists sixty-six subordinate churches, almost none of which have any prior evidence.16 (For all this, see Map 5.)
We thus find that ‘Rome’ is, in the documents at our disposal, in reality seven separate regions in our period, with only small document collections and isolated chance survivals covering the areas in between. (The countryside around the city is similarly attested, with a small number of well-documented areas and big gaps between them, though the main document collections are not identical here.17) Two separate conclusions follow from this. First, that when generalizing about the development of ‘Rome’, we must always keep, at least at the back of our minds, an awareness of the undocumented spaces in the city; indeed, some of the sharper apparent changes in the city’s history may just be the by-products of one document set drying up and a different one coming on stream—as when, for example, around 1020, S. Erasmo’s documents for the relatively ruralized Celio stop, and S. Maria Nova’s and S. Ciriaco in Via Lata’s sets for built-up regiones begin to be dense. I shall write about Rome quite explicitly in terms of its seven best-documented areas as a result. The second conclusion is that, inside each of these areas, we must be aware that we are the prisoners of the interests of one single church, or at the most two. What we really have at the core of our urban documentation are the interests, strategies, social and economic choices, and lay clients of less than ten Roman churches and monasteries, which might rise to fifteen if we added churches with a largely rural economic interest. Our evidence is biased towards monasteries, too, though at least it includes one major papal basilica, S. Pietro, a major titulus, S. Maria in Trastevere, and a very well-documented diaconia, S. Maria Nova (see below, p. 307, for this terminology). We will have to reconstruct an entire secular social and economic urban fabric, and an entire—and sharply changing—political and institutional superstructure, from building blocks originally destined for quite other purposes. We can do this, but it requires us to be aware of the interpretative steps involved. When previous historians have been unaware of them, or have forgotten them, the force of their argumentation has been diminished.
Historical reconstruction from documents is not straightforward anywhere, particularly when one moves away from very locally focused socio-economic history. (It is, from this standpoint, not wholly surprising that historians can sometimes, still today, get swept into trusting acceptance of narratives, which seem to give them more of what they want.) But at least Rome does provide us with some different sorts of material, which can sometimes pluck us away from the tramlines of analysis which are inescapable in other cities. One is a certain quantity of atypical written sources. There is a large amount of religious polemic, from nearly the whole period, which at least gives us an idea of the state of mind of (perhaps small) sections of the clergy. Rome also, perhaps more usefully, has several liturgical and procedural encyclopaedias, which tell us about the offices and ceremonials in the major churches; the modern edition of one of these, the Liber Censuum from 1192, collects together three separate twelfth-century accounts of the major ceremonies of the ritual year in the city, including substantial information about processions.181 will argue later that the regularity and complexity of this processional practice was one of the major things that held the city together.
The Liber Censuum was a more ambitious encyclopaedia than that, too, for, besides providing us with its main content, a set of major twelfth-century papal documents and a list of some of the forms of papal revenue, plus the processional ordines just mentioned, it also includes a version of one of the best examples of another Roman literary speciality, accounts of the secular and antique monuments of the city.19 Rome’s classical monuments are dominant enough now; they were far more dominant a thousand years ago. A Roman self-awareness of the ancient past of the city is quite widely attested, and it is one of the most particular aspects of the city’s culture—it is also visible in some of the city’s unusually substantial corpus of inscriptions from this period, most notably the long and plangent portal inscription of the so-called Casa dei Crescenzi, a twelfth-century tower-house with reused and imitative classical elements beside one of the Tiber bridges (see below, pp. 23 5-8).20 Romans had an articulated and explicit sense of the city’s monumental and symbolic geography, structured by processional routes past buildings both secular and ecclesiastical. This can often also serve as a real counterpoint to sometimes-monochrome documents recording ecclesiastical leases or sales of one-storeyed urban houses, and I shall use it as such, particularly when looking at the area between S. Maria Nova and the Colosseo (below, pp. 292-303).
Finally, and not least, I shall pay attention to archaeology. Rome’s medieval urban archaeology is among the most active in Italy, and Rome is also one of the few Italian cities that have so far provided us with significant excavations from the central Middle Ages, my focus in this book: here the Crypta Balbi and the Fori Imperiali excavations stand out, but are flanked by a considerable number of smaller recent excavations, in piazza Venezia, just south of the Trevi Fountain, on the Foro Romano side of the Capitolio, in the Colosseo, outside S. Paolo fuori le Mura, and others again (see map 5).21 These are backed up by numerous surviving secular buildings, some evident, others rather more hidden, and, of course, a rich network of churches, with some major early twelfth-century rebuildings. This material evidence shows more clearly than anything else how Romans appropriated the past physically, and, of course, how they changed it.22 And it also gives us the most direct evidence we have for the sophistication and commercialization of artisanal products, which we need to understand if we want to understand the city’s economy.
Rome’s evidence thus allows us to create a picture of the tenth to twelfth centuries that is far from one-dimensional. It is certainly heterogeneous; and the operation of putting chalk and cheese together always requires care, and a critical awareness of which connections can (and which cannot) legitimately be made. But I hope to give a sense both of the range of material we have for the city, and of the complexity of conclusions we can draw from it. All these types of source have their problems, but as long as we are aware of them we can get past them.
THE PROBLEM OF THE HISTORIOGRAPHY
Here, it is necessary to be quite clear: Rome’s historiography is, overall, rich and of high quality. It privileges some areas too much (Otto III; most popes and many cardinals; the establishment of the Senate), others too little. But the long-standing attraction of the city—and of its numerous foreign academies—has brought many outsiders in to do work on Rome, some of whom have done their best work there; and the strength of by far the largest university in Italy, the Sapienza, now flanked by two others, also highly active in this field, plus the country’s Istituto Storico per il Medio Evo and a venerable and important school of palaeography, have provided firm bases for a dense body of work by Romans on their own city. When I worked on Lucca, I usually knew by name every person who had even cursorily looked at any given document before me, and it was sometimes as few as two or three, after the archivists and text-editors who had arranged them to start with. For Rome, nearly every document has been studied, often in detail, often dozens of times. There are few new discoveries, except in archaeology; the best one can hope for is new insights.23 But, notwithstanding this overall quality and density, Roman historiography remains fragmented, until at least the world of Innocent III, and maybe later. A fuller list of the works on the city will, of course, be found in the bibliography. Here, I want to characterize some of the main approaches that have structured them, and, at times, also limited them. The arguments I wish to make here will, it is necessary to state at the outset, be familiar to those who currently work on the social history of the city, particularly in the later Middle Ages (the fourth strand of recent work on Rome discussed below, p. 19); but they may not be to others, and it is therefore necessary to set them out as clearly as possible here. They will make clearer what I want myself to achieve in this book as well.
A high percentage of the work done on Rome in the period 900-1150, especially in the last century of that period, has been in the framework of the papal grand narrative. This is true even of the first major scientific historian of medieval Rome, Ferdinand Gregorovius, Protestant and heavily opposed to the politics of Pius IX in the 1850s and 1860s; of course, narrative histories then all focused on rulers, and thus here inevitably on popes, but Gregorovius also offered a compelling model for later historians of all persuasions, and his basic storyline underpins Paolo Brezzi too.24
That story-line began with the supposed moral degradation of the early tenth-century age of the Teofilatto rulers of Rome, until the emperor Otto I saved the city by conquest in 962; followed by a confused period offamily rivalries punctuated by
Ottonian intervention, in the Crescenzian period, which lasted up to 1012; then the stable but still degraded Tuscolano papacy. Emperor Henry III again saved Rome at the synod of Sutri in 1046, when he overthrew three rival popes and installed a period of foreign pontiffs, first German, then Italian and French, which continued until 1130. The ‘reform’ papacy began here too, first under imperial patronage (Leo IX most notably), then increasingly independently of the emperors, until Gregory VII dramatically broke with them in 1076. War and papal schism followed until 1100, when a ‘reform’ pope, Paschal II (1099-1118), took the city back, and until 1122, when Calixtus II (1119-24) made peace with the emperor. Trouble began again with a new schism in 1130, this time between two Roman popes, Anacletus II and Innocent II; after Anacletus died and Innocent returned in 1137-8, the city was increasingly resistant to papal power, and the Senate was born violently, against Innocent, in 1143 as a result. The Protestant version of this story has tended to point up Sutri and the German popes as the great moment of ‘reform’, with Gregory VII as a powerful but tragic figure who deviated the movement by breaking church from state;25 the Catholic version has seen Gregory as taking ‘reform’ to new heights, by freeing the papacy not only from the aristocratic corruption of the Roman Adelspapsttum, but also from the chains of state and lay power.26 Both of these versions, of course, faithfully reflected the intense polemics of the late eleventh century, published by the MGH editors in the Libelli di lite in the 1890s.
By now, the Catholic version has largely won out; the central position accorded to Gregory in the work of Anglican historians such as John Cowdrey is a clear sign of it.27 But what unified both sides in this long dispute was the role Rome as a city played in their storylines, which was uniformly negative. A church controlled by Romans (as, usually, before 1046) was seen as not just degraded but narrowminded, and careless of the universalist obligations of popes. Hence the importance of the 1059 election decree, which, however seldom followed thereafter, institutionalized the principle that popes did not need to be elected in Rome. Romans thereafter were simply trouble: avaricious, they still had to be bought off, over and over, by ‘reformers’ who wished to rule the city; factious, their endless struggles undermined the authority of well-meaning popes like Paschal II and Gelasius II, and the very legitimacy of their successors, Honorius II and the papal rivals of 1130. As Bernard of Clairvaux put it, ‘What should I say of the people? It is the Roman people... What is better known to the world than the impudence and obstinacy of the Romans? A people unaccustomed to peace, accustomed to tumult, unpeaceful and intractable to this day..—Romans are simply Romans, you can’t deal with them.28 This view, a cliche in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, remains one today. The estimable series of papal biographies published since the 1970s by Anton Hiersemann Verlag, plus similar biographies published by the MGH and elsewhere, tend to have a short chapter in each entitled ‘Rom’, which details the (often futile) attempts by whichever pope to bring order to the city, alongside rather longer and more enthusiastic sections on Germany, France, Spain, etc. Rome becomes simply an Other in this tradition. Papal government, from Leo IX onward, properly looked outwards, to Latin Europe; its precarious local base was only an embarrassment. Even when Klaus-Jurgen Herrmann offered a partial rehabilitation of the Tuscolano popes in 1973, he did so by stressing their internationalist reforming credentials, too, with little discussion of their Roman
Rule at all.29
It is of course the right of every historian to choose his or her subject of study; and the analysis of major changes in papal institutions, as part of a wider ecclesiastical history, is not only an obviously legitimate historical field, but a very well-documented and thus satisfying one. I am very happy to leave it to its experts to study it. But it is a pity, all the same, that this tradition tends to neglect one of the longest-standing functions of the bishop of Rome, which was to rule his own diocese. This is what bishops are supposed to do everywhere, and the pope was not any less the ecclesiastical head of Rome because he often had an international role as well. Furthermore, since Hadrian I in the 770s at the latest, the pope was also the secular ruler of the city, and of most of what is now called Lazio as well. The way that rule was exercised is not an unimportant part of a rounded view of any given papacy. From Innocent III onwards into the thirteenth century, and still more in the sixteenth and seventeenth, papal historiography does not usually neglect it. By contrast in our period, particularly with the internationalization of the papacy after 1046, how Rome was actually ruled has remained opaque in this tradition, and is clearly to most authors in this tradition relatively unimportant.30 But Rome did have to be ruled, of course. To understand how it was, we will have to turn elsewhere.
In the 1870s, Rome was not governed by a pope for the first time since the eighth century, with the exception of a few intervals: Marozia/Alberico and Otto III/Giovanni di Crescenzio in the tenth and early eleventh, the Senate several times in the twelfth, Cola di Rienzo in the mid-fourteenth, Napoleon for five years in the early nineteenth century. In 1878, a newly founded journal, the Archivio della Societa romana di storiapatria (ASRSP), still the major journal for Roman history in our period and later, took as one of its main aims the publication of early Roman documents, up to 1200 and often beyond, and in the years around 1900 some of the best palaeographers in Italy dedicated themselves to that task, Pietro Fedele and Luigi Schiaparelli at their head.31 Their aim was essentially the creation of a documentary base for the study of the history of the city, which could thus be seen independently of the papal narrative. This took them into the reconstruction of Roman noble families in the tenth and eleventh centuries, as the structuring element in local politics, and often a truly difficult challenge—there are at least three rival versions of the genealogy of the Crescenzi, for example (see below, pp. 197-202)—and also into a rehabilitation of the rule over Rome by the Teofilatto family in the tenth century.32 (In both these fields they were also ably backed up by German and Austrian scholars.33) But above all it took them into the study of the origins of the Senate of Rome.
Most of the leading medievalists in the city in the early twentieth century, from Fedele on, dedicated major research articles to the ‘Roman revolution’ of 1143-4 and its scarce documentation. No other Italian commune, except perhaps Pisa, has such a dense historiography focused on its origins, in fact, which also partly excuses the near-total absence of any comparative element in their work. Was the ‘revolution’ aristocratic or popular, or somewhere in between? Did the city have any autonomous secular government before 1143, and how did it relate to the senatorial moment? What was the intellectual and cultural underpinning of that moment? These are significant questions, of course; they will recur here in Chapter 7. But what is equally striking is how much they mattered in this tradition, up into the early 1950s in fact, when Antonio Rota’s 110-page article on the first two years of the Senate and Arsenio Frugoni’s whole book on the fragmentarily attested activities of Arnaldo of Brescia beat the field into submission for a generation. For Brezzi in 1947, who clearly wished to reconcile the papal and Roman historiographical traditions in his influential narrative, the years of the foundation of the Senate were its ‘heroic age’, the summation of the ‘autonomous Roman history’ of the previous centuries, a moment ‘justly exalted’ by its historians.34 The extra-historical aims of this tradition are seldom as clear in other writers as they are in Brezzi, but this enthusiasm for Roman ‘heroism’ is quite as visible in duller and more positivist authors. The storyline, however, marked Roman failure as well. The commune did not last; its autonomy and eventually its institutions were destroyed by papal and baronial machinations. The origins of the commune, the Senate, are all the more wrapped in romanticism as a result.
Between the romance of Gregory VII and the romance of the ‘Roman revolution’ there may seem little to choose. But at least this second tradition dealt with the city, and took it on its own terms. Similarly, even the less value-laden studies of the post-1046 papal Curia in the past generation or so are, in general, of less centrality for this book, precisely because its membership was so rarely of Roman origin;35 on the other hand, the revived interest in the origins of the Senate in the 1980s, notably in a short and important monograph by Laura Moscati and an influential article by Girolamo Arnaldi, are of direct relevance here. Moscati in particular will be much cited in this book.36 There has also been a significant revival in the palaeographical and diplomatic analysis of Roman documentary and other scrip-torial traditions, which has not only produced a raft of new editions but has also enforced new ways of looking at the act of writing in the city.37 Rome has also, however, been approached from new historical directions in the past generation as well, which I have found of rather more use than most of the foregoing. Here, schematizing somewhat, I think that four separate strands of analysis can be identified. Let us look at them in turn.
The oldest is an interest in Roman topography, which indeed goes back to the nineteenth century, and has been a feature of the ASRSP from its inception. It gained particular purchase because ofthe existence ofso many medieval accounts of the significant buildings of Rome, which were edited in four substantial volumes between 1940 and 1953, and have been widely commented on both before and after, not least in the framework of an interest in the classicizing culture of the twelfth century (see below, Chapter 6).38 Separately, work on the standing buildings of medieval Rome produced the huge and rich corpus of church architecture associated with Richard Krautheimer, and some later and less complete attempts to catalogue the secular tower-houses of the city. Krautheimer synthesized a lifetime’s work in his Rome: Profile of a City in 1980, which also summed up and surpassed the Roman topographical tradition.39 Most of what has followed since in the field of topography has been little more than updating of detail, but recent archaeological work has produced a major re-examination of the period up to 1000 by Roberto Meneghini and Riccardo Santangeli. After 1000, there is no current synthesis of Rome’s archaeology, but Etienne Hubert’s document-based study of urban development between then and 1300 takes the story on in forceful and innovative ways.40 Krautheimer’s sharp separation between the abitato and the disabitato inside the city has in this recent work been considerably nuanced, as we shall see in Chapter 3. But no one has yet reworked Krautheimer’s remarkable evocations of the different faces of Rome’s regiones.
A second strand is a greatly developed understanding of the city in its regional context. The topography of the Campagna Romana is one aspect to this, one however almost devoid of synthesis, from Giuseppe Tomassetti in the late nineteenth century to (the enormously more scientific) Jean Coste in the late twentieth; the political and institutional history of Lazio has some good traditional studies, too, from Giorgio Falco or Peter Partner.41 Most recently, Valeria Beolchini’s important study of Tuscolo is a model combination of documentary and archaeological work. But it was Pierre Toubert’s monumental these on the Sabina and eastern Lazio in 1973 that marked the step change here.42 Toubert placed everyone’s understanding of the history of settlement, society, and the economy in Lazio on a different, integrated footing; his book has been a model for all subsequent work on the rural history of medieval Italy (and not only Italy). Les structures du Latium midiival was avowedly not about Rome, and its socio-economic conclusions do not work for Rome’s immediate hinterland, as we shall see in Chapter 2; but Toubert’s careful structural analysis also allowed him to entirely refigure the history of papal power in Lazio, and, as an integral part of that, the structures of papal authority in the city as well. His pages on the pre-1050 Adelspapsttum and on the judicial system of Rome up to 1100 are the best there is. Rome is here lit by an external light, to great effect. And Toubert owed very little to the two traditional grand narratives of Roman history—indeed, he could barely hide his lack of interest in them. He argued for a largely stable and bureaucratized city government, seen best through its judicial structures, lasting throughout the often sharp changes in Rome’s leadership, right up to its dissolution at the end ofthe late eleventh century, to be substituted in the twelfth by newly formed institutions, more attentive to Roman law.43 These are views that I accept in all but detail; I develop some of them further in Chapter 7. But, to repeat, the social structure of the city was not in his remit, and was barely mentioned except in a handful of footnotes.
A third strand is a network of recent work on Rome’s use of classical traditions. Some of this is an extended analysis of the classicizing imagery associated with the early Senate, part of it in the tradition of the Geistesgeschichte of Percy Schramm, whose 1929 account of the imperial ideology of Otto III and his predecessors and successors is still the starting point for the study of Rome’s pre-‘reform’ cultural history; and part of it located in the intellectual framework of ‘twelfth-century Renaissance’ studies. Some of this has a rather romantic tinge as well, and the 'renovatio imagery of the Senate was smartly critiqued in 1987 by Ingrid Baumgartner.44 More solidly based and useful has been the substantial recent work on the revival of classical Roman law in the city, particularly that by Giovanni Chiodi and Emanuele Conte; this has indeed transformed our understanding of legal practice there, even if the impact of Justinianic law was more paradoxical and inconsistent than has been recognized.45 Rome is seen by scholars such as Conte not in the negative, as a drag on the historic potential of its rulers, but rather as a model for other cities, in its development of complex law and bureaucratic government. This is certainly a set of discoveries that this book will build on.
The fourth strand is the extension backwards of a substantial body of sophisticated work on the thirteenth-century city. (Note that there is less of an equivalent extension forwards into the tenth century of the equally sophisticated work currently done on Carolingian Rome, both in Italian by the school of Paolo Delogu, and in English.46) Scholars such as Sandro Carocci, Marco Vendittelli, Jean-Claude Maire Vigueur, Matthias Thumser, and indeed Etienne Hubert again, look back at the twelfth century with eyes trained to a thirteenth - and fourteenth-century problematic, the network of power and ceremonial attached to a truly powerful papacy and the newly established baronial families, and to a much more commercialized city than previous scholarship recognized, and they seek its origins in the post-1050 ‘reform’ period.47 This has the potential to overturn, in particular, some of the core elements in the grand narrative of senatorial origins, particularly when used together with Moscati’s parallel work on an earlier period; indeed, both Carocci/Vendittelli and Maire Vigueur have sought to do precisely that, in ways I shall be happy to follow.48 I would add here Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri’s excellent study of the city clergy, 700-1200, the only work of ecclesiastical history for my whole period that pays proper attention to Rome’s urban society, for the author’s training was in the later medieval environment of the Sapienza as well; this book is all the more valuable in that through it one can see how the Curia actually related to the city’s own ecclesiastical structure, which allows one to avoid the temptation to ignore the papal court altogether.49 Again, this is not a mistake anyone who reads about the thirteenth century (for example in the work of Robert Brentano and Agostino Paravicini Bagliani50) could make, and it is a recognition that anyone studying the period 1050-1150 needs to keep hold of.
This rapid survey of recent and earlier work shows the wealth and density of current scholarship, which, to repeat, is not surpassed for any other Italian city. But Rome as a structural whole, at least in the period 900-1150 which is my focus here, does not emerge from it with full clarity. No general synthesis of any depth has been written since Brezzi; Maire Vigueur’s recent and ambitious survey starts just as my period ends. Perhaps it would be enough to synthesize all these strands, but that would be a dull task. It seems to me more effective, and certainly more satisfying, to start again: to try to figure Rome structurally in this period from scratch, bouncing off the secondary literature dialectically rather than depending directly on it. Notwithstanding my great respect for so many of the scholars cited in the last few pages, this is what I have tried to do. The society of the city, and the overarching economic structures that made it work up to 1150, are at the centre of my attention, as they are not for any of these writers except Moscati. On the basis of this, a ceremonial analysis like Twyman’s, a topographical analysis like Krauthei-mer’s, an urbanistic analysis like Hubert’s, an institutional analysis like Toubert’s, a legal analysis like Chiodi's, a social analysis like that ofCarocci and Vendittelli, will, I hope, fit together as a whole. Such, anyway, is my aim.
A POLITICAL FRAMEWORK FOR ROMAN HISTORY
The intention of this section is simply to offer a fairly rapid narrative of the history of the city of Rome, from slightly before my period starts until slightly after it ends. This is partly so as to introduce that history to readers who may not have a clear idea who Giovanni di Crescenzio was or why Calixtus II has a relatively good press, as an essential background to the more monographic analyses that follow; partly, however, it is an initial attempt to distance myself from the grand narratives of the past century and a half, for it has quite a distinct storyline from those characterized earlier, although it is indebted, in particular, to the insights of Pierre Toubert.51 Some of its cruxes will be defended and discussed in more detail in Chapters 4 and 7; but here they are set out in a simple chronological format, with a minimum of footnoting.
Let us begin with the very active late Carolingian papacy of Nicholas I (858-67) and his immediate successors. The city was run then, and had been for a century or more, by a network of aristocratic families, all of whom obtained status and power through the occupation of official posts, the underpinnings of papal government, in three separate hierarchies: as one of the seven palatine judges and administrators, such as the primicerius or nomenculator or arcarius, plus the influential and more specifically financial office of the vestararius; as military leaders, headed by a magister militum or superista (for all this see below, pp. 186-90); or else as clerical officials. The latter were either the bishops of neighbouring sees (many of whom resided in Rome), or the priests of the twenty-plus tituli of the city, the churches with early baptismal rights, or the deacons who became progressively more closely associated with the diaconiae, originally poor-relief centres, which became the alternative foci for the ecclesiastical regions of the city. (These were to become the three components of the college of cardinals. See below, p. 307, for more detailed discussion.) In the eighth century, most popes had previously been deacons; in the ninth, more had been priests
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