As with its political and ecclesiastical institutions, Rome’s urban fabric and economy has too much ideological baggage attached to be seen straight. Its surviving classical buildings and huge late antique churches towered over the Romans of our period; and those other numerous buildings which had fallen out of use since the fourth century, when the city still had maybe half a million people, made much of the land inside the Aurelian Walls an immense field of ruins. Outsiders could marvel at the mirabilia of the city, and did so in numerous writings praising the statues, palaces, and arches of the ancient world,321 or—in a more surreal Arab tradition—the bed of the Tiber paved in copper so that ships could not anchor there, the thousand baths, the lead roofs resembling the sea, the thirty thousand columns for stylites, the twelve thousand markets, and so forth.322 Conversely, they could focus on the ruins and on the failure of the Romans to live up to their former glories, as with the Versus Romae, perhaps a Neapolitan text, in the late ninth century; or, alternatively, on the superiority of Christian poverty to pagan splendour, as in the poems of Hildebert of Lavardin around 1100.323 What the Romans themselves thought of their material past (a substantial amount, in fact) we will see in Chapter 6; but it certainly got in the way of all sensible analysis by anyone else, both in our period and later, up to nearly the present day. Rome’s economy is hardly better understood. The image of the city as essentially unproductive, except on a small scale, and living off its countryside and the papal court, survives even in the recent work of analysts of the calibre of Philip Jones, not to speak of papal historians without economic experience, who can still write that there was ‘virtually no industry’ in the twelfth-century city.324 We will see that this is about as accurate as were the Arab geographers. Faced with this, we have to start again.
The work of starting again is already under way. The international merchant activity and the active urban redevelopment of the thirteenth century are clear in work by Marco Vendittelli and Etienne Hubert, and their links back to the very clearly attested artisanate of the years around 1100, analysed among others by Laura Moscati, are evident. The quality of Roman-made glazed pottery from as early as the eighth century, and its complexity from the tenth, has long been known to archaeologists. A picture of a thriving city is now easy to see, throughout our period, in fact.325 But it presents us with one basic problem, which needs to be confronted. Rome in the tenth century was by far the biggest city in Latin Europe, with a population plausibly estimated by Riccardo Santangeli Valenzani at 20-30,000 inhabitants (after a fall from a sixth/seventh-century level of maybe double that). It had a complex economy, and its elites were capable of innovative planning, as we shall see. In the eleventh and especially the twelfth century we can see it expanding further, with new urban building, including some ambitious churches; by 1300, Etienne Hubert and Jean-Claude Maire Vigueur would see, again on plausible grounds, a population of 40,000 or even 50,000.326 But by then it was by no means the largest city even in Italy. Milan was at least three times as big, with Venice, Florence, and Genoa not much less; Rome was by now in the middle range of Italian cities, along with Verona, Bologna, Pisa, Siena, and Palermo. Rome’s evident expansion did not match that of other Italian cities, then; Milan, the biggest and oldest of the new metropoleis, perhaps indeed surpassed the city on the Tiber already by 1100.327 Rome’s early size and wealth was measured by the much more modest parameters of the early Middle Ages; it did not adapt to the more commercial world of the central medieval Mediterranean with as much brio. We must, therefore, balance the city’s considerable urban activity against a knowledge that it might in theory have become still more active; and we have to ask why. This issue will underlie the whole chapter, and we will come back to it at the end.
World History
