Genealogy 2 both the otherwise undocumented family of Crescenzio a Caballo Marmoreo and that of the proto-Tuscolani, who ended up later in the century with land not just in the Sabina, but also in Palestrina and Cerveteri (Pope Gregory V confiscated the last-named in 998).569 They did not have the prominence in the city that the Crescenzi ‘proper’, the sons and grandson of Crescenzio di Teodora, eventually achieved, but they certainly operated on the level of the ‘Meliosi’ and de Imiza. We could add the Ottaviani, female-line descendants of the ‘Crescenzi’, too; but they were seldom documented in the city—their interests lay in the Sabina for the most part.
Many of these families came together in one of the most striking ecclesiastical success stories of the later tenth century, the development of the monastery of SS. Bonifacio e Alessio sull’Aventino in and after the 980s. Alexis was a new saint in the city, probably brought in from Syria by Bishop Sergios of Damascus (d.981), and his cult became very visible very fast; it was added to that of S. Bonifacio in the pre-existing monastery between 984 and 987. By 1000, the monastery, by now containing both Greek and Latin monks, became for a time a major focus of learning in Rome, and it trained the martyr-saint Adalbert of Prague, as well as Abbot Giovanni Canapario, who wrote a life of Adalbert. It was the only Roman church in our period to use relic miracles to buttress the development of its cult, doubtless because the cult was so new. We shall look at the significance Alexis had for ordinary Romans in more detail later (pp. 357-8). What is interesting for us here, however, is the range ofsupport this cult initially had from Rome’s leadership. Crescenzio ‘I’ became a monk here and was buried here in 984, as we have seen. In 987, both the ‘Meliosi’ and the Teofilatto/‘Stefaniani’ (in the persons of Stefania senatrix and her husband Benedetto comes) gave land to the monastery; in the same year, Leone di Giovanni de Primicerio sold land in Albano in a text that survives in S. Alessio’s archive, so it presumably soon ended up as a monastic gift too. In 1002, Pope Silvester II (making a rare appearance in a Roman document), together with Giovanni the urban prefect and a large set of slightly less important Roman nobiliores homines, formally ratified a recently forged founding document for the monastery. And the monastery even gained the support of the Ottonians: Otto II came here already in 981; Otto III confirmed its properties in 996, and appears in the monastic miracle collection giving a decorated cloak for the high altar; Giovanni Canapario’s Vita celebrates his arrival in Rome in 996. SS. Bonifacio e Alessio did not keep this centrality after the 1010s, as far as we can see, but for a moment it represented a religious aggregation which was not restricted to any faction in the city’s leadership. On the contrary: it showed the common identity of that leadership, as a group that had the same essential reactions, expressed (doubtless) competitively in its patronage, to an exciting new cult.570
There are three issues emerging from these discussions of the most influential Roman families of the mid - to late tenth century that need particular attention, before we move on: the changing role of titles and offices in their structure; their wealth; and the role of women in their construction, which was unusually great by contemporary standards—and by the standards of Roman history both before and after. Let us look at them in turn.
The clear sense that one gains from a study of the land documents for Rome, which (to repeat) begin to be less than occasional around 940, and reasonably numerous around 960, is that office-holders became slowly less prominent as the century ran on. Few palatine officials are found as actors in documents, selling or giving land, or taking it in lease—the exceptions are arcarii, who perhaps gained materially from their financial role.571 The people who dominate these documents were, as we have seen, from the half-dozen leading families of the city, but these are no longer for the most part recorded as holding office, except, again, as rulers of parts of Lazio (the Sabina, Albano), and except for a short period under Otto III. Instead, they held an elaborate array of titles, which marked them out from their aristocratic contemporaries, such as illustris or eminentissimus; at most, they were the descendants of officials, as Giovanni de Primicerio certainly was and the ‘Meliosi’ probably were. It thus seems as if the greatest aristocratic families were beginning after 960 or so to cut loose from the old official cursus honorum of the ninth century, and could by now operate more autonomously. Is this an optical illusion? After all, we certainly still find vestararii, prefects, and palatine judges in placitum documents and the like. But it does at least have to be said that, if we go back a century, of the seven ninth-century private documents with lay male actors, five feature an official (or, once, his son): a small sample, but a striking proportion.572 I think we can see a change here.
Initially, as we saw, this may have been because Prince Alberico was happy to have some close associates acting as his representatives without formal office. But by a generation later, in the politically uncertain decades between 963 and the 990s, the leading families had grown into a fractious oligarchy who did not necessarily need office-holding to establish and represent social status. The great officials still had status as well; we shall see the heirs of several officials still acting as leading aristocrats in the 1020s—40s in a moment. But this may mark the very beginning of the slow decline in prominence of the palatine judges, who by the twelfth century were refashioned as professional judicial experts, by then drawn largely, as it seems, from the ‘medium elite’ (below, pp. 248, 274). One consequence of this shift is that status was no longer so dependent on the choices of the ruler, whether pope or patricius; these choices remained crucial, of course, but a family who lost formal power did not necessarily lose all social position, as is clearest in the case of the Teofilatto family. This change has plenty of Europe-wide parallels in this same period, and it is important to recognize that we can see it in Rome too. It did not at all mean that rulers could not menace and weaken such families. Benedict VIII did not destroy the ‘Stefaniani’ when he removed them from the countship of the Sabina in 1014, but he did their power much damage, just as, in Saxony in the same period, Henry II greatly harmed the power of Werner of Walbeck when he removed him from the marquisate of the Northern March in 1009, even though Werner remained a major magnate.573 Total destruction of a family’s social position remained conceivable as well, although we seldom see it in Europe, and do not see it in Rome. But, in its absence, families who lost office could still continue to be players, could maintain their respect, could sometimes bounce back, and could if necessary—though not yet in Rome—go it alone.
The titles of eminentissimus, etc., did, of course, show the importance of some sort of formalized status in Rome. Since we have no idea how or by whom the titles were conferred (or if they were conferred at all, rather than assumed), we cannot say exactly how that worked. But it is certainly significant that they existed, and that they conveyed something real when they were used; when, say, in 1007 Giovanni di [Demetrio] Melioso gave land to his fidelis Giovanni, it must have been relevant that the lord was an illustrissimo et clarissimo viro and the dependant was simply a novle [sic] viro and the latter’s son a viro magnifico: elite titles in a generic sense, but not necessarily high-status.574 It is interesting, therefore, that most of the highest-status titles soon drop out of our documentary record as well. We have seen that consul and senator became restricted to the Tuscolani after the 1010s; likewise, the last reference to eminentissimus is 1013 (a Tuscolano reference); gloriosus is attested only once after 999 (a count of Galeria in 10 5 8).575 Only illustris(simus) survived in the eleventh century as a common epithet for top aristocrats. There was a certain simplification process here.
How rich were these aristocrats? This is exceptionally hard to tell. We have seen that churches owned effectively the whole of Rome’s urban area and the Agro romano, but that they leased much of it back, precisely, to the ‘old aristocratic’ stratum we have been looking at. Aristocrats also had or obtained estates well beyond Rome’s hinterland, often in full property, in the ‘land of castles’ all around the city, sometimes in the context of the ruling of territories on behalf of Rome and its rulers (the ‘Stefaniani’ and Ottaviani in the Sabina; Stefania senatrix in Palestrina; Cres-cenzio ‘II’ in Terracina, etc.). The least that we can say is that the richest families had many estates, and that these estates, leased from churches as they often were, were frequently large solid blocks of land, loci for the exercise of full economic domination, and (outside the Agro romano) of signorial rights as well.
We lack any full property lists for aristocrats in this period, unfortunately. When in 983 the executors of Stefano de Imiza gave a substantial set of lands (all held iuris cui existunt, i. e. on lease) to the monastery of S. Gregorio, this is evidently only the land he did not bequeath to his direct heirs, and not necessarily all even ofthat land. It did, all the same, consist of halves (in each case) of a castle and three estates, and a whole (small) lake, in Tuscia Romana, of an estate in Campania, of two castles south of Tivoli, of nine vineyards in Ariccia, and of lands in the city, including a house, a church, and a Tiber mill. If, then, we consider that Stefano had, as far as we can see, three children, and that it was not uncommon to hand over a maximum of a child’s portion to churches in pious gift, then Stefano might have held a minimum of four times this gift, and more if he gave to more than one church.576 A hypothetical minimum of twelve castles and twelve other estates, even if held in half-portions, is enough to live well on, and to support numerous military dependants, and as a result to be a serious player in the city, as the de Imiza family demonstrably was. This may give us an order of magnitude.
Another order of magnitude is offered us by the Tuscolani. Here, we have no snapshot of family possessions, however incomplete, to compare with that of the de Imiza; as we have seen, however, there is a case for arguing that the whole territory around Tuscolo had been leased to Gregorio of Tuscolo in perhaps the 980s, and the family kept it for two centuries. The lands they controlled directly there could conceivably have amounted to a solid block of up to 100 km2, over twice the size of S. Ciriaco’s Silva Maior, and demonstrably a sufficient base for a regional-level military protagonism until the final Roman destruction of Tuscolo in 1191.577 Outside Tuscolo, by contrast, the family is documented much less securely: a church and some land in the Velletrano, the castle of Mazzano in Tuscia Romana, vineyards and fields in Albano, and at Fiano and Scorano in Tuscia Romana, a salt pan at Porto, and land in and beside the city exhaust the list before 1100. This is a small set.578 Although we cannot regard it as anything approaching a full sample, given the gaps in our documentation, it certainly implies that Tuscolo and its territory was by far the family’s major resource; and, given that the Tuscolani seem to have been the principal family in Rome, it is likely that this is the outer limit of individual aristocratic wealth—it is maybe more than the de Imiza, but, if so, not overwhelmingly more. It can be added that the known lands of the ‘Stefaniani’ and Ottaviani—several castles in the Sabina and Tiburtino in each case, plus for the former the city of Palestrina and, more briefly, Cerveteri—are at the same order of magnitude as well, though this was complicated by a much more unstable history of gains and losses of land.579
It is clear that Rome’s leading families extended their landholding well beyond the Agro romano, and that they dealt in castles as much as did any other ambitious aristocratic family in Italy—in Europe—in and around 1000. They could extend their political interests a long way north and east of the city, as far as Rome controlled politically, which, as we have seen (pp. 36-7), was far more than other northern and central Italian cities controlled. But, although they were unusually widely spread, and held land in many places (notably Tuscolo itself) in unusually large blocks, it is not transparent that they were unusually wealthy. In Tuscany, in the Fiorentino, the ‘Suavizi’—a member of whom ceded her part of the family lands to the church of S. Pier Maggiore in Florence in 1067 and thus listed them—seem to have controlled twenty-three estates, usually with castles attached, even if many will have been smaller and more fragmented than estates in central Lazio; and the ‘Suavizi’ were by no means the dominant family in Florentine politics (that would be the Guidi, with several other families rivalling the ‘Suavizi’).580 In non-urbanized southern Tuscany, the Aldobrandeschi in 973 already had at least forty-five castles and estates. We cannot say that the ‘Suavizi’ outmatched the Tuscolani or the de Imiza (indeed, I would doubt it, at least for the former), but the Guidi did by 1100, at the latest, and the Aldobrandeschi did throughout.581 And, it must be added, so did many of the baronial families of thirteenth-century Lazio, the Annibaldi and Caetani with some thirty castles each (often foci of large solid estates), the Colonna and Orsini with double that.582 583 In our period, Roman families certainly dominated both the city’s near and far hinterland, but they did it collectively, through their large number (if the less prominent aristocratic families, with a few estates each, are added to the leading few), rather than as individuals.
This is important, for it puts into perspective my prior remarks about the ability of leading Roman families to go it alone. In our period, this was already conceivable; a dozen castles are already enough for serious territorial politics, and the territory of Tuscolo still more so. Around Florence, this was a choice visibly made by local aristocratic families, particularly after 1100 or so: they largely separated themselves from the city, facilitated by a growing trend to territorial concentrations in the city’s large contadoJ1 But Florence was not a leading political centre (except briefly under Matilda), and was certainly not a major economic focus yet; it was not attractive enough to keep powerful political actors attached to urban politics if they had reasons to leave. Rome was an independent state, and far larger and richer. If its leading families held lands of the same rough order of magnitude as those of Florence (and often less), we might reasonably conclude that there would be less incentive to leave the city and adopt a purely rural politics; but they did so all the same, and two generations earlier. We will come back to the point shortly. It must be added, however, that there is a converse to these observations. The ‘Cres-cenzi’ may not have had time, in their brief periods of rule, to build up large landed endowments to which they could repair in more difficult times, but the Tuscolani did; and they did not take advantage ofit. The basic block ofTuscolani possessions at the moment of their fall in 1044—6 does not seem significantly greater than it had been in the 990s. The Tuscolani popes had not bet on the establishment of a strong landed base for their relatives, unlike Roman popes in the thirteenth century; they had, rather, bet on the maintenance of family control over something still more important, hereditary power over the city itself. When they lost that, they were pushed back to the level of any powerful city-level aristocrat in Italy, and to well below the level ofthe Guidi or Aldobrandeschi. That was indeed defeat; and it would have been much less serious had they been as unscrupulous about family accumulation as Innocent III or Boniface VIII. But it shows how much they, at least, had been committed to a strategy that was overwhelmingly focused on the city.
Family identity is a difficult topic to grasp in this period, one without contemporary surnames to guide us (these are not documented before 1000, and are very rare before 1050); we cannot be sure what links individual family members thought were most relevant. But it is at least clear that female-line links were often regarded as of significant importance. Over all, more than a third of people with recorded parents in tenth-century documents have matronymics; but, in particular, numerous aristocrats identify themselves with matronymics in our sources: Crescenzio de Theodora, Stefano de Imiza, and Gregorio filius Maroze senatrix are only the most prominent.584 We know the names of the fathers of each of these, and they were in each case aristocrats as well. There was no intent to hide some form of disadvantageous or morally problematic alliance in these cases, or in any others we know of (for example, marriage to ecclesiastics—we have anyway half a dozen cases of men who claim to be bishop’s sons in our documents).585 We could possibly conclude that the status of the mother in these cases was greater than that of the father (Marozia ‘II’ senatrix, thanks to her cousinage to Prince Alberico, outranked her husband Teofilatto, even if he was a vestararius), but it would be unwise to assume this in all our examples. We can, conversely, conclude with some certainty that, in general, families who privileged descent from a mother rather than a father regarded mother’s kin as at least as relevant as a source of political loyalty, and, perhaps, identity itself, as the kin of the father. The question is what this means for our understanding of aristocratic strategies.
The big debates about the changing structures of early medieval European aristocratic families are a generation old, and indeed more: it was Karl Schmid in the 1950s who first proposed that the early medieval aristocratic Sippe was a cognatic kin-group, which included female-line relations, and was relatively wide and flexible—and also less politically focused—by comparison with the central medieval patrilineal Geschlecht or lineage. The latter, in Germany, crystallized along Carolingian royal models, but only after the power of the state had notably weakened in the eleventh century and later, and families had to go it alone. Male-line inheritance, surnames, and a reduced and often ambiguous social role for women, thus went together with the growth of local autonomous power for these lineages. In the 1960s and 1970s, this theory was both criticized and refined, as it was pointed out (for example) that patrilineal links were more important before 1000 or so than Schmid thought, that cognatic links could survive later, and also that lineage consciousness could equally be found in strong central medieval states, such as England. The core of the model has survived, all the same; a more nuanced version of it can be found in Regine Le Jan’s influential 1995 analysis of Frankish aristocracies, in which she argues that the fully cognatic Sippe was replaced in the tenth century by a bilateral pattern, in which ‘power was transmitted in the paternal and nobility in the maternal line’.586 It was different in Italy, however. Cinzio
Violante pointed out in 1977 that early medieval aristocratic family structures were particularly patrilineal in the Lombard parts of the peninsula, so did not change very substantially as one moved from the tenth century into the eleventh and twelfth, and the world of surnames. This survived even the introduction of Roman law in many of the cities of the Centre-North, for, as Manlio Bellomo showed, it reduced, very greatly, the amount of property granted to wives at marriage. This was not matched by an increase in the amount daughters could inherit, which was supposed in Roman law to match the rights of sons, because married daughters were simply excluded from inheritance. The male lineage remained dominant as a result.587
Rome fits these latter patterns only in part, because it always lived by Roman law. At the start ofour period and for a long time, daughters were accustomed to inherit in ways analogous to sons, which will have helped the cognatic underpinnings of family identity; into the twelfth century, female inheritance in the city was much more extensive than it was in most of the rest of Italy. In the twelfth century, as we shall see later for the city as a whole (p. 316), female inheritance diminishes substantially in our texts. Although this was not yet universal—the aristocratic holders of Civita Castellana in 1195, for example, certainly included both sons and daughters of previous holders—by the thirteenth century the baronial houses excluded female inheritance even more fully than did the laws of the northern city-states.588 Rome thus developed, eventually, in the same male-lineage direction as did the rest of Italy. All the same, throughout the period of this book, daughters had access to quite a lot of land, and, as late as the early twelfth century, even surnamed families seem to have been happy to see land move to families with different surnames without difficulty (as classical Roman gentes already did, and as modern British or Italian surnamed families do as well). This in the end complicated family identity under the Roman empire, as students of the fourth - to sixth-century imperial families and the gensAnicia know,589 as it does also today. But what effect did it have on a tenth-century Rome without surnames? Were there, in fact, bounded concepts of family at all in that period? Or is it illegitimate for us, in the end, to use our customary terminology, Tuscolani, ‘Crescenzi’, ‘Stefaniani’, ‘Meliosi’, Ottaviani, or whoever else, which tends to privilege the male line, at least in our own reconstructions? Were our families, rather, simply Schmidian Sippen, although in a decisively non-Germanic context, with individuals seeking alliances with kin of different kinds, competitively, in all directions?
This latter view would have been very easy to accept when the opinions of Bossi and Kolmel, and later Toubert, dominated: that the Tuscolani and Crescenzi were all descended by male and female lines from exactly the same ancestors, in the early tenth century. But even if these views are corrected in the ways I have proposed, some important female-line connections impose themselves among the upper aristocracy. Most notably, the close link between Prince Alberico and his cousins Marozia ‘II’ and Stefania, which is explicit in the only land document for Alberico himself, from 945, and which is assumed also in the fact that the cousins called themselves senatrix thereafter, was entirely female-line, through their respective mothers who were sisters (Marozia ‘I’ ruler of Rome and her sister Teodora ‘II’, both already titled senatrix). This link was further stressed by Marozia ‘II’’s heirs the Tuscolani, who, as we have seen, claimed kinship with Prince Alberico and used both Alberico and Teofilatto as personal names.590 Similarly, the Ottaviani picked up the personal name Crescenzio for family members immediately after Ottaviano di Giuseppe married Rogata, sister of the patricius Giovanni di Crescenzio. The ‘Stefaniani’ did not pick up names from their stepmother Stefania’s side, but their own use of the name Crescenzio is plausibly taken from their maternal grandfather Crescenzio a Caballo Marmoreo. Naming and titles are an important part of identity, so these are clear signs that the female line was similarly important.
I am happy to accept this general point. It fits with the constant privileging of sisters alongside brothers as participants in public acts, as with the participation of Costanza abbess of S. Maria Tempuli along with her three brothers (who appear elsewhere as sons de Imiza) in a court case of 977 over their collectively held property claimed by S. Lorenzo fuori le Mura, even though Costanza had moved to the religious sphere; or of the son and two married daughters of Demetrio di Melioso, who gave a collective gift in 987 to SS. Bonifacio e Alessio.591 This in itself fits with the wider evidence for the standard division of landed possessions between daughters and sons, already referred to, throughout this early period. Daughters/ sisters clearly did not move into a wholly different social network when they married. All the same, we cannot easily extend that common sociability into the next generation, with female-line cousins; except for the Tuscolani, I have not found such patterns. The Ottaviani, for example, notwithstanding some Crescen-zian names, followed the Sabina-focused politics oftheir paternal ancestors, not the Roman politics of the ‘Crescenzi’. Furthermore, notwithstanding the frequency of matronymics, most families that can be constructed by us from the documents are in the male line; daughters are recorded, but we can seldom track their own heirs.
What I would argue, in fact, is for the importance of female-line links in a kinship system that was for the most part structured by patrilineality. In this reading, it would be the Tuscolani who were the exceptions, and the reason for it is clear: the strong desire of female-line kin to attach themselves to the unparalleled prestige of Prince Alberico, whose own male heirs, it is worth remembering, were extinguished with John XII’s death in 964. What is highly likely is that there were very many more female-line genealogical links between the various leading Roman ‘old aristocratic’ families than we know. Indeed, we could scarcely doubt it, given aristocratic tendencies to endogamy (this is too early a period for us to find a large-scale recourse to marriage links with extra-Lazial aristocratic families; that would be a twelfth-century trend). But, given that this means that the families we have looked at certainly did indeed intermarry, it is also significant that we know little about it. Stefano de Imiza wanted to tell us what his mother’s name was, implying a connection with her birth family, but he never gives us any guidance as to who her relatives actually were. We can say interestingly little about marriage strategies in general, indeed, across our period. (It may be added that we also cannot say much about strategies by which families located extra male children in the church, or female children in nunneries, even though Rome’s nunneries were fairly numerous, and often status-filled—S. Ciriaco in Via Lata was founded by the Teofilatto family itself—for the documents tell us too little about family affiliations here.) Women could certainly be politically and socially active in Rome, but I conclude that they did so in the framework of largely, even though not exclusively, patrilineal families. For this reason, the network of historians’ names, Tuscolani, ‘Crescenzi’, etc., seems to remain reasonably sound, as long as they are used with care.
The eleventh century sees a change in the ‘old aristocracy’: a change that can be centred on the Tuscolano period. The regime change of 1012 did not result in any dramatic shifts in either the office-holders or the leading families of the city; the urban prefect Crescenzio, as we have seen, was the same man off and on from 1006 to 1017, Giovanni primicerius served from 1005 to 1013, Giorgio arcarius from 1011 to 1017, Gregorio primicerius defensorum from 998, under Otto III, until 1014—and these are minimum terms, simply following the documents that survive.592 But across the third of a century of Tuscolano power (1012-44), the major families become slowly less prominent in our city documentation. This is not helped by a sharp drop in the number of court cases, our best source for the membership of political society, after c. 1020, but the process is beginning to be visible already in the 1010s; furthermore, even in our private documents the families we have looked at become less clearly delineated, with the sole exception of the Ottaviani. Let us look at what we can say about them.
The 1010s mark the last (relatively) dense set of records of the placitum romanum, with their roll-calls of Roman political society; thirteen of them survive, as many as there will be for the rest of the century, until placitum documents fade out in the 1090s.593 They show a slightly different social profile to earlier court case texts, in that new families are prominent in them. This in itselfis not remarkable; most ofthe families we have just looked at were newly documented in the mid-tenth century as we have seen, and it was high time for new ones to appear. But there are now differences, all the same. Take the very formal tribunal that Benedict YIII set up in front of the castle of Tribuco in the Sabina in August 1014, part of his military campaign against the ‘Stefaniani’: here, the pope had evidently brought Rome’s political establishment to back up his confiscation of the castle of Bocchignano from Crescenzio di Benedetto. Present were four of the palatine judges, five indices dativi (judicial experts with less standing), five city abbots, and two comites (one an Ottaviani, present with his brothers); and then at least twenty-eight members of the non-office-holding urban elite. Some of these were related to palatine judges: Costantino and Crescenzio deArcario a loco Transtyberim and Beraldo filius Primus defensor de Cavallo marmoreo. Others, however, were simply described as coming from the regiones of Rome (as these last-named also were): Stefano and Perinzo a Sancto Eustachio, Elperino and Roizone a Via Lata, Giovanni di Stefano a Campo Martio; or else have something which was uncommon in the previous century, nicknames or surnames: Leone Fragapane, Benedetto Boccapecu.594
When these men, and others in the 1010s’ court cases, gain definition in our sources, they will emerge as a different social stratum, called here the ‘new aristocracy’; I will come back to them shortly. They are relevant here, however, in that they show that something was already changing by the 1010s: these new families do not call themselves by the old titles, even consul et dux, never mind eminentissimus, and, when we see them in operation elsewhere, they are urban and suburban dealers, not castle-holders or large rural landholders. The last years of Giovanni di Crescenzio and the first of Benedict YIII saw Rome’s rulers look to a less rich and much more urban social category for the first time. In another case, of 1015, in which Farfa faced off Pope Benedict’s brother Romano consul et dux et omnium Romanorum senator (the future Pope John XIX) over some land near Tribuco, Benedict heard the case in his own room in the Laterano palace, together with—unusually—his fideles, that is, his personal dependants: they included his other brother Alberico and some officials, but also men from both the ‘old’ and ‘new aristocracy’; Giovanni di [Demetrio] Melioso, but also men from S. Eustachio and SS. Apostoli, and Leone Cece, ancestor of a family of supporters of Gregory YII.595
The old families were clearly there, then, as yet; but what happened to them from now on? The Ottaviani, as already noted, are the easiest to track, for they took over control of the Sabina, and thus, thanks to Farfa’s unusually extensive documentation, stay in the spotlight to an extent. They ruled in the Sabina until around 1060, when they lost power for a time, probably as a direct result of the actions of Nicholas II, and they also lost the castles of Arci and Tribuco in 1060-1 to Farfa; they were sometimes counts/rectors of the Sabina later, but the Sabina was by then itself losing coherence as a comitatus, and in effect fragmented into its myriad castle territories. The Ottaviani remained on extremely poor terms with Farfa (in 1119 some Farfa monks refused to have any member of the Octavianisca consanguinitas as abbot, the first time that our name for the family has any justification in contemporary sources), and they lost their lands in the central Sabina around the monastery; in the twelfth century their power was focused on the Sabina-Tivoli borderlands, in Palombara, Mentana, Monticelli, and Monte Albano, and their shift in focus eastwards and southwards is already shown by the election of one of their number as Abbot Giovanni III of Subiaco in c. 1065.596 All the same, the Ottaviani remained active and powerful, less powerful in the twelfth century than the eleventh, but serious players in Rome’s countryside; they held signorial rights in Silva Maior, not far from Monticelli, up to 1199 (pp. 70, 76). But that was also, by now, the closest they got to Rome. They do not appear in the papal entourage, or in any Roman documents after 1014. They probably supported the papal bid of Silvester III in 1044, bishop of the Sabina as he was, and certainly that of Victor IV in 1159, who was a member of the family, but neither pope gained much purchase in Rome.597 They had never been closely linked to Rome, but by now had become an entirely rural family, focused on their castle-holding.
Something of the same process is visible for the ‘Stefaniani’. Crescenzio di Benedetto was urban prefect in 1036, as we have seen; but after that his family, too, vanish from Rome. They kept castles like Empiglione, Castel S. Angelo, and Passarano, on the Tivoli-Palestrina border, and also probably held Monticelli until c.1060; they were also supporters of at least one pope, Benedict X (1058-9), hardly more successful a figure than Silvester III. Thereafter we cannot trace them, and so it would not be so easy to say that they had already become as rural-focused as the Ottaviani; they died out or failed only twenty years after holding a major city office, and had remained players in papal politics until the end. But they, too, no longer figure in Roman documents after the 1010s; and the nobilissima comitissa Imilia, widow of Crescenzio’s nephew Donadeo, is explicitly stated in a Subiaco text of 1053 to be habitatrice in Pelastrina. The family had evidently kept a Palestrina connection, and some of them, at least, had transferred themselves there permanently.598
The ‘Meliosi’ are more shadowy still, and not as clear an example. Giovanni di Demetrio Melioso was a papal fidelis in 1015, as we have seen, and Gerardo di Crescentio di Melioso, if he was indeed a family member, had clear urban connections in 1088 (see above, p. 192 and below, p. 396). A case could be made for continued participation in the changing urban political system for this family. But it is at least worth noting that we cannot track them in the city in any public document between these dates. They appear in a few private documents, but they had lost their former centrality.599 As for the de Imiza and the de Primicerio families, they vanish altogether after the 1010s; they were either marginalized or died out.600
Not all the newly visible families of the Tuscolano period were members of the ‘new aristocracy’. As in previous generations, there were also (relatively) new families who operated by the old rules; they might simply be said to have stepped into the places left by the families we have been focusing on. We can track them by their continued use of the word illustris, or when we find individuals, as we still do, who claimed descent from major officials. None of them are as prominent as the major tenth-century figures, but we can say a little about some of them, all the same.
One example is the urban prefect Crescenzio and his brother Marino de Turre, whom we have already met. Crescenzio founded the church of S. Trifone in the urban region of Campo Marzio in or just before 1006; a papal confirmation of that year shows that he had given land around the church too, even if not a huge amount. This means that Marino is almost certainly also the Marino a Campo Marzio in documents of 1013 and 1021, as the name is not so common; this must have been the family’s urban base. Marino witnesses an urban lease of Farfa in the first of these, together (unusually) with his own fidelis Giovanni; in the second he held a vineyard outside Porta Flaminia. He was also active as an adstans in court cases from the 1010s, as we have seen, and donor to Farfa of a substantial piece of land in Ponticelli, near the monastery, in 1036. Marino calls himself nobilis vir in the latter document, and his wife and daughter are nobilissimae feminae. Where Turre, only cited in the 1036 text, was is unclear; it was almost certainly not in Rome; but that latter document has an entirely Roman—here, Pigna and Trevi— witness list, reinforcing the family’s urban background.601
A second example is Leone nomenculator (possibly the holder of the office in 988-93, although our data for the office are incomplete, so he could be later). He had a brother Pietro Capolonga nobili viro, who co-held a salt pan with Leone’s heirs in 1011; one of Leone’s sons, also called Leone, witnessed a sale near the Colosseo in 1018; Leone’s heirs held land on the Aurelia, west of Rome, in 1036; and Stefano nobili viro di Leone de Nomiculatorem, presumably the son of the 1018 witness, founded the rural monastery of S. Cornelio (the old domusculta Capra-corum) in and before 1041. Only this last document gives any hint that the family was particularly prominent, but the tract ofland Stefano gave in 1041 (held iuris cui existens, probably from the pope) was substantial, so we can at least say that they were well off.602 A third example is Albino arcarius. He left a widow, Teodoranda nobilissima femina, who with her children sold to Farfa in 1012 half an estate at S. Colomba on the Salaria; her daughter Berta was married to Farolfo illustris vir. A fourth is Crescenzio illustrissimus vir, the son of another arcarius, who in 1020 leased an estate on the Aurelia from SS. Cosma e Damiano in Trastevere; this estate was bounded by two silvae, both co-held by the heirs of Leone arcarius, probably the long-serving holder of the office in 966-99, and the heirs of a certain Costan-tino. When we add that the Tribuco case of 1014 included as adstantes, as we have seen, Costantino and Crescenzio deArcario a loco Transtyberim, it is not difficult to recognize all these people as an elite Trastevere family, descended from Leone arcarius, who held really quite a lot of land on the Aurelia.603 All these families seem to be operating much as did their predecessors a century earlier, leasing large blocks of land from the church and proclaiming their links to office-holders; unfortunately, none of them can be traced further with any certainty.
If we follow further the title illustris, the last indicator of high ‘old aristocratic’ status, we encounter several more people who seem to be, once again, from this same social stratum. One is Purpura illustris femina (or nobilissima femina), wife of Benedetto di Rogata, who between 1019 and 1030 willed a castle in the Tiburtino (complete with signorial rights) and an estate on the Prenestina to S. Gregorio sul Celio, leased part of an estate on the Portuense from SS. Cosma e Damiano, and leased a hill above the Vaticano from S. Pietro. Another is Guido di Bellizzo, illustrissimum atque inclito comite... que appellatur de Anguillaria, i. e. count of Anguillara (he was probably son of the Belizo comes of a court case of 1011), who in 1020 leased out fishing rights in the Lago di Bracciano. A third, Guido illustris-simo viro, who with his wife Stefania and son Ardemanno (not a very common name) ceded back to S. Ciriaco in Via Lata a lease on the Portuense in 1012, must have been the grandfather of the Guido di Ardemanno whose heirs, illustrissimi atque nobilissimi viri, sold the castle of Arci in the Sabina to Farfa in 1059.604
One family of this type is documented in slightly more detail. Giovanni inlustrissimo vir de urbi Romen [sic] di Giorgio and his wife Bona inlustrissima femina in 1030 founded (or re-founded) the rural monastery of S. Primo by the Lago Burrano on the Prenestina, and gave it a substantial estate between the lake and the River Aniene. The monastery did not last (by 1060 it was just a church), but this was not the only family focus. In 1049, the two founders appear again, with the same titles, this time giving a portion of Castel S. Angelo in the mountains above Tivoli to Subiaco (a new castle whose ownership they shared with the ‘Stefaniani’, as texts of 1036-8 show); in that text their co-donor is their son Giovanni, similarly called illustris, habitator in castello Corcorulo, that is to say Corcolle, 5 km east of S. Primo. Here, we have a clear demonstration of something that I postulated earlier for the ‘Stefaniani’ themselves: an urban aristocratic family moving out of the city. The ‘Stefaniani’ link remained in this case even after the family had pulled out of Castel S. Angelo; Giovanni di Giovanni witnessed Imilia of Palestrina’s cession of part of the same castle in 1053.605
We cannot say that any of these just-cited families was actually created by the Tuscolani; their earliest prominent members almost all first appear before Benedict
VIII became pope. Nor can we be sure that any major officials of the Tuscolano period itself produced new families such as these we have just looked at, for the period is rather sparse in its evidence of their acts.606 There is in fact only one major family who clearly owed their position to the Tuscolani, and that is the family of Gerardo comes of Galeria and his brother Sassone comes de comitatu of Civita Castellana. Galeria, on the edge of the Agro romano, seems fairly securely to have been a papal property in 1037, when Benedict IX ceded its brothel (domus lupanaris) to the bishop of Silva Candida, and it was a strong-point of some importance in the disturbances of the next generation; already in a text of 1026 there was a comes Galerie, Giovanni Tocco, one of the first comites in central Lazio not to be attached to an episcopal territory, and the inhabitants of Galeria are also called a magnuspopulus in the latter text, a Galeria court case—it was probably the largest settlement in the diocese of Silva Candida. Giovanni Tocco is only documented once, and exactly when Gerardo was put in is not clear, but the latter was authoritative enough in 1048 to preside over an important Farfa court case (a rather unorthodox one, but including Andrea secundicerius in the witness list), and the Annales Romani describe him as the leader of the comites qui veniebant per montanam, the rural lords, in support of Benedict IX in 1044. (Bonizone of Sutri, too, associates him with Benedict in a confused story.) Gerardo was clearly a Tuscolano appointment, then, perhaps put in in the 1030s; and this fits with his and his brother’s consistent hostility to the ‘reform’ popes, which culminated in Gerardo’s successful military defence of Benedict X against a Norman siege of Galeria in 1059.607
Gerardo was son of Raineri, whom David Whitton argues fairly convincingly to have been Marquis Raineri I of Tuscany (1014-27). Raineri was removed as marquis in favour of the Canossa family by the emperor Conrad II, but his family remained great lords in the territory of Arezzo (modern historians call them the ‘Marchesi’ or ‘Marchiones’). More recent historians of the ‘Marchiones’ have not picked up on this genealogical connection, which hangs on a reading of one Farfa document; this at least shows that Gerardo and Sassone (a distinctly more shadowy figure) had transferred themselves totally to Lazio, leaving no Aretine links behind. There is no particular reason to doubt Whitton’s argument, however.608 The Tuscolani had in this case brought in an external aristocratic family, and implanted them in a strategic centre of Tuscia Romana (or two such centres, if Sassone’s comital title is from the same period, which is entirely plausible), presumably as papal lessees. Gerardo had no prior Roman links (though his family did have independent links to Farfa), so his loyalty to the Tuscolani could be presumed. That presumption was a justified one; Gerardo’s political alignment did not waver, even after 1046. But it is also striking that the only demonstrably new family under the Tuscolani are never found in Rome: they were put straight into strong-points in Tuscia Romana, and stayed there.
In synthesis: in the Tuscolano period there are fewer references to the ‘old aristocracy’. There are fewer court cases to give snapshots of their prosopography. The leases we have privilege emphyteuses to their members much less, too; this is partly because the Subiaco register, which has so many, runs out in the 1010s, and because more archives from smaller Roman churches, which had fewer links with the main aristocratic families, begin around the same period; but it is also the case that the emphyteuses that still survive (including from S. Gregorio sul Celio, source for many tenth-century aristocratic documents) are also to less prominent people.609 So, certainly, are the libelli of smaller blocks of land, which are increasingly numerous, as we saw in Chapter 2 (pp. 56, 80). We also have fewer aristocratic donations to Roman churches, which had in the tenth century been an important element of ‘old aristocratic’ activity, and this seems in itself to be a less ambivalent mark of social change: these families were less involved in the city’s ecclesiastical patronage, and thus in the world of our documentation. And this is also the conclusion I draw from what we do know about the old leading families. The great tenth-century families either died out or moved to the countryside, with the probable exception of the ‘Meliosi’. Their eleventh-century successors often did the same, most obviously Guido of Anguillara, the family of Giovanni di Giorgio, and of course the comites of Galeria, who never had an urban foothold at all. We certainly cannot say that they all did; we do not have enough information about the heirs of Leone arcarius or Purpura illustris femina to be sure what happened to them. But we cannot track with certainty a single family from those described in this section into the slightly better-documented urban politics of the period 1050-1150, and only the ‘Meliosi’ show any even probable continuity. They did not participate in the battles over papal ‘reform’, or, if they did, they did so as members of the ‘counts who were around the city’, in the words of the Annales Romani:. external, not internal, forces.98 After 1046, their numbers were power
Fully swelled by the defeated Tuscolani themselves, who henceforth operated from their own extra-urban power-centre. The Tuscolani, ‘Stefaniani’, Ottaviani, and the counts of Galeria led this group; and they did so from castles on the edge of or beyond the Agro romano.
I argued earlier that the attraction of Rome was rather greater than that of (say) Florence, to aristocratic families with a dozen or so castles who wanted to be political players. Actually, in many cities, large cities like Milan or medium-sized ones like Cremona and Lucca, some urban aristocrats continued throughout the eleventh century and beyond to involve themselves in urban politics, even if they had castles; and even in Florence the moment of social separation from the city was not until the early twelfth, after the chaos of the civil war period.610 In Rome, by contrast, the families we are looking at left urban politics rather earlier, in the second quarter of the eleventh century, even though Rome was so rich and powerful; and it is hard to see why Monticelli or Corcolle or Palestrina might have been more attractive bases than the Quirinale or the Aventino. It is thus tempting to regard the ruralization of Rome’s ‘old aristocracy’ as a direct mark of political failure, after the Tuscolani moved against the ‘Stefaniani’, and after Henry III moved against the Tuscolani. That was, indeed, a dominant interpretation in the twentieth century. It works for the Tuscolani; but not, it has to be said, for any other family: the Ottaviani were patronized by the Tuscolani, but still had little to do with the city; the ‘Stefaniani’ were back in favour in Rome by the mid-1030s, but were also shifting out of the city’s orbit in the same period. Political failure does not, therefore, work as an overall explanation.
In the absence of dense evidence about the Tuscolano regime, there is no final answer to this problem. But three elements can be isolated, two certain, one more hypothetical, which can help us to understand how it was that ‘old aristocratic’ families left the city. One is that the 1010s already saw the first appearance ofnewer families, the leaders of Rome’s regiones, in the relatively numerous placita of the period: families who were less rich and much more urban-focused. Both Giovanni di Crescenzio and Benedict YIII were widening their political base. They did not do that at the direct expense of the older families (indeed, it is likely, as we shall see in a moment, that the newer families eventually felt they did not have enough), but there was only so much patronage to go around. Secondly, slightly later on, the few public documents for the 1020s-30s also show a greater participation of cardinals, that is, in general, leading churchmen, in what was after all the solidest papal-dominated regime since the ninth century (below, p. 392). This tradition, of using ecclesiastical office-holders in secular public acts, would be taken further under Hildebrand in the 1060s-70s, but started here. We do not know the family background of most Tuscolano cardinals, but clerical careers were more likely than secular ones to be open to men whose origins were not from the ‘old aristocracy’. The three-decade Tuscolano regime thus, quite plausibly, owed its stability to a slightly wider social base than did its predecessors. There would have been less space in their patronage networks for the traditional families as a result.
We also need to be cautious about the attractions of stability for the ‘old aristocracy’. Rome’s politics was not normally very stable in any period of the Middle Ages; indeed, it owed much of its attraction to the continual changes of regime every five or ten years, with each new pope. Families who were out of favour would scheme to return next time; families in favour would scheme to fix the decision-making mechanisms, so as to stay on top. All sorts of realignments in the pecking order of power could be planned for, and political actors both wanted and needed to stay in the city to achieve their ends. But it must swiftly have become clear who would succeed Benedict YIII, and that his brother Romano would not, as
John XIX, change the regime at all; nor would their nephew Benedict IX—who was younger, thus marking a possible generation change, but who was unlikely to change much initially, while his father Alberico comes palatii was alive.611 This stability was already a feature of the Alberician period, without any sign that families were leaving Rome then; but now the appearance of castles and the possibilities of rural lordship created a political alternative which had not existed previously. The main families also had relatively concentrated zones of influence, around Palestrina or Tuscolo, or between Galeria and Civita Castellana, or in the Sabina; there was not here the scatter of holdings that kept some northern Italian dioceses together for rather longer. So: now that there was less to do politically in the city, it would have been easier than previously for ‘old aristocratic’ families to transfer their attention to the castles and provincial towns under the direct control of each, even while maintaining links to Rome. These links might thereafter, across three decades, have become ever more formal, perhaps restricted to major ceremonial moments of the year such as Easter.
This is the hypothetical part; for exactly how the older families did link themselves to John XIX and Benedict IX has no useful documentation at all. But we do know that several of them maintained Tuscolano loyalties into the 1050s; the counts of Galeria supported Benedict IX and then Benedict X; the Ottaviani may have supported Silvester III against the former, but certainly swung behind the latter, as did the ‘Stefaniani’.612 This rearguard loyalty was after the end of the stable Tuscolano regime, an end which occurred with the revolt of 1044, so it is unlikely that these families had felt, or become, marginalized or oppositional in the decades of real Tuscolano power. But their links to the ruling family had not prevented them from drifting out of the city. And, once Tuscolano power had gone, they could not easily get back. In the upheavals of the 1040s and onwards, the comites were by now seen as external to Rome. The ‘old aristocracy’, which had dominated urban politics since at least 750, had turned into an outside force, in the most tranquil period for fifty years into the past and well over a century into the future. They left the field to much smaller families. The ‘new aristocracy’ would end up as dominant as their predecessors, but it would take another hundred years and more for this transformation to work itself through.
Rome’s new leading stratum, as we have seen, begins to take form after the year 1000. Their members appear in public acts in the 1010s; and, increasingly from then on, in a variety of leases, usually libelli, both from newly documented churches and monasteries such as S. Maria Nova and S. Maria in Campo Marzio, and also from a smaller number of monasteries (S. Gregorio sul Celio and S. Ciriaco in Via Lata) whose documentation started earlier and carried on throughout our period. Only one family from this stratum can be traced earlier than the 990s, the Frangipane: they were descended from the Pietro qui et Imperiola who is, as we saw, the only person listed as a participant in the 963 Rome synod who is referred to as de plebe.10'2 In the next half-century, a dozen similar families crystallized out of the top levels of the urban commercial and rentier elite, and emerged as politically active and, increasingly, surnamed families: early surnames are indeed associated with this stratum, and not the ‘old aristocracy’. We do not know exactly why the Romans revolted against Benedict IX in 1044, but it cannot be easily doubted that it was the ‘new aristocracy’ that led the revolt; we will come back to this point (p. 245). They adapted themselves quickly to the new German-led regime. Indeed, the first document that gives us a full list of them is the best parallel in the post-1046 period to the 963 Rome synod or the 1014 Tribuco placitum as a roll-call of the city’s elite: Nicholas II’s Arci court case from April 1060. This is where we shall start, then, before working through in greater detail what we know of them.
The Arci case was similar to that at Tribuco in more than one way; for, in it, Pope Nicholas II and his archdeacon Hildebrand moved formally to remove the Ottaviani from the castle of Arci in the Sabina, in favour of the monastery of Farfa, much as Benedict VIII had removed the ‘Stefaniani’ from Bocchignano in 1014. The difference was that this time the pope simply did this through a court case in Rome, rather than after military action. (The Ottaviani did not turn up, and waited before they came to terms; but they did so exactly a year later, ceding not only Arci but Tribuco as well, which they had leased from Farfa subsequent to the 1014 placitum, for the massive pay-off of ?126.) The case was the most formal documented gathering of the city’s political community for a generation. Its witnesses began with five cardinals, plus two external bishops and Hildebrand as archdeacon; then followed Giovanni the urban prefect (this was Giovanni Tignoso from Trastevere, who had been appointed in January 1059 as one of Nicholas’ first acts), five palatine judges, and two dativi iudices; then thirty-five lay witnesses, almost all of them clearly Roman—the only exception being two of the Guidi counts from north-east Tuscany, presumably present because Nicholas was also bishop of Florence. As usual, we cannot trace all of them; but those whom we can trace are significant.613 614
The list of the laity begins with Cencio de Praefecto, son either of the current prefect or of a predecessor. There were two Cencios who were the sons of prefects in this period, in fact: Cencio di Giovanni, who succeeded his father in the 1060s; and his rival Cencio di Stefano, who supported Honorius II/Cadalo of Parma in 1062 and imprisoned Gregory VII briefly in 1075, and whose brother killed Cencio di Giovanni in 1077—these being the most prominent Roman causes celebres of the early Gregorian papacy. Since he was later so opposed to Hildebrand, historians tend to assume that Cencio di Stefano was absent from the great gathering of April 1060, but we cannot be sure of that, and Cencio di Giovanni was perhaps too junior (his father had only been prefect for a year) to head such a list as yet. Then follow Leone di Benedetto Cristiano, a close associate of Hildebrand and ancestor of the Pierleoni; Alberto di Ottone Curso, the first known named member of the Corsi family; Giovanni Bracciuto, from a prominent Trastevere family; Conte and Bertramo di Giovanni di Guido, Giovanni probably being the Giovanni de Arci-praesbitero who witnessed a court case in 1017;615 Benedetto de Aepiscopo, clearly also from a high-status clerical family; and Cencio Fraiapane, the commonest early spelling of the Frangipane. The next two names belong to men who do witness elsewhere, but not in such a way as to tell us more about them; Giovanni di Balduino follows, who we know from a private document to have been an opifex or artisan;616 then the first totally untraceable name; then two of the Tuscolani, Benedict IX’s brothers, quite far down the list, and the only prominent ‘old aristocrats’ mentioned in the document, apart from the contumacious Ottaviani. Almost none of the rest of the list can be traced elsewhere, except for the Guidi counts from Tuscany near the end, and, with them, two members of the Sant’ Eustachio family; but two more artisans, a goldsmith and a weaver, appear along the way, and one identifiable member of the ‘medium elite’ of Pigna, Durante di Giovanni di Atria (below, p. 283). It is reasonable to assume that after the Frangipane the witnesses become for the most part less prominent, with some notable exceptions. But up to then, the Arci text is a nearly complete list ofRome’s new leadership in this early generation. Only one family that is prominent anywhere else in these decades is certainly absent, the filii Baruncii.
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