The built environment reflects and creates the community that formed it. Rituals and ritual spaces attempt to define community. Places do not have static meanings; their meanings change over time, and can be built or overthrown almost in an instant. Rome’s contemporary aspect as an open-air museum offers a tempting but illusory image of eternal stasis that conceals as much as it reveals about the medieval city. Its current state reflects nearly two centuries of archaeology aimed at exposing and preserving the ancient city first of all, if not exclusively. These archaeological programs were driven by successive ideologies and agendas, whether of the modern popes, European aristocrats on the Grand Tour, Italian nationalists, or Fascists. Before those, were the interventions of the Renaissance and Baroque papacy and Roman aristocracy that dramatically reshaped the city, its monuments, and its infrastructure with profound effect on European culture and cities as well. All of these moments of intervention placed comparatively little value on the medieval, and what remains of Rome of the Middle Ages often survived by happenstance, good fortune (for the medievalist), or to enshrine a particular narrative (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Map of papal Rome in the Middle Ages

What remains, while far from complete, is impressive: scores of medieval bell towers, fortifications, family towers, domestic architecture, and, of course, churches. It is, however, precisely because much remains of the medieval fabric of the city, and because the medieval written record is so conscious of the ancient monumental ruins that historians need to remind themselves that the medieval city they perceive, and the relationships it suggests, is not the medieval city or society that was. Even the natural topography has changed: hills have eroded and their slopes softened, streams have disappeared underground, sections of the city have been raised and filled in, and, most dramatically, the Tiber is no longer a natural river with banks offering a mix of economic opportunity and catastrophic flooding. Broad footpaths, loosely defined by individual structures, ruins, or farms, have been hardened into precise, named streets, walled in by palazzi. Nor was the medieval city static: the Rome of the Emperor Constantine I (r. 306–37) and Pope Sylvester I (r. 314–35) was not that of Pope Gregory I (r. 590–604) and the Byzantines, nor was it that of Leo III (r. 795–816) and Charlemagne (r. 768–814), of Gregory VII (r. 1073–85) and Henry IV (r. 1054–1105), let alone that of Cola di Rienzo (1313–54). They cannot be turned into a single medieval Rome, let alone a single medieval Papal Rome.

Although the pope is the Bishop of Rome by definition, Rome cannot properly be called a papal city until the eighth century, and even after that, the papacy’s control over the city was regularly challenged or put to one side. While a dynamic of powerful elites (emperors, popes, and aristocratic families) and Constantinian ideals serve as a through line, those dynamics and ideologies played out within an ever-shifting urban topography that shaped their outcomes and meaning. Because the idea of Rome, its ideological, political, and religious significance, is central to papal authority, and because that idea and ideal was intertwined with its shifting topography, understanding the topography and significance of the medieval city of Rome is of fundamental importance. If we define papal Rome too narrowly as simply the circle (clerical and lay) of the Bishops of Rome, or too broadly to mean simply medieval Rome, we miss the significance of the popes in the history of the city as well as in Europe and the Mediterranean. Rather, papal Rome is an idea about Rome constructed through its physical topography, and built environment that enabled popes to govern Rome, its environs, and ultimately, to project power throughout Europe and the Mediterranean. It was an invented history constructed in the early Middle Ages, that reached its apex in the early twelfth century. The assertion of medieval papal authority at its most grandiose and universal (the Donation of Constantine or the Dictatus papae, for example) was constructed in large part in response to local and immediate Roman events. The idea of papal Rome reshaped and reimagined Roman topography, the physical reality of Rome. For that reason, papal Rome does not extend the length of the Middle Ages, and ends well before the popes abandoned Rome for Avignon.

Papal Rome was invented largely in the eighth century through a reimagining of the history of the Roman empire that enabled the popes to contest the weakened Byzantine control of the city, and to create a Republic of St. Peter. Papal Rome as an idea was reinvigorated on a universal scale in the eleventh century, its mythical history was elaborated, its legal, Scriptural, and ritual source-texts scrutinized and expanded, and the city was transformed on a grand scale in the first half of the twelfth century to further that narrative. Ultimately, it was a symbolic language that could be, and was, coopted by any number of actors. In the twelfth century, the Roman commune, the Senatus Populusque Romani, took control of that language, the power it generated, and the city, and never fully gave it back in our period.Footnote ¹ This interplay between ideal and physical city was fostered by and often most clearly revealed in ritual processions as they moved across the city, or as Romans and those who would control Rome battled from region to region. We will return to these moments regularly to explore how Romans constructed and understood the changing city around them.

Historiography and the Topography of Medieval Rome

Nationalism, imperialism, and the re-emergence of representative governments all shaped the origins of the academic discipline of history in the nineteenth century, and the foundational histories written about the city of Rome and the papacy were shaped by all of these.Footnote ² As Rome became the capital of a unified Italy in 1870, a frenzy of digging and destruction took place and Rodolfo Lanciani (1845–1929) attempted to record what was exposed. This was the basis for Lanciani’s famous Forma urbis Romae, showing the multiple layers of the city, as he interpreted the rapidly emerging archaeological findings.Footnote ³ His periodization, Ancient and Early Christian, Renaissance and Baroque, and Modern, both captures and confuses the medieval topography. While Lanciani’s maps and notes include the medieval, even the categories he offers reveal his willingness to erase it (framing it only as the Early Christian and Renaissance periods).Footnote ⁴ Lanciani’s work, along with that of his older contemporary, Ferdinand Gregorovius (1821–91), remains foundational. Although his monumental History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages was criticized from the outset for being too much of a history of the papacy, Gregorovius was decidedly republican in his outlook, and, like Jacob Burckhardt (1818–97), he presents the papacy as a corrupt and negative force in a Hegelian dialectic advance of history.Footnote ⁵ Gregorovius, while groundbreaking in his use of archival materials, and sweeping in his interests, was also largely excluded from the Vatican archives.

Too late for Gregorovius, the most fundamental of those textual sources, the Liber pontificalis, was edited into its critical form by Msgr. Louis Duchesne (1843–1922) between 1886 and 1892.Footnote ⁶ Duchesne’s methods were rigorous and scientific, and his edition has stood the test of time.Footnote ⁷ Lanciani may have had greater sympathies for the papacy, but his position in the newly formed Italian state government also meant that he was unwelcome in the Vatican.Footnote ⁸ Lanciani’s students included Samuel Ball Platner whose Topographical Dictionary of Rome (1911) was an essential tool until it was supplanted in 1992, and largely eclipsed in 1993 by the work of Margareta Steinby.Footnote ⁹ Antonio Muñoz (1884–1960), another Lanciani student, is perhaps most infamous for having carved out the Fascists’ via dell’Impero from a medieval neighborhood.Footnote ¹⁰ It is now the via dei Fori Imperiali, and it completed and expanded a plan that had begun with unification and the first Piano Regolatore of 1873 to create a straight road connecting the Colosseum and the Capitoline. This was not only a symbolic shift away from the papal Rome of the nineteenth century, towards a nationalist (and then Fascist) Rome, but it was a material shift that destroyed churches and thousands of medieval and early modern structures with varying efforts to record what was lost. Roma Sparita, largely medieval, was the sacrifice chosen to create Roma Capitale and Roma Mussolinea, as part of a strategy to “isolate” the classical monuments and sites from the urban fabric.Footnote ¹¹ The “early Christian,” the Constantinian, was preserved and highlighted alongside the Ancient, but the medieval was always vulnerable in the pursuit of an imperial Roman and modern vision of the city.

Much of the medieval city had been lost, or recently destroyed, by the time of the first volume of Richard Krautheimer’s (1897–1994) Corpus basilicarum Christianorum in 1937.Footnote ¹² Krautheimer, as Lanciani before him, collected an encyclopedic range of textual and visual evidence for the Corpus basilicarum and his Rome: Profile of a City.Footnote ¹³ Krautheimer’s deeply influential work captured the creative and ideological reuse medieval Romans made of the ancient remains and forms they inherited. Krautheimer has taught generations of historians to better integrate visual source materials into the textual sources, even if he continually reconsidered some of his most influential theses about Roman architecture.Footnote ¹⁴ His methods have become an essential tool for historians of medieval Rome, although recently Chris Wickham has offered an important note of caution about the over reliance on these visual resources, especially in light of recent archaeology.Footnote ¹⁵ No sooner had Krautheimer’s Profile of a City been published than work began in 1981 to excavate the Crypta Balbi. These and subsequent excavations, combined with critical reappraisals of the city and its surrounding countryside, have led to a dramatic reevaluation of the history of the medieval city.Footnote ¹⁶ Most notably, Jean-Claude Maire Vigeur has restored the Roman commune to its rightful place in the history of the city from the middle of the twelfth century when it dislodged papal control.Footnote ¹⁷ That history was all but erased by the 1527 sacking of the city by the forces of Charles V (r. 1519–56) and further obscured by Renaissance and Baroque construction.Footnote ¹⁸ Chris Wickham, in turn, has reconsidered the history of the medieval city in the two centuries prior to the commune.Footnote ¹⁹ Most recently, Hendrik Dey has attempted to integrate the considerable archaeological discoveries of the past generation into a revision of Krautheimer’s great synthesis, in a New Profile of a City.Footnote ²⁰ Collectively, these studies reveal a more vibrant and dynamic city, with a broader distribution of population centers, richer agriculture, and greater industry and trade than we had previously thought. They also help us better appreciate the complex social dynamics involved in, and the wealth of resources needed to build, papal Rome in the Carolingian period, the energy exerted to re-establish it in the early twelfth century, as well as the impressive commune that displaced it.Footnote ²¹

Rome after Constantine

The construction and destruction at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries centered the modern city on the classical monuments from the Colosseum to the Capitoline. It also enshrined the ideology embedded in the via Papalis: a city with two papal and Constantinian monuments (San Giovanni in Laterano and Saint Peter’s) at the ends of a roughly east–west axis with the via Sacra and the classical monuments of the fora at its heart. That ideology of a “Christian Decumanus,” however, was created in fits and starts during the Middle Ages, and should not be assumed.Footnote ²² In order to understand the invention of papal Rome, the historical medieval urban fabric and its shifting topographies of power need to be recreated.

In the fifth century, Rome would have largely offered the appearance it had a century earlier. A handful of major churches were located primarily at the very edges of the city. It was a pattern set by Constantine, whose monumental Christian basilicas were on imperial lands outside of (Saint Peter’s, San Paolo fuori le Mura) or at the margins of (San Giovanni Laterano) Rome. In so doing, Constantine chose not to disrupt the sacred, imperial, and ideological center of Rome at the Palatine and Capitoline Hills and in the Forum Romanum (see Figure 1.1). The great pilgrimage sites, including S. Pietro and S. Paolo fuori le Mura, were outside of the city at the tombs of the martyrs.Footnote ²³ Ammianus Marcelinus, writing at the end of the fourth century, described the emperor Constantius II’s visit to Rome in 357 CE as a purely classical tour: admiring the fora, the temples (notably the temples of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline, and of Rome and Venus in the Forum Romanum), the Colosseum, the Stadium of Domitian, the Pantheon, and the Theater of Pompey among other sites. Rome could still be conceived as a purely ancient city.Footnote ²⁴ A century later, Santa Maria Maggiore and Sant Agata de’ Goti were the first churches to be built away from the walls. Two dozen other small tituli were spread throughout Rome’s neighborhoods.Footnote ²⁵ The pope was the Bishop of the city of Rome, but Rome was by no means a papal city.Footnote ²⁶

Even as the fortunes of Rome turned dramatically downward during the Gothic Wars of the sixth century, the Palatine, the mythological birthplace of Rome, and the location of the very real palace of Augustus, retained its place as the imperial heart of the city for centuries after the deposition of the “last Western Roman Emperor,” Romulus, in 476. The Ostrogothic King, Theodoric (r. 475–526), had continued the Roman imperial tradition of residing on the Palatine during his visits to Rome, and carried out restoration of the imperial palace.Footnote ²⁷ The Palatine retained its status, albeit with diminished structures, some used for refuse, or as a necropolis (as at the temple of Magna Mater).Footnote ²⁸ The Byzantine dux resided there, emperors continued to have their images installed there and resided there when they came to the city. In the sixth century, under Theodoric, the so-called Temple of Romulus and the Templum Pacis were the first major imperial monument to be converted into a church, dedicated to Saints Cosmos and Damian.Footnote ²⁹ In the same century, processions from SS. Cosma e Damiano would travel past S. Maria Antiqua, and up to the Palatine, connecting the area ritually and, perhaps, reintegrating the converted temple into the re-established Roman–Byzantine order centered on the Forum and the Palatine.Footnote ³⁰

The condition in the Forum, in the fifth through seventh centuries, was one of shifting meanings amidst reduced circumstances. When Theodoric came to Rome in 500, he traveled to S. Pietro and then to meet with the Roman Senate in the Forum. His route, in essence, followed the ancient via triumphalis.Footnote ³¹ Games continued in the Colosseum under Theodoric, although the demographic collapse in Rome brought about by Justinian’s wars of reconquest (r. 535–53) ended these. The fifth through seventh centuries show a general pattern of sustaining administrative buildings, setting aside large temples, and repurposing other monumental architecture for a variety of uses (domestic, military, or burial).Footnote ³² While the Romans rededicated a monumental column in the Forum to honor the visit of the Emperor Phocas on the Kalends of August in 608, other parts of the Forum by then had been given over to a blacksmith’s shop, for spoliation, and even, in the valley of the Colosseum, a necropolis.Footnote ³³ The Colosseum itself was, by then, being spoliated for building materials, used to stable animals, for storage (with lofts built into the vaulted passageways), and even for human habitation.Footnote ³⁴ Despite these changes, the Palatine and the Forum remained the ideological heart of the city.

If we consider two liturgical innovations associated with Gregory the Great (r. 590–604), the litaniae maiores and the litania septiformis, we see the pope’s limited role as the Bishop of Rome. Gregory observed and described the litania maior, a penitential procession that displaced the pre-Christian robigalia, on April 25, 592. The procession began at San Lorenzo in Lucina, which was also the site of Augustus’ monumental sundial (Horologium Augusti), north on the via Lata (now the via del Corso), out the Porta Flaminia, crossed the Tiber at the Milvian Bridge (referencing Constantine’s victory), before turning west through the ager romanus and approaching the porticus San Pietro by way of Castel Sant’ Angelo.Footnote ³⁵ The procession linked and redirected imperial (Horologium, Castel Sant’Angelo, Terebinth of Nero), pre-Christian (Robigalia), and Constantinian (Milvian Bridge and S. Pietro) imagery in innovative and foundational ways, but it was also almost entirely outside of the city and confined to its northern and western edge.

If the litania maior was almost entirely outside the city, Gregory’s litania septiformis was entirely within the city. There were, it appears, two versions of the litania septiformis under Gregory. Both versions shared in common an appeal to Mary as Salus Populi Romani at Santa Maria Maggiore, and both engaged the broader Roman population in processions organized by social status. In both iterations, groups gathered at six different churches and processed to Santa Maria Maggiore. The first litania septiformis is described by Gregory of Tours as having taken place in 590.Footnote ³⁶ The churches that served as gathering and processional starting points of the 590 litania were San Vitale, on the Quirinal just north and west of Santa Maria Maggiore, Santa Eufemia (no more than 800 feet from Maria Maggiore), SS. Cosma e Damiano in the Forum to the south and west (the westernmost of the churches in the 590 litania), SS. Giovanni e Paolo, Santo Stefano, San Clemente, and SS. Marcellino e Pietro. The absence of San Giovanni in Laterano in the 590 litania also suggests that Gregory’s election as pope had not yet been ratified by the Byzantine emperor.Footnote ³⁷ In 603, thirteen years later, the litania was significantly more geographically adventuresome: it added Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, San Marcello towards the base of the via Lata, and the Lateran. It reduced the number of churches from the Celian Hill, dropping San Clemente, SS. Marcellino e Pietro, and eliminated the neighboring S. Eufemia (for churches and monasteries listed throughout the chapter, see Figure 1.1).Footnote ³⁸

Because of the broad geographic distribution of the churches, and because the social order referenced is by clerical rank and gender (not by Roman social rank), scholars have argued that the litania septiformis “embodied a striking, unequivocal, and uncompromising Christian conceptualization of late antique Roman social structure,” and an evocation of Christian Rome.Footnote ³⁹ That is true to an extent, but the rites were constructed for specific moments and their influence was ephemeral as Gregory’s vision of Rome was clearly not embraced by the Roman clergy immediately after his death.Footnote ⁴⁰ Gregory of Tours reported that the litania of 590 was in response to the devastating floods of 589 that knocked over buildings (aedes, so buildings or temples) in the Campus Martius.Footnote ⁴¹ The litania of 590 shows that Rome had fully retreated to the hills, with only SS. Cosma e Damiano on the plain. Likely much of the dwindling population shifted as well. The litaniae maiores of 592 offered in lieu of the robigalia was, also, probably a response to the flooding and the wet weather that causes the wheat rust that the rite was intended to ward off. By 592, the procession was able to begin at San Lorenzo in Lucina, a sign of recovery at least on the via Lata, if not in the greater Campus. While Gregory’s text suggests that it was an annual rite, eleven years later, in 603, the litania maior was not observed by Gregory on April 25 when he, instead, led the procession from the Lateran to San Cesareo on the Palatine, receiving and installing the icons of the Emperor Phocas. Gregory’s willingness to ignore the litania maior is a sign that the floods and the wars that had brought disease and suffering, including the bubonic plague, had diminished by 603. The litania held in the year following the reception of Phocas’ icons was able to incorporate both the via Lata and Trastevere – a further sign that the Romans had recovered significantly. Sixth-century Rome was a Christian city, and Gregory I led it in great penitential acts, but these were in response to the crisis brought on by the Tiber, and Byzantine control of the city. Gregory’s great liturgies attempted to give meaning to and reshape important local events in his pastoral role as bishop, but Rome was still a recognizably imperial city and the pope, the emperor’s agent. His processions deferred to imperial authority and responded to apocalyptic disaster in the city.Footnote ⁴²

Inventing Papal Rome: Shifting Hills, Moving Bodies, Rebuilding Walls

The political and military instability of the Italian peninsula from the seventh through the ninth centuries created the necessity and the opportunity for the early medieval popes to foster a new identity. Two defensive reactions to that changing landscape fostered a new papal ideology and identity for Rome. The first was the transfer of the relics of saints and martyrs from the catacombs to the walled city itself. The second, and related to the first, was a robust papal building program that reimagined the ancient inheritance of the city, particularly of the Constantinian (as distinct from the Byzantine imperial) legacy as papal, and allowed the popes to deploy that legacy, or transfer it, as a governing strategy. This reimagination of imperial authority was made possible by the remarkable bond formed between the popes and the Carolingian rulers of the mid-eighth through ninth centuries.

The instability in the Mediterranean and on the Italian peninsula of the seventh through ninth centuries was caused, on the one side, by the military expansion and raids of the Lombards in the seventh and eighth centuries that left the Byzantines with increasingly nominal authority in Rome and southern Italy. At nearly the same time, in the southern Mediterranean, Muslim rulers and their armies extended their reach from the Arabian Peninsula and took the city of Carthage in 698. This conquest broke Byzantine control over the strategic Mediterranean choke point between Sicily and the African coast, opening up the possibility of their further military expansion in Sicily, the western Mediterranean, and the Italian peninsula. The distracted and weakened Byzantines were no longer able to enforce their authority in Rome, and this is the background both to Roman resistance to the Byzantine emperor’s attempt to seize and imprison Sergius I (r. 687–701), and John VII’s (r. 705–7) ambitious, if short-lived, building program on the Palatine a few years later.Footnote ⁴³

While Byzantine control of the city weakened in the seventh century, the Palatine was still considered the seat of governing authority and imperium. John VII initiated a plan to locate papal residences, building an episcopum, and to place papal administrative buildings on the Palatine. His sumptuous rebuilding of Santa Maria Antiqua at the entrance to the imperial ramp connecting the Forum to the Palatine was the first step in that plan.Footnote ⁴⁴ John VII originated a plan to directly take the place of the emperor at the imperial complex on the Palatine as the center of Rome. He also began a building campaign that placed himself visually in front of Romans, alongside an image of Maria Regina at Santa Maria Antiqua and in an oratory next to it, as well as at an oratory at Saint Peter’s. John may have been the first pope to embark on such a campaign of self-representation.Footnote ⁴⁵ Politically, he appears to have been the first in a series of popes to depict himself alongside Mary as heavenly intercessor, providing an authority for the papacy independent of Byzantium, or any earthly power.Footnote ⁴⁶ The brevity of his papacy, however, only allowed him to initiate a reimagination of Rome as a papal city. His successors would reimagine the entire Roman imperial legacy, and with it the papacy and the topography of the city. As the Palatine slipped out of significance, the Lateran would gain prominence, and the Domus Laterani became the Romanum Palatium.Footnote ⁴⁷ In the absence of direct Byzantine control, the Constantinian ideal was transferred to an emerging continental dynastic power, the Carolingians. This was not a simple or natural transition in the eighth century. The popes of the eighth and ninth centuries were energetic, visionary, and capable of commanding the resources of the city, but those resources were diminished by external threats and were martialed, at times, despite internal challenges, and their vision of the papacy was articulated often as an ad hoc response to those circumstances.

John VII’s intervention on the Palatine was limited due to his brief reign, but his successors were more fortunate and exercised greater governing authority. Gregory III (r. 731–41) was the first pope in a century to build new, large churches (Santa Maria in Aquiro, SS. Sergio e Bacco, and SS. Marcellino e Pietro), and he may have begun to issue coins in his own name. It was during his reign that a new political authority came to be articulated, Rome as The Republic of Saint Peter.Footnote ⁴⁸ Pope Zachary (r. 741–52) was the last of the so-called “Greek popes” and it is striking that this “Greek” pope would be the one to build dramatic new diplomatic ties on the peninsula and the continent. Zachary negotiated at Terni in 742 with the Lombard King Liutprand to restore lands taken from the duchy of Rome.Footnote ⁴⁹ Zachary also began to reorganize the domus cultae as important agricultural centers of production outside the city.Footnote ⁵⁰ His regional strength was underscored when, in effect, Zachary ultimately confirmed the authority of the Byzantine emperor Constantine V (r. 741–75), who donated significant estates in exchange. The ideological significance may not have been intended by Constantine, but the gift of land would have reflected and enhanced Zachary’s growing status on the peninsula and in the Latin West.Footnote ⁵¹

These diplomatic successes and growth in prestige form the background for the famous overture from Pepin “the short” (749 or 750), and his question to Zachary: whether it was right that the King of the Franks, exercising no power as king, should hold the title of king? We do not need to rehearse the details here. Zachary thought it was not right, and Pepin was elected and anointed king either by Boniface (675–754), the missionary and archbishop, or by other Frankish bishops in 751. “All of this happened ‘on the command of’ or ‘with the approval of’ or ‘on the authority of’ Pope Zachary.”Footnote ⁵² It is impossible to conceive this happening a mere fifty years prior when the Byzantine governing structure was still in place. In Rome, Zachary’s expansion of the Lateran complex reflected the impressive status the Republic of Saint Peter had gained in little more than a generation of independence from Constantinople.Footnote ⁵³ The last of the eastern popes had reoriented Rome. Rome’s new status and independence would be repeatedly challenged in the eighth century, but it would hold.

Zachary’s successor, Stephen II (r. 752–57), crossed the Alps and anointed Pepin (r. 751–68) himself in 754, affirming this novel relationship between pope and king. In Rome, he focused his efforts on building the infrastructure to support the growing number of pilgrims to S. Pietro and the feeding of the poor of the city.Footnote ⁵⁴ His brother and successor, Paul I (r. 757–67), began a process that would transform the sacred topography of the city. Just as his predecessors needed to foster Frankish alliances to address the threat of Lombard powers in the absence of Byzantine forces, Paul also needed to navigate an ever-present Lombard threat. In the last year of his brother’s reign, the Lombard king, Aistulf, had reneged on promises to Pepin at the Treaty of Pavia (755) and laid siege to Rome. Aistulf laid waste to the countryside, cutting several aqueducts and looting several extramural shrines and churches. Pepin returned to northern Italy and wrested still more territory away from the Lombards, granting it to Saint Peter’s Republic – the so-called “Donation of Pepin.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Made acutely aware of the vulnerability of the sacred relics that drew pilgrims to Rome, Paul began to transfer them into the city proper. Paul’s translations were innovative, but limited and targeted. The relics translated to the Monastery of SS. Silvestro e Stefano (now San Silvestro in Capite) reflect the Lombard siege and were taken from the areas of the Lombard encampment.Footnote ⁵⁶ The remains of St. Petronilla, thought to be the daughter of St. Peter and venerated by the new Frankish royal household (as daughter of Rome), received their own oratory at Saint Peter’s.Footnote ⁵⁷ In so doing, Paul was fulfilling a promise his brother had made to Pepin.Footnote ⁵⁸

Paul’s targeted translations were followed by a flood of relics, of church and urban renovation, and of pilgrims into Rome, from the reign of Adrian I (r. 772–95) to Paschal I (r. 817–24). This urban renovation was funded by the papal control over Byzantine–imperial properties outside of the city, Frankish pilgrimage and donations, and the growth of pilgrimage into the city itself, in an economic and ideological cycle that enhanced the authority of papal Rome and the idea of Rome as the Christian capital. Adrian I was a Roman aristocrat whose family lived in the vicinity of present-day Piazza Venezia. He restored or built six diaconae near Saint Peter’s and the Forum for the benefit of the urban poor and poor pilgrims. He transferred relics from outside the city to Santa Maria in Cosmedin, tearing down a temple in the process and building a columbarium-style crypt for the relics, perhaps revealing his own sense of ancient Roman forms.Footnote ⁵⁹ Outside the city, he conducted repairs on S. Pietro, S. Paolo, S. Lorenzo, SS. Marcellino e Pietro. Within the walls, he repaired Santa Maria Maggiore, the Lateran, San Clemente, SS. Apostoli, and San Marco. Liturgical curtains and objects were given to scores more churches. Adrian conducted significant repairs on the city walls themselves and returned four aqueducts to working order: the Aqua Traiana in the west serving the Gianiculum and the Vaticano and its diaconal bath; the Aqua Iobia, in the south, entering the city at the Porta Appia and extending to the Ripa Graeca (near S. Maria in Cosmedin); in the east, the Aqua Claudia entering the city by the Lateran and extending onto the Caelian and Palatine hills; and in the north, the Aqua Virgo, entering the city from the Pincian Hill and extending to the Campus Martius.Footnote ⁶⁰ These were not minor repairs; new lead pipes needed to be manufactured and installed and new arched bays built. The rural labor forces of the newly organized and expanded domuscultae needed to be mobilized to conduct the bulk of the work.Footnote ⁶¹ If one considers the churches that the popes of the eighth and ninth centuries worked on or built, and compares them with the zones served by the repaired aqueducts, one gets the picture of a broadly occupied, if lightly populated city.

Pope Stephen II, his brother Paul, and Adrian were all Roman elites by birth and family authority went along with Roman and papal ideology and governance. Leo III (r. 795–816), however, while Roman by birth, had risen up through the papal service and his family was from Apulia, and possibly of Greek or Arab descent. His building campaigns in the city continued in the same spirit as Adrian’s, but they also reflected his need, as an outsider, to assert the ideological relationship between Rome and empire, between pope and imperium. Leo would survive two uprisings from the Roman aristocracy. The first, in 799, led by Adrian’s family, and a second in 815 that Leo would forcefully suppress. It was the need to underscore this still relatively novel papal authority locally in the absence of aristocratic lineage that led to two of the most striking statements of papal authority from the period. First, Leo’s triclinium (banquet hall) apse mosaic (still visible, heavily restored and relocated across from the Lateran) depicted Leo and Charlemagne receiving their authority from St. Peter. It may well have also included Peter and Constantine receiving authority from Christ (as in the restoration), a clear allusion to the Donation of Constantine.Footnote ⁶² The Donation was most likely invented in the generation prior to Leo’s reign, and created a neat and ancient history for the sloppy transition between Byzantine and papal Rome.Footnote ⁶³ As a diplomatic document it was left unused, even though it may have been conceived as a statement of Roman authority against Ravenna.Footnote ⁶⁴ Leo’s triclinium mosaic is one of the clearest assertions of the Donation’s ideals in the immediate aftermath of its invention.Footnote ⁶⁵ The triclinium itself was part of a large expansion of the Lateran complex undertaken by Leo. His major triclinium was intended to invoke the imperial palace at Constantinople.Footnote ⁶⁶ Two of the great symbols of Rome, the bronze statue of the she-wolf and the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius (thought to be Constantine I) were moved to the exterior of the Lateran complex, in the Campus Lateranensis. The triclinium, the Lateran palace, and these artifacts were all intended to signify the transfer of authority from the Roman Empire to the Roman pontiffs. They reframed the eighth-century growth of papal Rome as a divinely ordained fourth-century transfer of authority. The message was intended for visiting diplomats, dignitaries, clergy, and even pilgrims. As importantly, it was aimed at the Roman populace itself, elements of which twice tried to kill Leo. Leo’s triclinium emphasized apostolic succession, that Leo and Charlemagne had received their authority from Peter, as Peter had received it from Christ. Although Leo did not invent the Donation, Leo publicized its new and fragile ideology to sustain his authority (and his life) at home and to project power abroad.

The attempt on Leo’s life in 799 provides an interesting view into the social, religious, and political topography of Carolingian Rome. Once again, we find ourselves at the litania maior. The litania maior in the eighth century, according to the Hadrianum, was to begin at San Lorenzo in Lucina, presumably proceed north along the via Lata, and exit through the Porta Flaminia towards the Milvian Bridge where it would return towards S. Pietro.Footnote ⁶⁷ This neighborhood, extending south from San Lorenzo in Lucina to San Silvestro in Capite along the via Lata, was not only the upper end of the property market in the eighth and ninth centuries, it was also the stronghold of what had been, in effect, a papal dynasty.Footnote ⁶⁸ Paul I, brother of Stephen II, had transferred the relics of St. Stephen and Pope Sylvester to their home, dedicating it to SS. Silvestro e Stefano (now San Silvestro in Capite). Paul connected the relics of the proto-martyr Stephen with the name of his brother and the great Constantinian pope Sylvester I and localized both in the family compound, now a sacred site. Adrian I, likewise came from the Roman elite of the via Lata, albeit further south and closer to S. Marco and the Capitoline. Theodotus, Adrian’s uncle, raised Adrian after his father died, and had served as primicerius, that is lay administrator of the Roman church, and can even be seen alongside Pope Zachary in a dedicatory image in S. Maria Antiqua.Footnote ⁶⁹ Paul I had recruited Adrian into the clergy, and appointed him regionary notary and subdeacon, likely for these connections.Footnote ⁷⁰ Positioning the children of the Roman military aristocracy within the papal government may have been Paul’s strategy to circumvent Lombard control over the election of the pope. Upon his own election, Adrian likewise moved against pro-Lombard elements within Rome.Footnote ⁷¹

It was through this neighborhood along the via Lata, among the Roman military aristocratic elite who had been dominating papal life for a generation, that Leo III traveled to commence the litania maior. He was greeted by two of Adrian’s relatives, both well positioned within the Roman clerical ranks: Paschalis, primicerius, and Campalis, sacellarius.Footnote ⁷² Paschalis made a show of apologizing for not wearing his clerical vestments and used the pretext to seize Leo with his accomplices and drag him to San Silvestro in Capite. The overall events are well known, and I will only highlight certain aspects of them.Footnote ⁷³ First, this was an effort by a faction of the Roman elite to remove Leo from power violently. Leo was not nobly born and not even from a Roman family. If the litania maior followed earlier forms, then the people of Rome would have proceeded by rank. Such a display, with a social lesser at its head, may have been too much and provided an occasion for the Roman aristocratic and papal elite to reassert their status. Surprisingly, they did not choose to hold Leo at San Silvestro. Instead, they took him to the opposite end of the city to S. Erasmo, next to the Aqua Claudia, near Santo Stefano Rotondo on the Caelian Hill, possibly to enable their exit through the Porta Metronia.

Rome at this time was a city of around 30,000 souls and sections of the city were more like small rural communities.Footnote ⁷⁴ Sant’Erasmo was a Greek monastery in just such a semi-rural section of the city, supported by water from the Aqua Claudia. Pope Adeodatus (r. 672–76) was from Sant’Erasmo and supported it by expanding its agricultural holdings.Footnote ⁷⁵ It appeared again in the documentary evidence of the ninth and tenth centuries, still comprised of orchards, vineyards, and small gardens.Footnote ⁷⁶ In short, it had little to recommend it apart from its remoteness and obscurity, and this may suggest that Paschalis and Campalis had too little support among the Roman aristocracy to hold Leo in so prominent a location as the via Lata. If Leo’s kidnappers thought the remoteness of Sant’Erasmo allowed them to hide or make a quick escape, they miscalculated. Albinus, Leo’s chamberlain, was able to secrete Leo out of the monastery under the cover of darkness, lowering him over the wall.Footnote ⁷⁷ While Leo would ultimately give gifts to both San Silvestro and S. Erasmo, gifts to the latter are so rare that it may suggest the monks enabled his escape in some way.Footnote ⁷⁸ If we follow Einhard’s account, Albinus took Leo to Spoleto immediately to await the arrival of Charlemagne and reinforcements. If we follow the account in the Liber pontificalis, Leo rested first at Saint Peter’s. Then, while Albinus escorted the pope to Spoleto, the conspirators attacked Albinus’ home and property – a reminder of their intramural power. Charlemagne’s arrival, however, was a clear indication of how much larger the papacy had become in the preceding century, and Leo’s coronation of Charlemagne as “emperor of the Romans” at Christmas 800 put a fine touch on Leo’s return to power.

We can learn several important points about Rome at the beginning of the ninth century from these events. First, in a city as large but as lightly populated as medieval Rome, different sections of the city had very different lives and, while agriculture was spread throughout the city, different areas had different population densities. The southern part of the city was a bit wilder and more rural than the comparatively “high end” area of the via Lata. Second, the detail of Paschalis arriving “improperly dressed” in the attire of a lay, military aristocrat rather than in clerical vestments serves as a reminder of the fluidity of these identities in Carolingian Rome. Third, while the Carolingian popes attempted to assert their authority across the peninsula, the Mediterranean, and into the continent, they needed first of all to articulate their authority within and to the city of Rome. Leo’s triclinium, and probably even the Donation of Constantine itself, was as much aimed at the Roman elite who saw it regularly, as it was at the visiting dignitaries and pilgrims from abroad; perhaps more so.

The Carolingian popes, from Paul to Leo III, focused on restoring churches broadly across the city and bringing relics from the catacombs and their churches into the relative safety of the city walls. They created, at the Lateran palace and Saint Peter’s especially, a ruling ideology to replace Byzantine authority. Shifting the locus of sanctity to the city while fostering an imperial ideology transformed Rome into a papal city, the seat of the Republic of Saint Peter, and also a city of saints, a sacred city, a new Jerusalem.Footnote ⁷⁹ This reimagined and rebuilt topography could be projected outward. At Fulda, in the second half of the eighth and ninth centuries, a new monastery was built; its church was designed in imitation of Saint Peter’s and intended to house the remains of St. Boniface, “apostle to the Germans.” Rome was likewise evoked architecturally, liturgically, poetically, and topographically through the compilation of Einsiedeln. The ninth-century codex copied out, likely from materials brought back to the monastery in the eighth century, a mixture of pre-Christian and Christian Roman inscriptions and poetry, as well as a series of pilgrimage itineraries through the city. The Einsiedeln itineraries reveal that the sacrality of Rome was now intramural. It also reveals that an idealized Rome, a mixture of imperial and sacred authority, had been articulated in Rome and transported across the Alps.Footnote ⁸⁰ In turn, the pilgrim’s gaze was also shaping the city.

Paschal I (r. 817–24) situated his efforts on building churches from the ground up: Santa Prassede (Esquiline), Santa Maria in Domnica (Caelian), and Santa Cecilia (Trastevere). His projects of reorganization of local property control, large-scale restoration and rebuilding, and sumptuous artistic campaigns emphasizing both the saints’ presence in the city and the pope’s role in the churches’ foundations, were all located at major arteries and dense habitation in the city and intended to attract maximum attention.Footnote ⁸¹ His majestic mosaic triumphal arches within these churches, no less than Leo’s triclinium, reinforced the message of Rome as imperial and as heavenly Jerusalem.Footnote ⁸² Paschal would bring another two thousand saintly bodies into the city at these churches and others, including Saint Peter’s.Footnote ⁸³ This was also a pragmatic decision. The port city of Centumcellae (modern Civitavecchia) north of Rome had largely been destroyed by “Saracen” raiders in 813 despite the efforts of Gregory III (r. 731–41) to rebuild its walls, even as he had reinforced Rome’s defenses. Paschal made only a feeble gesture towards Centumcellae, but his rapid escalation of the translation of relics must be understood in this fragile context.Footnote ⁸⁴

It was Leo IV (r. 847–55) who would finally attempt to secure the area. “For forty years [Centumcellae] had remained with its walls destroyed and abandoned by its occupants [who] left … for fear of the Saracens [and] set up their dwellings in woodland glades and untracked mountains.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Leo built a new city in a more defensible location and, in imperial fashion, named it after himself, “Leopolis.”Footnote ⁸⁶ It was twelve miles inland and no substitute for a port city, but demonstrates both the seriousness of the threats and Leo’s ability to martial the labor and resources for a significant building campaign. More impressive, of course, was Leo’s construction of a nearly two-mile wall around S. Pietro incorporating portions of the Vaticano and Gianiculum hills, incorporating Castel Sant’Angelo as the wall extended to the Tiber. This was in response to the success of a Saracen raiding party in the year prior to Leo’s reign. That raid quickly moved past defenses in Ostia, and reached as far as S. Paolo and S. Pietro, which were both stripped of precious objects.Footnote ⁸⁷ In 849, Leo, already constructing the defenses around S. Pietro as well as two chained towers flanking the Tiber near the Porta Portuensis, was able to martial a more robust response and repel a second raid at Ostia.Footnote ⁸⁸ That would prove the last raid from Arab Ifriqyia directly on Rome, but the threat in Lazio and the memory of it lingered. Above one gate to the Civitas Leonina, an inscription declared Rome, “the head of the world, its splendor, its hope.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Later, John VIII (r. 872–82) would build a walled city around S. Paolo – Iohannipolis. In the later ninth century, the popes were learning to hold and defend their republic without their Frankish allies crossing the Alps.

For two centuries, Rome had a series of energetic and enterprising popes who were able to navigate the shifting political landscape of the European continent, the Italian peninsula, and the Mediterranean all the while asserting their leadership of the city of Rome and of the Republic of St. Peter. I have emphasized the tenuousness of that local control and the reactive nature of many of their most famous projects. In fits and starts, however, they created a new imperium, refashioning the ancient legacy, inventing it as a gift from Constantine, and, as importantly, a new ideal of Rome, as a city of saints protected by the Queen of Heaven, the new Jerusalem. It was not a given that these ideas and ideals would outlive the moments that necessitated them. Indeed, for nearly two centuries from the tenth to the eleventh century, Rome was dominated by powerful families and new construction in the city was largely theirs. In the later eleventh century, a new generation would rediscover, reimagine, and redeploy the ideas from the height of the Carolingian popes.

Reform and Renaissance of the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries: Projecting and Resisting Papal Rome

Papal Rome is an idea about sacred authority applied to a physical space; the idea draws its power from that place by reimagining and reconstructing its history and meaning. It is larger than the simple act of the Bishop of Rome exercising governing authority in the city as other bishops did in the Latin West. While the popes of the tenth and eleventh centuries exercised that authority, the scope, interests, and roots of their authority were more narrowly of the city. This is not to create a negative view of the city. As Chris Wickham has emphasized, Rome had much in common with other cities of central and northern Italy: notably a powerful episcopal office dominated by aristocratic or elite local families. It had certain advantages as well: it was surrounded by a productive and stable ring of agriculture, immediately of largely ecclesiastical or monastic holdings, and much further out by seigneurial holdings in the Castelli and the villages that arose during the tenth- and eleventh-century incastellamento of the countryside.Footnote ⁹⁰ The area closer to the city, the agro Romano, extending from 5 to 20 kilometers from the city, was owned by urban churches and monasteries and produced grain. The lands immediately around the city was given over to vineyards, with some areas specializing in salt production (in the area of Ostia). These ecclesiastical lands were largely leased back to aristocratic families and so production was both stable and valuable. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, Rome was the largest city in Italy, and in Europe, apart from Constantinople.Footnote ⁹¹ Medieval Rome was flourishing, but from the vantage of papal Rome, it was a period of upheaval. Beginning in the late ninth century and through the tenth century, multiple popes were killed, deposed, or both (John VIII, r. 872–82; Boniface VI, r. 896; Stephen VII, r. 896–97; John X, r. 914–28; John XII, r. 955–63; Benedict V, r. 964; Benedict VI, r. 973–74). The scope of the papacy had narrowed.

The idea of papal Rome, however, still held a powerful place in imaginations outside of Rome itself in the tenth century, as at Fulda, where its monastic church was stylized after S. Pietro, or at the Abbey of Cluny, with its dedication to St. Peter, its architecture, and its structural organization recognizing the authority of the pope (rather than its benefactor).Footnote ⁹² Perhaps most importantly, the link between papal authority and Roman imperium remained alive in the imagination of the would-be successors of Charlemagne. It led Otto III (r. 996–1002) to invade Rome, defeat and behead Crescentius “II,” the self-styled omnium Romanorum Senator. Otto attempted to install his relative Gregory V as pope in 998, and to create for himself an imperial seat on the Palatine Hill – a vision of restored empire that Wickham memorably describes as, “so stupid, and so innovative, and so grandiose.”Footnote ⁹³

Inside the city of Rome, the early eleventh-century papacy was dominated by the elites, notably the Crescentii and the Tusculani, who ruled the city directly.Footnote ⁹⁴ Eleventh-century Rome experienced the demographic and economic expansion that was transforming Europe and the Mediterranean. While reliable population figures are hard to provide, Rome would ultimately expand to somewhere between forty and eighty thousand people by the thirteenth century.Footnote ⁹⁵ Rome was transformed by new families of growing prominence and wealth, and the development of new regiones. The Tusculani and the Crescentii gradually withdrew from the city, becoming rural powers, and new families dominated the growing city. There were the Papareschi in Trastevere, the family of Innocent II (r. 1130–43).Footnote ⁹⁶ On the opposite bank of the Tiber was the Pierleoni, the family of Pope Anacletus II (antipope 1130–38), Innocent’s rival.Footnote ⁹⁷ The Corsi held land in multiple sections of the city, but an important branch of the family dominated the Ripa to the south of the Pierleoni. They would support Innocent against Anacletus.Footnote ⁹⁸ To the east of the Pierleoni were the Frangipane, also supporters of Innocent. The Frangipane dominated the area around the Colosseum, which they partially fortified.Footnote ⁹⁹ They also had properties near the Lateran, on the Monti near Santa Prassede, San Gregorio on the Caelian, extending south to the area by the Septizodium and the southern end of the Circus Maximus. A wedge of the city from the Porta San Giovanni to the Porta Appia to the Roman Forum was dominated by the Frangipane. The Astaldi were also “al Coloseo,” and families overlapped in many different areas of the city.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The San Eustachio lived near the church of the same name near the Pantheon.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The Cencii held a tight hold near the Ponte San Pietro, perhaps too tight, as their efforts to control the area ultimately led to their ouster from the city after they seized and briefly held Gregory VII prisoner.Footnote ¹⁰² In the twelfth century, we find the Boboni (later renamed the Orsini) in the area of Campus Martius. The archaeological record reflects the preceding areas as the areas of growth in the city in the eleventh and twelfth centuries as well.Footnote ¹⁰³ In the twelfth century, these new families would expand their holdings into the agro Romano.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

These same families would ultimately vie for control of the papacy, as my allusion to the conflict between the Papareschi Innocent and the Pierleoni Anacletus makes clear. In 1044, however, these new families appear to have joined together to end a generation of Tuscolan family dominance of the papacy, ousting Benedict IX (although he would continue to fight for control of the city). It is impossible to distinguish whether this was motivated by the ideals of the reform, or if they simply found common cause with the reformers in the circle of the Roman monk Hildebrand, but it would lead to a new, bolder reimagining of papal Rome.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The ouster of Benedict provided an opportunity for King Henry III (r. 1028–56), not yet crowned emperor, to travel to Rome and resolve the matter. Henry deposed Benedict and other claimants to the papal title at Sutri in 1046 and appointed the first in a series of popes of his choosing: Clement II (r. 1046–47). Henry ultimately appointed his relative, Bruno, Bishop of Toul, as Leo IX (r. 1049–54). Leo’s insistence on the acclamation of the Roman people and clergy provided him much needed legitimacy in the city, as an outsider.

The contest over the investiture of the bishops and the controversies around the reform of the Church would shape much of the next century of Roman, European, and Mediterranean history and cannot be minimized. There is a tremendous amount of scholarship on these events and ideas, and much of it is fraught as it relates to both the origins of the academic discipline of history and the formation of the German and Italian states in the nineteenth century (as observed in the introduction). The importance of the contest in the history of papal Rome in the Middle Ages is central, but distinct. On the one hand, the end of the Tuscolan papacy and Henry III’s appointment of a string of non-Romans as popes is rooted in an ideal of Rome that lived outside of Rome. Henry had been recognized as King of Italy for seven years, but needed to be crowned emperor by a pope “whose authority and moral standing was unassailable.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ It was the idea of papal Rome as granter of imperial authority that necessitated Henry’s intervention and the appointment of non-Romans.

From the appointment of Leo IX, “the Papacy became a living, ever present reality for all Christians.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Nearly every pope following for more than a century would come from outside of Rome. Moreover, Leo and his successors to Paschal II (r. 1099–1118) would spend most of their papacies outside of the city for a variety of reasons: some preferred their own episcopal or abbatial seat, others were not safe in the city due to local Roman and imperial support for a rival. The latter especially became an opportunity for a new itinerant model of the papacy, holding synods and councils not only in Rome, but along the length of the Italian peninsula and on the continent with a breadth and regularity that had never been seen before.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ While papal Rome was hardly a physical reality in the second half of the eleventh century and papal interventions into the physical fabric of the city were exceedingly rare, it was growing more powerful as an ideal. Possibly the height of the disparity between ideal and reality occurred during the reign of Gregory VII (r. 1073–85). The so-called Dicatus Papae, which appear in the papal registry of 1075, are twenty-seven principles that sketch Gregory’s understanding of papal authority. They are a mixture of older and new ideas stated and organized with a novel and bold clarity.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The Dictatus begins with the Roman Church’s divinely ordained authority (Canon 1) and universal authority of the Roman Pontifex (Canons 2–7). The text clearly echoes elements of the Donation as well, in that the pope alone controls the imperial insignia and authority (Canons 8–12).Footnote ¹¹⁰ This was a legal rhetoric created to convince clergy and rulers of an unchanging history of the Roman Church’s authority.Footnote ¹¹¹

Even as he asserted this sweeping authority, however, Gregory was dependent on his regional allies (reliably Matilda of Canossa, and less reliably Robert Guiscard) to keep him safe from Henry IV and his Roman allies. Less than ten years after the Dictatus, Robert Guiscard invaded Rome to push out imperial forces and liberate Gregory VII from Castel Sant’ Angelo.Footnote ¹¹² While the contemporary chronicles paint a dark picture of the destructive force unleashed on the entire city by Guiscard’s forces, the archaeology of the last twenty years continues to underline significant fire damage at, but limited to, SS. Quattro Coronati. It must have been an awful sight to see the fortified sacred place burning, high on the Caelian, in between the Colosseum and the Lateran, and it clearly made an impression in the historical record. But the historical record exaggerates the actual damage done to the city. The chroniclers were framing the events in the language of classical histories of wars in Rome. William of Apulia casts Robert Guiscard as conqueror of the “armies of the city of Romulus,” the “Roman Empire’s highest ruler,” and “that German king.” With a nod to Robert’s brother Roger, William declares, “Not since Charlemagne or the age of the Caesars has any land produced the equal to these brothers.”Footnote ¹¹³ The memory of ancient Rome and its Carolingian transformation shapes the chronicler’s understanding of the events on the contemporary landscape and how those events reflected legitimate ruling authority. While Gregory, through his alliance with Robert (and Matilda who battered Henry’s forces as he fled), was able to assert the ideal model of Charlemagne defending the papacy, that he needed to do so against forces within the city exposes the tenuousness of his position in spite of the universalizing claims of the Dictatus.

Before he became Pope Gregory, Hildebrand had been allied with these same families in the crisis years of 1044–46 that launched the reforming movement to prominence, but something had clearly changed by 1084. Tensions may have begun as early as the reforming initiatives of Leo IX that reduced the direct financial benefit Romans received from church positions. For example, Leo and Gregory sought to offer direct ecclesiastical support to the pilgrims to Rome and, in turn, to control the collection of their pious donations (as well as the donations from abroad). This provided the papal administration with greater revenues, even as it cut out the “semi-lay” mansonarii (sacristans) of Saint Peter’s.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Likewise, the direct control of ecclesiastical property by clergy led to a decline in significant land donations to a church or monastery. Prior to these reforms, as we have seen in the case of SS. Silvestro e Stefano, giving family property to an urban monastery was a way to secure familial control over the property and its revenues, rather than see the property broken up through inheritance. The reforms, however, meant that such donations and their revenues were out of the control of the families. This led to two changes in Rome: first, the end of partible inheritance and the rise of agnatic inheritance patterns. Second, the consolidation of urban properties led to the creation of fortified urban compounds with towers to protect them. While properties in Rome had previously stood apart from one another, increasingly they were connected. Although it would not be until the thirteenth century that population pressure led to connected houses and buildings fronts on the street.Footnote ¹¹⁵ This change in property types was beginning in the eleventh century but accelerated in the twelfth no doubt in response to the efforts of Henry IV, Robert Guiscard, and then Henry V, to take the city, as well as changing inheritance patterns.

At the start of his papacy, Cencio di Stefano kidnapped Gregory VII during the Christmas evening procession between S. Pietro and Santa Maria Maggiore and held him in his tower at the Ponte S. Pietro, a fortress that allowed him to excise a toll on pilgrims to S. Pietro.Footnote ¹¹⁶ In short, Gregory’s efforts to end such lay practices as the collection of pilgrims’ donations ultimately led to increased urban incastellamento and weakened local support for the reforms themselves. The attack by Cencio, while roundly defeated, was perhaps a first sign of the growing tensions. Henry IV’s repeated campaigns to take the city and oust Gregory tested loyalties and strained papal resources, and reduced papal munificence within the city. When Henry finally took the city and installed Guibert of Ravenna as Clement III (r. 1080–1100) in 1084, he followed this with generous gifts to the Romans (possibly the restoration of a public festival) and support for Gregory finally collapsed.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Guiscard’s defeat of Henry and his Roman supporters was decisive, but papal governance of the city in its aftermath was increasingly “informal.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ Even as Urban II (r. 1088–99) was rousing knights to “liberate” Jerusalem at Clermont, or holding synods reaffirming investiture and excommunicating Clement’s ordained clergy, neither Urban nor Clement (even though he controlled papal revenues) could govern effectively enough to build or rebuild a church in the city.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The Roman elites continued to build towers and fortify their holdings in the city. By the thirteenth century, Rome would have close to two hundred familial towers, and the city at a distance appeared to the visitor, in the words of Master Gregory, “a field of towers.”Footnote ¹²⁰

In 1099, Paschal II (r. 1099–1118) succeeded both Urban II and Clement III, regained control of the city, and launched what we can now appreciate as a truly remarkable period of urban transformation. In something of a damnatio memoriae, a cardinal close to Paschal, Anastasius, filled in what is now the lower church of San Clement that had been restored during the reign of Clement III.Footnote ¹²¹ The new apse mosaic presented an idealized vision of the Church, referencing Roman traditions, both Byzantine and Carolingian, while simultaneously presenting a reformed model of the Church.Footnote ¹²² At the top of the triumphal arch that frames the apse are the winged creatures of Revelation, each with their Gospel, flanking Christos Pantokrator. Paul and Laurence, Peter and Clement are seated at the top of either side of the arch, ideal prelates of Rome. Twelve sheep process from the bejeweled cities of Jerusalem and Bethlehem at the bottom of the frame, the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah above them. At the center, the crucifixion restores the Edenic paradise of scrolling vines, inhabited by Latin Church “Fathers” dressed in the garb of reformed clergy and lay people peacefully pursuing their agricultural labor. Different Roman epigraphic scripts and colors are used to subtly direct the viewer.Footnote ¹²³ It is a much-studied wonder of twelfth-century mosaic art, capturing salvation history from the garden of Eden, through the Old Testament prophets, the crucifixion, resurrection, apostolic succession, the ecclesiastical reform of society, and all sweeping inexorably to the triumphant, bejeweled heavenly city.Footnote ¹²⁴

This allegory was being enacted on the ground. Further up the Caelian, Paschal rebuilt SS. Quattro Coronati. Below San Clemente, in the Forum, Sant’Adriano was rebuilt substantially, as was S. Bartolomeo on the island, Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, San Lorenzo in Lucina, and Paschal dedicated the small, but possibly new church of Santa Maria in Monticelli. The reformers of the previous generation had established church construction and dedication (with the deposition of relics) as a symbolically rich and consciously deployed enactment of the reform of the Church.Footnote ¹²⁵ Francesco Guidobaldi has observed the level of man-made fill in the early twelfth century and its coincidence with the building campaign of Paschal II. It now appears that Paschal II and other early twelfth-century popes were engaged in an effort to level significant portions of the city’s streets at S. Clemente, in the Forum, and in the area of Santa Maria in Monticelli (whose name might suggest the infill on which it was built). These areas not only coincide with Paschal’s building campaigns, but map closely with papal processional routes.Footnote ¹²⁶ Paschal and, likely at least some of, his immediate successors were engaged not only in a revival of ancient forms (as in the apse mosaic of San Clemente, or Innocent II’s Santa Maria in Trastevere), but in a major transformation of urban infrastructure that involved the burial of ancient remains.Footnote ¹²⁷ At San Crisogono in Trastevere, the original church was filled to a level of about 4.5 meters to stabilize the flood-prone area and allow for a new church to be built. At San Clemente, the ground was raised some 5 meters to build the new church on top of its predecessor.Footnote ¹²⁸ That these changes in infrastructure reflect papal processionals reveals the link between the revived ideal of papal Rome, papal ritual, and the transformation of the physical topography of the city.

Even as the ground rose beneath their feet, Romans watched the city grow closer to the sky. The construction of bell towers rivaled the construction of familial towers in the twelfth century. The Antonio Tempesta plan of Rome from 1593 shows close to one hundred of the distinctive Romanesque towers. Today, thirty-five remain, and all have been dated from 1100 to 1250.Footnote ¹²⁹ The towers represent a transformation of Rome’s acoustic landscape to rival the transformation of the physical landscape. They announced the city’s ecclesiastical, holy character in contrast to its increasingly militarized skyline (although some of the bell towers, at least, could have served a security function). At least four of the bell towers included a new feature: a small edicola, with some image of its saint (as most clearly visible at Santa Maria in Trastevere, but with extant frames at Santa Maria Nova, San Gregorio, and Santa Croce). These singing shrines are harder still to date with precision and may be later additions to the bell towers. This transformation and the mix of Islamic pottery and Roman marbles that decorate them deserve closer attention in the scholarship.Footnote ¹³⁰

From Paschal II to Innocent II, the reform papacy and its supporters remade the city of Rome in a profound manner. In the early twelfth century, papal processions moved through a growing city, with clear regiones, fortified family compounds, church and family towers rivaling each other for airspace, stepping along raised, rebuilt, and leveled ground. Papal Rome at its apex presented an ideal that attracted readings of it, an effort to integrate its history, ritual, and infrastructure into a coherent whole. Benedict, a canon of Saint Peter’s, attempted the task first. The Mirabilia urbis Romae was composed towards the end of the reign of Innocent II. The work asserts a coherence to the topography of the city beginning with its walls, hills, baths, palaces, theaters, bridges, monuments, as well as the catacombs and places of ancient martyrdom. In short, Benedict begins with the ancient inheritance, almost entirely pre-Christian. From there, his narrative appears to be less coherent, hopscotching across the city describing ancient monuments and contemporary landmarks (churches and family towers) with mythic history. The Mirabilia comes to us collected with papal ceremonial texts and is best understood in that context.Footnote ¹³¹ The monuments Benedict chose for detailed description almost always coincide with important papal processional routes. Benedict presents an ideal of papal Rome as Christian capitol, inheriting and governing the ancient Roman Empire. Rome precedes Jerusalem through Augustus’ vision of Christ’s birth at the imperial palace (not on the Palatine, according to Benedict, but on the Capitoline at Santa Maria in Aracoeli), through conquest under Titus, and his transference of the Temple treasures to Rome, as well as through the Empress Eudoxia’s gift of San Pietro in Vincoli on the Kalends of August.Footnote ¹³²

If we return one final time to the litania maior, by the twelfth century it was divided into separate processions, both focused on the corridor that connects San Giovanni Laterano, the Capitoline, and Saint Peter’s. The clergy and people of Rome gathered at S. Marco and processed to Saint Peter’s. Meanwhile, the pope said Mass at the Lateran and processed with the schola cantorum to the Colosseum and the Arch of Titus, past Santa Maria Nova, to San Marco, then to Saint Peter’s (see Figure 1.1).Footnote ¹³³ There he distributed largesse to the Roman people and received gifts, likely from the offerings of pilgrims. The simplified, stabilized, entirely intramural route suggests the ritual coherence of the city as does the increasing use of the phrase “via sacra” to describe the path through the Forum.Footnote ¹³⁴

The End of Medieval Papal Rome

“The pope you are seeking has fled …. We are Romans, like you.”Footnote ¹³⁵ Paschal II’s reign initiated a period of far greater papal presence in Rome, greater papal independence, greater ritual cohesion, and greater papal intervention into the fabric of the city than had been seen in more than a century, but there were signs that these bold transformations met resistance. This is not surprising because significant rituals are prone to volatility. In the crisis with Henry V in 1111, Paschal’s compromise position on investiture caused the staunch reformer and ritual exegete, Bruno of Segni (c.1045–1123), to turn on Paschal and even step away from his most assertive readings of the significance of papal vestments and rites.Footnote ¹³⁶ Paschal would even be stoned by supporters of the Pierleoni candidate for Urban Prefect during the Easter Monday procession as he processed both from and back to Saint Peter’s.Footnote ¹³⁷ It is telling that this dissent came at the appointment of the Urban Prefect and offers us a glimpse of what would come.

The tension between the ideal of papal authority that the reformers projected and enhanced and the realities of local Roman authority continued after Paschal’s death. In 1118, the Frangipane briefly kidnapped the newly elected Gelasius II (r. 1118–19). In July of the same year, the Frangipane moved against him again as Henry V’s last pope held S. Pietro. Gelasius made the mistake of agreeing to celebrate the feast of Santa Prassede at her church, this was Frangipane Rome (in fortis Fraipanum).Footnote ¹³⁸ Members of the Normanni and Crescentii families chose to accompany Gelasius because of the obvious danger, and the Frangipane did indeed attack the church, launching projectiles and firing arrows. The Normanni and Crescentii held the Frangipane off while Gelasius fled the city. In Pandulf’s account, Stefano Normanni appealed to the Frangipane, “What are you doing? Where are you attacking? The pope you are looking for has already gone, he has escaped. Surely you don’t want to destroy us? We are Romans, like you, and if we can say, your family.”Footnote ¹³⁹ The Frangipane quit the battle at this reminder of both their intermarriage and their common Roman identity. This too had emerged, or become more powerful, in the conflict between emperors and popes and the frequent battles to control the city, a sense of Roman identity independent of either pope or emperor.

In 1143, a dying Innocent II, himself a member of the powerful Papareschi of Trastevere, and after more than a decade of firm rule of the city, granted generous terms to the routed Tivolesi. A Roman revolt followed: the minor nobility, “the mercantile, manufacturing and professional classes,” declared the revival of the Roman Senate, with fifty-six senators, chosen from among “a few hundred families,” and the Roman commune was born.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Within a decade, the commune was taking on major building campaigns in and around the city, beginning with its infrastructure, the Milvian Bridge, the Aurelian walls. By the thirteenth century, the commune established the Magistri edificorum Urbis: three magistrates who regulated all public building and sanitation, “all questions pertaining to the buildings, walls, houses, streets and piazzas and boundaries” of Rome. In the thirteenth century, churches brought their property disputes to these civil magistrates. While a powerful pope like Innocent III (r. 1198–1216) might build and restore great churches, he could no longer weave the entire cityscape into a narrative of his own, ancient authority. Rome was the city of the popes, but Rome now stood apart from them, redeploying the rhetoric of antiquity, Senatus populusque Romani.Footnote ¹⁴¹

The Future of Medieval Papal Rome

New evidence, new questions, or new methods are needed to open up new insights into the Middle Ages, particularly an area so closely studied and with such a rich historiographical tradition as medieval Rome and the papacy. New questions and new methods are of vital importance as we rarely discover new and significant primary evidence. Rome, however, has been exceptional in this regard as new archaeological discoveries have transformed our understanding of the medieval city, revealing a more vibrant, more commercial city than we had previously understood. These have combined with new art historical methods and occasions of restoration, as at SS. Quatro Coronati and Santa Maria in Aracoeli.Footnote ¹⁴² More remains to be discovered as modern techniques allow us to peer behind or peel back Renaissance and Baroque encrustations of medieval spaces, and, if occasion and resources permit significant archaeological efforts (particularly in the areas of medieval Trastevere), these will ignite their own sets of possibilities. There is more to be done to fully integrate the current archaeology into new narratives of medieval papal Rome. In the meantime, new methods are being developed employing computational tools to build, analyze, and visualize large data sets. The use of geographic information systems is enabling both a systematic revision of Lanciani and a purpose-built medieval Forma urbis by Nicoletta Giannini.Footnote ¹⁴³ As these geographic databases grow to include textual evidence, a more integrated, more nuanced portrait of the city will continue to emerge (as can be seen in the innovative analysis of Francesco Guidobaldi, discussed above). These approaches will help us to better analyze the connections in Rome’s documentary remains, rich medieval artistic heritage, ritual practice (and the crowds that gathered for these rites), topography, and social change.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Likewise, computational tools will allow us to better understand the social networks and relationships that were fundamental to premodern institutions.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Perhaps most important are the areas of study missing from, or barely alluded to, in this chapter: women and religious minorities of medieval Rome. Women are named in a variety of textual and visual evidence, as patrons and leaders, with titles fundamental to Roman society, even senatrix and episcopa. The women of Rome need greater study in their own right. Likewise, the Greek communities of medieval Rome: how long and in what manner did they persist? The twelfth-century Mirabilia references the schola graecorum; what was its size and identity? More challenging, but no less in need of study, are the Jews of Rome, one of the most ancient Jewish communities in the world. When Benjamin of Tudela passed through the city he found a small community “of honorable position,” but one with its own rich sense of the city and its history.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Most challenging, but almost certainly a part of Roman life, would be to study the Africans and Muslims who intersected with the city. We know trade took place, as clearly as we can see the Arabic terra cotta in twelfth-century campanile, we know that there were Muslim communities in southern Italy, and we have tantalizing family names (such as Africanus or Saraceno).Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Gregory VII certainly understood Islam well enough to offer a grateful prayer for a Muslim ruler who allowed for a certain freedom of the Church in Africa. “We beseech that God himself will bring you … into the blessedness of the bosom of the most holy patriarch Abraham,” Gregory replied to an-Nāşir, King of Mauretania (r. 1062–88/89) at his request for approval of the election of the bishop Servandus.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Were there boundaries between these communities and Christian Roman society? Almost certainly, but what did they look like? What exchanges took place? Were they direct, or were they at a remove? The recent transformation of our understanding of the Muslim communities in Norman Italy suggests the possibilities.

Archaeology will continue to provide richer evidence for the vibrancy of medieval Rome, and new data will continue to emerge. It remains to be seen how a new generation of historians, employing still more sophisticated tools and more open questions, will allow us to reimagine the eternal city.