Chapter XVI: The City of Rome in the Middle Ages

‘It is related,’ says Sozomen in the ninth book of his Ecclesiastical History, ‘that when Alarich was hastening against Rome, a holy monk of Italy admonished him to spare the city, and not to make himself the cause of such fearful ills. But Alarich answered, “It is not of my own will that I do this; there is One who forces me on, and will not let me rest, bidding me spoil Rome.” ’

Towards the close of the tenth century the Bohemian Woytech, famous in after legend as St. Adalbert, forsook his bishopric of Prague to journey into Italy, and settled himself in the Roman monastery of Sant’ Alessio. After some few years passed there in religious solitude, he was summoned back to resume the duties of his see, and laboured for awhile among his half-savage countrymen. Soon, however, the old longing came over him: he resought his cell upon the brow of the Aventine, and there, wandering among the ancient shrines, and taking on himself the menial offices of the convent, he abode happily for a space. At length the reproaches of his metropolitan, the archbishop of Mentz, and the express commands of Pope Gregory the Fifth, drove him back over the Alps, and he set off in the train of Otto the Third, lamenting, says his biographer, that he should no more enjoy his beloved quiet in the mother of martyrs, the home of the Apostles, golden Rome. A few months later he died a martyr among the pagan Lithuanians of the Baltic.

Nearly four hundred years later, and nine hundred after the time of Alarich, Francis Petrarch writes thus to his friend John Colonna:—

‘Thinkest thou not that I long to see that city to which there has never been any like nor ever shall be; which even an enemy called a city of kings; of whose people it hath been written, “Great is the valour of the Roman people, great and terrible their name”; concerning whose unexampled glory and incomparable empire, which was, and is, and is to be, divine prophets have sung; where are the tombs of the apostles and martyrs and the bodies of so many thousands of the saints of Christ?’

It was the same irresistible impulse that drew the warrior, the monk, and the scholar towards the mystical city which was to mediaeval Europe more than Delphi had been to the Greek or Mecca to the Islamite, the Jerusalem of Christianity, the city which had once ruled the earth, and now ruled the world of disembodied spirits. For there was then, as there is now, something in Rome to attract men of every class. The devout pilgrim came to pray at the shrine of the Prince of the Apostles, too happy if he could carry back to his monastery in the forests of Saxony or by the bleak Atlantic shore the bone of some holy martyr; the lover of learning and poetry dreamed of Virgil and Cicero among the shattered columns of the Forum; the Teutonic kings, in spite of pestilence, treachery and seditions, came with their hosts to seek in the ancient capital of the world the fountain of temporal dominion. She was more glorious in her decay and desolation than the stateliest seats of modern power. Nor has the spell yet wholly lost its power. To half the Christian nations Rome has remained the metropolis of religion, to all the metropolis of art. In her streets, and hers alone among the cities of the world, may every form of human speech be heard.

But while men thought thus of Rome, what was Rome herself?

The modern traveller, after his first few days in Rome, when he has looked out upon the Campagna from the summit of St. Peter’s, paced the chilly corridors of the Vatican, and mused under the echoing dome of the Pantheon, when he has passed in review the monuments of regal and republican and papal Rome, begins to seek for some relics of the twelve hundred years that lie between Constantine and Pope Julius the Second. ‘Where,’ he asks, ‘is the Rome of the Middle Ages, the Rome of Alberic and Hildebrand and Rienzo? the Rome which dug the graves of so many Teutonic hosts; whither the pilgrims flocked; whence came the commands at which kings bowed? Where are the memorials of the brightest age of Christian architecture, the age which reared Cologne and Rheims and Westminster, which gave to Italy the cathedrals of Tuscany and the wave-washed palaces of Venice?’

To this question there is no answer. Rome, the mother of the arts, has scarcely a building to commemorate those times, for to her they were times of turmoil and misery, times in which the shame of the present was embittered by recollections of a brighter past. Nevertheless a minute scrutiny may still discover, hidden in dark corners or disguised under an unbecoming modern dress, much that carries us back to the mediaeval town, and helps us to realize its social and political condition. Therefore a brief notice of the state of Rome during the Middle Ages, with especial reference to those monuments which the visitor may still examine for himself, may have its use, and is no unfitting pendant to an account of the institution which drew from the City its name and its magnificent pretensions. Moreover, as will appear more fully in the sequel, the history of the Roman people is an instructive illustration of the influence of the ideas upon which the Empire itself rested, as well in their weakness as in their strength.

It is not from her capture by Alarich, nor even from the more destructive ravages of the Vandal Gaiserich, that the material and social ruin of Rome must be dated, but rather from the repeated sieges which she sustained during the war of Justinian against the Ostrogoths. This struggle, however, long and exhausting as it was, would not have proved so fatal had the previous condition of the city been sound and healthy. Her wealth and population in the middle of the fifth century were probably little inferior to what they had been in the most prosperous days of the imperial government. But this wealth was entirely gathered into the hands of a small and luxurious aristocracy. The crowd that filled her streets was composed partly of poor and idle freemen, unaccustomed to arms and long since deprived of political rights; partly of a far more numerous herd of slaves, gathered from all parts of the world, and morally even lower than their masters. There was no middle class, and no effective municipal administration, for although the senate and consuls with many of the lesser magistracies continued to exist, they had for centuries enjoyed little power, and were nowise fitted to lead and rule the people. Hence it was that when the long Gothic war and the subsequent inroads of the Lombards had reduced the great families to beggary, the old framework of society dissolved and could not be replaced. In a State rotten to the core there was no vital force left for reconstruction. The ancient forms of political activity had been too long dead to be recalled to life: the people wanted the moral force to produce new ones, and all the authority that could be said to exist in the midst of anarchy tended to centre itself in the chief of the new religious society.

So far Rome’s condition was like that of the other great towns of Italy and Gaul. But in two points her case differed from theirs, and to these the difference of her after fortunes may be traced. Her bishop had at hand no temporal potentate to overshadow his dignity or check his ambition, for the vicar of the Eastern court lived far away at Ravenna, and seldom interfered except to ratify a papal election or punish a more than commonly outrageous sedition. Her population received an all but imperceptible infusion of that Teutonic blood and those Teutonic customs by whose stern disciple the inhabitants of Northern Italy were in the end renovated. Everywhere the old institutions had perished of decay: in Rome the social and economic conditions were such that it was only out of the ecclesiastical system that new institutions could arise. Her condition was therefore the most pitiable in which a community can find itself, one of ceaseless struggle without purpose or progress. The citizens were divided into three orders: the military class, including what was left of the ancient aristocracy; the clergy, a host of priests, monks, and nuns, attached to the countless churches and convents; and the people, or plebs, as they are called, a poverty-stricken rabble without trade, without industry, with little municipal organization to bind them together. Of these two latter classes the Pope was the natural leader; the first was divided into factions headed by some three or four of the great families, whose quarrels kept the town in incessant bloodshed. The internal history of Rome from the eighth to the twelfth century is an obscure and tedious record of the contests of these factions with each other, and of the aristocracy as a whole with the slowly-growing power of the Church.

The revolt of the Romans from the Image-breaking Emperors in the East, followed as it was by the reception of the Franks as patricians and Emperors, is an event of the first importance in the history of Italy and of the Popedom. In the domestic constitution of Rome it made little change. With the instinct of a profound genius Charles the Great saw that Rome, though it might be ostensibly the capital, could not be the seat of government for his dominions. He continued to reside in Germany, and did not even fit up as a palace any one of the group of dwellings that stood, some of them still comparatively unscathed, upon the Palatine. For a time the awe of his power, the presence of his missus or lieutenant, and the occasional visits of his successors Lothar and Lewis II to the city, repressed her internal disorders. But after the death of the prince last named, and still more after the dissolution of the Carolingian Empire itself, Rome relapsed into a state of profligacy and barbarism to which, even in that age, Europe supplied no parallel, a barbarism which had inherited the vices of civilization without its virtues. The papal office in particular seemed to have lost its religious character, as many of its occupants had lost all claim to moral purity. For more than a century the chief priest of Christendom was no more than a tool of some ferocious faction among the nobles. Criminal means had raised him to the throne; violence, sometimes going the length of mutilation or murder, deprived him of it. The marvel is, a marvel in which papal historians have not unnaturally discovered a miracle, that after sinking so low, the Papacy should ever have risen again. Its rescue and exaltation to the pinnacle of glory was accomplished not by the Romans but by the efforts of the Transalpine Church, aiding and prompting the Saxon and Franconian Emperors. Yet even the religious reform did not abate intestine turmoil, and it was not till the twelfth century that a new spirit began to work in politics, which ennobled if it could not heal the sufferings of the Roman people.

Ever since the days of Alberic their pride had revolted against the haughty behaviour of the Teutonic Emperors. From still earlier times they had been jealous of sacerdotal authority, and now watched with alarm the rapid extension of its influence. The events of the twelfth century gave these feelings a definite direction. It was the time of the struggle of the Investitures, in which Gregory VII and his disciples had been striving to draw power over the things of this world as well as over those of the next into their grasp. It was the era of the revived study of Roman law, by which alone the extravagant pretensions of the decretalists could be resisted. The Lombard and Tuscan towns had become flourishing republics, independent of their bishops, and at open war with their Emperor. Municipal self-government already existed at Rome in some rude form, but now its recent developement in other parts of Italy, and especially in the North, naturally told upon the imperial city and vivified its old traditions. While all these things were stirring the minds of the Romans, Arnold of Brescia came preaching religious reform, denouncing the simoniacal practices and corrupt life of the clergy, not indeed, like some others of the so-called schismatics of his time, rejecting a sacerdotal order, but proclaiming that confession ought to be made not to it, but by Christians to one another, that the sinfulness of a priest destroyed the value of the sacraments he administered, that spiritual persons ought to be confined to spiritual duties and neither to possess worldly goods nor exercise secular authority. On the minds of the Romans such teaching fell like the spark upon dry grass. They threw off the yoke of the Pope, against which the Comune di Roma had often struggled; they drove out the imperial prefect, reconstituted the senate and what they called the equestrian order (apparently an organization of the minor nobles), appointed consuls, struck their own coins, and professed to treat the Germanic Emperors as their nominees, whose authority, though admitted as legitimate, was in their view derived from the Roman people. To have successfully imitated the republican constitution of the cities of Northern Italy would have been much, but with this they were not content. Knowing in a vague ignorant way that there had been a Roman republic before there was a Roman Empire, they fed their vanity with visions of a renewal of all their ancient forms, and saw in fancy their senate and people sitting again upon the Seven Hills and ruling over the kings of the earth. Stepping, as it were, into the arena where Pope and Emperor were contending for the headship of the world, they rejected the one as a priest, and declaring the other to be only their creature, they claimed as theirs the true and lawful inheritance of the world-dominion which their ancestors had won. Antiquity was in one sense on their side, and to us now it seems less strange that the Roman people should aspire to rule the earth than that a German barbarian should rule it in their name. But practically the scheme was absurd, and could not maintain itself against any serious opposition. As a modern historian aptly expresses it, ‘they were setting up ruins:’ they might as well have tried to raise a stately temple out of the broken columns that strewed their Forum. The reverence which the men of the Middle Ages felt for Rome was given altogether to the name and to the place, and nowise to the people. Their armed force was insignificant: so far from holding Italy in subjection, they could scarcely maintain themselves against the hostility of Tusculum.

Yet it might have been worth the while of the Germanic Emperors to have made the Romans their allies, and bridled by their help the temporal ambition of the Popes. Overtures were addressed to Conrad the Third in 1146—he refused to receive the envoys or to answer the letter—and again in 1151. Another opportunity arose when Frederick the First approached Rome in 1155 at the head of a great army. But the Swabian repelled in the most contumelious fashion the envoys of the senate. Even while he dreaded and resisted, he always respected the Vicar of Christ: towards the Romans he felt the contempt of a feudal king for burghers, and of the Lord of the World for a petty knot of rebels. Pope Hadrian the Fourth, whose insight found no heresy more dangerous than one which threatened the authority of the clergy, had, by the terrible weapon of interdict and with the support of the greater nobles, driven Arnold of Brescia out of Rome; and when the fugitive found protection, near Viterbo, from one of the counts of the district, the Pope required Frederick to seize him. The Emperor was at that moment seeking to induce the Pope to crown him, so Arnold was taken, tried by the prefect of the city, hanged, his body burned, and his ashes cast into the Tiber, lest the people should treasure them up as relics. His constancy in the presence of death, his refusal to recant, the calm dignity of his silent confession and prayer, softened the executioners, while it moved the beholders to tears; and the Emperor himself regretted too late his hasty compliance with the Pope’s demand.

Arnold is a remarkable figure, not only because he sought to reinvigorate the civic life of Rome but also because his is one of the earliest and clearest of the voices that were raised from time to time throughout the Middle Ages against the fatal secularization of the Church by wealth and temporal authority. The Church he desired was a church of apostolic poverty. He was an idealist, who taught, says his contemporary John of Salisbury, ‘things most consonant to the law of Christians, and most remote from actual life.’ Though a disciple of Abelard, he is less a dialectician than a theologian, perhaps less a theologian than a practical reformer, appealing to the words of Scripture, and seeking to bring back the primitive simplicity of the early days of Christianity. He is a forerunner in one sense of Dante, in another of Marsilius of Padua, one may even say, of the reformers of the sixteenth century. And, though the attempt to revive against the Pope the long obsolete powers of the Roman people may now seem fanciful, it must be remembered that the rights of the laity against the sacerdotal order and its head had, in the world as it then stood, no institution whereto they could attach themselves, no means whereby to make themselves respected, except the Emperor—whom the Romans sought to win—and the organization, under the Emperor, of a municipal republic. Arnold was hopelessly overmatched. Material force was against him; and the main stream of opinion was still running strongly in the channel into which Gregory VII had directed the hierarchical doctrine of his time. Nor did that stream slacken till the beginning of the fourteenth century. But it is the mark of a hero to be willing to face desperate odds: and those who in the end of the fifteenth century saw the papal court sunk in corruption, in worldliness, and indeed in a sort of paganism, might well deem that the Catholic Church would have fared better if the principles of Arnold had prevailed.

The martyrdom of their Lombard leader did not quench the hopes of his Roman followers. The republican constitution continued to exist, and rose from time to time, during the weakness or the absence of the pontiff, into a brief and fitful activity. It was indeed recognized by the Popes themselves. They used to receive the title and authority of Senator for life, and in particular, in ad 1337, Benedict XII gratefully accepted from the people the offices of Senator and Captain, Syndic and Defensor of the Republic. Once awakened, the idea, seductive at once to the imagination of the scholar and the vanity of the Roman citizen, could not wholly disappear, least of all while the Popes were absent at Avignon, and two centuries after Arnold’s time it found a more brilliant though less disinterested exponent in the tribune Nicholas Rienzo.

The career of this singular personage is misunderstood by those who suppose him to have been possessed of profound political insight, a republican on modern principles. He was indeed, despite his overweening conceit and what seems to us his charlatanry, both a patriot and a man of genius, in temperament a poet, filled with soaring ideas. But those ideas, although dressed out in gaudier colours by his lively fancy, were after all only the old ones, memories of the long-faded glories of the heathen republic, and a series of scornful contrasts levelled at her present oppressors, both of them shewing no vista of future greatness except through the revival of those ancient names to which there were no things to correspond.

It will be remembered that in ad 1327 the Emperor Lewis IV had, in his conflict with Pope John XXII, suddenly embraced and turned to account the claims of the city. Against the hostility of the Church he set the will of the Roman people. Acting under their decree Sciarra Colonna and his three fellow Syndics crowned the Bavarian, following, as was alleged, the precedent of ad 800, when Charles the Great had received the Empire as the gift of the Romans. If Cola di Rienzo, then a youth of fourteen, witnessed the coronation, this recognition of the rights of Rome may well have sunk deep into his mind. Some seventeen years later, 1344. being then a notary in the Pope’s service, he began a strange campaign addressed to the eyes no less than to the ears of the multitude, in which he displayed allegorical pictures, and delivered harangues upon those ancient rights of Senate and People which he was seeking to bring back into effective action, taking as his text, on one famous occasion, an inscription recording the statute by which the imperium had been conferred upon Vespasian. In ad 1347 he effected with the aid of some conspirators, and with the consent of the Papal Vicar, a sort of bloodless revolution, obtained a decree by which he was placed at the head of the executive government as Tribune, effected a number of reforms, and bridled the excesses of the nobility. He then despatched letters to all the chief cities of Italy inviting them to send representatives to a great assembly to be held at Rome. Some of them complied, and many more received the invitation respectfully, for there was a general desire to be rid of intestine strife and to recall the Pope from Avignon to Rome. In a gathering of jurists, and again in a Roman Parliament, Cola solemnly declared Rome to be the Head of the World, and (it is said) revoked all the gifts, concessions, and privileges which had been conferred by previous rulers, from Constantine downwards, upon the Holy See and the Germanic Electors. Somewhat later, repeating this declaration, he conferred the Roman citizenship upon all the cities of Italy, proclaiming them to be free, asserted for the city and people of Rome and for Italy the rights of the Empire and the function of choosing the Emperor, and cited the seven Electors and all others in Germany to appear before him and defend such rights as they claimed. Even the rival Emperors Lewis IV and Charles king of Bohemia (who had been chosen against Lewis in ad 1346) were included in this citation. The Romans applauded, but these latest assumptions, coupled with the whimsical antics into which Cola’s vanity had betrayed him, were too much for the public opinion of Italy, and far too much for the Pope. Clement VI denounced the Tribune as a heretic, and bade the Vicar depose him: the nobles gathered their forces against Rome, Cola quailed and fled; and when, after years of exile among the Apennines, and of captivity first in Bohemia (whither he had gone to win the favour of Charles IV), and afterwards at Avignon, he was sent back to Rome by Pope Innocent VI under the wing of Cardinal Albornoz, 1354. he perished after a brief spell of authority, torn to pieces by the fierce and fickle populace. Cola, with some learning, and a passionate love of antiquity, possessed dazzling eloquence and histrionic power. But he had no grasp of actualities, no sense of what was possible, no faculty for prompt decision, and what was no less fatal, he lacked both military skill and physical courage. In his later career he was by turns a Ghibeline and a Guelf, equally willing to bid for the favour of the Emperor and for the support of the Pope. His appeals were made, not to democratic principles but to antiquity, to the unquenched faith in the name of Rome, to that nascent spirit of Italian nationality which resented the intrusion of the foreigner. The idea of an Italy united with Rome for its capital is the only one of his dreams which proved, after five centuries, to be ultimately realizable; but his career did nothing to bring it nearer. He is memorable not as a creator of new ideas, but as one of the last and most fanciful exponent of those old ideas which were destined soon thereafter to fade and vanish away, as the moon’s light dies out under the brightening dawn. This dawn, however, was as yet scarcely visible. Men’s minds still lay under the old spell. The acts and plans of the Tribune, though they astonished his contemporaries by their boldness, do not seem to have been deemed either so strange or so utterly unpractical as they appear to us to-day. In the breasts of men like Petrarch, who loved Rome even more than they distrusted her people, the enthusiasm of Cola found a sympathetic echo: others scorned and denounced him as an upstart, a demagogue, possibly a heretic, certainly a rebel. But both friends and enemies seem to have comprehended and regarded as natural his feelings and designs, which were altogether those of his age. Being, however, a mere matter of imagination, not of reason, having no anchor, so to speak, in realities, no true relation to the world as it then stood, these schemes of republican revival were as transient and unstable as they were quick of growth and gay of colour. As the authority of the Popes became consolidated, and free municipalities disappeared elsewhere throughout Italy, the dream of a renovated Rome at length withered up and fell and died. Its last struggle was made in the conspiracy of Stephen Porcaro, 1453. in the time of Pope Nicholas the Fifth; and from that time onward there was no question of the supremacy of the bishop within his holy city.

It is never without a certain regret that we watch the disappearance of a belief, however illusive, around which the love and reverence of mankind once clung. But this illusion need be the less regretted in that it had only the feeblest influence for good on the state of mediaeval Rome. During the three centuries that lie between Arnold of Brescia and Porcaro, the disorders of Rome were hardly less violent than they had been in the Dark Ages, and to all appearance worse than those of any other European city. There was a want not only of fixed authority, but of those elements of social stability which the other cities of Italy possessed. In the greater republics of Lombardy and Tuscany the bulk of the population were artizans, hard-working orderly people; while above them stood a prosperous middle class, engaged mostly in commerce, and having in their system of tradeguilds an organization both firm and flexible. It was by foreign trade that Genoa, Venice, and Pisa became great, as it was the wealth acquired by manufacturing industry that enabled Milan and Florence to overcome and incorporate the territorial aristocracies which surrounded them.

Rome possessed neither source of riches. She was ill-placed for trade; having no market she produced no goods to be disposed of, and the unhealthiness which long neglect had brought upon her Campagna made its fertility unavailable. Already she stood as she stood down to our own time, lonely and isolated, a desert at her very gates. As there was no industry, so there was nothing that deserved to be called a citizen class. The people were a mere rabble, prompt to follow the demagogue who flattered their vanity, prompter still to desert him in the hour of danger. Superstition was with them a matter of national pride, but they lived too near sacred things to feel much reverence for them: they ill-treated the Pope and fleeced the pilgrims who crowded to their shrines: they were probably the only community in Europe that sent no recruit to the armies of the Cross. Priests, monks, and all the nondescript hangers-on of an ecclesiastical court formed a large part of the population; while of the rest many were supported in a state of half-mendicancy by the countless religious foundations, themselves enriched by the gifts or the plunder of Latin Christendom. The noble families were numerous, turbulent, ferocious; they were surrounded by bands of unruly retainers, and waged a constant war against each other from their castles in the adjoining country or in the streets of the city itself. Had things been left to take their natural course, one of these families, the Colonna, for instance, or the Orsini, would probably have ended by overcoming its rivals, and have established, as was the case in the republics of Lombardy, Romagna, and Tuscany, a ‘signoria’ or local tyranny, like those which had once prevailed in the cities of Greece. But the presence of the sacerdotal power, as it had hindered the growth of feudalism, stood also in the way of such a developement as this, and in so far aggravated the confusion of the city. Although the Pope did not till the fifteenth century establish his title as legitimate sovereign, he was by far the most considerable person in Rome, and the only one whose authority had both a permanent and an official character. But the reign of each pontiff was short; he had no military force, he was frequently—and from 1305 till 1378 continuously—absent from his see. He was, moreover, very often a member of one of the great families, and, as such, no better than a faction leader at home, while venerated by the rest of Europe as the Universal Priest.

The person who should have been to Rome what the national king was to the cities of France, or England, or Germany, was the Emperor. But he was like one of those wandering hero-spectres in the Odyssey who draw from a draught of blood a momentary vitality, and then relapse into shadowy feebleness. When he came with an army, and the streets of Rome were filled with slaughter, he secured a few days or weeks of power. At other times his phantom authority did little more than furnish a pretext to the Colonna and other Ghibeline chieftains for their opposition to the papal party. Even his abstract rights were matter of controversy. The Popes, whose predecessors had been content to govern as the lieutenants of Charles and Otto, now maintained that Rome as a spiritual city could not be subject to any temporal jurisdiction, and that she was therefore not really a part of the Emperor’s dominions, though at the same time his capital. Not only, it was urged, had Constantine yielded up Rome to Sylvester and his successors, Lothar the Saxon had at his coronation formally renounced his sovereignty by doing homage to the pontiff and receiving the crown as his vassal. The Popes felt then as they feel now, that their dignity and influence would suffer if they should even appear to admit in their place of residence the jurisdiction of a civil potentate, and although they could not secure their own authority, they were at least able to exclude any other. Hence it was that they were so uneasy whenever an Emperor came to them to be crowned, that they raised up difficulties in his path, and endeavoured to be rid of him as soon as possible. And here something must be said of the programme, as one may call it, of these imperial visits to Rome, and of the marks of their presence which the Germans left behind them, remembering always that after the time of Frederick the Second it was rather the exception than the rule for an Emperor to be crowned in his capital at all.

The traveller who to-day enters Rome by the railway from the north, slips in before he is aware, is huddled into a vehicle at the terminus, and set down at his hotel in the middle of the modern town before he has caught a glimpse of the city from a distance. Fifty years ago when he came overland from Tuscany along the bleak road that passes near Veii and crosses the Milvian bridge, he had indeed from the slopes of the Ciminian range a splendid prospect of the sea-like Campagna, girdled in by glittering hills, but of the city he saw no sign, save the pinnacle of St. Peter’s, until he was within the walls. Far otherwise was it in the Middle Ages. Then travellers of every grade, from the humble pilgrim to the new-made archbishop who came in the pomp of a lengthy train to receive from the Pope the pallium of his office, approached from the north or northeast side; following a track along the hilly ground on the Tuscan side of the Tiber until they halted on the brow of Monte Mario—the Mount of Joy—and saw the city of their solemnities lie spread before them, from the great pile of the Lateran far away upon the Coelian hill, to the basilica of St. Peter’s at their feet. They saw it not, as now, a sea of billowy cupolas, but a mass of low, red-roofed houses, varied by tall brick towers, and at rarer intervals by masses of ancient ruin, then larger far than now; while over all rose those two monuments of the best of the heathen Emperors, monuments that still look down, serenely changeless, on the armies of new nations and the festivals of a new religion—the columns of Marcus Aurelius and Trajan.

From Monte Mario the Teutonic host descended, when they had paid their orisons, into the Neronian field, the piece of flat land that lies outside the gate of St. Angelo. Here it was the custom for the elders of the Romans to meet the elected Emperor, present their charters for confirmation, and receive his oath to preserve their good customs. Then a procession was formed: the priests and monks, who had come out with hymns to greet the Emperor, led the way; the knights and soldiers of Rome, such as they were, came next; then the monarch, followed by a long array of Transalpine chivalry. Passing into the city they advanced to St. Peter’s, where the Pope, surrounded by his clergy, stood on the great staircase of the basilica to welcome and bless the Roman king. On the next day came the coronation, with ceremonies too elaborate for description, ceremonies which, we may well believe, were seldom duly completed. Far more usual were other rites, of which the book of ritual makes no mention, unless they are to be counted among the ‘good customs of the Romans’; the clang of war-bells, the battle-cry of German and Italian combatants. The Pope, when he could not keep the Emperor from entering Rome, required him to leave the bulk of his host without the walls, and if foiled in this, sought safety in raising up plots and seditions against his too powerful friend. The Roman people, on the other hand, violent as they often were against the Pope, had nevertheless a sort of national pride in him. Very different were their feelings towards the Teutonic chieftain, who came from a far land to receive in their city, yet without thanking them for it, the ensign of a power which the prowess of their forefathers had won. Bereft of their ancient right to choose the universal bishop, they clung all the more desperately to the belief that it was they who chose the universal prince; and were mortified afresh when each successive sovereign contemptuously scouted their claims, and paraded before their eyes his rude barbarian cavalry. Thus it was that a Roman sedition was the usual accompaniment of a Roman coronation. The three revolts against Otto the Great have been already described. His grandson Otto the Third, in spite of his passionate fondness for the city, was met by the same faithlessness and hatred, and departed at last in despair at the failure of his attempts at conciliation. A century afterwards Henry the Fifth’s coronation produced violent tumults, occasioned by his seizing the Pope and cardinals in St. Peter’s, and keeping them prisoners till they submitted to his terms. Remembering this, Pope Hadrian the Fourth would fain have forced the troops of Frederick Barbarossa to remain without the walls, but the rapidity of their movements disconcerted his plans and anticipated the resistance of the Roman populace. Having established himself in the Leonine city, Frederick barricaded the bridge over the Tiber under the fortress of St. Angelo, and was duly crowned in St. Peter’s. But the rite was scarcely finished when the Romans, who had assembled in arms on the Capitol, dashed over the bridge, fell upon the Germans, and were with difficulty repulsed by the personal efforts of the Emperor. Into the city, whose narrow streets and thick-set strongholds made advance dangerous, he did not venture to pursue them, nor was he at any period of his reign able to make himself master of the whole of it. Finding themselves similarly baffled, his successors at last accepted their position, and were content to take the crown on the Pope’s conditions and depart without further question.

Coming so seldom and remaining for so short a time, it is not wonderful that the Teutonic Emperors should, in the seven centuries from Charles the Great to Charles the Fifth, have left fewer marks of their presence in Rome than Titus or Hadrian alone has done; fewer and less considerable even than those which tradition attributes to Servius Tullius and the elder Tarquin. Those monuments which do exist are just sufficient to make the absence of all others more conspicuous. The most important dates from the time of Otto the Third, the only Emperor who attempted to make Rome his permanent residence. Of the palace, possibly nothing more than a tower, which he built on the Aventine, no trace has been discovered; but the church, founded by him to receive the ashes of his friend the martyred St. Adalbert, may still be seen upon the island in the Tiber. In it there stands, in front of the high altar, an ancient marble font which shews upon one side a figure of St. Adalbert, and on another side one of the Emperor himself, both executed in the rude style of the eleventh century. Having received from Benevento relics supposed to be those of Bartholomew the Apostle, it became dedicated to that saint, and is at present the church of San Bartolommeo in Isola, whose quaintly picturesque bell-tower of red brick, now grey with extreme age, looks out from among the orange-trees of a convent garden over the swift-eddying yellow waters of the Tiber.

Otto the Second, son of Otto the Great, died at Rome, and lies buried in the crypt of St. Peter’s, the only Emperor who has found a resting-place among the graves of the Popes. His tomb is not far from that of his nephew Pope Gregory the Fifth: it is a plain one of roughly chiselled marble. The lid of the superb porphyry sarcophagus in which he lay for a time now serves as the great font of St. Peter’s, and may be seen in the baptismal chapel on the left of the entrance of the church, not far from the monument to the last of the English Stuarts. Last of all must be mentioned a curious relic of the Emperor Frederick the Second, the prince whom of all others one would least expect to see honoured in the city of his foes. It is an inscription in the palace of the Conservators upon the Capitoline hill, built into the wall of the great staircase, and relates the victory of Frederick’s army over the Milanese, and the capture of the carroccio of the rebel city, which he sends as a trophy to his faithful Romans. These are all or nearly all the traces of her Teutonic lords that Rome has preserved till now. Pictures indeed there are in abundance, from the mosaic of the Scala Santa at the Lateran and the curious frescoes in the church of Santi Quattro Incoronati, down to the paintings of the Sistine antechapel and the Stanze of Raphael in the Vatican, where the triumphs of the Popedom over all its foes are set forth with matchless art and equally matchless unveracity. But these are mostly long subsequent to the events they describe, and these all the world knows.

Associations of the highest interest would have attached to the churches in which the imperial coronation was performed—a ceremony which, whether we regard the dignity of the performers or the splendour of the adjuncts, was probably the most imposing that Europe has known. But old St. Peter’s disappeared in the end of the fifteenth century, not long after the last Roman coronation, that of Frederick the Third, while the basilica of St. John Lateran, in which Lothar the Saxon and Henry the Seventh were crowned, damaged by time and by fire and an earthquake in the fourteenth century, has been so wofully modernized that we can hardly figure it to ourselves as the same building.

Bearing in mind what was the social condition of Rome during the Middle Ages, it becomes easier to understand the architectural barrenness which at first excites the visitor’s surprise. Rome had no temporal sovereign, and there were therefore only two classes who could build at all, the nobles and the clergy. Of these, the former had seldom the wealth, and never the taste, which would have enabled them to construct palaces graceful as the Venetian or massively grand as the Florentine and Genoese. Moreover, the constant practice of war within the city made defence the first object of a house, beauty and convenience the second. Down to the middle of the fifteenth century, fortresses rather than mansions were what the great families needed. The nobility, therefore, either adapted ancient edifices to their purpose or built out of their materials those huge square towers of brick, a few of which still frown over the narrow streets in the older parts of Rome. We may judge of their number from the statement that the senator Brancaleone levelled one hundred and forty of them, as Frederick I had in his time destroyed a good many. With perhaps no more than one exception, that of the so-called House of Rienzo, a building obviously older by at least two centuries than the Tribune’s time, these towers are the only domestic edifices in the city erected before the middle of the fifteenth century. The vast palaces to which strangers now flock for the sake of the picture galleries they contain, have been most of them constructed in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, a few even later. Among the earliest is that Palazzo Cenci, whose gloomy low-browed arch so powerfully affected the imagination of Shelley.

It was no want of wealth that hampered the architectural efforts of the clergy, for large revenues flowed in upon them from every corner of Christendom. A good deal was actually spent upon the erection or repairs of churches and convents, although with a less liberal hand than that of such great Transalpine prelates as Hugh of Lincoln or Conrad of Cologne. But the Popes always needed money for their projects of ambition, and in times when disorder and corruption were at their height the work of building stopped altogether. Thus it was that after the time of the Carolingians scarcely a church was erected, though some were repaired and enlarged, until the beginning of the twelfth century, 1308-1377. when the reforms of Hildebrand had breathed new zeal into the priesthood. The Babylonish captivity of Avignon, as it was called, with the Great Schism of the West that followed upon it, 1378-1417. was the cause of a second similar intermission, which lasted nearly a century and a half.

At every time, however, even when his work went on most briskly, the labours of the Roman architect took the direction of restoring and readorning old churches rather than of erecting new ones. While the Transalpine countries, except in a few favoured spots, such as Provence and part of the Rhineland, remained during several ages with few and rudely built stone churches, Rome possessed, as the inheritance of the earlier Christian centuries, a profusion of houses of worship, some of them still unsurpassed in splendour, and far more than adequate to the needs of her diminished population. In repairing these from time to time, the original form and style of work were, down to the days of the Renaissance, in most cases preserved, while in constructing new churches, the abundance of models, beautiful in themselves and hallowed as well by antiquity as by religious feeling, enthralled the invention of the workman, bound him down to be at best a faithful imitator, and forbade him to deviate at pleasure from the old-established manner. Thus it befell that while his brethren throughout the rest of Europe were passing by successive steps from the old Roman and Byzantine styles to Romanesque, and from Romanesque to Pointed, the Roman architect scarcely departed from the plan and arrangements of the primitive basilica. This is one chief reason why there is so little of Gothic work in Rome, so little even of Romanesque like that of Pisa. What there is appears chiefly in the pointed window, more rarely in the arch, seldom or never in spire or tower or column. Only one of the existing churches of Rome is Gothic throughout, and that, the Dominican church of Sta. Maria sopra Minerva, was built by foreign monks. In some of the other churches, and especially in the cloisters of the convents, instances may be observed of the same style: in others slight traces, by accident or design almost obliterated.

The mention of obliteration suggests a third cause of the comparative want of mediaeval buildings in the city—the constant depredations and changes of which she has been the subject. Ever since the time of Constantine Rome has been a city of destruction, and Christians have vied with pagans, citizens with enemies, in urging on the fatal work. Her siege and capture by the Norman Robert Wiscard, the ally of Hildebrand against Henry the Fourth, was far more ruinous than the attacks of the Goths or Vandals, and itself yields in atrocity to the sack of Rome in ad 1527 by the soldiers of the Catholic king and most pious Emperor Charles the Fifth. Since the days of the first barbarian invasions the Romans have gone on building with materials taken from the ancient temples, theatres, law-courts, baths, and villas, stripping them of their gorgeous casings of marble, pulling down their walls for the sake of the blocks of travertine, setting up their own hovels on the top or in the midst of these majestic piles. Thus it has been with the memorials of paganism: a somewhat different cause has contributed to the disappearance of the mediaeval churches. What pillage, or fanaticism, or the wanton lust of destruction did in the one case, the ostentatious zeal of modern times has done in the other. The era of the final establishment of the Popes as temporal sovereigns of the city is also that of the supremacy of the Renaissance style in architecture. After the time of Nicholas the Fifth, the pontiff against whom, it will be remembered, the spirit of municipal freedom made its last struggle in the conspiracy of Porcaro, everything was built in the neo-classic style, and the prevailing enthusiasm for the antique produced a corresponding dislike to everything mediaeval, a dislike conspicuous in men like Julius the Second and Leo the Tenth, from whom the grandeur of modern Rome may be said to begin. Not long after their time the great religious movement of the sixteenth century, while triumphing in the north of Europe, was in the south met and overcome by a counter-reformation in the bosom of the old church herself, and the construction or restoration of ecclesiastical buildings became again the passion of the devout. No employment, whether it be called a pleasure or a duty, could have been better suited to the court and aristocracy of Rome. They were indolent; wealthy, and fond of displaying their wealth; full of good taste, and anxious, especially when advancing years had chased away youth’s pleasures, to be full of good works also. Popes and cardinals and the heads of the great families vied with one another in building new churches and restoring or enlarging those they found till little of the old was left; raising over them huge cupolas, substituting massive pilasters for the single-shafted columns, adorning the interior with a profusion of rare marbles, of carving and gilding, of frescoes and altar-pieces by the best masters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. None but a bigoted mediaevalist can refuse to acknowledge the warmth of tone, the repose, the stateliness, of the churches of modern Rome; but even in the midst of admiration the sated eye turns away from the wealth of ponderous ornament, and longs for the clear pure colour, the simple yet grand proportions, that give a charm to the buildings of an earlier age.

Few of the ancient churches have escaped untouched; many have been altogether rebuilt. There are also some, however, in which the modernizers of the sixteenth and subsequent centuries have spared two features of the old structure, its rounded apse or tribune and its bell-tower. The interior of the concave tribune is usually covered with mosaics, exceedingly interesting, both from the ideas they express and as the only monuments of pictorial art that remain to us from the Dark Ages. To speak of them, however, as they deserve to be spoken of, would involve a digression for which there is no space here. The campanile or bell-tower is a quaint little square brick tower, of no great height, usually standing detached from the church, and having in its topmost, sometimes also in its other upper stories, several arcade windows, divided by tiny marble pillars. What with these campaniles, then far more numerous than they are now, and with the huge brick fortresses of the nobles, towers must have held in the landscape of the mediaeval city very much the part which domes do now. Although less imposing, they were probably more picturesque, the rather as in the earlier part of the Middle Ages the houses and churches, which are now mostly crowded together on the flat of the Campus Martius, were scattered over the heights and slopes of the Coelian, Aventine, and Esquiline hills, regions which were deserted after the ruin wrought by Robert Wiscard, and which remained almost unbuilt upon till the recent growth of the city has (since 1870) begun to cover the Esquiline and part of the Coelian with houses. Modern Rome lies chiefly on the opposite or north-eastern and north-western sides of the Capitol, and the change from the old to the new site of the city was not completed until the sixteenth century. The Rome of Frederick Barbarossa and Arnold of Brescia lay mostly round the Capitol and between the Capitol and the Tiber; it included the old suburb of Trastevere, but not the region near St. Peter’s, which constituted the (then still separate) Leonine city. In ad 1536, in anticipation of the entry of Charles the Fifth, the rebuilding of the Capitol (afterwards carried on by Michael Angelo) was begun upon foundations said to have been laid by the first Tarquin; and the palace of the Senator, the greatest municipal edifice of Rome, which had hitherto looked towards the Forum and the Coliseum, was made to front in the direction of St. Peter’s and the modern town, which had then already begun to spread out over the old Campus Martius and the slopes of the Quirinal.

The Rome of to-day is no more like the city of Rienzo than she is to the city of Trajan; just as the Roman church of the twentieth century differs profoundly, complete as her historical continuity may appear, from the church of Hildebrand. But among all their changes, both church and city have kept themselves wonderfully free from the intrusion of foreign, or at least of Teutonic, elements, and have faithfully preserved at all times something of an old Roman character. Latin Christianity inherited from the imperial system of old that firmly knit yet flexible organization, which was one of the grand secrets of its power. The great men whom mediaeval Rome gave to or trained up for the Papacy were, like their predecessors of the ancient world, administrators, legislators, statesmen; seldom enthusiasts themselves, but perfectly understanding how to use and guide the enthusiasm of others—of the French and German crusaders, of such men as Francis of Assisi and Dominic and Ignatius. Between Catholicism in Italy and Catholicism in Germany or England there was always, as there is still, a perceptible difference. So also, if the analogy be not too fanciful, was it with Rome the city. Socially she seemed always drifting towards feudalism; yet she never fell into its grasp. Materially, her architecture was at one time considerably influenced by Pointed forms, yet Gothic never became, as in the rest of Europe, the dominant style. It approached Rome late, and departed from her early, so that we scarcely notice its presence, and seem to pass almost without a break from the old Romanesque to the new Graeco-Roman of the Renaissance. Thus regarded, the history of the city, both in her political fortunes and in her buildings, is seen to be intimately connected with that of the Holy Empire itself. The Empire in its title and its pretensions expressed the idea of the permanence of the institutions of the ancient world; Rome the city had, in externals at least, carefully preserved their traditions: the names of her magistracies, the character of her buildings, all spoke of antiquity, and gave it a strange and shadowy life in the midst of new races and new forms of faith.

Based on the feeling of the unity of mankind, the Empire was a perpetuation of the Roman dominion into which the old nationalities had been absorbed, with the addition of the Christian element which had created a new nationality that was also universal. By the extension of her citizenship to all her subjects heathen Rome had become the common home, and, figuratively, even the local dwelling-place of the civilized races of man. By the theology of the time Christian Rome had been made the mystical type of humanity, the one flock of the faithful scattered over the whole earth, the holy city whither, as to the temple on Moriah, all the Israel of God should come up to worship. She was not merely an image of the mighty world, she was the mighty world itself in miniature. The pastor of her local church is also the universal bishop; the seven suffragan bishops who consecrate him are overseers of petty sees in Ostia, Antium, and the like, towns lying close round Rome: the cardinal priests and deacons who join these seven in electing him derive their title to be princes of the Church, the supreme spiritual council of the Christian world, from the incumbency of a parochial cure within the precincts of the city. Similarly, her ruler, the Emperor, is ruler of mankind; he is deemed to be chosen by the acclamations of her people: he must be duly crowned in one of her basilicas. She is, like Jerusalem of old, the mother of us all.

There is yet another way in which the record of the domestic contests of Rome throws light upon the history of the Empire. From the eleventh century to the fifteenth her citizens did not cease to demand in the name of the old republic their freedom from the tyranny of the nobles and the Pope, and their right to rule over the world at large. These efforts—selfish and fantastic we may call them, yet men like Petrarch did not disdain to them their sympathy—issued from the same theories and were directed to the same ends as those which inspired Otto the Third and Frederick Barbarossa and Dante himself. They witness to the same incapacity to form any ideal for the future except a revival of the past; the same belief that one universal state is both desirable and possible, but possible only through the means of Rome: the same refusal to admit that a right which has once existed can ever be extinguished. In the days of the Renaissance these notions were passing silently away: the succeeding century brought with it misfortunes that broke the spirit of the nation. Italy was the battlefield of Europe: her wealth became the prey of a rapacious soldiery: Florence, the noblest of her republics, was conquered by an unfeeling Emperor, and handed over to a despot as a pledge of amity to a selfish Medicean Pope. 1530. When the hope of independence had been lost, the people turned away from politics to live for art and literature, and found, before many generations had passed, how little such devotion could compensate for the departure of a national spirit, and of the activity of civic life. A century after the golden days of Ariosto and Raphael, Italian literature had become frigid and affected, while Italian art was dying of mannerism.

At length, after long ages of sloth, the stagnant waters were troubled. The Romans, who had lived in listless contentment under the paternal sway of the Popes, received new ideas from the advent of the revolutionary armies of France, and found the papal system, since its re-establishment in 1815 as an ecclesiastical bureaucracy, less tolerable than it had been of yore. When the rest of Italy had been delivered from the rule of Hapsburgs and Bourbons, the name of Rome became again a rallying-cry for the patriots of Italy, but in a sense most unlike the old one. The contemporaries of Arnold and Rienzo desired freedom as a step to universal domination: their descendants, inspired by national patriotism as well as by civic pride, more wisely sought to be the capital of the Italian kingdom. Dante prayed for a monarchy of the world, a reign of peace and Christian brotherhood: those who, five centuries later, invoked his name as the earliest prophet of their creed strove after an idea that never crossed his mind—the gathering of all Italians into a national state. Yet this he and they had in common,—they and he alike desired to exclude the Papacy from the sphere of secular government.

One who watched the long struggle of the Italians to make Rome the free capital of a united nation, from the days of the Mazzinian triumvirate of 1849 to the happier day when the army of Victor Emmanuel passed through the Porta Pia, may be permitted to recall the sentiments of that time, now grown dim to the new generation.

Dull common-sense politicians in other countries did not then understand this passion for Rome as a capital, and used to lecture the Italians on their flightiness. The Italian patriots did not themselves argue or pretend that the banks of the Tiber were a suitable site for a capital. They admitted, in the days before 1870 to which I am referring, that Rome was lonely, unhealthy, and in a bad strategical position; that she had no particular facilities for trade; that her people were less thrifty and industrious than the Tuscans or the Piedmontese. Nevertheless all Italy cried with one voice for Rome, believing that her national life could never thrill with a strong and steady pulsation till the ancient capital had become the nation’s heart. They felt that it was owing to Rome—Rome pagan as well as Christian—that they had once played so grand a part in the drama of European history, and that the recollections of those glorious days had done much to create the passion for national unity. This enthusiasm for a famous name was substantially the same feeling as that which created and hallowed the Holy Empire of the Middle Ages. The events which on both sides of the Atlantic befell during the momentous forty years between 1830 and 1870 proved that men were not then, any more than they had ever been before, chiefly governed by calculations of material profit and loss. Sentiments, fancies, theories, retained their power; the spirit of poetry had not wholly passed away from politics. Strange, therefore, as seems to us the worship paid to the name of mediaeval Rome by those who saw the sins and the misery of her people, it can hardly have been an intenser feeling than was the imaginative reverence wherewith the patriots of Italy during those years of struggle looked on the city whence, as from a fountain, all the streams of their national life had sprung, and in which, as in an ocean, they were all again to mingle.