The City of Rome in the Middle Ages

Last year’s Pegasus contained an article on the life of Gordon McNeil Rushforth F. S. A., who bequeathed his library to the University College of the South West in 1938. In February 1982 Rushforth’s notebooks and papers were generously donated to the Exeter University Library by the Rev E.P. Baker, to whom he had left them at his death. Among the collection are the manuscript texts of four unpublished lectures: one of these, “Rome in the Middle Ages”, was given on 8th August 1922 as part of an extra -mural course, put on by the Cambridge University Local Lectures organization. It is reproduced here exactly as Rushforth wrote it, with only a few words added here and there [in square brackets] to complete the sense. Rushforth illustrated his talk with slides: sixty years later, we can look instead at the illustrations in Richard Krautheimer’s brilliant book, “Rome: Profile of a City”, 312–1308 (Princeton University Press, 1980).

Let us begin by considering the importance of the idea of Rome in the medieval mind. On the one hand there was the ancient prestige of the City, the capital of the greatest empire the world had known, the seat of a civilisation and art so far above what most of the Middle Ages could attain. They may have known little about the true history of the ancient world, or the meaning of its remains, but the glamour of the past and the legends which grew up combined to form a conception of almost supernatural grandeur which dominated the medieval imagination. On the other hand, Rome was the Holy City of the West, the seat of the visible head of the Catholic Church, the shrine of the princes of the Apostles, Peter and Paul, and of more bodies of the saints and more relics than any other place in the world, and so [was] one of the three great pilgrimages, the others being Jerusalem and Campostela.

We may say that, physically and materially, what kept Rome together, and, preserved its integrity and continuity throughout the Dark Ages, was its Walls. Rome in the days of its greatness as capital of the Roman Empire was an unwalled city. Almost at the end of the ancient period, when the barbarian invasions were becoming a real and tangible danger even to Italy and the heart of the Empire, Rome was fortified by Aurelian (271-5), and his walls were restored by Arcadius and Honortus in 402 when the Goths were threatening. These ancient walls once built were never allowed to fall into serious decay and are standing today. Every age has left its mark on them in the form of restorations and renewals, and though they did not give absolute immunity, for Rome has been captured again and again, they as often saved it from invasion and devastation, and formed a protection and shelter behind which it could recover from the storms which from time to time swept over it. They have enabled it to justify its title of the Eternal City.

The next point on which I should like to insist is the immense difference, not only in life and culture and polity, but also in outward appearance, between medieval Rome and ancient Rome on the one hand, and modern Rome on the other. We shall see how, between let us say the 7th and the 14th centuries, the traces of the ancient city were steadily obliterated, so that all that was left to meet the eye was great isolated stacks of ruins, like the Coliseum and the Baths of Diocletian, too vast and solid to be destroyed. On the other hand, the architectural revolution of the Renaissance, continued down to our own days, has largely destroyed the medieval buildings, or altered them past recognition. Medieval remains in Rome are by no means common or obvious. We have to search them out, and still more we have to reconstruct the picture of medieval Rome in imagination by the help of documents. Armellini, the historian of the Roman churches, has said (p.13) that of all the cities of Italy Rome is the poorest in medieval monuments.

In particular, the Roman churches in the course of the last four centuries have generally been given an entirely new dress, both inside end out, even when the original fabric remains as the skeleton. Take the first both in rank and age, St. John Lateran, the cathedral church of Rome. Restored again and again after earthquakes and fires, Constantine’s basilica remained all through the Middle Ages with all its added wealth of medieval monuments and furniture. Then the 16th and 17th centuries the interior was completely transformed, and in the 18th the (east) front lost all its ancient appearance by the addition of a facade which is one of the grandest specimens of the baroque style, and worthy of the occasion, but you would never guess that behind it [is] (or was) the oldest church in Rome — ‘omnium urbis et orbis ecclesiarum mater et caput’, as its proud title proclaims. It has no more connexion with it than the style of Westminster Abbey has with that of St. Paul’s. Then the greatest of all the Roman churches, and the richest in medieval monuments, St. Peter’s, was entirely destroyed and rebuilt in the course of the 16th and 17th centuries, and all that represents the old church today are fragments of tombs collected in the crypt, and the famous twisted vine-columns now in the balconies of the dome.

A northern visitor to Rome about the beginning of the 13th century has recorded the vivid picture left in his memory by the first view of Rome as he came by the road from the North over Monte Mario. And the two things that struck his eye were the great masses of ancient buildings (palatia, the Coliseum etc.), standing up among the houses or dominating the empty spaces within the walls; and the ‘seges turrium’, the forest of church and baronial towers. A number of the tall medieval campaniles or bell-towers still remain beside their churches, but they are exceptions, and far more have vanished in the reconstructions and alterations since the Renaissance. Still rarer are the towers belonging to the fortified houses or castles of the great medieval families, for the Renaissance palace has replaced the baronial castle. In the case of one of the largest roman palaces, still belonging to one of the oldest Roman families, the Colonna, a medieval tower is even now attached to the Renaissance building.

What a different spectacle is presented by the view from Monte Mario today, when the sea of roofs is dominated by the dome of St. Peter’s and in these last twenty years by the colossal Monumento Nazionale at the Capitol!

Down to the beginning of the 5th century ancient Rome with all its great buildings and their contents was practically intact. We cannot dwell now on the splendour and interest of the spectacle presented, but the world has never seen anything like it again.

Then in 410 came the capture and sack of Rome by the Goths under Alaric. The spell of the city’s inviolability was broken, and the following centuries saw it attacked again and again. Instead of being the capital of a great empire and the seat of government, it became an isolated fortress or place of refuge in the midst of a hostile world. It was no longer safe to live outside the walls. Under the Early Empire the city had spread out along the great roads in suburbs and villas and parks, in a way which made a sort of vast garden-city up to and on to the hills twenty miles away. Now all this had to be abandoned, and its place was gradually taken by what we know as the Campagna, mere grassland with ancient ruins scattered about it. One result of this was that the great aqueducts which crossed it, bringing water from the hills to Rome, could no longer be maintained in order, and the supply if not entirely cut off became meagre. And so the great Imperial Baths fell out of use, and with them a whole chapter of ancient civilisation was closed. It may be imagined how under these conditions the population of the city shrank in numbers, so that by degrees whole tracts within the walls were abandoned and became almost as wild and desolate as the Campagna.

There was no longer any public authority interested in or capable of keeping up the great public buildings, and there was nothing but the solidity of the Roman masonry and concrete construction to resist the gradual and inevitable process of decay. But over one great complex of buildings the tradition of at least a nominal supervision seems to have been maintained, and that was the Imperial Palace (or rather series of palaces) which covered the Palatine Hill. It was never quite abandoned though the later Western Emperors and Theodoric ceased to live in Rome, and after Justinian’s conquest of Italy in the sixth century it once more became nominally an Imperial residence and a seat of the Imperial government. The Byzantine rule became more and more unsubstantial, and finally faded away in the eighth century; but in 629 a Roman Emperor (Heraclius) could still be crowned in the great hall of the palace, in 663 it must have been occupied by another emperor (Constans II) on his visit to Rome, and as late as the end of the century we still find an Imperial curator palatii executing works of repair. After that it was left to its fate or actual demolition, but its imposing remains always made a great impression on the medieval world, and it was known as ‘the great palace’ (palatium maius). At the end of the 12th century a northern visitor could still identify and admire the House of Augustus, i.e. that Flavian reconstruction, the wreck of which has been revealed by modern excavation, though it had already begun to be stripped of its marbles for the benefit of the churches.

We must remember that the amount and bulk of the ancient buildings still standing in at least the earlier Middle Ages was far greater than anything of which we have cognisance. Human forces were not sufficiently powerful to affect them seriously, and they suffered mainly through neglect to keep roofs and walls in order, and still more through occasional fires and earthquakes. It was when the Renaissance had given birth, not only to a real interest in the ancient buildings, but also to a new creative art and architecture, that the ancient remains were sacrificed wholesale to the needs of the latter.

Imperial Rome was the capital of ancient culture and religion. Medieval Rome was the Christian capital of the Western world. The latest official record of ancient Rome — the Catalogue of the contents of each of the Fourteen Regions into which the city was divided, drawn up in the 4th century — tells us that it contained 423 temples. It has often been said that Rome has as many churches as there are days in the year, and the real number is not very different. But as the old Catalogues show in the Middle ages there were many more which have now disappeared. One list of the 14th century gives the total of 414, which it will be noticed is nearly that of the ancient temples. We may ask, what was the process by which the transformation was brought about?

There were no doubt churches in Rome before Constantine, but the history of the Roman churches we know begins with the basilicas which he built for the newly recognized religion. A few more were added in the course of the 4th century (e.g. S.Maria. Maggiore in 352). Then at the end of the century we get the official suppression of paganism and the closing of the temples. But it must not be supposed that the temples were regularly converted into churches. It was rather an exception when this took place. At the present day there are only some half dozen churches which can be certainly said to be converted temples. If it had been done oftener, more ancient work would have been preserved: as it is, the Pantheon (S.Maria Rotunda), the round temple by the Tiber (S.Maria del Sole) and the pseudo-peripteral temple S.Maria Egiziaca close by (the so-called Temple of Fortuna Virilis) are some of the most complete ancient buildings to be found in Rome. When churches were not built independently, it was secular and not religious buildings which were converted. There are two striking instances of this in the region of the Forum.

On the east side, the deserted Curia, the seat of that august body the Roman Senate, was made into the church of S.Adriano by Honorius I about 620, and it still retains substantial remains of its latest ancient reconstruction by Diocletian, while the adjacent senatorial offices (the Secretarium Senatus) became the church of S.Martina, which, though on the old site, was completely rebuilt in the 17th century. On the opposite side, underneath the Palatine, was a building of the time of Hadrian, with the plan of a Roman house (vestibule, atrium tablinum, etc.), which may have been the library attached to the Temple of Augustus, the high back wall of which bounds it on one side. Here was installed, probably as early as the 5th century, the earliest church in Rome dedicated to the Virgin S.Maria Antiqua, ‘Old St.Mary’s’, a name which it must have acquired after the Basilica Liberiana had been rededicated to Mary by Xystus III in 492 and distinguished as S.Maria Maior — ‘Great St. Mary’s’. We shall have more to say about St. Maria Antiqua presently.

We may learn a good deal about medieval Rome from a rapid survey of the chief epochs of church building and restoration. One great source of information is the Liber Pontificalis or Book of the Popes, biographies containing particularly accounts of what churches each Pope built or restored or endowed or enriched with gifts, compiled probably in the sixth century, but continued and added to from time to time (notably in the 12th century), and embodying original documents and contemporary information, and always the local tradition.

The first period to he noticed is what we may call the Byzantine age — the period that is from Justinian’s conquest of Italy in the middle of the 6th century down to the disappearance of the last traces of Imperial authority in the 8th. There was a regular invasion of Greek influence accompanying the Greek officials, clergy, monks, residents. Churches and monasteries were dedicated to oriental saints and filled with their pictures. [The period was] marked officially by the foundation of monasteries (e.g. S.Saba on the Aventine).

A very instructive monument of this age is the church of S. Maria Antiqua. Not an important church in rank or size, but almost unique in the fact that its walls were decorated with successive series of pictures from the 6th to the 9th centuries, and then, apparently about the middle of the 9th century, the church was buried in an earthquake, to be revealed to us in an almost untouched condition by the excavations of 1900 and 1901. When you think how entirely the older Roman churches which have remained in continuous have been transformed by restorations and changes of fashion down to the present day, the importance of this will be realized. It is like lifting the curtain on the realities of that early medieval world about which our information is so meagre, and which seems so remote and almost mythical. In S.Maria Antiqua we tread the pavements that were trodden by the Romans of the 7th and 8th centuries, they confront us pictured on its walls in the dress and personal appearance they wore in life, and above all we are surrounded by the religious art of the time expressing their religious beliefs and tendencies.

This art is Byzantine in character. To explain its subjects we have to go to the manuals of Byzantine art; and many of them are accompanied by explanatory inscriptions in Greek. Yet this was not the church of a foreign community. The works were carried out by or under a succession of Popes — Martin I (649-54), John VII (705-8), Zacharias (741-52), Paul I (757-68), Hadrian I (772-95). Latin appears side by side with Greek in the descriptions. And the art is Byzantine art with a difference: it has a certain Roman and Italian character.

One feature of the church is significant. When first excavated it was full of graves, not only in the floor, but even in the form of loculi dug out of the solid walls, especially in the outer church, which seems to have remained in use till the 11th century. Burial inside the city, especially around and in churches, began when the ideas of the ancient world disappeared, and after the catacombs were abandoned (410) and it was no longer safe to go outside the city.

For [the] same reason the catacombs ceased to be [a] place of pilgrimage or religious service, and the bodies of the saints and martyrs [were] brought into the city churches.

With the coming of the Franks and the coronation of Charles the Great as Roman Emperor in 800, Rome was freed from the Byzantines and from the Lombards, and under the comparatively favourable conditions which ensued, Pope Hadrian I (772–795) stands out as a notable restorer and builder. He not only did much work for the churches, as the long list of his restorations and donations in the Liber Pontificalis shows — S.Maria in Cosmedin, the church of the Greek quarter, was his creation — but also he repaired the walls of the city, he once more put four of the ancient aqueducts in working order, and he did something to revive and organize cultivation in the Campagna. There is little or nothing to show of his works today. Some of his pictures survive at S.Maria Antiqua in the outer church, and give some idea of the church decoration of the time, and of the decadence of art. But they cannot tell us what the work in the precious metals or in textiles and embroidery was like which he lavished on St. Peter’s and other churches.

One of his immediate successors Paschal I (8l7-24) continued Hadrian’s works of restoration and decoration. Three churches at least remain as special monuments of his activity — S.ta Prassede, S.ta Cecilia, and S.Maria in Domnica, and in each case the apse mosaic from the permanence of the material has survived, with the Pope’s portrait. From the churches of Constantine onwards, mosaic had been a regular form of church decoration, especially for the apse and the face of the arch which enclosed or framed it. We may trace a real Roman school of mosaic, independent of Byzantine work though affected by it. S.Maria Antiqua [was] not important enough to have this costly decoration, but John VII, who did so much for that church, put up important mosaics in his chapel of the Virgin in St. Peter’s, of which fragments survive. By the 9th century, as the mosaics of Paschal I show, the old inspiration bad become fossilized; but as we shall see, when art revived in the 12th century the Roman mosaic workers produced more splendid works than ever before.

The relative prosperity of the days of Hadrian and Paschalis died away, and the 10th and 11th centuries are the darkest and most degraded period of Rome and the Papacy. Hitherto what culture and art existed was the last faint tradition of the art and culture of the ancient world. But no new life was put into it, and under the terrible conditions of the age the effort grew fainter, and the results were more and more degraded. In the some way the ancient city of Rome in its outward aspect was still there in the 9th century, with the old lines of paved streets, and the temples and baths and palaces, still containing some of their precious contents, but gradually falling into ruin; while all the church building and church restoration by the Popes was only carried on by using up old materials and adapting old buildings. There was no fresh architectural or artistic movement.

A glimpse of what Rome looked like in the 8th and 9th centuries is revealed to us by a sort of guide or itinerary, based on a plan of the city, and intended for pilgrims or visitors. It is known as the Einsiedeln Itinerary. It is, so to speak, the letterpress belonging to a plan of Rome, and gives eleven routes across the city, with what was to be seen on the way. There are no descriptions, but it shows that at the time the main streets of ancient Rome were still used, and that the great public buildings had mostly preserved their ancient names. Moreover the author could read and copy correctly the inscriptions upon them which told the story of their origin and purpose. Many of the buildings which he saw had disappeared before an interest in antiquities and inscriptions revived once more in the early days of the Renaissance.

The catastrophe which brought all this world to an end was the devastation of Rome in 1084 by the Normans under Robert Guiscard Duke of Apulia, brought in to save Gregory VII from the Romans. Fire raged over most of the city, and the eastern quarters, the Caelian especially, from the Forum to the Lateran, never recovered. The old sites were buried under the ruins and ashes, and many of the old roads and landmarks must have disappeared. The old church of S.Clemente is more than 13ft. below the level of the new one. The outer church of S.Maria Antiqua dedicated to St. Antony was buried in the same way, and in later times([at the] end of the 13th century) S.Maria Liberatrice was built high above it.

As has happened before in the world’s history, a great catastrophe has been the starting point for an architectural and artistic revival. Besides, in the 11th and 12th centuries new life was beginning to stir in Western art and architecture. And then there was the necessity of replacing the destroyed or damaged churches. And so we get a whole series of reconstructions, and new developments of pictorial and decorative art, belonging to what we may call the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century which, accompanied as it was with an intellectual revival as well, was the precursor of the classical Renaissance of the 14th and following centuries.

First came the new church of S.Clemente, the one we see today, early in the 12th century. The old marble fittings of the quire [were] brought up from the church below. (Some [of the] paintings in the lower church [were] probably done just before 1084; [those of the] story of Clement VI are beautiful things in their way, besides being interesting archaeologically and liturgically, and show that revival was already at work.) Then followed the SS. Quattro Coronati (1111), S.Adriano (1110), S.Maria in Cosmedin (1123) in the form in which we see it, S.Maria in Trastevere by Innocent II (l130 — 43), S.Maria Nova (about 1161) and so forth. In the thirteenth century one outstanding work was the remodelling of S.Lorenzo Fuori by Honorius III (1216–27) when the new nave was added and the orientation of the church reversed.

One remarkable feature of these new buildings was the revival of mosaic pictures, especially for the apse, in magnificent decorative forms, based on the study of the apse mosaics of the age of Constantine, and far more splendid and artistic than anything that had been achieved in this way for centuries. The great examples are the apses of S.Clemente (before 1125), S.Paolo Fuori (by Honorius III 1216 — 27), and S.Maria Maggiore (by Nicholas IV l288–94), where the Coronation of Mary in the midst of grand convolutions of foliage is of surpassing richness and beauty. This and the great apse mosaic of the Lateran were executed for Nicholas IV by Jacopo Torriti.

At the same time there came into flower the exquisite and purely Roman decorative art of the Roman Marmorarii or marble workers, specially represented by the family of the Cosmati. It was based on the study of ancient marble and mosaic work, and its characteristic is the use of decorative mosaics (they did not usually attempt figures) in both glass (gilt) and marble tesserae applied to or framed by carved white marble work. Altar fronts, screens, pulpits and candelabra with twisted shafts, pavements, even grave slabs, are some of its familiar forms. We need not go to Rome to see what it looks like, for Westminster Abbey contains a small museum of this exotic work which seems to have taken the fancy of the art-loving Henry III and his son Edward I. In one place we have the signature of one of the artists — ‘Petrus Romanus civis’. The shrine of the Confessor and Henry’s own tomb are the chief specimens, the latter in almost classical forms. Later, Gothic, as the fashion of the day, affected the Cosmati work, but it must be remembered that the Gothic style was always an exotic in Rome, and had only a short life there. There is only one purely Gothic church in Rome, the Minerva (end of the 14th century).

Contemporary with the great mosaics in S.Maria Maggiore, a Roman painter of the same school, Pietro Cavallini, was decorating S.Cecilia with grand figures and scenes. I will say nothing of the Tuscan artists brought to Rome to help decorate the churches and palaces at the end of the 13th century — Giotto and the sculptor Arnolfo di Cambio, for they really belong to the history of the Renaissance proper.

All this promise of a new life of Roman art was brought to a premature end by the exile of the papacy at Avignon (1305–77); and the Renaissance at Rome was postponed for another century.

This is one side of the picture. Rome seems to be emancipated from the past, and to be starting on a fresh career. But there was another aspect of the Rome of the twelfth century which is revealed to us by various documents of the period. The continuity of the old tradition about the ancient Rome has been broken: the true names and history of the buildings or ruins has been forgotten, and a whole world of myth and legend has taken their place. About 1130 a Canon of St. Peter’s Benedict (afterwards Celestine II) drew up an ordo — directions for the routes to be taken by the official Papal processions on festivals and other occasions. Compared with the Einsiedeln Itinerary, it shows how many of the ancient names had disappeared in the interval and been replaced by popular and legendary ones. Still more important is the book known as the Mirabilia, “the Marvels of Rome”, which was probably also drawn up by Benedict about 1140. It is much more than an itinerary, and gives a detailed account of the city with descriptions of the great buildings and stories of their origin and meaning. It has sometimes been called a popular guide book for pilgrims, but Duchesne regarded it as the first indication of an awakening of interest in the antiquities of the city; the first attempt to write what we should call an historical and archaeological handbook. The results indeed are quite futile from the point of view of our knowledge, but the interest of the book is the attempt to coordinate the existing facts and beliefs about the ancient buildings, because there was a public which wanted to be informed about them. Its other value is that it tells us what was believed at the time. It shows that there was little or no knowledge of the real facts. The ruins have got the wrong ancient names or purely fanciful names, and fantastic stories are told, to explain their origin, and that of statues.

Another very interesting and instructive picture of the antiquities of Rome in the 12th century has lately come to us from the discovery in a Cambridge library of a little book written by a visitor to Rome — a certain Magister Gregorius, at the end of the 12th or beginning of the 13th century. He was presumably an ecclesiastic, and he wrote down what he heard, and still better, what he saw in Rome for the instruction and edification of the community to which he belonged at home. He was evidently not a pilgrim, and he may have come on business connected with his community. What makes him important for us is that he shows little or no interest in Christian Rome — the churches and relics. All his interest is in ancient Rome and its remains. Like the Mirabilia (which he does not seem to have known or used) he illustrates this new interest in antiquity which appears in the 12th century, though his Roman history and his identifications of buildings are no better. On the other hand he has the great merit of telling us what he saw, and sometimes the things he mentions are not recorded by anyone else, or not so early — we have already noticed his vivid record of the impression made on his mind and memory by his first view of the city from Monte Mario, with its forest of towers and mighty masses of building. Another of his most striking descriptions is that of a marble Venus which he was taken to see. It was perfect and still retained its delicate colouring, so that it seemed alive. ‘And’, he continues, ‘such was its wondrous beauty and magical charm that I was constrained to go three times to see it, though, it was two miles distant from my lodging.’ Such appreciation of ancient art was rare or non-existent in the earlier Middle Ages, though we may remember that that princely prelate, Henry of Blois, Bishop of Winchester, brother of King Stephen, brought a collection of ancient statues from Rome in 1151 to adorn his palace at Winchester. And we may also remember that we are not very distant from the time when the remains of ancient sculpture were influencing and inspiring the first great Tuscan sculptors, Nicholas and John of Pisa.

We must now glance at the secular buildings of medieval Rom, the palaces and castles. First and foremost comes the Lateran Palace, the regular official residence of the Popes, from Constantine down to the beginning of the 14th century. Considering its importance and long history, and the wealth and variety of its contents and decorations, the accumulations of ages, we know singularly little about it. The whole thing was swept away in the 16th century, and we can only make a very imperfect reconstruction of it from allusions and references. Magister Gregorius speaks of it as the winter palace of the Pope, because in his day the Vatican had already begun to be used as an alternative residence. We know that at the entrance was a great porch or portico, and within was a grand staircase leading to ten State or Papal apartments on the upper floor. There was also a great triclinium or dining-hall with an apse containing a mosaic commemorating Charles the Great’s coronation in 800. Then there were the Papal archives and library, and the Pope’s private chapel — the Sancta Sanctorum — the only fragment of the palace preserved intact, at the head of the Scala Santa. It is a small and rather plain Gothic chapel which received its present from in 1278, with contemporary paintings, marble Cosmati work and pavement. In front of the palace, as early as the 10th century, was a remarkable collection of ancient bronze statues — the M.Aurelius (“Constantine”), the Wolf, the Spinario, the head and hand from the Colossus.

When the Popes were away at Avignon, the palace was allowed to fall into decay, so that when they came back in 1377 it was uninhabitable, and henceforward they made the Vatican Palace their official residence. As we have said, a palace had been started at the Vatican in the last half of the 12th century. In the 15th it was completely reconstructed. The work was begun by Nicholas V in l450, but his chapel with Fra Angelico’s pictures [is] the only relic. The oldest surviving part of the palace is the part built by Alexander VI: the Borgia Pope, for his own occupation. It looks outwardly like a medieval castle, but with its famous decorations by Pinturricchio, belongs of course to the first flower of the Renaissance.

Very difference from the Papal palaces were the fortresses and castles of the nobles, often made in or out of ancient buildings. Thus the Coliseum, far more perfect in the Middle Ages than as now after it was robbed to build Renaissance palaces and churches, was at one time occupied as a fortress by the Frangipani. But the greatest and most famous of them was the Castle of St. Angelo, which has never lost its character as a fortress, though nowadays it is little more than a museum. But till quite modern times it was to Rome what the Tower is to London — state fortress and state prison. Originally it was the Imperial Mausoleum built by Hadrian when the first Imperial Mausoleum of Augustus was full; and the Emperors and their families were regularly buried there down to the 3rd century. Its position at the head of the bridge which connected it with the city made it inevitable that, if ever Rome were besieged, it should be occupied and defended as an outwork. And we find it so used in the siege of Rome during Justinian’s conquest in the 6th century, when it lost much of its splendid marble and bronze ornaments. (Nevertheless Magister Gregorius still saw a bronze bull standing on the rampart.) No doubt it continued to be treated as a fortress, for in the dark days of the 10th century we find it in the hands of the Roman leader Crescentius, and from him it got the name of Castellum Crescentii which it long retained (so in Magister Gregorius). The other name Castellum Sci Angeli replaced it later (14th century) but is older than that, and serves to record the tradition of the Vision of St. Michael on its summit seen by Gregory the Great during the plague, and the chapel commemorating this (610). Later, other families held it, and it was not till the Popes took up their residence in the Vatican at the end of the 14th century that it became a Papal fortress connected with the palace by a covered passage along the wall, and so formed an important element in providing for the security of the Pope’s person. Clement VII was saved by it in 1527 when Rome was being sacked by the Constable of Bourbon.

The impression left by the history of Rome in the Middle Ages is one of continuous disorder, conflict, destruction and these fortresses are the outward symbols of the state of things that prevailed. There was hardly ever a period of quiet long enough for civilisation and art to make much growth. The political aspirations of the Roman people and their leaders (Cola di Rienzo), based on the memories of the ancient world, led to nothing but disappointments. The nobles were at constant war with one another, or with the people; and the medieval Popes were never able to assert their authority for long together, and at last gave up the struggle and retired to a foreign country.

We cannot wonder that under these circumstances Rome was backward in culture as compared with other Italian cities. It was not until the Papal authority was firmly established by a series of energetic Popes in the 15th and 16th centuries that an at least outward prosperity and magnificence made Rome the dignified capital of Catholicism, though it was at the expense of popular liberty and ultimately of intellectual progress. With the emancipation and unification of Italy in our own days, Rome while retaining its character as a religious capital and at the same time becoming an important centre of scientific and humanistic studies, has started on a new career as the capital of a great European State.

G. Mc. N. Rushforth