Counter-Reformation Rome As Caput Mundi

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chapter 7 Romanus and Catholicus: Counter-Reformation Rome as Caput Mundi

Simon Ditchfield

Rome is not just a place to visit but an idea to “think with.” When Rome became headquarters of the first world religion with followers on all four continents then known to Europeans—Europe, Asia, Africa, and America—the Eternal City had been Christian for more than a millennium. In his famous sermon delivered on the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul (29 June), Pope Leo I (r.440–61) un- equivocally promoted the connection between Christian Rome and the “heavenly Kingdom” of a celestial Jerusalem:

For these are the men, through whom the light of Christ’s gospel shone on you, O Rome, and through whom you, who was the teacher of error, were made the disciple of Truth. These are your holy Fathers and true shepherds, who gave you claims to be numbered among the heavenly kingdoms, and built you under much better and happier auspices than they, by whose zeal the first foundations of your walls were laid: and of whom the one that gave you your name [Romulus] defiled you with his brother’s blood. These are they who promoted you to such glory, that being made a holy nation, a chosen people, a priestly and royal state [1 Peter 2:9], and the head of the world [caput mundi] through blessed Peter’s Holy See you attained a wider sway by the worship of God than by earthly government.1

In the early modern era, this very claim that Rome be considered caput mundi through the authority of St. Peter, the first pope, was inserted above the bird’s eye view of the city (c.1580) that Pope Gregory XIII (r.1572–85) commissioned for the Vatican Palace’s Gallery of Maps, in which all the regions of ancient and modern Italy were frescoed.

1 Sermon 82, §1, as adapted from C.L. Feltoe, A select library of the Nicene and post-Nicene Fathers, ser. 2, vol. 12 (Edinburgh, 1894). Leo IV (r.847–55) constructed and gave his name to the monumental Leonine Walls to protect St. Peter’s following the 846 sack by Saracen raiders.

Relaunching Rome as the capital of global Roman Catholicism after the Reformation should be associated above all with Gregory XIII. As Michel de Montaigne recorded in his travel journal:

He has built colleges for the Greeks [1577], and for the English [1578], Scots, French, Germans [re-endowed in 1573 and merged in 1580 with the Hungarian College, itself founded in 1578] and Poles, and has endowed each one with more than ten thousand crowns a year in perpetuity, be- sides the huge expense of the buildings. He has done this to call to the Church the children of those nations, corrupted by evil opinions against the Church.2

But Gregory did considerably more, as detailed in the etching (1582–c.1585) sometimes attributed to Nicolaus van Aelst, published by Marcantonio Ciappi, the pope’s biographer.3 (Fig. 7.1) Framing the pope’s portrait are depictions of the churches, seminaries, and colleges he helped found, those just mentioned as well as that of the Maronites or Lebanese Christians (1584) and the Jesuit seminary-cum-college-cum-research institute, the Roman College, inaugu- rated in 1584 (and ancestor of the current Gregorian Pontifical University). Gregory spent the impressive sum of almost 40,000 scudi on the latter, and its importance is demonstrated by its prominent position at top center of the print. Further afield, the pope contributed to the costs of seminaries for train- ing clergy in Vienna (1574), Graz (1578), Prague (1575), Olomouc (1579), Vilnius and Fulda (1584), and Dillingen (1585). In addition, in 1576–79 Gregory endowed 50 places for students in Milan’s Swiss College, founded by Carlo Borromeo in 1568 to train priests to work effectively in Western Europe’s largest archdio- cese, which included the Swiss canton of the Grisons, an area “infected” with Protestant heresy. In the Far East, Gregory helped underwrite the costs of no fewer than four Jesuit houses in Japan. He also received the Tenshō mission of four noble Japanese boys to Europe (1584–86), which climaxed with their extended stay in Rome, where they had audiences with both Gregory and his successor Sixtus V (r.1585–90). Gregory’s audience is given pride of place in the etching, just below and to the left of the Roman College, which is positioned centrally in the first row above the pope’s portrait.

2 Montaigne 1983, 75 (29 December 1580). 3 M.A. Ciappi, Compendio delle heroiche et gloriose attioni, et santa vita di papa Greg. XIII (Rome, 1591).