The leather sole of the pilgrim’s shoe slipped on the smooth marble step, and he barely restrained himself from pitching forward. His guide – a raggedly-dressed man he had found dozing in the stairway – looked back and grinned. “Not much farther, Signor.” And, sure enough, three more windings of the stair brought them to a low door. The guide ducked through, and beckoned the pilgrim to follow. He did – and was nearly blinded by the April sun. Blinking to adjust his vision, he joined his guide on the edge of the platform, noting with dismay that the railing had been cut away.
The guide drew himself up. “Welcome, my friend, to the finest view in Rome, atop the grand pillar built by the emperor Traiano.” He pointed to a battered bronze statue, fifteen feet tall, poised on a pedestal in the center of the platform. Although the arms had been hammered off and one of the glass eyes had fallen out of its socket, the maimed face still gazed majestically over the city.
After admiring the statue, the pilgrim took in his surroundings. The view behind was partially blocked by an immense roofless building nearly as tall as the column. The calls of starlings echoed in the rubble-filled interior.
Directly below on either side were the smaller buildings, also roofless, that his guide had called the libraries. The sharp noise of metal on stone drew his attention to the library on the left. Squinting, he could see an old man using hammer and chisel to break a marble statue into manageable pieces. He glanced at his guide, who shrugged. “A lime burner, gathering stone for his kiln.”
To the south, clusters of huts and a few churches squatted in a marshy valley dotted with collapsing buildings. The hill behind was crowned by an immense pile of ruins. The guide followed his gaze. “The famous Forum and Palace Hill.” In the other direction, beyond a massive roofless temple, the pilgrim’s gaze was drawn to an enormous domed structure that loomed over a field of leaning columns. The guide anticipated his question. “The building with the dome is the Church of Santa Maria, which the heathens called Pantheon.”
The pilgrim nodded absently. Scanning the western horizon, he pointed to a tall campanile. “Is that the bell tower of St. Peter’s?” The guide replied that it was. The pilgrim squinted. “And what is that building with the bright roof just to the right?” The guide’s lips twitched. “That is the palace built a few years ago by Charles, King of the Franks.” He spat and grinned. “Your pardon, signor; I meant to say, Charles, the Emperor of the Romans.”
This vignette, set in early ninth century, is fictional. But it illustrates both the colossal ruinscape Rome had become by that period and the most important historical development of the early middle ages: the emergence of a new line of Roman emperors, and the ensuing tensions between these rulers and the popes.
But to understand this development, or indeed to understand Medieval Rome at all, we have to begin with a bit of backstory on the papacy. As you’ll recall from the previous episode, late antique popes like Leo I – who faced down Attila the Hun – assumed an increasingly active role in the political and social life of Rome as the imperial government weakened. This trend accelerated after the fall of the Empire, and culminated in the reign of Pope Gregory I, who has been called with equal justice the last ancient pope, and the first medieval one.
Gregory was born around 540 into an old senatorial family. He received a classical education, and served for some time as the prefect of Rome – an office roughly equivalent to mayor. When he was in his mid-thirties, he left public life and withdrew to a monastery. But after only three years in the cloister, he was summoned by the pope and sent as a special legate to the court of the eastern Roman emperors in Constantinople. On returning to Rome, he became the next pope’s secretary and – a few years later – his successor.
When Gregory assumed the papacy, Italy was in chaos. After the deposition of Romulus Augustulus, the peninsula had been governed by barbarian kings for nearly sixty years. These were peaceful decades, in which the small Germanic aristocracy lived in relative harmony with the old Roman elite. Then, in 534, the eastern Roman emperor Justinian had sent his great general Belisarius to reconquer Italy. The war lasted for nearly two decades. Rome was taken, lost, and taken again; and by the time the war ended, had been reduced to a burned-out ghost of its former self, with fewer than 30,000 inhabitants. The rest of Italy fared little better; and the arrival of a new Germanic tribe, the Lombards, swiftly undid the work of the re-conquest.
By the time Gregory was elected pope in 590, little more than a scattering of walled cities and the strip of territory between Rome and Ravenna remained under the control of the eastern Empire. Even within this territory, imperial officials were few and far between, and those few were more interested in lining their pockets than in maintaining basic services. Into this power vacuum stepped Pope Gregory.
As pontiff, Gregory had to maintain close ties with the eastern Empire without alienating the Lombards. To that end, he kept a permanent legate in Constantinople, and annually renewed a truce with the Lombard king. He established a personal diplomatic contact with Theodelinda, the Lombard queen, and with her help began the conversion of the Lombards from Arian to Catholic Christianity. Even more ambitious was the mission Gregory sent to convert the Anglo-Saxons, which would eventually bring Britain into the fold of the church.
Closer to home, Gregory created a large and efficient bureaucracy for managing the church’s widespread landholdings, negotiating fiercely to keep them out of Lombard hands. He had the produce from these estates sent to Rome, where it was distributed to the poor at purpose-built welfare centers.
When not writing diplomatic letters or managing the city, Gregory was composing sermons. The style of his homilies, written in the plain language of the common people, was immensely influential, as were the regular processions of the clergy he orchestrated on feast days. Both became mainstays of the medieval church in Rome.
The popes who followed Gregory attempted to imitate his example, with varying degrees of success. The papacy’s relationship with the eastern Empire continued to be complicated. The eastern emperors usually respected the authority of the popes; but when popes disagreed with the emperors on serious theological matters, they ran a serious risk of being kidnapped and/or replaced by imperial officials. This dynamic continued through the early eighth century, when eastern Roman authority in central Italy collapsed. No help was forthcoming from Constantinople; and so the popes turned for protection to the most powerful man in Western Europe: Pepin the Short.
However vertically challenged, Pepin had no shortage of ability or confidence. His father, Charles Martel – that is, Charles the Hammer – had been the Mayor of the Palace (an office roughly equivalent to Prime Minister) for the Merovingian Frankish kings, who governed a territory roughly equivalent to modern France. Though never crowned, Charles was ruler in all but name, and famously led the Franks at the Battle of Tours in 732, where he halted the Arab advance into Europe.
Charles’ son Pepin inherited his position as Mayor of the Palace, and continued his father’s expansionist policies. He was known, however, to be dissatisfied with having the power but not the title of a king – and in this circumstance, the current pope, Zachary, saw a chance to gain Pepin’s goodwill. In 751, Pepin sent Zachary a letter in which he hinted at his willingness to assume the royal title. Zachary was more than willing to encourage him. A few years later, his successor Stephen travelled personally to Pepin’s court, and anointed him king. Through a series of discussions during his stay, Stephen convinced Pepin to act as the protector of the papacy; and shortly thereafter, Pepin forced the Lombard king to surrender Rome, Ravenna, and the strip of land between to the pope – the origin of the Papal States.
In 773, renewed Lombard aggression prompted the current pope, Adrian, to solicit the help of Pepin’s recently-crowned son Charles. Known, in his lifetime and thereafter, as Charles the Great or Charlemagne, the new king was a formidable figure, well over six feet tall and endowed with immense strength and energy. Over the course of his long reign, he would add northern Spain and much of Italy and Germany to his realm, would preside over a brief but brilliant renaissance of Classical learning, and – most importantly for our purposes – would maintain close ties with Rome and her popes.
In response to Pope Hadrian’s plea for assistance, Charlemagne immediately marched to Italy, suppressed the Lombard king, and confirmed the pope’s sovereignty over the lands granted by his father. Even after he annexed northern Italy to his domains, Charlemagne adhered to this agreement, winning the gratitude of a series of popes. The consummation of the relationship between the papacy and its protector came on Christmas Day in the year 800, when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne Roman Emperor in St. Peter’s Basilica.
This was a momentous gesture, and a controversial one. There was already a Roman emperor in the east. But since that emperor, Irene, was both female and a murderer – to settle a succession crisis, she’d had her son blinded so savagely that he died of blood loss – she was probably, in Pope Leo’s book, doubly disqualified for the title. Alternatively, it is possible that, by crowning a new western emperor, the pope hoped to lay the groundwork for a marriage between Charlemagne and Irene. Whatever the pope’s motives in offering the imperial crown and Charlemagne’s in accepting it, however, neither seems to have anticipated the power struggle that would ensue.
In the years following the coronation, religious controversy soured relations between the pontiff and the emperor; and when Charlemagne had son Louis crowned co-emperor, he pointedly neglected to ask Pope Leo to perform the ceremony. After Charlemagne died in 814 and was succeeded by Louis, it was left to a new pope, Paschal I, to reestablish relations with Europe’s most powerful dynasty.
In the first months of his reign, Paschal made a pact with Louis, in which the emperor confirmed the pope’s independence and possession of Papal States, and promised not to intervene in papal elections. This agreement proved to be the basis of an effective working relationship. Louis asked Paschal to confirm his succession plans; and Paschal reciprocated by sending rich gifts and an envoy to the marriage of Louis’ son Lothar. Later, he would even invite Lothar to Rome for coronation as King of Italy.
Shortly thereafter, however, the newly-crowned Lothar began to work with members of the Roman nobility against Paschal. The pope responded by blinding and executing several of his officials for conspiring with the Franks – a move that did nothing to endear him to Emperor Louis.
A less grisly means by which Paschal asserted his authority was church building. During the seven years of his papacy, he built or rebuilt three churches in Rome: Santa Prassede, Santa Maria in Domnica, and Santa Cecilia in Trastevere. All three shared certain characteristics. They were, first, repositories of bones from the catacombs. Since the time of Constantine, the Roman catacombs had been major destinations for pilgrims eager to pray near the remains of the saints and martyrs buried there. By the eighth century, however, bandits and deterioration had made the catacombs dangerous to visit. Paschal and his predecessors decided to solve this problem by bringing the catacombs to the pilgrims. Cartloads of bones were brought into the city, and installed in specially-built crypts beneath the altars of selected churches. Each of these crypts – known as a confessio – consisted of a semi-circular corridor recessed five or six feet into the ground, a design intended to encourage the efficient circulation of pilgrims.
All three of Paschal’s churches were also characterized by extensive use of ancient Roman spolia. In part, this was simply practical: it was much easier to pluck columns or decorative marble from one of Rome’s many ruined buildings than to have new ones carved. But Paschal seems to have used ancient materials deliberately, in an attempt to connect his authority with the halcyon days of Constantine and the fourth century, and his churches with the great basilicas of late antiquity.
A final attribute shared by Paschal’s three churches was their extensive use of mosaics. Mosaics had been conventional in churches since at least the time of Constantine. From the beginning, they borrowed from secular iconography: Jesus was represented as a Roman emperor, Mary as an empress, saints as senators, etc. Mosaics and other sacred images were always important devotional aids in a culture whose illiteracy rates exceeded 90 %; but over the course of the early medieval period, they came to be venerated with particular fervor in the territory of the Eastern Roman Empire. The fear that veneration would bleed into idolatry prompted a series of eastern Roman emperors to ban all sacred images – a policy known as iconoclasm. At the time of Santa Prassede’s construction, the eastern emperor Michael II was presiding over a renewed burst of image-breaking – a policy that drove many Byzantine mosaicists to Italy. Pope Paschal drew on the talents of these men to decorate his churches.
All three of these characteristics – relics from the catacombs, ancient spolia, and fine mosaics – are on display in Santa Prassede, the greatest achievement of Paschal’s building program. In plan, Santa Prassede was a scaled-down version of the original St. Peter’s – probably a deliberate attempt by Pope Paschal to make his church recall the great basilica.
Like Paschal’s other churches, Santa Prassede had a crypt below the altar for bones from the catacombs. According to an inscription in the church, the remains of no fewer than 2300 martyrs, including 14 early popes, were moved here. Among these remains were the bones of St. Praxedes (Santa Prassede in Italian), the elusive second-century martyr to whom the church is dedicated.
Since the church’s famous mosaics are described in the photo essay at toldinstone.com, I’ll restrict myself to a few general comments here.
Perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of Santa Prassede’s mosaics is their classical style. To ninth-century observers, these mosaics would have looked distinctly old-fashioned, and would have recalled the fourth- and fifth-century mosaics of the great basilicas. The entire scheme of the apse, in fact, was copied from the late antique church of Saints Cosmas and Damian.
The finest of Santa Prassede’s mosaics are in the small chapel of St. Zeno, built as a mausoleum for Paschal’s mother Theodora. Like the rest of Santa Prassede, the chapel was to evoke the golden age of Constantine; to that end, Paschal had his builders make extensive use of ancient spolia around the entrance, and based the design of the chapel itself on late antique mausoleums. The mosaics, likewise, hearken back to Roman designs four or five centuries old.
The most personal touch is the small mosaic portrait of the pope’s mother Theodora. Her face, outlined by the square blue halo that indicates she was still alive when the portrait was created, has the slightest suggestion of a smile. But the overall impression is more political than sentimental. With its gorgeous mosaics and porphyry-inlaid floor, the chapel almost has the feel of an imperial mausoleum – yet another none-too-subtle message from the pope to the new Roman emperors.