Washington University in St. Louis Washington University Open Scholarship Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations Arts & Sciences Spring 5-15-2015 Gold, Grain, and Grace: Piety and Community in Late Medieval Rome James Allen Palmer Washington University in St. Louis Follow this and additional works at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Palmer, James Allen, "Gold, Grain, and Grace: Piety and Community in Late Medieval Rome" (2015). Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 432. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds/432 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Arts & Sciences at Washington University Open Scholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Washington University Open Scholarship. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS Department of History Dissertation Examination Committee: Daniel Bornstein, Chair Christine Johnson Ronald G. Musto Mark Gregory Pegg Michael Sherberg Gold, Grain, and Grace: Piety and Community in Late Medieval Rome by James A. Palmer A dissertation presented to the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences of Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2015 St. Louis, Missouri © 2015, James A. Palmer Table of Contents List of Abbreviations………………………………………………………………......................iii Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………….iv Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………………v Chapter 1: Introduction – Roman History and Roman Time……………………………………...1 Chapter 2: A Baron Prepares for Death..………………………………………………………..44 Chapter 3: Living and Dying Together………………………………………………………….82 Chapter 4: For His Soul and Those of His Dead……………………………………………….122 Chapter 5: The Houses of Women……………………………………………………………...171 Chapter 6: Peacemaking and Community………………………………………………………209 Chapter 7: Conclusion – Piety, Economy, and Community in Late Medieval Rome………….255 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………269 ii List of Abbreviations ACSP – Archivio del Capitolo di S. Pietro ASC – Archivio Storico Capitolino ASR – Archivio di Stato di Roma ASRSP – Archivio della Società romana di storia patria BAV – Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana CNC – Collegio dei Notai Capitolini OSS – Ospedale S. Spirito SAP – Sant’Angelo in Pescheria SMM – Santa Maria Maggiore iii Acknowledgments I have accrued innumerable debts during the process of researching and writing this dissertation. My adviser, Daniel Bornstein, actively supported me in my goal of writing on Rome even before I arrived at Washington University in St. Louis. I must also thank the other members of the committee: Mark Gregory Pegg and Christine Johnson for comments on drafts and at workshops as well as letters of support, Michael Sherberg for spending a semester helping me to learn to read the fourteenth-century Roman vernacular, and Ronald G. Musto for his extensive comments and suggestions on every part of the dissertation. I would also like to thank Daniel Lord Smail, Katherine L. Jansen, Carol Symes, and Thomas Kuehn, who each read one or more draft chapters and provided helpful comments. Over the course of this project I have also had the good fortune to receive generous financial support. Washington University in St. Louis’ International and Area Studies Program’s generous Pre-dissertation Summer Research Grant enabled me to carry out preliminary soundings of the archives in the summer of 2010. A Fulbright IIE fellowship to Italy in academic year 2011-2012 allowed me to carry out the bulk of the research. A Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship in academic year 2014-2015 has funded the final stages of writing. For all this support I am immensely grateful. James A. Palmer Washington University in St. Louis May 2015 iv ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Gold, Grain, and Grace: Piety and Community in Late Medieval Rome by James A. Palmer Doctor of Philosophy in History Washington University in St. Louis, 2015 Daniel Bornstein, Chair This dissertation argues that as the composition of Rome's ruling group shifted over the fourteenth century its members sought reliable, autonomous mechanisms for strengthening the cohesion of their elite community. For these they turned to various kinds of pious giving, ways of generating kin-like ties by means of circulating wealth within the sphere of economic action made available by the logic of purgatory. Their efforts succeeded in creating a ruling group marked by strong ties of social solidarity. Over time, these strategies also had the cumulative effect of shifting the attitudes of the political elite toward the commune itself. Rather than seeing the commune as the primary example of a rightly ordered Christian society, in the way common in communal ideology, they increasingly saw that right order embodied in their own autonomous social networks. As the commune ceased to be an object of contention among Rome's political elite, it ceased to be the primary locus of that elite's political identity and legitimacy and its preservation ceased to be a priority in way it had been before. The result was that when Boniface IX took control of the city in 1398 the local elite was no longer inclined to fight for communal autonomy, as they had as recently as the late 1340s. Thus, understanding the ways religion and the social order were entwined with one another in fourteenth-century Rome enables us to better understand its political history. v Chapter 1: Introduction – Roman History and Roman Time “From the greatest oppositions into which high culture could have split, a complete organic unity has grown…The fusion of different things into a unity that characterizes the spatial image of Rome’s cityscape achieves an effect that is no less real in its temporal form. In a truly peculiar way that is difficult to describe, one can perceive here how the separateness of time-periods converges into a presentness and togetherness…Certainly the idea of the historical course of things never falls silent in Rome.” Georg Simmel, “Rome” “Time is precious in this realm.” Dante, Purgatory, XXIV, 91-92 On the night of May 19, 1347, a Roman notary named Cola di Rienzo passed a kind of vigil in the church of Sant’Angelo in Pescheria.1 Upon the walls of this church, Cola had earlier commissioned (as he would again) allegorical images depicting Rome’s wrongly ordered state in explicitly religious terms. 2 A reformer and visionary whose aspirations for Rome embraced both its ancient origins and its identity as the conceptual center of Christendom, Cola sought to bring order and justice to a city long wracked by violent political turmoil. On May 20, with papal support and with much of his baronial opposition’s military might absent, Cola seized the city in 1 Ronald G. Musto, Apocalypse in Rome: Cola di Rienzo and the Politics of the New Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003; Amanda Collins, Greater than Emperor: Cola di Rienzo (ca. 1313-54) and the World of Fourteenth-Century Rome (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. 2 On Cola’s propagandistic artworks, see Amy Schwarz, “Images and Illusions of Power in Trecento Art: Cola di Rienzo and the Ancient Roman Republic,” (PhD diss., State University of New York at Binghamton, 1994); and her “Eternal Rome and Cola di Rienzo’s Show of Power,” in Acts and Texts: Performance and Ritual in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007). 1 a dramatic coup, laying the groundwork for his new buono stato, a just and holy society that would remake Rome and return it to its rightful place at the center of world affairs. He endeavored to restore the glory of ancient Rome, albeit in a medieval guise. His early successes included the expulsion of the powerful Colonna family and their defeat in battle just outside the city. Yet this success was fleeting. By autumn, Cola’s support from the pope in Avignon, as well as that of his local collaborators, had withered away and Rome’s self-styled Tribune soon found it necessary to flee. Cola’s self-imposed exile, which included time spent among religious radicals in a mountain enclave, a period as a guest and then a prisoner of Emperor Charles IV, conviction as a heretic by Pope Clement VI, and his improbable reprieve upon the death of Clement himself, ended when he reentered Rome in 1354 and enjoyed a brief return to power. This fleeting return to glory ended when he awoke one day to find himself cornered by an angry mob of Romans in his palace on the Campidoglio. Finding it impossible to dissuade them from their attempt to overthrow him, Cola attempted to escape in disguise and was caught. With their prey at hand, the crowd hesitated. Cola glared at them, his face smeared with soot from his attempt at disguise. One account states that in that moment “no man wanted to touch him.” His stockings, fine “in the manner of a baron,” peeked infuriatingly from beneath the shabby clothes with which he had concealed himself. “In the silence he gazed about,” seeming simultaneously to challenge the crowd and to seek some escape. “Finally, Cecco dello Viecchio seized his rapier and thrust it into his stomach. He was the first.”3 Cola’s end came quickly. After killing him, the Roman crowd 3 Anonimo Romano, Cronica, ed. Giuseppe Porta, 3rd edition (Milan: Adelphi, 2007) [henceforth, AR, Cronica], p. 197; “Nullo omo era ardito toccarelo. Là stette per meno de ora, la varva tonnita, lo voito nero commo fornaro, in iuppariello de seta verde, scento, colli musacchini inaorati, colle caize de biada a muodo de barone. Le vraccia teneva piecate. In esso silenzio 2 dragged Cola’s corpse through those streets until his head disintegrated. Then they strung him up by his feet and left him to hang. “He had so many wounds he resembled a sieve. There was nowhere without wounds.