Rome. The Biography of the City

ONE MYTHS, MONARCHS AND REPUBLICANS

In the days of Augustus, the first of the Roman emperors, a young writer from Padua, Titus Livius, brought to a close the first part of his epic history of the city in which he had come to live. His story had begun in that remote age, seven hundred years before his own birth, in which the origins of Rome were overcast by the mists of romantic legend. Its scene was the high ground overlooking the Tiber some fifteen miles from the salt flats through which the river flowed to the sea. Down the slopes of the hills ran streams which formed swamps and small lakes in the valleys below.¹ And beyond the valleys was the wide expanse of the Roman Campagna, a silent, undulating plain of woodland and pasture that stretched as far as the eye could reach to the surrounding mountains, to the Alban hills in the south, to the Apennines in the east, and, in the north, to the commanding heights of the empire of the Etruscans. Above a bend in the Tiber, where an island lay in midstream like an anchored ship, was the only place for miles at which the river could be crossed with ease. Here rose a hill which was to become known as the Palatine; and it was here, in the eighth century before Christ, that Titus Livius set his story.

He wrote of Romulus and Remus, twin sons of Rhea Silvia, daughter of Numitor, King of Alba Longa in the Alban Hills and a descendant of Aeneas, the hero of Troy. While a virgin attendant in a sacred shrine, Rhea Silvia had been raped by a man she claimed was Mars, god of war. Her twin babies had been left to die in a bucket by the waters of the flooded Tiber but had been saved by a she-wolf which had offered them her teats to suck and had nursed them gently until they were found by a herdsman who took them back to his hut. On reaching manhood, in 753 B.C. the twins decided to establish a new settlement for their tribe on the hills above the river where their lives had been saved; and they asked the gods of the countryside to declare by augury which of them should be its governor. Romulus then climbed to the top of the Palatine, while Remus took up his position on the summit of the nearby hill, the Aventine, to watch for signs in the flight of birds by which the gods made their wishes known. Soon six vultures flew across the Aventine, and Remus understood from this that his claims had been preferred. But then a flight of twelve vultures spread their wings above the Palatine, and Romulus took this as a sign that the gods' favours had fallen upon him. The brothers fell to quarrelling; their supporters began to fight each other; Remus jumped over the half-finished walls which his brother had built on the Palatine, and Romulus killed him in a fit of rage.

Thereafter Romulus's settlement grew and prospered. Yet, whereas there were strong and able men enough, there were too few women, the refugees from other tribes to whom asylum had been given at Rome, in the hope of increasing the population, being mostly male. Romulus, therefore, sent envoys to the surrounding peoples proposing intermarriage. But their offers were insultingly declined. To Romulus the use of force now seemed inevitable, and he set the scene of it with care and cunning. Concealing his resentment, he announced that the forthcoming celebrations of the Consualia, the festival Livy supposed was in honour of the water-deity Neptunus, would be held at Rome that year with particular splendour and that all surrounding tribes would be welcome to attend them. Among the peoples who accepted the invitation and came to inspect the walls and dwellings of the rapidly growing settlement were the Sabines, a well-favoured mountain tribe from the north. When the celebrations were at their height, the men of Rome fell upon the youngest of the Sabine women and dragged them to their homes, while their parents fled through the gates in panic-stricken terror. The fears of the Sabine girls were allayed by Romulus who assured them that as wives of Romans they would thereafter be treated well, sharing in the privileges of the new community and enjoying its coming greatness; they must overcome their present bitterness and give their hearts to those who had taken possession of their bodies.

In due time the Sabine women did learn to live contentedly with their Roman husbands, but the people from whom they had been seized could not forget the humiliation of their rape and planned to avenge it. Their opportunity arose when the daughter of Spurius Tarpeius, commander of the Roman garrison, who had gone outside her father's fortifications to fetch fresh water for a sacrifice, encountered in the valley a party of Sabine soldiers. She fell into flirtatious conversation with them and was persuaded to admit them into the citadel, asking to be given, as a reward for her treachery, ‘what they had on their shield arms’, meaning the gold bracelets the Sabines then wore from wrist to elbow. The bargain was struck and, on her part, fulfilled, but, once the Sabines had gained access to the citadel, they rewarded her not with the bracelets on their shield arms but with the shields themselves, crushing her to death beneath their weight as a fitting punishment for a traitor. In the ensuing battle with the Romans, the Sabines gained the first advantage; but then Romulus rallied his warriors and seemed on the point of destroying his opponents when the Sabine women, their hair hanging loose and their garments rent, pushed their way in a body between the combatants, begging them, as husbands on the one side and as fathers and brothers on the other, not to shed kindred blood. ‘The effect of the appeal was immediate and profound,’ so Livy recorded. ‘Silence fell. Not a man moved. A moment later Romulus and the Sabine commander stepped forward to make peace. Indeed, they went further: the two peoples were united under a single government, with Rome as the seat of power.’

As the years passed other rival tribes were engaged in battle and were defeated, and these vanquished tribes were allowed to establish their families in the neighbourhood of the victors, thus increasing the heterogeneous population of the settlement. Gradually, the power of Rome spread far and wide, westwards to the sea, eastwards to the Apennines, south towards the lands of the Volsci and north towards the empire of the Etruscans.

Romulus, the inspiration of Rome's victories, disappeared from sight one day when a cloud enveloped him as he was reviewing his soldiers in a thunderstorm on the ground beyond Rome's walls known as the Campus Martius.² As the cloud lifted and the sun came out again it was seen that the royal throne was empty. There were those who said that the king had been lifted by a whirlwind back to the domain of the gods whence he had come. Others maintained that he had been murdered and his body had been concealed by some of the hundred senators he had created and who were now jealous of his power. But, after a year's interregnum during which the senators shared the government between them, another king was elected; and he in turn was followed by five others. The first of these six kings, all chosen after the necessary omens had been observed, was a learned Sabine and man of peace, Numa Pompilius. He it was who inspired the Romans with their fear of the gods. He appointed priests with specified religious duties and a high priest with wide authority over them, the Pontifex Maximus; he designated virgin acolytes to serve in the shrine of Vesta, goddess of the hearth and fireside, and to attend to her sacred flame; he introduced twelve Salii or Leaping Priests for the service of Mars, giving them a uniform of an embroidered tunic and bronze breastplate and providing them with sacred shields which they were to carry through the city as they chanted their hymns to the triple beat of their ritual dance. He divided the year into twelve lunar months and stipulated certain days upon which it would be unlawful to carry on public business; he built the Temple of Janus, god of gates and doors, which was to be left open when Rome was at war and closed in time of peace.³ And he succeeded in bringing peace to the city by securing treaties of alliance with those neighbouring peoples who were not already bound to it.

Upon Numa's death, however, this peace was disrupted by his royal successor, Tullus Hostilius, who won great glory as a soldier in a reign of thirty-two years. The next king, Ancus Marcius, was a grandson of Numa Pompilius whose noble record in the matter of religious observances he was determined to emulate. Yet Ancus was as ready as Tullus had been to fight for the honour and independence of Rome, provided that wars were declared and peace negotiations conducted in accordance with those strict legal formalities and unvarying rites which were later to be supervised by the priestly representatives of the Roman people, the fetials.

During Ancus's reign a clever, ambitious and cunning young man from Etruria came south to settle in Rome. The grandson of an exile from Corinth, he adopted the name of Lucius Tarquinius Priscus and within a few years had gained for himself so eminent a reputation in the city that he was able to secure his election to the throne on Ancus's death. As king, Lucius Tarquinius Priscus planned the Circus Maximus,⁴ bringing down horses and boxers from Etruria to entertain the Romans in splendid public games; he enclosed the city within a new, strong wall; he drained the low-lying land where the city's Forum⁵ stood, making grants of land around this traditional meeting-place to builders of houses, shops and porticoes; and he laid the foundations for a new temple dedicated to Jupiter on the hill known as the Capitol.⁶

Sometime in about 579 B.C. this first Etruscan king of Rome was murdered by assassins hired by Ancus's who hoped to attain the succession for themselves. But, by concealing her husband's murder, the widowed queen was able to persuade the populace to accept her son-in-law, Servius Tullius, as regent, and eventually as king, entitled to wear the white and purple robe of royalty and to be preceded by lictors, members of the now traditional royal escort each of whom bore before him an axe bound with rods, symbolic of the king's power to beat and behead recalcitrant citizens without trial.

Once established in power, Servius Tullius began the great work for which he was always to be remembered, the organization of Roman society according to a fixed scale of rank and fortune. From now on, a census of the population was to be taken regularly, and the people, already divided into curiae for voting purposes, were to be further divided into various classes and assigned, according to their means, responsibilities in war and privileges in peace. The richest citizens were required to constitute the cavalry, the equites, or, as leaders of the infantry, to equip themselves with sword and spear as well as armour. The rest of the infantry was furnished by four other classes of citizens, the poorer of whom had merely to arm themselves with slings and stones. The poorest citizens of all were exempt from military service, but denied the political privileges which the other classes enjoyed in proportion to their rank.

Having thus organized Roman society in a class system based upon wealth, Servius Tullius then divided Rome into separate administrative areas. He also extended the boundaries of the city, taking in two other hills, the Quirinal and the Viminal, building a rampart around them and, beyond this rampart, distributing land which had been captured in war among ordinary citizens. This distribution much displeased the Senators and, in their discontent, Servius's rival, Tarquin, son of the murdered Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, saw his opportunity to replace him. Encouraged by his wicked and ambitious wife Tullia, Tarquin increased his influence in the Senate by promises and bribery and, when he considered the time ripe, he had Servius murdered. Tullia triumphantly drove over the corpse in her carriage, spattering her dress with blood. And so, in about 534 B.C., the tyranny of Tarquin the Proud began.

Declaring that an idle people was a burden on the state, he inaugurated a massive programme of public works, lavishing the spoils of a successful campaign against the Volscians upon the enlargement and adornment of the magnificent Temple of Jupiter which his father had begun, and setting to work upon it not only builders and craftsmen from all over Etruria but also hundreds of labourers from the proletariat of Rome. Work also began on improvements to the Circus where new tiers of seats were constructed, and upon the excavation of the Cloaca Maxima, the great sewer of the city.⁷

About this time, so Livy wrote, an alarming and ominous event occurred. A huge snake slid out of a narrow crack in a wooden pillar in the royal palace in the Forum. To interpret such omens it was customary to seek the advice of Etruscan soothsayers; but Tarquin felt that, since the portent had been observed in his own royal palace, he was justified in seeking enlightenment from Greece where, at Delphi, the most famous oracle in the world could be consulted. Unwilling to trust so important a mission to anyone else, he dispatched two of his three sons, Titus and Arruns, together with his nephew, Brutus.

At Delphi, having asked the oracle about the snake, the young princes could not resist making another inquiry: ‘Who is to be the next king of Rome?’ From the depths of the cavern came the answer: ‘He who shall be the first to kiss his mother shall hold in Rome supreme authority.’ Agreeing to keep this secret from their youngest brother, Sextus Tarquinius, who had been left behind in Rome, Titus and Arruns then drew lots to decide which of them, on return, should kiss their mother first. But, as they did so, their cousin, Brutus, far more astute and ambitious than he liked to appear, pretended to stumble and, falling to the ground, his lips touched the earth, mother of all living things.

Back in Italy the two princes and their brother were drinking together with friends when the conversation turned to the relative merits and faithfulness of their wives. One of the party, Collatinus, strongly maintained that his wife, Lucretia, was without doubt incomparably superior to all other women in Rome, and he undertook to prove it. If they called upon her unexpectedly now, he said, they would be sure to find her, unlike his companions' wives, engaged in some innocent and useful pursuit. And so it proved to be. While the other wives were enjoying themselves in the greatest luxury at a dinner party, Lucretia, surrounded by her maidservants, was hard at work spinning by lamplight. She rose to greet her husband and his friends, the princes; Collatinus, delighted with his success, invited them all to have supper with him.

During the meal the youngest of the princes, Sextus Tarquinius, was much taken with the beauty and proven chastity of his charming hostess; and, as lust rose within him, he determined to debauch her. Some days later he returned to the house when Lucretia was alone and, finding his way to her bedroom, he awakened her by placing his hand on her breast and whispering in her ear, ‘Lucretia, not a sound! It is Sextus Tarquinius. I am armed. If you utter a sound, I will kill you.’ But Lucretia refused to submit to his threats and blandishments until he said that he would dishonour her for ever in the eyes of the world by killing her first, then cutting the throat of a slave whose naked body he would place by her side. ‘Will they not believe,’ he asked her, ‘that you have been caught in adultery and paid the price?’ So Lucretia yielded; Sextus enjoyed her, and rode away, proud of his success.

The next day she told her father and husband, in the company of her husband's friend, Brutus, what had happened. Then she drew a knife from her robe and stabbed herself through the heart. Drawing the knife from her body, Brutus held it before him as he declared, ‘By this girl's blood and by the gods I swear that with sword and fire, and whatever else can lend strength to my arm, I will pursue Tarquin the Proud, his wicked wife and all his children, and never again will I let them or any other man be king in Rome!’

At Brutus's passionate bidding the populace of Rome rose up in arms against the tyrant. Tarquin and his two elder sons fled into exile in Etruria; his youngest son, Sextus, was killed. The Kingdom of Rome was at an end. And, in about 507 B.C., with Brutus and Collatinus appointed the first two Consuls in Rome, the days of the Republic began.

Such, then, were the legends of the early history of Rome, legends that clearly indicate the kinds of people and behaviour which later Romans found admirable; and if they were great enough to invent such legends, we at least, as Goethe said, should be great enough to believe them. In fact, behind the fanciful embellishment of the myths, many of them Greek in origin, there lies a basis of truth. There were, indeed, Iron Age settlements on several of the hills above the Tiber where Rome was to be built; and a hut of one of them, known as the House of Romulus, was still preserved as a showplace on the slopes of the Palatine in the days of the Empire. There are, in fact, grounds for believing that the people who lived in these settlements merged with the Sabines and that they were governed by a king and had the kind of class structure and military organization which Servius Tullius is said, on fairly strong evidence, to have imposed upon them. There is also evidence of Etruscan influence in Roman pottery and in the system of land drainage in the Roman Forum from about the time which the legends ascribe to the arrival in Rome of the exile from Etruria who was to become King Tarquinius Priscus.

These Etruscans were a mysterious people who seem to have arrived in Italy either by sea from the Balkans or overland from the north and to have established themselves in the Po Valley and along the western coast in what was to become Tuscany. They were experts in metal-work and in pottery as well as energetic merchants who carried on a thriving trade with the Greek cities of southern Italy. It was natural, therefore, that the Etruscans should be drawn towards Rome whose hills dominated the nearest place to the sea at which the river Tiber could be crossed, and towards the salt beds at the mouth of the Tiber whence the Via Salaria, the Salt Road, led towards Perugia and the other Etruscan towns in the north.

Once the Etruscans were established in Rome, their influence became pervasive and lasting. The kings adopted Etruscan clothes and regalia as well as the ceremonial chair, the sella curulis, later to become the symbol of authority of the Roman magistrate; the priests adopted Etruscan religious practices, their methods of divination and augury; the farmers learned Etruscan methods of tilling and draining land. Etruscan sacrifices of men and animals to propitiate the unquiet spirits of the dead were for long to be enacted in the Roman amphitheatre, while the Etruscan lictors’ axe and rods were to be revived as part of the trappings of Fascism.

The expulsion of the Etruscan kings and the warfare that soon broke out with rival states led to hard times for the Roman people. Trade was disrupted, agriculture depressed, plagues were persistent. In efforts to placate the gods, new temples were built in the city, temples to Apollo, a god of healing, to Ceres, goddess of corn, to Mercury, a god of trade, to Saturn, a god by whose favours crops were spared from blight. But the days continued dark and pestilential; and the poor grew ever more aware that under the Republic they had as little say in government and as few rights as they had had under the monarchy.

It seems that in 494 B.C. the discontent of the plebeians culminated in revolt against the patrician rule of magistrates and Senate. In the course of this revolt, when Rome was menaced by enemy armies, the plebeians marched out of the city on to the Aventine, threatening to found a separate community. Two Tribunes were consequently elected as representatives of the people, and later a Commission of Ten was established to compile a code of laws. The resultant Twelve Tables, the first landmark in the history of Roman law, were inscribed on bronze plaques and exhibited in the Forum; and for generations to come schoolboys were required to memorize and recite their provisions and to regard them as a cornerstone of the Republic whose greatness was symbolized in the device carried by the Republic's legions, S.P.Q.R. – Senatus Populusque Romanus, the Senate and People of Rome. The Tables, while instituting some reforms, were a codification into law of the customs prevailing in what was still essentially a pastoral and highly conservative community. Many of their provisions were harsh but they did combine to go some way towards acquiring equality before the law for all the people of Rome. Punishments were savage: ‘Any person who destroys by burning any building or heap of corn deposited beside a house shall be bound, scourged and put to death by burning at the stake… If any person has sung or composed against another person a song which is slanderous or insulting he shall be clubbed to death… If theft has been done by night, if the owner kill the thief, the thief shall be held lawfully killed… Slaves caught in the act should be flogged and thrown from the [Tarpeian] Rock⁸… He who shall have roused up a public enemy, or handed over a citizen to a public enemy, must be executed.’ Yet ‘putting to death of any man who has not been convicted, whosoever he might be’ was forbidden; and there were many other clauses designed to protect the weak against the powerful.

For all their vaunted merits, however, the Twelve Tables did not bring the plebeians any closer to sharing authority with the Senate; nor did those theoretical powers they possessed, such as the sole right to declare war in their public Assembly, ever count for much. The Senate remained the effective government of Rome, and the men from those almost invariably rich families who constituted its membership also filled, as though by right, the principal offices of the Republic. The most venerable of these offices was that of the Consuls who wore red sandals with crescent-shaped buckles and leather thongs and a special toga with a wide purple band, and who, like the kings before them, were escorted by twelve lictors carrying the fasces, the rods and axe, as an emblem of state. Other, lesser offices, also occupied by patrician families, were the Quaestors, who, after 421 B.C., were responsible for financial administration; the Censors, who were established in 440 B.C. to supervise the returns which determined the responsibility of citizens for taxes and military service; the Praetors, who presided in the courts of law; and the Aediles, who were responsible for the streets, temples, sewers and market-places of the city and who organized public displays, games and festivals. In times of crisis a Dictator could be appointed with supreme power and with the right to an escort of twenty-four lictors, though not with the right to ride a horse in Rome, a privilege that might have given him pretensions to regality.

As well as the political offices, there were the religious ones, and these, too, the patricians fought hard to keep out of the hands of the plebeians. They were all of great influence and none more so than the High Priest, the Pontifex Maximus, who, as master of the ‘sacred law’, presided over the College of Pontiffs. Responsible not only for adjustments in the calendar made necessary by a Roman year of 355 days and for all occasions in life or death, such as marriages, adoptions and burials, in which ritual was involved, the Pontifex Maximus also had charge of the virgins who served Vesta, the goddess of the hearth, whose circular temple, one of the earliest in Rome, was built in the centre of the Forum.⁹ These priestesses, free of all bodily defects and chosen between the ages of six and ten, were handed over in the House of the Vestal Virgins¹⁰ in the Forum by their fathers to the Pontifex Maximus who thereafter had full control over them. They were required to remain unmarried for thirty years and to devote that time to offering sacrifices, to performing the ordained rites, and to tending the sacred fire which symbolized the survival of the state. ‘And severe penalties have been established for their misdeeds,’ in the words of the Greek historian, Dionysius of Halicarnassus. ‘Vestals who are guilty of lesser misdemeanours are scourged with rods, but those who have suffered defilement by unchastity are delivered up to the most shameful and the most miserable death [by being buried alive]… There are many indications, it appears, when a priestess is not performing her holy functions with purity, but the principal one is the extinction of the fire which the Romans dread above all misfortunes, looking upon it, from whatever cause it proceeds, as an omen which portends the destruction of the city.’

In addition to his other duties, the Pontifex Maximus was responsible for ensuring that the gods were not mocked or displeased and that their wishes were made known. In divining these desires or commands he had the assistance of Augurs who were expert in interpreting the signs by which deities communicated their will to the earthly world in the voice of thunder or by flashes of lightning, by movements in the entrails of sacrificed animals, or by the flight of birds.

Ever since Romulus had seen in the flapping of vultures' wings a favourable omen for his foundation and governorship of the city, the Roman people had set great store by portents and their proper interpretation; and in times of danger, when unnatural events were often witnessed, they heard with alarm the spreading reports of monstrous births, of strange objects in the heavens, of statues pouring blood, of talking animals, of weeping corn, of stones and flesh falling from the heavens. Since the rules of divination were guarded by the Augurs in the strictest secrecy, and since portents could be interpreted in all manner of ways and, of course, invented, the powers of the priestly order of Augurs were immense. To prevent an election they had merely to declare that the time was not propitious to hold it; to block a law they had only to pronounce the omens had signified the gods' opposition to it. Cicero, who was later to confess that the office of Augur was the ‘one bait’ which could tempt him back into politics, went so far as to say that the highest and most important authority in the state is that of the Augurs. For what power is greater than that of adjourning assemblies and meetings… or that of declaring null and void the acts of these assemblies?… What is of greater import than the abandonment of any business already begun after a single Augur has announced, ‘On another day’? What power is more impressive than that of forcing the Consuls to resign their offices? What right is more sacred than that of giving or refusing permission to hold an assembly of the people?

The Roman people's readiness to accept the verdict of the Augurs was rarely in doubt; their reverence for the gods was deep and unequivocal, and their offerings to them punctiliously observed, the scrupulous regard for the forms of the rite in Roman religion being held quite as important as the rite itself. The conservative statesman, Marcus Porcius Cato, a rigid upholder of ancestral customs and a large-scale farmer whose treatise on agriculture written in about 160 B.C. is the oldest extant complete prose work in Latin, advised his fellow-farmers:

Before you gather in the harvest you should offer a preliminary sacrifice of a sow pig in the following way. Offer the pig to Ceres before you store away these crops: spelt, wheat, barley, beans, rape seed. First address Janus, Jupiter and Juno with incense and wine before you sacrifice the pig. Offer a sacrificial cake to Janus with these words, ‘Father Janus, in offering to thee this sacrificial cake I make good prayers that thou be kind and favourable to me, my children and my house and household.’… [Also] make an offering to Mars Silvanus in the wood in the daytime for each head of work oxen. Three pounds of spelt grits, four and one half of lard, four and one half of meat, three sextarii of wine… No woman to be present at this sacrifice or to see how it is offered.

Precise instructions are then given of the words to be employed, of the other gods to be honoured with their due sacrifices, and of how they, too, should be addressed.

The Roman gods, indeed, were numerous and to each a proper and precise respect was due in accordance with their known powers. One god looked after the seed when it was underground, others when the grain was growing, yet others when it was stored. The god Nodutus cared for the stem, Volutina for the sheaths, Flora for the crop in flower, Matuta for it in its maturity, Runcina when it was gathered in.

Individual gods had their own specialist priests known as Flamens, but these were offices not so widely sought as those of the Augurs, for the Flamens were subject to numerous taboos. The Flamen of Jupiter, for example, was not permitted to ride a horse or see the army in battle array, to eat or even name certain foods, to pass under an arbour of vines or to go out into the open air without his cap. Additionally, according to the lawyer, Aulus Gellius, ‘the feet of the couch on which he sleeps must be smeared with a thin coating of clay, and he must not sleep away from his bed for three nights in succession, and no other person must sleep in that bed… If he has lost his wife he must abdicate his office. His marriage cannot be dissolved except by death.’

In the Capitoline temple of the god Jupiter, which this Flamen served, were kept the Sibylline Books, the Books of Fate, which contained the secret key to the destiny of Rome and which were, therefore, as awesomely regarded as the pronouncements of the Augurs. These Books of Fate, containing oracular utterances of the renowned Sibyl of Cumae, a Greek city in Campania, had been purchased and brought to Rome, so it was said, by Tarquinius Priscus. They were carefully guarded in the Temple of Jupiter where they were treated as sacred relics and consulted whenever important decisions were to be made. The texts they contained were framed in the vaguest terms and, as the sceptical Cicero complained, since all specific references to time and place were omitted, they could be interpreted as predicting anything that the Keeper of the Books wanted them to predict. His office, therefore, accorded him great political influence, and it was yet another one which the plebeians were determined to have opened to them.

From time to time the plebeians achieved a success in their struggle for political power. Not long after the promulgation of the Twelve Tables, for instance, in 445 B.C., the marriage of a plebeian with a patrician, forbidden by those laws, was allowed. In 348 B.C. it was agreed that one of the two Consuls should always be a plebeian; and in 338 that the Senate should automatically ratify all measures voted by the People's Assembly. Then, in 287 B.C., when a Dictator, Quintus Hortensius, was in temporary office at a time of national crisis, it was decreed that resolutions of the plebeians' Council should have the force of law without the need for the Senate's concurrence. This appeared a major triumph for the plebeians; but in practice it did not prove so, for not only were the leading and richer members of the plebeians' Council those least interested in upsetting the established regime, but the Tribunes of the People, the Council's guiding lights, were soon persuaded to be less enthusiastic in their support of plebeian rights by the grant of senatorial privileges. So the plebeians failed to take advantage of their victory; the patricians, looking down upon them as their social inferiors, continued to control the Senate, and the Senate controlled the government.

Throughout the struggle between the classes, Rome was gradually extending its dominion. Rival peoples in central Italy were defeated, including the Etruscans whose capital Veii, only ten miles from Rome, was utterly destroyed. Some of the vanquished were granted full Roman citizenship, others lesser privileges; the unmanageable were kept in subjection until they too were considered worthy of joining the growing federation of states. There was, however, a serious setback at the end of the fourth century B.C., when Gaulish nomadic tribesmen from beyond the Alps swarmed down into Italy. ‘Terrified townships rushed to arms as the avengers went roaring by,’ so Livy recounted. ‘The air was loud with the dreadful din of the fierce war-songs and discordant shouts of a people whose very life is wild adventure… Men fled from the fields for their lives; and from all the immense host, covering miles of ground with its straggling masses of horse and foot, the cry went up “To Rome”.’

North of the city the Roman army was routed, and the Gallic squadrons poured through the city's open gates. All men capable of bearing arms, so Livy said, together with the women and children and the more able-bodied Senators, had withdrawn to the fortress on the Capitol, leaving the aged and useless in the city below. With these remained the oldest of the patricians who, dressed in the ceremonial robes they had been privileged to wear in their days of office, sat waiting for death in the courtyards of their houses upon the ivory-inlaid chairs of the city's magistrates. Here the enemy found them.

They might have been statues in some holy place, and for a while the Gallic warriors stood entranced; then, on an impulse, one of them touched the beard of a certain Marcus Papirius – it was long, as was the fashion of those days – and the Roman struck him on the head with his ivory staff. That was the beginning: the barbarians flamed into anger and killed him, and the others were butchered where they sat. From that moment no mercy was shown; houses were ransacked and the empty shells set on fire.

In Rome today evidence of this conflagration can still be seen in the layer of burnt debris, fragments of roof-tiles and carbonized wood at the edge of the Forum.

The Capitol, however, was held against the Gauls. An assault was made upon it in daylight and driven off. Then one starlit night another attempt was made. The enemy clambered silently up the steep ascent, passing up their weapons from hand to hand. The guards heard nothing; even the dogs were silent.

But they could not elude the vigilance of the geese which, being sacred to Juno, had not been killed in spite of the shortage of provisions. The cackling of these birds and the flapping of their wings woke Marcus Manlius, consul of three years before and a distinguished soldier, who, catching up his weapons and at the same time calling the rest to arms, strode past his bewildered comrades to a Gaul who had already got a foothold on the crest and dislodged him with a blow from the boss of his shield. As he slipped and fell, he overturned those who were next to him, and the others in alarm let go their weapons and, grasping the rocks to which they were clinging, were slain by Manlius. And now the rest had come together and were assailing the invaders with javelins and stones, and presently the whole company lost their footing and were flung down headlong to destruction.

By this time provisions in the Gallic army were running low and disease was spreading fast as choking clouds of dust and ashes from the burned buildings blew across the camp. Corpses were piled in heaps and burned on a spot afterwards known as the Gallic Pyres. An armistice was arranged; and the surviving Gauls, anxious to return home to deal with enemies on their own frontiers, accepted a money payment and withdrew.

For Rome the experience had been both devastating and humiliating, and steps were soon taken to ensure that the city was better defended in future. In place of the rampart of Servius Tullius, a new wall of volcanic stone designed by Greek engineers was constructed to enclose an area of more than a thousand acres, including all the seven hills.¹¹ From the gates in these walls, large parts of which can still be seen today, legions marched forth in campaign after campaign, against the Aequi, the Hernici and the Volsci, the Samnites, the Umbrians and the Gauls. All were eventually overcome and pacified, and thousands of foreign people were brought to Rome as slaves and many later set free. For the time being the south of Italy remained under Greek dominion; but by 265 B.C. Rome had become master of this area too, and was the supreme power in the Italian peninsula south of the Po.

Sicily, however, remained for the moment outside the sphere of Roman influence; and Rome's interest in this island led her into conflict with Carthage, the north African maritime power whose ships and armies controlled most of the western Mediterranean. The first war with the Carthaginians lasted for over twenty years, during which the Romans lost more than five hundred ships in storms and savage sea battles. But by a treaty of 241 B.C. Rome won control over most of Sicily and later took Sardinia and Corsica as well. A second war with Carthage began in 218 B.C. and brought fearful losses upon the Roman armies at the hands of the brilliant Carthaginian general, Hannibal, who marched across the Alps with his troops and elephants and inflicted defeat after defeat upon the legions, notably at Cannae in southern Italy where over thirty thousand Roman soldiers were killed. The disaster at Cannae was avenged on the Metaurus river where Hannibal's brother, Hasdrubal, was overwhelmed; but Hannibal himself remained undefeated in Italy where his hungry army wreaked havoc in the countryside. Handicapped by a lack of siege equipment, he did not attempt to capture the city of Rome, but on several occasions during the long war the Romans expected him to do so. Once he came within sight of the walls and pitched his camp only three miles away. The Romans, with grand defiance, put up his campsite for auction; and it fetched a high price. On another occasion, fears of an attack were increased by strange portents and by the discovery in unchastity of two Vestal Virgins, one of whom was buried alive in accordance with custom, while the other killed herself. The Sybilline Books were consulted, and by their direction a Gallic man and woman and a Greek man and woman were also buried alive in the market-place. At last, in the summer of 204 B.C., a strong Roman army under a brilliant young general, Publius Cornelius Scipio, sailed across the Mediterranean to Africa. Hannibal was recalled to meet the threat and two years later was decisively defeated at Zama, south-west of Carthage. Carthaginian power was thus destroyed, and in 146 B.C., to prevent it regaining its former dominion, Carthage itself was razed to the ground and its inhabitants massacred in accordance with the persistent demands of Cato who ended his every speech in the Senate, upon whatever subject it might be, with the words, ‘And I also think that Carthage must be destroyed.’

By then Roman domination had spread not only across the Mediterranean into north Africa but across the Adriatic into Illyria, into Spain and Syria; and Macedonia had been taken over as a Roman province, a prelude to the incorporation of Greece itself as the province of Actaea.

The influence of Greek thought and culture on life in Rome was profound. Soldiers returning from the wars, officials from eastern embassies and administrators from Greek provinces came back to Rome with admiration for Greek architects and sculptors, for Greek potters and furniture makers, for Greek teachers, philosophers and writers. Soon there was scarcely an aspect of Roman life that was not influenced to a greater or lesser extent by Greek models. Greek teachers came to Rome to instruct the young in all manner of arts and accomplishments, from language and literature, rhetoric and philosophy, to wrestling and hunting, invariably addressing their pupils in Greek which remained the language of higher education long after Latin had come to be adopted as an acceptable tongue for the teaching of grammar. Greek artists also came, and the houses of the well-to-do became filled with Greek sculptures, with copies of Greek statues especially made for the Roman market, and with cameos and jewelled ornaments made by Greek slaves and freedmen. The houses themselves were designed on lines recommended by the architects of Greece. Usually built of the local Roman stone, often faced with stucco, and roofed with flanged tiles of local clay, they consisted of a number of rooms facing on to an interior courtyard, the atrium, and had another smaller, quiet courtyard at the back, laid out as a garden, surrounded by a colonnade and known as the peristylium, a word derived from the Greek.¹²

Greek gods, too, were imported into the Roman pantheon; existing Roman gods were identified with Greek equivalents, Jupiter with Zeus, for example, Venus with Aphrodite, Juno with Hera, Diana with Artemis, while new cults were introduced. In about 186 B.C. the worship of Dionysus or Bacchus, the Greek god of wine and ecstatic liberation, became widespread in Rome; reports of the orgiastic rites indulged in by the cult's converts alarmed the Roman authorities. ‘To the religious content were added the pleasures of wine and feasting, to attract a greater number,’ reported Livy, in a highly coloured account of these Bacchanalia. ‘When they were heated with wine, and all sense of modesty had been extinguished by the darkness of night and the mingling of men with women and young with old, then debaucheries of every kind began and all had pleasures at hand to satisfy the lusts to which they were most inclined.’ It was also reported that the cult was a cover for the conspiracies of revolutionary movements, so it was decreed by the Senate that the rites could not be held without permission and could then be attended by no more than five people at a time.

To most members of the Senate, old-fashioned and respectable, it seemed by the end of the second century B.C. that the Republic was already in decline. The virtues of their ancestors, their patience and resource, frugality and industry, loyalty, discipline and deep sense of responsibility had won them independence and widespread dominion. But the cost to Rome had been great. Plunder and war indemnities had brought great riches to the city; gold and silver had poured in from Spain; from the East had come luxurious curtained beds, rich coverlets, bronze couches and gorgeous furniture of a sumptuousness never before seen in Rome. The booty had been carried, and continued to be carried, in splendid processions down the Via Sacra. The victorious general, his face painted the colour of blood, marched in a gorgeous tunic, a golden crown, too heavy for him to wear, held above his head. Following him, his proud soldiers sang songs full of ribaldry and insults to their leaders, while the long lines of captives stretched back far out of sight, the most important of them, walking for the last time in the open air, soon to be executed in the cells beneath the spurs of the Capitoline hill. Behind them the chariots clattered over the stones, followed by the wagonloads of plunder, of vestments and tapestries, of gold vessels, jewelled scabbards and works of art. Yet, whereas in the past the plunder had been reserved for the city and the honour of the gods, with only a small share for the soldiers, now the army took as much as they could lay their hands on and successful generals became men of astonishing riches.

Nor was it only plunder that came to Rome. The conquest of Sicily had resulted in such vast amounts of wheat being paid in taxes that the whole population of the city could be fed on it for a considerable part of the year; and after 167 B.C. there was no need for Roman citizens themselves to pay taxes. Bakers became commonplace, whereas formerly bread had been made at home; cooks, regarded by the ancients as the lowest sort of slave, were now much in demand, and what had been considered a servile task began to be considered a fine art. With the plunder and grain, slaves had been brought to Rome in their thousands and employed in all manner of tasks both in the workshops of the city, where they deprived free labourers of work, and beyond its walls on the farms and cattle ranches, in the vineyards and olive groves of rich Roman citizens, displacing poor country people who were forced to come to the city in what proved to be a vain search for new employment. Miserable as was the lot of these displaced peasants, that of the slaves was usually far worse. They were frequently ill used: Roman lawcourts accepted their evidence only when it had been extracted under torture; and should a slave, provoked beyond endurance by an intolerable owner, take up arms against him, all his companions in the household might well be killed outright. Cato advised that all slaves, while working, should be kept on an economical diet which excluded meat; those no longer able to do their proper work should be sold for what they would fetch. From time to time slaves seized weapons and broke out into rebellion, but these uprisings were savagely repressed.

In addition to the slaves and the discontented poor, a new class had come into prominence since the end of the wars against Carthage. These were the wealthy businessmen of Rome, known as the Equites because in the past it was they who, sufficiently well off to afford a horse, provided the cavalry of the Roman army. For the most part they did not seek political office. Indeed, to have entered the Senate would have entailed the abandonment of their principal sources of income, since Senators and their sons had to rely for their income on their landed estates, and such activities as brick and tile making, which was conveniently considered a branch of agriculture; they were forbidden to compete for government contracts, to lend money or to own ships large enough for overseas trade.

The senatorial class itself, however, was also changing. A new elite known as the Optimates had emerged. These were the ‘best men’ who prided themselves not so much upon the distinction and length of their family trees, but upon the number of their ancestors who had achieved high office in the Republic. Their houses were filled with death-masks of distinguished forebears, and with busts and statues to remind themselves and their guests of the part their families had played in the creation of Rome. On ceremonial occasions, and particularly at funerals, these busts were borne aloft by respectful servants, death-masks were worn by actors who also put on the robes and carried the insignia of high office, and orations were made in honour of the family's name, more often perpetuating myths than recounting verifiable fact. Conservative, and in many cases reactionary, the Optimates agreed with Cicero, who had Scipio Aemilianus declare in The Republic that ‘of all forms of government, there is none which by constitution, in theory or in practice, can be compared with that which our fathers left us and which had previously been left to them by their ancestors’. They firmly upheld the supremacy of the Senate and maintained that the People's Assembly should always follow the Senate's lead and take its sensible advice.

Politically opposed to the Optimates were the Populares, not, as their name might imply, a proletarian group, but mostly men from old senatorial families who were nevertheless in favour of constitutional, judicial and land reforms. They were supported by the Equites who saw much virtue in the proposals for reform advocated by Tiberius Gracchus, a young aristocrat who was elected Tribune for the People for the year 133 B.C. But Gracchus's provocative plans so alarmed the Optimates that soon after his election he was murdered at the door of the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus. Three hundred of his supporters were clubbed to death and their bodies thrown into the Tiber. Tiberius's brother, Gaius Gracchus, a fine orator, subtle yet passionate, endeavoured to carry on his brother's work as a reformer. For a time he seemed on the verge of success but his plans to grant full Roman citizenship to most Italians, and thus to allow outsiders to share the Romans' free circuses, their cheap grain and the bribes they enjoyed for placing their votes in the People's Assembly, lost him the support of the Roman people. And in 121 B.C. he, too, was defeated. Forced to flee for his life, he reached the wooden bridge across the river and, there, on the point of capture, he presented his throat to a faithful slave who had accompanied him. No less than three thousand of his supporters were afterwards executed without trial.

Political differences in Rome had ended in unprecedented violence. The poor were more deeply antagonistic than ever towards the rich, and the Roman Republic was in its early death throes. At this time there rose to prominence a man from outside the governing class, a tough, crudely outspoken soldier named Gaius Marius who refused to learn Greek on the grounds that it was absurd to use a language which had to be taught by a subject race, and who had grown rich as a businessman and extorter of taxes. He had served with distinction against a royal rebel in north Africa and against German tribes on the northern Italian frontiers; and, by recruiting troops irrespective of their property qualifications, had created a new kind of army, no longer composed of citizens fulfilling a civic duty, but of volunteers without other means of support who, after fighting under the silver eagles, the emblems of Rome, remained loyal to the general who could provide for them rather than to the Senate which distrusted them.

This transference of the legions' loyalty was to have profound consequences in the future; but for the moment the fears of the Senate were concentrated not so much upon the army but upon a war in Italy provoked by the rage of Rome's Italian allies who, after all they had done to secure victory in north Africa and against the German tribes, were still denied Roman citizenship, a privilege which Gaius Gracchus and his followers had attempted to procure for them. This war was known as the Social War (after socii, allies); in it Rome had to face not only the armies of her former allies but also of such peoples as the Samnites who, still resenting their defeats so many generations earlier, were demanding not citizenship of Rome but independence from it. The war lasted until 87 B.C. and according to the retired army officer, Velleius Paterculus, it ‘carried off more than three hundred thousand of the youth of Italy’ before the Senate felt obliged to grant concessions. Even then peace did not come to Rome. Marius had walked off in dudgeon when not given supreme command, allowing his former staff officer, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, a rich patrician of skill and cunning, to enhance a reputation almost as great as that of Marius himself; and when Mithridates VI, a swashbuckling king in Asia Minor, began to expand his kingdom at the expense of Rome's allies, provinces and client states in the East, Sulla was given command of the Roman army. But this appointment was immediately cancelled at the instigation of Marius's supporters who appointed him in Sulla's place. Refusing to accept his supersession, Sulla left Rome to take command of the legions waiting to sail for Asia Minor, marched them back to the city, declared Marius an outlaw and forced him to go into hiding in north Africa. Marius, however, did not remain there long. As soon as Sulla had set sail to fight Mithridates in Greece, Marius returned to Italy to assemble an army from amongst his old soldiers; and, with another ambitious general, Lucius Cornelius Cinna, he marched upon Rome to wreak revenge upon Sulla's supporters there. He did so with the utmost ferocity, slaughtering his principal enemies and allowing his soldiers and slaves to murder, rape and plunder. But in 86 B.C., soon after he had had himself elected consul for the seventh time, he died insane, leaving his colleague, Cinna, to rule alone until he was killed in a mutiny two years later as he was preparing to lead an army against Sulla, who was still in Greece.

In 82 B.C. Sulla appeared in Italy once more and, overwhelming an army which the Senate, now controlled by Populares, had sent out to block his entry into Rome, he stormed into the city, massacring his enemies on a scale which even Marius had not attempted. His personal bodyguard disposed of almost 10,000 citizens, among them forty Senators, as many as 1,600 of the Equites and countless numbers of lesser citizens whose possessions Sulla's men appropriated. Sulla then appointed himself Dictator and rewarded 100,000 of his soldiers with lands taken from the families of the slain.

For the next two years this man, whose complexion was so pitted and blotched that it was said to resemble a mulberry scattered with oatmeal, personally controlled the government of Rome. In the interests of the Optimates, he passed a succession of conservative laws, restoring the power of the oligarchic Senate and destroying that of the Tribunes of the People. He also embarked upon an ambitious programme of public works in the city, sponsoring the construction of a new Senate House¹³ and of the Tabularium, the State Record Office.¹⁴ He married his fifth wife, ‘a very beautiful woman of a most distinguished family’ who, like himself, was recently divorced. Nevertheless, according to Plutarch, ‘he still kept company with women who were ballet dancers or harpists and with people from the theatre’.

They used to be drinking together on couches all day long. Those who were at this time most influential with him were the following: Roscius the comedian, Gorex the leading ballet dancer, and Metrobius the female impersonator. Metrobius was now past his prime, but Sulla throughout everything continued to insist that he was in love with him. By living in this way he aggravated a disease which had not been serious in its early stages and for a long time he was not aware that he had ulcers in his intestines. This resulted in his whole flesh being corrupted and turning into worms. Many people were employed day and night in removing these worms, but they increased far more quickly than they could be removed. Indeed, they came swarming out in such numbers that all his clothing, baths, hand-basins and food became infected with the corruption. He tried to clean and scour himself by having frequent baths throughout the day; but it was no use; the flesh changed into worms too quickly.

In 79 B.C. Sulla suddenly retired to Campania where he died a year later. The diseased body was brought back to Rome and laid upon a funeral pyre.

Then a strong wind came up and blew upon the pyre, raising a huge flame. They just had time to collect the bones, while the pyre was smouldering and the fire nearly out, when rain began to fall heavily and continued falling until night. It would seem, then, that his good fortune never left him and indeed actually took part in his funeral. His monument is in the Field of Mars and they say that the inscription on it is one that he wrote himself. The substance of it is that he had not been outdone by any of his friends in doing good nor by any of his enemies in doing harm.

Soon after Sulla's death Italy was racked by another outbreak of savage violence which threatened to cost as many lives as the recent wars. It began in a barracks at Capua where captives, mostly Thracians and Gauls, were kept in appalling conditions and trained as gladiators. One day about eighty of these men broke out, armed themselves, first with spits and choppers from the cookhouse, then with gladiators' weapons from a convoy of wagons on its way to another city, and in the wild country of Lucania, south-east of Naples, defeated a small army of legionaries sent out against them from Rome. Slaves joined the gladiators, as did discontented herdsmen and shepherds, until their leader, Spartacus, a Thracian of high intelligence and some culture, had a formidable and well-armed multitude at his command. Spartacus would have taken them north across the Alps where they could have obtained their freedom. But, having defeated four armies, his men supposed themselves invincible and were content to remain in Italy ravaging the countryside. In 71 B.C., however, Spartacus was at last overwhelmed in Apulia, and six thousand of his followers were crucified along the Appian Way.

The Roman general who brought about this defeat was the enormously rich Marcus Licinius Crassus, an ingratiating and avaricious officer, who was assisted in the later stages of the campaign by another gifted and ambitious commander, the arrogant Cnaeus Pompeius, afterwards known as Pompey the Great, who took much of the credit for Spartacus's defeat. Pompey and Crassus might well have come to blows; but, both recognizing the advantages of cooperation, they agreed to demand to be elected consuls for the year 70 B.C. though neither, as commanders of armies in the field, was eligible for election and Pompey was additionally disqualified on the grounds of his youth. After their election, Crassus remained in Rome, increasing his fortunes and political standing, while Pompey sought further glory, first in the Mediterranean where, with a navy of five hundred ships, he stamped out the pirates whose insolent operations were interfering with Rome's grain supply, then in western Asia where, in the process of creating new provinces and dependent states and in founding new cities, he not only redrew the map of Rome's dominions beyond the Ionian Sea but also became even richer than Crassus. When he returned to Rome he was welcomed with a Triumph, the third he had been accorded, more magnificent than any the city had seen. Two whole days were set aside for it, yet even so there was not enough time to include all the spectacles prepared. At the head of the procession were carried placards with the names of the countries which the hero had brought within Rome's orbit, banners indicating the huge amounts of money these lands would bring to Rome in taxes, and standards inscribed with Pompey's victories over the pirates. Then came parades of priests and musicians, dancers and jesters; then sad, straggling lines of manacled prisoners, rows of pirate chiefs, and, as Plutarch listed them, ‘the wife and son and daughter of King Tigranes of Armenia, Aristobulus King of the Jews, a sister and five children of Mithridates, some Scythian women, hostages given by the Iberians, by the Albanians and the King of Comnagene. There were also great numbers of trophies, one for every battle in which Pompey had been victorious… But what seemed the greatest glory of all and one quite unprecedented in Roman history was that this third Triumph of his was over a third continent. Others before him had celebrated three Triumphs; but Pompey's first had been over Libya, his second over Europe, and now this last was over Asia, so that he seemed in a sense to have led the whole world captive.’

There had been fears in Rome that this great hero might establish an unlimited dictatorship as Sulla had done, and in his absence groups of patricians had intrigued with each other in efforts to prevent it. Among them was a corrupt, charming and devious candidate for the consulship, the radical Lucius Sergius Catilina. So widespread were the suspicions aroused by this shady and unprincipled character that a rival candidate, whose relatively humble origins had proved an insurmountable obstacle to the ambitions of less gifted men, was brought into prominence.

Marcus Tullius Cicero was the son of a retired country gentleman, none of whose ancestors had ever been Consul and whose pretensions to high office would, therefore, normally have been regarded by the Optimates as unbecoming in a so-called ‘new man’. But Cicero's gifts as an orator were quite exceptional; and by dint of constant, eager practice in the Forum, where he fluently pleaded cases in his supremely eloquent Latin before the Roman courts and deeply impressed the crowds who came to hear him, he had at the age of twenty-nine been elected Quaestor, and in 63 B.C., before he was forty-four, he had become Consul.

His disappointed, embittered rival, Catilina, endeavoured to gain the consulship the next year by promising all manner of sweeping reforms; but he was again defeated, and now, despairing of gaining power by conventional means, turned his thoughts to an insurrection by the discontented and the seizure of power in a coup d'état. When Cicero heard rumours of this plot he acted decisively by ordering the immediate arrest of the conspirators. Catilina himself had fled from Rome and was subsequently killed near Pistoia. But five of his accomplices were brought before the Senate. Cicero argued persuasively and brilliantly for the death sentence and, having got his way, went out to the waiting crowds to announce to tremendous cheers, ‘Vixerunt!’, ‘They are dead!’ He had been strongly supported in his arguments by Marcus Porcius Cato, a man as implacable and as rigid in his advocacy of Rome's antique traditions as his great-grandfather. Opposing him had been a young, recently elected Praetor, Gaius Julius Caesar.

TWO IMPERIAL ROME

Caesar was a tall, handsome, tirelessly energetic man from a family which, while ancient and patrician, was not unduly rich. He wore his clothes with a kind of flamboyant elegance which in a later age would have been considered that of a dandy; and he took great trouble with the arrangement of his hair, which became increasingly scanty as he grew older. His political sympathies seemed to lie with the Populares but whether this tendency was due to conviction, to ambition or to family influences – his aunt had been married to Marius and his own wife was the daughter of Cinna – no one could be sure. Certainly the Dictator, Sulla, had not liked or trusted him, and his family had thought it as well to obtain for him a post away from Rome in Asia Minor where his obvious ambition and the disconcerting gaze of his dark, penetrating eyes would arouse less apprehension. There he had come to the notice of the homosexual King of Bithynia in whose bed, it was widely reported, he had spent many libidinous hours; and this supposed affair was to be held against him by his enemies throughout the coming years.

Yet after his return to Rome on Sulla's death he had soon gained a reputation in the courts as a talented pleader whose rather high-pitched voice was offset by firm, impassioned and eloquent gestures. To improve these oratorical skills he had gone to Rhodes to pursue his studies under a celebrated Greek rhetorician who taught on the island. He had certainly improved his skills; he had also become renowned for his ruthlessness: on the journey out his ship had been attacked by pirates who had held him to ransom. They had treated him well enough and had released him unharmed when the ransom was paid. But he had sworn that he would have his revenge; and, as soon as he could, he went after them with a company of soldiers he had raised for the purpose. He came upon them, captured them, and had them all crucified, their throats cut first by way of mercy.

Back in Rome once more, Caesar had reappeared in the courts. He had become active in the College of Priests to which he had been elected in 81 B.C., and, after a time spent in the army as a junior officer, had come to the fore as a young aristocrat who, while proudly tracing his ancestry back through Romulus as far as the goddess Venus, had no patience with the unyielding conservatism of the established government. He had also, following the death of his first wife, married again, having carefully chosen a bride who could provide him with the ample wealth which was not only demanded by his extravagance and taste for luxury but which was still essential for the pursuit of high political office in Rome.

For the moment the great names in Rome remained Crassus and Pompey; and in order to promote his own ambitions, Caesar was prepared for the moment to further theirs. And so the three men rose together. In 65 B.C. Caesar was appointed Aedile, an office which, since it included responsibility for the provision of entertainments for the people of Rome, as well as for the maintenance of the city's buildings, gave its holder unrivalled opportunities to make himself popular. Eagerly seizing these opportunities, Caesar put on more spectacular circuses, wild beast shows and gladiatorial combats than Rome had ever witnessed before. From the office of Aedile, he quickly progressed to that of Pontifex Maximus, and in 62 B.C. to that of Praetor which took him to Spain where he showed himself to be as gifted a general as an orator and where he extracted so much money from defeated tribesmen that he was able not only to add to his own wealth and to gain the loyalty of his soldiers by lavish rewards but also to secure useful allies in Rome by sending part of the plunder home.

So, step by step, Caesar advanced to power, divorcing his second wife and marrying instead Calpurnia, daughter of a Senator soon to be Consul. The consulship was now almost within Caesar's own grasp. And, following merciless campaigns in Gaul and two invasions of Britain, which won him even greater renown and riches, he was ready to challenge Pompey for supreme power.

Caesar's other former colleague, Crassus, had already been killed in Mesopotamia; but the elimination of Pompey, by 52 B.C. sole Consul in Rome, was not so easily obtained. Caesar had thought at first of strengthening his alliance with him by suggesting that he should divorce Calpurnia and marry Pompey's daughter while pompey himself should marry a young relative of Caesar. Pompey chose, however, to marry the daughter of one of Rome's oldest and most distinguished families, the head of which he invited to share the consulship with him. And, after this, Caesar gradually came to the decision that was to lead him in 49 B.C., at the age of fifty-one, to take his army south across the Rubicon, the small stream between Ravenna and Rimini which divided Gaul south of the Alps from Italy, even though this meant defying Rome's law of treason which forbade a provincial governor to lead troops out of his territories. As he approached the Rubicon he said to his officers, ‘Even now we might draw back; but once across that little bridge, then the whole issue will be with the sword.’

So it was to be. At first there was little resistance as Caesar marched south through Italy. He was joined at Rimini by Gaius Scribonius Curio, an influential Tribune of the People from Rome, whose support he had bought by paying off his debts. He was also welcomed there by another Roman Tribune, the intelligent, strong and forthright Mark Antony. Together they marched on Rome, while Pompey retreated southwards into Campania, thence to Brindisi and across the Adriatic towards the Balkans to the place where the decisive battle between him and Caesar was to be fought.

Disappointed in his hopes of winning the support of Cicero who, disliking him intensely, went off to join Pompey, Caesar was also disappointed by the halfhearted reception accorded to him in Rome by the Senate. Although distrustful of Pompey, most of the senior Senators were equally suspicious of Caesar, particularly after he had appropriated the contents of the state treasury in the Temple of Saturn. But, with or without the concurrence of the old aristocracy, Caesar was determined to rule in Rome; and, since he could not become Consul, as elections for this office had to be supervised by the Senators who currently held the office, both of whom had left the city declaring their support of Pompey, he had himself created Dictator instead. Then, having done what he could to deal with the financial crisis in Rome precipitated by these disturbances, he set off to fight his rival.

Overwhelming Pompey's forces on the plain of Pharsalus, Caesar pursued him to Egypt where Pompey was murdered by officers of the boy King Ptolemy XIII who offered his head to Caesar as a peace offering upon his landing at Alexandria. Caesar was not, however, to be so easily persuaded to re-embark. He needed to raise money in Egypt, and he made up his mind not to leave until he had it. To remain, indeed, became not so much a necessity as a pleasure once he had met King Ptolemy's 21-year-old half-sister, the joint-ruler of the country, Cleopatra VII. Driven into exile by Ptolemy's regency council, she now returned secretly and was brought to see Caesar in the palace where he was staying in Alexandria, smuggled into his presence tied up in a sleeping-bag. Caesar was immediately enchanted by her, and she was intrigued by him. They became lovers, and she had a child whom she called Caesarion. This liaison with the young and captivating Cleopatra, whose beautiful voice was ‘like an instrument with many strings’, brought Caesar into conflict with the Egyptian army which supported Ptolemy XIII. But the army was defeated, Ptolemy was killed, Egypt became a client state, and Cleopatra was confirmed as queen, with her surviving half-brother, Ptolemy XIV, as joint sovereign for mere convention's sake. Then, after further victories in Asia Minor and in Africa, Caesar returned to Rome to celebrate his glorious successes in four Triumphs which eclipsed even the magnificence of those of his dead rival Pompey.

The immense cost of the spectacular Triumphs of Caesar, which were to be commemorated in the canvases of Mantegna, would have exhausted the fortunes of most other generals. But Caesar still had money to spare for more lasting celebrations of his victories, and he decided upon a complete reconstruction and enlargement of the Forum,¹ that traditional meeting-place, the heart of all the public life of the city, the scene of speeches and elections, of funeral services and sacrifices to the gods, of Triumphs and religious processions, sometimes of executions and of gladiatorial combats, often of celebrations such as the banquet Caesar himself gave here in 45 B.C. to 22,000 guests. Not content with the reconstruction of the Forum, Caesar also spent huge sums of money upon the restoration of the meeting-place of the Senate, the Curia,² upon building a new Rostra,³ or orators’ platform, at the Forum's Capitoline end, and upon the erection of the Basilica Julia⁴ to the south of the Via Sacra.⁵

This magnificent Basilica was entirely faced with marble. Its central hall, marked out with squares for games, was surrounded by a gallery supported by thirty-six columns. Here the lawyers held their courts, and the Centumviri tried important suits in civil law. These drew crowds of spectators who showed a passionate interest in the legal processes and rhetorical flights of oratory with which they were conducted. The acoustics were notoriously bad: when the four ‘chambers’ into which the Centumviri were divided were all trying separate cases at the same time the confusion was appalling, and the noise made all the more tremendous by the supporters whom some advocates paid to accompany them to the Basilica in order to cheer at appropriate intervals. It sometimes happened that the speech of an advocate with a particularly strong voice would resound through the building so loudly that no other speakers could be heard; on one occasion, a powerful and moving plea delivered in the thunderous tones of Galerius Trachalus was vigorously applauded not only by the crowds of people in his own chamber but in all the others as well.

North of the Basilica Julia, built as an integral part of the Forum of Caesar, was the Temple of Venus the Mother, Venus Genetrix,⁶ from whom Caesar's family claimed to be descended. Outside the temple stood an equestrian statue of Caesar himself, the horse, by Lysippus, taken from a monument of Alexander the Great; and inside was a statue by Arcesilaus of Venus with her breasts adorned with pearls. Beside it was a gilt-bronze statue of Cleopatra.

The Egyptian queen had come to Rome with her son, Caesarion, ostensibly to ratify a treaty of alliance, but in reality to be with her lover, who installed her in great luxury in a house on the east bank of the Tiber beneath the Aventine hill. Her ‘insolence’ while she was staying there enraged Cicero who confessed to his friend, Atticus, that he detested her; and Cicero was far from being alone in his intense dislike of her and in his distrust of the man upon whose protection she relied. Those who attributed to her influence Caesar's plans to establish public libraries on the Egyptian model in Rome, and his appointment of an Egyptian astronomer to supervise the revision of the dislocated Roman calendar, could not complain that her influence was malign; but other innovations, such as religious rituals practised in Alexandria where rulers were worshipped as gods, seemed to many of Caesar's critics clear evidence of his desire to become a godlike ruler himself.

Caesar's achievements could not be denied. For instance, by resettling the workless destitute of Rome, as well as former legionaries, in foreign colonies he did much to alleviate the problems of poverty and unemployment in the city; and by increasing the number of Senators and widening the areas in Italy from which they could be chosen, he made the Senate a far more representative body than it had formerly been. Yet he contrived at the same time alarmingly to increase his own personal power. He had a law passed enabling him personally to choose candidates for high office; he adopted the title Imperator, signifying his supreme command of the armed forces of Rome; he then had himself appointed Dictator in Perpetuity, the letters signifying his elevation to this new office being stamped around his profile on the coinage of Rome, which for the first time bore the image of a living citizen. His striking features were also to be seen in numerous portrait busts, fine examples of an art form in which the Romans now excelled; and these were displayed throughout the city and its surrounding provinces. It was whispered that he would soon revive the kingship; and the rumours were intensified when two staunchly Republican Tribunes of the People, who had removed a diadem from the head of the Dictator's statue and had arrested the ringleaders of a crowd which hailed Caesar as king, were deposed by the servile Senate.

In the hope of putting an end to these reports of his unbridled ambition, Caesar arranged with Mark Antony to make a public display in the Forum of his loyalty to the Republic. The occasion, so Plutarch related, was the festival of the Lupercalia held in February in honour of the fertility god Faunus: ‘At this time many of the magistrates and young men of noble families run through the city naked; and in their jesting and merry-making strike those whom they meet with thongs. And many women of high rank purposely stand in their way, holding out their hands to be struck like schoolchildren, believing that they will be granted an easy delivery if pregnant or become fertile if barren.’ Caesar, sitting on a golden throne above the Rostra and wearing a triumphal robe, watched this ceremony; and Antony, who was the Dictator's fellow-Consul and one of the priests of the Lupercalia, took part in the sacred running. When he came to the Forum the crowd made way for him. He was carrying a diadem with a wreath of laurel round it, which he held out to Caesar, who twice ostentatiously pushed it away.

Caesar's action was cheered by the crowds in the Forum. But the stories about his ambitions persisted; and, when it became known that he was to embark upon an expedition against the Parthians and had appointed his own political supporters with plenipotentiary powers to represent him while he was away, the opposition against him crystallized. At the centre of the plot to dispose of him were Gaius Cassius Longinus, a proud and hot-tempered soldier who was bitterly disappointed in not being given a command in the Parthian expedition; an impoverished follower of Cassius, Publius Casca; and Cassius's brother-in-law, Marcus Brutus, a former devoted protégé of Caesar and, so some people claimed, his illegitimate son. A fervent Republican, he was inordinately proud of his supposed descent from that Brutus who had deposed the last of the Etruscan kings of Rome.

Caesar, while recognizing well enough that he was far from universally admired or liked, seemed to discount all warnings that he might be in danger. Indeed, he disdainfully remained seated when one day a delegation of Senators came to present him with various laudatory decrees, and he went so far as to disband his personal bodyguard.

On 15 March 44 B.C., shortly before he was due to leave for his campaign against the Parthians, he attended a meeting of the Senate in the Curia Pompeia, an assembly hall attached to the Theatre of Pompey.⁷ As Caesar approached the hall a man pushed a note of warning into his hand, but he did not trouble to read it. He entered the building alone and defenceless, Mark Antony, who had accompanied him thus far, being detained at the door in conversation by one of the conspirators. Other conspirators crowded round him as he walked towards his chair, pretending to support a petition made to him by one Tullius Cimber on behalf of an exiled brother. Suddenly Tullius took hold of Caesar's toga with both hands and pulled it from his back as a signal for the attack. The first blow was struck by Casca who missed his aim and merely scratched Caesar just below the throat. Caesar jumped away, dragging his toga free and, grabbing Casca's knife with one hand, used the other to stab him in the arm with the point of his metal pen.

So it began. And, as the other conspirators crowded around Caesar, baring their daggers, those who were not in the conspiracy were so horror-struck that they stood transfixed while the victim, driven this way and that, was stabbed time and again until the white of his tunic was reddened with blood.

Some say that Caesar fought back against all the rest [wrote Plutarch], darting about to avoid the blows and crying out for help, but when he saw that Brutus had drawn his dagger, he covered his head with his toga and sank down to the ground. Either by chance or because he was pushed there by his murderers, he fell down against the pedestal on which the statue of Pompey stood, and the pedestal was drenched with his blood, so that one might have thought that Pompey himself was presiding over this act of vengeance against his enemy, who lay there at his feet struggling convulsively under so many blows.

Brutus stepped forward as though he wished to make a speech. But the Senators, unwilling to wait for him, rushed out of the building and fled to their homes, their excitement and terror infecting the Roman people, some of whom bolted their doors while others ran from their homes and shops to see where the assassination had taken place.

As Antony went into hiding, Brutus and his collaborators, ‘still hot and eager from the murder’, marched to the Capitol, holding up their daggers in front of them, calling out that liberty had been restored and inviting distinguished people whom they met to join their procession. The next day Brutus made a speech which was listened to in complete silence, indicating, so Plutarch thought, that the people both pitied Caesar and respected Brutus. And, as though in recognition of this popular feeling, the Senate voted that there should be no alteration made in any of the measures passed by Caesar while in power, yet at the same time Brutus and his friends were given honours and high rewards. ‘Everyone thought, therefore, that matters were not only settled but settled in the best possible way.’

Matters, however, were far from settled. ‘The state of things is perfectly shocking,’ one of Caesar's associates reported. ‘There is no way out of the mess. For if a man with Caesar's genius failed, who can hope to succeed?’ The Dictator was dead; but the Republic was not restored: power remained in the hands of those who could command the support of the legionaries and it could be seized by any man who, assured of this support, could force the Senate to accept an autarchy.

Mark Antony, still Consul, saw himself as that man. When Caesar's body was brought back to the Forum from Pompey's Theatre, he made a moving funeral oration which Shakespeare's imagination has rendered unforgettable. Antony's words, the sight of Caesar's lacerated body and the rumoured contents of the dead man's will which was said to have bequeathed a legacy to each Roman citizen, combined to arouse the people to frenzy. They tore down railings, they smashed benches and tables to make a pyre upon which Caesar's body was burned; they then rampaged through the city with blazing brands, setting fire to the houses of his assassins. Brutus and Cassius escaped from Rome, and Antony later allowed them to assume commands in the East.

Antony's general policy was, indeed, one of appeasement. He issued orders in Caesar's name, having taken possession of his papers, and he erected a statue in the Forum dedicated to Caesar, ‘Glorious Father of the Country'; but he stamped out a rapidly developing cult of Caesar's divinity and abolished for ever the title of Dictator. In his endeavours to take over control of the state, Antony was, however, at a serious disadvantage, for Caesar had nominated as his personal heir his great-nephew and adopted son, a brilliant, astute, calculating soldier, not yet nineteen years old, who now took the name Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus. For a time Antony ruled in conjunction with the young Octavian and Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, an aristocratic former deputy of Caesar who had proposed him for the dictatorship. These three men defeated a Republican army at the battle of Philippi after which both Brutus and Cassius killed themselves. Cicero was put to death; and despite Antony's earlier objections, Caesar was declared a god, and Octavian was thus elevated to the status of a god's son.

Octavian made much of this relationship; and when he and Antony, having disposed of Lepidus, divided the Roman empire between them, coins in the western part of the empire, whose capital was at Rome, described Octavian, its ruler, as ‘Son of the Divine Julius’. At the same time, in the eastern empire Antony, now Cleopatra's lover, endorsed her claim that Caesarion was Caesar's son and rightful heir. The inevitable and final clash between the two rival parties came at Actium outside the Gulf of Ambracia. Here in 31 B.C. Octavian's fleet, commanded by his friend, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, overwhelmed the ships of Antony and Cleopatra who fled to Egypt where, the next year, they both killed themselves at Alexandria.

Vastly enriched by Cleopatra's treasure, Octavian returned to Rome where by gradual and cautious degrees, shrewdly and carefully placating Republican sentiments and skilfully taking advantage of the Roman people's desire for peace after civil strife, he established himself as the leading man of the state. Short of stature, often ill and more often believing himself to be ill, he did not possess the personal magnetism of Julius Caesar. Nor did he possess Caesar's great gifts as a general; but he chose his deputies with well-judged discrimination, kept strict discipline within the legions and retained the loyalty of his friends, as well as the support of some of the greatest poets and writers who flourished in his time. Ovid, immoral and self-indulgent, offended him and was exiled to Romania; while Livy's reservations about Julius Caesar and his admiration for Caesar's enemies led Octavian to refer to him as a ‘Pompeian’. But Virgil expressed his approval of Octavian and so did Horace who became his friend, though he had fought against him under Brutus and Cassius at Philippi.

Octavian could be ruthless, not only with his opponents but also with those members of his family who offended his taste for a simple and well-regulated life: he banished his daughter, and then his granddaughter, when they fell into company of which he disapproved. Yet he was never a tyrant, and his adoption ofthe grave and exalted name Augustus, signifying a man who enjoyed the divine gift of carrying out his enterprises under favourable auspices, and later the title of Pater Patriae was accepted by the Romans who recognized his firm sense of duty and who welcomed his reforms and the lasting peace which accompanied them. This peace was commemorated in Rome by that beautiful monument of white marble, the Ara Pacis Augustae, the Altar of Augustan Peace, which was consecrated in 13 B.C. in a ceremony attended, as the frieze depicts, by great officers of state accompanied by lictors with their rods, by priests and by Flamens in their strange spiked skull caps, by members of the imperial family and by Augustus himself.⁸

The Pater Patriae kept the people of Rome content with liberal supplies of food and lavish entertainments. He established an effective police force, a fire-brigade and a strong, permanent bodyguard, the Praetorian Guard. He also inaugurated a building programme which was more ambitious by far than Julius Caesar's and by which, so he proudly declared, he transformed a city of brick into one of marble. With the help of a team of architects, mostly no doubt Greek, he constructed a new Forum to the north and at right angles to his adoptive father's, flanking it with immense colonnades and two large side apses between a temple filled with treasures and dedicated to Mars the Avenger,⁹ in commemoration of his victory at Philippi where retribution for Caesar's murder was exacted. Another splendid new temple was raised in honour of his deified father,¹⁰ and, nearby, a new Rostra. Augustus also ordered the reconstruction of the Basilica Julia which had been burned down, as well as of the ancient shrine of the Lares and Penates, household gods of the Roman state, and of the ancient Basilica Aemilia which had been used for generations as a meeting-place and as a centre for money changers, remains of whose copper coins fused into the stone by the heat of fire during a Gothic invasion of the declining Empire can still be seen in the green stains in the Basilica's pavement.¹¹ At the same time, various members of Augustus's family and friends were responsible for the restoration of the Temple of Saturn,¹² the treasury of the Roman state, the Temples of Concord¹³ and of Castor and Pollux,¹⁴ and the official house of the Pontifex Maximus.¹⁵

On the Capitol, Augustus himself restored, at what he proudly described as ‘great expense’, the fine temple of Jupiter; and, in fulfilment of a vow he had made after having escaped being struck by lightning in Spain, he built a new temple to Jupiter Tonans.¹⁶ On the Palatine hill he erected a huge new temple to Apollo with fine porticoes and libraries at the side,¹⁷ and he converted the Lupercal, the cave in which Romulus and Remus had been suckled by the wolf, into an ornamental grotto.¹⁸ On the Quirinal he reconstructed the temple of Quirinus where Romulus was worshipped as Mars;¹⁹ on the Aventine he restored the ancient Temples of Diana²⁰ and of Juno Regina.²¹ Below them he built a huge circular Etruscan mausoleum with a steeply pitched conical roof of earth planted with cypress trees.²² And, downstream from this, opposite the island in the Tiber reached by the Ponte Fabricio, he completed the Theatre of Marcellus which, named after his nephew, was later to be transformed into one of Rome's grand Renaissance palaces.²³

After the death of Augustus in A.D. 14, his strong-willed widow, Livia, continued to live on the outskirts of Rome in a fine villa at Prima Porta. The exquisitely decorated plaster of one of the rooms, painted with birds and flowers in a trompel'œil manner that makes the representation of a little bird-cage astonishingly real, has been preserved in the Museo delle Terme.²⁴ Livia also had a smaller house on the Palatine, perhaps the one now known as the Casa di Livia;²⁵ and this, too, had walls beautifully painted with fruits and flowers and with mythological scenes set amidst temples and porticoes. It was here on the Palatine that Livia's wary and grimly sarcastic son, Tiberius, who succeeded Augustus, built himself the palace known as the Domus Tiberiana, the first of those grand imperial buildings which were soon to spread all over the hill.²⁶ But grand as it must have been, this palace, whose floors disappeared in the sixteenth century beneath the Orti Farnesiani,²⁷ was almost modest compared with the fantastic Golden House of the Emperor Nero.

Nero was the great-grandson of Tiberius's wife, Julia, Augustus's daughter, who had formerly been married to Agrippa, commander of the Roman forces at Actium. By Agrippa, Julia had had five children, the youngest of whom had given birth to Caligula, Tiberius's successor. Caligula had spent much of his youth on the island of Capri, where Tiberius had spent the last ten years of his life in secluded retirement, and when he came to the imperial throne was still only twenty-four years old. Arrogant, profligate and mentally deranged, Caligula had no taste for the business of government and ruled through his secretaries, in the same way as Tiberius had governed through such deputies as Sejanus, whose overweening ambition had led to his execution in the ancient water cistern later converted into the dark dungeons of the Mamertine prison.²⁸ But Caligula was not emperor for long. At the beginning of 41 he and his wife and daughter were all murdered by officers of the Praetorian Guard. Increasingly influential in imperial affairs, they had secured his succession less than four years previously and now arranged for the throne to pass to his well-meaning, though eccentric and probably spastic uncle, Claudius.

Claudius was married to Messalina, a lascivious and malevolent woman whom he was persuaded to have killed after she had taken part in a form of public wedding ceremony with her lover. He then married his niece Agrippina, a great-granddaughter of Augustus who was widely suspected of being responsible for poisoning him with a dish of deadly mushrooms. Nero was Agrippina's son by a previous and very rich husband.

He was sixteen when he became emperor, and he gave good grounds for hope that he would be a generous and discerning ruler. He was described as handsome with an imposing manner, though completely under the dominance of his formidable mother whom he both loved and feared. Yet it was not long before he displayed those characteristics of monstrous cruelty, abandoned profligacy and insane vanity described in the pages of Tacitus and Suetonius. ‘His body was blotchy and repulsive,’ Suetonius said. ‘He had blue myopic eyes and a thick neck. He had a paunch and his legs were excessively thin. He enjoyed good health. In spite of the immoderate luxury of his habits, he was ill on only three occasions in the fourteen years of his reign, and even then he never gave up drinking or changed his indulgent way of life… or the manner of his entertainments.’

The most notorious and profligate of these entertainments [according to Tacitus] were those given in Rome by Tigellinus [his unpleasant Sicilian principal minister and joint commander of the Praetorian Guard]. A banquet was set out upon a barge on a lake in the palace grounds. This barge was towed about by vessels picked out with gold and ivory and rowed by debauched youths who were chosen in accordance with their proficiency in libidinous practices. Birds and beasts had been collected from distant countries, and sea monsters from the ocean. On the banks of the lake were brothels filled with ladies of high rank. By these were prostitutes, stark naked, indulging in indecent gestures and language. As night approached the groves and summer-houses rang with songs and were ablaze with lights. Nero disgraced himself with every kind of abomination, natural and unnatural, leaving no further depth of debauchery to which he could sink.

Having arranged for the death of his mother who, after escaping murder by drowning, was battered to death by a gang of sailors, Nero then ordered the execution of his 19-year-old wife who died in a hot bath, bound with cords and with all her veins cut. Afterwards he married his mistress who died after a vicious kick from him when she was pregnant. Yet, depraved and monstrously cruel as he was, Nero did have artistic gifts and worked hard to develop them. He wrote poetry; he spent long hours practising on the harp; he endeavoured to improve his singing voice by lying with lead weights on his chest in painful attempts to strengthen his diaphragm; he studied Greek literature and sought to introduce Greek games and Greek contests in the arts, going so far as to perform himself in public, to the horror of the upper classes, not only as musician, poet and actor but even as charioteer. Nero also had pretensions and talents – as an amateur architect, and seems to have taken the deepest interest in the construction in 61 of the gymnasium and baths known as the Thermae Neroniae.²⁹

The Emperor's opportunities as a builder were spectacularly increased when, during the moonlit night of 18 July 64, a fire broke out in some shops near the Palatine and, fanned by the wind, soon spread uncontrollably throughout the city.

Furiously the destroying flames swept on [wrote Tacitus], first over the level ground, then up the heights, then again plunging into the hollows, with a rapidity which outstripped all efforts to cope with them, the ancient city lending itself to their progress by its narrow, tortuous streets and its misshapen blocks of buildings. The shrieks of panic-stricken women; the weakness of the aged, and the helplessness of the young; the efforts of some to help themselves, of others to help their neighbours; the hurrying of those who dragged their sick along, the lingering of those who waited for them – all added to the scene of utter confusion.

Nero was at Antium when the fire began. He hurried back to Rome to help direct the fire-fighting and to supervise the provision of shelter for the homeless. But any credit he might have been given for this was dispelled by a well-founded rumour that when the flames were at their height he had mounted a stage in his palace and had likened modern calamities to ancient disasters by singing a tale of the sack of Troy.

The fire, which had burned fiercely for six days, left most of Rome in smouldering ruins. Of the fourteen regions into which the city was then divided, only four remained intact. Three had been burned to the ground, and little had escaped in the other seven. The Emperor's palace, the Domus Transitoria, had been utterly destroyed. Nero set to work with a will, ordering the reconstruction of the city on more regular lines than had been possible in the haphazard, piecemeal building of the past, widening the streets, creating open spaces and providing tall apartment blocks for the workers who had lost their homes. Most of the Emperor's energies, however, went into the planning with his architects, Severus and Celer, of what became known as the Golden House, that magnificent palace whose porticoes, pavilions, baths, temples, fountains and gardens sprawled in lavish profusion across a 200-acre park extending from the Palatine hill across the valley to the Esquiline and taking in parts of the Caelian hill as well. In the valley was a large artificial lake surrounded by fanciful grottoes, columns and gazebos; and towering over the colonnaded approach to the golden façade of the palace itself was a colossal gilded bronze statue, 120 feet high, of Nero himself, the hero of the enterprise.

Inside the palace were white, painted rooms from which flowers fell upon the guests through fretted ivory ceilings; walls were inlaid with mother-of-pearl and precious stones; concealed jets in the cornices sprayed fine showers of rose water and scent; the roof of a great dining-hall ‘revolved slowly day and night in time with the sky’; streams of water flowed down a staircase over a glistening mosaic floor; water from the sea and sulphur-water from Tivoli poured into the palace's baths; on every side were works of art from Greece including, perhaps, the Laocoön.³⁰

Little now remains of this Domus Aurea, which Nero's successors converted to public use before it was swept by a raging fire in A.D. 104. But in the fifteenth century some of its rooms, with delicately painted stucco reliefs by the artist known as Fabullus, were discovered buried in the earth beneath the Baths of Trajan; and these rooms, to which artists were lowered by ropes so that they could inspect the work of their great and ancient predecessor, were the inspiration of both Raphael and Giovanni da Udine for their decorations of the open galleries of the Vatican.³¹

When the palace was finished Nero declared, ‘Good! Now at last I can begin to live like a human being!’ But, in fact, he had only a short time left to enjoy the fantastic setting he had created for himself. Hated by the people of Rome, he was also detested by the Senate whose independence was lost and whose members, in constant danger of being tried for treason, were denied high office by the Emperor's preference for Greeks and orientals. A group of Senators and others conspired to replace him. The plot was discovered, however; the conspirators were hunted down and executed; and Nero became more tyrannical and megalomaniacal than ever. Identifying himself with several gods, including Apollo, god of the sun and of the arts, he claimed to be above the natural laws that governed mortal man. When news of fresh revolts reached him, he merely laughed, ordered another banquet, and composed more songs, proclaiming that he had only to appear and to sing to bring the world to his feet.

Then one night in 68 the Emperor awoke from a troubled dream and found the palace strangely quiet. His guests had fled and even his guards had gone. He ran through the empty rooms and, returning to his bedroom, discovered that a golden box of poisons which he kept there had been removed. He shouted for the gladiator, Spiculus, who could, if the occasion demanded, kill him with a single, painless blow of his sword. But Spiculus had fled with the others. At length Nero came upon an attendant who offered him refuge in his house beyond the city walls.

He mounted a horse just as he was, ‘barefooted and with an old faded cloak thrown over the tunic,’ Suetonius recorded. ‘His head was covered with a handkerchief across his face… All of a sudden there was an earth tremor, and lightning flashed right in his face. Terrified, he heard soldiers in a nearby camp cursing him, and he heard a passer-by say, “These men must be after Nero.”’ His horse took fright and shied at the stench of a corpse which had been left on the road, and the jolt pulled the handkerchief from his head. A veteran of the Praetorian Guard, recognizing him, saluted out of habit.

Outside the house he waited while a tunnel was dug so that he could enter it unobserved. He scooped up some water from a pond, murmuring, ‘This is Nero's iced water now.’ He crawled on all fours through the tunnel into the nearest room where he lay down on a thin mattress covered by his old cloak. He was offered a piece of coarse brown bread but, although he was hungry, he refused to eat. Abandoning all hope, he ordered that a trench be dug just large enough to take his fat body, and that wood and water should be fetched so that the last rites could be properly observed. He burst into tears as the materials were gathered, crying out again and again, ‘What a great artist dies in me!’

A message was brought to the house: the Emperor had been declared a public enemy by the Senate and, as soon as he was discovered, was to be executed as criminals had been in the days of his ancestors. He asked what kind of death that was, and was told he would be stripped naked, tied to a stake and flogged to death. He picked up a dagger and tried its edge, but he lacked the courage to use it. Asking for someone to set him an example of suicide, he reproached himself for his lack of resolution. ‘It is a disgrace for me to go on living like this,’ he said in Greek. ‘It is unworthy of a man like Nero.’ But it was not until he heard the clatter of horses' hooves outside that he summoned the courage to strike the blow. Whispering a line from Homer in a trembling voice – ‘and in my ears there rings the beat of swift-footed horses’ – he seized the dagger and, with help, pushed it into his throat.

After the death of Nero, the last of the emperors from the family of Augustus, the Empire, which for all the many failings of the imperial court had been governed well in his reign, was torn by civil war. Emperor followed briefly upon emperor. First Galba, the rich governor of Nearer Spain, was hailed by his soldiers and marched on Rome, but he was soon murdered. Then Otho, his successor, was driven to commit suicide. And Vitellius, who followed Otho, was lynched in a Roman street. Quietly waiting his opportunity, however, was a 60-year-old man whom Nero, having once disgraced for falling asleep during one of the imperial song recitals, had appointed to crush a revolt in the province of Judaea. This was the wary, hard-working, autocratic yet amiable Vespasian, whose simple tastes befitted the son of an honest Sabine tax-collector. Proclaimed Emperor in Egypt, where he had served after leaving Judaea, Vespasian declined to leave for Rome until he had consulted the oracles. But these being favourable, he entered the city, and under his rule, which lasted for ten years from 69, Rome slowly recovered from the damage which the months of civil disturbances and the wild extravagance of Nero and Vitellius had inflicted upon it. His financial measures were unconventional but effective; his solid, approachable character, his unaffected love for the simple, country life to which he had grown accustomed as a child in a village in the Sabine hills, and his rugged, bluff good humour endeared him to the Roman citizens. Maintaining a regular daily routine, Vespasian rose early, received friends and deputations as he dressed, attended conscientiously to affairs of state, drove out for a ride in his carriage, went to bed with one of his mistresses, had a bath, then enjoyed an ample though never exotic dinner, often making a crude joke as he ate. His jokes were celebrated, and one in particular was cited as characteristic. It concerned a tax which he had levied on the ammoniac urine that the Roman fullers collected from the city's public urinals to use in the dyeing of cloth. Vespasian's son regarded this tax as unseemly and voiced his objections to his father. Vespasian held a coin under his son's nose, urging him to notice that gold had no smell.

With the money that he raised, Vespasian was able to restore the buildings which had been damaged or burned in the reigns of his predecessors and to construct so many new ones that he felt himself justified in inscribing on his coinage the legend, Roma Resurgens. Appearing on building-sites with a basket of masonry on his shoulder, he gave personal encouragement to the redevelopment of the Capitol and the Forum; he lavishly restored a sanctuary dedicated to Claudius;³² he erected in a new Forum³³ the now vanished Temple of Peace to house treasures looted from Jerusalem;³⁴ and he began, on the site of Nero's drained lake, that most famous of Rome's ancient monuments, the Colosseum.

THREE BREAD AND CIRCUSES

‘Rome has been restored to herself,’ wrote the Spanish poet Martial when the ‘far-seen amphitheatre’ was nearing completion. ‘What was formerly a tyrant's delight is now the delight of the people.’ The tyrant's colossal column, the figure on the summit replaced by that of the sun-god, still stood nearby and it was possibly this, rather than the vast size of the Colosseum itself, that gave the amphitheatre its name. The measurements were daunting. Its oval ground area, 617 feet long by 513 feet wide, enclosed an arena 282 feet by 177 feet. The surrounding walls rose in four storeys to a height of 187 feet. The top floor, an enclosed, colonnaded gallery, was reserved for women and the poor, who sat on wooden seats; the floor immediately below this, also enclosed, was reserved for slaves and foreigners; beneath this were tiers of exposed marble seats, the higher for the middle class, the lower for more distinguished citizens. Just above the level of the ringside were the boxes of the Senators, magistrates, priests, Vestal Virgins and members of the Emperor's family. High overhead on the roof of the topmost gallery, were sailors expert in the handling of canvas whose duty it was to pull across a coloured awning to protect the spectators from rain or the heat of the sun.

In all about fifty thousand spectators could be accommodated. They approached the amphitheatre across a precinct cobbled with lava and then a smooth pavement bounded by stones. Above them loomed the plain exterior of the building, faced with the local limestone known as travertine and relieved by statues standing in the arches between the columns of the arcades. They entered through seventy-six entrances, each of which was numbered to correspond with the admittance tickets which also bore the number of a seat. There were four other unnumbered entrances, two for the Emperor's entourage, and two for the gladiators, through one of which, the Porta Sanivivaria, the survivors returned to their barracks and through the other, named after Libitina, goddess of death, the corpses of the defeated were taken out.¹

The gladiatorial combats, adopted by the Romans from the Etruscans, had lost most of their religious, sacrificial significance and had become part of that system by which the authorities placated the people of Rome, a large proportion of whom were always unemployed, by providing them with regular entertainment as well as with free distributions of food. Relics of their religious past lingered on, however: the games, for instance, were also known as munera, offerings; and the attendant who made sure that a fallen gladiator was dead by delivering a coup de grâce to the head was usually dressed as Charon, ferryman of the souls of the dead across the river Styx from the upper world into Hades. Yet these were mere trappings. Great men vied with each other in the presentation of more and more spectacular games, not so much as sacrifices to the spirits of the dead as for their own glory and to gain the gratitude of the people, while the imperial court valued them as a vital social bond bringing the Emperor closer to the populace.

The games usually began early in the morning with a parade of gladiators, dressed in purple and gold cloaks, driving round the arena in chariots. The gladiators then marched around on foot, followed by slaves carrying their weapons, shields and plumed helmets, and ended in front of the Emperor's box where they thrust their right arms forward from their naked chests, shouting, ‘Hail Emperor! We men who are about to die salute thee!’ They then marched off to await their turn to fight, for the spectacle was generally opened not by them but by comic turns in which clowns and cripples, dwarfs and obese women pretended to fight each other with wooden swords and threw themselves to the ground in extravagant representations of paroxysmal death.

The gladiators reappeared to the cheers of the crowd and the blast of trumpets. Some carried heavy swords or lances and wore armour on their arms and legs; others, with little protection apart from a shoulder piece, had nets in which they hoped to be able to entangle their opponents before dispatching them with the thrust of a spear. When the fighting began the shouts of the crowd grew louder and more excited: ‘Habet, he's got him!’ ‘Lash him!’ ‘trike him!’ ‘Burn!’ ‘Kill!’ ‘Whip him to fight harder!’ ‘Why does he meet the sword so timidly?’ ‘Why doesn't he die like a man?’ But soon individual voices and cries were lost in the wild and deafening uproar. A wounded gladiator who fell to the ground could appeal for mercy by casting aside his shield and raising his left hand. His opponent could, in the absence of the Emperor, kill or spare him as he chose. If the Emperor were present, the choice was his. As the spectators screamed their preference he made his decision known, either by raising his thumb as a sign of reprieve or by turning it down as a verdict of death.

Successful gladiators were the heroes of the day; and there were those, unlike the impressed criminals and prisoners of war, who chose the precarious existence in the hope of achieving fame and the admiration of women. It was a hard life, though, as well as a dangerous one. The training was long and exacting; and, if the medical attention and the meals supplied in the gladiatorial schools were adequate, the quarters in which the men were lodged were usually cramped and foul.

Fights between gladiators were but one of the spectacles that the Colosseum had to offer. There were boxing matches, archery contests, women swordsmen, fights between charioteers, all of them often accompanied by the music of bands and hydraulic organs. Above all, there were wild beast shows in which thousands of animals were slashed to death. For these, the arena would be planted with trees and scattered with rocks, and from the labyrinth of cells beneath would emerge hundreds of roaring, bellowing, howling animals – leopards and bears, lions, tigers, camels, giraffes, ostriches, crocodiles, deer and chamois. As they came out and ran confused and frightened about the arena, they were engaged and baited, wounded and finally slaughtered with expert crudelitas by the skilled venatores, professional beast slayers who knew by constant practice how best to taunt an animal to fury without much danger to themselves, and how to satisfy the passions of the bloodthirsty crowd. The experiences of Alypius, a young law student, well illustrate how even the squeamish and kind-hearted could be affected by the general hysteria. Alypius was dragged unwillingly into the amphitheatre by some fellow-students on their way home from a dinner party. At first he shut his eyes but the wild excitement of all around him, their shouts of encouragement and furious imprecations, induced him to look upon the bloodshed from which he then found it impossible to take his fascinated eyes. He began to experience a savage thrill of pleasure, to shout and jump like the rest; and thereafter he never missed a venatio if he could help it and dragged in others initially as reluctant to witness the cruelty as he himself had been.

A few condemned these spectacles. Nero's tutor Seneca, visiting the amphitheatre one day at noon when the shows were exceptionally savage, afterwards voiced his disgust. He had expected ‘some fun and wit’ but discovered ‘just the reverse’:

It is pure murder. The men have no protective clothing. Their entire bodies are exposed to the blows, and no blow is ever struck in vain. The spectators call for the slayer to be thrown to those who in turn will slay him, and they demand that the victor should be kept for another butchering. The outcome for the combatants is death; the fight is waged with sword and fire… And when the show stops for an interval, they shout, ‘Let's have men killed meanwhile! Let's have something going on.’

But protests such as Seneca's were rare. Neither Horace nor Pliny expressed disapproval of the amphitheatre. Indeed, most leading Romans commended the gladiatorial games as exemplifying the qualities which were traditionally most admired in the Roman character, courage in the face of death, endurance, respect for ancient customs. Even Cicero, who condemned the cruelty of the wild beast hunts, saw virtue in the gladiators' fights which were object-lessons in discipline and self-sacrifice. ‘See how men who have been well trained prefer to receive a blow rather than basely avoid it,’ he wrote. ‘How frequently it is shown that there is nothing they more highly estimate than giving satisfaction to their owner or to the people!… What gladiator of ordinary merit has ever uttered a groan or changed countenance?’

As revered as successful gladiators were the charioteers of the circus, where performances were staged before audiences as enthusiastic if not as large as those in the Colosseum. There were several circuses in Rome, the Circus Flaminius which had been built in the days of the Republic,² the Circus Gaius inagurated by Caligula,³ and, most splendid of all, the Circus Maximus which, in use perhaps since the time of the kings, had been improved and enlarged by Julius Caesar and could accommodate well over 150,000 spectators.⁴ Here, in the immense arena eventually measuring 1,800 feet by 600 feet and surrounded by shops and eating places, by taverns and the booths of prostitutes and fortune-tellers, horse races and chariot races took place in an atmosphere of noisy excitement, betting frenzy and amorous intrigue.

Many are the opportunities that await you in the circus [Ovid advised in his Art of Love]. No one will prevent you sitting next to a girl. Get as close to her as you can. That's easy enough, for the seating is cramped anyway. Find an excuse to talk to her… Ask her what horses are entering the ring and which ones she fancies. Approve her choices… If, as is likely, a speck of dust falls into her lap, brush it gently away; and, even if no dust falls, pretend it has done and brush her lap just the same. If her cloak trails on the ground gather up the hem and lift it from the dirt. She will certainly let you have a glimpse of her legs… The deft arrangement of a cushion has often helped a lover… Such are the advantages which a circus offers to a man looking for an affair.

The sport was opened by a purple-robed state official wearing a heavy wreath of gilded laurels and holding an ivory baton surmounted by an eagle. He raised up a white napkin to the crowd and dropped it on to the freshly raked yellow sand that covered the arena. At first there might be displays of equestrian skill, the performers always riding without stirrups or standing on their heads or lying upon the horses, jumping from one mount to the next, engaging in mock sword fights with each other, or leaning down to snatch a trophy from the sand. Next came the horse races; then the chariots thundered round the track, as many as twelve emerging at once from the stables as soon as the rope, which was extended between the twin statues of Mercury, was pulled away. Sometimes the chariots were drawn by two horses, more often by four (quadrigae), occasionally by as many as ten. They raced round the circuit for seven laps, enveloped in clouds of sand thrown up by the wheels and the horses' hooves, the completion of each lap being signalled to the crowd by the movement of large wooden eggs and later of dolphins on the high embankment in the centre of the course. The chariots bore the colours – red, white, blue and green – of the factiones or stables from which they came; the horses were bedecked with pearls in their manes; their breastplates were studded with charms and medallions; the coloured ribbons of their factio were tied round their necks and in their knotted tails. The charioteers, leaning back against the reins, whips in their hands, helmets on their heads, their legs bound with leather straps, daggers sheathed by their thighs in case they had to cut themselves loose, also proclaimed the identity of their factio by the colour of their tunics. As the chariots hurtled towards the posts where they had to turn, consummate skill was needed to guide the horses into just the right position, for horses that turned too close to the post might swing the chariot crashing into it, while those that gave it too wide a berth lost positions that might never be regained.

The excitement of the displays in the Circus Maximus and the Colosseum attracted far larger audiences than did the theatres of Rome, even though the plays which were presented frequently offered scenes as violent and far more lubricious than those to be seen in the more popular places of entertainment. There were three principal theatres in Rome at this time, none of them offering anything like the accommodation afforded by either the Colosseum or the Circus Maximus, yet all of them enormous when compared with the largest theatres which have succeeded them. The Theatre of Pompey had about 27,000 seats, the Theatre of Marcellus some 10,000 and the smaller Theatre of Balbus which had been built in 13 B.C. had 8,000.⁵ But long gone were the days when such theatres could be filled by dramatists like Livius Andronicus, one of the founders of Roman drama, or Plautus and Terence who had adapted the content and style of the Greek masters for the stages of Rome. Plays were now written not so much for public performance as for private declamation; and the theatres presented productions more notable for the impressiveness of their effects than for the beauty of their language, the interest of their plots or the delineation of character. Playing to huge auditoria, actors wore easily identifiable masks and brightly coloured costumes, often merely making stylized gestures or dancing while a chorus spoke or loudly sang the accompanying words. Audiences, coarsened and degraded by the spectacles in the amphitheatre, demanded as much violence and sensationalism, rape, incest, pillage and cannibalism as the plot could be made to support. Women appeared naked on the stage, Leda making love to the swan, Pasiphae with the white bull of Minos; and when blows were exchanged real blood was shed and wounds inflicted. Before the end of the first century, convicted criminals were substituted for actors in the final scene and actually executed; bandits died on crosses; and a convict forced to take over the part of Hercules was wrapped in a poisoned cloak and burned on a funeral pyre.

Although the worst excesses were enacted in the times of the less humane emperors, even in those of the more kind-hearted the savageries continued apace. In the reign of Titus, when the Colosseum was inaugurated, no less than 5,000 animals, so it was calculated by Suetonius, were slaughtered there in a single day.

Titus had become Emperor in 79 when his father Vespasian, before suffering a fatal stroke, alluded to the customary apotheosis of an emperor in the last of his famous jokes: ‘Goodness me! I think I am about to become a god.’

Titus had proved a vengeful conqueror of the Jews whose rebellion he had suppressed, slaughtering prisoners wholesale after the sack of Jerusalem, throwing them to wild animals, setting up the Roman eagle in the Holy of Holies and carrying off to Rome the sacred treasures of Herod's temple. These included the silver trumpets and the seven-branched candelabrum, the menorah, which are shown being carried through Rome in a relief on the Arch of Titus erected across the end of the Via Sacra in 81.⁶ Titus had also been renowned for his profligate ways, his riotous parties, his fondness for young homosexuals and his lust for the Jewish princess, Berenice. Once established in power in Rome, however, he sent Berenice back to her people; he saw no more of his pretty boys, and he proved himself a generous, affable and charming ruler who displayed a sincere concern for the welfare of the city when first it was attacked by plague and then by yet another fire. His reign, though, was short. He died in 81, to be succeeded by his brother, Domitian, a lonely, introverted man of twenty-nine who had always been jealous of Titus's success and who had affected to be more interested in poetry and music than in politics. According to Suetonius, Domitian spent much of his time at the beginning of his reign by himself, catching flies and impaling them with deadly accuracy on the point of his pen. When his wife fell in love with an actor and had to be dismissed from the imperial household, he was more lonely than ever and before long found an excuse to call her back to him. The older he grew the more isolated and suspicious he became. And, since he had deeply offended the Senate by appointing himself Censor for life so that he had permanent control over its membership, by adopting titles of unprecedented grandeur such as Dominus et Deus, and by seeming bent upon a course leading to complete absolutism, he had good cause to fear the dagger of an assassin. It was said that in his palace on the Palatine he paced up and down the principal courtyard glancing apprehensively at the images of the gardens reflected in the polished Cappadocian marble surfaces, in dread of catching sight of a lurking enemy.

This immense palace, largely financed by confiscations of property from Senators accused of treachery, rivalled in splendour Nero's Domus Aurea. Designed for Domitian by Caius Rabirius, it comprised his official residence the Domus Flavia, his private palace the Domus Augustana, and a vast stadium, surrounded by double porticoes, where horse races were probably held. To clear the site for this extensive development, rows of houses were demolished and tons of earth were carted away to level the ground. Fifteen years passed before the new complex of cloisters and peristyles, fountains and pools, sunken gardens and colonnades, temples and decorated apartments was completed. The remains of the dining-hall still bear witness to the place's vanished magnificence, to the pleasures enjoyed by the Emperor's guests who, reclining on cushioned couches beneath pink marble walls, could see through windows overlooking gardens in which brightly plumaged birds fluttered in cages beside sparkling fountains.⁷ But the obsessively paranoiac Domitian seems to have derived little pleasure himself from the luxury of his palace. And in 96, the year of its completion, the death he had long expected overtook him. He was stabbed to death by several assailants encouraged by his wife Domitia, various palace officials and the commanders of the Praetorian Guard.

The elderly and pliable lawyer, Marcus Cocceius Nerva, undoubtedly one of the conspirators, was chosen to succeed him. But the fury of the army, whose pay Domitian had considerably increased, and of the rank and file of the Praetorian Guard, forced Nerva to adopt a son and heir from outside his own family. And so, in 98, a gifted provincial official, well liked by both the army and the Senate, Marcus Ulpius Traianus, became Emperor upon Nerva's death.

Trajan had been born near Seville in 53. His mother was Spanish, his father a descendant of Roman settlers. He himself had served with distinction as Governor in Upper Germany and after two highly successful campaigns in the Kingdom of Dacia (in what is now Romania), the immense sums seized from this rich land enabled Trajan to undertake a programme of public works in Rome on a scale of unparalleled grandeur. On the site of Nero's Golden House he built the city's finest baths.⁸ He constructed a new Forum, the last of its kind, to the designs of the great architect from Damascus, Apollodorus, whose marble colonnades, temples, libraries and grand Basilica Ulpia, surrounding an open space with marble statues and bronze reliefs, were long considered amongst the most wonderful marvels of the ancient world.⁹ He built commodious markets, the Mercati Traianei, whose shops, originally built in three tiers, can still be seen off the Via IV Novembre.¹⁰ And most remarkable of all, to the west of the markets, Trajan erected in 113 the monumental column whose summit about 140 feet above the ground marks the height of the ridge that once separated the Forum from the Campus Martius. Designed by Apollodorus and constructed of eighteen blocks of marble four feet high and eleven and a half feet in diameter, it is decorated with exquisitely executed reliefs which spiral up around it, containing 2,500 figures and constituting a detailed and uniquely informative narrative of Trajan's Dacian campaigns. At the top of the column stood a statue of the victorious Emperor, and a spiral stone staircase inside led to a platform from which extensive views could be enjoyed over the rooftops of the city.¹¹

The population of Rome at this time was probably about a million, their buildings covering an area of almost eight square miles. But there were so many large public basilicas, temples, circuses, baths and theatres, so many acres of imperial gardens, so much land that could not be inhabited for fear of offending the gods that most people were compelled to live in tall apartment blocks, insulae, which towered, as many as six storeys high, over the narrow lanes.¹²

In the more solid and pleasant of these insulae the whole of the ground floor was occupied by a single tenant and the accommodation was nearly as spacious as that in a house; but the apartments over it were small and cramped and became increasingly less desirable on each successive floor, the highest and cheapest floors being overcrowded with tenants and sub-tenants, their families and dependants. From the outside, the insula might well present an attractive appearance, its façade decorated with tiles and mosaics, with balconies of wood or brick projecting from each storey and with potted plants and flowers to be seen behind their railings. Inside, however, the apartments were for the most part dark and comfortless, lit by windows covered with parchment or sheets of cloth, or by wooden shutters which might keep out the rain or the glaring sun but which plunged rooms into a darkness that a candle or smoky lamp did little to alleviate. Furniture was sparse, limited to a few stools and beds, though the beds were frequently part of the structure, shelves or bunks fitted against the wall. Heat was commonly provided by movable braziers and cooking done on open stoves, so that the flimsily built structures were as likely to catch fire as they were to collapse.

Water supply and sanitation were almost as primitive as they had been in the time of the kings. By Trajan's day more than 200 million gallons of water were brought into Rome every day by eight aqueducts; but while the occupants of some of the ground floors of the insulae benefited from this, those who lived above them did not. Water had to be fetched in buckets from fountains in the streets or brought up the stairs by notoriously lazy and ill-natured water-carriers. Similarly, while the drainage system of the city, started seven centuries before, had since been regularly extended and improved, the upper floors of the insulae were not connected to it. Their occupants had to take their receptacles downstairs to empty them into a pit in the basement or into nearby cess trenches. Those who could not or would not do this hurled their contents from the windows into the street.

Despite Nero's reconstruction of the city on a more regular plan after the fire of 64, many of the streets of Rome were as narrow, tortuous and dark as they had ever been, the widest being scarcely more than twenty feet and, in the centre of the city, the Via Sacra and the Via Nova were not even as wide as this. Not all of them were paved or had sidewalks and, although a decree had been passed in the time of Domitian prohibiting shopkeepers from displaying their wares in the streets, the decree seems not to have been too strictly observed. The lower floors of many insulae were divided into shops and booths, taverns and warehouses; and, since the traders' families lived in poky little lofts approached by ladders, it was natural that they should wish to spend their lives in the streets when the weather allowed and to bring out their goods to catch the attention of the passers-by. As well as shopkeepers, barbers carried on their business in the street, cutting hair with iron scissors in the fashion favoured by the reigning Emperor or some idolized charioteer, curling the locks of the young, dyeing those of the old, shaving chins with iron razors which were often painfully blunt despite frequent recourse to the whetstone, and, when their arms were jogged by the crowd, staunching the consequent flow of blood with spiders' webs soaked in oil and vinegar.

Craftsmen, too, worked in the street; itinerant vendors shouted their wares; jugglers, snake charmers and acrobats collected audiences; beggars thrust forward their bowls and cans; and even schoolmasters attempted to teach their pupils in the persistent din. The passage of carts and baggage animals in the streets during the hours of daylight had been forbidden by law by Julius Caesar, and the prohibition had remained in force; but horsemen were allowed, and so were the wagons of demolition and building contractors, litters and chairs borne by slaves; on the frequent days when public games were held, so were chariots bound for the amphitheatre, and, on the days of religious festivals, the carriages of priests and Vestal Virgins. The embargo on other vehicles did little, therefore, to lessen the confused congestion of the daytime streets, while the nights were disturbed by the shouts of wagoners and drovers, and the cries of night watchmen in the unlit alleys. ‘Most sick men die here from insomnia,’ Juvenal who was living in Rome at the end of the first century wrote in one of his satires:

Rest is impossible. It costs money to sleep in Rome.

There is the root of the sickness. The movement of heavy wagons

through narrow streets, the oaths of stalled cattle drovers

would break the sleep of a deaf man or a lazy walrus.

On a morning call the crowd gives way before the passage

of a millionaire carried above their heads in a litter,

reading the while he goes, or writing, or sleeping unseen:

for a man becomes sleepy with closed windows and comfort.

Yet he'll arrive before us. We have to fight our way

through a wave in front, and behind we are pressed by a huge mob

shoving our hips; an elbow hits us here and a pole

there, now we are smashed by a beam, now biffed by a barrel.

Our legs are thick with mud, our feet are crushed by large

ubiquitous shoes, a soldier's hobnail rests on our toe…

Newly mended shirts are torn again. A fir-tree

flickers from the advancing dray, a following wagon

carries a long pine: they swing and threaten the public.

Suppose the axle should collapse, that axle carrying

Ligurian stone, and pour a mountain out over the people –

what would be left of the bodies? The arms and legs, the bones,

where are they? The ordinary man's simple corpse

perishes like his soul.

The life of the rich was in sharp contrast to that of the poor whose life was passed in these dark, noisy and noisome alleys. The houses of the classes from which the Senators were chosen were not elaborately furnished, but the furniture they did contain was of the most exquisite quality and made in a variety of beautifully fashioned materials, bronze and maple wood, ivory and tortoiseshell, terebinth and porphyry with inlays of silver and gold. Statues, busts, water-clocks and curios, strange and valuable objects collected during tours of duty in the Empire's far-flung provinces were all carefully arranged in the small rooms which led one into another around courtyards shaded by trees, bright with flowers and filled with the sounds of singing birds and splashing fountains.

In the bedroom the master of the house would wake early, usually at dawn, and, while slaves with brushes and sponges, buckets of sand and water set about their daily tasks, he would throw aside the covers of his bed and begin to dress. The operation was not a lengthy one, for he wore no special clothes at night, content to sleep in the undergarments he had worn by day. Over his loincloth he wore a belted tunic of linen or wool, in cold weather two or even three of these, and then the synthesis or, for more formal occasions, the white toga whose folds could not be arranged without much practice or the help of an experienced slave. On his feet he wore sandals or boots of soft leather reaching half-way up the calves like those worn by soldiers.

The toilet of his wife was necessarily a more lengthy process. It did not take long for her to dress, since, like her husband, she wore her underclothes in bed and over her shift she had only to don her stola which reached to the ground, covering her feet, and her palla, or shawl, which she could if she wished pull over her head. But the dressing of her hair, which was combed up and twisted into elaborate shapes by her ornatrix, or the arrangement of her wig, which was usually blonde, took quite as long as the application of her make-up: the whitening of her forehead, the reddening of her lips, the outlining of her eyes with antimony and the painting of her eyebrows with dampened ash. For the conditioning of her skin she would have used some kind of unguent, such as that described by Ovid which consisted of barley-meal and wheat-flour, ground pulse and ground antlers, beaten eggs, narcissus bulbs, gum and honey. Sprayed with scent, with jewels fixed in her braided hair, glittering studs in her ears, a necklace round her throat, rings on her fingers and bracelets on her arms, she was now ready to be helped on with her brightly coloured cloak and to go forth into the morning sun carrying perhaps a feathered fan and followed by a servant with a parasol.

In earlier times women had been at the mercy of their husbands, who had been selected for them by their parents and to whom they had usually been married at a very early age, sometimes as young as twelve years old, often at fourteen. As the fifth of the Twelve Tables of 449 B.C. had decreed, ‘Females shall remain in guardianship even when they have reached their majority.’ In those days a woman had no right in law to divorce her husband, though he could, without undue difficulty, get rid of her on the slenderest pretext, and even though himself an acknowledged adulterer, could kill his wife for her own unfaithfulness. But since then women, although very rarely to be found practising a profession, had gradually liberated themselves and had come to have interests and influence in what had formerly been considered male preserves. This was much to the consternation of many old-fashioned conservatives who expressed their disapproval of modern wives, strongly condemning them for practising birth-control, for attempting to rival men in learning and seeking to share in their games and sports. ‘What modesty can you expect of a woman who wears a helmet, abjures her own sex, and delights in feats of strength?’ Juvenal asked indignantly. ‘Who… with spear in hand and breasts exposed takes to pig-sticking?’ Juvenal was equally appalled by women who, instead of eating by themselves as in the past, or demurely sitting at their husbands' feet, now reclined beside them, drinking, eating and joining the male conversation on those couches for three people from which the triclinium, the dining-room, derived its name.

In most families the main meal was eaten in the evening, breakfast and the midday meal being little more than snacks. The triclinia, arranged around low tables, were furnished with cushions upon which the bare-footed diners rested their elbows. When children were present, they sat on stools. The table was usually covered with a cloth and on this were placed knives and spoons and toothpicks. Forks were unknown. Anything which could not be carried conveniently to the mouth in a spoon was picked up in the fingers. Servants were consequently in attendance with bowls of warm, scented water and napkins. Slaves carried the food to the table, the dishes for a banquet filled with such delicacies as had long been enjoyed and would still be relished for centuries to come, oysters, lobsters and mullet, goose's liver and capons, sucking-pigs and roasted veal, asparagus, truffles, mushrooms, fruits and cakes. Wine, in labelled amphorae with wooden or cork stoppers, was decanted through strainers into mixing-bowls and then cooled with snow or mixed with warm water before being poured into drinking-bowls.

The meal was a leisurely one. Seven courses were common, and between them the guests might be entertained with music or with dancers and acrobats. In houses renowned for gluttony and vice, dinner might last for as long as ten hours, the guests gorging themselves while watching the dancing of naked Spanish girls or staggering out from time to time to be sick in a room set aside for this purpose. Sometimes they drank so much that they could not stand and had, like the rich and vulgar host described by Martial, to summon a slave with an amphora into which they could ‘remeasure the wine [they] had drunk from it, relying upon the slave to guide the stream’. But such crapulous behaviour was far from common. At the dinner tables of most well-to-do families in Trajan's Rome, a modern observer might consider the appetites of the guests healthy rather than Gargantuan and the behaviour decorous, even though spitting on the floor was commonplace and belching a polite indication of enjoyment.

Before his meal the Roman would have had his bath. The rich had bathing-rooms in their own houses where slaves scraped, washed and massaged them, but all citizens had access to the public baths. Just as the latrines were recognized places to meet, gossip and exchange the news of the day, so were the thermae with which successive Consuls and Emperors had provided the people in every quarter of the city. Most of them offered the full range of halls and chambers – apodyteria where the people undressed; sudatoria where they sat and sweated; calidaria where, in an atmosphere slightly less hot, they could splash themselves with water from tubs or fountains and cleanse their skins with scrapers; tepidaria where they could cool themselves before diving into the cold baths of the frigidaria. In some less reputable establishments men and women bathed naked together; but most baths had either staggered opening hours or separate chambers, generally adjoining, so that the same heating system could be used for both, and the sexes segregated. The men sometimes wore leather trunks, more often nothing at all; most women wore a loincloth.

In many baths there were promenades lined with works of art, reading-rooms and libraries, exhibition halls and gymnasia. All manner of ball games were played in the baths and all sorts of sports were practised, particularly wrestling matches in which both men and women took part. The women's baths had beauty parlours, and outside both men's and women's were cafés and small shops.

The baths closed at sunset. Thereafter, however, there were many other places in which the Roman could enjoy himself when the circus and the amphitheatres were silent. There were, for instance, the brothels outside which prostitutes displayed themselves on benches. Many, if not most, of them were foreigners, often Egyptian or Syrian. They wore far more startlingly bright clothes than respectable women would choose, short tunics and togas and bangles round their ankles. Taxed by the authorities on the basis of the fees they charged their customers, they were allowed to parade the streets and were a common sight on the Via Sacra and in the Subura, the noisy, crowded area of the city which Juvenal called the ‘boiling Subura’. To be seen with these prostitutes occasionally was not considered reprehensible in a young man of good family. Venereal disease seems to have been known but was far from widespread.

The authorities regulated the opening hours of brothels, but tavern-keepers were not so circumscribed and a cooling drink was always available. So, too, was a game of chance; for, despite the prohibitions regularly imposed, gambling was a common pastime with most Roman citizens and an obsession with many. Bets were placed on games of backgammon, chess and draughts as well as on those simpler games played with marbles and dice, nuts and knuckle-bones. Stakes were high and passions ran hot. ‘When was gambling so reckless?’ Juvenal wondered. ‘Men now come to the gaming tables not with purses but with a treasure chest.’ For those with a taste for less risky and less exciting pursuits there were the lovely walks beyond the city walls, amidst the temples and porticoes, the statues and frescoes of the Saepta Julia,¹³ the shady cypress groves and olive trees of the Campus Martius.

By the time of Trajan's death the Roman people, whose city he had so enriched, had learned to address him as Optimus Princeps, the best of all rulers. They had even more cause to be grateful to his adopted son who succeeded him in 117, the restless, homosexual and complex Hadrian. Of Spanish extraction, Hadrian seems to have spent most of his early life in Rome where he became known as a young man of highly cultivated tastes and strong, if often irrational, opinions. As Emperor he did not care to have his artistic opinions questioned and he quarrelled so violently with Apollodorus over the designs for the Temple of Venus and Rome that he had him banished from the city and possibly had him executed too. This temple, designed by Hadrian himself and dedicated by him in 135, was but one of several buildings, original in conception and skilful in execution, for which the Emperor was responsible in Rome.¹⁴ His love of Greece, apparent in his beautiful villa at Tivoli,¹⁵ is also evident in the Pantheon, that wonderfully well-preserved Roman monument which, even in Hadrian's day, was the admiration of the civilized world.

The original Pantheon had been built between 27 and 25 B.C. by Agrippa to whom credit is still given in the inscription above the portico. But whereas Agrippa's building was renowned for its exterior, Hadrian's is remarkable for the huge circular hall behind the grey and red granite columns of the pedimented porch. Inside this hall, beneath the vast dome which, covered with sheets of gilded bronze, remained the largest in the world until modern times, stood statues of the gods covered with jewels, that of Venus, so Pliny said, wearing in the ears the two halves of the pearl which Mark Antony took from Cleopatra after she had drunk its twin dissolved in vinegar to win a bet.¹⁶

Having rebuilt the Pantheon as a suitably magnificent temple for all the gods, Hadrian began to construct his own memorial, the mausoleum which in the later history of Rome became that awesome state fortress and prison known as Castel Sant’ Angelo.¹⁷ The mausoleum was not finished at the time of Hadrian's death in 138 and was completed by his adopted heir, Antoninus, who, because of his devotion to his country, his gods and his father, became known as Antoninus Pius.

For over twenty years Antoninus ruled over a largely peaceful Empire; but the long frontiers of this Empire were coming under ever more persistent attack and, after his time, emperors intent upon survival were increasingly preoccupied with its defence. Antoninus Pius's successor, the conscientious and idealistic Marcus Aurelius, spent most of his reign fighting the German tribes of the north, and the column which towers above the Piazza Colonna commemorates his triumphs.¹⁸ Yet Marcus Aurelius, who seems still to ride with noble purpose across the Capitol in the equestrian bronze statue which so impressed Michelangelo, was the last of the four good emperors of Rome's triumphant age.¹⁹ His cruel and arrogant son Commodus was possessed by so wildly consuming a passion for gladiatorial contests that he took part himself in almost a thousand combats, arriving in the amphitheatre wearing a gold crown studded with jewels and preceded by an attendant bearing the club and lion skin of Hercules with whom he had identified himself. In Hercules's honour he slaughtered animals in the arena with insensate relish before appearing in his role as gladiator. The Senators dutifully watched his performances, shouting their approval of his bloodlust, although as one of them, Dio Cassius, recorded, their overriding emotion was one of fear, since it was rumoured that Commodus, in celebration of Hercules's killing of the Stymphalian birds, had made up his mind to round off an invigorating display of his prowess by massacring a few spectators.

On one occasion, Dio Cassius said, ‘having killed an ostrich and decapitated it, he came up to where we Senators were sitting, holding the head in his left hand and raising aloft his bloody sword; and, without uttering a word, he wagged his head with a grin as though to threaten he would treat us in the same way.’ Frightened as they were, the Senators could scarcely restrain their laughter at the antics of their crazy master, yet knowing that any sign of amusement would have resulted in their being killed on the spot, they stuffed their mouths with the laurel leaves from their garlands.

The strangulation of the megalomaniacal Commodus on the orders of a commander of the Praetorian Guard inaugurated a period of intermittent civil war in which a succession of imperial reigns were brought to a violent end, usually at the instigation or with the cooperation of these powerful household troops. Commodus's successor, Pertinax, the son of a freed slave who after distinguished military service had become Prefect of the City of Rome, was murdered within three months. Then the rich Senator, Didius Julianus, who had bought the throne at an auction organized by the Praetorian Guard, was killed after nine weeks on the orders of the resolute and forceful north African, Septimius Severus, who had been proclaimed Emperor by his legions on the Danube. Severus died a natural death in Britain, reputedly bequeathing to his sons the advice to get on well with each other, to be generous to their armies and not to bother with anyone else. But Caracalla, the violent and emotional son who followed him, having had his brother murdered, was himself assassinated by Macrinus, the Praetorian Prefect, in 217. Macrinus himself became Emperor for a short time until he, too, was killed in a rebellion planned by the Syrian sister-in-law of Septimius Severus, Julia Maesa, who replaced him with her grandson. This new 14-year-old Emperor was a devotee and high priest of the Syrian sun-god, El-Gabal, who was worshipped in the town of his birth in the form of a conical black stone which was said to have fallen there from heaven. The boy was known as Elagabalus after this deity whose cult he brought to Rome without any attempt to assimilate it into Roman institutions.

As the attention of the new emperor was diverted by the most trifling amusements [wrote Edward Gibbon in a characteristic passage], he wasted many months in his progress from Syria… and deferred till the ensuing summer his triumphal entry into the capital. A faithful picture, however, which preceded his arrival, and was placed by his immediate order over the altar of victory in the senate-house, conveyed to the Romans the just but unworthy resemblance of his person and manners. He was drawn in his sacerdotal robes of silk and gold… his head was covered with gems of an inestimable value. His eyebrows were tinged with black, and his cheeks painted with an artificial red and white. The grave Senators confessed with a sigh, that, after having long experienced the stern tyranny of their own countrymen, Rome was at length humbled beneath the effeminate luxury of Oriental despotism…

In a solemn procession through the streets of Rome the way was strewed with gold dust; the black stone, set in precious gems, was placed on a chariot drawn by six milk-white horses richly caparisoned. The pious emperor held the reins, and, supported by his ministers, moved slowly backwards, that he might perpetually enjoy the felicity of the divine presence. In a magnificent temple raised on the Palatine Mount, the sacrifices of the god Elagabalus were celebrated with every circumstance of cost and solemnity. The richest wines, the most extraordinary victims and the rarest aromatics were profusely consumed on his altar. Around the altar a chorus of Syrian damsels performed their lascivious dances to the sound of barbarian music, whilst the gravest personages of the state and army, clothed in long Phoenician tunics, officiated in the meanest functions with affected zeal and secret indignation.

To the temple of his deity, for his greater honour, Elagabalus transported all the most holy objects in Rome, including the Palladium, a small figure of Pallas Athene which had been brought from Troy by Aeneas. Shocked as they were by this blasphemous impiety, the Senators were even more horrified by the orgies which now took place in the imperial palace where the most exotic and extravagant meals were served at all hours of the day and night, where concubines and catamites disported themselves upon cushions stuffed with crocus petals and where the Emperor himself, dressed as a woman, made mockery of high Roman offices by bestowing them upon his various lovers and offended against the most sacred laws of Rome by violating a Vestal Virgin.

For fear lest his outrageous behaviour might result in her own ruin, his grandmother disowned him. Experiencing no difficulty in persuading the Praetorian Guard to assassinate both him and his mother, she had another grandson, Severus Alexander, declared emperor in his place. For thirteen years he and his mother ruled the Empire between them until in 235 both were killed in a mutiny of their troops.

Thereafter emperor followed emperor with bewildering frequency, there being six different rulers in Rome in the one year 238. Many were usurpers; most were army officers; nearly all died violent deaths, usually at the hands of soldiers supporting the claims of a rival. One of them, Philip the Arab, son of a desert chief, who reigned for five years from 244, celebrated the thousandth anniversary of the foundation of Rome with exceptionally savage wild beast hunts in the Colosseum, with shows and entertainments which ‘dazzled the eye of the multitude’, with mystic sacrifices and with music and dancing on the Campus Martius which was ‘illuminated with innumerable lamps and torches’. But such celebrations could not divert attention from the sad plight of Rome, the decline of the Senate much of whose authority was being assumed by the army, the slow disintegration of the Empire's frontiers and the recurrent financial crises within the city.

Little building of note had taken place in Rome since the time of Septimius Severus who restored the Portico d'Ottavia²⁰ and the Temple of Vesta, who made the fine terrace known as the Belvedere on the Palatine²¹ and in whose honour were erected both the Arco degli Argentari²² near the Circus Maximus and the grand Arch of Septimius Severus in the Forum.²³ Septimius Severus also began the huge and splendid baths which bear the name of his son Caracalla who inaugurated them in 217. They were the most luxurious in Rome, as the remains of them to be seen in the fountains of the Piazza Farnese, in the Salon d'Hercule of the Palazzo Farnese and in the baptistery of S. Giovanni in Laterano still testify.²⁴ They were also the largest baths in the city, being able to accommodate 1,600 people at a time. Not until the reign of Diocletian were larger baths to be built.²⁵

Diocletian, a man of humble origins from Dalmatia, came to the throne in 284. Before his accession there had been a brief recovery in Rome's fortunes. Valerian, who had become emperor in 253 and his co-emperor and successor, his son Gallienus, had led strong forces against the Persians and Germans. Gallienus, after reorganizing the army, had inflicted a decisive defeat upon the Goths in what is now Yugoslavia in a battle that cost them no less than fifty thousand lives. And Aurelian, who succeeded Gallienus's successor, Claudius Gothicus, had been equally successful against Rome's enemies in northern Italy, and had built the defensive walls round the city which enclosed those parts of it that had spread far beyond the walls of the Republic.²⁶ So, as the fourth century approached, the Empire, although still in financial chaos, was no longer on the verge of disintegration; and Diocletian, an administrator of exceptional ability, gave it the firm government it now needed. He enlarged the army; he overhauled the system of collecting taxes from the greatly increased number of Roman citizens who had become liable to pay them by the Constitutio Antoniniana of 212–13; and he increased the number of imperial provinces, removed their governors from military commands and, under his ultimate authority, created three other rulers whose capitals were established at Milan, Trier and in Salonica. His own capital was at Izmir on the Aegean coast, though the Senate remained in Rome, which was still the inspiration of the Empire, an ideal to be worshipped as a god.

Diocletian's reforms answered their purpose: the Empire was more orderly and united than it had been for generations. But the Emperor saw a threat to its unity and to the cult of the worship of Rome in that spreading, foreign, unpatriotic cult, Christianity. And he determined to stamp it out once and for all.

FOUR CATACOMBS AND CHRISTIANS

One Sunday afternoon towards the middle of the fourth century a group of Roman schoolboys went out through a gate in the Aurelian Wall and walked along the Via Appia. ‘We went down into the catacombs,’ one of them, Eusebius Hieronymus, recorded. ‘These are caves excavated deep in the earth, and contain, on either hand as you enter, the bodies of the dead buried in the walls. It is all so dark there… Only occasionally is light let in to mitigate the horror of the gloom, and then not so much through a window as through a hole. You take each step with caution, as though surrounded by deep night.’

For generations these mazelike, subterranean galleries and passages, dug out of the soft tufa rock around Rome, had been used by a religious sect which, in Tacitus's words, ‘were detested for their abominations and popularly known by the name of Christians after one Christus who was put to death in the reign of Tiberius by the Procurator, Pontius Pilate’. The Christians had at first interred their dead in tombs above ground as well as below, but as land for burial became scarce and expensive and as persecution increased, they had taken to excavating cemeteries below ground where burials could take place without so much notice by the authorities or interference from hostile pagan crowds. The largest of them were dug on land belonging to such well-to-do converts as the Flavian relatives of the Emperor Domitian who gave permission to their fellow-Christians to use their villas for meetings and worship and their gardens as burial grounds. And so beneath the cypress trees along the Via Appia, and on other roads leading out of the city, warrens of dark tunnels were dug through the rock, some of them on four different levels like the Catacombs of St Calixtus, named after a former slave who, having served a sentence of hard labour in the Sardinian quarries, had been placed in charge of them before becoming leader of his sect. On the walls of the chambers were painted Christian symbols – the fish, the lamb, the shepherd – and scenes from the Bible, and in the recesses were placed not only the bodies of the dead, wrapped in lime-coated shrouds, but also precious objects such as lamps and vessels of golden glass, and relics of holy men, martyrs and saints.¹

Among the bodies of saints placed here were, it is believed, that of St Sebastian, traditionally said to be a member of Diocletian's bodyguard who was condemned to be shot to death with arrows when his religion became known, and, for a time, those of two earlier saints, Paul, the great Jewish missionary from the Greek city of Tarsus, and Simon, the fisherman from the shores of the Sea of Galilee whose Aramaic title Kepha (Peter), meaning rock, was given to him by Christ himself with the words, ‘And on this rock I will build my Church, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven.’ In fulfilment of this mission Peter is believed to have come to Rome where both he and Paul were executed in the persecutions ordered by Nero.

These persecutions followed the fire of 64 for which the Emperor himself was widely held to be responsible and for which scapegoats were consequently needed.

To put an end to the rumours he shifted the charge on to others [Tacitus recorded]. First those who acknowledged themselves of the [Christian] persuasion were arrested; and upon their testimony a vast number were condemned… Their death was turned into a diversion. They were clothed in the dress of wild beasts, and torn to pieces by wild dogs; they were fastened to crosses, or set up to be burned, so as to serve the purpose of lamps when daylight failed. Nero gave up his own gardens for this spectacle.

As it was in Nero's time, so it was in the reigns of Domitian and Marcus Aurelius, of Decius and Valerian. There were emperors who were more merciful. Trajan, for instance, ordered, ‘Christians are not to be hunted out. Any who are accused and convicted must be punished. Yet if a man denies being a Christian and corroborates his denial by such acts as worshipping our gods, he should be pardoned, however suspect he may have been in the past.’ But throughout the second and third centuries the Christians were more often persecuted than not; and, even when the authorities were prepared to tolerate them, the common people suspicious of their exclusiveness, their rites and their supposed ‘abominations’ which included cannibalism – regarded them as alien troublemakers and revolutionaries, a danger to the state and a blasphemy against the ancient gods of Rome. Their deaths in the amphitheatre accordingly became one of the fiercest thrills that the shows there could afford. Christians were eaten by half-starved lions, burned alive before images of the sun-god, shot down by flights of arrows, hacked to death with axes and swords. In the reign of Diocletian alone, when the congregation of Christians was forbidden, when their clergy were arrested unless they sacrificed to the recognized gods, and their places of worship destroyed together with their sacred objects and holy books, there were probably as many as three thousand martyrs. Yet their religion could not be suppressed; and while those arrested were torn to pieces in the Colosseum, the survivors were joined by convert after convert until by the time of Diocletian's death there were perhaps thirty thousand Christians in Rome, meeting together for worship, occasionally in halls reserved especially for the purpose but usually in villas or ‘houses of the Church’ known as tituli after the original title holders of the building.

By then there had already been thirty-three bishops, or popes, in Rome, all holding that position of divine, unique authority within the Christian community which, so they believed, had been granted to St Peter by Christ. A minority of them had been born in Rome; several came from the East; one at least from Africa. Some were of humble birth, others noblemen. This evident capacity of Christianity to attract converts from all peoples and classes in the Empire was one of the main reasons why it appealed to the man who emerged as the strongest contender for the imperial throne after the confusion caused by the abdication of Diocletian.

This man was Constantine. The son of an army officer and an experienced officer himself, Constantine had been born in about 285 in what is now Yugoslavia and had spent most of his youth in the eastern part of the Empire which Diocletian had divided to protect its borders. His mother, Helena, a former serving-girl from Asia Minor, was at some uncertain date converted to Christianity and, on a visit to the Holy Land, was credited with having discovered the cross upon which Christ was crucified. Her son, so it was alleged, had the nails melted down and made into a charmed bit for the bridle of his horse. Having married the stepdaughter of one of Diocletian's fellow-Emperors, Maximian I, Constantine had invaded Italy in 312 and at the Mulvian Bridge near Rome had defeated his brother-in-law, Maxentius, Maximian's son, to become undisputed ruler of the Empire in the West. At this battle he had fought under a banner bearing the insignia of the faith to which he had been converted from sun-worship and to which he was drawn not only by political considerations but also by his own need for a personal, divine intercessor. Thereafter, in those battles in which he won and consolidated his rule over the whole of the Empire, East and West, he claimed to be fighting in Jesus's name and to be the champion of His faith against the forces of evil. By imperial edicts he granted freedom of worship to all Christians and restored to them the property, both personal and corporate, of which they had been deprived during the persecutions.

In Rome, Constantine contrived to benefit the Christian community without giving too much offence to the rich and influential classes who were still mostly, and in many cases devoutly, pagan. He gave the Christians buildings in which they could meet and worship their God, bury their dead and revere their saints and martyrs. But he ensured that the sites were well away from the centre of the city and that, while the interiors of the buildings might be splendid, they displayed little of this splendour to the passers-by in the streets outside.

South-west of the Porta Maggiore² stood a palace which had formerly belonged to the rich Laterani family and which had formed part of his wife's dowry.³ This he gave to the Pope who established in it the surviving private chapel, the Sancta Sanctorum,⁴ now approached by the Scala Sancta, the holy stairs which, so tradition firmly held, Jesus ascended in Pontius Pilate's palace in Jerusalem and which were brought to Rome by Constantine's mother.⁵ Helena, as Empress-Dowager, had a palace near to the Lateran, the Palatium Sessorianum; and here the great hall was converted into a basilica which became known as S. Croce in Gerusalemme in commemoration of the holy Cross, its most precious relic.⁶ North of S. Croce in Gerusalemme, Constantine himself is believed to have built a basilica, the first Basilica di S. Lorenzo fuori le Mura.⁷ This was constructed over the catacomb where lay the bones of St Laurence, one of the deacons of the early Christian community in Rome. St Laurence, it is said, was burnt to death on a grill in 258 when, having been ordered to hand over the sect's valuables, he collected together the city's destitute and sick and presented them to the authorities with the words, ‘Here is the Church's treasure.’ Certainly, beside the Lateran Palace on the site of what is now St John Lateran, Constantine did build the Constantinian basilica which, since it contained the cathedra, or official seat of the bishop, became and has always since remained Rome's cathedral.⁸ A large rectangular hall with a nave flanked by double aisles and terminating in an apse, this basilica seems to have been conceived by Constantine, internally at least, as a splendid Christian rival to the monumental public meeting-halls of the imperial city.

The same inspiration is evident also in the other great basilica which Constantine built on the slopes of an imperial estate on the Vatican hill. This basilica was as massive as the Constantinian basilica; but between the apse and the nave, which was covered with graves, a transept changed the longitudinal shape into that of a cross. Beneath this crossing, surmounted by a baldacchino supported on twisted marble columns, was the shrine of St Peter whose remains, brought here from the catacombs, were reburied in the basilica which was for ever to bear his name.⁹ At about the same time, above the catacombs, yet another large basilica was built as a kind of enclosed and roofed-in cemetery, its floor, like that of St Peter's, covered with graves. Dedicated to the Apostles, it was later known as the Basilica of San Sebastian in honour of the Christian soldier who, his body pierced by arrow shafts, survived death only to be executed.¹⁰

Basilicas, churches, covered cemeteries and mausolea were not the only fine buildings to be erected in Rome in the time of Constantine. In the Forum he completed, to modified designs, a secular basilica begun by Maxentius, the Basilica Nova, an immense structure, the last of ancient Rome's law courts and meeting-places, three of whose huge coffered vaults still remain.¹¹ In one of its apses Constantine had placed an immense seated statue of himself, the body of wood, the robe of gilded bronze and the head of marble. This colossal head, six feet high and weighing nine tons, can still be seen in the courtyard of the Palazzo dei Conservatori on the Capitoline hill where the deeply cut pupils of the large and penetrating eyes stare out, above the huge hooked nose, like those of a commanding god.

Like most of his great predecessors, the Emperor Constantine built baths for the city. He may well have been responsible for the Arch of Janus Quadrifons,¹² the huge structure in the Forum Boarium, the ancient cattle market by the banks of the Tiber.¹³ And he was, of course, the inspiration for the Arch of Constantine which was erected in 315 by the Senate and people of Rome to commemorate the Emperor's triumph over Maxentius at the Mulvian Bridge.¹⁴

Splendid as Constantine found Rome, however, and magnificent as were the new buildings he gave to the city, he had to accept Diocletian's view that it could no longer serve as the Empire's capital, being too far removed from the northern and eastern frontiers. He had also to recognize that he had failed to make Rome fully Christian, that the deep-rooted pagan beliefs of most families were as strong as ever. So the Emperor removed his court to Byzantium on the Bosphorus strait and there founded the new Christian capital which was to become known as Constantinople.

Yet, although Rome was no longer the seat of imperial power, the city remained the caput mundi, ‘Invicta Roma Aeterna’, as its coins declared. The centre and showplace of the civilized world, with a population of about 800,000, it was still the home of those incalculably rich families whose political influence was still paramount in the Senate, whose members still filled many of the most important posts in Italy and the Empire, whose businesses were still run from Rome, whose villas still stood beyond its walls and whose ancestors’ mausolea lined the roads leading out of it. Visitors to the city still stood in awestruck admiration as they looked across the Forum to the Colosseum, or gazed up at the temples, tiled with gilded bronze, on the Capitoline hill, or wondered at the number and size of the basilicas and triumphal arches, the statues, obelisks and fountains, the baths and libraries, the circuses and theatres.

Eight bridges crossed the river.¹⁵ Nineteen aqueducts carried water to the city on row upon row of arches stretching in seemingly endless lines across the countryside beyond the walls.¹⁶ The Roman poet, Rutilius Namatianus, expressed his pride in the indestructible glory of his city:

No man will ever be safe if he forgets you;

May I praise you still when the sun is dark.

To count up the glories of Rome is like counting

The stars in the sky.

There were still many powerful men in Rome who believed that this glory could only be preserved by a return to the old traditions and the old gods, by a rejection of the new Christianity with its foreign, plebeian origins, its internal feuds and its unfamiliar art. There were men like Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, the noble, upright, rich and cultivated leader of the Senate who, while numbering many Christians among his friends, constantly upheld the superior virtues of the pagan tradition and even supported the gladiatorial games, arranging for lavish entertainments to be given when his son was appointed Praetor and expressing disappointment when the German prisoners he had imported chose to strangle each other in their chains rather than fight before a Roman crowd. Symmachus was naturally appalled by an imperial order from Constantinople that the winged statue of Victory should be removed from the Senate House. ‘The Great Mystery cannot be approached by one avenue alone,’ he protested on behalf of his fellow-Senators. ‘Leave us the symbol on which our oaths of allegiance have been sworn for so many generations. Leave us the system that has given prosperity to the State.’ But his words were in vain; in 382 the statue was taken away. And a few years later in 392, shortly before Symmachus's death, an imperial decree, sterner and more effective than previous edicts, forbade all forms of pagan sacrifice and banished flowers and incense from the altars of the household gods. ‘They who were once the gods of the nation,’ wrote St Jerome, ‘dwell now with the owls and bats under their lonely roofs.’ In 408 a further decree provided that all temples should be put to other than religious uses. The gladiatorial games had already been abolished in 404 by imperial decree after a Christian monk, Telemachus, had been stoned to death by furious spectators in the arena of the Colosseum when he had tried to separate two fighting gladiators.

Up till the close of the fourth century, pagan shrines had been restored and kept in repair and use beside the places of Christian worship. A few years after Constantine's death in 337, new pagan statues had been erected along the Sacra Via; and since then the Temple of Vesta had been renovated. But now the struggle was over. Christianity had triumphed and Christian buildings were to dominate the city. No longer were they to be relegated to the outskirts of Rome and made as discreet as their size would allow. They were henceforth to appear as conspicuous and monumental witnesses to the faith, some of them being built in the very heart of the city and most, displaying increasingly classical emphasis, designed with high naves, approached through a porch or narthex, flanked by aisles and terminating in semicircular apses.

Powerful support for this new style of church building came from St Damasus, a rich and well-born prelate of strong Roman sympathies who was elected Pope in 366 and strove hard to identify the Christian Church more closely with Rome's long classical past. He and his immediate successors, many of them Roman and most of them upper class, treasured their classical heritage, revered the great Latin writers, admired the architecture which had developed in their times and saw the Kingdom of God as a sanctified successor to the Empire of the Caesars. The religious buildings which now appeared in Rome clearly reflected both this new philosophy and the growing confidence of the Church. Among these buildings, in which columns and other features from classical buildings were incorporated, were the grandly imposing S. Paolo fuori le Mura, begun in 384, to replace the modest basilica that Constantine had built over the grave of St Paul;¹⁷ the church of San Lorenzo in Damaso, now part of the fabric of the Palazzo della Cancelleria;¹⁸ and the church of S. Pudenziana which is dedicated to the daughter of the Senator who was believed to have been one of St Peter's first converts in Rome and in which the magnificent mosaic in the apse depicts Christ surrounded by the Apostles wearing the togas of Roman Senators.¹⁹ In about 400 building began north of the Colosseum upon the church of S. Pietro in Vincoli as a shrine for the chains which had bound St Peter.²⁰ Soon afterwards work started to the south of the Colosseum on the basilica of SS. Giovanni e Paolo which was dedicated to the two Christian martyrs who were beheaded in 361 for refusing to sacrifice to pagan gods.²¹

But while all this building was in progress within the city, beyond its walls the Roman Empire was crumbling into ruins. Invasion succeeded invasion, defeat followed defeat. In 378 the German people known as Visigoths overwhelmed an imperial army at Adrianople; and in 408 they invaded Italy and marched south upon Rome under their leader Alaric, a nobleman by birth who had once commanded the Gothic troops in the Roman army. When the Visigoths first appeared before the Aurelian Walls, which had recently been strengthened and raised to almost twice their original height, they were kept at bay with payments of money. But in 410 when they reappeared, the gates were opened by traitors within the city, and for the first time in eight hundred years a foreign force occupied Rome.

A ferocious sack had been expected when the fearful sound of the Gothic war trumpets had been heard; but the tall, rough-looking troops of Alaric, mostly Arian Christians like their commander, were not malevolent. Some building's were burned down, including the Palace of Sallust,²² many houses and churches were plundered, a few citizens were roughly treated, and pagan temples were ransacked with exceptional venom. But after three days, the Visigoths withdrew, having respected the sanctity both of St Peter's and of St Paul's. Yet, while the fabric of the city had not been badly damaged, the people of Rome had suffered a deep emotional shock. ‘It is the end of the world,’ lamented St Jerome, as Christians blamed pagans for their humiliation and disgrace, and pagans blamed Christians for having deserted the gods who had in the past afforded the city protection. ‘Words fail me. My sobs break in… The city which took captive the whole world has itself been captured.’

Confidence soon returned, however. The Pope at the time of Alaric's invasion was Innocent I, a man of strong will and high ability who at every opportunity stressed the supreme authority of the papacy and its importance as a political and spiritual force. And in 440 a man of like determination, energy and force of character was elected Pope. This was the Roman-born Leo I who insisted that the powers which he had inherited had come to him through his predecessors directly from St Peter and that Peter alone had been granted that power by Christ.

Fortified by the faith, Pope Leo went out himself when Rome was next endangered to confront the barbarians in the north. The enemy now was the restless, savage-tempered Attila, the squat and swarthy leader of the Huns, who ‘felt himself lord of all’ and took pride in the title that had been bestowed upon him, ‘the Scourge of God’. In 452 Attila's forces crossed the Alps and, having sacked and pillaged various northern towns including Milan, Padua and Verona, were preparing to advance south when Pope Leo arrived at his headquarters. He demanded and obtained a meeting with Attila and, while no one knew what passed between them, the Huns soon withdrew, persuaded perhaps that famine and pestilence in Italy would destroy them should they move south towards Rome.

A few years later Pope Leo was faced with another threat, this time from the Vandals, fierce Germanic warriors who attacked by night, blackening their faces and their shields. In 455, having poured across Spain and ravaged north Africa, they invaded Italy and, led by their gifted chieftain, Gaiseric, they advanced upon Rome. Leo could not prevent them breaking into the city which they pillaged far more thoroughly than Alaric's men had done. They remained for two weeks during which they stripped most of the gilded tiles from the roof of the Temple of Capitoline Jupiter, rampaged through the mansions of the rich, invaded the Christian churches, and then marched down to their ships at Ostia with thousands of captives and wagons piled high with plunder, including the menorah and other sacred objects which the Emperor Titus had brought to Rome from Jerusalem.

Yet brutal and rapacious as the Vandals had proved to be, the damage they did to Rome was not as widespread as it would have been had not Pope Leo interceded so forcefully for the city and obtained undertakings from Gaiseric to restrain his men from murder, rape and indiscriminate incendiarism. Gaiseric did not keep all his promises, but at least the ancient basilicas were spared; and life in Rome was soon restored to normal. Indeed, in the years that had passed since the first barbarian incursion into the city, the moral force of the Christian faith had grown ever stronger. The Church was still rich, and the papacy had become recognized as a decisive factor in European affairs. In the proud words of Pope Leo, Rome was once more ‘the head of the world through the Holy See of St Peter’.

Interrupted though it had been, the building of churches in Rome continued apace, as thousands of converts were admitted into the faith. The most magnificent of all early Christian churches in Rome and one that most clearly exemplifies the continuing taste for classical forms so evident in the late fourth century was, indeed, started soon after the invasion of Alaric and finished in 432. This is S. Sabina on the Aventine which has survived largely unchanged to this day.²³ In the year of its completion the church of S. Maria Maggiore had been begun on the Esquiline and had been decorated with some of the most beautiful fifth-century mosaics that have come down to us.²⁴ Soon afterwards Pope Sixtus III, who took a deep interest in the architecture of the city, had undertaken a reconstruction of the Lateran Baptistery as well as of San Lorenzo fuori le Mura. And one of Sixtus III's successors, Simplicius, who was chosen Pope in 468, built the lovely S. Stefano Rotondo on the Caelian hill whose unusual circular design may have been inspired by the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.²⁵

During the papacy of Simplicius, while bitter doctrinal disputes divided Christendom in the East, the Roman Empire in the West approached its final disintegration. When the boy Emperor Romulus Augustulus was deposed in 476 by the German warrior Odoacer, no successor was appointed and Odoacer became ruler of Italy. Yet building continued in Rome as though these events in the outside world were of little concern to a city whose prestige as the home of the papacy had been much enhanced by the death of imperial power in the West. Old structures were renovated and extended, while new ones – monasteries, mausolea, chapels, shrines and baptisteries – appeared both inside the walls and beyond them where suburbs were developing beside the graves of the martyrs and where hostels, shops and taverns catered for the ever-growing number of pilgrims who flocked to Rome from all over the Christian world.

Pilgrims to Rome in these years discovered a city surprisingly little changed by the passing troubled years. In 467 the Bishop of the Auvergne described the jostling, affable crowds and the convivial atmosphere in the circus and the markets. The rich still entertained visitors with traditional Roman hospitality in their houses; orators still practised their art in the Forum; wrestling matches and wild beast shows were still held in the Colosseum, whose massive walls remained untouched by building contractors who were later to use it as a quarry; chariots still careered in clouds of dust around the Circus Maximus to the roars of the excited crowd; statues were still to be found in all quarters of the city. Indeed, Odoacer's successor as King of Italy, the Ostrogoth Theodoric maintained that the bronze and marble population of Rome was almost equal to its natural one: ten years after his death there were an estimated 3,785 statues still standing in the city. Anxious to preserve these ‘precious monuments left in the streets and the open spaces of Rome’, Theodoric, a persistent advocate of racial harmony, instructed his representatives in Rome to guard them carefully and at night to listen for the ringing sound which should warn the watchmen that a thief might be attempting to remove an arm or leg. Theodoric also gave orders for the repair of the Colosseum after it had been damaged by an earthquake in 508 and for the restoration of the imperial palaces on the Palatine, setting aside for the purpose the proceeds of a tax on wine.

But after the death of Theodoric in 526, there were further catastrophic upheavals in Italy which were to precipitate ancient Rome's decay. The Byzantine Emperor Justinian I determined to drive the Arian Ostrogoths out of the peninsula and to re-establish direct imperial rule and the true faith. During the war that followed, Justinian's general Belisarius occupied Rome, which was three times besieged, its defenders on one occasion smashing the statues on Hadrian's mausoleum and catapulting the fragments at the enemy. The city was eventually captured by the new Ostrogothic leader, Totila, who demolished long sections of the Aurelian Wall, burned the Trasteverine district and threatened to raze the rest of the city as a pasture for cattle. Belisarius addressed a passionate appeal to him to remember that ‘trespass against Rome's greatness would be justly regarded as an outrage’:

Beyond all cities on earth Rome is the greatest and most wonderful. For neither has she been built by the energy of a single man, nor has she attained to such greatness and beauty in a short time. On the contrary, a long succession of emperors, many associations of illustrious men, countless years and wealth… have been required to gather together all the treasures she contains. She remains a monument to the virtues of the world… Destroying Rome, you will lose not the city of another but your own. Preserving her you will enrich yourself with the most splendid possessions of the earth.

Influenced by such pleas as this, Totila held his hand in Rome where the population had been reduced by the sieges to perhaps as few as 30,000. But the city was not long to remain his capital. In 552 he was defeated and killed in a battle in the Apennines against the eunuch Narses, formerly commander of the imperial bodyguard, who had succeeded Belisarius as general of the Byzantine forces.

Once the Ostrogoths had been finally defeated, however, Italy had other invaders. The Lombards, a Germanic people, began to move down from the north in 568 and then to lay waste the countryside outside Rome, driving farmers and peasants, monks and clergy to seek safety in the city where a series of disasters – fires, floods, food shortages and plague – made life miserable for all those inside the walls.

As the sixth century drew to its close, Rome's decay was pitiable. Eyewitnesses painted a desolate picture of a city in which buildings were crumbling into ruins; aqueducts and sewers were in urgent need of repair; public granaries had long since collapsed; monuments were dismembered, legally if deemed to be ‘beyond repair’; statues were looted and violated; the Tiber carried along in its swollen, yellow waters dead cattle and snakes; people were dying of starvation in hundreds and the whole population went about in dread of infection. Those with sufficient money had forsaken their city for the relative comforts of Constantinople. Their large country villas had been abandoned for use as quarries or as living quarters for poor monks. The surrounding fields, undrained, had degenerated into swamps, and mosquitoes infested the plain of the Campagna.

In 590 a long procession of supplicants and penitents, numbering almost the entire population of Rome, could have been seen walking with bowed heads through the streets of the city. Some, already dying, fell down and expired by the way. The survivors marched slowly on until they came to the Mausoleum of Hadrian where, so the faithful reported, the Archangel Michael, captain of the heavenly host and guardian of the sick, appeared in the sky sheathing his sword as a sign that the plague would soon be over. In gratitude for this heavenly deliverance, a chapel was afterwards built above the mausoleum and dedicated to St Michael, and thereafter the fortress which the mausoleum had already become was to be known for all time as the Castel Sant' Angelo.

Leading the penitents that day in 590 was a man from a rich patrician family who had been born in Rome some fifty years before, the great-grandson of Pope Felix III. Strongly drawn to monasticism, he had resigned his position as Prefect of the city, had converted his family's palace on the Caelian hill into St Andrew's Monastery, and had sold the rest of his estate for the foundation of other monasteries elsewhere, all of them, like St Andrew's, governed by rules similar to those established by St Benedict. After taking Holy Orders he had gone to Constantinople as papal nuncio and, a few weeks before the march of the penitents, he had been elected Pope. Complaining that he had never wanted such preferment, Pope Gregory I proved himself not only one of the most saintly men who had held this high office but also an administrator, statesman and diplomat of exceptional gifts, the creator of the medieval papacy. Declaring that he did not intend to have ‘the treasury of the Church defiled by disreputable gain’, he devoted himself to the relief of the poor, reorganizing the system of food distribution which the papacy had taken over from the imperial authorities, and establishing or improving several relief centres, known as diaconiae, which were later to be converted into churches as, for example S. Giorgio in Velabro²⁶ and S. Maria in Via Lata.²⁷ He also took care of the needy among the pilgrims whose numbers were constantly increasing throughout his pontificate.

Dedicated to the conversion of unbelievers, Pope Gregory sent missions from Rome in every direction, into Lombardy, Spain and England, then into Germany, the coastlands of France and the Low Countries. Before long, Christian pilgrims from all these places were arriving in Rome, some of them bringing great wealth, others walking in penniless, several with iron collars round their necks or arms indicating that they were criminals upon whom a pilgrimage to Rome had been imposed as an expiation of their misdemeanours. They crowded into the basilicas, filed through the catacombs, worshipped at the shrines, deposited gifts, made endowments, dropped coins in the bowls of mendicants, or flocked to the diaconiae for food and shelter. Soon guidebooks were provided for them, instructing them what routes to follow, what to look out for, where to see the grill upon which St Laurence had been burnt, or the arrows which had pierced the body of St Sebastian, or the chains with which St Peter had been bound. Pope Gregory himself found the trade in relics distasteful and absurd. He had once discovered some Greek monks digging up ‘martyrs’ bones' in a graveyard where most burials had, in any case, been pagan; and he warned those anxious to purchase relics, like the Byzantine empress who had made inquiries about the head of St Paul, that removing sacred objects and disturbing bones were highly dangerous activities, adding that a group of workmen who had broken into St Laurence's tomb accidantally during building operations had all died within days. Pope Gregory insisted that the strips of linen lowered into graves were as worthy of veneration as the bones they contained.

During St Gregory's pontificate no new churches were built in Rome for the crowds of visitors to the city and its growing resident population. But several existing buildings had already been, or were soon to be, appropriated for Christian use, and others were reconstructed so as to admit more worshippers, to facilitate their movement past the holy places or to keep them at a safe distance from valuable relics. In the days of Felix IV (526–30), the audience hall of the city Prefect on the Via Sacra had been converted into the church of SS. Cosma e Damiano and decorated with mosaics;²⁸ about half a century later, probably in the pontificate of Benedict I (575–9), a former ceremonial hall at the foot of the Palatine, had been transformed into the church of S. Maria Antiqua;²⁹ in the time of Boniface IV (608–15), for the first time a pagan temple was made over to the Christians when the Pantheon became the church of S. Maria ad Martyres;³⁰ and in 625 Pope Honorius I turned the Senate House in the Forum into the church of S. Adriano.³¹ Pope Gregory's predecessor Pelagius I (556–61) had reconstructed S. Lorenzo fuori le Mura so that the martyr's grave could be seen by pilgrims; and, perhaps at Gregory's own suggestion, an annular crypt, one of the earliest of many, was constructed in St Peter's to ease the flow of pilgrims and to allow them to see relics without being close enough to touch or damage them.

The flood of pilgrims into Rome from Europe, Asia Minor and north Africa was soon to be much increased by thousands of refugees from the Muslim Arabs who were carrying the banner of the Prophet far north and west from their homelands into Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Mesopotamia and Persia, into eastern Europe and across the southern shores of the Mediterranean and into Spain. These refugees settled in Rome where they established their own communities: Greeks, for example, in the area between the Circus Maximus and the Tiber where they built a church, later to be known as S. Maria in Cosmedin but then called S. Maria de Schola [or foreign colony] Graeca.³²

In the years to come, refugees from the east and their descendants, several of whom, Greeks and Syrians, were elected Pope, were to exercise a profound influence over the Roman Church. They established monasteries in and around Rome of which there were no less than twenty-four by 680. And they brought to Rome their sacred relics, including the head of the Persian martyr, Anastasius, and the manger of the baby Jesus which, from the time of the Palestinian Pope Theodore, could be seen in the church of S. Maria Maggiore. They helped to ensure that icons became commonplace in Rome, that the decoration and furnishing of many Roman churches followed eastern patterns and that the eastern practice of moving martyrs' bones from one place to another, so strongly resisted by Pope Gregory I, became generally accepted.

Pope Gregory died in 604. He left the papacy efficiently administered, fully capable of managing its own affairs as well as those of the temporal government, rich enough not only to maintain its buildings and to see to the wants of the clergy but also to care for the poor, to pay officials to govern the State and for troops to defend it, and to represent Rome in her uneasy relations with Byzantium, still theoretically her overlord.

Long after Gregory's death the influence and authority of Constantinople and of the Hellenistic world was still felt in Rome. In 667 the disagreeable Byzantine Emperor Constans II came on a state visit to the city, was received with punctilious ceremony by Pope Vitalian, by the clergy and notables, and behaved as though Rome were his own personal property. He removed many of its bronze statues, stripped the gilded bronze tiles from the roof of the Pantheon and left behind his name scratched on both the Janus Quadrifons and inside the Column of Trajan.

During his stay Constans occupied rooms in one of the old imperial palaces on the Palatine hill where most of the buildings were now in ruins, roofless and with grass and weeds growing between the cracks in walls and pavements. Much of imperial Rome below the Palatine was in the same forlorn state. But, since Pope Gregory's time, Christian Rome had been much embellished. Honorius I, a member of a noble family long settled in the Roman Campagna, who had been Pope from 625 to 638, had spent a great deal of money on restoring and converting old buildings, and in constructing new ones. On the southern outskirts of the city, he is thought to have rebuilt the church of SS. Vincenzo e Anastasio;³³ near the Porta S. Pancrazio on the Janiculum he had been responsible for the restoration of the splendidly decorated S. Pancrazio;³⁴ and on the site of the grave of the martyr, St Agnes, he had completely reconstructed the basilica of S. Agnese fuori le Mura³⁵ which the Emperor Constantine the Great's granddaughter, Constantia, had raised to the young Christian girl who, consecrating her virginity to Christ, had offered herself to martyrdom when she was no more than twelve years old.

When the Emperor Constans came down from the Palatine on the last day of his visit and sailed away with his plunder to Sicily, he had only a few months left to live. In September 668 he was murdered by a slave in Syracuse. After his death, Rome grew increasingly independent of Byzantium – itself beleaguered by the Arabs and later, once more, by the Lombards – and, while certain papal patrons still displayed a taste for eastern forms of art, these forms were absorbed into those traditionally associated with Rome which remained, as it always essentially had been, a city of the West.

Rome's independence was sharply demonstrated in the early eighth century during a heated controversy over iconoclasm. The Byzantine Emperor, the Syrian Leo III, condemned the veneration of religious pictures and relics as sacrilegious and ordered their removal and destruction. Immediately the Romans, led by Pope Gregory II and then by Gregory III, rose up in determined resistance. Gregory II, whom Byzantine agents in Rome attempted to murder, warned the Emperor: ‘The whole West has its eyes on us… and on St Peter… whom all the kingdoms of the West revere… We go out to the most distant corners of the West to seek those who desire baptism… and they and their princes wish to receive it from ourselves alone.’

In 753, when the Lombards, having captured Ravenna, capital of the Byzantine governors of Italy, laid siege to Rome, the Pope, Stephen II, ignoring Byzantine instructions and advice, entered into negotiations with the enemy on his own account. Having persuaded them to lift the siege, he travelled north across the Alps and made his way to Saint-Denis near Paris to the Christian ruler of the Franks, a Germanic people who had invaded the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century and had now established their rule over a vast territory between the Pyrenees and the Rhine, including the land to which they were to give their name, France. Their king was Pepin the Short, last of a line of hereditary officials whose supreme influence over the corrupt and degenerate Frankish monarchs of the Merovingian dynasty had passed from father to son, generation after generation. Pepin had deposed the weak and sickly Merovingian King, Childeric III, and, with papal acquiescence, had packed him off to a monastery, having cut off his long, flowing hair, the age-old symbol of royalty among the Franks. At Saint-Denis, Pope Stephen confirmed his predecessor's approval of Pepin's usurpation, and on the understanding that the Romans would be granted Frankish support against the Lombards, anointed him in the abbey as King of the Franks and ‘Patrician of the Romans’. Soon afterwards, the Lombards were defeated and forced to restore to Rome the Patrimony of St Peter, those large tracts of land acquired by the Church, which they had seized in central Italy and which, together with former Byzantine territory, were collectively to be known as the Papal States.

In 774 Pepin's son and successor, Charlemagne, came to Rome. A tall, fair, masterful young man, he was met outside the city by a delegation of magistrates and nobles sent to welcome him by Pope Hadrian I. The processional route along the Flaminian Way was lined with young Romans under arms, with children carrying palms and olive branches and chanting the praises of the Deliverer and Protector of Rome. Representatives of the national communities stood under their banners, among them the Saxons, the name of whose schola, the burgus Saxonum, survives in Rome today as the Borgo, the quarter around Castel Sant' Angelo. At the sight of the holy crosses and the emblems of the saints, Charlemagne dismounted from his horse, and proceeded the rest of the way to St Peter's on foot, kissing the ground before entering the Basilica.

Already overlord of nearly all that is now France, Belgium and the Netherlands, as well as parts of Germany and Switzerland, Charlemagne was inspired by this visit to Rome to conceive of an even greater empire, a Christian empire to replace that of the Caesars, an empire which would stretch beyond the Rhine to the Vistula, and south of the Alps to encompass Italy.

A quarter of a century later, Charlemagne, Rex Pater Europae, set out upon a lengthy progress of his dominions, a progress which was to culminate in another visit to Rome and the realization of his long-cherished ambition. Grieving at the loss of the last of his five wives, the beautiful Liutgard, who had died on the way, he arrived in the city in November 800. At Christmas Mass in St Peter's, where Pope Leo III placed the imperial crown upon his now grey-haired head, the congregation rose to acclaim him with shouts that rang round the walls: ‘Long life and victory to Charles Augustus, crowned by God, the great and pacific Emperor of the Romans!’ The Roman Empire of the West had been revived.

FIVE INFAMY AND ANARCHY

During the Lombard invasions, aqueducts had been destroyed, churches had been looted, and catacombs had been broken into and bones and sacred relics carried off. Several times the Tiber had burst its banks and the swirling waters had flooded over the fields and into the streets. Pope Hadrian I, a Roman aristocrat by birth, had raised a large labour force in the countryside and had set about repairing the damage, restoring Rome's water supply, extending the city's welfare system, rebuilding the Aurelian Walls and their fortified towers, improving agriculture on the large estates of the Church beyond them, and clearing the debris out of the catacombs from which cartloads of bones and relics were drawn into Rome to be re-buried in consecrated ground. Numerous churches were renovated and several were adorned with rich furnishings, curtains and candelabra; silver paving was installed at St Peter's, together with a chandelier with over a thousand lights.

Helped by generous gifts from Charlemagne and by the increased landed wealth of the Church, Pope Leo III, a Roman priest of humble stock, was able to continue the work undertaken by his predecessor, and add to the glories of the city, now once again an imperial capital. At the Lateran Palace a grand dining-hall was constructed which rivalled the Hall of the Nineteen Divans in the great palace of the Emperors in Constantinople. Around St Peter's, a wall, to be known as the Leonine Wall,¹ was begun by Leo III and completed in 854 by Leo IV, also a Roman, who, attended by barefoot, chanting clergy with ashes strewn in their hair, consecrated it with prayers and holy water. By the time of Paschal I, yet another native of Rome, the concern of church builders to make the new imperial city a noble reflection of both the early Christian Rome of the Emperor Constantine and of the Rome of classical antiquity had become apparent. Exemplified in S. Prassede² and its annexed Chapel of St Zeno,³ both of which contain magnificent mosaics, this intention is also apparent in the splendid churches of SS. Quattro Coronati,⁴ S. Martino ai Monti,⁵ S. Maria Nova (now S. Francesca Romana),⁶ S. Maria in Domnica⁷ and in the rebuilt S. Cecilia in Trastevere⁸ to which were brought from the catacombs the bones of the virgin martyr who is said to have been sentenced to death by suffocation in the steam of her own bathroom and, surviving both this and attempts at decapitation by a soldier, to have lingered for three days, softly singing hymns to the glory of God and converting many by her example.

When Pope Leo IV died in 855, however, this brief Carolingian renaissance in Rome was already at an end. Charlemagne himself had died forty years before and his successors had found their involvement with Rome as complicated and often as unwelcome as the papacy and the Romans had found their subjection to the Empire. Disagreements and quarrels over the relative authority of Pope and Emperor had been exacerbated not only by the interference of influential Roman families but also by the failure of the imperial forces to protect Rome adequately against Saracen pirates, who came up the Tiber in 846 and plundered both St Peter's and S. Paoli fuori le Mura. As the alliance between the Carolingian dynasty and the papacy disintegrated, these rich families and their supporters became ever more powerful, making and breaking popes at will and presuming to speak for the city as the patricians of the ancient past had done. Theophylactus, one of the richest and most masterful of the aristocrats, assumed full control of Rome at the beginning of the tenth century, styling himself Senator and Consul and considering himself ruler of the papacy as well as of the city. His daughter, Marozia, became the wife of Prince Alberic of Spoleto; and their son, Alberic the Younger, ruled Rome for over twenty years as Princeps atque omnium Romanorum Senator. On his deathbed in 954 he made arrangements for his dissolute 18-year-old son, who had been christened Octavian after the Roman emperor, to be elected Pope as John XII.

John XII's pontificate was disastrous. Having summoned King Otto I from Germany to support him against Berengar, the ruler of northern Italy, and having crowned Otto as Emperor in St Peter's, John immediately regretted his action and, upon the new Emperor's departure, opened negotiations with Berengar instead. Otto then returned to Rome, deposed John XII, appointed his own nominee, a layman, as Pope Leo VIII, and made it clear to the Romans that he regarded both the city and the papacy as his to have and to hold. Deeply resentful of this, the Roman aristocracy, who had long since regarded the papacy as theirs, refused to submit and, appealing to the people to support them, time and again rose up in revolt.

The first of these revolts erupted in January 964 when at the sudden ringing of the alarm bells, the Romans flew to arms and attacked the German Emperor Otto's forces in the Borgo, the area enclosed by the Leonine Wall across the river. Repulsed, they fled to Castel Sant’ Angelo where the imperialists broke down the barricades, and would have slaughtered all the fugitives had not Otto himself intervened. The next day the Roman leaders of the rebellion appeared before the Emperor to beg for mercy. They were required to swear allegiance both to him and to Pope Leo. A hundred of them were kept as hostages; the rest, humiliated, were permitted to depart. ‘Otto left the city in anger, leaving the Pope like a lamb amongst wolves,’ in the words of Ferdinand Gregorovius. ‘The blood which had been shed on 3 January never dried in Rome. Hatred of the foreigner found nourishment therefrom, and the Romans who had been repressed by force, scarcely saw their prisoners at liberty and the Emperor at a distance, when they hastened to give vent to their desire for revenge.’

They recalled the deposed Pope, John XII, who arrived back in the city with a host of friends and vassals to drive his rival out of it. Excommunicating Leo VIII, Pope John took a savage revenge upon those clergy who had supported him, ordering one to be flogged, another to lose a hand, a third to have two fingers and his nose cut off and his tongue torn out. He would, no doubt, have ordered further punishments had not he died on 14 May, murdered, so it was reported, by the enraged husband of his mistress.

In his place the Romans, without reference to the Emperor whom they had sworn to obey, elected the learned Benedict V, an impertinent presumption which aroused the fury of Otto I who descended once more upon Rome to ensure the reinstatement of his creature, Leo VIII. The imperial army arrived before the walls at the beginning of June. The surrender of Benedict was peremptorily demanded. It was immediately refused, and the first assault upon the city was launched. At the beginning resistance was stubborn. Benedict was persuaded to mount the walls to encourage the defenders by his presence. But plague broke out in the city, and food supplies ran low. The gates were opened on 23 June. Benedict was handed over, his vestments were torn off by Leo VIII, his pallium was cut in two, his ferule broken in half, and he was sentenced to perpetual exile. The leaders of the resistance again swore obedience to the Emperor beside St Peter's grave and undertook never again to interfere in papal elections.

For the moment, the Romans were spared further punishment. But upon the death of Leo VIII, and the nomination by the Emperor of John XIII as his successor, they rebelled once more; and this time the Emperor was merciless. He banished to Germany several leading citizens who had assumed the title of Consul; twelve decarones, representatives of the districts or rioni⁹ into which the early-medieval city was divided, were hanged or blinded; the city Prefect was handed over by the Emperor to Pope John XIII who ordered that he be hanged by his hair from the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, stripped naked, placed backwards upon an ass whose tail, furnished with a bell, he had to grasp as reins, and then driven through the streets with a sack of feathers on his head and other sacks fastened to his thighs, before being exiled beyond the Alps. The bodies of two other rebels who had died were dug up and thrown outside the city walls.

The Romans were provoked rather than subdued by these humiliations. And for the rest of the century and well into the next the disturbances and intermittent violence in the city continued unabated, while the papacy was beset by repeated scandals and the rivalry of anti-popes. Already one pope, Stephen VI, had ordered the exhumation of the body of Pope Formosus, a predecessor who had offended him. The corpse was clothed in pontifical vestments, seated upon a throne and put on trial. Found guilty of all the offences with which it was charged, it was stripped of its vestments; the three fingers of the right hand with which papal benediction was customarily bestowed were torn off; and the remains were then thrown into the Tiber. Some months later the pope who had presided over this gruesome tribunal was thrown into prison and strangled. His successor was violently deposed, the next pope murdered, and by 904 when Pope Christopher was executed, having murdered his predecessor, Leo V, there had been eight popes in as many years. It had long since become customary for the servants of a dead or deposed pontiff to overrun his private apartments and the public rooms in the Lateran Palace, with as many of the populace as could gain admittance, and for them to carry off everything that came to hand, clothes and money, furniture and hangings, pictures, gold and silver. Yet the Lateran was soon filled with treasures once more, since popes who did not find means to enrich themselves were few. So were lesser prelates whose pleasure-bent lives were passed in what Gregorovius described as ‘sumptuous dwellings, resplendent in gold, purple and velvet’.

They dined like princes on vessels of gold. They sipped their wine out of costly goblets or drinking horns. Their basilicas were smothered in dust, but their commodious wine goblets were resplendent with decoration. As at the banquet of Trimalchio, their senses were gratified with the spectacle of beautiful dancing girls and the ‘symphonies’ of musicians. They slept on silken pillows and on beds artificially inlaid with gold, in the arms of their paramours, leaving their vassals, servants and slaves to look after the requirements of their court. They played at dice, hunted and shot with the bow. They left the altar, after celebrating Mass, with spurs at their ankles, daggers at their sides to mount their horses – furnished with gold bridles – and to fly their falcons. They travelled surrounded by swarms of parasites, and drove in luxurious carriages which no king would have scorned to possess.

The death of Pope John XIII in 972 and that of his protector, the Emperor Otto I, the next year did nothing to end the rivalry between the Roman nationalists and the imperialists. John XIII's successor, an imperial nominee, Benedict VI, was dragged into Castel Sant' Angelo and strangled in 974 in an insurrection led by the powerful Roman family, the Crescenzi, who installed Boniface VII, a Roman, in his place. The anti-Pope Boniface VII was then expelled from Rome by the Emperor's young heir, Otto II, and replaced by Benedict VII; and the Roman, led by the Crescenzi, were thereafter continually at odds with successive emperors. Otto II died in 983, and since his heir, Otto III, was a child of three whose throne was in danger of usurpation, Boniface VII thought it safe to return to Rome from Constantinople where he had fled with the papal treasury. In Rome he had Pope Benedict's successor, John XIV, arrested, imprisoned and killed, either by starvation or poisoning. Boniface himself was then murdered by the fickle mob and his corpse was thrown under the statue of Marcus Aurelius. Thus it went on. Boniface's successor, a Roman antagonistic to the Crescenzi, was followed by a pope of pure German descent, Gregory V, whom the Crescenzi and their adherents drove out of Rome, offering the papal tiara for a large sum of money to a rich Greek who accepted it and thus became the anti-Pope, John XVI. As soon as he heard of these insults to his imperial authority, Otto III, now seventeen, marched south upon Rome with a large army and discovered the anti-Pope hiding in the Campagna. He cut off his nose, tongue and ears, tore out his eyes, and dragged him back to Rome where he was thrown into the cell of a monastery to die. The Emperor then advanced towards Castel Sant' Angelo where the Romans were holding out, took it by assault on 29 April 998, and captured the head of the Crescenzi family whose eyes were snatched from his skull and whose limbs were mutilated before he was dragged through the streets on the skin of a cow, decapitated on the battlements and finally displayed on a gallows on the Monte Mario beside the corpses of twelve other leading Romans who had taken part in the revolt.

‘Woe to Rome!’ lamented a monkish chronicler at about this time. ‘Oppressed and downtrodden by so many nations! Thou art taken captive; thy people are ruled by the sword. Thy strength is become as naught… Thou wert too beautiful… Thy gold and thy silver are carried away in the sacks of thine enemies. What thou didst possess thou hast lost!’

Yet there were even worse times still to come. Power in Rome now passed from the Crescenzi to another influential family whose estates looked down upon Rome from the heights of Tusculum. In 1032, the Tuscolani, several members of whose family had already held the office, arranged for another of their kin, though a mere boy, to be elected Pope Benedict IX; and in his time the papacy reached the utmost depth of moral degradation. The young Pope lived like a Turkish sultan in the palace of the Lateran, while his brother ruled the city as ‘Senator of the Romans. Their family filled Rome with robbery and murder, according to Gregorovius whose lurid account does not seem to have been unduly exaggerated. ‘All lawful conditions had ceased… Only an uncertain glimmer, however, falls on these days when the Vicar of Christ was a pope… more criminal than Heliogabalus. We dimly see the leaders of Rome conspiring to strangle the youthful delinquent at the altar on the feast of the Apostles, until terror, produced perhaps by an eclipse of the sun, allowed Benedict time to escape.’

In 1044 a conspiracy to rid Rome of Benedict IX was more successful. But the anti-Pope who bribed his way to the succession, after savage fighting during an earthquake, was scarcely an improvement. Grossly sensual and corrupt, he was said to be closer to Satan than to Christ, to consort with devils in the woods, to attract women to his bed by spells, to conjure up demons with the help of books of magic which were afterwards found in the Lateran. He occupied the palace for less than two months. Driven out by the Tuscolani, he sought safety in the Sabine hills; and Benedict IX returned to the palace, only to sell his holy office to his godfather.

It seemed by now that the whole structure of the papacy was in danger of dissolution. But as at other times in its history when it seemed in the greatest peril, a man was found to save it. On this occasion its saviour was an obscure monk from the Cluniac monastery of St Mary on the Aventine hill.

Hildebrand, the son of a Tuscan labourer, had left his monastery to continue his education at the Schola Cantorum at the Lateran. Here his character earned him the high regard of one of the masters, the future Pope Gregory VI, who took him into his service. He later worked for Leo IX and Alexander II, two popes who in the middle part of the eleventh century concerned themselves with the reform of the medieval Church. The reform movement had begun in the monasteries of northern Italy and France from which attacks had been made on all manner of abuses in the Church from the sale of offices to the concubinage of the clergy. The reformers had then extended their programme to demand freedom from political and foreign interference and the right of the Church to be solely responsible for the election of popes and the investiture of bishops.

As papal adviser, Hildebrand was closely identified with the formulation of the Church's demands, and in 1073 he was elected by acclamation to succeed his former master, Alexander II, as Pope Gregory VII. Stern and autocratic, Gregory was determined to maintain the momentum of the reformist movement. Emphasizing the need for ecclesiastical and spiritual renewal, he made it clear that he would brook no opposition from either the Emperor or the aristocracy of Rome. He was soon in trouble with both. At Christmas 1075 he was reading midnight Mass in the crypt of S. Maria Maggiore when shouts and the clash of arms were heard outside and a party of men broke into the church brandishing arms. One of them seized the Pope by the hair and, dragging him wounded from the altar, threw him on to a horse and galloped off with him through the dark streets to a fortified tower belonging to a nobleman, Cencius de Praefecto. The city was soon in uproar. Alarm bells clanged, militia barred the gates, men paraded with torches throughout the rioni and priests veiled their altars. The next day, when it became known where the Pope was held, the tower of Cencius was stoned by the populace and the prisoner was released. He returned immediately to complete the interrupted Mass at S. Maria Maggiore.

Not in the least intimidated by this episode, Pope Gregory now repeated in even stronger terms his demands for a more powerful and autonomous Church, going so far as to claim that the Pope had not only the right to overrule Church councils and to dethrone bishops, but to depose emperors and to wear a red cloak as a sign of imperial rank as well as a high papal tiara as symbolic of his government of the world by ordinance of God. These assertions of the Church's authority naturally led to a fierce quarrel with the German Emperor, Henry IV, who, as self-styled ‘Emperor by the pious ordination of God’, took to addressing Gregory as ‘no longer Pope but false monk’. Gregory quickly responded by excommunicating Henry and declaring him deposed. The excommunication was so effective in depriving the Emperor of support north of the Alps that he felt obliged to come sough as a penitent, to beg for forgiveness and for reacceptance into the Church. On hearing of his approach, and not yet knowing its purpose, the Pope, who was on his way to Germany for a conference at Augsberg, withdrew to Canossa, the fortress home of his friend and supporter, the Countess of Tuscany. Outside the triple walls of the fortress the Emperor begged for forgiveness, clothed in a penitential shirt. For three cold January days the Pope kept him waiting. Then the gates of the castle were opened and the Emperor, after receiving absolution, was required to give up his crown into the Pope's hands, to agree that he would remain a private person until the decision of a council was made known and that, if he were to be restored to the throne, he would swear obedience to the Pope's will.

This humiliating submission was, however, not a lasting one. By virtue of his absolution, Henry regarded himself once more the rightful King of Germany with his authority undiminished. And so the quarrel flared up afresh. Henry, excommunicated and deposed for the second time, refused to accept the verdict; and, marching south, he laid siege to Rome. He persuaded his German bishops to depose Gregory in turn and to replace him by the Archbishop of Ravenna who took the title of Clement III. Set upon resistance, Gregory appealed for help to Robert Guiscard, the Norman Duke of Apulia and Calabria, and prepared for war.

Rome paid a dreadful price. In June 1083 Henry's troops broke through the Leonine Wall and, after fierce fighting, took possession of St Peter's. Gregory occupied Castel Sant' Angelo and from this commanding stronghold succeeded in preventing the Germans from crossing the Tiber into the city. But over the next few months the Pope lost the support of most of the Roman people who, tired of war and unwilling to have their homes destroyed in a fight between the opposing factions, agreed to open the gates. On 21 March 1084, therefore, several regiments of German soldiers marched through the gate of St John, and surrounded the Lateran Palace, where Henry took up residence with his anti-Pope, Clement III, who later crowned him in St Peter's. Gregory, still holding out in Castel Sant' Angelo, refused to submit. And a large proportion of the noble families of Rome and their vassals, including the Corsi and the Pierleoni, continued to support him against the foreign interloper. So, too, did the Normans under Robert Guiscard.

When the mansions of the Corsi and Pierleoni had been stormed and reduced to ruins, and when Septimius Severus's colonnaded Septizonium¹⁰ on the Palatine, which Gregory's nephew, Rusticus, bravely defended, had also been shattered by the German siege machines, the Normans, accompanied by thousands of Saracens from Sicily and gangs of rapacious Calabrian peasants, advanced to Gregory's relief in Castel Sant' Angelo. At news of their approach the Emperor hastily decamped along the Via Flaminia with his outnumbered forces, taking his anti-Pope with him. A week later, the vanguard of Robert Guiscard's forces entered the Flaminian gate and advanced across the Campo Marzio towards Castel Sant' Angelo, brushing aside the resistance of those Romans who still supported the Emperor. Having released the Pope, whom they escorted to the Lateran, they then inaugurated a pillage of the city which was to last for several days.

The Romans, sinking their differences, made repeated attacks upon the common enemy, but their leaders were cut down mercilessly. Those who sought safety in flight were captured and held to ransom, their houses looted and then set on fire. Medieval chroniclers depict a fearful scene of sack and rape, of robbery and murder, of huge areas of the city laid to waste or destroyed by fire. And while due allowance must be made for the woeful exaggeration of such disasters by imaginative monks, the reality was appalling enough. Men, women and children were carried off into captivity and slavery with ropes round their necks; many churches were wrecked and some, like those of the Quattro Coronati, S. Clemente, S. Silvestro and S. Lorenzo in Lucina, were burned to the ground. Whole districts in the most densely populated parts of the city were reduced to rubble, numerous monuments were damaged beyond repair, and if little was plundered this was because previous pillagers had left little which was considered worth the trouble of carrying off.

Pope Gregory, now hated by the Romans who blamed him for the catastrophe, went wearily away with his deliverers. Although he retained his breadth of vision, he never recovered from his ordeal and within a few months, on 25 March 1085, he died at Salerno.

For the whole of the next century, Rome remained intermittently a battleground over which popes fought anti-popes, supporters of the papacy attacked adherents of the Emperor, while both sides hired mercenaries and bribed their rivals' retainers and vassals. Popes were kidnapped, denied admission to the city, like Urban II, driven out of it, as Paschal II was by the Emperor Henry IV, forced to flee from it for their lives, like Gelasius II. And all the time the arguments about the relationship between the temporal and the spiritual power raged unabated, from time to time changing emphasis, once seeming to be partially resolved by the agreement known as the Concordat of Worms, by which Pope Calixtus II and the Emperor Henry V came to an uneasy compromise over the investiture of bishops and abbots, only to flare up again, intensified and complicated by the eternal concept of Rome as ‘queen of all other cities’ and ‘head of the world’, and by the refusal of the Roman people to accept either Pope or Emperor as master of their affairs.

The Romans had been dominated for a long time by the mighty families whose castellated and battlemented mansions, many of them built into and over the city's ancient monuments, towered above the roofs of every rione: the Corsi, the Crescenzi and the Pierleoni, the Tuscolani and the Frangipani, the Colonna, the Normanni and the Papareschi, the Tebaldi, the Savelli, the Caetani, the Annibaldi and the Orsini. All of them were rich; many of them claimed descent from the great families of imperial Rome; and several had recently provided or were soon to provide candidates for the papacy. Innocent II, for example, was a Papareschi, Anaclete II a Pierleoni, Clement III an Orsini. Yet these families no longer indisputably controlled the rioni. For in Roman society a new force was developing, composed of craftsmen and skilled artisans, now organized into guilds, of entrepreneurs, financiers and traders, of lawyers, lesser clergy and officials employed in the administration of the Church. And it was largely due to the growing influence of such groups as these that in 1143, during the pontificate of the Papareschi Pope, Innocent II, the Roman people rose in revolt, demanding the banishment of all nobles from the city, looting their palaces as well as those of the cardinals, and proclaiming the establishment of a Republic, the restoration of the Senate and the appointment of a head of government known as the Patricius. Encouraged by the revolutionary fervour of Arnaldo da Brescia, the austere radical religious reformer who came to Rome soon afterwards, the Senate pursued their demands for the Pope's abdication to the Patricius of his temporal power and for his income to be limited to those tithes and gifts which had satisfied the priests of Rome in the distant past.

At the height of the dispute between the Senate and the papacy, Innocent II died. His successor, Celestine II, unable to come to terms with the Republicans, also died within five months. Lucius II, equally unsuccessful, resolved to suppress them by force, launched an attack upon their stronghold on the Capitol, was apparently wounded in this assault by a rock that struck him on the head, and died as his predecessors had done with the argument unresolved. It was now left to Eugenius III, the first Cistercian pope, to attempt to settle the crisis. Denounced by Arnaldo da Brescia as ‘a man of blood’ whose Curia was ‘a den of thieves’, and barred from entering St Peter's for his consecration by lines of unyielding Republican Senators, Eugenius was driven out of Rome in February 1145 when he declined to renounce the civil power of the papacy. He fled to Viterbo where he set about collecting troops for the suppression of the Republic. But both sides, exhausted by the struggle, were now prepared to compromise; the Republicans agreed to dismiss the Patricius, while the Pope undertook to recognize the Republic.

It was an unsatisfactory compromise which could not last. And the arguments, occasionally breaking into violence, continued for a further forty years, during which time both parties invoked the help of the Germans; and the Emperor, having decided to support the Pope, immediately afterwards resumed the old disputes, while joining with him in denying the demands of the Roman citizens. At last, in 1188 a final solution was achieved by Pope Clement III, who had been born in Rome. He agreed to recognize the city as a commune with rights to declare war and make peace, to appoint Senators and a Prefect. He also undertook to make over a proportion of the papal income for the maintenance of the city walls and the payment of officials. In exchange, the Senators, among whom members of great families rubbed shoulders with those less nobly born, swore loyalty to the Pope, recognized his temporal powers and restored to him the property of the Church which had been seized in the troubles. Thereafter, while the aspirations of the citizens had been largely satisfied, the popes gradually regained and extended the influence which they had enjoyed in the days of Gregory the Great. Under Innocent III and his successor, Honorius III, from 1198 to 1227, the medieval papacy, having for the time being thrown off the claims of the German Empire and become master of its own affairs, was the ultimate spiritual authority in Europe and a force which had to be respected in the continent's political and international affairs. In spite of recurrent moral weakness and almost constant lack of physical force, it was now a dominant force in western Europe.

With stability restored to the city, the popes turned their attention to its material improvement. Church building had not been entirely suspended in the previous troubled century. In its first decades the grandly ornate new churches of Quattro Coronati, S. Clemente,¹¹ S. Maria in Trastevere,¹² S. Bartolomeo in Isola¹³ and S. Crisogno¹⁴ had all been completed, and others had been rebuilt, several of them with tall campanili as at S. Maria in Cosmedin. Later, S. Giovanni a Porta Latina¹⁵ and SS. Bonifacio e Alessio¹⁶ had been consecrated; and at the end of the century a large new basilica had been started at S. Lorenzo fuori le Mura. Innocent III, however, was less concerned with ecclesiastical than with secular buildings. He renovated the Lateran Palace; he began the construction of a large fortified mansion for the papacy on the site of the present Vatican;¹⁷ he and his brother, Riccardo, built an immense tower, the Tor de' Conti near the Forum of Nerva, as a fortification for this part of the city,¹⁸ and, as though in extenuation of such a display of pride and extravagance, he commissioned and endowed S. Spirito in Sassia as a hospital and hostel for poor pilgrims across the river in the Borgo between St Peter's and Castel Sant' Angelo.¹⁹

This part of Rome within the Leonine Wall had by now become as crowded with buildings as the rioni on the other bank of the Tiber and contained a large proportion of the city's 35,000 or so inhabitants. Around St Peter's, the magnet of Christianity, were huddled monasteries and lodging-houses, small churches and oratories, the houses of clergy, taverns and hermits' cells, a foundlings' home, an orphanage and a poor-house, a home for penitent prostitutes and all kinds of shops that made the civitas Leonina a city in its own right, a community at once part of and separate from Rome, regina urbium. Money changers thronged beneath the walls of the basilica, calling the rates of exchange and ringing coins on the tops of their tables. Standing before their booths or crying their wares in the streets were vendors of candles, of souvenirs and bits of relics, of rosaries and icons, of phials of oil and holy water, of strips of linen that had touched the tomb of St Laurence and of dried flowers that had grown near the grave of St Sebastian. Men sold straw for bedding; cobblers repaired the soles of shoes worn into holes by long pilgrimages; fishmongers and fruiterers shouted above the din of the crowds; and booksellers, renting space from the canons, offered their goods for sale within the walls of the basilica where mendicants and would-be guides wandered about in search of the charitable, the curious and the gullible.

Below them the Tiber wound its way beneath the Ponte Sant’ Angelo, its banks littered with nets and pots and fishing-baskets, ancient grain mills floating on the surface, water-carriers lowering their buckets at the river's edge. Beyond the river bank, through the gloomy tortuous streets, past the outside staircases of the cramped houses, beneath overhanging balconies and brick arches just high enough to admit the passage of a woman with a bundle on her head, the Romans strolled and pushed and jostled, avoiding as best they could the beasts of burden and the laden porters, stepping over the rubbish and ordure flung upon the earth and the cobblestones, and jumping across the streams of blood and filthy water from the butchers’ and tanners' shops which flowed unchecked despite the authorities’ ordinances. The houses on either side were constructed of brick and other materials usually plundered from ancient ruins, their roofs sometimes tiled or shingled, more often thatched. Their occupants spent much of the day in the streets, sitting in front of the doors or on the lower steps of the exterior staircases, working at some craft, cooking, washing clothes or talking to each other as though oblivious of the busy yet familiar scene. High above their heads loomed the numerous campanili and the burnt-brick fortified towers of the mansions of the rich which could be seen rising as though in threatening menace in every rione and clustering together closely on the higher ground of the Esquiline, Caelian and Aventine hills. Near at hand were the markets – the meat market at the Theatre of Marcellus, the fish market at S. Angelo in Pescheria,²⁰ and the market on the Capitol. And beyond them to the east and north and south, stretched the disabitato, that expanse of open land, of fields and vineyards, farms and ruins, scrub and pasture between the built-up areas and the Aurelian Walls. On the inner edge of it, the houses were more spacious, with gardens in which fig trees and vines cast a welcome shade, seeming a world away from the dark, cramped dwellings of the teeming, dirty Trastevere; and in the distance to the west, near the place where the Porta S. Giovanni now stands, were the groups of buildings lying in the shadow of the renovated Laterann.

Many of the monuments of imperial Rome lay crumbling and apparently disregarded, a tempting invitation to foreign princes, bishops and other rich visitors who went about the city, collecting interesting pieces, as the half-brother of King Henry IV of England did in 1430 when he visited Rome as Bishop of Winchester. Other ancient monuments had, however, been preserved by their being made over to churches or private individuals by the popes. In this way, the Triumphal Arch of Septimius Severus, for example, was saved by its being allocated to two proprietors, one of them the Church of SS. Sergio e Bacco, whose priests built beside and over it.²¹ Both the Arch of Titus and the Arch of Constantine had been appropriated by the Frangipani family who, confirmed in possession of them, assured them a kind of rough protection by turning them into fortresses. This family also built a series of bristling towers around the Circus Maximus.

Yet, despite the casual manner in which the inhabitants treated a large part of their heritage, no visitor to Rome could be unaware of the influence which the ancient city had had upon the medieval, nor, despite depredation and neglect, how much of imperial Rome remained. A celebrated guidebook, the Mirabilia, written in these years by a canon of St Peter's, draws the stranger's attention not only to the Christian treasures of the city but also, with a sense of awe and wonder, to its pagan antiquities. A number of these were displayed outside the Lateran Palace where, beside groups of now unidentifiable classical bronzes, could be seen the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius; the head and hand of the colossal image of Constantine placed upon high columns,²² a bronze tablet upon which was incribed part of a decree by which the Roman people transferred Augustus's imperial authority to Vespasian;²³ the bronze sculpture of a boy picking a thorn from his foot;²⁴ and the lupa, the she-wolf, symbol of early Rome, which had been struck by lightning in 65 B.C. when it stood on the Capitol.²⁵ Moreover, while most ancient monuments had been pilfered for building materials, and while parts of others, including even statues, had been thrown into the lime kilns, many antiquities had been saved by the Church or the Senate from further damage or appropriation. Trajan's Column, for example, had been preserved by the Senate who decreed that it should ‘never be mutilated or destroyed, but should remain as it stands to the honour of the Roman people, as long as the world endures. Anyone daring to injure it shall be punished by death and his property shall fall to the Treasury.’ Similarly, the monks of S. Silvestro in Capite,²⁶ who had acquired the Column of Marcus Aurelius, declared that ‘anyone taking the column by force from our convent shall be eternally damned as a spoiler of the Temple, and shall be encompassed by the everlasting anathema. So be it.’

Other monuments, dilapidated and collapsed, had been repaired and re-erected, like the obelisk which is now at the Villa Mattei on the Caelian.²⁷ This was restored and placed on the Capitol near the Palazzo del Senatore²⁸ which itself, like the earlier Casa di Crescenzio,²⁹ was a medieval structure reflecting a deep reverence for classical antiquity. And those responsible for these repairs were proud to inscribe their names, in the manner of their ancient forebears, upon the works for which they had been responsible: on walls and bridges can still be read such inscriptions as that of 1191–3 on the Pons Cestius, ‘Benedictus [Benedict Carushomo], Chief Senator of the Illustrious City, restored this almost entirely ruined bridge.’

When Honorius III died in 1227 to be succeeded by Francis of Assisi's friend, Gregory IX, the quarrel with the German Emperor, now Frederick II, over papal authority broke out afresh and was still unresolved on the death of the Emperor in 1250. At the same time, the city of Rome became more aggressive in its demands, particularly its financial demands, upon the papacy. These were most forcefully and successfully expressed after the appointment of the Bolognese Brancaleone di Andalò as a professional and highly paid Senator in 1252. Brancaleone, a tough and resolute personality, as well as subduing the power of the papacy in the city, also succeeded in keeping the meddlesome Roman families in order, demolishing no fewer than 140 of their fortified towers and hanging two pugnacious Annibaldi. But after the death of Brancaleone, whose head was placed in an antique vase and displayed as a valuable relic on a marble pillar on the Capitol until removed by the Church, Rome once again became an intermittent battleground with the Pope's supporters fighting his rivals in the streets, and the controversy over papal supremacy raging more fiercely than ever. And it was not until Charles of Anjou, a grim younger brother of the King of France and since 1283 himself King of Naples and Sicily, came to the protection of the Pope that some sort of order was restored. For the papacy, however, and ultimately for Rome, order was bought at a high price. Once the authority of the French king was established in Rome, Charles, who had had himself appointed Senator, tried to ensure that the popes thereafter elected were either sympathetic to France or, like Innocent V, were actually French. But the consequences of this foreign dominance did not at first become apparent. In 1277 an Italian of noble birth, Giovanni Gaetano Orsini, was elected; and although he was followed by a Frenchman, his subsequent successors, up till Boniface VIII, were all Italian: Honorius IV was a Savelli, Nicholas IV a Masci of Ascoli and Boniface VIII a Caetani of Anagni.

Under these Italian popes the Church increased its wealth, as legal fees and bribes, payments for benefices and offices, tithes and donations poured into Rome, and as pilgrims showered handfuls of money upon the holy shrines. Bankers, innkeepers and traders prospered too, particularly in 1300, which Boniface VIII proclaimed the first Holy Year.

The profits made by the people of Rome that year were incalculable. One visitor ‘saw so large a party of pilgrims depart on Christmas Eve that no one could count the numbers. The Romans reckon,’ he continued, ‘that altogether they have had two millions of men and women. I frequently saw both sexes trodden underfoot, and it was sometimes with difficulty that I escaped the same danger myself.’ Day and night the streets were packed with people, lining up to pass through the churches; to see the shrines and the most famous relics; to gaze with reverence upon the handkerchief with which St Veronica wiped the sweat from Christ's face on his way to Calvary and which still bore the image of his features; to throw coins upon the altar of S. Paolo fuori le Mura, where two priests remained constantly on duty with rakes in hand to gather up the scattered offerings; to buy the relics, amulets, mementoes and pictures of saints whose sale brought such profits to the street-vendors of Rome.

Also prospering in these last decades of the thirteenth century were the artists and craftsmen at work in the city, helping to fulfil the ambitions of the popes and their families who hoped to make Rome worthy of her past, a place which would rival and even surpass in beauty Florence and the other cities of Tuscany, while remaining within a conservative tradition that looked warily upon the Gothic innovations in architecture spreading south from beyond the Alps. Numerous churches were completely redecorated at this time. St Peter's, S. Paolo fuori le Mura and S. Maria Maggiore were remodelled and the Lateran Palace and Basilica reconstructed. Splendid tombs and sepulchral monuments were created. Painters, sculptors, jewellers, goldsmiths and workers in mosaics and marble were all kept busy, as clergy and laity alike displayed their taste in extravagant and ostentatious rivalry. Cimabue and Arnolfo di Cambio came down from Florence. Giotto was sent for to work at St Peter's and at the opulent new palace at the Vatican which took the place of the more modest residence built by Innocent III. Artists born or long resident in Rome were fully employed as well. Pietro Cavallini worked at the Lateran and St Peter's, at S. Paolo fuori le Mura, S. Cecilia, S. Giorgio in Velabro and S. Maria in Trastevere. Jacopo Torriti was employed on the mosaics at the Lateran Basilica and at S. Maria Maggiore where he was helped by Filippo Rusuti.

But soon this brief flurry of artistic activity came to an abrupt halt, for the supposed financial and political security of Rome proved to be illusory. Charles of Anjou was dead and the Angevin influence in Rome eliminated. Yet France was still unwilling to accept the claims made for the papacy by Boniface VIII who, repeating those of Innocent III, declared in his bull Unam Sanctam that ‘if the earthly power err it shall be judged by the spiritual power’. Dispensing excommunication after excommunication to gain obedience to his demands, Boniface enraged the monarchs of the West, and in particular King Philip IV of France. He was about to excommunicate Philip when the French legate in Italy, abetted by the Colonna family whose estates the Pope had appropriated, invaded the papal palace at Anagni and carried him off into captivity. Humiliated and ill treated, Boniface was allowed to return to Rome where he died soon afterwards. He was briefly succeeded by the inadequate Italian, Benedict XI, but in 1305, through the manipulation of the French king, the Frenchman Bertrand de Got became Pope as Clement V and secured a succession of subsequent French popes by creating a majority of French cardinals. Required by his master, Philip, to annul Boniface's bull Unam Sanctam, Clement abandoned Rome in 1308 and moved the papal residence to Avignon. For sixty-eight years French popes were to conduct the affairs of the Church from their new centre in the south of France, in what became known as the Babylonian Captivity; and Rome, abandoned also by the artists whose patrons had deserted them, sank once more into anarchy.

SIX SAINTS, TYRANTS AND ANTI-POPES

‘My longing to see Rome, even now when the city is deserted and a mere shadow of its former self, is scarcely to be believed,’ Francesco Petrarch wrote to a friend a few days before Christmas 1334. ‘Seneca rejoiced in his fortune at having seen it. And if a Spaniard was capable of these feelings, what do you think I, an Italian, feel? Rome has never had, and never will have an equal.’

Petrarch was then living at Avignon in the household of Cardinal Giovanni Colonna. His father, a Florentine lawyer, had gone to Avignon with the intention of obtaining employment at the papal court and had sent his son to study at the nearby town of Montpellier in the hope that he would follow in the family profession. But Petrarch had little interest in law, and as soon as his father died he gave up his studies to satisfy what he described as ‘an unquenchable thirst for literature’. Passionately devoted as he was to the classical Latin poets, his longing to see Rome intensified with the passing years, and in 1337, when he was thirty-three and already a distinguished poet, his ambition was satisfied at last.

Rome was by then, as Petrarch had envisaged, a sad shadow of the city of the Caesars, withered and decayed, ‘a rubbish heap of history’. Within weeks of the Curia's departure for Avignon, the Lateran basilica had been destroyed in a raging fire, and ever since then, while rebuilding desultorily continued, the city had been torn by violence. Rome's patrician families, bereft of any master, fought each other in the streets. The Colonna waged war on the Orsini; the Conti and the Savelli, the Frangipani and the Annibaldi joined one side then the other; retainers and mercenaries camped amidst dusty ruins and in the deserted houses of cardinals; and priests, many of them related to the belligerent factions, joined in the quarrels and paraded through the streets with daggers and swords. Lawlessness was unbounded. Houses were invaded and looted by armed bands; pilgrims and travellers were robbed; nuns were violated in their convents. Long lines of flagellants filed through the gates, barefoot, their heads covered in cowls, claiming board and lodging but offering no money, scourging their naked backs, chanting frightening hymns outside churches, throwing themselves weeping, moaning, bleeding before the altars.

Petrarch had been warned what to expect. His patron, Cardinal Colonna, had urged him to go to Rome if only to have a romantic illusion dispelled by dismal reality. Yet, walking through the ruins in the company of various members of the Colonna family who described the city as it had been in the days of their forefathers, Petrarch was profoundly and lastingly impressed. He lamented the decay; he was distressed by the lack of knowledge and even of interest that most Romans had in their heroic past. But he told Cardinal Colonna that he found the city, despite its present neglect, even more beautiful than he had anticipated. He begged the Pope, Benedict XII, to return from Avignon and to help Rome to be recognized once more as the caput mundi. He resolved to write an epic poem in the manner of Virgil, extolling one of ancient Rome's most renowned heroes, Scipio Africanus. And he conceived an ambition to be crowned as poet on the Capitol in a ceremony reminiscent of those performed, in the manner of the ancient Greeks, in the time of the emperors.

Three years later, in September 1340, he received the hoped-for invitation to be granted the laurel crown both from the Chancellor of the University of Paris and from the Roman Senate. He did not hesitate in his choice for long. Paris had become Europe's seat of learning; but Rome, though now abandoned, had been the centre of a high culture and a remarkable civilization when the French capital had been a rough riverside settlement. Petrarch went to Rome and on 8 April 1341, in the great hall of the Palace of the Senate on the Capitol, he was summoned by a herald to appear before the people. He delivered an address in Latin, knelt to have the wreath of laurel placed upon his head, then advanced in procession to St Peter's where he laid the crown upon the tomb of the Apostle. Soon afterwards he left Rome but, as though to remind him that even poets laureate are not immune from the trials of ordinary men, he was robbed on the way and obliged to return to the city for an armed escort.

Among those who acclaimed Petrarch that day upon the Capitol was a good-looking young notary, Cola (Niccoló) di Rienzo, as ardent a votary of ancient Rome as Petrarch himself, an enthusiast who was later to boast that he was the natural son of the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry VII, but who was in fact the child of an obscure tavern keeper and a washerwoman. Eloquent, vehement and emotional, Cola was well known in the city as an excitable connoisseur of ancient monuments and inscriptions over which he would declaim with much enthusiasm and some learning. He was a demagogic champion of the people's rights and a vociferous critic of the patrician families in one of whose violent squabbles his brother had been murdered. When, therefore, in 1343 a delegation left Rome for Avignon to request the recently elected Pope, Clement VI, to return and exercise his authority in the unruly city, it was inevitable that Cola, although not yet thirty, should accompany it. Indeed, in Avignon he emerged as the emissaries' leader, impressing the Pope with his vivid and moving account of the plight of Rome and of its people whose lives the aristocrats were making so miserable. Clement declared that he would at least visit Rome as soon as he could, and issued a bull providing for another Holy Year in 1350 and thereafter every half century. Taking personal credit for what he represented as the complete success of the mission, Cola reported

his triumph to the Romans in a letter in which folie de grandeur, later to be a pronounced characteristic of his unbalanced nature, was already evident.

On his return to Rome, where he proposed that a splendid statue of the Pope should be erected in the Colosseum or on the Capitol, Cola enhanced his reputation as a champion of the people and began to see himself in the role of their deliverer from the thrall of the nobles, and as the instigator of a revolution that would restore to them the glory and the grandeur of the days of ancient Rome. The nobility treated him as a joke rather than a threat, inviting him to dinner and laughing at his grandiloquent talk and his prophesies of nemesis. But when he spoke in public, as he did one day in the Lateran basilica, wearing a kind of toga and a white hat decorated with strange symbols of gold crowns and swords, the populace listened and wondered.

Allegorical scenes depicting shipwrecks, fires and like catastrophes now appeared on the walls of the city. Notices were posted on the doors of churches with such announcements as that which appeared on S. Giorgio in Velabro: ‘In a short time the Romans will return to their good ancient government.’ Support for Cola among the people and in the guilds grew day by day: it was felt that with the help of his ally, the Pope, he might well destroy the arrogant power of the nobles who were still the unscrupulous masters of the Senate. And in May 1347 Cola was ready to strike.

On the morning of Whit Sunday he left the church of S. Angelo in Pescheria after Mass and, surrounded by his adherents and accompanied by the evidently nervous papal vicar, he marched towards the Capitol to summon a parliament. His head was bare but he was otherwise in full armour. Armed guards had been placed at intervals along the route. The ringing of church bells and the fluttering of banners above the heads of the marchers gave the procession a celebratory rather than a conspiratorial air. At the Capitol, Cola made an inspiring speech, assuring the thousands of people who had gathered there that he was prepared to die out of love for the Pope and for the salvation of the people. A lieutenant then read out a programme of revolutionary reform directed against the nobles. All the edicts were accepted by acclaim; and the powers of a dictator were conferred upon Cola who announced that he would exercise them in conjunction with the Pope's representative. He later bestowed upon himself the title of ‘Niccolò, by the authority of our most merciful Lord Jesus Christ, the Severe and Clement, the Tribune of Freedom, of Peace and Justice, and the Illustrious Redeemer of the Holy Roman Republic’.

The sudden and unexpected success of the self-styled Tribune threw the nobles into confusion. At first they condemned the illegal usurpation of authority, Stefano Colonna, commander of the militia, going so far as to declare that he would ‘throw the young fool from the windows of the Capitol’. But they did not maintain that attitude for long. A mob appeared in arms before the Colonna palace; its master fled to Palestrina; all other nobles were confined to their estates or fortresses, and then summoned to do homage at the Capitol. Intimidated, they obeyed. The Colonna and Orsini, the Savelli, Annibaldi and Conti joined with the College of Judges, the notaries and guilds of Rome in swearing loyalty to the new Republic and to its ‘Illustrious Redeemer’.

Having enlisted a large military escort of both cavalry and infantry and appointed a personal bodyguard, Cola and his colleagues issued a series of decrees on all kinds of political, judicial and financial matters. Exiles were recalled to Rome; the poor received generous assistance; nobles were ordered to remove the fortifications from their palaces and to take down the coats of arms from their walls. Opponents of the regime were severely punished alongside malefactors, adulterers and gamblers. Corrupt judges were exposed in the pillory with their crimes inscribed on mitres placed upon their heads; a criminal monk was beheaded; so was a recalcitrant noble of the house of Annibaldi. A former Senator, Jacopo Stefaneschi, found guilty of expropriation, was hanged on the Capitol.

Cola was not content, however, with the restoration of a stern though just Republic in Rome. His hazy vision extended to an Italian confederation with Rome as its capital, a national brotherhood of the whole of ‘Sacred Italy’ which would bring peace and order to the entire world. He sent out envoys with silver wands to all the principal cities and rulers in the peninsula, inviting them to send representatives to a national parliament in Rome. And so strong was the hope for a transformation in the melancholy state of spiritual and political affairs in Italy, so powerful the influence which the very name of Rome still inspired, that Cola's pretensions were taken seriously and in many cases with enthusiasm. Respectful replies were received from Milan and Venice, from Florence and Siena, from Genoa, Lucca, Spoleto and Assisi. Twenty-five cities agreed to send delegations to the parliament in Rome. The Pope sent a silver casket engraved with his own arms as well as with those of Rome and of Rome's new Tribune. From Avignon also came warm encouragement from Petrarch: ‘Prudence and courage be with you… Everyone must wish Rome good fortune. So just a cause is sure of the approval of God and of the world.’

Cola himself was convinced that he was under the personal protection of the Holy Spirit. His behaviour became increasingly flamboyant. He rode about the city clothed in gold-trimmed silk on a white horse, a banner bearing his assumed coat of arms flying over his head. On the festival of Saints Peter and Paul he rode to St Peter's on a charger, clad for this occasion in green and yellow velvet, carrying a steel sceptre in his hand. Fifty men with spears guarded him. The sword of Justice was borne before him. Blaring trumpets and ringing cymbals announced his approach, while an attendant scattered among the people pieces of gold and coins engraved for the Tribune by Florentine masters. On the steps of St Peter's the clergy greeted him with a rendering of Veni Creator Spiritus.

The festival of 1 August, the day chosen for the opening of the national parliament and the celebration of the unity of Italy, was marked by the most extravagant ceremonies. Customarily upon this day the chains of St Peter were displayed to the faithful; but before this solemnity was observed, Cola di Rienzo had himself created a knight in the Lateran, appearing in front of the assembled congregation cleansed by immersion in the ancient green basalt basin in the Baptistery where the Emperor Constantine was said to have washed away his paganism. The next day, now clothed in scarlet, Cola presented himself to the people as ‘Candidate of the Holy Spirit, the Knight Nicholas, the Severe and Clement, the Zealot for Italy, the Friend of the World, the Tribune Augustus'. He announced by decree that the Roman people now held jurisdiction over all other peoples as they had done in the ancient past; that Rome, the foundation of Christendom, was once more the head of the world; that all the cities of Italy were free cities with the rights of Roman citizenship, and that, since he and the Pope were now arbiters of the world, the rival claimants to the Holy Roman Empire must appear before him and a papal representative to have their fates decided. Raising his sword in the air and pointing it dramatically in three directions, he then called out, ‘This is mine!’ Although not clear as to the exact purport of these words, the populace cheered loudly as a flourish of trumpets brought the proceedings to a close.

Enthusiasm for the Tribune's policies was, however, already waning fast. The Pope, disconcerted by Cola's grandiose claims, expressed regret at his earlier support. The cities of Italy, fearing the loss of their independence, began to reconsider their endorsement of a national brotherhood under so flamboyant and perhaps deranged a leader. Men who had worked with him and had at first been fascinated by his Messianic pronouncements doubted his ability to put his visionary theories into practice. The Roman people regarded their former hero with growing uneasiness, as he had himself crowned with wreaths of plants from the Arch of Constantine and, on the day of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, compared himself to the Virgin's son. A monk, who had been among his most fervent admirers and who now broke down and wept, expressed the general disappointment and disillusionment.

Encouraged by the Pope who dispatched a legate to Rome to take proceedings against Cola, the Roman nobles now prepared for revenge. Cola struck first by inviting several of the Colonna and Orsini to a grand banquet on the Capitol, and then arresting them after one of the guests, Stefano Colonna, had made a sardonic reference to the gorgeous attire of their host. But Cola shrank from further punishment. While the populace waited for news of their execution, and the bells in the campanili above the prison walls tolled in mournful expectation of their death, Cola pardoned them on condition that they swear loyalty to the laws of the Republic.

On their release the nobles immediately broke their oath and within a month they and the troops they had raised were rampaging throughout the countryside beyond the walls of the city. Inside Rome, the Pope's legate had arrived at the Vatican Palace where he summoned Cola to appear before him. The Pope's anger with the presumptuous Tribune had been inflamed by Cola's recent announcement that the whole of ‘Sacred Italy’ must reconstitute itself as a new Roman Empire and by his evident ambition to become Emperor himself. Neither the French Pope nor the French cardinals had any wish to see the restoration of the Roman Empire which would threaten the independence of the papacy and might well entail the return of the Curia to Rome from Avignon. The papal legate was consequently enjoined to be uncompromising with Cola.

But Cola was not to be intimidated. He arrived at the Vatican wearing chain-armour and a silver crown. In his hand he carried a sceptre and, to the astonishment of the legate, over his mail he had put on a pearl-embroidered dalmatic such as Emperors wore at their coronation.

‘You have sent for me,’ he is reported to have announced with haughty curtness. ‘What do you want?’

‘I have a message from our Lord, the Pope.’

‘What message?’

The impatient arrogance of Cola's demeanour so flustered the legate that he apparently lost the power of speech, and stood dumbfounded in the hall. So the Tribune ‘contemptuously turned his back and left the palace with a curious smile’. At the foot of the steps he mounted his horse and galloped off to fight the aristocrats.

On the cold morning of 20 November 1347, in torrential rain, the opposing forces advanced upon each other outside the gate of San Lorenzo. Cola's troops, mostly infantry still staunchly loyal to his Republic, were commanded by scions of noble houses who had quarrelled with their families. The aristocrats' army of some four thousand infantry and six hundred horsemen was led by old Stefano Colonna, his sons and grandsons and various members of the Orsini, Caetani and Frangipani families in unaccustomed alliance. The clash was short and vicious. At first it seemed that the aristocrats would triumph as they rushed upon Cola's men, incensed by the deaths of the 20-year-old Giovanni Colonna, whose horse fell into a pit, and of his father who was thrown from his saddle. Cola himself, shivering with fear at the onslaught and at the sight of his banner sinking into the mud, cried out in terror, ‘O God! Hast Thou deserted me?’ But his men soon rallied, and before long the nobles' forces were in headlong flight. They left behind them no less than eighty once-feared and respected aristocrats whose bodies, stripped naked, lay on the field until the afternoon, to be insulted by the Roman mob.

Cola, his confidence restored, an olive wreath on his head, led his troops in triumph to the Capitol where, with a theatrical gesture, he wiped his clean and naked sword upon his surcoat before returning it to its sheath and addressing his victorious soldiers. The next day he went out with his young son beyond the gate of San Lorenzo and there, with bloody water from the pool where Giovanni Colonna had fallen, he christened him ‘Knight Lorenzo of the Victory’, obliging his cavalry leaders to dub the boy with their swords.

This heartless act and his craven behaviour on the field of battle lost Cola much of his remaining support. It was said that his character had entirely changed, that he lived in his palace in the greatest luxury, surrounded by wastrels who fawned upon him, flattering his insane vanity, and that he was spending money like water. Certainly he raised taxes to an almost unprecedented height to pay his troops. Yet even this might have been forgiven him for the sake of his past, had not the Pope issued a bull against the Roman people, detailing numerous charges against Cola as a criminal and a heretic, and instructing them to depose him. With the Holy Year so close they dared not offend the Pope and risk losing the profits the pilgrims would bring. And so, bereft of popular support, plagued by terrifying dreams, by fainting fits and giddiness, Cola decided to abdicate. On 15 December 1347 he came down from the Capitol in tears. Some of the people who watched him depart cried too; but no one came forward to prevent his leaving or even to wish him well. Soon afterwards the papal legate made his formal entry into the city, took possession of it in the name of the Church, and announced that the Jubilee of 1350 would take place as planned.

For weeks before this Holy Year began, the roads leading into Rome had been crowded with pilgrims who camped on the verges, importuned by those hundreds of pedlars and tricksters, mendicants and guides, pickpockets, acrobats and musicians who always materialized in Rome when strangers with money appeared. According to Pope Clement VI's biographer, as many as five thousand people entered the city every single day and were lodged and fed there, complaining of the cupidity of the Romans but finding plenty to eat, at a price. The Pope himself remained at Avignon; so whereas the pilgrims of 1300, including the Florentine chronicler, Giovanni Villani and, perhaps, Dante, had been able to receive the papal blessing from Boniface VIII standing in the loggia of the Lateran, those of 1350 had no such gratification. Nor were they able to admire the Lateran itself which was again collapsing in ruins. Indeed, most of the great Christian as well as the imperial monuments of Rome were now in a deplorable condition, neglected, scarred by war, or shattered by earthquake. The Black Death which had ravaged western Europe two years before, and had killed well over half of the inhabitants of Florence, had not taken so dreadful a toll in Rome as in other large cities in Italy, a mercy commemorated by the marble steps leading to the church of S. Maria d'Aracoeli.¹ But the earthquakes of 9 and 10 September 1348 had rocked the city. St Paul's had tumbled in ruins, as had the basilica of the SS. Apostoli.² Several towers had collapsed; the gable of the Lateran had crashed to the ground; blocks of masonry had fallen into the arena from the upper floors of the Colosseum. And little of this damage had been repaired. ‘The houses are overthrown,’ wrote Petrarch, appalled by the state of the city. ‘The walls tumble to the ground, the temples fall, the sanctuaries perish… The Lateran lies on the ground, and the Mother of all churches stands without a roof and exposed to wind and rain. The holy dwellings of St Peter and St Paul totter, and what was until recently the temple of the Apostles is a shapeless heap of ruins to excite pity in hearts of stone.’

The laws of the city, Petrarch added, were ‘trodden underfoot’; and pilgrims took care to go about in groups, for isolated visitors were in constant danger of robbery and even of murder. One cardinal, in a far from uncommon instance, was shot at from a window as he made his way to St Paul's, the arrow piercing his hat, and thereafter he never ventured out without a helmet and a coat of mail under his habit. Once the Jubilee was over the lawlessness became more scandalous than ever. Nobles, employing brigands as household troops, took possession of their rioni and ruled them as petty tyrants. The papal vicar was driven out of the city, and any pretence of central government was at an end. A group of citizens, encouraged by the Pope, assembled in S. Maria Maggiore on the day after Christmas 1351 and decided to insist upon the appointment of an elderly and respected Roman as Rector. This man, whose installation was ratified by the Pope, was Giovanni Gerroni. But he had not exercised his wide-ranging powers for long when, beset by conspirators plotting his downfall, he declared himself unequal to his task and left Rome, taking the contents of the public treasury with him. Once more the great families, the Orsini and Colonna prominent among them, took control; once more the populace rose in revolt, driving one Senator, Stefanello Colonna, from the city, and burying another, Berthold Orsini, beneath a heap of stones which were hurled at him as he came down the stairs from the Capitol; and once again a popular leader was elected to save the Republic. But the new dictator, Francesco Baroncelli, was no more effective than Giovanni Gerroni had been. And the Romans began to regret the fall of the Tribune, Cola di Rienzo, who, for all his faults, had once brought order to their lives and a hope, if brief, of renewed glory.

After escaping from Rome, Cola had spent two years high up in the fastnesses of the Abruzzi mountains east of Rome, living as a penitential hermit with an austere and conservative sect of Franciscan anchorites known as the Fraticelli. From the Abruzzi he had wandered further north across the Alps and had made his way to the court of Charles IV, King of Bohemia, whom he had pressed to go to Rome as the city's saviour, undertaking to return there first himself as imperial vicar, in the way that John the Baptist had prepared the way for Christ. Elaborating upon this theme, Cola enjoined King Charles to picture himself being crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the Pope, to envisage Cola as being created Duke of Rome, and to imagine the three of them, Emperor, Pope and Duke, as representing the Holy Trinity on earth. Wary of his strange visitor and his ‘fantastic dreams’, the King reported Cola's arrival in Prague to the Pope, who instructed the Archbishop of Prague to detain him in the strictest custody. In July 1352 the Archbishop declared that Cola was guilty of heresy and must be handed over to the papal plenipotentiary. The next month Cola arrived in Avignon where, soon afterwards, Pope Clement died.

Clement's successor, Innocent VI, a former professor of civil law at Toulouse, regarded Cola in a more favourable light than his predecessor had done. He thought that his return to Rome, demanded by Petrarch and now also by the Romans themselves, might be used to the Church's advantage. Cola's experience of Roman affairs might well be of assistance to Cardinal Gil Alvarez Carrillo de Albornoz, a Castilian grandee, who had recently been appointed Vicar-General of Italy. Pope Innocent, therefore, ordered Cola's release from prison where he had lain excommunicated and under sentence of death. And so it was that on 1 August 1354 immense crowds thronged the streets of Rome to welcome back their former Tribune. From windows and rooftops decorated with banners and with flowers, he was cheered by excited people as he advanced towards the Capitol.

But Cola was no longer the handsome figure who had left Rome seven years before. Now pale and fat, he had lost his gift of fiery eloquence; his enthusiastic fervour had given way to dreamy introspection, occasionally broken by fits of hysteria in which laughter alternated with uncontrollable tears. Once established in power, he behaved with that tyrannical excess that had characterized his last months as Tribune in 1347, raising money by arbitrary taxes and every other means at his command, even seizing citizens and selling them for the ransoms which could be extorted from their families. Soon not only the nobles but the people, too, were bent upon his downfall.

One morning in October, through the window of his bedroom overlooking the Piazza Mercato, came the shouts of the mob: ‘Popolo! Popolo! Death to the traitor who has imposed the taxes!’ Finding that the guard and his servants had all fled, Cola hastily put on his armour and the splendid clothes he had worn as Tribune, snatched up the banner of Rome and went out on to the balcony. At first, he tried to address the people but their shouts carried his words away. Then, unfurling the banner, he pointed to the gold letters, Senatus Populusque Romanus. But the shouts grew louder and more insistent: ‘Death to the traitor!’ Stones were hurled and an arrow pierced his hand. Then the mob set fire to the wooden fortifications surrounding the palace. As the flames took hold, Cola, having hurriedly shaved off his beard, donned an old cloak and blackened his face, rushed down the stairs through the smoke into the courtyard. Shouting ‘Death to the traitor!’ like the rest, he tried to escape unrecognized in the crowd. But he had forgotten to remove his rings and bracelets, and, catching the glint of these, someone shouted, ‘This is the Tribune!’ as he grabbed the fugitive by the arm. Cola was dragged towards the bottom of the steps by the statue of the Madonna where Berthold Orsini had been stoned to death, and the crowd fell silent. Cola crossed his arms upon his chest. He was now a pathetic figure, the edges of his magnificent grey silk, gold-trimmed dress clearly visible beneath his tattered cloak, his legs still clad in purple stockings. For a time that seemed so protracted that his medieval biographer described it as a full hour, no one moved against him. Then one of his own former officials came forward with a sword and thrust it through his body. His head was cut off, his body stabbed, and his mangled corpse dragged away to the rione of the Colonna where it was strung up outside a house near the church of S. Marcello.³ For two days it was left dangling there, to be stoned by street-boys.

Almost every day in these years, sitting by the door of the convent of S. Lorenzo in Panisperna,⁴ could be seen a fair-skinned elderly woman begging for the poor and gratefully raising to her lips the offerings that were made to her. The daughter of a Swedish judge and widow of a Swedish nobleman to whom she had borne eight children, Birgitta Godmarsson, foundress of the Brigittines, had felt herself drawn to Rome by a vision in which Christ had appeared before her, commanding her to leave immediately for the city and to remain until she had seen both Pope and Emperor there. As she went upon her spiritual and charitable rounds in Rome from church to crumbling church and hospital to ruinous hospital, she had further visions: both Jesus and His Mother spoke to her, strengthening her faith in the eventual salvation of the city and the return of the Pope to it. Around the house where she lived, in what is now Piazza Farnese, stretched the charred shells of burned-out buildings, piles of rotting refuse, deserted palaces, stagnant swamps, fortresses abandoned by their wealthy owners who had gone to live on their estates in the Campagna, hovels occupied by families on the verge of starvation, churches rendered derelict by the long absence of the Curia. Pilgrims took home with them stories of a gloomy, quiet city whose silence was broken only by the howling of dogs and the occasional shouts of a mob.

In Avignon the popes remained deaf to the calls which the Romans made to them, heedless of the prayers which the saintly Birgitta Godmarsson uttered so fervently and of the letters which Petrarch continued to write into his old age. In 1362, however, Guillaume de Grimoard became the sixth of the Avignon popes as Urban V. Encouraged by Charles IV, now Holy Roman Emperor, who offered to accompany him, he recognized the need to return to Rome, not only for the sake of the neglected and decaying city but also for the papacy itself which was now in danger at Avignon both from the mercenary bands roaming throughout western Europe and from the English who were fighting the French in wars which were to last for a hundred years. Pope Urban also hoped to bring about a reunion of the Eastern and Western Churches and considered that negotiations with the patriarch of Constantinople could be conducted more satisfactorily if he were in Rome. In 1367, therefore, Pope Urban travelled across the Alps, knelt in prayer before the grave of St Peter and took up residence in the stuffy, dismal rooms of the Vatican which had been prepared for him. His visit, though, was brief. He found the city oppressive and even more dilapidated than he had feared. The clergy did not encourage an understanding with Constantinople, and he felt that he could more easily carry on the role of mediator between England and France from Avignon. So, having supervised the removal of the Apostles’ heads to the Lateran and seen them enclosed in the silver busts he had ordered as reliquaries, he went back to France in 1370, ignoring St Birgitta's warning that he would die if he abandoned Rome and fulfilling her prophecy by expiring at Avignon within a few months of his return.

Six years later, his successor, Gregory XI, the last of the Avignon popes, fearing that the Church and her estates in Italy would be lost to the papacy for ever were he not to return, made up his mind to take the Curia permanently back to Rome. He was encouraged and strengthened in his decision by a remarkable young woman who was to become patron saint of Italy.

Caterina Benincasa was the youngest of the several children of a dyer from Siena. A spirited, pretty girl, she at first surprised and then dismayed her parents by showing no disposition to marry and by resisting all efforts, including beatings, to change her mind. She insisted upon becoming a Dominican nun, a member of the tertiary order who take simple vows and may continue to live at home. She spent long hours in prayer, experienced a succession of ecstatic raptures and ultimately the pain of the stigmata. Her holiness, her ascetism, the long letters and prayers which she dictated, being unable to write, attracted wide attention and a group of faithful followers, the Caterinati, who were to accompany her on her travels. The first of her fateful journeys took her to Avignon where, passionately devoted to the cause of peace within the Church and Italy, and urgently preaching a crusade against the Muslims, she begged Pope Gregory to fulfil his intention of leaving France and returning to Rome. Towards the end of 1376 he made up his mind to follow her advice and the dictates of his own conscience.

Pope Gregory sailed up the Tiber by night and came ashore by St Paul's on the morning of 16 January 1377 to the cheers of the crowd and the sound of trumpets. As recorded on the reliefs decorating his tomb in the church of S. Francesca Romana he was accompanied by numerous cardinals on magnificently caparisoned horses. The artist has depicted him riding beneath a baldacchino with St Catherine by his side and with Rome in the form of Minerva coming forward to meet him. Above the Porta S. Paolo, which is shown as a tottering ruin, the papal chair drifts through the clouds and an angel bears the papal tiara and the keys of St Peter. The scene so charmingly evoked marks, however, not the end of a sad period in the history of Rome, but the beginning of an age of even more bitter discord. For Pope Gregory, though not yet fifty, was already an elderly-looking and dying man. He survived for little more than a year, and his death provoked a papal election of extraordinary animosity.

The Roman people had made it clear, through deputations, addresses and speeches in the various rioni, that the next pope must be an Italian and preferably a Roman; and when the cardinals entered the hall of conclave in the Vatican a large crowd shouted menacingly, ‘Romano o Italiano lo volemo!’ To protect the cardinals, militiamen had been ordered to surround the Vatican, and the Borgo had been barricaded. As a warning against violence, a block and headsman's axe had been placed in St Peter's; and the treasures of the Church had been removed to Castel Sant' Angelo.

The precautions seemed well justified to the nervous cardinals who were informed before entering the curtained compartments into which the hall had been divided that the building had recently been struck by lightning. It was now invaded by the captains of the rioni who reminded the cardinals of the Romans' demands. One cardinal, braver than the others, replied that the conclave must be left undisturbed to reach its own decision. As though provoked by this, the shouts from the mob outside grew louder and more threatening. Meanwhile the floor of the hall splintered as lances were pushed up between the beams from below where firewood and tinder were being piled so that the whole place could be burned down should the voting prove unfavourable.

The first ballot showed a majority in favour of Bartolomeo di Prignano, the Archbishop of Bari, whc, although an Italian, was a Neapolitan, a subject of the House of Anjou which still reigned in Naples, and a candidate, therefore, not unacceptable to the French. But a rumour spread abroad that the Roman Cardinal Francesco Tibaldeschi had been chosen. Shouting their congratulations, hundreds of people burst into the conclave to greet their supposed new pope who was persuaded by his fellow-cardinals to act the part to save them all from being hurled out of the windows. And so, while the aged Tibaldeschi sat trembling in the papal chair with mitre and mantle, apprehensively acknowledging the vociferous plaudits of his supporters, the other cardinals escaped to a nearby chapel where the election of the Archbishop of Bari was confirmed. At length Tibaldeschi admitted the imposture, and the uproar in the hall grew more tumultuous than ever. But when it became known that the new pope, who took the title of Urban VI, was at least an Italian if not a Roman, the protests quietened down, and the people grudgingly accepted the election.

The French cardinals, however, did not. Exasperated by Urban, who behaved in so high-handed and yet confused a manner that some of them maintained his elevation had driven him mad, they protested that his election was invalid, since it had been conducted under duress, and declared, on behalf of a majority of the Sacred College, that he was deposed and that Robert, Cardinal of Geneva, was Pope instead. The Great Schism had begun.

The new anti-Pope, the lame and wall-eyed Clement VII, returned to Avignon. The rough and energetic Neapolitan, Urban VI, remained in Rome. And Catherine of Siena, broken-hearted by the division of the Church and by her failure to reform its degenerate clergy, died in April 1380 in Via S. Chiara and was buried in S. Maria sopra Minerva.⁵

One of those who mourned her comforted himself with the thought that she had been spared the sight of the further degradation of Rome and of the Church which, under Urban's successor, another Neapolitan, the clever and avaricious Boniface IX, celebrated a third Jubilee in 1390. A monetary expedient rather than a holy festival, this Jubilee was financed by the dispensation of indulgences on an unprecedented scale and brought to Rome a stream of pilgrims. But the corruption of the Church was no less distressing to them than the sight of the city, now little more than a decayed provincial town. Goats nibbled amongst the weed of the piazzas and in the overgrown rat-infested ruins of the Campo Marzio; cattle grazed by the altars of roofless churches; robbers lurked in the narrow alleys; at night wolves fought with dogs beneath the walls of St Peter's and, with their paws, dug up corpses in the nearby Campo Santo. ‘O God, how pitiable is Rome!’ an English visitor lamented. ‘Once she was filled with great nobles and palaces, now with huts, thieves, wolves and vermin, with waste places; and the Romans themselves tear each other to pieces.’

Abandoning in despair their attempts to form a strong and stable political state, the Romans allowed the grasping Boniface to assume full control of the city, to turn the Vatican as well as the restored and enlarged Castel Sant' Angelo into a stronghold, to rebuild the Senatorial Palace as a papal fortress, and to appoint his relations and their friends to positions of power and profit. On his death, fear of the King of Naples led to the election of yet another Neapolitan pope, Innocent VII, against whom the Romans roused themselves to revolt in an uprising that ended in humiliating retreat. And after the death of Innocent VII, the election of the Venetian, Gregory XII, who seemed disposed to try to come to terms with the Pope in Avignon, led to the invasion of Rome in 1413 by the King of Naples who was determined not to lose his influence through the ending of the Great Schism.

At about this time a fresh attempt to end the Schism, which was dividing Europe into rival camps, was made by a council of the Church at Pisa. The council's solution was to depose both the Avignon and the Roman pope and to elect in their place the Cretan, Petros Philargos, who took the title of Alexander V. He promptly adjourned the council whose decision was, in any case, not recognized by either of his rivals. There were now three popes instead of two, each of whom excommunicated the others.

A renewed attempt to disentangle the imbroglio was now made by the Emperor Sigismund who summoned another Church council at Constance. By this time a new pope had appeared upon the scene in the unlikely person of Baldassare Cossa, successor of the pope chosen at Pisa, Alexander V, whom he was widely supposed to have murdered. Sensual, unscrupulous and extremely superstitious, Baldassare Cossa, who took the title of Pope John XXIII, came from an old Neapolitan family and had once been a pirate and then a dissolute soldier.

In mutually suspicious alliance with the King of Naples, Pope John established himself in Rome where, in breach of their understanding, the King attacked him on 8 June 1413, driving him out of the city. He fled with his court along the Via Cassia beside which several prelates died of exhaustion and the rest were robbed by their own mercenaries. Yet again, the city behind them was plundered. The Neapolitan soldiers, unchecked by their commander, set fire to houses, looted the sacristy of St Peter's, stabled their horses in the basilica, ransacked sanctuaries and churches, and sat down amidst their loot to drink with prostitutes from consecrated chalices.

Pope John XXIII, who had fled to Florence, went on to the council at Constance where he found himself accused of all manner of crimes, including heresy, simony, tyranny, murder, and the seduction of some two hundred ladies of Bologna. After escaping from Constance in the guise of a soldier of fortune, he was recognized, betrayed and brought back to face the council which deposed both him and the Avignon Pope Benedict XIII and which, once the Germans and English had united with the Italians to keep out the French, elected a new Italian Pope, Martin V.

He came from the Roman house of Colonna which, for all its power over the past three centuries, had not before produced a pope. And he returned to Rome in 1420 under a purple baldacchino, jesters dancing before him, the people shouting their welcome long into the night as they ran through the streets with flaring torches. He was to reign in Rome for over ten years, and was to be succeeded by two other Italian popes of rare qualities, the Venetian Eugenius IV and the Ligurian Nicholas V. There was hope that at last a new age was dawning.

SEVEN ‘THE REFUGE OF ALL THE NATIONS’

Patron and advocate of Rome's new age, Nicholas V appeared peculiarly ill suited for his role. Small, pale and withered, he walked with bent shoulders, his black eyes darting nervous glances around him, his large and prominent mouth pursed as though in disapproval. Yet no one doubted his generosity and kindliness, just as all who knew him praised his learning, his determination to reconcile the Church with the secular culture of the burgeoning Renaissance and to make Rome once again worthy of its past as the glory of the ancient world and the focus of Christianity. The son of a Ligurian doctor, he had been forced by poverty to abandon his studies at the University of Bologna and to go to work as a tutor in Florence. Amiable and witty, he had made many friends and impressed them with the breadth of his knowledge. ‘What he does not know,’ said one of them, his fellow humanist, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, ‘is outside the range of human understanding.’ He had become Pope in 1447.

Both his predecessors, Martin V and Eugenius IV, the austere, dignified and extremely tall son of a rich merchant, had done what they could to restore the ravaged city. Pope Martin had revived the ancient office of Overseer of the Public Thoroughfares with a view to clearing away the rubbish and filth that filled the streets and poisoned the air. He had restored several churches and other public buildings; reconstructed the aqueducts which were in such a ruinous condition that many citizens had no idea what their original purpose had been; and, after rebuilding the Acqua Vergine, he had erected a fountain facing the Piazza dei Crociferi which was to be transformed in the eighteenth century into one of Rome's most celebrated sights, the Trevi Fountain.¹ Pope Martin had also summoned to Rome the great Tuscan master, Masaccio, and had brought from Ostia the relics of St Augustine's mother, St Monica, whose tomb can now be seen in the church of S. Agostino.² Yet when Pope Eugenius had returned to Rome in 1443, having been driven from it after quarrelling with his predecessor's family, the Colonna, the city was still in the most parlous condition. S. Maria in Domnica and S. Pancrazio both remained on the verge of collapse; S. Stefano had no roof, and many other churches were in as bad or worse a state. Several lanes in the Borgo were avoided by the prudent citizen because of the ever-present danger of tumbling masonry. The streets, filthy as ever, still resembled those of a country village in which cattle, sheep and goats, driven by their owners in long country capes and knee-boots, wandered from wall to wall.

You must have heard of the condition of this city from others, so I will be brief [wrote a visitor, Alberto de' Alberti, in March 1444]. There are many splendid palaces, houses, tombs and temples, and other edifices in infinite number, but all are in ruins. There is much porphyry and marble from ancient buildings, but every day these marbles are destroyed by being burnt for lime in scandalous fashion. What is modern is poor stuff, that is to say, the new buildings; the beauty of Rome lies in what is in ruins. The men of the present day, who call themselves Romans, are very different in bearing and in conduct from the ancient inhabitants. Breviter loquendo, they all look like cowherds.

Other visitors wrote of moss-grown statues, of defaced and indecipherable inscriptions, of ‘parts within the walls that look like thick woods’, caves where forest animals were wont to breed, of hares and deer being caught in the streets, of the daily sight of heads and limbs of men who had been quartered being nailed to doors, placed in cages or impaled on spears.

Eugenius had continued Martin's work of restoration. He had repaired the Hospital of the Holy Spirit, renovated the Lateran Palace, carried out extensive works at Castel Sant’ Angelo, restored walls and bridges as well as numerous churches. He had ordered the removal of piles of rubbish and wooden shanties from around the Pantheon, forbade the extraction of masonry from the Colosseum and other ancient monuments under the severest penalties, paved streets, constructed, a mint near St Peter's, and commissioned the imposing bronze doors from the Florentine Filarete which are still to be seen in the central portal of the present basilica and which were among the first examples of Renaissance work in Rome.³

Yet, despite all the work that his predecessors had done, Nicholas V found that Rome was still for the most part a crumbling, dirty medieval city, bitterly cold in winter when the tramontana blew across the frozen marshes, unhealthy in summer and autumn when malaria was rife. The inhabitants, a large proportion of them foreigners and most of the rest born outside the city, numbered now no more than about forty thousand, less than a twentieth of the population in the days of Nero and ten thousand less than the Florence of the Medici. Had it not been for the pilgrims who came to Rome each year and provided the city with its one highly profitable trade, there would have been fewer inhabitants even than this.

The Pope set about his task with characteristic resolution, in accordance with his belief that if the faith of the people was to be strong, they must have visual encouragement, ‘majestic buildings, lasting memorials, witnesses to their faith planted on earth as if by the hand of God’. Several more churches were, therefore, repaired, including S. Stefano Rotondo and S. Teodoro.⁴ The Senatorial Palace was again rebuilt, as was the Vatican Palace, which thereafter became the principal papal residence. Work also began on a new basilica to replace old St Peter's whose southern wall, now leaning outwards almost five feet from its base, was in danger of collapse. Having consulted Leon Battista Alberti, whom he had known in Florence, Pope Nicholas decided upon a domed basilica with a nave and double aisles, and, disregarding his predecessor's prohibition, had no less than 2,500 wagonloads of materials from the Colosseum carted across the Ponte Sant' Angelo.

By the beginning of 1449 Pope Nicholas considered that the restoration of Rome and the peaceful state of the Church justified his declaring that the year 1450 would be a Universal Jubilee. Plenary indulgences – remission of punishments due for past sins – were to be given to all who came to Rome and paid daily visits over a specified period to the city's four principal churches, St Peter's, St Paul's, the Lateran Basilica and S. Maria Maggiore. Italians had to remain in Rome for fourteen days to qualify; those who came from beyond the Alps for eight. Romans had to make the peregrination of the churches every day for a month.

Tens of thousands of pilgrims consequently made their way to Rome from all over Europe. ‘Countless multitudes of Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, Portuguese, Greeks, Armenians, Dalmatians and Italians were to be seen hastening to Rome as to the refuge of all the nations of the earth,’ wrote one who made the journey. ‘They were full of devotion and chanting hymns in their different languages.’ Another eyewitness compared the thronging multitudes to a flight of starlings or a swarm of ants. From Danzig (Gdánsk) in Germany alone as many as two thousand men, women and children took the road to the south.

A greater crowd of Christians was never known to hasten to any Jubilee [recorded an enthusiastic chronicler from Brescia]. Kings, dukes, marquesses, counts and knights, people of all ranks in Christendom, daily arrived in such huge crowds in Rome that there were millions in the city. And this continued for the whole year, excepting in the summer on account of the plague which carried off innumerable victims. But almost as soon as the epidemic abated at the beginning of the cold season the influx again began.

All the most popular shrines were crowded to the doors. At all hours of the day hundreds of pilgrims jostled and pushed and craned their necks in the catacombs beneath the church of St Sebastian, in St Peter's, where the Pope, who was frequently seen walking barefoot between the stations, gave his benediction every Sunday, and in those other sacred places where the heads of the Apostles, the handkerchief of St Veronica and the other precious relics of Rome were displayed. There was a special attraction this year, the canonization of St Bernardine of Siena, the Franciscan friar and ‘people' preacher’. This took place on Whit Sunday in St Peter's, where a lofty throne was installed for the Pope beneath two hundred wax-lights. Surrounded by fourteen cardinals and twenty-four bishops, all magnificently arrayed in the richest vestments, he carried out the rite with the ‘greatest exactness, solemnity and splendour’.

The surge of pilgrims to Rome in 1450 brought immense profits to the Church, enabling the Pope to deposit 100,000 golden florins in the Medici bank alone and to continue confidently with his restoration of the city. Huge sums were also made by numerous Roman citizens, particularly money-changers, apothecaries, innkeepers and artists who painted pictures of the holy handkerchief and other relics. But the numbers of pilgrims were far too great for the authorities to cope with adequately. The additional food brought into the city from the Papal States proved utterly insufficient for the thousands of mouths to be fed. Millers ran out of grain, bakers out of flour, dealers out of wine and cheese, fruit and salted meat. Prices rose steeply. Many hungry pilgrims were forced to depart before their obligations had been completed. The Florentine pilgrim, Giovanni Rucellai, estimated that there were 1,022 inns in Rome – though a census of 1527 records no more than 236 – but they were soon all full, ‘and every house became an inn’.

Pilgrims begged for the love of God to be taken in on payment of a good price, but it was not possible. They had to spend the nights out of doors. Many perished from cold; it was dreadful to see. Still such multitudes thronged together that the city was actually famished. Every Sunday numerous pilgrims left Rome, but by the following Saturday all the houses were again fully occupied. If you wanted to go to St Peter's it was impossible on account of the masses of men that filled the streets. St Paul's, St John Lateran, and S. Maria Maggiore were filled with worshippers. All Rome was filled, so that one could not go through the streets. When the Pope gave his solemn blessing, all spaces in the neighbourhood of St Peter's, even the surrounding vineyards, from which the loggia of the benediction could be seen, were thick with pilgrims, but those who could not see him were more numerous than those who could, and this continued until Christmas.

After Christmas there was a slight lull, but then in Lent the crowds surged in again to such an extent that many of them had to camp out in the vineyards, there being no other sleeping-places left.

In Holy Week the throngs coming from St Peter's or going there were so enormous that they were crossing the bridge over the Tiber until the second or third hour of the night [wrote the contemporary Roman chronicler, Paolo di Benedetto di Cola dello Mastro]. The crowd was here so great that the soldiers of Sant' Angelo, together with other young men – I was often there myself – had frequently to hasten to the spot and separate the masses with sticks in order to prevent serious accidents. At night many of the poor pilgrims were to be seen sleeping beneath the porticoes, while others wandered about in search of missing fathers, sons, or companions; it was pitiful to see them. And this went on until the feast of the Ascension, when the multitudes of pilgrims again diminished because the plague came to Rome. Many people then died, especially many of these pilgrims; all the hospitals and churches were full of the sick and dying, and they were to be seen in the infected streets falling down like dogs. Of those who with great difficulty, scorched with heat and covered with dust, departed from Rome, a countless number fell a sacrifice to the terrible pestilence, and graves were to be seen all along the roads, even in Tuscany and Lombardy.

After the plague there was another fearful disaster on 19 December when a larger crowd than ever had assembled to see the holy handkerchief and receive the papal benediction. About four o'clock it was announced that, due to the lateness of the hour, the benediction could not be given that day. So all the people hurried away over the Ponte Sant' Angelo which was encumbered with shopkeepers' booths. At the far end of the bridge a number of horses and mules took fright, blocking the passage of the pedestrians. Unaware that the bridge was for the moment impassable, other pilgrims pushed forward on to it, pressing those in front of them into the now struggling mass of bodies, several of whom fell and were trampled underfoot. Soon panic broke out. People were squashed to death or pushed screaming through the booths and over the railings into the river. For a whole hour the confusion continued as people struggled to get off the bridge, while others forced their way on to it to drag away the dead and wounded. Soon over 170 bodies were laid out in the nearby church of SS. Celsoe e Giuliano⁵ and a further thirty lay drowned in the Tiber. People who escaped had their clothes torn to pieces.

Some were to be seen running about in their doublets, some in shirts, and others almost naked [a Florentine pilgrim reported to Giovanni de' Medici]. In the terrible confusion all had lost their companions, and the cries of those who sought missing friends were mingled with the wailing of those who mourned for the dead. As night came on, the most heartrending scenes were witnessed in the church of San. Celso which was full of people up to 11 o'clock; one found a father, one a brother, and another a son among the dead. An eyewitness says that men who had gone through the Turkish war had seen no more ghastly sight.

The disaster did, however, have one good outcome: to prevent such accidents in future Pope Nicholas ordered a row of houses in front of the bridge to be cleared away, the demolition of the ruinous Arch of Gratian, Valentinian and Theodosius⁶ and the creation of an open space, the Piazza di Ponte Sant' Angelo.

As well as endeavouring to make Rome architecturally worthy of her position as the focus of Christianity, Pope Nicholas tried to make her worthy of it artistically, too. He made it a leading centre for goldsmiths and silversmiths and for tapestry makers, calling upon Renaud de Maincourt to come from Paris and to open a tapestry workshop in the city. He also employed Fra Angelico, the small and saintly friar from Florence who knelt to pray before starting to paint each morning, who was so overcome by emotion when depicting Christ upon the cross that tears poured down his cheeks, and who was so modest and unworldly that when Nicholas asked him to dinner he excused himself from eating meat without the permission of his prior, it never occurring to him that the Pope's authority in the matter might suffice. For Nicholas, Fra Angelico decorated the lovely private chapel in the Vatican as well as the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament, and painted the altarpiece of the high altar of S. Maria sopra Minerva. He died in Rome in 1455 and was buried in this church.

With works of art came books. Agents were sent all over Europe in pursuit of manuscripts and volumes, and generously rewarded humanist scholars came to Rome to translate and copy ancient texts. At the Pope's desire Homer, Herodotus and Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, Ptolemy and Diodorus were all translated into Latin. And at his death this librarian manqué, himself a gifted calligrapher, was able to bequeath over a thousand volumes to the Vatican Library, his own foundation.⁷

In the short pontificate of Pope Nicholas's successor, the Spaniard Alfonso de Borgia who became the first of the Borgia Popes as Calixtus III in 1455, the vigour of artistic and scholarly life in Rome diminished. An elderly, gouty compromise between candidates backed by the Colonna and the Orsini, Calixtus III condemned his predecessor for spending so much money on restoration, works of art and books when he should have been concentrating on a crusade against the Saracens. He himself sold works of art and even pawned his mitre to fight the Turks and raised a pontifical fleet to free various Aegean islands from their control. But most of his time was spent as an invalid in the Vatican, surrounded by relations who passed in and out of his candle-lit bedroom and who invited other Spaniards to come to Rome to share their good fortune. To the undisguised relief of the Romans, exasperated by the invasion of those they called ‘the Catalans’ and by the Spanish accents and fashions to be seen and heard in the streets, Pope Calixtus died three years after his elevation. So, once again, cardinals from all over Europe converged upon Rome to play their parts in a conclave which was to elect a pope in whom the papacy and Rome, by now indissolubly interwoven, could both take pride.

One of the cardinals making his way to Rome that hot summer of 1458 was Guillaume d'Estouteville, the rich and wily Archbishop of Rouen who, intent upon being elected himself, began promising positions of honour and profit immediately upon his arrival. In the latrines of the Vatican, recognized as the safest places in which to conduct intrigues, his supporters gathered, discussing ways by which their candidate could be assured of the necessary two-thirds majority. Confident as they were at first, it soon became clear that most of the eighteen cardinals present favoured another candidate, the equally ambitious Bishop of Siena, who described in his autobiography the dramatic scenes in the conclave when the time for the second scrutiny drew near, the first vote having proved inconclusive.

The cardinals assembled in the Chapel of St Nicholas where, upon the altar, was the golden cup into which they were to place their slips of paper. The cup was guarded by three cardinals, one of them d'Estouteville who was trembling with excitement. Into the cup, in order of seniority, the cardinals dropped their votes, and when all had done so the cup was emptied. The papers were unfolded and the names read out. D'Estouteville then declared the result. But the Bishop of Siena, who had been prudently making notes of the names as they had been announced, objected that his rival had miscounted the number of votes cast for him. And so he had. But even so the Bishop of Siena had not acquired the sufficient majority; and it was decided that the Sacred College would have to resort to the method known as per accessum by which, during discussion, it could be discovered whether or not any of the voters might be prepared to transfer their support to another candidate for the sake of agreement.

‘All sat in their places, silent, pale, as though they had been struck senseless,’ recalled the Bishop of Siena in his account of the final stages of the conclave. ‘No one spoke for some time, no one so much as moved a muscle apart from his eyes which glanced this way, then that. The silence was astonishing.’ Suddenly the young Rodrigo Borgia, who had been appointed cardinal (at the age of twenty-five) by his uncle, Calixtus III, stood up to announce, ‘I accede to the Bishop of Siena.’ But, after this declaration, all fell into silence once more. Two cardinals, afraid to vote in this open manner, hurriedly left the room, ‘pleading the calls of nature’. Then another cardinal rose to announce his support of the Bishop of Siena. Yet even this did not secure the two-thirds majority: one more vote was wanted. Still no one spoke. At length the aged Prospero Colonna unsteadily rose to his feet and ‘would have given his voice solemnly [in favour of the Bishop of Siena] but he was seized about the waist [by d'Estouteville] who rebuked him harshly. And when he persisted in his intention d'Estouteville tried to drag him out of the room. Provoked by this indignity, Colonna called out in loud protest, “I also accede to Siena and I make him Pope!’”

In Rome there were rejoicings that night that an Italian had been chosen. ‘Everywhere was laughter, joy, voices crying, “Siena! Siena! Oh, fortunate Siena!”… Bonfires blazed at every crossroads… Neighbour feasted neighbour. There was not a place where horns and trumpets did not sound, not a quarter of the city that was not alive with public joy. The older men said they had never seen in Rome such popular rejoicings.’

The Pope, who chose the title Pius II, was disappointed only by the Roman mob who had, as custom allowed, ransacked his apartments. Some of the looters, mistaking the name announced from a high window of the palace, had rushed away to the house of the rich Archbishop of Genoa where they were delighted with their plunder. Those who burst into the real Pope's rooms, however, found little of value, though they took away everything they could carry, even the marble statues.

The Pope had been born poor. The son of an impoverished nobleman who farmed his own land beyond the yellow stone walls of the small Tuscan village of Corsignano, he was the eldest of eighteen children. Before his birth, his mother had had a startling dream that she was bringing into the world a baby with a mitre on his head. And since miscreant clerics were made to wear paper mitres while being tortured or executed, since miterino (‘worthy of a mitre’) was rudely applied to those whom such a fate might be expected to befall, his mother naturally feared that her son would come to some disgraceful end. Indeed, although he turned out to be a good child, willing to help his father till the grey and stony soil, and to be a conscientious, though amorous and high-spirited student, it was not until he became Bishop of Trieste that she felt able to place a more favourable interpretation upon her vision. Attractive, clever, witty and eloquent, her son advanced rapidly in the world. Already a diplomat of exceptional persuasiveness when he entered the Church, as well as a renowned orator, poet and conversationalist, he had become a bishop a mere two years after taking holy orders. He had entered the conclave with quiet confidence that he would be elected; and, while prepared to promote the interests and indulge the whims of his friends and family in the manner of so many of his predecessors, he was also determined to become a worthy occupant of his holy office and to bear always in mind the words he had spoken to a friend when he was ordained deacon and accepted that the chastity he confessed to dread must now replace his former licentiousness, ‘I do not deny my past. I have been a great wanderer from what is right, but at least I know it and hope that the knowledge has not come too late.’

Steeped as he was in classical literature and moved as he was by beauty in architecture as well as in nature, Pius II had a deep and abiding interest in the antiquities of ancient Rome; and he frequently inspected these remains and described them with enthusiasm. While yet a cardinal he had composed the well-known epigram:

Oh Rome! Your very ruins are a joy,

Fallen is your pomp; but it was peerless once!

Your noble blocks wrench'd from our ancient walls

Are burn'd for lime by greedy slaves of gain.

Villains! If such as you may have their way

Three ages more, Rome's glory will be gone.

He did his best to protect the city's monuments from further spoliation, and in a bull of April 1462 forbade the breaking down of ancient buildings in Rome and in the Campagna even on private property. In his Commentaries he describes himself overcome by rage on seeing a man digging up stones from the Appian Way, ‘smashing large boulders into small pieces with which to build a house at Genzano’. He reproved the man angrily, and gave orders that the road must never again be plundered in this way. Yet Pius himself was not above pillaging a monument when a building of his own inspiration needed good pieces of stone. Thus marble slabs from the Colosseum and the Forum were used for the steps leading up to the new tribune for the Papal Benediction which the Pope constructed at St Peter's.

These steps and the tribune were one of the few ambitious enterprises which Pope Pius undertook in Rome, for he had in mind a great crusade, and the resources of the Church, even though pilgrims and jubilees were so highly profitable, were severely limited. The Papal States made the Pope a sovereign prince, but they did not produce much revenue; Rome itself produced far less; while the taxes of Church property outside Italy and the first year's revenues, known as annates, which holders of benefices had been required to pay to the papacy since the beginning of the fourteenth century, had been severely reduced by what was known as the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges. This decree, issued by the French clergy in 1438, upheld the right of the French Church to administer its temporal property independently of the papacy and reduced annates by four fifths. It was not superseded until 1516 when the papacy and the French king agreed to the Concordat of Bologna. Throughout his pontificate, therefore, Pius II had financial worries. The Curia as the repository of the Church's archives, the administrator of her justice, the superintendent of her finances, diplomacy and policies, and Christendom's final court of appeal, was an extremely expensive organization to run, even though there were steady fees and charges to support its organization and officials. The Pope was alone responsible for the payment of the magistrates and the costly administration of Rome which, although there was still a Senator who paraded about the city clothed in crimson gown and brocaded cloak, carrying an ivory sceptre and attended by four servants, His Holiness now ruled monarchically with the help of a Governor.

There were still occasional revolts against this rule. There had been one in 1436 when Pope Eugenius had been forced to flee and to restore order, first through his crafty, cruel, awesome representative, Giovanni Vitelleschi, Bishop of Recanati, and then through the equally worldly and despotic Cardinal Lodovico Scarampo, in whose time various priests found guilty of theft were exposed for several days in a cage in the Campo dei Fiori. The ringleader, a canon, was seated on an ass and, wearing a mitre decorated with figures of devils, was hanged on a tree in the Piazza S. Giovanni; and two of his principal accomplices were burned to death. Again, in the reign of Nicholas V, there had been disturbances when an arrogant citizen, Stefano Porcari, in emulation of Cola di Rienzo, had attempted to overthrow papal rule and establish a Republic; he had been executed together with his brother-in-law, Angelo de Maso, and Angelo's eldest son. And now, in Pius II's time, while the Pope and most members of the Curia were out of Rome, having gone north to a congress at Mantua, Angelo de Maso's two younger sons, Tiburzio and Valeriano, rose up against papal rule and, collecting a gang of three hundred young men, mostly from noble families, rampaged about the city, forcing the intimidated Senator to flee from his palace in the Campo dei Fiori and seek safety in the Vatican. Thereafter citizens were seized and held to ransom; women were violated and then drowned; the houses of supporters of papal rule were ransacked. One of the gang kidnapped and raped a girl on her way to her wedding. This so outraged the citizens that the Governor felt obliged to take strong action. Tiburzio de Maso was induced to quit the city which he left for one of the castles of his relations, the Savelli, ‘swaggering like some great prince through the streets’, saluting the crowds who had gathered to see him depart.

When Pope Pius returned to Rome, the de Maso brothers, encouraged in their revolt by the Colonna family and the condottiere leader, Giacomo Piccinino, were stirring up further trouble. And Pius knew that in order to restore order and firm papal government in the city they would have to be destroyed. Tiburzio, who had made his way back into Rome through a gap in the walls near the Baths of Diocletian, was arrested and, with several of his companions, sentenced to death. The Senator, Cardinal Tebaldo, proposed that men guilty of ‘such atrocious crimes’ should be tortured before they were executed. But the Pope intervened: death was punishment enough, and priests could accompany the condemned men to the scaffold. He wept from pity when they were hanged.

He was now fifty-five years old. Persistent gout, stone and a constant cough had long since aged him prematurely. His hair was almost white, his small frame bowed and shrunken; and he was quickly roused to anger, though the outbursts were soon controlled. He worked as hard as ever, rising at daybreak and saying or hearing Mass before attending to his papers. Audiences and interviews with cardinals and officials of the Curia occupied his time before a scanty midday meal followed by a brief siesta. Dictation, literary work and more audiences took up the afternoon until supper-time. Before going to bed he said the remainder of his office, and when in bed he called his secretaries for further dictation before five or six hours' sleep.

Preoccupied with the threat to Christendom from the Turks – who had captured Constantinople in 1453, pushed their frontiers as far as the Danube, and in 1480 were to establish a bridgehead in southern Italy by capturing Otranto – Pope Pius had been bitterly disappointed by the failure of the Congress he had called at Mantua to discuss a great crusade. He had returned to Rome and, standing on the steps of St Peter's, had displayed pieces of the skull of the Apostle Andrew to the assembled multitude as he vowed to deliver the Christian world from its enemies. In the summer of 1464, racked with gout and fever, he had set out for Ancona where the forces of Christendom were to assemble for a Holy War. But once again his hopes were not to be realized. When he arrived at Ancona there were only two ships in the harbour; and by the time a few others sailed down the Adriatic from Venice he had but a few hours left to live. No sooner was he dead than the Venetian galleys set sail for home; and the cardinals, thankful to be spared the discomfort of a crusade, returned to Rome to elect his successor.

EIGHT RENAISSANCE AND DECADENCE

Sitting in the loggia of his new palace overlooking the Via Lata the Pope watched the races that were one of the highlights of the Roman carnival. From the palace to the Arch of Domitian, first Jews raced against each other, then there were races between young Christians, between middle-aged men, old men, asses and buffaloes, and at last the eagerly awaited contest of the barberi, the riderless Arab horses, tightly swaddled in white cloth and with nail-encrusted saddles to make them run ‘like mad creatures’. They came thundering past to be halted in mid-gallop by an immense white sheet hung across the street. The crowds, dressed in all manner of fantastic costumes as nymphs and gods, heroes and fairies, paraded up and down beneath the decorated buildings from which foliage and garlands, ribbons and flowers dropped down towards the rows of benches and daises. At the end of the day, the Pope entertained the citizens at tables spread with delicious food in front of his palace, and then from his windows cast handfuls of money to the crowds who were permitted to finish the remains of the banquet.

The palace stood next to the Basilica di San Marco,¹ which the Pope had carefully restored. Known in his day as the Palazzo San Marco, some of its windows can still be seen in the façade of the Palazzo Venezia into which the smaller palace eventually developed.² Having moved into the palace in 1466, the Pope had decided that the carnival should be held near by in the Via Lata instead of on the Capitol or Monte Testaccio; and so Rome's principal thoroughfare, the Corso, which takes its name from the carnival races or corse, came into being.

The Pope, who had assumed the title of Paul II on his election as Pius II's successor in 1464, was a charming and open-handed Venetian, vain and sensual. Devoted to pleasure and to spectacle, he was also possessed of a strong and resolute will. He revised the statutes of Rome and took forceful action against the brigosi, those who fought in the merciless family vendettas which were still the scourge of Rome as of so many other Italian cities, depriving them of civil rights and even pulling their houses down. And although widely blamed by the stricter clergy for imparting a pagan nature to the festivities of the carnival, he acted firmly against the Roman Academy, a semi-secret society founded to revive classical ideals and the celebration of old Roman rites, and to promote antiquarian and archaeological pursuits. He had its members, including its founder, Julius Pomponius Laetus, arrested on various charges and one of their number, Bartolomeo Platina, was put to the torture.

Yet Paul II, himself a Christian humanist, was a patron of scholars as well as an insatiable collector of objects of art, of jewels, intaglios, cameos, vases, cups inlaid with precious stones, of gold and silver plate and those tapestries and brocades with which the Palazzo San Marco was filled. His extravagance, harshly condemned by some of his contemporaries, was later to be seen as a relatively harmless foible when compared with the nepotism of his successor, Sixtus IV, who, in his efforts to promote the interests of his family, embroiled the papacy in the tangles of Italian politics.

A large, ambitious, gruff and toothless man with a huge head, a flattened nose and intimidating expression, Francesco della Rovere had been born into an impoverished fishing community in Liguria. He had been unremitting in granting offices, money and profitable lordships in the Papal States ever since it had been in his power to do so. Six of his young relations, nephews or illegitimate sons, were made cardinals. These included Pietro Riario, who, having been appointed Bishop of Treviso, Patriarch of Constantinople and Archbishop of both Florence and Seville as well as Mende, died before he was thirty, worn out by excess and heavily in debt, having squandered 200,000 gold florins in his short life as cardinal. His cousin, Giuliano della Rovere, the 28-year-old Bishop of Carpentras, was also appointed a cardinal, as was the son of the Pope's niece, Raffaele Riario, though he was only seventeen. Giuliano's nephew, Lionardo della Rovere, was made Prefect of Rome, while Pietro Riario's brother, the fat, noisy and vulgar Girolamo Riario, was granted the lordship of Imola, a small town between Bologna and Forli, for the purchase of which a loan was requested from the Medici bank.

This request led to a serious quarrel with the Medici, since the head of the bank and of the Florentine state, Lorenzo de' Medici, was anxious himself to purchase the strategically placed town of Imola and determined at all costs to keep it out of the hands of the Pope. He accordingly made excuses for not granting the loan; so the Pope turned to the Medici's leading rivals as Florentine bankers in Rome, the Pazzi, who eagerly took the opportunity of obtaining the valuable Curial account. Encouraged by this coup, Francesco de' Pazzi, the young manager of his family's bank in Rome, conceived a plan for taking over from the Medici as rulers in Florence. In this he sought the help of Girolamo Riario, whose ambitions were far from satisfied by the lordship of Imola, and of a condottiere, Gian Battista Montesecco, who had worked for the papacy in the past. Montesecco promised help, provided he could be assured by the Pope himself that the enterprise had papal blessing. It was agreed, therefore, that he should be granted an audience. He was accompanied to the Vatican by Girolamo Riario and by Francesco Salviati, the disgruntled Archbishop of Pisa who had been denied access to Tuscany, being unacceptable to Lorenzo de' Medici.

‘This matter, Holy Father, may turn out ill without the death of Lorenzo and [his brother] Giuliano, and perhaps of others,’ Montesecco said, according to his own account of the subsequent conversation.

‘I do not wish the death of anyone on any account, since it does not accord with our office to consent to such a thing. Though Lorenzo is a villain, and behaves ill towards us, yet we do not on any account desire his death, but only a change in the government.’

‘All that we can do shall be done to see that Lorenzo does not die,’ Girolamo said. ‘But should he die, will Your Holiness pardon him who did it?’

‘You are an oaf. I tell you I do not want anyone killed, just a change in the government. And I repeat to you, Gian Battista, that I strongly desire this change and that Lorenzo, who is a villain and a furfante [scoundrel], does not esteem us. Once he is out of Florence we could do whatever we like with the Republic and that would be very pleasing to us.’

‘Your Holiness speaks true. Be content, therefore, to let us do everything possible to bring this about.’

‘Go, and do what seems best to you, provided there be no killing.’

‘Holy Father, are you content that we steer this ship? And that we will steer it well?’ Salviati asked.

‘I am content.’

The Pope rose, assured them of ‘every assistance by way of men-at-arms or otherwise as might be necessary’, then dismissed them.

The three men left the room, convinced as they had been when they entered it that they would have to kill both Lorenzo and Giuliano if their plan was to succeed, and that the Pope, despite all that he had said to the contrary, would condone murder if murder were necessary.

Murder, indeed, was committed, though not condoned by the Pope. The assassination took place on Sunday 26 April 1478 during Mass in the Cathedral in Florence. Giuliano de' Medici was slashed to death before the High Altar, but his brother, Lorenzo, escaped with a wound in the neck. The Florentine people, rallying to the family's help, sought out the murderers and, having stripped Francesco de' Pazzi naked, hanged him at the end of a long rope from the machicolation of the Palazzo della Signoria.

The Florentines' fierce reprisals after the failure of the conspiracy aroused intense anger in Rome where Girolamo Riario, at the head of three hundred halberdiers, stormed off to arrest the Florentine ambassador and would have cast him into the dungeons of Sant' Angelo had not the Venetian and Milanese ambassadors protested against this violation of diplomatic immunity. Riario's uncle, the Pope, ordered the arrest of all Florentine bankers and merchants in Rome, though he felt obliged to release them when reminded that his great-nephew, Cardinal Raffaele Riario, a student at the University of Pisa, was then on a visit to Florence where, though not involved in the plot, he had been thrown into prison and threatened with hanging.

Having excommunicated ‘that son of iniquity and foster-child of perdition, Lorenzo de' Medici, and those other citizens of Florence, his accomplices and abettors', the Pope declared war upon them and persuaded the King of Naples as well as Siena and Lucca to do the same. On this occasion conflict was averted by Lorenzo de' Medici's astute diplomacy. But the Pope's attempts to involve Italy in quarrels that might be turned to the advantage of his greedy family later did result in wars; and Count Riario's quarrel with the Colonna and his involvement with the Orsini led once more to fighting in Rome between these two rumbustious families.

Yet, for all his persistent nepotism and its expensive and bloody consequences, Sixtus IV was a great benefactor to Rome and to the Roman people to whom in 1471 he ‘restored’ the ancient bronzes which had stood outside the Lateran for generations and are now in the Capitoline Museum. Indirectly, the Pope could also take credit for that most splendidly majestic of all Rome's palaces, the Palazzo della Cancelleria, which was built by his nephew, Raffaele Riario, with the vast profits of a single night's gambling.³ Largely by means of the heavy taxation of foreign churches and the sale of ecclesiastical offices, Pope Sixtus himself was able to carry out numerous public works. Streets were paved and widened, including the Via Papalis, the Via dei Coronari and the Via dei Pellegrini. More churches were rebuilt, notably SS. Nereo e Achilleo,⁴ S. Maria del Popolo⁵ and S. Maria della Pace;⁶ a foundling hospital was established; and in preparation for the Holy Year, 1475, the Pope laid the foundation stone of the Ponte Sisto,⁷ standing up in a boat as he dropped some gold coins into the water. Pope Sixtus's finest bequest to Rome, however, is the Sistine Chapel which was built for him by Giovannino de’ Dolci and decorated by some of the most gifted artists of his time, including Botticelli and Ghirlandaio, Pinturicchio, Signorelli and Perugino.⁸

Patron of letters as well as of art and architecture, Pope Sixtus reformed the University of Rome, the Sapienza.⁹ A ‘Universal School’ for the study of law and the liberal arts had been founded by Charles of Anjou in 1265, and Thomas Aquinas, summoned to Rome by Urban IV, had taught here for a time. But he, like others before and after him, had found that the Romans – men of a legal turn of mind and of practical inclinations – were not drawn to scholasticism and the abstractions of philosophy. He had felt more at home in Paris, as the medieval theologian, St Bonaventure had also done. Rome's ‘Universal School’, accordingly, had not thrived; and the Sapienza, founded by Boniface VIII in 1303, had fared little better. The university, as re-established by Eugenius IV and reformed by Sixtus IV, proved more lasting, however, although on more than one occasion the professors' pay was stopped when the demands of the Pope's soldiers seemed more pressing. One of these professors was Julius Pomponius Laetus, founder of the Roman Academy and now restored to papal favour, who continued with his work in collecting ancient Roman inscriptions.

Meanwhile, the Pope himself was collecting books and manuscripts to add to the Vatican Library. He constructed a new building in which these books could be housed and studied by scholars, and, from Melozzo da Forli, he commissioned a picture of himself in it with his librarian, Bartolomeo Platina, the member of the Roman Academy who had been tortured in the time of Paul II. Also in the picture, almost it seems as a matter of course, are three of his nephews, Girolamo Riario and Giovanni and Giuliano della Rovere.

The Pope was still obsessed by the fortunes of these young men in whose interests he had quarrelled with several Italian states other than Florence. In 1483 he had gone so far as to place Venice under interdict; and when he heard that the Venetians had done well out of the war which he had hoped would profit his family he was so angry that at first he could not speak. Then he burst out furiously that he would never countenance such terms. The next day he collapsed and within a few hours was dead.

The Romans' immediate reaction was one of rejoicing that the power of the Pope's avaricious relations was at an end. The mob ransacked the Riario palace¹⁰ and, for good measure, plundered the granaries and broke into the banks of the Genoese money-lenders. Girolamo Riario marched south to salvage the possessions and authority of the family. But the Colonna mustered their forces to prevent him, and Florence and Siena both offered the Colonna their support. As barricades were erected in the streets and the citizens were mustered on the Capitol, civil war appeared inevitable. The speedy election of a new Pope, the genial, easy-going and unexceptionable Innocent VIII, delayed the outbreak of violence but could not prevent it. One of Lorenzo de' Medici's agents referred to Innocent as ‘the Rabbit’ and there was something undeniably conigliese about the slant of his doleful eyes and his unassertive manner. Strongly supported in the election by the late Pope's nephew, Giuliano della Rovere, under whose influence he remained, he was also said to be the tool of Lorenso de' Medici whose daughter, Maddalena, was married to one of the several sons of the Pope, who complacently acknowledged them as his own.

Whether or not prompted by advisers, Innocent's policies, often unscrupulous, were almost invariably unsuccessful; and during his pontificate Rome relapsed into the kind of anarchy that had been all too familiar a century before. Armed gangs roamed through the city at night, and in the mornings the bodies of men who had been stabbed lay dead and dying in the streets; pilgrims and even ambassadors were robbed outside the gates; the palaces of rival cardinals became fortified strongholds with crossbowmen and even artillery at the windows and on the castellated roofs. Justice became a commodity to sell like any other. A man who had murdered his two daughters was permitted to buy his liberty for 800 ducats. Other murderers purchased pardons from the Curia and safe conducts which allowed them to walk the streets with armed guards to protect themselves from avengers. The Vice-Chamberlain, when asked why malefactors were not punished, answered with a smile in the hearing of the historian, Infessura, ‘Rather than the death of a sinner, God wills that he should live – and pay.’

As Innocent lay dying, unable to take any nourishment other than women's milk, the Sacred College discussed the choice of a suitable successor. No scholar was needed now, still less a saint, but a man who could bring order to Rome, who could protect the Papal States against their rivals and enemies, who was, in short, a capable administrator and diplomat, a man of strong personality rather than of moral worth. And, at a cost, such a man was found. In the early morning of 11 August 1492 the window of the Hall of Conclave was opened, the Cross appeared from it and the election of Rodrigo Borgia of Valencia as Pope Alexander VI was announced.

Pope Alexander had lived in Rome for several years in the palace now known as the Palazzo Sforza-Cesarini¹¹ where, to celebrate the arrival in Rome of the skull of St Andrew, tapestries had been draped from the windows and objects of art from the Borgia collections had been displayed in the loggia. It was known that Rodrigo Borgia was extremely rich, having inherited fortunes from both his brother and his uncle, Pope Calixtus III, and having acquired the revenues of various convents in Spain and Italy as well as those of three bishoprics. It was also known that he had numerous mistresses and at least six illegitimate sons, three of them by Vanozza Cattanei who was also the mother of his beloved daughter, Lucrezia, and by now a respected and respectable woman. Yet Pope Alexander was not considered particularly corrupt or vicious in an age in which, as the Florentine statesman, Francesco Guicciardini, put it, ‘the goodness of a pontiff [was] commended when it [did] not surpass the wickedness of other men’. Charming, energetic, unabashedly enthusiastic in his pursuit of pleasure, he soon induced women to overlook the plainness of his features and the ungainliness of his corpulent body. Women and men alike were impressed by his intellect. ‘He is of aspiring mind,’ a contemporary wrote of him, ‘of ready and vigorous speech, of crafty nature but above all of admirable intellect where action is concerned.’

Certainly the Roman people greeted his election with enthusiasm, believing his tastes and the joviality of his nature augured well for them. He was borne through the streets to the sound of cheers and trumpets to the Lateran where, the excitement proving too much for him, he fell fainting into the arms of Cardinal Riario. At first the enthusiasm seemed justified: the Pope was not as generous with his money as the Romans had hoped, but flagrant abuses in the administration of justice were ended, prices in the markets became more reasonable and stable and the streets, in which murders had been commonplace, were no longer splashed night with blood. Yet men looking to the future had cause to fear that the Pope's passionate devotion to his children and, in particular, his determination to advance the interests of his son, the sinisterly beguiling Cesare, might have dreadful consequences.

On the day of his father's coronation Cesare, then aged twenty-seven, was appointed Archbishop of Valencia. Soon afterwards, though his interests were exclusively secular, he became a cardinal. Thus was launched a notorious career which was to take Cesare, through bribery, aggression and murder, to the Dukedom of the Romagna and the command of the armies of the Church. Pope Alexander's ambitions for his son, however, were threatened in the early stages of this career by the equally insistent aspirations of the unprepossessing but romantic and adventurous King Charles VIII of France. In 1494 Charles announced his claim to the Kingdom of Naples as inheritor of the rights of the House of Anjou, and in September led his huge and lumbering army across the Alps and down into Lombardy.

As the French approached Rome, having occupied Florence, the Pope was forced to realize that his refusal to allow them free passage through papal territory would be ignored. For the first time in his life he seemed utterly irresolute. He called in Neapolitan troops only to dismiss them; he brought his valuables, together with arms and ammunition, to Castel Sant' Angelo, yet at the same time considered flight. He repeated his refusal to allow the French free passage, then rescinded it.

The vanguard of King Charles's army entered Rome at about three o'clock in the afternoon of the last day of December 1494. The last troops did not pass through the Porta del Popolo until long after darkness had fallen. By flickering torchlight and the gleam of lanterns, the men and horses marched through the narrow streets, Swiss and German infantry in brightly coloured uniforms, carrying broadswords and long lances, Gascon archers, French knights, artillerymen with bronze cannon and culverins, and, surrounded by his bodyguard, the King himself, a short, ugly young man with a huge hooked nose and thick fleshy lips, constantly open. He dismounted at the Palazzo S. Marco from which Lorenzo Cibò, Archbishop of Benevento, hurried forth to meet him and to conduct him inside. He entered the dining-room and sat by the fire in his slippers while a servant combed his hair and the wispy, scattered strands of his reddish beard. Food was placed upon a table; a chamberlain tasted every dish before the King ate, the remains being thrown into a silver ewer; four physicians likewise tested the wine into which the chamberlain dangled a unicorn's horn on a golden chain before His Majesty raised it to his lips.

During the next few days, while the King visited the churches of Rome, while the Pope took shelter in Castel Sant' Angelo, and while three of his cardinals entered into negotiations with a French delegation, the occupying forces wreaked havoc in the city. Houses were occupied; banks attacked; palaces, including that of Vanozza Cattanei in the Piazza Branca, were ransacked. At length a treaty was concluded, and on 28 January 1495 Charles left Rome, having recognized Alexander as Pope but established himself for the moment as master of the Pope's domains. He was soon master, too, of Naples; and although a Holy League of Italian states was formed to expel him from the peninsula, when the mercenary troops of the League engaged him in battle on his homeward journey by the banks of the River Taro, they were unable to prevent his withdrawal with his plunder to France. Since he was left in possession of the field and had captured the French baggage train – which included a piece of the Holy Cross, a sacred thorn, a limb of St Denis, the Blessed Virgin's vest and a book depicting naked women ‘painted at various times and places… sketches of intercourse and lasciviousness in each city’ the Italian commander, the Marquis of Mantua, claimed the victory. But the French army, though battered and weary, was still a powerful force. Accompanied by mules – one to every two men – loaded with treasure, it moved north towards the Alps and reached France in safety. The Italians were shocked by the realization that for all their virtues, talents, wealth, past glory and experience, they had been unable to withstand the ruthless men from the north, just as Pope Alexander, so proud of his stamina and prone to comparing his strength to that of the bull in his family's coat of arms, had been unable to withstand the shock of meeting the French King. Recognizing the power of France in the little, short-sighted figure who limped towards him, his head and hands twitching, Alexander had fallen fainting to the ground.

As though to exacerbate the humiliations which the city and Italy had undergone, the Roman people had now to contend with other adversities. Syphilis, probably brought to Europe in 1494 either from Africa or the West Indies, or from America by Christopher Columbus's sailors, was spreading fast. French soldiers had contracted it in Naples, and called it the Neapolitan disease; Italians referred to it as the morbo gallico. In Rome it was so virulent that seventeen members of the Pope' family and court, including Cesare Borgia, had to be treated for it within a period of two months. With venereal disease came the worst inundation that the city had known for many years. In December 1495 the waters of the Tiber gushed through the streets, surging into churches and swirling round the walls of palaces that collapsed into the flood. A number of people were drowned, including the prisoners in the Tor di Nona.¹² The cost of the damage was incalculable.

The disaster was ascribed to the hand of God and interpreted as a punishment for the follies and corruption against which the ascetic and fervent Dominican friar, Girolamo Savonarola, was preaching so vehemently in Florence. Warning of even worse disasters to come, he condemned the Church as a satanic institution for the promotion of whoredom and vice, speaking of visions of plague and tempests, famine and catastrophe, and of a black cross, rising from Rome, inscribed with the words, ‘The Cross of God's Anger’. The Pope forbade Savonarola to preach, then, when he persisted, offered him a cardinal's hat, which was refused with the words that another sort of red hat would suit him better, ‘one red with blood’. Finally the Pope excommunicated him. But the attacks continued until the Florentines themselves took action against the inconvenient fanatic and had him tortured, hanged and burned.

Thereafter, the corruption of the Pope and of most of the cardinals, who owed their elevation to him, became more outrageous than ever. ‘The Pope is seventy years old,’ wrote Paolo Capello in September 1500. ‘He grows younger every day; his cares do not last a night; he is of cheerful temperament and does only what he likes; his sole thought is for the aggrandizement of his children; he troubles about nothing else.’ His adored daughter, Lucrezia, who was married to Alfonso of the proud house of Este, was entrusted with the care of the Vatican Palace and with papal affairs and correspondence while her father was absent. His son, Cesare, was indulged in every whim, granted titles and immense sums of money which were raised by the sale of offices, including cardinalates, to his relations and to such intimate friends as Adriano Castellesi da Corneto who built the fine palace in the Borgo later to be called the Palazzo Giraud-Torlonia.¹³ No favour was denied Cesare whose word became law in Rome: those who stood in his way were strangled, poisoned, thrown into the Tiber or into the dungeons of Castel Sant' Angelo, or, as in the case of a daring lampoonist, punished by the loss of a hand and his tongue, which were nailed together.

When Cesare's brother, Giovanni, who had been created Duke of Gandia, Prince of Tricario, Count of Claromonte Lauria and Carinola, and Duke of Benevento, disappeared in Rome, Cesare was immediately suspected of having killed him. A charcoal-dealer who lived beside the Ripetta¹⁴ was seized and questioned.

About one o'clock [he said], I saw two men come from the street on the left of the Slavonian Hospital to the Tiber, close to the fountain where people throw rubbish into the river. They looked round and then returned. Soon after two more appeared, looked round likewise and made a sign. Then came a man on a white horse, a dead body behind him, whose head and arms hung on one side, his feet on the other. He rode to the spot indicated, when his attendants with all their might threw the corpse into the river. The horseman asked: ‘Have you thrown him well in?’ They replied, ‘Yes, sir.’ He looked into the river, and the attendants, seeing the cloak of the dead floating on the surface, threw stones to make it sink.

Questioned as to why he had not informed the authorities, the charcoal-dealer replied, ‘In my time I have probably seen a hundred corpses thrown into the river at night and no one has ever troubled about them.’

The river was dragged by scores of fishermen and the body pulled ashore. The wrists were tied together and there was a deep wound in the neck as well as others in the head and thighs. The Pope was overwhelmed with grief. ‘I know the murderer,’ he declared, weeping in his room. ‘Had I seven papacies, I would relinquish them all for the life of my son.’ Announcing that he would henceforth think only of the reform of the Church, he appointed a commission of six cardinals to make recommendations towards that end. But when they did so, the Pope decided that nothing could be done which might diminish papal authority, and the inquiries into the murder were soon quietly dropped. The Duke of Gandia's precious furniture and jewels were consigned to Cesare's trust for the dead man's little heir.

Cesare Borgia may or may not have murdered his brother, but he certainly killed his brother-in-law, the Duke of Bisceglie, second husband of his sister, Lucrezia, for whom he had a more profitable marriage in mind. The Duke was stabbed on the steps of St Peter's on his way home from the Vatican, then strangled in his bed where he lay recovering from the wound. This was in September 1500, another Holy Year.

The pilgrims who came to Rome that year had no need to be told the stories with which this murder was embellished, nor those that surrounded the death of the Duke of Gandia and the stabbing by Cesare Borgia of the Pope's chamberlain whose blood was spattered in his master's face, to realize how right Savonarola had been to call Rome the ‘sink of iniquity’. Everywhere the evidence was there for them to see. Cardinals flaunted their riches in the piazza as openly as in their palaces, where banquets were held of a richness that would have been regarded extraordinary even on the tables of Lucullus. The Pope's daughter, gorgeously dressed and surrounded by scores of other women as flamboyant as herself, rode her bejewelled horse through the streets to the Vatican. The Pope's son, on the festival of S. Giovanni, sat on horseback on the steps of St Peter's, hurling lances at bulls, which had been collected for the purpose within a wooden enclosure, before advancing to one of the animals whose head he severed at a single stroke. The corpse of the physician to the Hospital of the Lateran – whose practice it had long been to shoot passers-by with arrows at dawn before robbing them, and to poison rich patients whose wealth had become known to the hospital's confessor – swung from a gallows on the battlements of Sant' Angelo next to the bodies of other hanged men.

Yet the pilgrims still offered money at the sacred shrines; indulgences were still bought with faith and hope; and the crowds still knelt in front of St Peter's – an estimated 200,000 on Easter Sunday – to receive the blessing of the Pope. And while there was much to condemn in Alexander, there were grounds, too, for gratitude. Andrea Bregno's splendid altar, now in the sacristy of S. Maria del Popolo, was commissioned by him; the area around Castel Sant' Angelo was transformed by him; the piazza in front of it was enlarged and paved; a street, the Via Alexandrina, now the Borgo Nuovo, was built to lead from it to the Vatican; the fortress itself was reconstructed inside and given a far more imposing external appearance. The Vatican Palace was also enhanced for all future generations by the work Pope Alexander commissioned for his new Borgia Tower, the decorations by Bernardino Pinturicchio and his assistants of the rooms, among them the Sala del Credo and the Sala delle Sibille, in the Borgia Apartment.¹⁵

A year before this work was finished in 1495, an artist of genius came to live in Rome. Although he was over fifty and had already executed several distinguished designs in Milan where he had collaborated with Leonardo da Vinci, his first four years in the city where he was to spend the rest of his life were passed in tireless study, examining and measuring the classical monuments of the city, preparing himself for the days when he should make himself known to the world as Donato Bramante, innovator and master of the High Renaissance style of architecture which was to spread from Rome throughout Europe.

NINE PATRONS AND PARASITES

Three years after the body of Pope Alexander VI, already decomposing in the August heat, had been carried out of the Vatican, Giuliano della Rovere, who had detested his predecessor, that ‘Spaniard of accursed memory’, led a procession to St Peter's basilica as Pope Julius II. Accompanied by cardinals, prelates and dignitaries of the Curia, he walked behind the Cross to a wide hole, twenty-five feet deep, to lay the white marble foundation stone of the new building which was to rise above the crumbling structure of the old. He climbed down into the hole, around the edges of which the spectators crowded, kicking earth over his mitre so that he called out crossly to them to move back. There he was handed an earthenware vase containing gold and bronze medals on one side of which was stamped his own likeness and on the other a representation of the intended church with domes and towers and portico. The vase was placed in a small cavity beneath the stone on which was inscribed: ‘Pope Julius II of Liguria in the year 1506 restored this basilica which had fallen into decay.’ The Pope then scrambled out hastily, leaving the stone slightly askew, evidently concerned that the sides of the hole might collapse before he had reached the safety of the pavement.

It was a rare display of anxiety. The Pope was a tall, thin, good-looking man, rough and irascible, talkative, restless and overbearing. He had a fiercely commanding expression and a very quick temper. He always carried a stick with which he would strike irritating subordinates, and he would hurl anything at hand, including his spectacles, at messengers who brought him unwelcome news. He had had many mistresses in the past, from one of whom he had contracted syphilis, and as a cardinal had fathered three daughters. But his sensual appetites had since then been concentrated on Greek and Corsican wine and on good food, in particular caviar, prawns and sucking pig. ‘No one has any influence over him, and he consults few or none,’ the Venetian ambassador reported. ‘Anything that he has been thinking about during the night has to be carried out immediately… It is almost impossible to describe how strong and violent and difficult to manage he is… Everything about him is on a magnificent scale, both his undertakings and his passions.’

The grandson of a poor fisherman, he often spoke of the poverty of his childhood and was proud to claim that he was ‘no schoolman’. He sometimes said that he ought to have been a soldier; and certainly when he personally led his armies out of Rome to compel the obedience of rebel cities in the Papal States and to recover lost territories for the Church, he displayed a taste for hard campaigning that dismayed the less robust cardinals whom he obliged to accompany him. Unwilling to rely upon capricious and often irresolute mercenaries, he decided to form a professional papal army; and this decision led in 1506 to the creation of the Swiss Guards who remained a fighting force until 1825 when they became a smaller domestic bodyguard, though still retaining their old uniform of slashed doublets, striped hose and rakish berrette as well as their pikes and halberds.

Strong-willed, purposeful and resolute, Pope Julius was as determined to recreate in Rome a monument worthy of the everlasting glory of the Church as he was to re-establish the Church's rule in the Papal States and to restore the temporal power of the papacy which he believed to be essential to its authority. This monument to papal prestige was to be the new Church of St Peter's whose foundation stone he had laid on that Low Sunday in the spring of 1506.

His immediate predecessors had merely tinkered with the old basilica. Nicholas V, after restoring much of the decaying fabric, parts of which, so he was warned by Leon Battista Alberti, were in danger of collapsing, had come to realize that it was really past repair. He commissioned designs for a new building fro m the Florentine sculptor, Bernardo Rossellino, who was probably advised by Alberti. But work had not progressed far by the time of Nicholas's death; and it had not seriously been resumed by Calixtus III, who was more concerned with the Turkish menace than the arts of the Renaissance. Patching and minor improvements, rather than complete rebuilding, had been the policy of Pius II and Paul II as well as of Sixtus IV, all of whom recoiled from the momentous undertaking that so much appealed to Pope Julius's taste for the grand, irrevocable gesture.

His decision was regarded in Rome with deep misgiving by cardinals and citizens alike. It was tantamount to sacrilege, they protested, to destroy a sacred basilica, more than a thousand years old, a holy place venerated, generation after generation, since the very dawn of Christianity. Around the pedestal of the antique and mutilated statue of Menelaus known as Pasquino¹ were displayed innumerable protests about the Pope's decision. But Julius was undeterred. He had made up his mind, and nothing would alter it. He considered Rossellino's design, and rejected it as too old-fashioned; he considered, with more sympathy, another plan proposed by Giuliano da Sangallo, but this too he thought insufficiently ambitious. And so, for an edifice which, as he put it, would ‘embody the greatness of the present and the future’, he turned to Bramante who had already displayed his exceptional gifts in the design of the enchanting Tempietto in the cloister of S. Pietro in Montorio.²

Encouraged by the Pope, Bramante set to work with a will, directing hundreds of workmen in demolishing the decaying walls of Constantine's basilica and discarding everything inside it for which he had no use, statues and mosaics, candelabra and icons, tombs and altars, earning himself the title of ‘il ruinante’. Load after load of Carrara marble and that volcanic ash known as pozzolana were carted on to the site, together with travertine from Tivoli and lime from Montecelio. One day the Pope came to watch the work in progress and remarked proudly to a foreign envoy to whom he introduced his architect, ‘Bramante tells me he has 2,500 men on this job. One could hold a review of such an army.’

The cost mounted month by month. By the beginning of 1513 well over 70,000 gold ducats had been spent. But money was not an acute problem, even though the municipality of Rome had to be supported, the poor of the city cared for, the military forces of the papacy paid and its architectural heritage constantly sustained. The papacy was receiving a good share of the riches being derived from the discovery of America; numerous indulgences were being granted; loans were being raised from, among others, the astonishingly rich banker, Agostino Chigi, who retained as security the papal tiara which he kept in his counting-house behind the Arco dei Banchi³ in the Via del Banco di S. Spirito;⁴ and gifts were being solicited from all over Europe. The King of England sent tin for the roof and was rewarded with wine and Parmesan cheese.

Money was needed not only for St Peter's. Pope Julius had spent and continued to spend huge sums on the Vatican Palace where an extensive and lovely garden, the first great Roman pleasure-garden since the time of the Caesars, was laid out beneath its walls, and where the Cortile del Belvedere was formed between the Vatican offices and the formerly isolated Palazzetto del Belvedere which was itself converted into a sculpture gallery.⁵ To this gallery were carried the Pope's two masterpieces of classical sculpture, the Apollo del Belvedere⁶ which had formerly stood in the garden of his cardinalate mansion beside the church of S. Pietro in Vincoli, and the Laocon which had been discovered in January 1506 by a man digging in his vineyard near the Baths of Trajan.⁷ The Pope had immediately sent Giuliano da Sangallo to inspect this. And as Giuliano's son, then nine years old, had recorded, ‘We set off together, I on my father's shoulders. As soon as my father saw the statue, he exclaimed, “This is the Laocon mentioned by Pliny.” The opening had to be enlarged to get the statue out.’ There were, of course, many rich collectors anxious to acquire it. But Julius managed to obtain it by promising the finder and his son a large annuity. The statue was carried through streets bedecked with flowers to the peal of church bells and the singing of the choir of the Cappella Giulia which the Pope himself, a lover of music as well as of sculpture, had founded.

While money was being lavished upon the Vatican Palace and St Peter's, work was continuing on the widening and restoring of Rome's streets. The Via delle Botteghe Oscure, the Street of the Dark Shops, the Via S. Celso, the Lungara and the Judaeorum were all transformed, as was the Via Magistralis which became, and remains, the Via Giulia, one of Rome's most handsome thoroughfares. The Pope also expended immense sums on the church of S. Maria del Popolo which was decorated by several of those artists whom his largesse drew to Rome and in which Julius placed the magnificent tombs of Cardinals Girolamo Basso della Rovere and Ascanio Sforza, designed for him by Andrea Sansovino.⁸

The erection of a fine marble tomb for himself had long been one of the Pope's most cherished ambitions. As a first step in its realization he sent for a young sculptor from Florence, Michelangelo Buonarroti. The son of a poor Tuscan magistrate of aristocratic stock, Michelangelo was a gloomy, laconic young man of twenty-nine, self-absorbed, quarrelsome and quickly offended. The Pope found him an infinitely more difficult artist to deal with than the amenable Bramante and the sweet-natured, charmingly polite and unobtrusive Raffaello Sanzio who was also working for him in the Vatican on the rooms to be known as the Raphael Stanze.⁹ But Michelangelo was already recognized as a genius of astounding power and versatility, and it was inconceivable that the Pope, one of the most enlightened and discriminating patrons that Rome had ever known, should not wish to employ him.

At first all went well. Michelangelo was paid a hundred crowns for the expenses of his journey to Rome where the Pope was delighted with the designs that were shown to him. He asked the sculptor to go to the quarries in the mountains of Carrara; and here Michelangelo spent eight months choosing and helping to excavate the blocks of marble, weighing in all over a hundred tons, for a monument which promised to surpass ‘every ancient or imperial tomb ever made’.

After he had chosen all the marble that was wanted [so his fellow-Tuscan and contemporary, Giorgio Vasari, recorded], he had it loaded on board ship and taken to Rome, where the blocks filled half the square of St Peter's… In the castle [Castel Sant’ Angelo] Michelangelo had prepared his room for executing the figures and the rest of the tomb; and so that he could come and see him at work without any bother the Pope had ordered a drawbridge to be built from the corridor to the room. This led to great intimacy between them, although in time the favours Michelangelo was shown… stirred up much envy among his fellow craftsmen.

The easy intimacy between the Pope and Michelangelo did not last long, however. The sculptor did not like being watched at work, normally choosing to have his studio locked; nor did he like being asked questions about his probable rate of progress. Touchy and irritable, he began to resent what he took to be his patron's bossy interference, and was then offended by the casually offhand manner in which his request for interviews and money were refused by the papal officials. After one such rebuff, Michelangelo lost his temper, told his servants to sell all the contents of his studio and rode out of the city to Florence. He was eventually persuaded to return to the Pope's service, but not to work on the tomb as he had hoped. First of all, though he protested it was ‘not his kind of art’, he was required to make a monumental bronze statue of Julius fourteen feet high, which was to be erected on the façade of the Church of S. Petronio in Bologna and, after a revolution some years later, was melted down for a cannon by the Pope's enemy, the Duke of Ferrara. He was then asked to undertake a task for which he felt even more ill qualified, the painting of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. ‘He tried in every possible way to shake the burden off his shoulders,’ Vasari said. ‘But the more he refused, the more determined he made the Pope, who was a wilful man by nature… Finally, being the hot-tempered man he was, he was all ready to fly into a rage. However, seeing His Holiness was so persevering Michelangelo resigned himself to doing what he was asked.’ He was given an advance payment of 500 ducats and began work on 10 May 1508.

Immediately he regretted that he had given way. There was trouble over the scaffolding which Bramante constructed for him: initially it hung down from the ceiling on ropes but Michelangelo wanted it supported by props from the floor. There was trouble with his assistants whom he had sent for from Florence and whom he considered so incompetent that he scraped off everything they had done and decided to paint the whole area, all ten thousand square feet of it, himself. He locked the chapel door, refusing admittance to his fellow-artists and to everyone else, thus provoking another quarrel with the Pope who was himself told to go away. And then there was trouble with a salty mould which, when the north wind blew, appeared on many areas of the ceiling and so discouraged Michelangelo that he despaired of the whole undertaking and was reluctant to go on until Giuliano da Sangallo showed him how to deal with it.

The labour was physically as well as emotionally exhausting. He had to paint standing, looking upwards for such long periods that his neck became stiff and swollen; he could not straighten it when he climbed down from the scaffold and had to read letters holding them up with his head bent backwards. In hot weather it was stiflingly hot and the plaster dust irritated his skin; in all weathers the paint dripped down upon his face, his hair and his beard. ‘The place is wrong, and no painter I,’ he lamented in a sonnet he wrote describing his exhausting work. ‘My painting all the day doth drop a rich mosaic on my face.’ ‘I live in great toil and weariness of body,’ he wrote to his brother. ‘I have no friends… and don't want any, and haven't the time to eat what I need.’

He was plagued by his patron who insisted upon being let into the chapel to see what he was paying for. The Pope kept asking when it would be finished, as he clambered up the scaffold with his stick, impatient to have the chapel opened before he died. ‘How much longer will it take?’

‘When it satisfies me as an artist,’ Michelangelo replied on one occasion, eliciting from Julius the angry reply, ‘And we want you to satisfy us, and finish it soon.’

Later Michelangelo refused to commit himself further than to say he would finish it when he could. ‘When I can! When I can!’ the Pope, infuriated, shouted back at him. ‘What do you mean? When I can. I'll soon make you finish it!’ He hit him with his stick, then threatened to hurl him off the scaffold if he did not get on more quickly. After these outbursts came apologies. The Pope's chamberlain would call at Michelangelo's house with presents of money, with excuses and apologies, ‘explaining that such treatment was meant as a favour and a mark of affection’.

At last, after nearly four years' work, the scaffolding was removed. But the artist was still not satisfied; there were touches that he wanted to add, backgrounds and draperies he wanted to enliven with ultramarine, details to enrich with gold. But the Pope would wait no longer. Even before the dust had settled after the dismantling of the scaffolding, he rushed into the chapel to look at the astonishing achievement of more than three hundred figures, many of them painted three and even four times life-size. On the morning of 31 October 1512 he celebrated Mass inside the chapel and afterwards, in Vasari's words, the whole of Rome ‘came running to see what Michelangelo had done; and certainly it was such as to make everyone speechless with astonishment’.

Now over seventy and in the last year of his life, the Pope thought once more of his uncompleted tomb to which Michelangelo returned ‘most eagerly’. And, although the tomb never was finished as originally intended, out of its grand conception came one masterpiece that can still be seen in Rome, the vibrant statue of Moses in S. Pietro in Vincoli.¹⁰

News of the death of Pope Julius II on 20 February 1513 was received in Rome with the utmost sorrow. Women were seen weeping in the streets as they waited their turn to kiss the pontifical feet which were left protruding from the grille of the mortuary chapel; men told each other that they would not live to see another pope who was at once so staunch a patriot and so munificent a patron. The city was thronged with mourning crowds so numerous that the dead man's Master of Ceremonies had never known the like in forty years’ residence in the city. ‘All knew him to be a true Roman pontiff,’ declared the Florentine statesman and historian, Francesco Guicciardini. ‘Although full of fury and extravagant conceptions, he was lamented above all his predecessors and… held in illustrious remembrance’.

Yet sorrowful as the Romans were that winter, the election of Giovanni de' Medici, son of the great Lorenzo, as Pope Leo X, was greeted with an enthusiasm as extravagant as their recent grief. Delighting in pageantry, the new Pope took pains to ensure that the Sacro Possesso, the formal entry into the Vatican, was as splendid an occasion as money and the ingenuity of the Master of Ceremonies could provide. Every house on the route of the procession was bedecked with wreaths of laurel and ilex, with rich brocades and velvet draperies; the streets were strewn with box and myrtle; ornate inscriptions in Latin welcomed and glorified the new Pope, son of a Roman mother, Clarice Orsini, greeting him as the ‘Paragon of the Church’ and ‘Ambassador of Heaven’. Altars had been set up at several corners; heraldic devices and Medici and Orsini emblems were displayed on rooftops and over doorways; fountains ran with wine instead of water. Triumphal arches, erected by rich merchants and bankers seeming to vie with one another in opulence and inventiveness, spanned the streets and contained in their niches effigies of Christian martyrs in close proximity to antique statues of pagan gods; and, in the arch erected by Agostino Chigi, there were real people dressed as gods.

The procession left the piazza in front of the Vatican, led by men-at-arms. There followed scarlet-clad members of the cardinals’ households and of the prelates of the papal court; standard bearers; mounted captains of the rioni; milk white mules from the Papal States; equerries in red robes fringed with ermine, bearing papal crowns and jewelled mitres; Roman noblemen with escorts of liveried attendants, among them the heads of the Orsini and Colonna families walking side by side and hand in hand; merchant princes of Florence, several of them related to the Pope; foreign ambassadors and their suites; pages with silver wands, escorting a palfrey on which was carried the Holy Sacrament beneath a canopy of cloth of gold; priests, clerks, lawyers in black and violet; bishops and cardinals on horses with trailing white draperies; and, last of all, men of the Swiss Guard in their parti-coloured uniforms, armed with halberds, marching before His Holiness who, astride a white Arab stallion, was shaded from the sun by a baldacchino of embroidered silk carried by eight Roman citizens of patrician rank.

The figure of the Pope was scarcely equal to the magnificence of his escort. Excessively fat and flabby, he looked much older than his thirty-seven years. His mouth hung open; his face was almost purple in the heat; the sweat ran down his short neck and the folds of his chin. He appeared to be sinking under the weight of his jewelled cope and his triple tiara as he rode along, unconcernedly breaking wind. Yet he found the energy to smile with benign satisfaction upon the people who lined the way, to nod complacently when an attendant read out some flattering inscription which his own purblind eyes could not discern; to raise his plump hands, encased in perfumed gloves sewn with pearls, to bestow the papal benediction. He murmured a few words of pleasant encouragement when his chamberlains threw out handfuls of silver coins from their capacious money-bags. Indeed, his geniality and obvious enjoyment of the spectacle, his pride and exalted contentment were disarming. The people renewed their shouts of welcome: ‘Leone! Leone! Leone!’

At the Ponte Sant’ Angelo the Jews, as custom required, were assembled to request permission to continue living in Rome and, in the person of the Rabbi, to offer a copy of their Law. The Pope allowed the volume to fall to the ground as he uttered the prescribed words rejecting their faith, but it was noticed that as he confirmed their privileges there was only the slightest diminution of his graciousness.

Having traversed the Via Papale and reached the statue of Marcus Aurelius which then still stood outside the Lateran, the Pope dismounted and entered the hall of the palace, exhausted but evidently well prepared to do justice to an ample and delicious banquet.

‘In thinking over all the pomp and lofty magnificence I had just witnessed,’ mused a Florentine physician who recorded every detail of that splendid Possesso, ‘I experienced so violent a desire to become Pope myself that I was unable to obtain a wink of sleep or any repose all that night. No longer do I marvel at these prelates desiring so ardently to procure this dignity. I really believe that everyone would rather be made a Pope than a Prince.’

Inside the Lateran the Pope was relishing his meal with all the enthusiasm, though less of the gross appetite, that he had displayed for good food and drink ever since, at his father's urgent insistence, he had been created a cardinal at the age of sixteen. He is reported to have murmured to his brother Giuliano soon after his election, ‘God has given us the papacy. Let us enjoy it.’

Enjoy it he certainly did, and at prodigious cost. It was estimated that within a single year, despite his creation of no less than 1,200 offices for sale, his disposal of bishoprics and abbeys and his lavish creation of expensive cardinalates, he had spent not only all the savings of his predecessor but also the entire revenues of himself and his successor. ‘He could no more save a thousand ducats,’ so Macchiavelli's friend, Francesco Vettori, thought, ‘than a stone could fly through the air.’ Although soon deeply in debt to almost every banking-house in Rome, some of which charged him interest at 40 per cent, he made not the slightest attempt to economize in any way, raising the number of the papal household to 683, continuing to bestow purses of gold upon guests who sang with him and to squander money at the gaming-table where he would cheerfully pay his losses at the simple game of primiero without demur and throw the winnings over his shoulder. He paid enormous sums for French hounds and Icelandic falcons and for the preservation of whole districts of the Campagna where he abandoned himself to the pleasures of hawking and hunting, to the slaughter of penned animals, some of which, entangled in nets, Leo himself would kill, holding a spear in his right hand and a glass to his weak left eye, complacently acknowledging the congratulations of his attendants.

Wagonloads of carcasses were brought back to Rome where scores of chefs prepared them for the Pope's tables to accompany the delicacies and surprises, the peacocks' tongues and lampreys cooked in cloves and nuts in a Cretan wine sauce, the pies of nightingales. And the bankers and merchants, the prelates and nobles of Rome rivalled the Pope and each other in the sumptuousness of their banquets.

The meal was exquisite [wrote the Venetian ambassador of a characteristic dinner at the palace of Cardinal Cornaro]. There was an endless succession of dishes, for we had sixty-five courses, each course consisting of three different dishes, all of which were placed on the table with marvellous speed. Scarcely had we finished one delicacy than a fresh plate was set before us, and yet everything was served on the finest of silver of which his Eminence has an abundant supply. At the end of the meal we rose from the table both gorged with rich food and deafened by the continual concert, carried on both within and without the hall and proceeding from every instrument that Rome could produce – fifes, harpsichords and four-stringed lutes as well as the voices of a choir.

Banquets at the riverside palace of Agostino Chigi, whose bathroom fittings were all of silver and gold, were even more pretentious. This inordinately rich banker was said to have had his servants cast the silver dishes upon which each course of dinner had been served into the Tiber in a gesture indicative of his indifference to such trifles, though it was also said that he had taken the precaution of having a net placed beneath the surface of the water so that they could be dragged out again at night. He had also given a dinner at which the food was served on plates engraved with the armorial bearings of his guests, and at which the walls of the banqueting hall were covered with the finest tapestries. At the end of the meal the Pope, as honoured guest, congratulated his host on the excellence of the food and the magnificence of the setting. Chigi then gave a signal for the cords supporting the arras to be released. The tapestries fell to the floor, revealing empty stalls and mangers. ‘Your Holiness!’ he said, ‘this is not my banqueting hall. It is merely my stable.’

The Pope's own table was renowned for its entertainments, for the antics of jesters, of dwarfs and buffoons, of the vulgarly witty Dominican friar, Fra Mariano Fetti, who could eat forty eggs or twenty chickens at a sitting and pretended to enjoy ravens complete with feathers and beaks, of half-starved morons who gobbled up carrion covered with strong sauce in the fancy that they were being privileged to consume a papal delicacy.

The most successful of all Pope Leo's practical jokes was deemed to be that played upon one Baraballo, an old priest who was persuaded to believe that his absurd attempts at verse demanded comparison with the great poems of Petrarch and that he, too, was worthy of being crowned with laurel on the Capitol to which he would be granted the honour of riding on a white elephant which had recently been presented to the Pope by the King of Portugal and was now housed in the Belvedere. On the appointed day the windows of the Vatican were crowded with smiling faces as the poor, deluded priest walked forth in scarlet toga fringed with gold to be lifted into an ornately decorated howdah. ‘I could never have believed in such an incident if I had not seen it myself and actually laughed at it,’ wrote Paolo Giovio, the Pope's biographer: ‘the spectacle of an old man of sixty bearing an honoured name, stately and venerable in appearance, hoary-headed, riding upon an elephant to the sound of trumpets.’

Yet the Pope who took such pleasure in this kind of farce, who enjoyed bullfights and who would sit for hours myopically watching cardinals and their ladies dancing at masked balls, was by no means entirely occupied with trivialities. Certainly he preferred broad comedies and more or less indecent farces to the more serious dramatic performances which were also staged in his palace; and certainly he was indiscriminate in his literary and musical patronage, being as inclined to reward the most frivolous poetaster or satirist as he was to grant his patronage to such leading writers as Ariosto and Guicciardini, while virtually disregarding the claims of Erasmus. ‘It is difficult to judge,’ remarked Pietro Aretino who had cause to be grateful for the Pope's open-handedness, ‘whether the merits of the learned or the tricks of fools afforded most delight to His Holiness.’ But, even though his own tastes were questionable, the Pope was an estimable patron all the same. He brought the most accomplished European choristers to the Sistine Chapel; he conferred considerable benefits upon the Sapienza, increasing the number of professors and the range of faculties; he granted his protection to the Roman Academy and positively encouraged the study of Latin and Greek, offering his friendship to Marco Girolamo Vida as well as Ariosto, bringing Giano Ascaris to Rome and suggesting that he should edit the Greek manuscripts in his possession, and inviting Markos Musuros to come to the city with at least ten young men to teach Italians the Greek language. He also brought his extensive and valuable family library from Florence to Rome where, until it was returned by his cousin for the Biblioteca Laurenziana, it was made freely available to those scholars and writers who were offered numerous inducements to come to Rome to fulfil the Pope's ambition of making it the most cultured city in the western world.

Pope Leo was anxious to play his part in making it a most beautiful city, too. He commissioned Sansovino to design the church of S. Giovanni dei Fiorentini¹¹ in the Piazza dell' Oro, then the centre of the Florentine colony in Rome. He built the Via Ripetta to provide a new way out of the congested old town towards the Piazza del Popolo.¹² He restored the church of S. Maria in Domnica, providing it with its splendid porticoed façade which is attributed to Baldassare Peruzzi. He found money to continue the reconstruction of St Peter's and the decoration by Raphael of the Vatican Palace, commissioning from Raphael cartoons for ten tapestries to hang on the walls of the Sistine Chapel.

He could not, however, bring himself to tolerate the disturbing presence of Michelangelo. He claimed to have the deepest affection for him and would even tearfully tell stories of their childhood together in the Medici Palace in Florence where, as Vasari said, the young Michelangelo, whose gifts had been recognized by the Pope's father, had lived as one of the household. But the Pope, while recognizing his genius, did not really get on with Michelangelo. ‘He is an alarming man,’ he said, ‘and there is no getting on with him.’ He persuaded him to turn to architecture and to go back to Florence where a new façade was required for Brunelleschi's Church of S. Lorenzo.

Michelangelo was kept at work in Florence by Pope Leo's cousin, Giulio de' Medici, who succeeded to the papal throne after the short and uneventful intervening reign of the obscure and parsimonious ascetic, the Flemish Adrian VI, who spent more time in prayer and private study than on the problems of the Church. As a young, rich cardinal, the new Pope, who took the title Clement VII, had lived in Rome in the Palazzo della Cancelleria which had been confiscated from Cardinal Raffaele Riario because of his involvement in a plot against Pope Leo X. Tall and handsome with black hair, sallow complexion and deep brown eyes, one of which had a slight squint, Giulio de' Medici bore no resemblance to his cousin. Nor did his manner cold, aloof and dismissive give grounds for hope that he would be as generous and hospitable. In an unflattering, though not unjust sketch of his character, Francesco Guicciardini described him as ‘rather morose and disagreeable than of a pleasant and affable temper; by no means trustworthy and naturally disinclined to do a kindness; very grave and cautious in all his actions; perfectly self-controlled and of great capacity, if timidity did not sometimes warp his better judgement’. Yet, saturnine as he appeared and reserved as he undoubtedly was, he had proved himself a most bountiful as well as discriminating patron of artists and musicians. He was a liberal contributor to all kinds of charitable causes, as his cousin had been, and a generous, though not ostentatious host. By nature disinclined to be either gregarious or open-handed, he was well aware of the advantages of hospitality and munificence; and when he became Pope, after the exchange of numerous bribes during the longest conclave in human memory, he continued to lavish invitations upon the influential and commissions upon the talented. He brought to a successful conclusion an ambitious scheme for cleaning and improving the streets of Rome, taking a particular interest in the Via Trionfale, the Flamina, the Via Lata which led from the Piazza del Popolo to the Piazza Venezia and the streets around Piazza Navona.¹³ And he continued to employ Raphael in Rome and asked him to design a villa, later to be known as the Villa Madama, on the cypress-covered slopes of Monte Mario above the bend of the Tiber at the Ponte Molle.¹⁴ He brought Raphael's favourite pupils, Giulio Romano and Gian Francesco Penni, to work in the Vatican. He encouraged the Polish astronomer, Nicolaus Koppernigk, known as Copernicus, in his controversial researches, attending his lectures when he came to Rome and requesting him to publish his findings. And he bought several works of art from the vain and cantankerous Benvenuto Cellini.

But the Pope had little time to spare for the contemplation of the works he commissioned or, indeed, for the musical evenings and the theological and philosophical discussions that he had enjoyed as a cardinal, since foreign affairs and the growing schism in the Church preoccupied his waking hours. His cousin had tried to dismiss from his mind all thoughts of German demands for reform in the Church, hoping that the problems would eventually resolve themselves in the pettifogging arguments of German monks. But there was one tiresome Augustinian friar in particular who would not be satisfied.

TEN THE SACK OF ROME

Martin Luther had come to Rome in 1510 on business for his Order. Shocked by what he saw, he was confirmed in his belief that the Church must be radically reformed. The city itself disappointed him: it was hard to recognize ‘the footprints of ancient Rome, as the old buildings were now buried beneath the new, so deep lieth the rubbish, as is plain to see by the Tiber, since it hath banks of rubbish as high as twice the length of a soldier's spear’. He found the Renaissance atmosphere of the city thoroughly distasteful. He loathed Aristotle, yet here men considered him almost on a par with the Fathers of the Church; and they seemed to consider such ornamentations as those in Raphael's Stanze, in which Christian and pagan themes mingled in outrageous harmony, as worthy of regard and study as Holy Writ. They equated beauty with goodness; they supposed the pursuit of happiness on earth could be reconciled with the hope of eternal salvation. While the Pope went ‘triumphing about with fair-decked stallions, priests gabbled Mass’. ‘By the time I had reached the gospel,’ Luther complained, ‘the priest next to me had already finished and was shouting, “Come on, finish it, hurry up!”’ He had been thankful to return to Germany.

Pope Leo had eventually excommunicated Luther and had hoped that the supremely powerful Emperor Charles V, who was also King of Spain and Naples as well as ruler of the Netherlands, would, as a good Roman Catholic, bring the heretic to trial and have him executed. Although there would have been strong opposition in Germany to such a drastic move against the Reformation, the Emperor was prepared to act against Luther provided he obtained something in exchange: he asked for the support of the papacy in his intended attack against France's remaining possessions in Italy, including Milan which King Francis I had seized in 1515. A bargain was struck. The Emperor's army marched against the forces of Francis I, Milan was occupied and the French were obliged to retreat towards the Alps. The French King, however, had never supposed that once papal affairs were in the hands of the suspicious and hesitant Medici, Clement VII, the understanding between the papacy and the Emperor would remain secure; and he was right. After repeated changes in his vacillating and convoluted policies, the Pope did decide to ally himself with France; but this naturally antagonized Charles V who, having defeated the French once more, took action to forestall the threatened anti-imperial league.

As a first step he instructed his envoy, Ugo di Moncada, to approach the unruly Cardinal Pompeo Colonna, who had vociferously opposed Clement VII's election in the hope of becoming pope himself. Colonna was easily persuaded to raise a strong force of mercenaries and retainers, to march through the Borgo and to attack and pillage the apostolic palace as a self-styled deliverer of Rome from papal tyranny. Driven to seek safety by flight into Castel Sant’ Angelo, Pope Clement was further humiliated by being compelled to sign a treaty abandoning the anti-imperial alliance and pardoning Colonna. But as soon as he could, he broke the treaty, sent papal troops to ravage the Colonna estates, declared the family outlaws and all their titles forfeit. In a rage so intense that he trembled at the very mention of Pope Clement's name, Cardinal Colonna offered the services of all the men he could muster to Charles V's viceroy at Naples.

These were not the only enemies that Clement's faithless and irresolute policies had raised up against the papacy. For a huge army of German Landsknechte, mostly Lutherans, assembled by the Emperor's brother, Ferdinand of Austria, had marched across the Alps, declaring their determination to wreak vengeance upon the Roman anti-Christ. Led by the fat old veteran, Georg von Frundsberg, and undeterred by torrential rain and blinding snowstorms, they advanced into Lombardy, and defeated and killed the skilful condottiere, Giovanni delle Bande Nere, head of the junior branch of the House of Medici. Joined in February 1527 at Piacenza by the main body of the Emperor's army of Spaniards, Italians and an international force of lancers under the renegade Constable of France, Charles, Duke of Bourbon, the German Landsknechte converged upon Rome.

Warned by his secretary, Gian-Matteo Giberti, that they were ‘on the brink of ruin’, the Pope tried to come to terms with the commanders of the advancing armies, now well over 20,000 strong. The prospect of a large indemnity tempted them; but the Landsknechte refused to be denied the opportunities of pillage. They rounded upon their leaders, shouting that they would not go back until they had had their way with Rome; and in the tumultuous uproar Georg von Frundsberg was seized with a fit of apoplexy and had to be carried off helpless to Ferrara. The march then continued under the nervous direction of the Duke of Bourbon who was as much the servant as the master of the undisciplined, heterogeneous forces he commanded. These forces, half-starved, their ragged uniforms soaked by torrents of rain and the swirling waters of the mountain streams through which they stumbled, holding hands in gangs of thirty, drew ever nearer to Rome, excited by thoughts of plunder.

Rome was certainly an easy prey to any large band of marauders. The sprawling walls, constantly repaired but never now formidable, still enclosed the huge area occupied by the capital of the ancient Empire. Unlike other large early-sixteenth-century towns in Italy, within the city walls were vineyards and gardens, waste grounds and thickets in which deer and wild boar sought shelter, villas and shapeless ruins covered with ivy and eglantine from whose dense foliage pigeons clattered out in their hundreds. The wooded hills of the Palatine, the Caelian and the Aventine were dotted with farmhouses and convents and with those crumbling monuments that had served as quarries for many generations. West of the immense bulk of the Colosseum sprawled the long, marshy, scrub-covered expanse of the Campo Vaccino with only a few columns of antique temples to indicate that this cowherds' pastureland had once been the classic Forum. The Capitol, bristling with towers and battlements, and the fortified ruins in the valley below were awesome reminders of the lawlessness and family feuds of the recent medieval past. Indeed, Rome was still essentially a medieval city. Since the dawn of the Renaissance many fine new churches had been built in Rome, among them S. Maria del Popolo, S. Agostino, as well as S. Giovanni dei Fiorentini and S. Pietro in Montorio. Splendid new palaces and villas had been built in the city too, apart from the Palazzo della Cancelleria, the Venezia, the Farnese and the Villa Madama. In the Borgo were the Palazzo Soderini, the Penitenzieri¹ and the Palazzo Castelli (Giraud-Torlonia). Across the river in the Ponte Rione were the Palazzo Lante ai Caprettari,² the Palazzo Cicciaporci³ and the Palazzo Cenci.⁴ In the nearby district of Parione were the palaces of the Massimi.⁵ And in the area, at that time open, between the Porta S. Spirito which led into the Borgo and the Porta Settimiana which was the entrance into Trastevere, Baldassare Peruzzi had built a splendid villa for Agostino Chigi.⁶

Yet the Rome which lay between the Corso and the Tiber and in the transpontine quarter of Trastevere, the Rome in which most of its people still lived, was the Rome of the Middle Ages, a Rome of alleys and dark lanes, a maze of courts and passages with the occasional church and fortress rising above the little houses that crowded down to the river where they overhung the muddy waters and could be entered by boat.

In this part of Rome, and in the Ponte Rione where could be found the houses of the bankers and merchants, jewellers and silversmiths, booksellers and courtesans, lived and worked most of the fifty to sixty thousand people of Rome. A large proportion of these inhabitants were foreigners, many of them Jews living in the rioni of Regola, Ripa and Sant’ Angelo; about seven thousand of them were Spaniards; and some were French, several of these congregating in the streets leading off Piazza Navona where they carried on business as pastrycooks and confectioners. There was also a numerous German community working in inns and butchers’ shops and in the printing industry which had been originated in Rome by their fellow-countrymen in the previous century.

Foreigners and natives alike were mostly occupied in making or supplying the ordinary needs of life; few were now craftsmen. Many, about three in every hundred, lived by prostitution, either by the arts and skills of a courtesan such as the lovely Clarice Matrema-non-Vuole who could recite by heart all Petrarch and most of Virgil and Ovid, or by the earthier charms of girls like the one who gave Benvenuto Cellini syphilis.

The cosmopolitan nature of Rome's population added to the problems of the city's defence. Many citizens believed that they might just as well be ruled by the international Emperor as by the Italian Pope who had, in any case, made himself extremely unpopular by the financial measures which his circumstances had forced upon him. Indeed, the caporioni had such difficulty in persuading the able-bodied men of their districts to turn out in obedience to the tapping of the drum that only six out of the thirteen rioni could produce a muster at all; and many of those on parade were of doubtful use, the most trustworthy having already been appropriated for the protection of private property. Even to close the bridges proved an impossible task, for Renzo da Ceri, the experienced condottiere appointed to lead the defence, was prevented from doing so by Roman people whose business interests required them to be left open.

The Pope seemed as paralysed by indecision as the Roman people were indifferent to his fate. The imperialist army was almost within sight of the gates before he asked for financial help from the Commune – and was told that he could have it only if he raised twice as much elsewhere. It was not until a week after this that he raised money himself by selling cardinalates to six rich men – and making more fuss over this, so Francesco Guicciardini, his lieutenant-general, said, ‘than over ruining the papacy and the whole world’. And it was not until 4 May, when the enemy were advancing up Monte Mario and his villa there was being taken over for officers' quarters, that he summoned the Great Council of Rome to a meeting in the Church of S. Maria d'Aracoeli where he assured them unconvincingly that the crisis would be over in a few days but that in the meantime the citizens must do their best to defend themselves.

His commander, Renzo da Ceri, had already reinforced the weakest parts of the Leonine Wall and had erected defensive works inside the Vatican; but with so few troops at his disposal, he had little hope of keeping the enemy out of a city whose delegates would have attempted to negotiate a separate peace had he allowed them to leave it. With only 8,000 armed men, including 2,000 Swiss Guards and 2, 000 former members of Giovanni de' Medici's Bande Nere, he awaited the arrival of the inevitable herald from the imperialist camp as the bell on the Capitol rang the tocsin throughout the night.

The herald's demand for surrender and the payment of a huge indemnity was recognized by both sides as nothing more than a customary preliminary to the assault which Bourbon could not have prevented his hungry, half-naked men from launching even had he wanted to. When he spoke to them before the attack, ‘he had not even reached the end of his oration’, so one of his officers recorded, ‘before an excited and joyful murmur began to fill the camp, from which it could be guessed that for that multitude every hour to be endured before the assault would seem like a century’.

The inevitable attack began at about four o'clock in the morning of 6 May 1527 with an outburst of harquebus fire on both sides. An assault on the wall between Porta del Torrione and Porta S. Spirito and two diversionary feints were made at the same time upon the Belvedere and Porta Pertusa. This first assault was repulsed with heavy losses; but then a thick mist arose from the Tiber, and the defenders, their artillery now virtually useless, were reduced to throwing rocks, shouting at their unseen enemy, ‘Jews and infidels, half-castes, Lutherans’, and to letting off the occasional shot.

One of these stray shots from a harquebus hit the Duke of Bourbon who was carried away dying to a nearby chapel by the Prince of Orange, an adventurer in the Emperor's service. The news of Bourbon's death caused elation among the defenders, who left their posts and dashed through the streets of the Borgo crying, ‘Victory! Victory!’ It also caused momentary despondency in the imperialist ranks. But the Germans and Spaniards soon rallied and, having mounted scaling-ladders made from vine poles under cover of the thick mist, they were soon clambering over the breaches and, vastly superior in numbers, were pushing the defenders back. The Swiss Guards fought bravely and so did some of the Roman militia, the Bande Nere and the students of the Collegio Capranicense⁷ who had dashed to the defence of the walls and had all been killed. But many of the papal troops either deserted to the enemy or joined the crowds struggling to escape across the Tiber over the bridges, on which scores of people were crushed to death, or in overloaded boats that capsized, throwing many more into the river.

The Pope ran for safety along the stone corridor that led from the Vatican to Castel Sant’ Angelo, glancing down through the apertures at the havoc below, his skirts held up by the Bishop of Nocera so that he could run the faster. ‘I flung my own purple cloak about his head and shoulders,’ the Bishop said, ‘lest some Barbarian rascal in the crowd below might recognize the Pope by his white rochet, as he was passing a window, and take a chance shot at his fleeing form.’ Thirteen cardinals and some three thousand fugitives also reached the castle; but others, desperately trying to reach safety before it was too late, were caught on the drawbridge as it was raised and fell into the moat.

Rome was now at the mercy of the imperialist troops. Gian d'Urbina, the cruel and arrogant commander of the Spanish infantry, infuriated by a pike wound in the face inflicted by a Swiss Guard, rampaged through the Borgo, followed by his men, killing everyone they came across. ‘All were cut to pieces, even if unarmed,’ wrote an eyewitness, ‘even in those places that Attila and Genseric, although the most cruel of men, had in former times treated with religious respect.’ The Hospital of S. Spirito was broken into, and nearly all those who were cared for there were slaughtered or thrown into the Tiber alive. The orphans of the Pietà were also killed. Convicts from the prisons were set free to join in the massacre, mutilation and pillage.

The imperialists stormed over the Ponte Sisto and continued their savagery in the heart of the city. The doors of churches and convents, of palaces, monasteries and workshops were smashed open and the contents hurled into the streets. Tombs were broken open, including that of Julius II, and the corpses stripped of jewels and vestments. The Sancta Sanctorum was sacked; the Host stamped and spat upon; relics and crucifixes ridiculed or used as targets by harquebusiers. The head of St Andrew was cast contemptuously to the ground and that of St John kicked about the streets as a football. The Holy Lance that had speared Christ's side and had been presented to Innocent VIII was paraded through the streets of the Borgo on the spear of a German soldier; St Veronica's handkerchief was offered for sale in an inn; the Emperor Constantine's golden cross was stolen and never recovered; so were the tiara of Nicholas I and the Golden Rose of Martin V. Romans who took shelter in churches were slaughtered out of hand. ‘Even on the high altar of St Peter's,’ according to one contemporary account, ‘five hundred men were massacred, as holy relics were burned or destroyed.’

Men were tortured to reveal the hiding-places of their possessions or to pay ransoms for the sparing of their lives, one merchant being tied to a tree and having a fingernail wrenched out each day because he could not pay the money demanded.

Many were suspended for hours by the arms [wrote Francesco Guicciardini's brother, Luigi]; many were cruelly bound by the genitals; many were suspended by the feet high above the road or over the river, while their tormentors threatened to cut the cord. Some were half buried in the cellars; others were nailed up in casks or villainously beaten and wounded; not a few were branded all over their persons with red-hot irons. Some were tortured by extreme thirst, others by insupportable noise and many were cruelly tortured by having their teeth brutally drawn. Others again were forced to eat their own ears, or nose, or their roasted testicles and yet more were subjected to strange, unheard-of martyrdoms that move me too much even to think of, much less describe.

The Spaniards were the most brutal, it was generally agreed. ‘In the destruction of Rome the Germans were bad enough, the Italians were worse, but worst of all were the Spaniards.’ They practised ‘unheard-of tortures to force their victims to disclose where they had hidden their treasures’. And they were not always successful, it seems; years afterwards casks and vessels of buried money were discovered, suggesting that the owners had died before they could recover them.

Those who professed to support the imperial cause suffered with the rest, and none was safe from capture and demands for ransom. Neither S. Giacomo,⁸ the Spanish church in the Piazza Navona, nor the church of the Germans, S. Maria dell' Anima,⁹ was spared. Nor was the palace of the imperial ambassador, where two hundred refugees were hidden, nor the Palazzo dei SS. Apostoli,¹⁰ which was occupied by the mother of one of the imperial commanders, Ferrante Gonzaga. Over two thousand people, more than half of them women, who had been given refuge in the Palazzo dei SS. Apostoli, were made to pay ransom. Most officers had little authority over their men and stood by helpless when they did not condone, encourage or even participate in the atrocities: one German commander boasted his intention of eviscerating the Pope once he had laid his hands on him.

Some priests were, indeed, eviscerated. Others were stripped naked and forced to utter blasphemies on pain of death or to take part in profane travesties of the Mass. One priest was murdered by Lutherans when he refused to administer Holy Communion to an ass. Cardinal Cajetan was dragged through the streets in chains, insulted and tortured; Cardinal Ponzetti, who was over eighty years old, shared his sufferings and, having parted with 20,000 ducats, died from the injuries inflicted upon him. Nuns, like other women, were violated, sold in the streets at auction and used as counters in games of chance. Mothers and fathers were forced to watch and even to assist at the multiple rape of their daughters. Convents became brothels into which women of the upper classes were dragged and stripped. ‘Marchionesses, countesses and baronesses,’ wrote the Sieur de Brantôme, ‘served the unruly troops, and for long afterwards the patrician women of the city were known as “the relics of the Sack of Rome”.’

As the invaders grew exhausted by their excesses, Cardinal Pompeo Colonna rode into Rome with two thousand followers on 7 May. Moved to tears by the sight of Rome, he opened his palazzo as a place of refuge, and did what he could to control his men – but they too were uncontrollable. They ran through the city, eager to plunder anything which the imperialists had disregarded, ‘carrying away even the ironwork of the houses’ and, so the Duchess of Urbino was told, ‘raking together the chattels of the poor’. ‘They were peasants, dying of hunger,’ the Cardinal of Como said, ‘and they sacked and robbed all that the other soldiers had not deigned to harvest.’

The number of people killed in the Sack of Rome was never determined. ‘We took Rome by storm,’ one of the German invaders reported laconically, ‘put over six thousand men to the sword, seized all that we could find in the churches and elsewhere, burned down a great part of the city, tearing apart and destroying all copyists' works, all letters, registers and state documents.’ A Spanish soldier claimed that he had helped to bury almost ten thousand corpses on the north bank of the Tiber and that a further two thousand had been thrown into the river. A Franciscan friar confirmed that twelve thousand people had been killed, and added that many lay unburied. In places they were piled so high they blocked the streets.

By the beginning of June, when St Peter's had been turned into a stable, the church of the Florentines into a barracks and the oratory of the nunnery of S. Cosimato¹¹ into a shambles, when palaces had been stripped bare, the Villa Madama had been almost destroyed and many other houses burned to the ground, when the Sapienza had been ruined and precious libraries and pictures lost for ever, Rome was a city of despair. Through it the stench of ordure and of decaying corpses was wafted by the early summer breeze and, mingling with the noxious smell of open drains and sewers, aggravated an epidemic of plague.

In Rome, the chief city of Christendom [a Spaniard wrote], no bells ring, no churches are open, no Masses are said, Sundays and feast-days have ceased. Many houses are burned to the ground; in others the doors and windows are broken and carried away; the streets are changed into dunghills. The stench of dead bodies is terrible; men and beasts have a common grave and in the churches I have seen corpses that dogs have gnawed. In the public places tables are set close together at which piles of ducats are gambled for. The air rings with blasphemies fit to make good men – if such there be – wish that they were deaf. I know nothing wherewith I can compare it, except it be the destruction of Jerusalem. I do not believe that if I lived for two hundred years I should see the like again.

From the windows of Castel Sant' Angelo which Benvenuto Cellini, according to his own fantastic account, saved virtually single-handed by his own ‘unimaginable energy and zeal’, Pope Clement looked out repeatedly for some sign that the army of the anti-imperial league was on its way across the Campagna to his relief. But each day he was disappointed, for the army, commanded by the Duke of Urbino, a general of unsurpassed prudence, remained rooted in Isola Farnese about ten miles north of Rome; and by 7 June the Pope had made up his mind he must capitulate. Required to surrender large areas of papal territory, he was not permitted to leave the castle until an immense ransom had been paid, and months passed while wearisome negotiations were conducted. In December the imperial troops, driven out of the city by plague and hunger, returned after plundering the Campagna. They threatened to hang their captains and cut the Pope to pieces if they did not receive their arrears of pay. When he heard this the Pope decided he must try to escape without delay; and on 7 December, with the connivance of an imperialist commander, he managed to do so. Disguised as a servant in a cloak and hood with a basket over his arm and an empty sack on his shoulder, he made his way to the episcopal palace at Orvieto, where an embassy from Henry VIII of England, which had sought him out to obtain his authority for the King's divorce from Catherine of Aragon, found him ‘in an old palace of the bishops of the city, ruinous and decayed… the chambers all naked and unhanged and the roofs fallen down’.

Beset by worry, pitiably thin and shrunken, almost blind in one eye, his liver diseased and the pale skin of his bearded face tinged with yellow, the Pope remained at Orvieto, while the imperial troops continued to occupy Rome. It was not until 11 February 1528 that, their arrears paid at last, they moved out; and not until October that the Pope rode back to the Vatican.

It was a devastated city that he saw. ‘Rome is finished,’ decided Ferrante Gonzaga the day after the Pope's return. ‘Four fifths of it is quite uninhabited.’ It was estimated that over 30,000 houses had been destroyed – almost as many as remained – and those that did still stand faced out upon streets filled with rubble and, even now, with the stench of putrefaction. The population had been reduced by half, and most of those who still lived in the city were compelled to live on charity. Trade had come to a halt; shops were deserted. Only three of Rome's more than a hundred apothecaries and herbalists still carried on business and it was believed that as many as 12,000,000 gold ducats had been lost. Much had been saved, of course. Philip of Orange, who had taken up quarters in the Vatican (where he was robbed by Landsknechte), managed, by posting reliable guards, to ensure that the Vatican Library and Raphael's Stanze were kept from harm. The body of the Duke of Bourbon which was laid in the Sistine Chapel helped to protect the paintings there. Many relics were preserved by being buried in secret places. But the catalogue of losses, which included the Raphael tapestries in the Vatican and the stained-glass windows of Guillaume de Marcillat in St Peter's, made mournful reading. So did the list of scholars and artists who had left Rome for other cities.

Parmigiano had fled to Bologna where he was joined by the philosopher Lodovico Boccadifferro and the engraver Marcantonio Raimondi. Giovanni da Udine, who had helped Raphael with the Vatican Loggie and the Villa Madama, had returned to Udine. Vicenzio da San Gimignano had returned to Florence; and Giovanni Battista Rosso Fiorentino settled in Perugia before moving to France. Polidoro da Caravaggio had fled, only to be murdered in Messina. Jacopo Sansovino had left Rome for Venice where he was appointed City Architect. Fabio Calvo, the translator of Vitruvius, Paolo Bombace, the Greek scholar, Paolo Bombasi, the poet and Mariano Castellani, the writer, had all perished in the sack. The grammarian, Julianus Camers, had committed suicide. The poet, Marcantonio Casanova, had been seen begging for bread in the streets before dying of the plague. Peruzzi had been tortured, forced to paint the dead Duke of Bourbon, released, recaptured, tortured again and robbed, before escaping to Siena where he became Architect to the Republic.

The man blamed and vilified for this disastrous dispersion lingered on in the Vatican, ill and almost blind, until, in the late summer of 1534, he contracted a fatal fever. Few mourned for him. He had, so Francesco Vettori said, ‘gone to a great deal of trouble to develop from a great and respected cardinal into a small and little respected pope’. Indeed, his death, so a Roman correspondent informed the Duke of Norfolk, was ‘the cause of rejoicing’ in the city. In St Peter's, where his body lay, intruders transfixed it with a sword and his temporary tomb was smeared with dirt. The inscription beneath it, ‘Clemens Pontifex Maximus’ was obliterated and in its place were written the words ‘Inclemens Pontifex Minimus’. Had it not been for the intervention of his nephew, Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici, the body would have been dragged round the streets on a meat-hook. Rome seemed once more to have returned to the barbarity and desolation of the Dark Ages.