THE CITY OF ROME IN THE MIDDLE AGES.
'It is related,' says Sozomen in the ninth book of his Ecclesiastical
History, 'that when Alaric was hastening against Rome, a holy monk of
Italy admonished him to spare the city, and not to make himself the
cause of such fearful ills. But Alaric answered, "It is not of my own
will that I do this; there is One who forces me on, and will not let
me rest, bidding me spoil Rome[323]."'
Towards the close of the tenth century the Bohemian Woitech, famous in
after legend as St. Adalbert, forsook his bishopric of Prague to
journey into Italy, and settled himself in the Roman monastery of
Sant' Alessio. After some few years passed there in religious
solitude, he was summoned back to resume the duties of his see, and
laboured for awhile among his half-savage countrymen. Soon, however,
the old longing came over him: he resought his cell upon the brow of
the Aventine, and there, wandering among the ancient shrines, and
taking on himself the menial offices of the convent, he abode happily
for a space. At length the reproaches of his metropolitan, the
archbishop of Mentz, and the express commands of Pope Gregory the
Fifth, drove him back over the Alps, and he set off in the train of
Otto the Third, lamenting, says his biographer, that he should no more
enjoy his beloved quiet in the mother of martyrs, the home of the
Apostles, golden Rome. A few months later he died a martyr among the
pagan Lithuanians of the Baltic[324].
Nearly four hundred years later, and nine hundred after the time of
Alaric, Francis Petrarch writes thus to his friend John Colonna:--
'Thinkest thou not that I long to see that city to which there has
never been any like nor ever shall be; which even an enemy called a
city of kings; of whose people it hath been written, "Great is the
valour of the Roman people, great and terrible their name;" concerning
whose unexampled glory and incomparable empire, which was, and is, and
is to be, divine prophets have sung; where are the tombs of the
apostles and martyrs and the bodies of so many thousands of the saints
of Christ[325]?'
It was the same irresistible impulse that drew the warrior, the monk,
and the scholar towards the mystical city which was to mediæval Europe
more than Delphi had been to the Greek or Mecca to the Islamite, the
Jerusalem of Christianity, the city which had once ruled the earth,
and now ruled the world of disembodied spirits[326]. For there was
then, as there is now, something in Rome to attract men of every
class. The devout pilgrim came to pray at the shrine of the Prince of
the Apostles, too happy if he could carry back to his monastery in the
forests of Saxony or by the bleak Atlantic shore the bone of some holy
martyr; the lover of learning and poetry dreamed of Virgil and Cicero
among the shattered columns of the Forum; the Germanic kings, in spite
of pestilence, treachery and seditions, came with their hosts to seek
in the ancient capital of the world the fountain of temporal dominion.
Nor has the spell yet wholly lost its power. To half the Christian
nations Rome is the metropolis of religion, to all the metropolis of
art. In her streets, and hers alone among the cities of the world, may
every form of human speech be heard: she is more glorious in her decay
and desolation than the stateliest seats of modern power.
But while men thought thus of Rome, what was Rome herself?
The modern traveller, after his first few days in Rome, when he has
looked out upon the Campagna from the summit of St. Peter's, paced the
chilly corridors of the Vatican, and mused under the echoing dome of
the Pantheon, when he has passed in review the monuments of regal and
republican and papal Rome, begins to seek for some relics of the
twelve hundred years that lie between Constantine and Pope Julius the
Second. 'Where,' he asks, 'is the Rome of the Middle Ages, the Rome of
Alberic and Hildebrand and Rienzi? the Rome which dug the graves of so
many Teutonic hosts; whither the pilgrims flocked; whence came the
commands at which kings bowed? Where are the memorials of the
brightest age of Christian architecture, the age which reared Cologne
and Rheims and Westminster, which gave to Italy the cathedrals of
Tuscany and the wave-washed palaces of Venice?'
To this question there is no answer. Rome, the mother of the arts, has
scarcely a building to commemorate those times, for to her they were
times of turmoil and misery, times in which the shame of the present
was embittered by recollections of a brighter past. Nevertheless a
minute scrutiny may still discover, hidden in dark corners or
disguised under an unbecoming modern dress, much that carries us back
to the mediæval town, and helps us to realize its social and political
condition. Therefore a brief notice of the state of Rome during the
Middle Ages, with especial reference to those monuments which the
visitor may still examine for himself, may not be without its use, and
is at any rate no unfitting pendant to an account of the institution
which drew from the city its name and its magnificent pretensions.
Moreover, as will appear more fully in the sequel, the history of the
Roman people is an instructive illustration of the influence of those
ideas upon which the Empire itself rested, as well in their weakness
as in their strength[327].
[Sidenote: Causes of the rapid decay of the city.]
It is not from her capture by Alaric, nor even from the more
destructive ravages of the Vandal Genseric, that the material and
social ruin of Rome must be dated, but rather from the repeated sieges
which she sustained in the war of Belisarius with the Ostrogoths. This
struggle however, long and exhausting as it was, would not have proved
so fatal had the previous condition of the city been sound and
healthy. Her wealth and population in the middle of the fifth century
were probably little inferior to what they had been in the most
prosperous days of the imperial government. But this wealth was
entirely gathered into the hands of a small and effeminate
aristocracy. The crowd that filled her streets was composed partly of
poor and idle freemen, unaccustomed to arms and debarred from
political rights; partly of a far more numerous herd of slaves,
gathered from all parts of the world, and morally even lower than
their masters. There was no middle class, and no system of municipal
institutions, for although the senate and consuls with many of the
lesser magistracies continued to exist, they had for centuries enjoyed
no effective power, and were nowise fitted to lead and rule the
people. Hence it was that when the Gothic war and the subsequent
inroads of the Lombards had reduced the great families to beggary, the
framework of society dissolved and could not be replaced. In a state
rotten to the core there was no vital force left for reconstruction.
The old forms of political activity had been too long dead to be
recalled to life: the people wanted the moral force to produce new
ones, and all the authority that could be said to exist in the midst
of anarchy tended to centre itself in the chief of the new religious
society.
[Sidenote: Peculiarities in the position of Rome.]
So far Rome's condition was like that of the other great towns of
Italy and Gaul. But in two points her case differed from theirs, and
to these the difference of her after fortunes may be traced. Her
bishop had no temporal potentate to overshadow his dignity or check
his ambition, for the vicar of the Eastern court lived far away at
Ravenna, and seldom interfered except to ratify a papal election or
punish a more than commonly outrageous sedition. Her population
received an all but imperceptible infusion of that Teutonic blood and
those Teutonic customs by whose stern discipline the inhabitants of
northern Italy were in the end renovated. Everywhere the old
institutions had perished of decay: in Rome alone there was nothing
except the ecclesiastical system out of which new ones could arise.
Her condition was therefore the most pitiable in which a community can
find itself, one of struggle without purpose or progress. The citizens
were divided into three orders: the military class, including what was
left of the ancient aristocracy; the clergy, a host of priests, monks
and nuns, attached to the countless churches and convents; and the
people or _plebs_, as they are called, a poverty-stricken rabble
without trade, without industry, without any municipal organization to
bind them together. Of these two latter classes the Pope was the
natural leader, the first was divided into factions headed by some
three or four of the great families, whose quarrels kept the town in
incessant bloodshed. The internal history of Rome from the sixth to
the twelfth century is an obscure and tedious record of the contest of
these factions with each other, and of the aristocracy as a whole with
the slowly growing power of the Church.
[Sidenote: Her condition in the ninth and tenth centuries.]
The revolt of the Romans from the Iconoclastic Emperors of the East,
followed as it was by the reception of the Franks as patricians and
emperors, is an event of the highest importance in the history of
Italy and of the popedom. In the domestic constitution of Rome it made
little change. With the instinct of a profound genius, Charles the
Great saw that Rome, though it might be ostensibly the capital, could
not be the real centre of his dominions. He continued to reside in
Germany, and did not even build a palace at Rome. For a time the awe
of his power, the presence of his _missus_ or lieutenant, and the
occasional visits of his successors Lothar and Lewis II to the city,
repressed her internal disorders. But after the death of the prince
last named, and still more after the dissolution of the Carolingian
Empire itself, Rome relapsed into a state of profligacy and barbarism
to which, even in that age, Europe supplied no parallel, a barbarism
which had inherited all the vices of civilization without any of its
virtues. The papal office in particular seems to have lost its
religious character, as it had certainly lost all claim to moral
purity. For more than a century the chief priest of Christendom was no
more than a tool of some ferocious faction among the nobles. Criminal
means had raised him to the throne; violence, sometimes going the
length of mutilation or murder, deprived him of it. The marvel is, a
marvel in which papal historians have not unnaturally discovered a
miracle, that after sinking so low, the Papacy should ever have risen
again. Its rescue and exaltation to the pinnacle of glory was
accomplished not by the Romans but by the efforts of the Transalpine
Church, aiding and prompting the Saxon and Franconian Emperors. Yet
even the religious reform did not abate intestine turmoil, and it was
not till the twelfth century that a new spirit began to work in
politics, which ennobled if it could not heal the sufferings of the
Roman people.
[Sidenote: Growth of a republican feeling: hostility to the Popes.]
[Sidenote: Arnold of Brescia.]
[Sidenote: Short-sighted policy of the Emperors.]
Ever since the time of Alberic their pride had revolted against the
haughty behaviour of the Teutonic emperors. From still earlier times
they had been jealous of sacerdotal authority, and now watched with
alarm the rapid extension of its influence. The events of the twelfth
century gave these feelings a definite direction. It was the time of
the struggle of the Investitures, in which Hildebrand and his
disciples had been striving to draw all the things of this world as
well as of the next into their grasp. It was the era of the revived
study of Roman law, by which alone the extravagant pretensions of the
decretalists could be resisted. The Lombard and Tuscan towns had
become flourishing municipalities, independent of their bishops, and
at open war with their Emperor. While all these things were stirring
the minds of the Romans, Arnold of Brescia came preaching reform,
denouncing the corrupt life of the clergy, not perhaps, like some
others of the so-called schismatics of his time, denying the need of a
sacerdotal order, but at any rate urging its restriction to purely
spiritual duties. On the minds of the Romans such teaching fell like
the spark upon dry grass; they threw off the yoke of the Pope[328],
drove out the imperial prefect, reconstituted the senate and the
equestrian order, appointed consuls, struck their own coins, and
professed to treat the German Emperors as their nominees and
dependants. To have successfully imitated the republican constitution
of the cities of northern Italy would have been much, but with this
they were not content. Knowing in a vague ignorant way that there had
been a Roman republic before there was a Roman empire, they fed their
vanity with visions of a renewal of all their ancient forms, and saw
in fancy their senate and people sitting again upon the Seven Hills
and ruling over the kings of the earth. Stepping, as it were, into the
arena where Pope and Emperor were contending for the headship of the
world, they rejected the one as a priest, and declaring the other to
be only their creature, they claimed as theirs the true and lawful
inheritance of the world-dominion which their ancestors had won.
Antiquity was in one sense on their side, and to us now it seems less
strange that the Roman people should aspire to rule the earth than
that a German barbarian should rule it in their name. But practically
the scheme was absurd, and could not maintain itself against any
serious opposition. As a modern historian aptly expresses it, 'they
were setting up ruins:' they might as well have raised the broken
columns that strewed their Forum and hoped to rear out of them a
strong and stately temple. The reverence which the men of the Middle
Ages felt for Rome was given altogether to the name and to the place,
nowise to the people. As for power, they had none: so far from holding
Italy in subjection, they could scarcely maintain themselves against
the hostility of Tusculum. But it would have been well worth the while
of the Teutonic Emperors to have made the Romans their allies, and
bridled by their help the temporal ambition of the Popes. The offer
was actually made to them, first to Conrad the Third, who seems to
have taken no notice of it; and afterwards, as has been already
stated, to Frederick the First, who repelled in the most contumelious
fashion the envoys of the senate. Hating and fearing the Pope, he
always respected him: towards the Romans he felt all the contempt of a
feudal king for burghers, and of a German warrior for Italians. At the
demand of Pope Hadrian, whose foresight thought no heresy so dangerous
as one which threatened the authority of the clergy, Arnold of Brescia
was seized by the imperial prefect, put to death, and his ashes cast
into the Tiber, lest the people should treasure them up as relics. But
the martyrdom of their leader did not quench the hopes of his
followers. The republican constitution continued to exist, and rose
from time to time, during the weakness or the absence of the Popes,
into a brief and fitful activity[329]. Once awakened, the idea,
seductive at once to the imagination of the scholar and the vanity of
the Roman citizen, could not wholly disappear, and two centuries after
Arnold's time it found a more brilliant if less disinterested exponent
in the tribune Nicholas Rienzi.
[Sidenote: Character and career of the tribune Rienzi.]
The career of this singular personage is misunderstood by those who
suppose him to have been possessed of profound political insight, a
republican on modern principles. He was indeed, despite his
overweening conceit, and what seems to us his charlatanry, both a
patriot and a man of genius, in temperament a poet, filled with
soaring ideas. But those ideas, although dressed out in gaudier
colours by his lively fancy, were after all only the old ones,
memories of the long-faded glories of the heathen republic, and a
series of scornful contrasts levelled at her present oppressors, both
of them shewing no vista of future peace except through the revival of
those ancient names to which there were no things to correspond. It
was by declaiming on old texts and displaying old monuments that the
tribune enlisted the support of the Roman populace, not by any appeal
to democratic principles; and the whole of his acts and plans, though
they astonished men by their boldness, do not seem to have been
regarded as novel or impracticable[330]. In the breasts of men like
Petrarch, who loved Rome even more than they hated her people, the
enthusiasm of Rienzi found a sympathetic echo: others scorned and
denounced him as an upstart, a demagogue, and a rebel. Both friends
and enemies seem to have comprehended and regarded as natural his
feelings and designs, which were altogether those of his age. Being,
however, a mere matter of imagination, not of reason, having no
anchor, so to speak, in realities, no true relation to the world as it
then stood, these schemes of republican revival were as transient and
unstable as they were quick of growth and gay of colour. As the
authority of the Popes became consolidated, and free municipalities
disappeared elsewhere throughout Italy, the dream of a renovated Rome
at length withered up and fell and died. Its last struggle was made in
the conspiracy of Stephen Porcaro, in the time of Pope Nicholas the
Fifth; and from that time onward there was no question of the
supremacy of the bishop within his holy city.
[Sidenote: Causes of the failure of the struggle for independence.]
It is never without a certain regret that we watch the disappearance
of a belief, however illusive, around which the love and reverence for
mankind once clung. But this illusion need be the less regretted that
it had only the feeblest influence for good on the state of mediæval
Rome. During the three centuries that lie between Arnold of Brescia
and Porcaro, the disorders of Rome were hardly less violent than they
had been in the Dark Ages, and to all appearance worse than those of
any other European city. There was a want not only of fixed authority,
but of those elements of social stability which the other cities of
Italy possessed. In the greater republics of Lombardy and Tuscany the
bulk of the population were artizans, hard working orderly people;
while above them stood a prosperous middle class, engaged mostly in
commerce, and having in their system of trade-guilds an organization
both firm and flexible. It was by foreign trade that Genoa, Venice,
and Pisa became great, as it was the wealth acquired by manufacturing
industry that enabled Milan and Florence to overcome and incorporate
the territorial aristocracies which surrounded them.
[Sidenote: Internal condition of the city.]
[Sidenote: The people.]
[Sidenote: The nobility.]
[Sidenote: The bishop.]
Rome possessed neither source of riches. She was ill-placed for trade;
having no market she produced no goods to be disposed of, and the
unhealthiness which long neglect had brought upon her Campagna made
its fertility unavailable. Already she stood as she stands now, lonely
and isolated, a desert at her very gates. As there was no industry, so
there was nothing that deserved to be called a citizen class. The
people were a mere rabble, prompt to follow the demagogue who
flattered their vanity, prompter still to desert him in the hour of
danger. Superstition was with them a matter of national pride, but
they lived too near sacred things to feel much reverence for them:
they ill-treated the Pope and fleeced the pilgrims who crowded to
their shrines: they were probably the only community in Europe who
sent no recruit to the armies of the Cross. Priests, monks, and all
the nondescript hangers on of an ecclesiastical court formed a large
part of the population; while of the rest many were supported in a
state of half mendicancy by the countless religious foundations,
themselves enriched by the gifts or the plunder of Latin Christendom.
The noble families were numerous, powerful, ferocious; they were
surrounded by bands of unruly retainers, and waged a constant war
against each other from their castles in the adjoining country or in
the streets of the city itself. Had things been left to take their
natural course, one of these families, the Colonna, for instance, or
the Orsini, would probably have ended by overcoming its rivals, and
have established, as was the case in the republics of Romagna and
Tuscany, a 'signoria' or local tyranny, like those which had once
prevailed in the cities of Greece. But the presence of the sacerdotal
power, as it had hindered the growth of feudalism, so also it stood in
the way of such a development as this, and in so far aggravated the
confusion of the city. Although the Pope was not as yet recognized as
legitimate sovereign, he was not only the most considerable person in
Rome, but the only one whose authority had anything of an official
character. But the reign of each pontiff was short; he had no military
force, he was frequently absent from his see. He was, moreover, very
often a member of one of the great families, and, as such, no better
than a faction leader at home, while venerated by the rest of Europe
as the universal priest.
[Sidenote: The Emperor.]
[Sidenote: Visits of the Emperors to Rome.]
It remains only to speak of the person who should have been to Rome
what the national king was to the cities of France, or England, or
Germany, that is to say, of the Emperor. As has been said already, his
power was a mere chimera, chiefly important as furnishing a pretext to
the Colonna and other Ghibeline chieftains for their opposition to the
papal party. Even his abstract rights were matter of controversy. The
Popes, whose predecessors had been content to govern as the
lieutenants of Charles and Otto, now maintained that Rome as a
spiritual city could not be subject to any temporal jurisdiction, and
that she was therefore no part of the Roman Empire, though at the same
time its capital. Not only, it was urged, had Constantine yielded up
Rome to Sylvester and his successors, Lothar the Saxon had at his
coronation formally renounced his sovereignty by doing homage to the
pontiff and receiving the crown as his vassal. The Popes felt then as
they feel now, that their dignity and influence would suffer if they
should even appear to admit in their place of residence the
jurisdiction of a civil potentate, and although they could not secure
their own authority, they were at least able to exclude any other.
Hence it was that they were so uneasy whenever an Emperor came to them
to be crowned, that they raised up difficulties in his path, and
endeavoured to be rid of him as soon as possible. And here something
must be said of the programme, as one may call it, of these imperial
visits to Rome, and of the marks of their presence which the Germans
left behind them, remembering always that after the time of Frederick
the Second it was rather the exception than the rule for an Emperor to
be crowned in his capital at all.
[Sidenote: Their approach.]
The traveller who enters Rome now, if he comes, as he most commonly
does, by way of Civita Vecchia, slips in by the railway before he is
aware, is huddled into a vehicle at the terminus, and set down at his
hotel in the middle of the modern town before he has seen anything at
all. If he comes overland from Tuscany along the bleak road that
passes near Veii and crosses the Milvian bridge, he has indeed from
the slopes of the Ciminian range a splendid prospect of the sea-like
Campagna, girdled in by glittering hills, but of the city he sees no
sign, save the pinnacle of St. Peter's, until he is within the walls.
Far otherwise was it in the Middle Ages. Then travellers of every
grade, from the humble pilgrim to the new-made archbishop who came in
the pomp of a lengthy train to receive from the Pope the pallium of
his office, approached from the north or north-east side; following a
track along the hilly ground on the Tuscan side of the Tiber until
they halted on the brow of Monte Mario[331]--the Mount of Joy--and saw
the city of their solemnities lie spread before them, from the great
pile of the Lateran far away upon the Cœlian hill, to the basilica of
St. Peter's at their feet. They saw it not, as now, a sea of billowy
cupolas, but a mass of low red-roofed houses, varied by tall brick
towers, and at rarer intervals by masses of ancient ruin, then larger
far than now; while over all rose those two monuments of the best of
the heathen Emperors, monuments that still look down, serenely
changeless, on the armies of new nations and the festivals of a new
religion--the columns of Marcus Aurelius and Trajan.
[Sidenote: Their entrance.]
[Sidenote: Hostility of Pope and people to the Germans.]
From Monte Mario the Teutonic host descended, when they had paid their
orisons, into the Neronian field, the piece of flat land that lies
outside the gate of St. Angelo. Here it was the custom for the elders
of the Romans to meet the elected Emperor, present their charters for
confirmation, and receive his oath to preserve their good
customs[332]. Then a procession was formed: the priests and monks, who
had come out with hymns to greet the Emperor, led the way; the knights
and soldiers of Rome, such as they were, came next; then the monarch,
followed by a long array of Transalpine chivalry. Passing into the
city they advanced to St. Peter's, where the Pope, surrounded by his
clergy, stood on the great staircase of the basilica to welcome and
bless the Roman king. On the next day came the coronation, with
ceremonies too elaborate for description[333], ceremonies which, we
may well believe, were seldom duly completed. Far more usual were
other rites, of which the book of ritual makes no mention, unless they
are to be counted among the 'good customs of the Romans;' the clang of
war bells, the battle cry of German and Italian combatants. The Pope,
when he could not keep the Emperor from entering Rome, required him to
leave the bulk of his host without the walls, and if foiled in this,
sought his safety in raising up plots and seditions against his too
powerful friend. The Roman people, on the other hand, violent as they
often were against the Pope, felt nevertheless a sort of national
pride in him. Very different were their feelings towards the Teutonic
chieftain, who came from a far land to receive in their city, yet
without thanking them for it, the ensign of a power which the prowess
of their forefathers had won. Despoiled of their ancient right to
choose the universal bishop, they clung all the more desperately to
the belief that it was they who chose the universal prince; and were
mortified afresh when each successive sovereign contemptuously scouted
their claims, and paraded before their eyes his rude barbarian
cavalry. Thus it was that a Roman sedition was the all but invariable
accompaniment of a Roman coronation. The three revolts against Otto
the Great have been already described. His grandson Otto the Third, in
spite of his passionate fondness for the city, was met by the same
faithlessness and hatred, and departed at last in despair at the
failure of his attempts at conciliation[334]. A century afterwards
Henry the Fifth's coronation produced violent tumults, which ended in
his seizing the Pope and cardinals in St. Peter's, and keeping them
prisoners till they submitted to his terms. Remembering this, Pope
Hadrian the Fourth would fain have forced the troops of Frederick
Barbarossa to remain without the walls, but the rapidity of their
movements disconcerted his plans and anticipated the resistance of the
Roman populace. Having established himself in the Leonine city[335],
Frederick barricaded the bridge over the Tiber, and was duly crowned
in St. Peter's. But the rite was scarcely finished when the Romans,
who had assembled in arms on the Capitol, dashed over the bridge, fell
upon the Germans, and were with difficulty repulsed by the personal
efforts of Frederick. Into the city he did not venture to pursue them,
nor was he at any period of his reign able to make himself master of
the whole of it. Finding themselves similarly baffled, his successors
at last accepted their position, and were content to take the crown on
the Pope's conditions and depart without further question.
[Sidenote: Memorials of the Germanic Emperors in Rome.]
[Sidenote: Of Otto the Third.]
Coming so seldom and remaining for so short a time, it is not
wonderful that the Teutonic Emperors should, in the seven centuries
from Charles the Great to Charles the Fifth, have left fewer marks of
their presence in Rome than Titus or Hadrian alone have done; fewer
and less considerable even than those which tradition attributes to
those whom it calls Servius Tullius and the elder Tarquin. Those
monuments which do exist are just sufficient to make the absence of
all others more conspicuous. The most important dates from the time of
Otto the Third, the only Emperor who attempted to make Rome his
permanent residence. Of the palace, probably nothing more than a
tower, which he built on the Aventine, no trace has been discovered;
but the church, founded by him to receive the ashes of his friend the
martyred St. Adalbert, may still be seen upon the island in the Tiber.
Having received from Benevento relics supposed to be those of
Bartholomew the Apostle[336], it became dedicated to that saint, and
is now the church of San Bartolommeo in Isola, whose quaintly
picturesque bell-tower of red brick, now grey with extreme age, looks
out from among the orange trees of a convent garden over the
swift-eddying yellow waters of the Tiber.
[Sidenote: Of Otto the Second.]
[Sidenote: Of Frederick the Second.]
Otto the Second, son of Otto the Great, died at Rome, and lies buried
in the crypt of St. Peter's, the only Emperor who has found a
resting-place among the graves of the Popes[337]. His tomb is not far
from that of his nephew Pope Gregory the Fifth: it is a plain one of
roughly chiselled marble. The lid of the superb porphyry sarcophagus
in which he lay for a time now serves as the great font of St.
Peter's, and may be seen in the baptismal chapel, on the left of the
entrance of the church, not far from the tombs of the Stuarts. Last of
all must be mentioned a curious relic of the Emperor Frederick the
Second, the prince whom of all others one would least expect to see
honoured in the city of his foes. It is an inscription in the palace
of the Conservators upon the Capitoline hill, built into the wall of
the great staircase, and relates the victory of Frederick's army over
the Milanese, and the capture of the carroccio[338] of the rebel city,
which he sends as a trophy to his faithful Romans. These are all or
nearly all the traces of her Teutonic lords that Rome has preserved
till now. Pictures indeed there are in abundance, from the mosaic of
the Scala Santa at the Lateran[339] and the curious frescoes in the
church of Santi Quattro Incoronati[340], down to the paintings of the
Sistine antechapel and the Stanze of Raphael in the Vatican, where the
triumphs of the Popedom over all its foes are set forth with matchless
art and equally matchless unveracity. But these are mostly long
subsequent to the events they describe, and these all the world knows.
Associations of the highest interest would have attached to the
churches in which the imperial coronation was performed--a ceremony
which, whether we regard the dignity of the performers or the
splendour of the adjuncts, was probably the most imposing that modern
Europe has known. But old St. Peter's disappeared in the end of the
fifteenth century, not long after the last Roman coronation, that of
Frederick the Third, while the basilica of St. John Lateran, in which
Lothar the Saxon and Henry the Seventh were crowned, has been so
wofully modernized that we can hardly figure it to ourselves as the
same building[341].
[Sidenote: Causes of the want of mediæval monuments in Rome.]
[Sidenote: Barbarism of the aristocracy.]
Bearing in mind what was the social condition of Rome during the
middle ages, it becomes easier to understand the architectural
barrenness which at first excites the visitor's surprise. Rome had no
temporal sovereign, and there were therefore only two classes who
could build at all, the nobles and the clergy. Of these, the former
had seldom the wealth, and never the taste, which would have enabled
them to construct palaces graceful as the Venetian or massively grand
as the Florentine and Genoese. Moreover, the constant practice of
domestic war made defence the first object of a house, beauty and
convenience the second. The nobility, therefore, either adapted
ancient edifices to their purpose or built out of their materials
those huge square towers of brick, a few of which still frown over the
narrow streets in the older parts of Rome. We may judge of their
number from the statement that the senator Brancaleone destroyed one
hundred and forty of them. With perhaps no more than one exception,
that of the so-called House of Rienzi, these towers are the only
domestic buildings in the city older than the middle of the fifteenth
century. The vast palaces to which strangers now flock for the sake of
the picture galleries they contain, have been most of them erected in
the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, some even later. Among the
earliest is that Palazzo Cenci[342], whose gloomy low-browed arch so
powerfully affected the imagination of Shelley.
[Sidenote: Ambition, weakness, and corruption of the clergy.]
It was no want of wealth that hampered the architectural efforts of
the clergy, for vast revenues flowed in upon them from every corner of
Christendom. A good deal was actually spent upon the erection or
repairs of churches and convents, although with a less liberal hand
than that of such great Transalpine prelates as Hugh of Lincoln or
Conrad of Cologne. But the Popes always needed money for their
projects of ambition, and in times when disorder or corruption were at
their height the work of building stopped altogether. Thus it was that
after the time of the Carolingians scarcely a church was erected until
the beginning of the twelfth century, when the reforms of Hildebrand
had breathed new zeal into the priesthood. The Babylonish captivity of
Avignon, as it was called, with the great schism of the West that
followed upon it, was the cause of a second similar intermission,
which lasted nearly a century and a half.
[Sidenote: Tendency of the Roman builders to adhere to the ancient
manner.]
[Sidenote: Absence of Gothic in Rome.]
At every time, however, even when his work went on most briskly, the
labours of the Roman architect took the direction of restoring and
readorning old churches rather than of erecting new ones. While the
Transalpine countries, except in a few favoured spots, such as
Provence and part of the Rhineland, remained during several ages with
few and rudely built stone churches, Rome possessed, as the
inheritance of the earlier Christian centuries, a profusion of houses
of worship, some of them still unsurpassed in splendour, and far more
than adequate to the needs of her diminished population. In repairing
these from time to time, their original form and style of work were
usually as far as possible preserved, while in constructing new ones,
the abundance of models beautiful in themselves and hallowed as well
by antiquity as by religious feeling, enthralled the invention of the
workman, bound him down to be at best a faithful imitator, and forbade
him to deviate at pleasure from the old established manner. Thus it
befel that while his brethren throughout the rest of Europe were
passing by successive steps from the old Roman and Byzantine styles to
Romanesque, and from Romanesque to Gothic, the Roman architect
scarcely departed from the plan and arrangements of the primitive
basilica. This is one chief reason why there is so little of Gothic
work in Rome, so little even of Romanesque like that of Pisa. What
there is appears chiefly in the pointed window, more rarely in the
arch, seldom or never in spire or tower or column. Only one of the
existing churches of Rome is Gothic throughout, and that, the
Dominican church of S. Maria sopra Minerva, was built by foreign
monks. In some of the other churches, and especially in the cloisters
of the convents, instances may be observed of the same style: in
others slight traces, by accident or design almost obliterated[343].
[Sidenote: Destruction and alteration of the old buildings:]
[Sidenote: By invaders.]
[Sidenote: By the Romans of the Middle Ages.]
[Sidenote: By modern restorers of churches.]
The mention of obliteration suggests a third cause of the comparative
want of mediæval buildings in the city--the constant depredations and
changes of which she has been the subject. Ever since the time of
Constantine Rome has been a city of destruction, and Christians have
vied with pagans, citizens with enemies, in urging on the fatal work.
Her siege and capture by Robert Guiscard[344], the ally of Hildebrand
against Henry the Fourth, was far more ruinous than the attacks of the
Goths or Vandals: and itself yields in atrocity to the sack of Rome in
A.D. 1526 by the soldiers of the Catholic king and most pious Emperor
Charles the Fifth[345]. Since the days of the first barbarian
invasions the Romans have gone on building with materials taken from
the ancient temples, theatres, law-courts, baths and villas, stripping
them of their gorgeous casings of marble, pulling down their walls for
the sake of the blocks of travertine, setting up their own hovels on
the top or in the midst of these majestic piles. Thus it has been with
the memorials of paganism: a somewhat different cause has contributed
to the disappearance of the mediæval churches. What pillage, or
fanaticism, or the wanton lust of destruction did in the one case, the
ostentatious zeal of modern times has done in the other. The era of
the final establishment of the Popes as temporal sovereigns of the
city, is also that of the supremacy of the Renaissance style in
architecture. After the time of Nicholas the Fifth, the pontiff
against whom, it will be remembered, the spirit of municipal freedom
made its last struggle in the conspiracy of Porcaro, nothing was built
in Gothic, and the prevailing enthusiasm for the antique produced a
corresponding dislike to everything mediæval, a dislike conspicuous in
men like Julius the Second and Leo the Tenth, from whom the grandeur
of modern Rome may be said to begin. Not long after their time the
great religious movement of the sixteenth century, while triumphing in
the north of Europe, was in the south met and overcome by a
counter-reformation in the bosom of the old church herself, and the
construction or restoration of ecclesiastical buildings became again
the passion of the devout[346]. No employment, whether it be called an
amusement or a duty, could have been better suited to the court and
aristocracy of Rome. They were indolent; wealthy, and fond of
displaying their wealth; full of good taste, and anxious, especially
when advancing years had chased away youth's pleasures, to be full of
good works also. Popes and cardinals and the heads of the great
families vied with one another in building new churches and restoring
or enlarging those they found till little of the old was left; raising
over them huge cupolas, substituting massive pilasters for the
single-shafted columns, adorning the interior with a profusion of rare
marbles, of carving and gilding, of frescoes and altar-pieces by the
best masters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. None but a
bigoted mediævalist can refuse to acknowledge the warmth of tone, the
repose, the stateliness, of the churches of modern Rome; but even in
the midst of admiration the sated eye turns away from the wealth of
ponderous ornament, and we long for the clear pure colour, the simple
yet grand proportions that give a charm to the buildings of an earlier
age.
[Sidenote: Existing relics of the Dark and Middle Ages.]
[Sidenote: The Mosaics.]
[Sidenote: The Bell-towers.]
Few of the ancient churches have escaped untouched; many have been
altogether rebuilt. There are also some, however, in which the
modernizers of the sixteenth and subsequent centuries have spared two
features of the old structure, its round apse or tribune and its
bell-tower. The apse has its interior usually covered with mosaics,
exceedingly interesting, both from the ideas they express and as the
only monuments of pictorial art that remain to us from the Dark Ages.
To speak of them, however, as they deserve to be spoken of, would
involve a digression for which there is no space here. The campanile
or bell-tower is a quaint little square brick tower, of no great
height, usually standing detached from the church, and having in its
topmost, sometimes also in its other upper stories, several arcade
windows, divided by tiny marble pillars[347]. What with these
campaniles, then far more numerous than they are now, and with the
huge brick fortresses of the nobles, towers must have held in the
landscape of the mediæval city very much the part which domes do now.
Although less imposing, they were probably more picturesque, the
rather as in the earlier part of the Middle Ages the houses and
churches, which are now mostly crowded together on the flat of the
Campus Martius, were scattered over the heights and slopes of the
Cœlian, Aventine, and Esquiline hills[348]. Modern Rome lies chiefly
on the opposite or north-eastern side of the Capitol, and the change
from the old to the new site of the city, which can hardly be said to
have distinctly begun before the destruction of the south-western part
of the town by Robert Guiscard, was not completed until the sixteenth
century. In A.D. 1536 the Capitol was rebuilt by Michael Angelo, in
anticipation of the entry of Charles the Fifth, upon foundations that
had been laid by the first Tarquin; and the palace of the Senator, the
greatest municipal edifice of Rome, which had hitherto looked towards
the Forum and the Coliseum, was made to front in the direction of St.
Peter's and the modern town.
[Sidenote: Changed aspect of the city of Rome.]
[Sidenote: Analogy between her architecture and her civil and
ecclesiastical constitution.]
[Sidenote: Preservation of an antique character in both.]
The Rome of to-day is no more like the city of Rienzi than she is to
the city of Trajan; just as the Roman church of the nineteenth century
differs profoundly, however she may strive to disguise it, from the
church of Hildebrand. But among all their changes, both church and
city have kept themselves wonderfully free from the intrusion of
foreign, at least of Teutonic, elements, and have faithfully preserved
at all times something of an old Roman character. Latin Christianity
inherited from the imperial system of old that firmly knit yet
flexible organization, which was one of the grand secrets of its
power: the great men whom mediæval Rome gave to or trained up for the
Papacy were, like their progenitors, administrators, legislators,
statesmen; seldom enthusiasts themselves, but perfectly understanding
how to use and guide the enthusiasm of others--of the French and
German crusaders, of men like Francis of Assisi and Dominic and
Ignatius. Between Catholicism in Italy and Catholicism in Germany or
England there was always, as there is still, a very perceptible
difference. So also, if the analogy be not too fanciful, was it with
Rome the city. Socially she seemed always drifting towards feudalism;
yet she never fell into its grasp. Materially, her architecture was at
one time considerably influenced by Gothic forms, yet Gothic never
became, as in the rest of Europe, the dominant style. It approached
Rome late, and departed from her early, so that we scarcely notice its
presence, and seem to pass almost without a break from the old
Romanesque[349] to the Græco-Roman of the Renaissance. Thus regarded,
the history of the city, both in her political state and in her
buildings, is seen to be intimately connected with that of the Holy
Empire itself. The Empire in its title and its pretensions expressed
the idea of the permanence of the institutions of the ancient world;
Rome the city had, in externals at least, carefully preserved their
traditions: the names of her magistracies, the character of her
buildings, all spoke of antiquity, and gave it a strange and shadowy
life in the midst of new races and new forms of faith.
[Sidenote: Relation of the City and the Empire.]
In its essence the Empire rested on the feeling of the unity of
mankind; it was the perpetuation of the Roman dominion by which the
old nationalities had been destroyed, with the addition of the
Christian element which had created a new nationality that was also
universal. By the extension of her citizenship to all her subjects
heathen Rome had become the common home, and, figuratively, even the
local dwelling-place of the civilized races of man. By the theology of
the time Christian Rome had been made the mystical type of humanity,
the one flock of the faithful scattered over the whole earth, the holy
city whither, as to the temple on Moriah, all the Israel of God should
come up to worship. She was not merely an image of the mighty world,
she was the mighty world itself in miniature. The pastor of her local
church is also the universal bishop; the seven suffragans who
consecrate him are the overseers of petty sees in Ostia, Antium, and
the like, towns lying close round Rome: the cardinal priests and
deacons who join these seven in electing him derive their title to be
princes of the Church, the supreme spiritual council of the Christian
world, from the incumbency of a parochial cure within the precincts of
the city. Similarly, her ruler, the Emperor, is ruler of mankind; he
is chosen by the acclamations of her people[350]: he can be lawfully
crowned nowhere but in one of her basilicas. She is, like Jerusalem of
old, the mother of us all.
[Sidenote: Extinction of the Florentine republic, A.D. 1530.]
There is yet another way in which the record of the domestic contests
of Rome throws light upon the history of the Empire. From the eleventh
century to the fifteenth her citizens ceased not to demand in the name
of the old republic their freedom from the tyranny of the nobles and
the Pope, and their right to rule over the world at large. These
efforts--selfish and fantastic we may call them, yet men like Petrarch
did not disdain to them their sympathy--issued from the same theories
and were directed to the same ends as those which inspired Otto the
Third and Frederick Barbarossa and Dante himself. They witness to the
same incapacity to form any ideal for the future except a revival of
the past; the same belief that one universal state is both desirable
and possible, but possible only through the means of Rome: the same
refusal to admit that a right which has once existed can ever be
extinguished. In the days of the Renaissance these notions were
passing silently away: the succeeding century brought with it
misfortunes that broke the spirit of the nation. Italy was the
battle-field of Europe: her wealth became the prey of a rapacious
soldiery: the last and greatest of her republics was enslaved by an
unfeeling Emperor, and handed over as the pledge of amity to a selfish
Medicean Pope. When the hope of independence had been lost, the people
turned away from politics to live for art and literature, and found,
before many generations had passed, how little such exclusive devotion
could compensate for the departure of freedom, and a national spirit,
and the activity of civic life. A century after the golden days of
Ariosto and Raphael, Italian literature had become frigid and
affected, while Italian art was dying of mannerism.
[Sidenote: Feelings of the modern Italians towards Rome.]
At length, after long ages of sloth, the stagnant waters were
troubled. The Romans, who had lived in listless contentment under the
paternal sway of the Popes, received new ideas from the advent of the
revolutionary armies of France, and have found the Papal system, since
its re-establishment fifty years ago as a modern bureaucratic
despotism, far less tolerable than it was of yore. Our own days have
seen the name of Rome become again a rallying-cry for the patriots of
Italy, but in a sense most unlike the old one. The contemporaries of
Arnold and Rienzi desired freedom only as a step to universal
domination: their descendants, more wisely, yet not more from
patriotism than from a pardonable civic pride, seek only to be the
capital of the Italian kingdom. Dante prayed for a monarchy of the
world, a reign of peace and Christian brotherhood: those who invoke
his name as the earliest prophet of their creed strive after an idea
that never crossed his mind--the national union of Italy[351].
Plain common-sense politicians in other countries do not understand
this passion for Rome as a capital, and think it their duty to lecture
the Italians on their flightiness. The latter do not themselves
pretend that the shores of the Tiber are a suitable site for a
capital: Rome is lonely, unhealthy, and in a bad strategical position;
she has no particular facilities for trade: her people, with some fine
qualities, are less orderly and industrious than the Tuscans or the
Piedmontese. Nevertheless all Italy cries with one voice for Rome,
firmly believing that national life can never thrill with a strong and
steady pulsation till the ancient capital has become the nation's
heart. They feel that it is owing to Rome--Rome pagan as well as
Christian--that they once played so grand a part in the drama of
European history, and that they have now been able to attain that
fervid sentiment of unity which has brought them at last together
under one government. Whether they are right, whether if right they
are likely to be successful, need not be inquired here. But it
deserves to be noted that this enthusiasm for a famous name--for it is
nothing more--is substantially the same feeling as that which created
and hallowed the Holy Empire of the Middle Ages. The events of the
last few years on both sides of the Atlantic have proved that men are
not now, any more than they ever were, chiefly governed by
calculations of material profit and loss. Sentiments, fancies,
theories, have not lost their power; the spirit of poetry has not
wholly passed away from politics. And strange as seems to us the
worship paid to the name of mediæval Rome by those who saw the sins
and the misery of her people, it can hardly have been an intenser
feeling than is the imaginative reverence wherewith the Italians of
to-day look on the city whence, as from a fountain, all the streams of
their national life have sprung, and in which, as in an ocean, they
are all again to mingle.
FOOTNOTES:
[323] Hist. Eccl. l. ix. c. 6: τὸν δὲ φάναι, ὡς οὐχ ἑκὼν τάδε
ἐπιχειρεῖ, ἀλλά τις συνεχῶς ἐνοχλῶν αὐτὸν βιάζεται, καὶ ἐπιτάττει τὴν
Ῥώμην πορθεῖν.
[324] See the two Lives of St. Adalbert in Pertz, _M. G. H._, iv.,
evidently compiled soon after his death.
[325] Another letter of Petrarch's to John Colonna, written
immediately after his arrival in the city, deserves to be quoted, it
is so like what a stranger would now write off after his first day in
Rome:--'In præsens nihil est quod inchoare ausim, miraculo rerum
tantarum et stuporis mole obrutus ... præsentia vero, mirum dictu,
nihil imminuit sed auxit omnia: vere maior fuit Roma maioresque sunt
reliquiæ quam rebar: iam non orbem ab hac urbe domitum sed tam sero
domitum miror. Vale.'
[326] The idea of the continuance of the sway of Rome under a new
character is one which mediæval writers delight to illustrate. In
Appendix, Note D, there is quoted as a specimen a poem upon Rome, by
Hildebert (bishop of Le Mans, and afterwards archbishop of Tours),
written in the beginning of the twelfth century.
[327] In writing this chapter I have derived much assistance from the
admirable work of Ferdinand Gregorovius, _Geschichte der Stadt Rom im
Mittelalter_. Unfortunately no English translation of it exists; but I
am informed by the author that one is likely ere long to appear.
[328] Republican forms of some sort had existed before Arnold's
arrival, but we hear the name of no other leader mentioned; and
doubtless it was by him chiefly that the spirit of hostility to the
clerical power was infused into the minds of the Romans.
[329] The series of papal coins is interrupted (with one or two slight
exceptions) from A.D. 984 (not long after the time of Alberic) to A.D.
1304. In their place we meet with various coins struck by the
municipal authorities, some of which bear on the obverse the head of
the Apostle Peter, with the legend Roman. Pricipe: on the reverse the
head of the Apostle Paul, legend, Senat. Popul. Q. R. Gregorovius, _ut
supra_.
[330] Rienzi called himself Augustus as well as tribune; 'tribuno
Augusto de Roma.' (He pretended, or his friends pretended for him--it
was at any rate believed--that he was an illegitimate son of the
Emperor Henry the Seventh.) He cited, on his appointment, the Pope and
cardinals to appear before the people of Rome and give an account of
their conduct; and after them the Emperor. 'Ancora citao lo Bavaro
(Lewis the Fourth). Puoi citao li elettori de lo imperio in Alemagna,
e disse "Voglio vedere che rascione haco nella elettione," che
trovasse scritto che passato alcuno tempo la elettione recadeva a li
Romani.'--_Vita di Cola di Rienzi_, c. xxvi (written by a
contemporary). I give the spelling as it stands in Muratori's edition.
[331] The Germans called this hill, which is the highest in or near
Rome, conspicuous from a beautiful group of stone-pines upon its brow,
Mons Gaudii; the origin of the Italian name, Monte Mario, is not
known, unless it be, as some think, a corruption of Mons Malus.
It was on this hill that Otto the Third hanged Crescentius and his
followers.
[332] I quote this from the _Ordo Romanus_ as it stands in Muratori's
third Dissertation in the _Antiquitates Italiæ medii ævi_.
[333] Great stress was laid on one part of the procedure,--the holding
by the Emperor of the Pope's stirrup for him to mount, and the leading
of his palfrey for some distance. Frederick Barbarossa's omission of
this mark of respect when Pope Hadrian IV met him on his way to Rome,
had nearly caused a breach between the two potentates, Hadrian
absolutely refusing the kiss of peace until Frederick should have gone
through the form, which he was at last forced to do in a somewhat
ignominious way.
[334] A remarkable speech of expostulation made by Otto III to the
Roman people (after one of their revolts) from the tower of his house
on the Aventine has been preserved to us. It begins thus: 'Vosne estis
mei Romani? Propter vos quidem meam patriam, propinquos quoque
reliqui; amore vestro Saxones et cunctos Theotiscos, sanguinem meum,
proieci; vos in remotas partes imperii nostri adduxi, quo patres
vestri cum orbem ditione premerent numquam pedem posuerunt; scilicet
ut nomen vestrum et gloriam ad fines usque dilatarem; vos filios
adoptavi: vos cunctis prætuli.'--_Vita S. Bernwardi_; in Pertz, _M. G.
H._, t. iv.
(It is from this form 'Theotiscus' that the Italian 'Tedesco' seems to
have been derived.)
[335] The Leonine city, so called from Pope Leo IV, lay between the
Vatican and St. Peter's and the river.
[336] It would seem that Otto was deceived, and that in reality they
are the bones of St. Paulinus of Nola.
[337] The only other of the Teutonic Emperors buried in Italy were, so
far as I know, Lewis the Second (whose tomb, with an inscription
commemorating his exploits, is built into the wall of the north aisle
of the famous church of S. Ambrose at Milan), Henry the Sixth and
Frederick the Second, who lie at Palermo, Conrad IV, buried at Foggia,
and Henry the Seventh, whose sarcophagus may be seen in the Campo
Santo of Pisa, a city always conspicuous for her zeal on the imperial
side.
Six Emperors lie buried at Speyer, three or four at Prague, two at
Aachen, two at Bamberg, one at Innsbruck, one at Magdeburg, one at
Quedlinburg, two at Munich, and most of the later ones at Vienna.
[338] See note 198, p. 178.
[339] See p. 117.
[340] These highly curious frescoes are in the chapel of St. Sylvester
attached to the very ancient church of Quattro Santi on the Cœlian
hill, and are supposed to have been executed in the time of Pope
Innocent III. They represent scenes in the life of the Saint, more
particularly the making of the famous donation to him by Constantine,
who submissively holds the bridle of his palfrey.
[341] The last imperial coronation, that of Charles the Fifth, took
place in the church of St. Petronius at Bologna, Pope Clement VII
being unwilling to receive Charles in Rome. It is a grand church, but
the choir, where the ceremony took place, seems to have been
'restored,' that is to say modernized, since Charles' time.
[342] The name of Cenci is a very old one at Rome: it is supposed to
be an abbreviation of Crescentius. We hear in the eleventh century of
a certain Cencius, who on one occasion made Gregory VII prisoner.
[343] Thus in the church of San Lorenzo without the walls there are
several pointed windows, now bricked up; and similar ones may be seen
in the church of Ara Cœli on the summit of the Capitol. So in the apse
of St. John Lateran there are three or four windows of Gothic form:
and in its cloister, as well as in that of St. Paul without the walls,
a great deal of beautiful Lombard work. The elegant porch of the
church of Sant' Antonio Abate is Lombard. In the apse of the church of
San Giovanni e Paolo on the Cœlian hill there is an external arcade
exactly like those of the Duomo at Pisa. Nor are these the only
instances.
The ruined chapel attached to the fortress of the Caetani family--the
family to which Boniface the Eighth belonged, and whose head is now
the first of the Roman nobility--is a pretty little building, more
like northern Gothic than anything within the walls of Rome. It stands
upon the Appian Way, opposite the tomb of Cæcilia Metella, which the
Caetani used as a stronghold.
[344] A good deal of the mischief done by Robert Guiscard, from which
the parts of the city lying beyond the Coliseum towards the river and
St. John Lateran never recovered, is attributed to the Saracenic
troops in his service. Saracen pirates are said to have once before
sacked Rome. Genseric was not a heathen, but he was a furious Arian,
which, as far as respect to the churches of the orthodox went, was
nearly the same thing. He is supposed to have carried off the
seven-branched candlestick and other vessels of the Temple, which
Titus had brought from Jerusalem to Rome.
[345] We are told that one cause of the ferocity of the German part of
the army of Charles was their anger at the ruinous condition of the
imperial palace.
[346] Under the influence, partly of this anti-pagan spirit, partly of
his own restless vanity, partly of a passion to be doing something,
Pope Sixtus the Fifth did a great deal of mischief in the way of
destroying or spoiling the monuments of antiquity.
[347] These campaniles are generally supposed to date from the ninth
and tenth centuries. I am informed, however, by Mr. J. H. Parker, of
Oxford, whose antiquarian skill is well known, that he is led to
believe by an examination of their mouldings that few or none, unless
it be that of San Prassede, are older than the twelfth century.
This of course applies only to the existing buildings. The type of
tower may be, and indeed no doubt is, older.
Somewhat similar towers may be observed in many parts of the Italian
Alps, especially in the wonderful mountain land north of Venice, where
such towers are of all dates from the eleventh or twelfth down to the
nineteenth century, the ancient type having in these remote valleys
been adhered to because the builder had no other models before him. In
the valley of Cimolais I have seen such a campanile in course of
erection, precisely similar to others in the neighbouring villages
some eight centuries old.
The very curious round towers of Ravenna, some four or five of which
are still standing, seem to have originally had similar windows,
though these have been all, or nearly all, stopped up. The Roman
towers are all square.
[348] The Palatine hill seems to have been then, as it is for the most
part now, a waste of stupendous ruins. In the great imperial palace
upon its northern and eastern sides was the residence of an official
of the Eastern court in the beginning of the eighth century. In the
time of Charles, some seventy years later, this palace was no longer
habitable.
[349] Such as we see it in the later and lesser churches of basilica
form.
[350] It was thus that most of the earlier Teutonic Emperors, and
notably Charles and Otto, professed to have obtained the crown;
although practically it was partly a matter of conquest and partly of
private arrangement with the Pope. In later times, the seven Germanic
princes were recognized as the legally qualified electoral body, but
their appearance on the stage was a result of the confusion of the
German kingdom with the Roman Empire, and in strictness they had
nothing to do with the Roman crown at all. The right to bestow it
could only--on principle--belong to some Roman authority, and those
who felt the difficulty were driven to suppose a formal cession of
their privilege by the Roman people to the seven electors. See p. 227
_supra_: and cf. Matthew Villani (iv. 77), 'Il popolo Romano, non da
se, ma la chiesa per lui, concedette la elezione degli Imperadori a
sette principi della Magna.'
[351] That which Dante, Arnold of Brescia, and the rest really have in
common with the modern Italian 'party of movement' is their hostility
to the temporal power of the Popes.