fighters. Then, as now, land was the ultimate form of property, and its
produce the usual form of wealth; and then, as now, many families were
'land-poor,' in the sense of owning tracts of country which yielded
little or no income but represented considerable power, and furnished
the owners with most of the necessaries of life, such rents as were
collected being usually paid in kind, in oil and wine, in grain, fruit
and vegetables, and even in salt meat, and horses, cattle for
slaughtering and beasts of burden, not to speak of wool, hemp and flax,
as well as firewood. But money was scarce and, consequently, all the
things which only money could buy, so that a gown was a possession, and
a corselet or a good sword a treasure. The small farmer of our times
knows what it means to have plenty to eat and little to wear. His
position is not essentially different from that of the average landed
gentry in the Middle Age, not only in Italy, but all over Europe. In
times when superiority lay in physical strength, courage, horsemanship
and skill in the use of arms, the so-called gentleman was not
distinguished from the plebeian by the newness or neatness of his
clothes so much as by the nature and quality of the weapons he wore when
he went abroad in peace or war, and very generally by being mounted on a
good horse.
In his home he was simple, even primitive. He desired space more than
comfort, and comfort more than luxury. His furniture consisted almost
entirely of beds, chests and benches, with few tables except such as
were needed for eating. Beds were supported by boards laid on trestles,
raised very high above the floor to be beyond the reach of rats, mice
and other creatures. The lower mattress was filled with the dried leaves
of the maize, and the upper one contained wool, with which the pillows
also were stuffed. The floors of dwelling rooms were generally either
paved with bricks or made of a sort of cement, composed of lime, sand
and crushed brick, the whole being beaten down with iron pounders, while
in the moist state, during three days. There were no carpets, and fresh
rushes were strewn everywhere on the floors, which in summer were first
watered, like a garden path, to lay the dust. There was no glass in the
windows of ordinary rooms, and the consequence was that during the
daytime people lived almost in the open air, in winter as well as
summer; sunshine was a necessity of existence, and sheltered courts and
cloistered walks were built like reservoirs for the light and heat.
In the rooms, ark-shaped chests stood against the walls, to contain the
ordinary clothes not kept in the general 'guardaroba.' In the deep
embrasures of the windows there were stone seats, but there were few
chairs, or none at all, in the bedrooms. At the head of each bed hung a
rough little cross of dark wood--later, as carving became more general,
a crucifix--and a bit of an olive branch preserved from Palm Sunday
throughout the year. The walls themselves were scrupulously whitewashed;
the ceilings were of heavy beams, supporting lighter cross-beams, on
which in turn thick boards were laid to carry the cement floor of the
room overhead.
Many hundred men-at-arms could be drawn up in the courtyards, and their
horses stalled in the spacious stables. The kitchens, usually situated
on the ground floor, were large enough to provide meals for half a
thousand retainers, if necessary; and the cellars and underground
prisons were a vast labyrinth of vaulted chambers, which not
unfrequently communicated with the Tiber by secret passages. In
restoring the palace of the Santacroce, a few years ago, a number of
skeletons were discovered, some still wearing armour, and all most
evidently the remains of men who had died violent deaths. One of them
was found with a dagger driven through the skull and helmet. The hand
that drove it must have been strong beyond the hands of common men.
The grand staircase led up from the sunny court to the state apartments,
such as they were in those days. There, at least, there were sometimes
carpets, luxuries of enormous value, and even before the Renascence the
white walls were hung with tapestries, at least in part. In those times,
too, there were large fireplaces in almost every room, for fuel was
still plentiful in the Campagna and in the near mountains; and where the
houses were practically open to the air all day, fires were an absolute
necessity. Even in ancient times it is recorded that the Roman Senate,
amidst the derisive jests of the plebeians, once had to adjourn on
account of the extreme cold. People rose early in the Middle Age, dined
at noon, slept in the afternoon when the weather was warm, and supped,
as a rule, at 'one hour of the night,' that is to say an hour after 'Ave
Maria,' which was rung half an hour after sunset, and was the end of the
day of twenty-four hours. Noon was taken from the sun, but did not fall
at a regular hour of the clock, and never fell at twelve. In winter, for
instance, if the Ave Maria bell rang at half-past five of our modern
time, the noon of the following day fell at 'half-past eighteen o'clock'
by the mediaeval clocks. In summer, it might fall as early as three
quarters past fifteen; and this manner of reckoning time was common in
Rome thirty-five years ago, and is not wholly unpractised in some parts
of Italy still.
It was always an Italian habit, and a very healthy one, to get out of
doors immediately on rising, and to put off making anything like a
careful toilet till a much later hour. Breakfast, as we understand it,
is an unknown meal in Italy, even now. Most people drink a cup of black
coffee, standing; many eat a morsel of bread or biscuit with it and get
out of doors as soon as they can; but the greediness of an Anglo-Saxon
breakfast disgusts all Latins alike, and two set meals daily are thought
to be enough for anyone, as indeed they are. The hard-working Italian
hill peasant will sometimes toast himself a piece of corn bread before
going to work, and eat it with a few drops of olive oil; and in the
absence of tea or coffee, the people of the Middle Age often drank a
mouthful of wine on rising to 'move the blood,' as they said. But that
was all.
Every mediaeval palace had its chapel, which was sometimes an adjacent
church communicating with the house, and in many families it is even now
the custom to hear the short low Mass at a very early hour. But
probably nothing can give an adequate idea of the idleness of the Middle
Age, when the day was once begun. Before the Renascence, there was no
such thing as study, and there were hardly any pastimes except gambling
and chess, both of which the girls and youths of the Decameron seem to
have included in one contemptuous condemnation when they elected to
spend their time in telling stories. The younger men of the household,
of course, when not actually fighting, passed a certain number of hours
in the practice of horsemanship and arms; but the only real excitement
they knew was in love and war, the latter including everything between
the battles of the Popes and Emperors, and the street brawls of private
enemies, which generally drew blood and often ended in a death.
It does not appear that the idea of 'housekeeping' as the chief
occupation of the Baron's wife ever entered into the Roman mind. In
northern countries there has always been more equality between men and
women, more respect for woman as an intelligent being, and less care for
her as a valuable possession to be guarded against possible attacks from
without. In Rome and the south of Italy the women in a great household
were carefully separated from the men, and beyond the outer halls in
which visitors were received, business transacted and politics
discussed, there were closed doors, securely locked, leading to the
women's apartments beyond. In every Roman palace and fortress there was
a revolving 'dumb-waiter' between the women's quarters and the men's,
called the 'wheel,' and used as a means of communication. Through this
the household supplies were daily handed in, for the cooking was very
generally done by women, and through the same machine the prepared food
was passed out to the men, the wheel being so arranged that men and
women could not see each other, though they might hear each other speak.
To all intents and purposes the system was oriental and the women were
shut up in a harem. The use of the dumb-waiter survived the revolution
in manners under the Renascence, and the wheel itself remains as a
curiosity of past times in more than one Roman dwelling today. It had
its uses and was not a piece of senseless tyranny. In order to keep up
an armed force for all emergencies the Baron took under his protection
as men-at-arms the most desperate ruffians, outlaws and outcasts whom he
could collect, mostly men under sentence of banishment or death for
highway robbery and murder, whose only chance of escaping torture and
death lay in risking life and limb for a master strong enough to defy
the law, the 'bargello' and the executioner, in his own house or castle,
where such henchmen were lodged and fed, and were controlled by nothing
but fear of the Baron himself, of his sons, when they were grown up,
and of his poorer kinsmen who lived with him. There were no crimes which
such malefactors had not committed, or were not ready to commit for a
word, or even for a jest. The women, on the other hand, were in the
first place the ladies and daughters of the house, and of kinsmen,
brought up in almost conventual solitude, when they were not actually
educated in convents; and, secondly, young girls from the Baron's
estates who served for a certain length of time, and were then generally
married to respectable retainers. The position of twenty or thirty women
and girls under the same roof with several hundreds of the most
atrocious cutthroats of any age was undeniably such as to justify the
most tyrannical measures for their protection.
There are traces, even now, of the enforced privacy in which they lived.
For instance, no Roman lady of today will ever show herself at a window
that looks on the street, except during Carnival, and in most houses
something of the old arrangement of rooms is still preserved, whereby
the men and women occupy different parts of the house.
One must try to call up the pictures of one day, to get any idea of
those times; one must try and see the grey dawn stealing down the dark,
unwindowed lower walls of the fortress that flanks the Church of the
Holy Apostles,--the narrow and murky street below, the broad, dim space
beyond, the mystery of the winding distances whence comes the first
sound of the day, the far, high cry of the waterman driving his little
donkey with its heavy load of water-casks. The beast stumbles along in
the foul gloom, through the muddy ruts, over heaps of garbage at the
corners, picking its way as best it can, till it starts with a snort and
almost falls with its knees upon a dead man, whose thrice-stabbed body
lies right across the way. The waterman, ragged, sandal-shod, stops,
crosses himself, and drags his beast back hurriedly with a muttered
exclamation of mingled horror, disgust and fear for himself, and makes
for the nearest corner, stumbling along in his haste lest he should be
found with the corpse and taken for the murderer. As the dawn
forelightens, and the cries go up from the city, the black-hooded
Brothers of Prayer and Death come in a little troop, their lantern still
burning as they carry their empty stretcher, seeking for dead men; and
they take up the poor nameless body and bear it away quickly from the
sight of the coming day.
Then, as they disappear, the great bell of the Apostles' Church begins
to toll the morning Angelus, half an hour before sunrise,--three
strokes, then four, then five, then one, according to ancient custom,
and then after a moment's silence, the swinging peal rings out, taken up
and answered from end to end of the half-wasted city. A troop of
men-at-arms ride up to the great closed gate 'in rusty armour marvellous
ill-favoured,' as Shakespeare's stage direction has it, mud-splashed,
their brown cloaks half concealing their dark and war-worn mail, their
long swords hanging down and clanking against their huge stirrups, their
beasts jaded and worn and filthy from the night raid in the Campagna, or
the long gallop from Palestrina. The leader pounds three times at the
iron-studded door with the hilt of his dagger, a sleepy porter,
grey-bearded and cloaked, slowly swings back one half of the gate and
the ruffians troop in, followed by the waterman who has gone round the
fortress to avoid the dead body. The gate shuts again, with a long
thundering rumble. High up, wooden shutters, behind which there is no
glass, are thrown open upon the courtyard, and one window after another
is opened to the morning air; on one side, girls and women look out,
muffled in dark shawls; from the other grim, unwashed, bearded men call
down to their companions, who have dismounted and are unsaddling their
weary horses, and measuring out a little water to them, where water is a
thing of price.
The leader goes up into the house to his master, to tell him of the
night's doings, and while he speaks the Baron sits in a great wooden
chair, in his long gown of heavy cloth, edged with coarse fox's fur, his
feet in fur slippers, and a shabby cap upon his head, but a manly and
stern figure, all the same, slowly munching a piece of toasted bread and
sipping a few drops of old white wine from a battered silver cup.
Then Mass in the church, the Baron, his kinsmen, the ladies and the
women kneeling in the high gallery above the altar, the men-at-arms and
men-servants and retainers crouching below on the stone pavement; a
dusky multitude, with a gleam of steel here and there, and red flashing
eyes turned up with greedy longing towards the half-veiled faces of the
women, met perhaps, now and then, by a furtive answering glance from
under a veil or hoodlike shawl, for every woman's head is covered, but
of the men only the old lord wears his cap, which he devoutly lifts at
'Gloria Patri' and 'Verbum Caro,' and at 'Sanctus' and at the
consecration. It is soon over, and the day is begun, for the sun is
fully risen and streams through the open unglazed windows as the maids
sprinkle water on the brick floors, and sweep and strew fresh rushes,
and roll back the mattresses on the trestle beds, which are not made
again till evening. In the great courtyard, the men lead out the horses
and mount them bareback and ride out in a troop, each with his sword by
his side, to water them at the river, half a mile away, for not a single
public fountain is left in Rome; and the grooms clean out the stables,
while the peasants come in from the country, driving mules laden with
provisions for the great household, and far away, behind barred doors,
the women light the fires in the big kitchen.
Later again, the children of the noble house are taught to ride and
fence in the open court; splendid boys with flowing hair, bright as gold
or dark as night, dressed in rough hose and leathern jerkin,
bright-eyed, fearless, masterful already in their play as a lion's
whelps, watched from an upper window by their lady mother and their
little sisters, and not soon tired of saddle or sword--familiar with the
grooms and men by the great common instinct of fighting, but as far from
vulgar as Polonius bade Laertes learn to be.
So morning warms to broad noon, and hunger makes it dinner-time, and the
young kinsmen who have strolled abroad come home, one of them with his
hand bound up in a white rag that has drops of blood on it, for he has
picked a quarrel in the street and steel has been out, as usual, though
no one has been killed, because the 'bargello' and his men were in
sight, down there near the Orsini's theatre-fortress. And at dinner when
the priest has blessed the table, the young men laugh about the
scrimmage, while the Baron himself, who has killed a dozen men in
battle, with his own hand, rebukes his sons and nephews with all the
useless austerity which worn-out age wears in the face of unbroken
youth. The meal is long, and they eat much, for there will be nothing
more till night; they eat meat broth, thick with many vegetables and
broken bread and lumps of boiled meat, and there are roasted meats and
huge earthen bowls of salad, and there is cheese in great blocks, and
vast quantities of bread, with wine in abundance, poured for each man by
the butler into little earthen jugs from big earthenware flagons. They
eat from trenchers of wood, well scoured with ashes; forks they have
none, and most of the men use their own knives or daggers when they are
not satisfied with the carving done for them by the carver. Each man,
when he has picked a bone, throws it under the table to the house-dogs
lying in wait on the floor, and from time to time a basin is passed and
a little water poured upon the fingers. The Baron has a napkin of his
own; there is one napkin for all the other men; the women generally eat
by themselves in their own apartments, the so-called 'gentlemen' in the
'tinello,' and the men-at-arms and grooms, and all the rest, in the big
lower halls near the kitchens, whence their food is passed out to them
through the wheel.
After dinner, if it be summer and the weather hot, the gates are barred,
the windows shut, and the whole household sleeps. Early or late, as the
case may be, the lords and ladies and children take the air, guarded by
scores of mounted men, riding towards that part of the city where they
may neither meet their enemies nor catch a fever in the warm months. In
rainy weather they pass the time as they can, with telling of many
tales, short, dramatic and strong as the framework of a good play, with
music, sometimes, and with songs, and with discussing of such news as
there may be in such times. And at dusk the great bells ring to
even-song, the oil lamp is swung up in the great staircase, the windows
and gates are shut again, the torches and candles and little lamps are
lit for supper, and at last, with rushlights, each finds the way along
the ghostly corridors to bed and sleep. That was the day's round, and
there was little to vary it in more peaceful times.
Over all life there was the hopeless, resentful dulness that oppressed
men and women till it drove them half mad, to the doing of desperate
things in love and war; there was the everlasting restraint of danger
without and of forced idleness within--danger so constant that it ceased
to be exciting and grew tiresome, idleness so oppressive that battle,
murder and sudden death were a relief from the inactivity of sluggish
peace; a state in which the mind was no longer a moving power in man,
but only by turns the smelting pot and the anvil of half-smothered
passions that now and then broke out with fire and flame and sword to
slash and burn the world with a history of unimaginable horror.
That was the Middle Age in Italy. A poorer race would have gone down
therein to a bloody destruction; but it was out of the Middle Age that
the Italians were born again in the Renascence. It deserved the name.
[Illustration]
REGION IV CAMPO MARZO
It was harvest time when the Romans at last freed themselves from the
very name of Tarquin. In all the great field, between the Tiber and the
City, the corn stood high and ripe, waiting for the sickle, while Brutus
did justice upon his two sons, and upon the sons of his sister, and upon
those 'very noble youths,' still the Tarquins' friends, who laid down
their lives for their mistaken loyalty and friendship, and for whose
devotion no historian has ever been brave enough, or generous enough, to
say a word. It has been said that revolution is patriotism when it
succeeds, treason when it fails, and in the converse, more than one
brave man has died a traitor's death for keeping faith with a fallen
king. Successful revolution denied those young royalists the charitable
handful of earth and the four words of peace--'sit eis terra
levis'--that should have laid their unquiet ghosts, and the brutal
cynicism of history has handed down their names to the perpetual
execration of mankind.
The corn stood high in the broad field which the Tarquins had taken from
Mars and had ploughed and tilled for generations. The people went out
and reaped the crop, and bound it in sheaves to be threshed for the
public bread, but their new masters told them that it would be impious
to eat what had been meant for kings, and they did as was commanded to
them, meekly, and threw all into the river. Sheaf upon sheaf, load upon
load, the yellow stream swept away the yellow ears and stalks, down to
the shallows, where the whole mass stuck fast, and the seeds took root
in the watery mud, and the stalks rotted in great heaps, and the island
of the Tiber was first raised above the level of the water. Then the
people burned the stubble and gave back the land to Mars, calling it the
Campus Martius, after him.
There the young Romans learned the use of arms, and were taught to ride;
and under sheds there stood those rows of wooden horses, upon which
youths learned to vault, without step or stirrup, in their armour and
sword in hand. There they ran foot-races in the clouds of dust whirled
up from the dry ground, and threw the discus by the twisted thong as the
young men of the hills do today, and the one who could reach the goal
with the smallest number of throws was the winner,--there, under the
summer sun and in the biting wind of winter, half naked, and tough as
wolves, the boys of Rome laboured to grow up and be Roman men.
There, also, the great assemblies were held, the public meetings and the
elections, when the people voted by passing into the wooden lists that
were called 'Sheepfolds,' till Julius Caesar planned the great marble
portico for voting, and Agrippa finished it, making it nearly a mile
round; and behind it, on the west side, a huge space was kept open for
centuries, called the Villa Publica, where the censors numbered the
people. The ancient Campus took in a wide extent of land, for it
included everything outside the Servian wall, from the Colline Gate to
the river. All that visibly bears its name today is a narrow street that
runs southward from the western end of San Lorenzo in Lucina. The Region
of Campo Marzo, however, is still one of the largest in the city,
including all that lies within the walls from Porta Pinciana, by Capo le
Case, Via Frattina, Via di Campo Marzo and Via della Stelletta, past the
Church of the Portuguese and the Palazzo Moroni,--known by Hawthorne's
novel as 'Hilda's Tower,'--and thence to the banks of the Tiber.
[Illustration: PIAZZA DI SPAGNA]
From the Renascence until the recent extension of the city on the south
and southeast, this Region was the more modern part of Rome. In the
Middle Age it was held by the Colonna, who had fortified the tomb of
Augustus and one or two other ruins. Later it became the strangers'
quarter. The Lombards established themselves near the Church of Saint
Charles, in the Corso; the English, near Saint Ives, the little church
with the strange spiral tower, built against the University of the
Sapienza; the Greeks lived in the Via de' Greci; the Burgundians in the
Via Borgognona, and thence to San Claudio, where they had their Hospice;
and so on, almost every nationality being established in a colony of its
own; and the English visitors of today are still inclined to think the
Piazza di Spagna the most central point of Rome, whereas to Romans it
seems to be very much out of the way.
The tomb of Augustus, which served as the model for the greater
Mausoleum of Hadrian, dominated the Campus Martius, and its main walls
are still standing, though hidden by many modern houses. The tomb of the
Julian Caesars rose on white marble foundations, a series of concentric
terraces, planted with cypress trees, to the great bronze statue of
Augustus that crowned the summit. Here rested the ashes of Augustus, of
the young Marcellus, of Livia, of Tiberius, of Caligula, and of many
others whose bodies were burned in the family Ustrinum near the tomb
itself. Plundered by Alaric, and finally ruined by Robert Guiscard, when
he burnt the city, it became a fortress under the Colonna, and is
included, with the fortress of Monte Citorio, in a transfer of property
made by one member of the family to another in the year 1252. Ruined at
last, it became a bull ring in the last century and in the beginning of
this one, when Leo the Twelfth forbade bull-fighting. Then it was a
theatre, the scene of Salvini's early triumphs. Today it is a circus,
dignified by the name of the reigning sovereign.