From the second century BC through the fourth century AD, Rome was the most populous city that the western world had ever seen. Until the eighteenth century, no European metropolis could rival imperial Rome, neither in size (1,400 hectares) nor in population (up to 1 million).1 At the dawn of the fifth century, Rome remained a vibrant and thriving city, although, just like the empire itself, it had undoubtedly changed a lot since the golden age of the Flavian and the Antonine dynasties.
Hendrik Dey’s The Making of Medieval Rome tells the story of Rome and the Romans during the next millennium, namely from 400 to 1420 AD. In the introduction, Dey clearly states why his book differs so profoundly from Richard Krautheimer’s justly renowned Rome. Profile of a City 312-1308, published in 1980 and covering roughly the same period.2 While Krautheimer was interested in following the evolution of the Christian city, Dey is looking at the making of the ‘Other Rome’, the Medieval one. The selected chronology aptly reflects this intellectual orientation. In terms of Rome’s topography and urban development, the arc of time between 400 and 1400 appears to fit perfectly with the literal meaning of ‘medieval’, which in this sense stands as the long, intermediatory centuries between antiquity and early modernity. Of course, especially in this case, the term does not merely suit classification purposes: ‘medieval Rome’ actually refers to an inherently different season in the history of the city (if not to say of the western world), one that opened on the crumbling structures of the ancient world and closed on the beginning of the Renaissance and its enthusiasm for change.
In seven, chronologically ordered chapters, this work presents three essential features of Medieval Rome. Through them, readers can most certainly gather a better understanding of the city’s physiognomy, and above all, of the uniqueness of its people.
The first factor lies just here, in the absolute sense of exceptionalism that, even in the Middle Ages, marked the native Romans. The political and military crises of the fifth and sixth centuries led to a demographic collapse: although we do not have the exact figures, between 350 and 550, Rome’s population probably fell from over 700,000 to barely 100,000 inhabitants. This downward trend was not only dramatic but also irreversible for many centuries to come. At any point between the sixth and the fifteenth century, the numbers never exceeded 50,000-60,000 people, and at times they may have easily dipped as low as 20,000-30,000. In addition to the demographic degrowth, Rome’s population experienced a simultaneous simplification in their life standards: public buildings and infrastructures (such as roads, aqueducts, and the annona) could no longer be mantained without a systematic tax collection of imperial scale. The level of sophistication of private housing also declined significantly, entailing more modest accommodations. The import of bulk commodities from all over the Mediterranean was replaced by an efficient but less ambitious regional network of exchange.3
As Dey bluntly puts it, if a Roman living in AD 400 were to be transported two centuries forward in time, that very same person would not be able to make heads or tails of their surroundings (p. 3). In the span of two hundred years, Rome had transformed beyond recognition. But even when put in front of this drastic change, Rome’s inhabitants remained true to themselves. Despite the discomfort they might have felt for the material deterioration of the urban decor, the early medieval Romans were emboldened by a persistent sense of exceptionalism, which was rooted deep in the city’s imperial legacy and in the physical remains of its staggeringly grandiose past. They were inspired by the cityscape itself. “Like urbanites everywhere, medieval Romans were products of their particular surroundings, but the experience of inhabiting medieval Rome was highly unusual insofar as the city itself was such an unusual place” (p. 4).
Romans’ sense of exceptionalism was not only based on the memory of Rome’s glorious past but also on its extraordinary resilience to challenging times: in spite of the numerous crises, the city and its community kept on functioning as a privileged center of consumption. The effervescent economic life of Rome in the so called ‘dark ages’ is the second key argument of Dey’s study.
Despite the crisis of the western and the eastern Mediterranean trades (respectively in the fifth and in the seventh centuries), throughout the whole 600s, Rome was still well integrated into the trans-Mediterranean political and commercial networks. Of course, much was due to its connections to the ‘Byzantine enclave’ and to the rest of the Byzantine world.4
A single, groundbreaking excavation at the Crypta Balbi in the 1980s and 1990s has overturned centuries of conventional wisdom on the early Middle Ages, much of which – the seventh and tenth centuries in particular – used to be treated as a time of unrelenting poverty and squalor. These findings point to the existence of a surprisingly robust economy: in most periods, people in Rome still employed coins for commercial transactions, as the production and circulation of high-quality goods never really stopped. Furthermore, raw materials and imported commodities were plentiful. Local artisans had preserved the technical knowledge of the ancient world, allowing them to keep catering to the needs of the urban consumers.5
There is general agreement that even when its population dropped at 20,000-30,000 (or whatever the actual number was) Rome remained the most inhabited city in Italy and in the whole Latin Christianity, at least up until the eleventh century (p. 138). But besides the raw numbers, it also had more producers, artisans, educated professionals, and clerics; its economy was more diversified and the landowners that lived within its walls controlled more land than those from any other city.6
Although Rome’s persistent and vibrant economic life owed much to the presence of the pope, it would be misleading to think that the urban community missed political and economic initiatives. The third and probably the most original among Dey’s arguments stands precisely in the sense of autonomy of the urban community, that is in its independence from the ecclesiastical institutions.
Krautheimer’s Rome was basically the pope’s backyard; its topography a mere collection of churches. In large part, that was due to his time: towards the 1980s, churches represented by far the best-known category of surviving medieval buildings. It is thus not a case that Krautheimer painted the medieval cityscape of Rome mainly through them. However, he knew perfectly well that most Romans were not clerics, and that Rome did not consist primarily of ecclesiastical constructions. He accepted the prevailing consensus that Rome’s remaining inhabitants (he guessed they numbered around 90,000) were mostly clustered in the cup-handle-shaped bend of the Tiber, in the Campus Martius, and across the river in the adjacent sections of Trastevere, from about the Tiber Island up to the Vatican. He called this populated nucleus of settlement the abitato, as it was known by the sixteenth century. The reality, now broadly recognized in numerous studies, is that Romans still occupied much of the intramural area all throughout the early Middle Ages, and they only really began to concentrate in the locations indicated by Krautheimer roughly from the eleventh century (p. 89).7
Moreover, the results of new studies regarding the dynamics of land tenure, property ownership, and the sources of wealth have led not so much to downplaying the role of the Church but better yet to contextualize it. These inquiries shed more light on the reach and the limitations of the ecclesiastical institutions in a city that remained a relatively wealthy and dynamic place in its own right. In a sense, later medieval Rome has been normalized and brought into nearer rapport with other Italian cities, such as Pisa and Milan, for instance.8
Just as in other Italian communes, in Rome too various factions and families predominated in different quarters, contributing to the gradual formation of discrete neighborhoods often centered on prominent landmarks and strongholds. Many residents of these neighborhoods rarely left them. By the later Middle Ages, the cityscape was so ‘balkanized’ that people from different neighborhoods spoke perceptively different varieties of the Roman dialect.
The final part of the book is consistent with this idea of ‘normalization’ or perhaps ‘secularization’ of Rome’s history, although Dey never uses the latter term to describe such a change in perspective (p. 8). Unlike Krautheimer, who stopped his account in 1308, Dey’s book closes in 1420. His declared aim is to stress that ‘medieval’ Rome did not end when the papacy was transferred to Avignon, at the beginning of the fourteenth century: popes had been avoiding Rome for well over a century before Avignon, and even when present, their capacity to shape the city and the lives of its inhabitants was hardly absolute. To suggest otherwise is to imply that fourteenth-century Rome, just because bereft of popes for seven decades, was somehow no longer medieval. By contrast, to the general purpose of reconceptualizing Rome’s transition to the early modern age, Dey suggests to draw on the recognition that “the Rome the people of the Renaissance inherited was mostly a creation of the Middle Ages” (p. 259).
Through this refined and thorough research, Dey conveys an image of Rome which is not just a shallow background in the portrait of the pope (or of a few aristocratic families): quite the opposite, Medieval Rome is a composite mosaic of diverse social entities, each of them contributing with their individual stories to breathe its never-ending life in the lungs of the eternal city.
Notes:
1 For the numbers given in the following, see: Elio Lo Cascio, La popolazione, in: Id. (ed.), Roma imperial. Una metropoli antica, Rome 2000, pp 56-61; Id., Le procedure di recensus dalla tarda repubblica al tardo antico e il calcolo della popolazione di Roma, in: Rome impérial. Démographie et logistique, Rome 1997, pp 3-76; Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the end of civilization, Oxford 2005; Paolo Delogu, La storia economica di Roma nell’alto medioevo, in: Id. / Lidia Paroli (eds.), La storia economica di Roma nell’alto medioevo, Florence1993, pp 11-29.
2 Richard Krautheimer, Rome. Profile of a City 312-1308, Princeton 1980.
3 See Roberto Meneghini / Riccardo Santangeli Valenzani, Roma nell’altomedioevo. Topografia e urbanistica della città dal V al X secolo, Rome 2004; Paolo Delogu, Il passaggio dall’antichità al Medioevo, in: André Vauchez (ed.), Roma medievale, Rome 2001, pp 3-40.
4 Peter Brown, Byzantine and Early Islamic Africa, ca 500-800: Concluding Remarks, in: Susan Stevens / Jonathan Conant (eds.), North Africa under Byzantium and Early Islam, Washington DC 2016, pp 295-301, at p 299.
5 Clementina Panella / Lucia Saguì, Consumo e produzione a Roma tra tardoantico e altomedioevo. Le merci, i contesti, in Roma nell’alto medioevo, Spoleto 2001, pp 757-820; Lucia Saguì, Roma, i centri privilegiati e la lunga durata della tarda antichità. Dati archeologici dal deposito di VII secolo nell’esedra della Crypta Balbi, in Archeologia Medievale 29 (2002), pp 7-42; Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages. Europe and the Mediterranean, 400-800, Oxford 2005, pp 712; 735-736.
6 Meneghini /Santangeli Valenzani, Roma, pp 23-24; Chris Wickham, Rome according to their Malign Custom. Rome in Italy in the Late Ninth Century, in Julia Smith (ed.), Early Medieval Rome and the Christian West. Essays in Honour of Donald A. Bullough, Leiden / Boston 2000, pp 151-167, at pp 162-5; Id., Medieval Rome. Stability and Crisis of a City, 900-1050, Oxford 2014, p 112.
7 Krautheimer, Rome, p 85; cf. Meneghini / Santangeli Valenzani, Roma, pp 224-226.
8 Étienne Hubert, Espace urbain et habitat à Rome du X siècle à la fin du XIII siècle, Rome 1990; Wickham, Medieval Rome; Id., Sleepwalking into a New World. The Emergence of Italian City Communes in the Twelfth Century, Princeton 2015.