Reviving the Eternal City

Elizabeth McCahill

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780674727151
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Italian History
• Index: History

In 1420, after more than one hundred years of the Avignon Exile and the Western Schism, the papal court returned to Rome, which had become depopulated, dangerous, and impoverished in the papacy's absence. Reviving the Eternal City examines the culture of Rome and the papal court during the first half of the fifteenth century, a crucial transitional period before the city's rebirth. As Elizabeth McCahill explains, during these decades Rome and the Curia were caught between conflicting realities--between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, between conciliarism and papalism, between an image of Rome as a restored republic and a dream of the city as a papal capital.Through the testimony of humanists' rhetorical texts and surviving archival materials, McCahill reconstructs the niche that scholars carved for themselves as they penned vivid descriptions of Rome and offered remedies for contemporary social, economic, religious, and political problems. In addition to analyzing the humanists' intellectual and professional program, McCahill investigates the different agendas that popes Martin V (1417-1431) and Eugenius IV (1431-1447) and their cardinals had for the post-Schism pontificate. Reviving the Eternal City illuminates an urban environment in transition and explores the ways in which curialists collaborated and competed to develop Rome's ancient legacy into a potent cultural myth.

1

Rome’s Third Founder? Martin V, Niccolò Signorili, and Roman Revival, 1420–1431

AS THE introduction to this book argues, it is possible, in part, to recreate or at least imagine what Martin V saw the day he entered Rome as pontiff. It is, however, much more difficult to know how he interpreted what he saw, what the city meant to him. Manetti memorably recorded Nicholas V’s vision of what Rome could and should be, and Pius II left his own Commentaries, giving his opinion not just on the city but on Italy more generally. Unfortunately, Martin and his successor left no such personal responses to the urban center they fought so hard to rule. Thus, their attitudes to Rome have to be pieced together from their actions and from contemporary interpretations of the city. While these literary sources do not provide direct insight into the urban goals of Martin or Eugenius, they demonstrate an array of interpretative frameworks through which the city could be viewed and some of her Quattocento meanings. They thus offer guidance as to the parameters within which the popes’ ideas developed.

Some Readings of Rome, 1330–1430

One of the most influential fourteenth-century responses to Rome was Petrarch’s letter to Giovanni Colonna. When Petrarch visited Rome in 1337, he found a city impoverished by the absence of the Curia, and writing to Colonna, he further exaggerates Rome’s emptiness and desolation, transforming her into a blank slate on which his imagination can have full play. By claiming to see a legion of famous Romans including Evander, the she-wolf, Ancus Martius, Lucretia, Lars Porsena, Horatius, Coriolanus, Curtius, Jugurtha, Caesar, Augustus, Nero, Peter, Paul, and Constantine, Petrarch offers a virtuosic summary of his knowledge of Roman history.¹ His letter is an exercise in rhetorical imitation, a rewriting and reinterpretation of Evander’s prophecy to Aeneas, but unlike Vergil, Petrarch does not offer a triumphal promise of political grandeur. Instead, he bewails the fact that “nowhere is Rome less known than in Rome”; rather than summarizing a common cultural heritage, his historical catalogue displays knowledge that is only accessible to a few experts. Although Petrarch acknowledges the possibility that “Rome would rise again instantly if she began to know herself,” the rest of his letter questions the feasibility of a revival of ancient civilization. In fact, Petrarch suggests that Rome may be nothing but a projection of his own, classically trained imagination, an emblem of his own reading.

During the last few years of Martin’s reign, Niccolò Signorili, the secretary to Rome’s magistrate, dedicated his Descriptio urbis Romae eiusque excellentiae to the pope.² Whereas Petrarch focuses on the extent to which Rome has fallen, Signorili takes a more optimistic tone. He does bewail the fact that writings about Rome’s laws, honors, and general history have been lost, and he explains that the Conservators of the Camera urbis urged him to remedy this situation. As in so many dedications, he waxes on about his own lack of knowledge, eloquence, and ability but concludes that, even if he can only offer a sketch of Rome’s grandeur, it will be better than nothing.

Starting from this, Holy Father, one thing is constant and most true with credible evidence and without doubt; indeed it is very evident to all nations and it does not require proof that Rome alone shines clearly throughout the world in spiritual and temporal affairs with a special law and dignity, since the seats of both the highest Apostle and the supreme emperor are located here. And from this it follows, not surprisingly, that this city deserved to be decorated with such lofty structures, to be distinguished with such great titles and to be raised to such superiority, with divine clemency permitting. Thus Rome is called the head of the world, the head of faith, the mother of laws, the common fatherland and mistress of all people and their teacher, both from the disposition of her laws and from the universal usage of her speech. Your holiness is able to grant the truth of this testimony. For you, who are considered lord throughout the world so that you are honored as Rome’s protector by the munificence of great kings and princes, you should hold fast to this city, take care to conserve her honors and dignities, and not permit her, who ought by every right to be honored by all, to be held in small esteem by her subjects.³

Here, in short, is the other side of a coin that Rome offered to her Quattrocento interpreters. At the same time that she was nothing, a ruined shell, she was also a landscape whose meaning was so multivalent, so predetermined, that no number of superlatives could capture it. The temporal and spiritual capital of the world, Rome was as great, as awe-inspiring as she was elusive. Signorili goes on to argue that Martin was raised by God in order to restore the city, which he describes as the pope’s “oppressed true wife.”⁴ In other words, Signorili does not deny that Rome is in a sorry state, but he believes—or at least claims to believe—that Martin can easily effect a cure and restore her to the honors she deserves. After all, together pope and city are the head of faith and the head of the world.

Signorili’s dedication demonstrates that even the most extravagant exponents of Rome’s grandeur realized the city had fallen on hard times. The question was how to interpret this depression. Was it a sign of how completely and irrevocably Rome had fallen from her past glory? Was it a downturn of the wheel of fortune that controlled all human endeavors? Or was it a temporary blip, a minor interruption in the grand, eternal story of the caput mundi? At least in the passage above, Petrarch subscribes to the first of these readings, and the nostalgia he expresses has been described as one of the great achievements of the humanists, connoting as it does an awareness of anachronism and of the differences between antiquity and the present day.⁵ This appreciation of anachronism was not, however, the exclusive property of humanists.⁶ A Spanish traveler to Rome, Pero Tafur, who was certainly no humanist, describes a reaction similar to Petrarch’s:

I stayed at Rome during the whole of Lent, visiting the sanctuaries and ancient buildings, which appeared to me to be very wonderfully made, but not only am I unable to describe them, but I doubt whether I could appreciate them as they deserved. Therefore I may be pardoned, such is the grandeur and magnificence of Rome, if I fall short in my account, for I am not equal to so great an undertaking in view of the extent to which these ancient buildings have been destroyed and changed, and are decayed. Nevertheless, to all who behold them it is clear that they were once very magnificent, in spite of the tumults which they witnessed after the beginning of the downfall of Rome, in the discords between the princes who were her citizens, the destruction wrought by powerful kings who fought against her, and the hand of time which consumes everything. Moreover, Pope St. Gregory, seeing how the faithful flocked to Rome for the salvation of their souls, but that they were so astounded at the magnificence of the ancient buildings that they spent much time in admiring them, and neglected the sacred object of their visit, the Pope, I say, sent orders to destroy all or the majority of the antiquities which had survived from ancient times.⁷

Tafur works to give historical reasons for Rome’s dilapidation, more concrete explanations than those offered by Petrarch. The basic thesis of his statement is nevertheless the same; Rome is in ruins, but Tafur claims that appreciation of Rome’s duality is not confined to experts but is, in fact, “clear to all who behold [the ruins.]” Thus, while it is difficult to know whether to credit Tafur’s inclusivity or Petrach’s elitism, it seems that some late medieval visitors saw Rome with a double vision—ruin and past majesty were distinct but simultaneously apparent.⁸ Such an attitude hardly seems remarkable to modern Westerners. Visitors to Rome today, like visitors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, are struck by Rome’s ruins and the haunting sense of lost grandeur they convey.⁹ But in the early Quattrocento there was far less agreement about the relationship between Rome’s past and her present. Rather than being subject to neat (or arbitrary) modern periodization, Rome’s pagan, republican, imperial, and Christian pasts intermingled in complementary ways. Rome stood for empire and the loss of empire, grandeur and the loss of grandeur, a Christianity that completed Rome’s classical legacy, and a Christianity that systematically sought to destroy that legacy; yet for even its most gloomy visitors it also held out the possibility of renewal.¹⁰ If humanist rhetoric encouraged dialectical reasoning, so too did the city that symbolized both the greatness and the loss of antiquity.

Martin V and Rome

As the preceding section suggests, Martin was presented with a grab bag of possible interpretations of Rome. Which ones did he find most compelling? This question is particularly fraught because it relates to a broader historiographical debate about the balance of communal and papal authority and about when Rome became a Renaissance city, ruled by a papal signore. According to one compelling interpretation, in 1398 Boniface IX effectively ended the communal government that had emerged in the twelfth century and was briefly restored during the papacy’s absence in Avignon, first under Cola di Rienzo and then under the Bandaresi.¹¹ Thereafter, even when the popes were away from Rome, struggles between their representatives and municipal authorities were only about minor details; the principal battle for a strong popular government had been lost.¹² An alternative reading defines the reign of Nicholas V as an essential turning point; before him, the papacy was still struggling to gain a footing, but he succeeded in making Rome into his own seigniorial state and introducing the era of the “papal prince.” Recently, other historians have painted a more complex picture, in which the balance between papal and municipal authority was, if not constantly shifting, at least constantly tested throughout the Quattrocento.¹³ The frequent plots against fifteenth-century popes serve as just one manifestation of how the communal ideal endured. In the aftermath of one such plot, Martin’s successor, Eugenius IV, had to flee from Rome disguised as a monk and a republic was again declared, albeit briefly. Eugenius’s plight suggests that much of Martin’s success in regaining control of Rome was personal rather than institutional.

During Martin’s life, humanists praised his restoration of the Papal States and, more particularly, of Rome; his return to and revival of the city made him a third Romulus, a third founder of the city.¹⁴ After Martin’s death, curial scholars tended to view his reign nostalgically, transferring the myths of the golden ages of Augustus and Cola di Rienzo onto his pontificate.¹⁵ In the twentieth century, the studies of Peter Partner were less complimentary, portraying Martin as more concerned for the aggrandizement of himself and his family than the amelioration of conditions in Rome and the Papal States. Two recent Italian collections of essays on the Colonna pope have revived some of the humanists’ enthusiasm for Martin’s innovations, albeit in more muted and cautious terms.¹⁶ If Martin’s intentions and priorities are open to debate, however, certain facts are not in dispute. As a member of the august Colonna family, Martin V had deep and complex ties to Rome and the campagna.¹⁷ Like the thirteenth-century popes who came from Rome and Lazio, he was a feudal baron who saw the territorial strength of the Colonna as a long-term goal, one that would outlast his pontificate.¹⁸ In other words, Martin’s perspective on how to rule Rome was both local and traditional. Whatever his more general and theoretical ideas about Rome may have been, he instituted reforms that promoted papal monarchy but that also favored a new urban elite. Because of their debts to the pontiff, the members of this elite did not necessarily see the promotion of a strong communal administration as the best means of furthering their own interests.

In 1425 the pope renewed the statutes of 1363, an apparent sign of respect for Rome’s municipal autonomy. Nevertheless, in a variety of ways Martin co-opted or undermined communal authority. While he did not make sweeping changes on par with those of Boniface IX, Martin seems to have chosen most city officials himself rather than allowing them to be elected.¹⁹ Although the Senator (selected by Martin) was theoretically Rome’s governor, in fact the papal Vice-Chamberlain served as the true administrator of the city, taking an active role in the Capitoline court, overseeing the gabelle, and controlling the flow of money from the Camera urbis, much of which went to the Apostolic Camera...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction: Rome ca. 1420
• 1. Rome’s Third Founder? Martin V, Niccolò Signorili, and Roman Revival, 1420–1431
• 2. In the Theater of Lies: Curial Humanists on the Benefits and Evils of Courtly Life
• 3. A Reign Subject to Fortune: Guides to Survival at the Court of Eugenius IV
• 4. Curial Plans for the Reform of the Church
• 5. Acting as the One True Pope: Eugenius IV and Papal Ceremonial
• 6. Eugenius IV, Biondo Flavio, Filarete, and the Rebuilding of Rome
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index