The Virtues of Economy: Governance, Power, and Piety in Late Medieval Rome

By James A. Palmer

The humanist perception of fourteenth-century Rome as a slumbering ruin awaiting the Renaissance and the return of papal power has cast a long shadow on the historiography of the city. Challenging this view, James A. Palmer argues that Roman political culture underwent dramatic changes in the late Middle Ages, with profound and lasting implications for city's subsequent development. The Virtues of Economy examines the transformation of Rome's governing elites as a result of changes in the city's economic, political, and spiritual landscape.

Palmer explores this shift through the history of Roman political society, its identity as an urban commune, and its once-and-future role as the spiritual capital of Latin Christendom. Tracing the contours of everyday Roman politics, The Virtues of Economy reframes the reestablishment of papal sovereignty in Rome as the product of synergy between papal ambitions and local political culture. More broadly, Palmer emphasizes Rome's distinct role in evolution of medieval Italy's city-communes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Dec 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781501742392

Book preview

THE VIRTUES OF ECONOMY

GOVERNANCE, POWER, AND PIETY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ROME

JAMES A. PALMER

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

In memory of Linda Alice Palmer

(1952–1998)

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

A Note about Currency

Introduction

PARTONE: ROME IN THELATEMIDDLEAGES

1. Ruin and Reality

2. Power, Morality, and Political Change in Fourteenth-Century Rome

PARTTWO: PERFORMANCES OFVIRTUE

3. Living and Dying Together

4. For the Benefit of Souls

PARTTHREE: ROMANPOLITICALSOCIETY ANDTHEQUESTION OFAUDIENCE

5. The Houses of Women

6. Good Governance and the Economy of Violence

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In writing this book I incurred a number of debts that I wish to acknowledge here. First, I thank Daniel Bornstein, to whom I owe a tremendous amount. I benefitted in the early stages of this project from the advice and guidance of Ronald G. Musto, Mark Gregory Pegg, Christine Johnson, Michael Sherberg, and Manu Radhakrishnan. During my year of archival research, the support of Anna Esposito, Andreas Rehberg, and Roberto Rusconi was immensely helpful, as was the companionship of fellow archive dwellers Daniele Lombardi and James William Nelson Novoa. For many stimulating conversations and constant willingness to read all manner of drafts, during that year and after, I am grateful to Joseph Viscomi. As I composed and presented parts of this book, I benefitted from the suggestions of Edward Muir, Barbara Rosenwein, Christopher Celenza, Daniel Lord Smail, Carol Symes, Thomas Kuehn, Carrie Beneš, Glenn Kumhera, Katherine Jansen, Maureen Miller, and Emily Graham, and I thank them for it. In addition, I thank the staff of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana and Archivio Segreto, the Archivio di Stato in Rome, and the Archivio Storico Capitolino for their patience and assistance as I learned the ropes. Research was supported by an Italian Fulbright fellowship, and writing of the manuscript, by the American Council of Learned Societies, for both of which I am immensely grateful. Several of my colleagues at Florida State University have read and commented on versions of this manuscript, providing encouragement and advice as I worked on revisions. Finally, and most importantly of all, I thank Weiwei Luo, to whom it is my good fortune to be married. At crucial moments throughout this process, from the earliest stages of the manuscript to the final stages of the book, conversations with her have been the key to helping me see what this project could be. Like my life, without her this book would be much less than it is.

A NOTE ABOUT CURRENCY

Fourteenth-century Rome used a variety of currencies, including both gold and silver coins, as well as a money of account that was used for record keeping and calculation but was not actually minted. The silver coins were denari provisini and soldi provisini, valued at 12 denari to 1 soldo. They were the most commonly used coins. The money of account used in Rome were lire provisini. One lira was worth 240 denari, or 20 soldi. Rome also made ready use of the gold florin, the international currency of choice, throughout the period covered in this book. The exchange rate was 47 soldi to the florin. In the later fourteenth century and moving into the fifteenth, use of the comparable gold ducat is increasingly attested.

Introduction

Late Medieval Rome, an Elusive Phantom

The history of late medieval Rome presents the historian with an intriguing challenge. The most commonly encountered version of it is that of a sleepy, half-ruined medieval city’s gradual transformation, as a result of its absent bishop’s return, into the seat of the glorious renaissance papacy. There is some reason for this. Rome was a city of middling size by Italian standards, famously abandoned by the papacy in favor of Avignon for the majority of the fourteenth century. If the city subsequently flourished, what could be more natural than to attribute its reawakening to the return of the popes? Yet to do so is to misunderstand the city’s transformation. It is to perpetuate an enduring but misleading sense of Roman history that has its origins in the early fifteenth century and entered into modern historiography when it was embraced by Jacob Burckhardt in the nineteenth.¹ In part because of understandable interest in the humanists and their ideas, and in part because of Burckhardt’s continuing influence despite an increasing tendency to receive his ideas critically, this version of Roman history has been particularly influential among Anglophone scholars.² The result is that late medieval Roman history has often been papal history, just as it was for contemporary and near contemporary humanists.

Rome itself contributes to its misremembrance. As Georg Simmel long ago noted, the city is a mishmash of historical moments made physically manifest, remnants of various ages each layered onto the other and simultaneously visible in a way that seems, almost miraculously, to produce an organic unity.³ In its ruins, he noted, this piecemeal work of man appears to us entirely as a product of nature.⁴ Rome’s disorienting combination of historical fragments seems to coalesce into something whole, its collage of historical moments into something timeless. Yet, when its compelling form is considered in conjunction with the centuries-long tendency to associate the city and papacy, it is clear that the fundamentally papal character of later centuries has been retroactively imprinted on the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century city. The visual effect of Simmel’s Rome is an optical illusion. Instead of an easily accessible natural phenomenon, Rome remains what it was for one of its most famous nineteenth-century historians, Ferdinand Gregorovius: an elusive phantom that the historian must grasp and shape.⁵

This book represents a new response to that challenge, an effort to give shape to something of Rome’s history. It focuses primarily on the late fourteenth century, a period of the city’s history long obscured by focus on the returning papacy, praise of which would begin in the years immediately following the ones this book covers. It examines the politics of the everyday, telling the story of how Roman political culture, a culture at once lay and powerfully religious, paved the way for the rule of a papacy whose dominion was neither natural nor inevitable. It reveals that the late fourteenth century witnessed the emergence, within the ruling elite of Rome’s communal government, of a new political self-understanding, a transition from commitment to governing Rome as a free city-commune to willingness to act as the governing agents of a ruling pope. In this trajectory, late medieval Rome resembles many of the numerous city-communes that dotted northern and central Italy from the eleventh century onward. Like many of them, Rome was an ostensible republic governed by an elite oligarchy that dominated various institutions of governance formally established by legal statute. As was so often the case, it would come to be dominated by a single ruler. Rome is less exceptional than it seems. That its ruler would be an ecclesiastic, the pope, by no means distinguishes the political history of Rome from that of its peer polities. The history of the communes is by its very nature both political and religious.⁶

Rome’s communal traditions and their emphasis on the city’s autonomy were long-standing and vital. Mid-fourteenth-century Rome is famous as the site of the republican and apocalyptic revolution of Cola di Rienzo, which endeavored to reinvigorate communal government and usher in a new age of the Holy Spirit.⁷ Yet, by the turn of the fifteenth century, the autonomous Roman commune was gone, replaced by papal dominion. Its institutions remained as mechanisms of papal governance, but the absence of autonomy or meaningful ideological commitment makes any appearance of communal vitality illusory. This transformation is notable in its own right, but its aftermath endows it with critical importance. Despite sometimes rocky relations with the city and its inhabitants, it was by and large from Rome that the popes would consolidate their power over the ever more robust Papal States, which have come to serve as an important case study for the emergence of early modern European states in general, for the evolution of sovereign power, and for the process and limits of secularization.⁸ This consolidation of papal power began in the fourteenth century and continued in the mid-fifteenth century, accelerating with the end of the Western Schism and the papacy of Martin V.⁹ Though the papacy is commonly credited with Rome’s transformation, this book will demonstrate that such an understanding of Italian, papal, and Roman history misses a fundamental, homegrown transformation of Rome’s political culture, which preceded and enabled the consolidation of papal power.

The source base for any study of fourteenth-century Rome is notoriously sparse, rendering a history like this one impossible without some new way of approaching it.¹⁰ This book draws on a body of sources largely overlooked as evidence of Roman political history, documentary acts found in notarial notebooks.¹¹ These so-called private acts range from the sale or rental of property and the arranging of marriages to last wills and testaments and the resolution of feuds. They give us a glimpse of Roman daily life and the city’s quotidian politics. An interdisciplinary approach to the practices they reveal makes it possible to arrive at an understanding of the transactions and intentions—as well as the political, social, and moral orders—embodied in notarial sources. That approach forms the core of this book. Readers may note that the book thus argues for the importance of notarial sources while also drawing on them as its main evidence. This is because to a large extent the public records of the commune no longer exist. Despite that, the political fate of the commune and the main actors in deciding that fate are well known, having been well established by others. To avoid any problem of confirmation bias, I have tested my reading of private sources against the established sequence of events. Ultimately, the evidence will be analyzed with two key focuses in mind. The first is contemporary with the evidence but being freshly reconsidered in recent work: namely, reconsideration of the relationship between economy and virtue. The other, the reimagining of the category of political society in an Italian city commune like Rome, derives from scholarship on a very different time and place.

The first of these becomes clear if we consider that Rome’s transformation from commune to papal city was not, first and foremost, a papal achievement but rather the result of changes in Roman political culture. Those changes stemmed from two things. First, the political elites of Rome were faced with a crisis of legitimacy, occurring throughout much of Italy during the fourteenth century but differing in its particulars from place to place.¹² Second, they had to address this crisis while simultaneously adjusting to the changing composition of their own ruling group. In the face of these challenges, Rome’s ruling elites sought to legitimize their power and status by situating them in relation to the dominant normative value of their day, virtù.

Here some attention to specific terms is required. Most commonly rendered as virtue, virtù has no straightforward English equivalent. It was a kind of acumen or savvy, a canny capacity for carefully considered and decisive action, at once financial, social, and political.¹³ It was universally understood to be a quality essential for success in nearly every arena, be it managing lineage patrimony, overseeing a business, or governing a polity. This book, taking inspiration from recent work by Giorgio Agamben, focuses on the public performance of virtuous acts in this sense, considering them, and virtue as well, through the Aristotelian economic lens common to the late medieval world, one that understood the management of public affairs like politics to be in many ways directly analogous to the management of private or domestic matters.¹⁴ When the terms economy and virtue are used in this book, they are thus not intended in the limited sense typical of current usage. For example, economy here does not pertain strictly to something like modern economics, instead carrying meanings like governance (itself not purely political) or management. Nor does virtue, as used here, refer only to religious or moral matters. Instead it carries the polyvalent sense already described. Both governance and economy were, and are here, alternative ways of referring to the cultivation, oversight, and leveraging of assets to achieve ends. Doing these things effectively indicated one’s virtue. Broadly construed economic virtue of this sort is something that any fourteenth-century participant in commercial, political, or even simply social life would have recognized. It would have been easily legible as a capacity for good governance when it came to matters of politics, just as it was for the governance or management required for success in matters of business or the handling of private patrimony. Close attention to these terms and ideas matters because in response to the crisis of legitimacy that they faced, Romans embraced an ideology that increasingly presented the virtues of good governance as a species of personal, often economic virtue.

This new Roman ideology stood in contrast to contemporary ideas about virtue politics and to the long-standing preference of many Romans for more traditional communal values, similar to those found in other Italian cities and based on a sense of the inherent virtue or justice of the commune and its institutions of governance. Turning away from this traditional communal ideology, the Roman ruling group of the late fourteenth century increasingly preferred to represent itself as a virtuous administrative elite. They did this through the documented public performance of ostensibly private acts that had no necessary connection to communal institutions or to their identity as communal officeholders. In adopting this strategy, they became active participants in a transformative contemporary conversation, one dominated by Italian humanists who argued that good governance required virtue that was obtainable only through a liberal education based on classical models, and who may also have been moving the entire discourse of virtue in an increasingly secular direction.¹⁵ The Roman case suggests that humanist virtue politics may have been a way for humanist intellectuals to distinguish themselves not only in the world of contemporary ideas but also in relation to a less obvious contemporary rival, the vernacular virtue politics of Italy’s political class. If the Roman case is truly representative, a question outside the scope of this book, this has been understandably hard to see. Rome’s new ideology of good governance, after all, was not recorded in treatises or public letters, as humanist ideas were; it was enacted, performed in Roman homes and piazzas, and recorded by notaries.

Approaching Roman documentary practice with an eye to the performance of virtue requires consideration of the question of audience, and it is here that political society comes into play. Crucially, the intended audience for the Roman discourse of virtue included not only the citizens who constituted the commune but also a broader Roman society. This society represented a different sense of what Rome was and how one could be a part of it than did the civic world of the commune or the legal framework of its statutes. It was rooted in the city’s identity as the spiritual capital of Latin Christendom. This imagined Christian community encompassed and transcended the civic world of the commune. Looking beyond the civic in order to understand Rome’s political history reveals a broader range of political actors, as well as the varied public that they engaged. This more capacious community was late medieval Rome’s true political society. When analyzing and discussing it, this book draws on the use of the term established by Partha Chatterjee, despite the very different time and place with which his work concerns itself. Fundamental here is the idea of political society as something distinct from but at times crucial for civil society, especially as a forum for innovations in practice that deviate from theoretical ideals associated with civil society. In modern India, Chatterjee suggests that political society is important for governing agents who need to renew or confirm their status as providers of well-being, serving as a place where novel ideas or approaches might be deployed and tested.¹⁶ As will be shown, this was the very challenge facing Rome’s political elite and just the solution they needed. Their city’s political society included not only male citizens but all of Rome’s many inhabitants: women, foreigners, Jews, and pilgrims, groups marginal or external to the civic realm. It was not simply the world of citizens and of civic institutions but rather the more capacious world of Roman neighborhoods. This diverse alternative to the civic realm provided a space for innovative discourse, in this case a political and social discourse of virtue, in which Rome’s varied political society participated directly as the active audience for elite claims to legitimate power. It was this dialogue between civic elites and their social worlds that made elite performances of virtue so transformative, fundamentally reshaping late medieval Rome’s political culture and destiny.

The Plan of the Book

By the late fourteenth century, Rome’s new political culture so effectively legitimized the political privilege and social distinction desired by the city’s elite that the traditional sources of legitimacy, the idea and institutions of the free commune, were displaced in its favor. But Rome’s transformation in the late fourteenth century is appreciable only if we consider and contextualize the fundamental structures of Roman life and the way they were changing as our period began. That is the task of the next two chapters. Chapter 1 examines the structures and trajectory of the Roman commune’s political history leading up to this moment, a history culminating in the mid-fourteenth-century revolution of Cola di Rienzo. In the wake of that event, Roman social and political values emerge with particular clarity, providing a glimpse of the cultural context within which the novel strategies of the late fourteenth-century ruling group emerged. Analysis of it elucidates the crossroads at which Roman politics had arrived by the late 1350s, clarifying the precise nature of the first of the two major challenges facing the city’s ruling elite, the crisis of legitimacy. Chapter 2 explores the second of those challenges, the transformation of the ruling group itself. It examines the two visions of Rome that defined the city’s early fourteenth-century political culture: the Rome of the barons and that of the nonbaronial urban elite. This long-standing ideological conflict was waning by the mid-fourteenth century, as formal rivals for power in Rome began to come together to form a new composite ruling group. This transitional moment will be revealed through an analysis of the unique testament of a Roman baron, as well as court cases and other documents revelatory of his character as well as his relationship to Rome and to his political rivals there.

The two subsequent chapters examine key instances of Roman performance of economic virtue and thus the virtue of good governance, both of which occurred at the highly charged intersection of the sacred and the profane and had important political implications. Chapter 3 reveals the findings of a systematic study of all surviving fourteenth-century Roman testaments. A last will and testament was an important example of private patrimonial economy, both temporal and spiritual. Executed publicly, it had important political repercussions. Romans used these traditional documents to forge and maintain crucially important social ties that we can understand as kinship, although they transcended biological or matrimonial relations. Chapter 4 turns to private family chapels. Well known as an effort to claim status through public memorialization, the establishment and operation of such chapels was also legible in terms of pious economy, stewardship, and the virtues of good governance. Enhancing the prestige and memory of their lineages, they also created a mechanism by which earthly coin could be exchanged for the spiritual currency of prayer, which was both desirable and easily transferable. Its production generated social status, and its strategic circulation enabled prominent Romans to bind themselves to one another and to render their political community more resilient to the instabilities of daily life. Chapel patrons projected an image of themselves as leading members of a rightly ordered society based on a just economy that was at once terrestrial and spiritual. As with the management of lineage patrimony in testaments, the establishment and maintenance of a chapel combined economic virtue with a clear performance of the virtues of good government.

From analysis of performance we turn to two chapters on the question of audience and of political society. Chapter 5 examines the instantiation of the spiritual economy on the Roman landscape in the form of women’s houses. Some were home to the widows and daughters of Roman citizens while others housed female paupers of Christ who were often foreigners. Despite the fact that many did not pertain to Roman citizens, all such houses signaled the moral virtue of the women within and their role in Rome’s spiritual economy and political society. The houses of Roman widows and their daughters were sites of elite participation in and identification with Rome’s Christian community, signaling in its transcendence of the civic realm the intended audience for performances of virtue, of which they were yet another example. Chapter 6 turns to a different kind of economy, that of violence. Through a theatrical form of ritualized peacemaking, Roman elites managed private violence, claimed justice and peace as characteristic of Roman political society, and claimed for themselves a unique capacity to sustain this rightly ordered social world. Such peacemaking was the domain of the political elite but under their guidance was participated in not only by prominent male citizens but by women, noncitizens, and even Jews. Performed on the city’s streets, these rituals make clear the importance of the circuit between the Roman political elite and the city’s diverse political society. They also reveal the gradual decentering of communal institutions. Nowhere is the legitimization of power in a political society that transcends the civic realm clearer. It is in these rituals that the transformative potential of Rome’s new political culture becomes most apparent, as they gradually produced a distinct new Roman elite with a new kind of claim to the virtues of good governance.

Roman elites embraced strategies that were intended to complement and reinforce their power as communal officeholders. But these strategies also shifted focus away from the commune, rooting the virtues of good government in private rather than public virtue. This had profound repercussions, which are explored in the conclusion’s consideration of Pope Boniface IX’s engagement with Rome following his ascent to the papacy in 1389. Boniface’s accrual of goodwill early in his papacy culminated in the concession to him of dominion over Rome in 1398. Ultimately, it will be shown that the production of social distinction and political legitimacy through the practices described in this book, practices not dependent on communal institutions, was so successful that Rome’s political elites lost interest in defending the autonomy of the Roman commune, ceding power willingly to the papacy. It was this transformation of Roman political culture that ultimately enabled the transformation both of Rome and its place in future politics. Appreciating this frees us from a misleading sense of Roman history born from the pens of fifteenth-century humanists and passed down through the generations to Burckhardt and beyond and, by so doing, fundamentally alters Rome’s place in the political history of Italy and of Europe.

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1. Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. C. G. Middlemore (London: Penguin, 1990).

2. The scholarship is extensive and excellent. John W. O’Malley, Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome: Rhetoric, Doctrine, and Reform in the Sacred Orators of the Papal Court, c. 1450–1521 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1979); John D’Amico, Renaissance Humanism in Papal Rome: Humanists and Churchmen on the Eve of the Reformation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1983); Christopher S. Celenza, Renaissance Humanism and the Papal Curia: Lapo da Castiglionchio the Younger’s De curiae commodis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999); and most recently, Elizabeth M. McCahill, Reviving the Eternal City: Rome and the Papal Court, 1420–1447 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

3. Georg Simmel, Rom: Eine ästhetische Analyse, Die Zeit 191 (1898): 137–39; reprinted in English as Rome, trans. Ulrich Teucher and Thomas M. Kemple, in Theory, Culture, and Society 24 (2007): 30–37.

4. Georg Simmel, Two Essays: ‘The Handle,’ and ‘The Ruin,’ Hudson Review 11, no. 3 (1958): 371–85; originally published as Der Henkel and Die Ruine, in his Philosophische Kultur (Leipzig: Alfred Kronner, 1911), 116–24 and 125–33 respectively.

5. From a letter by Gregorovius to Sigmund Münz and quoted by the latter in his Ferdinand Gregorovius, English Historical Review 7 (1892): 697–704, 698.

6. Jean-Claude Maire Vigueur, L’altra Roma: una storia dei romani all’epoca dei comuni (secoli XII–XIV) (Turin: Einaudi, 2011); Sandro Carocci, Storia di Roma, storia dei comuni, in I comuni di Jean-Claude Maire Vigueur: percorsi storiografici, ed. Maria Teresa Cacioregna, Sandro Carocci, and Andrea Zorzi (Rome: Viella, 2014), 51–68. Maire Vigueur’s understanding of Rome has been embraced by Chris Wickham in his recent works Medieval Rome: Stability and Crisis of a City, 900–1150 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) and Sleepwalking into a New World: The Emergence of Italian City Communes in the Twelfth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 119–60. The essential study of the political history of the communes is Philip J. Jones, The Italian City-State: From Commune to Signoria (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). Augustine Thompson, Cities of God: The Religion of the Italian Communes, 1125–1325 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005) rightly criticizes the omission of the religious in Jones’s account, focusing on the early communal period and ending in the early fourteenth century. He does not discuss the situation under the rule of the signori. This book offers one way of considering that transition in light of his arguments.

7. See, most recently, Ronald G. Musto, Apocalypse in Rome: Cola di Rienzo and the Politics of the New Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). On Cola’s revolution, see chap. 2.

8. Most crucial here is Paolo Prodi, Il Sovrano Pontefice. Uno corpo e due anime: la monarchia papale nella prima età moderna (Bologna: Mulino, 1982); for Susan Haskins’s English translation, see The Papal Prince: One Body and Two Souls; the Papal Monarchy in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

9. Peter Partner, The Lands of St. Peter: The Papal State in the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1072); Prodi, Il Sovrano Pontefice; Maria Luisa Lombardo, Il notaio romano tra sovranità pontificia e autonomia comunale (secoli XIV–XVI) (Milan: Giuffrè, 2012), 6–15.

10. Our copy of the city’s 1363 statutes comes down to us in a later copy. The best edition is Camillo Re, ed., Statuti della città di Roma (Rome: Tipografia della Pace, 1880). See too, Anna Modigliani, L’Eredità di Cola di Rienzo: Gli statute del comune dei popolo e la riforma di Paolo II, vol. 2 of Cola di Rienzo e il comune di Roma (Rome: Roma nel Rinascimento, 2004). For Rome’s government at work in this period, see Cristina Carbonetti Vendittelli, La curia dei magistri edificiorum Urbis nei secoli XIII e XIV e la sua documentazione, in Roma nei secoli XIII e XIV, cinque saggi, ed. Etienne Hubert (Rome: Viella, 1993), 1–42. The chronicle of the Anonimo Romano, though of clear literary significance, is fragmentary and mostly concerned with earlier events. Anonimo Romano, Cronica, ed. Giuseppe Porta, 3rd ed. (Milan: Adelphi, 2007). Henceforth cited as AR, Cronica. Evidence hinting at Rome’s literary culture in this period has only recently begun to be explored. See Dario Internullo, Ai margini dei giganti: la vita intelletuale dei Romani nel Trecento (1305–1367) (Rome: Viella, 2016).

11. On Rome’s Trecento notarial sources, see Isa Lori Sanfilippo, I protocolli notarili romani del Trecento, Archivio della Società Romana di Storia Patria 110 (1987): 99–150; Anna Maria Corbo, Relazione descrittiva degli archivinotarili Romani dei secoli XIV–XV nell’Archivio di Stato e nell’Archivio Capitolino, in Brezzi and Lee, Sources of Social History, 49–67. Several of these have been published as modern editions: Renzo Mosti, ed., I Protocolli di Iohannes Nicolai Pauli. Un notaio romano del ‘300 (Rome: École française de Rome, 1982); Renzo Mosti, ed., Il Protocollo Notarile di Anthonius Goioli Petri Scopte (1365) (Rome: Viella, 1991); Renzo Mosti, ed., Un notaio roman del Trecento: I protocolli di Francesco di Stefano Caputgallis (1374–1386) (Rome: Viella, 1994); Isa Lori Sanfilippo, ed., Il Protocollo Notarile di Lorenzo Staglia (1372) (Rome: Società Romana di Storia Patria, 1986); and Isa Lori Sanfilippo, ed., Il Protocollo Notarile di Pietro di Nicola Astalli (1368) (Rome: Società Romana di Storia Patria, 1989). In citations to these, I will provide references to both the manuscript and the published edition. In addition, Mosti’s unpublished editions of the protocols of Paulus Serromani (1348–55), Marinus Petri Milçonis (1357), Paulus de Serromanis (1359–87), and Lellus Pauli de Serromanis (1387–98) are available online through the Società Romana di Storia Patria at http://www.srsp.it/body_testinotai.asp. Two large sets of notarial notebooks remain available only in manuscript: those of Antonio and Lorenzo Scambi, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, S. Angelo in Pescheria, I/1-25, and those of Nardo Venettini, Archivio Storico Capitolino, Sez. 1, 785 and 785bis.

12. Guido Ruggiero, The Renaissance in Italy: A Social and Cultural History of the Rinascimento (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 21–66. Notably, although Ruggiero begins and ends his chapter on legitimacy with a discussion of a pilgrim traveling to Rome, the Roman variant on this crisis of legitimacy does not figure in his discussion.

13. Ibid., 16, 113–15, and throughout. See, too, Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Vol. 1: The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).

14. Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011). This notion of economy resonates with the efficacious acumen of virtù to a great extent and also reflects common notions of nobility, and even justice, in late medieval Italy. See, for example, Spencer Pearce, Dante: Order, Justice and the Society of Orders, in Orders and Hierarchies in Late Medieval and Renaissance Europe, ed. J. H. Denton (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 33–55, which suggests that for Dante the right order of the world corresponded with the just order and that the capacity to recognize and correctly choose that right order was one of the marks of nobility. For Dante, this discernment was unusual, and we can understand it as a manifestation of virtù. For both Augustine and Aquinas, this right order, or just order, was explicitly a distributive or economic order, as well as a social one, based on giving to each that which they are rightly due. See, for Augustine, Robert Dodaro, Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Mary T. Clark, Augustine on Justice, in Augustine and Social Justice, ed. Teresa Delgado, John Doody, and Kim Paffenroth, (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books 2015), 3–10. For Aquinas, see Summa Theologica II-II, q. 58, a. 1c and I-II, q. 96, a. 3; q. 98, a. 1.

15. For this characterization of humanist virtue politics, see the recent work of James Hankins, for example, The Virtue Politics of the Italian Humanists, forthcoming in Beyond Reception: Renaissance Humanism and the Transformation of Antiquity, ed. Patrick Baker, Johannes Helmrath, and Craig Kallendorf and currently available at http://www.academia.edu/30007286/The_Virtue_Politics_of_the_Italian_Humanists; and James Hankins, Leonardo Bruni’s Laudatio Florentine Urbis, Dante, and ‘Virtue Politics,’ Bullettino dell’Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo 119 (2017): 333–58.

16. Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), and further elaborated in his Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). Despite its specific orientation in another context, Chatterjee’s core ideas are extremely helpful as a means of overcoming the traditional emphasis on the civic in studies of late medieval Italian politics.

PART ONE

Rome in the Late Middle Ages

CHAPTER 1

Ruin and Reality

In order to reimagine the history of late medieval Rome, we should begin with consideration of the key context, the structures and developments that paved the way for the transformation of the city in the late medieval period. This chapter lays that groundwork by examining three major related themes. The first is the nature of humanist ideas about Rome and their enduring influence on subsequent studies of Rome, the Renaissance, and the rise of the modern state, the latter being a field in which the Papal States now figure prominently. This will be followed by a survey of the Roman realities that ultimately render this humanist caricature untrustworthy and suggest that late fourteenth-century Rome was the site of a series of related crises that shaped the city’s subsequent history. Finally, the realities of that moment will be examined, a means of thinking about them suggested, and the argument made that this context provides a far better framework for understanding the city at this moment in its history than does the dramatic but misleading narrative propounded by humanist historical writing.

Humanism and Historiography

Fourteenth- and fifteenth-century writers alike often denigrated Rome out of a sense of patriotic or professional pride, creating a stereotypical sense of Roman history that has endured until today and prevented the city’s inclusion in some of the most important recent developments in the historiography of the Italian communes. Giovanni Villani’s observation of the city’s decline in the early fourteenth century is famous and indicative of common tropes. When the Florentine visited Rome in 1300, he observed that it was a city in decline, while his own city was on the rise.¹ Similarly famous is the observation by the great legal scholar Bartolo of Sassoferrato that the political regime of Rome, which he associated with the city’s barons, was a perverse outlier that could only be described as monstrous.² Opponents of the papacy’s relocation to Rome spoke of the city as the bishop’s abandoned spouse, not least the revolutionary Cola di Rienzo to whom we will return below. But for our