CHAP. XVI. Rome. A few months later he died a martyr among the pagan Lithuanians of the Baltic.b

Nearly four hundred years later, and nine hundred after the time of Alarich, 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?'e

It was the same irresistible impulse that drew the warrior, the monk, and the scholar towards the mystical city which was to mediaeval 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. For there was then, as there is now, something in Rome to

b See the two Lives of St. Adalbert in Pertz, M. G. H. iv, evidently compiled soon after his death.

© Another letter of Petrarch's to John Colonna, written immediately after his arrival in the city, runs thus: - In praesens nihil est quod inchoare ausim, miraculo rerum tantarum et stuporis mole obrutus. . . praesentia vero, mirum dictu, nihil imminuit sed auxit omnia: vere maior fuit Roma maioresque sunt reliquiae quam rebar: iam non orbem ab hac urbe domitum sed tam sero domitum miror. Vale' (Epp. Fam. ii. 14). The reliquiae have been sadly reduced since Petrarch wrote, but the stranger still feels after his first day in Rome that the city is more wonderful than he expected.

d The idea of the continuance of the sway of Rome under a new character is one which mediaeval 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.

attract men of every class. The devout pilgrim came to CHAP. XVI. 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 Teutonic 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. She was more glorious in her decay and desolation than the stateliest seats of modern power. Nor has the spell yet wholly lost its power. To half the Christian nations Rome has remained 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.

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 Rienzo? 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?'

CHAP. XVI.

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 mediaeval 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 have its use, and is 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 the ideas upon which the Empire itself rested, as well in their weakness as in their strength.

It is not from her capture by Alarich, nor even from the more destructive ravages of the Vandal Gaiserich, that the material and social ruin of Rome must be dated, but rather from the repeated sieges which she sustained during the war of Justinian against the Ostrogoths.' This

The history of the City has been written by Ferdinand Gregorovius in his Geschichte der Stadt Rom im Mittelalter, of which there exists an English translation. [Since this chapter was written, in 1865, much has been done to unveil by excavation the antiquities of early imperial Rome, but little (except the church of S. Maria Antica) which throws light on the mediaeval city has been discovered.]

The great siege in which Belisarius defended the city against Witigis is fully and vividly described by Procopius, Bell. Goth. bks. i. and ii.

After capturing the city in A.D. 546, Totila, who had at first intended to destroy it utterly, turned out the inhabitants, and Rome stood empty for more than a month. See Procop., Goth. iii. 22 (èv 'Púμŋ áv@pwπov ovdéva éáoas, ἀλλ ̓ ἐρήμον αὐτὴν τὸ παράπαν ἀπολιπών); and cf. Hodgkin, Italy and her Invaders, bk. v. ch. 20.

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 luxurious aristocracy. The crowd that filled her streets was composed partly of poor and idle freemen, unaccustomed to arms and long since deprived of 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 effective municipal administration, for although the senate and consuls with many of the lesser magistracies continued to exist, they had for centuries enjoyed little power, and were nowise fitted to lead and rule the people. Hence it was that when the long Gothic war and the subsequent inroads of the Lombards had reduced the great families to beggary, the old 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 ancient 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.

CHAP. XVI.

Causes of the rapid decay

of the City.

of Rome.

So far Rome's condition was like that of the other Peculiarities great towns of Italy and Gaul. But in two points her in the position case differed from theirs, and to these the difference of her after fortunes may be traced. Her bishop had at hand 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

U

CHAP. XVI. 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 disciple the inhabitants of Northern Italy were in the end renovated. Everywhere the old institutions had perished of decay in Rome the social and economic conditions were such that it was only out of the ecclesiastical system that new institutions could arise. Her condition was therefore the most pitiable in which a community can find itself, one of ceaseless 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, with little 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 eighth to the twelfth century is an obscure and tedious record of the contests of these factions with each other, and of the aristocracy as a whole with the slowly-growing power of the Church.

Her condition in the

ninth and tenth centuries.

The revolt of the Romans from the Image-breaking Emperors in the East, followed as it was by the reception of the Franks as patricians and Emperors, is an event of the first 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 seat of government for his dominions. He continued to reside in Germany, and did