Everybody knows the Colosseum. And everyone knows that this part of the Colosseum…looks
a lot better than this part. So what happened? How and why did half of the greatest Roman
amphitheater vanish? Sounds like a job for… Questions about Ancient Greece and Rome
(you were afraid to ask in school). As usual, I’m Dr. Garrett Ryan. And today,
I’ll be talking about the history of the Colosseum during the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
For almost 500 years, the Colosseum was the Roman Empire’s most impressive arena.
Emperor and emperor sponsored spectacles to astonish and delight the Roman people.
Exotic animals from the farthest reaches of world were hunted with gilded spears.
Criminals were devoured by bears in elaborate mythological charades.
The Empire’s greatest gladiators dueled on bloodstained sands. And so on.
Over its half-millennium of use, the Colosseum underwent a long series of renovations.
The most important took place in the early third century, when a fire destroyed the
entire upper deck of seating. It took the emperors five years to restore the building,
and signs of hasty repairs are still visible all along the north wall. Later, over the course of
the fifth century, a series of earthquakes caused serious damage that was never fully repaired.
The spectacles held in the Colosseum also changed over the centuries.
The most impressive spectacles, unsurprisingly, were held during the Empire’s salad days.
To celebrate his victory in Dacia, for example, Trajan celebrated a whopping 123 days of games,
in the course of which 5,000 pairs of gladiators fought and 11,000 animals were killed.
From the early mid-third century onward, the quality of the games started to slip.
The later Roman emperors were poorer and more distracted than their predecessors,
and tended to spend most of their time and money far from the city of Rome.
It also didn’t help that most of the more exciting animals
had been hunted to the point of scarcity, and that the price of gladiators was always rising.
Eventually, the gladiatorial combats stopped altogether. According to a later legend,
a monk leapt down to the arena, and tried to stop a gladiator from killing his opponent.
The enraged spectators then stoned the monk to death. Upon learning of this,
the emperors ended the combats. Or so the legend goes. Reality was probably less dramatic.
Although Christian disapproval was one cause of the decline in combats,
the fact that the emperors were no longer paying for them seems to have been equally important.
Whatever the reason, the last gladiators fought in the Colosseum sometime in the early fifth century.
The beast hunts, however, continued. They lasted longer, in fact,
than the Western Roman Empire itself. The last hunts were sponsored by the barbarian kings
who succeeded the emperors. These kings, however, had little interest in the games, not least
because it was difficult to justify staging them for Rome’s steadily shrinking population.
The final recorded hunts in the Colosseum were held in the year 523.
Within a few centuries, all understanding of the Colosseum’s function was lost.
Some claimed it had been a temple of the Sun, and had originally been crowned by a vast golden dome.
Others thought that it had been a temple dedicated to all the gods,
and that a gigantic statue of Jupiter had originally stood in the Arena.
The strangest legends revolved around the Roman poet Virgil, whom medieval legend transformed
into a great magician. Virgil, it was said, had built the Colosseum with the help of his demons,
and used it as a theater for necromancy. Part of the confusion derived from the fact
that the Colosseum was already half-ruined at the beginning of the Middle Ages,
and steadily fell apart over the course of the next millennium. Earthquakes were the
main natural cause. Like any tall masonry structure, the Colosseum was susceptible to
seismic damage. And thanks to a quirk of geology, part of the building was especially vulnerable.
The Colosseum’s massive concrete foundations only go down to bedrock on the north side
of the building. On the south side, the foundation rests on waterlogged sediment. This unstable
subsoil amplified seismic shocks, and gradually brought about the collapse of half the building.
The Colosseum’s greatest enemies, however, were the Romans themselves.
The building’s walls were built of a fine limestone called travertine,
and its seats were made of marble. Both stones were attractive to medieval builders.
Marble and travertine were not only easy and attractive to re-use;
they could also both be burnt in kilns to make lime for mortar.
Pillaging of the Colosseum’s stone began even before the final games were staged in the arena,
and continued on a massive scale for more than a thousand years.
The Colosseum wasn’t just a quarry. For much of the Middle Ages, hundreds of people lived in the
ruinous vaults and passageways. There were houses complete with courtyards and little gardens.
There were shops with wooden awnings and storage lofts. There were stables,
there were churches, and at one point there was even a full-blown fortified palace.
Remarkably, many of the Medieval Colosseum’s inhabitants were lime-burners,
who spent their days tearing apart the building in which they were squatting.
Thanks largely to their efforts, the Colosseum became an increasingly inhospitable place to live.
Finally, in 1349, an earthquake brought down the entire south half of the Colosseum’s circuit wall,
forming a colossal pile of rubble. Over the next four centuries, this heap,
colloquially called the Colosseum’s Thigh, built half the churches of Renaissance Rome.
In 1452, a single busy contractor carried off more than 2,500 cartloads of stone
After all these centuries of earthquakes and pillaging, it might seem surprising that anything
is left of the Colosseum. The reason so much remains, remarkably, is that part of the building
was protected. As mentioned earlier, the north side of the Colosseum was always less susceptible
to earthquake damage. It was kept from being pulled apart by scavengers, however, by the popes.
The north side of the Colosseum happened to face the processional route connecting the Lateran
Palace with the Vatican. The popes seems to have deliberately preserved this part of the Colosseum
as a monumental backdrop for their parades. Not that every pope agreed; as late as the
sixteenth century, Pius V proposed demolishing the arena’s remains. But most pontiffs, fortunately,
insisted on preserving this fragment of Rome’s greatest ancient building.
So, there you have it: we have half a Colosseum because earthquakes and the popes spared it.
If you’d like to learn more about the Colosseum, I now offer virtual guided tours exploring the
building and the Roman games. You can visit toldinstone.com to learn more.
In the meantime, as always, thanks for watching.