To celebrate the upcoming 10th Anniversary of OSP, we’ve restocked all of our enamel pins in
our Crowdmade store – In Gold! So fancy, so shiny! These extra limited edition pins will be in stock
through the end of Cyber Monday. They’re in a fixed supply and they’ll ship out fast,
so if you want ‘em, go grab ‘em at the link below.
When the western Roman empire fell in 476 AD, the average citizen could be forgiven for not
noticing. The Roman senate still convened, the new king Odoacer was a Christian like his predecessor,
and he ruled over Italy with the full approval of the emperor in Constantinople. Compared with the
sacking Rome suffered 21 years earlier at the hands of the Vandals, the arrival of Odoacer,
“Barbarian” though he may be, was painless. Any citizen old enough to remember the city at the
start of the century could say what monuments were smashed or which provinces had been lost,
but even they had only known Rome since it became Christian, and could never imagine a time when
their battered city was the singular master of the world’s grandest empire. By 475, Rome’s capital,
its culture, and its state were already unrecognizable from the time of Constantine – let
alone the glory days of Hadrian or Marcus Aurelius three centuries earlier – so as consequential as
it was to depose the last Roman emperor in 476, the Fall had already been happening for a while.
Yet, as we will learn, there was a long way still to drop. But despite its many, many hardships, the
next half-millennium also saw Rome renew itself, changing with circumstance to take on a vital
role in the new Medieval world as the seat of the Popes. So, to trace how this city of ruins became
a city of cathedrals, let’s do some history.
In answering what’s essentially the question of “How did Ancient Rome become Medieval Italy”,
we should start with Demographics, because it’s around the end of the empire that several new
groups began making themselves at home. For your convenience and my sanity, let’s start with our
boy Odoacer, who came to Rome with a Germanic army on one side and an entire population of
Germanic agriculturalist families on the other. These were the most recent of several client
kingdoms whose people resettled in the empire over the last century, and their unfamiliarity
with Latin didn’t stop them from fitting in with Roman customs or Christian religion, and they even
played ball with the Roman aristocracy. Sure as hell beats a sacking. But while the eastern
emperor Zeno had given Odoacer tacit approval to take hold of Italy, he then gave the Ostrogothic
king Theodoric explicit approval to take it from Odoacer. So Theodoric beat him in battle and then
killed the man during their truce dinner, and proceeded to rule Italy and Illyria for the next
three decades as viceroy of the Byzantine emperor, during which time he re-instituted the food-dole,
paid to host games, restored temples, imperial monuments & public infrastructure, and even gave
the Senate a boost with coins inscribed “Senatus Consulto”, By the Decree of the Senate. This Goth
was more effective and arguably more Roman than most late Roman emperors. But also more imperial,
as Theodoric pulled some crafty diplomacy to gain direct control of the Visigothic
Kingdom in Iberia, and also leveraged marriage alliances to make the Burgundian
and Vandal Kingdoms into his vassal states. This was brief, but damn was it impressive.
Theodoric’s badassery aside, Italy
was once again a singular kingdom, lacking the centralized networks of trade and power that made
the empire thrive, but it fared better than most western provinces in the wake of the Fall. The
cultural incentives and financial means to indulge in any new public megaworks were long gone,
and likewise the population decline of Late Antiquity cut Rome’s residents to a tenth as
people increasingly opted for the countryside; but life carried on, empire be damned. That is, until
535, when Theodoric’s daughter Queen Amalasuintha was killed by Gothic usurpers at the same time the
Byzantine empire was conquering its way up into Italy on the orders of Emperor Justinian. In the
ensuing conflict between the new Gothic kings and the incoming Byzantines, the winner was neither,
but the undeniable loser was Rome.
To simplify an embarrassingly-convoluted back-&-forth, the Byzantine general Belisarius
recaptured Naples through an aqueduct and soon retook Rome itself without a fight. Recovering the
ancient capital for the emperor in Constantinople was almost as impressive as it was short-lived,
because the new-new Gothic king came down to lay siege the following year. Rome held strong,
but Belisarius was recalled to defend the East against Persia, during which time, plague hit,
and the peninsula fell right back under Gothic control, this time with a new-new-new
king who plundered everything left in Rome that wasn’t bolted to the floors. He wanted to burn
the whole city and turn it into a pasture, but relented only after Belisarius implored
the man not to, on the basis that Rome stood as a monument to the vast possibility of human
achievement across generations. Profound words, and broadly accurate, but also rather generous
given the state of the city in the mid 500s. Even before the wars, Rome was a shell of itself,
with only tens of thousands of residents living in a city built for a million, and a steadily
dwindling catalogue of intact monuments. Aqueducts ran dry, temples and palaces were stripped bare,
residents occupied the ruins of ancient monuments, and centuries without repairs
became apparent when buildings large and small toppled from earthquakes, floods,
or a particularly stuff breeze. And frequent floods by the Tiber covered the city in layers
of silt, burying old ruins and turning piles of scavenged rubble into grass-topped hills. Rome’s
destruction wasn’t the work of sack-bois alone, but of systemic disrepair; it decayed, slowly,
consistently, over centuries, beyond what even the most well-meaning kings could maintain – until one
day in 546 when the Goths had the city forcibly abandoned and Rome was utterly, totally, empty.
Now… I know this looks bad…
And it IS, because the hollow city flipped between Goths and Byzantines three more times
before Belisarius finally held it for good in 552 and helped some Italians resettle – yet, with an
astoundingly-prompt incursion by the new Germanic Lombards, things continued to get worse for Italy
in the 500s. But consider: Rome cannot die. It is too important and too stubborn for something so
trivial as death to claim it for long. Because just as steadily as it had first been built,
so too could it be rebuilt, and that began with the Church. Now, Christianity had been The New
Normal for a few centuries, but it was here, as a frontier province of the Byzantine empire,
that the institution of the Papacy had free reign to change from a purely-religious
authority in European Christianity to also become something approximating a monarch for
its corner of Byzantine Italy. With the regional Exarch governing all the way over in Ravenna,
Rome paid lip service to the emperor through the 5 & 600s as the Popes became more confident
and capable leaders, leveraging their position as the biggest landowner in Italy to be the de-facto
governors of the province. This evolved gradually and then all at once, as the Byzantines embroiled
themselves in controversy about religious artwork in the 720s, then the Lombards conquered Ravenna
and killed the Exarch in 751, but in 756 the Frankish King Pepin donated that territory back
to the Popes for them to govern directly. This special relationship with the Franks
developed under Pepin’s son Charlemagne, who confirmed Papal authority in central Italy and
was later crowned by Pope Leo III as Emperor of the Romans in 800 AD. Whoof, busy century.
So by the turn of the 800s,
Rome had grown its religious power over Europe, took direct control over their Papal States,
and now had an entire empire in their pocket. This would remain, despite some growing pains
in the coming centuries, the status quo of European geopolitics for the next one-thousand
years. Charlemagne’s ascension also set the role of Latin in the medieval world. The language
of Rome always had regional variations, and spoken Latin was rarely as formal as oratory or
literature; but without an empire there to enforce linguistic consistency, colloquial Latin began
evolving into the Romance Languages, sooner than you might expect. Latin speakers across Europe
were softening consonants and merging vowel sounds even before the fall of the West. It was all still
“Latin”, but it had diverged from the classical model, and was already resembling Italian, French,
and Spanish. So Charlemagne’s big swerve was to dictate that all Latin used in church should
fit a standard, classic-style pronunciation. But since this new Church Latin sounded so different
from everyday speech, Europeans began writing their vernacular languages phonetically to
distinguish the sounds from Latin. So it’s here that Latin fossilized into a uniform standard,
while allowing these early vernaculars to freely grow & evolve into the Romance Languages.
While the Idea of Rome was completely reinventing
itself over these centuries, so too was the actual city. This started back in the 3 & 400s with
Rome’s first purpose-built Churches: like Saint John in the Lateran, Santa Maria Maggiore, and Old
St Peter’s, all classically-styled but forgoing the cramped layout of pagan temples to instead
emulate the roomier Basilica structure used in Law courts; and soon enough this would become THE
standard design for European churches. Basilicas kept popping up through the Fall of the West,
but the next few centuries were a little thin on construction on account of those Gothic Wars and
the sacks therein causing the most concentrated damage the city of Rome had ever suffered. So
despite the Popes’ growing power and influence, this didn’t immediately correlate with imperial
splendor, as even this first batch of churches was proving very costly to maintain. However,
this constraint provided an opportunity, as in 609 AD the Pope made a brand new church
by reconsecrating the old Roman Pantheon as Saint Mary of the Martyrs. Cheap, effective,
and great for preservation! The city’s ruins proved to be remarkably useful through the
medieval period, as old buildings could be retrofitted into housing, marble cladding
could be plied off and reused in churches, bronze statues could be melted for new metal,
and even marble statues could be broken down into lime for mortar. It’s painfully unsentimental,
and I try not to think about it too hard or I’ll cry about it, but it was extremely practical. And
some old structures like the Aurelian walls were still perfectly fit for purpose, persuading some
50,000 Italians to move back into Rome after the Lombard conquests. Finally, true to Belisarius’
word, Rome’s greatest asset was ancient prestige, because when the Muslim Conquests locked the Holy
Land out of the Christian pilgrimage circuit, that left Rome as the premier destination for Christian
pilgrims, and that meant business.
For the average pilgrim arriving in Rome at the turn of the millennium, they might be surprised
to encounter not one city, but seemingly three. The old core among the hills had become largely
uninhabited, as the population clustered by the Campus Martius around the Pantheon, while the
Papal government operated in the Lateran to the southeast, and pilgrims stayed in Leonine city up
by St Peters, which was enclosed by a newly-added Leonine wall. Despite its shrunken stature,
Rome was still the largest city in Christian Europe after Constantinople, and centuries
of income from tolls, taxes, pilgrim lodgings, souvenirs, gifts from royal Christian patrons,
and the occasional bribe all paid for shiny new cathedrals in the city, allowed the Popes to
renovate some aqueducts and infrastructure, as well as re-implementing the food dole
for the city’s poor. Pilgrimage was such big business even dead visitors could be profitable,
as the church confiscated the possessions of pilgrims who died in the city. If Rome could no
longer collect its payout by imperial right, they were more than happy to become a tourist trap.
The reigns of Rome didn’t belong exclusively to
the Papacy, as there were still a dozen big noble families who built personal fortresses in the
ruins of the city, but that’s a far cry from the thousands of aristocrats in the classical period;
and this political climate left zero room for Rome’s oldest institution: the Senate. Justinian
tried to save it by lowering the property qualifications to join, but its power, prestige,
and headcount steadily eroded over the decades until, on some unknown day, it ended. In the 570s
it was still sending embassies to the East, and they greeted the emperor when he visited in 603,
but by 628 Pope Honorius had them disbanded, and converted the senate house into a church. All the
more striking than deposing the child emperor in 476: the most fundamental and persistent
institution of the Roman state had died with so little fanfare we don’t even know when. Yet,
the ancient aristocratic tradition of causing trouble for the state was alive and well, as those
powerful families vied for influence over the Papacy in the 10th and 11th centuries to wildly
chaotic and extraordinarily debauched results – and that is all I have the PG-clearance to say.
Finally,
Rome’s earlier political break with Constantinople was cemented by a religious schism, dividing the
Pope’s Catholic church from the eastern Orthodox church. And three decades later, Rome got sacked
by the Normans in 1084. Aah, after all these centuries, the Gauls return to sack Rome…
nature is healing. So – what on earth have we just witnessed transpire? Frankly,
a lot of contradictions: the empire fell, but a version of Roman society endured; the city shrank,
but it didn’t die; provinces were reconquered by the Byzantines, but became more independent;
and still, old ruins were used for new purposes, religious diplomacy created an entire empire,
Latin simultaneously took on new life and became immortal, and, once again,
a millennium of European geopolitics sprung out from Rome. Even Belisarius couldn’t have
realized just how right he was about the meaning and unending significance of Rome - as these five
transformative centuries established its identity not just as an ancient capital, but as The
Eternal City.
Thank you so much for watching! I could have kept following this narrative literally forever,
but that’s what Pope Fights is for, and what’s a good meme series without a weirdly hardcore origin
story. Of course, this entire video was a misnomer because over in the Byzantine east, there was no
“after empire”, and there wouldn’t be for another thousand years. And yes, they were extremely
smug about it. However those were subjects for a different video, and I’ll see you in the next one.