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Simon Sebag Montefiore has both the name, and the look, of a historian. His freshly pressed cotton sky blue shirts and Panama hats give him a colonial air that's, thankfully, not reflected in his warm, knowledgeable delivery. He is both passionate and curious about his subject, the city of Rome, and its history, and that comes across in droves in his recent BBC4 series, Rome:A History of the Eternal City. You're not gonna watch that by mistake.
Set across three hour long episodes (City of the Sacred, Divine Gamble, and The Rebirth of God's City) it sought to tell a tale not just of the Italian capital but of how it become, over the last three thousand years, a centre for religious devotion, religious piety, and, more often than not, religious infighting. Rome, of course, is a spectacularly pretty city but its story, you'll not be surprised to learn, has been anything but pretty.
These days, Rome hosts thousands of Catholic pilgrims but its origins as a sacred site predate Christianity entirely, Pagan gods dominated Rome for a millennia, the city's churches are built on the site of Pagan temples, and the Pope even has a Pagan precedent.
The creation myth of Rome is these days mined heavily for tourists, you can buy all sorts of tat featuring Remus and Romulus, but in the way it seems to be accepted we discover the roots of religious Rome, and, perhaps, the roots of the gullibility, faith some would say, that allowed Rome to flourish as a religious centre. The kind of city where, each July, a statue of the Virgin Mary is towed along the Tiber by a motorboat in front of an adoring crowd holding balloons and lighting fireworks.
This pomp and circumstance has its roots in the tale of Romulus and Remus, the abandoned twins who were suckled by a she-wolf, before growing up to argue over which hill the city of Rome would be built upon. Romulus favoured the Palatine Hill, Remus the Aventine. They consulted with the gods who proposed a contest of augury, interpreting omens from the observed flight of birds.
Remus saw six birds first but his brother, Romulus, saw twelve thus exacerbating their dispute into a feud which eventually saw Romulus, or perhaps one of his followers, kill Remus and found the city of Rome upon the Palatine Hill in the year 753BC. The mythical story of Rome had begun, as it would continue, with power struggles, with murder, and with both of these things being justified by the invention of deities.
At least that's the creation myth of Rome. The reality is somewhat more prosaic. Rome began as a patchwork of farms on the seven hills overlooking the marshy Tiber valley that slowly expanded to form a more or less unified whole. Romans came to believe that the land within the city limits, inside the 'pomerium' boundary, enjoyed a divine status and, therefore, all wars and burials had to take place outside of it. To break these rules was not just tantamount to sacrilege, it was sacrilege.
It's why the Appian Way, one of the most important Roman roads into the city (from Brindisi), is only lined with tombs up until the Roman city limits. Other bodies were held in catacombs (also outside the city proper). These were impressive but nothing compared to sewers so large that Romans boasted of being able to sail boats through them. Sebag Montefiore, uncharacteristically and somewhat indecorously, describes "penetrating the fecal caverns".
Built in the 6c BC they were the brainchild of the fifth king of Rome, Tarquinius Priscus, and they were believed not only to purify the city practically but also symbolically. The depraved young emperor, Elagabalus, was assassinated and tossed into the sewer. Rome needed to be purged not just of faeces and urine but also of depravity. As we'll discover that turned out be an ongoing process.
The Bocca della Verita, the mouth of truth into which scores of young lovers pose for photographs these days (the legend being that if you've been unfaithful the marble mask bites your hand off), is actually a sewer cover. A marriage of the secular and the sacred at its most blatant.
The Forum, in the heart of Pagan Rome, saw speeches made, laws passed, and trials take place. Temple upon temple was built there and, because this was sanctified ground, all laws had to be passed there where the augurs consulted the heavens. Legend has it that was the direct result of the rule of another legendary king, Romulus' successor Numa Pompilius is the ruler credited with creating the rituals that made the rise of Rome possible.
The Forum was built over many different eras but every building there, during those different eras, was dedicated to God. One of these fine erections, the Regia, served as the office of the Pontifex Maximus, the most important position in ancient Roman religion and the aforesaid papal precursor.
But it was also home to the Vestal Virgins, chosen at the age of six for their moral and physical perfection and tasked with tending the sacred flame. If the flame went out Rome would fall. Like the ravens leaving the Tower of London.
The Haruspices were Etruscan diviners, skilled at interpreting signs from the Gods. Which they did by extracting a liver from a freshly sacrificed sheep and using it as a map in heaven. Sounds legit.
This liver/heavenly atlas would be divided into sixteen regions, each with their own gods. If the region representing the god of war was in any way bruised or damaged this would signify that the war god was not happy and now was not the time to wage war. A clean liver might mean time for war.
This wasn't the only animal cruelty that was going on in ancient Rome. The festival of grain at the Circus Maximus in April drew crowds to witness foxes with torches tied to their tails to protect crops from vermin, dogs were sacrificed to protect against mildew, and to ensure a good harvest, each October, a horse got it in the neck.
While it seems certain that the foxes, dogs, and horses weren't very happy, it turns out some of the people weren't either. In 509BC aristocrats rebelled against King Tarquin the Proud and their success ensured that the Senate would replace the king and that, ultimately, the Roman Republic was born.
Religion, however, remained at the heart of Roman life. The dedication ceremony of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline Hill that year saw, supposedly, all of Rome out to celebrate. The temple was designed to remind people that Jupiter was the source of Roman glory and was, de facto, the first pagan cathedral of Rome. Rome was no longer a town but a city, a sacred capital.
More temples rose, built with the spoils of Roman conquest and expansion. Generals rode around Rome in chariots with their vanquished foes shackled alongside them. These generals were allowed to dress as Jupiter for a day but to ensure they didn't develop a messiah complex, a slave was 'employed' to whisper to the general:- "remember, you are only mortal".
The Roman expansion from city to empire led to an influx of Greeks and Egyptians and they brought their own gods with them. Some, like Isis, were imported into the Roman religion syncretically and one, Magna Mater (great mother, an Anatolian mother goddess), ended up playing a crucial role in the history of Rome.
In 205BC Rome and Carthage (led by Hannibal) found themselves in a power struggle over future control of the Mediterranean and in order to defeat the Carthaginians, the Romans appointed Magna Mater a Roman goddess. When she arrived on the Tiber, like the Virgin Mary thousands of years later, escorted by self-castrated eunuch priests, all of Rome arrived to welcome her. Three years later, Hannibal was defeated. I'd say that's more a case of correlation than causation but logic doesn't go far when discussing religious belief.
By the 1c BC the whole of Rome had become a shrine to Julius Caesar. Caesar was a gambler, a risk taker, and a master manipulator. He used religion for his own political ends, he claimed descent from the goddess Venus, and on the Ides of March the man his own soldiers called "the balding adulterer" was murdered.
The murder had been intended to save the republic but instead it brought it to an end and Rome became what Caesar had been working towards making it - an autocracy. Future Roman emperors would not just be the most powerful men in the western world, but also the sons of God.
Caesar's heir was his eighteen year old nephew Octavian, a brilliant strategist who anointed his generals and priests with godly status and won a decisive power struggle over his rivals, Mark Antony and his spouse Cleopatra, the last active ruler of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt. Defeated, both committed suicide. Mark Antony by sword. Cleopatra by snake.
Octavian had won a battle between east and west, between the Occident and the Orient, and, in celebration Octavian changed his name to Augustus Caesar, the title of the Eternal City was bestowed upon Rome, and a temple was built to Octavian/Augustus' great uncle Julius Caesar in the Forum.
On 1st January 42BC the Senate declared Julius Caesar 'divine', a god, and that meant that his 'son' (great nephew, really) Augustus, the emperor, was the son of a god. In 12BC Augustus declared himself Pontifex Maximus and built shrines on every street corner in Rome. Augustus Caesar, the arch-propagandist, was creating a new imperial Roman mythology.
When Augustus died a Senate vote declared him, too, to be a god. It set a trend. Emperors would now ascend to a deified status when they died and temples sprang up to celebrate Antonius Pius, Vespasian, and Titus. Vespasian even joked on his deathbed, "I think I'm about to become a god".
Others lacked Vespasian's modesty and humour. The "demented" Caligula dressed as Venus in a dress, Hadrian deified his young gay lover, and Nero erected a 120ft tall statue of himself as the sun god in the heart of Rome.
Perhaps because of the indulgent nature of some of these emperors, foreign sects were gaining pockets of popularity across Rome and one, a belief called Christianity that had arrived from the east, took particular displeasure at the Roman worship of the emperors. This 'sect' had, within three centuries, taken over Rome. The Roman gods would crumble into dust and Christianity would rise in its place. Where it still stands, challenged but unbowed, to this day.
How did this happen? Initially the Christians were seen (correctly) as cranks, their beliefs worthy only of mockery. Graffiti from the time, around 1AD, shows the crucifixion of a Christian with a donkey's head. It's believed to be the oldest ever representation of the crucifixion and, at the time, it would have been seen as a double insult. Not just the donkey, but the cross. Christians, understandably, didn't like the cross. It remains to me a mystery why they do now.
As crosses were used to mock Christians perhaps they were trying to reclaim power of the symbol, invert it in some way. That would certainly fit in with the Roman belief that the Christians practiced magic, indulged in incest, and even partook of cannibalism.
When depression, civil war, and invasion nearly crushed the Roman empire they were saved by the emperor Diocletian who took it upon himself to destroy all the sects that he felt were polluting and destabilising Rome. This he did. With one exception. Christianity remained, and it was the Christians who were blamed when Diocletian's temple was razed to the ground.
The fire had happened, Diocletian declared, because the Christians had been worshipping the wrong god. Christians who did not denounce their belief in this new Christian god were executed yet, while this was happening, Pagan Romans continued to convert to a sect headed by an upstart who had died a criminal's death in the remote Roman outpost of Judea.
The key was that Christianity offered its believers, if they were 'good', eternal life, and with the life expectancy of the average Roman being 29 the appeal is blindingly obvious. Pagan gods may grant the fortunate a great empire - but you can only enjoy it for three decades - the Christian god God offers immortality, and to everyone. Your move next, Pagans!
As crosses were used to mock Christians perhaps they were trying to reclaim power of the symbol, invert it in some way. That would certainly fit in with the Roman belief that the Christians practiced magic, indulged in incest, and even partook of cannibalism.
When depression, civil war, and invasion nearly crushed the Roman empire they were saved by the emperor Diocletian who took it upon himself to destroy all the sects that he felt were polluting and destabilising Rome. This he did. With one exception. Christianity remained, and it was the Christians who were blamed when Diocletian's temple was razed to the ground.
The fire had happened, Diocletian declared, because the Christians had been worshipping the wrong god. Christians who did not denounce their belief in this new Christian god were executed yet, while this was happening, Pagan Romans continued to convert to a sect headed by an upstart who had died a criminal's death in the remote Roman outpost of Judea.
The key was that Christianity offered its believers, if they were 'good', eternal life, and with the life expectancy of the average Roman being 29 the appeal is blindingly obvious. Pagan gods may grant the fortunate a great empire - but you can only enjoy it for three decades - the Christian god God offers immortality, and to everyone. Your move next, Pagans!
The message of Jesus had started to travel soon after his crucifixion in Jerusalem, as did his apostles. One of them, Peter, reached Rome but he chose a bad time to arrive (for his life at least, for posterity - he couldn't have timed it better). Following a destructive fire in Rome, the emperor Nero rounded up many of the city's Christians at the Imperial horse racing track and had them executed.
Blaming them for the fire, Nero had some killed by dogs, others set on fire, and a select few crucified. Peter, out of respect for Jesus, requested he be crucified upside down. The Roman state, the Pagan establishment, quite clearly, saw Christianity as a threat. Communion was seen as a, somewhat indirect, form of cannibalism. Sixtus II, the Bishop of Rome (or Pope) was beheaded by Roman soldiers.
303AD saw the bloodiest attack on the Christians up until that point. Churches were destroyed and bishops were decapitated, the body of St Victoria still lies, throat cut, for all to see in modern day Rome. Yet this just led to martyrs and further promotion of Christianity.
The spot where Peter had been crucified was marked by an obelisk which, to this day, still stands in (roughly) the same place, in the middle of St Peter's Square. It's not a horse racing track anymore but the seat of the Roman Catholic church.
The person credited with making the growing, and influential, sect of Christianity the state religion is the emperor Constantine. Constantine was harsh, he was ruthless, he was a warlord who had slashed his way to power, and he showed no pity or remorse, even having both his wife and son executed.
Just the kind of guy to embrace Christianity. When Constantine fell out with his deputy, Maxentius, it led to a civil war. Before going into a crucial battle on the banks of the Tiber, Constantine claimed to have seen a cross silhouetted against the sun accompanied by the legend "by this sign you shall conquer". Constantine fought, and won, under Christian banners.
He had changed the history of Rome, and the history of the world, by gambling on a change of religion. How different the last 1700 years may have been had Maxentius been victorious?
Of course, not everyone in Rome was happy with this turn of events and, battle over, a soft power had to be enacted to ensure transition to Christianity was as smooth as possible. Christian churches were made 'imperial' to attract Romans and Constantine's mother, Helena, was sent to Jerusalem from where she returned with a wealth of Christian relics including, we're led to believe (itchy chin), the very steps of Pontius Pilate's palace that Jesus had walked after being sentenced to death. To this day, pilgrims visiting Rome still ascend these steps on their knees.
Not only was Rome becoming Christian but Christianity was taking on a Roman flavour. Constantine's first seven Christian churches were built on the outskirts of Rome so as not to upset the Pagan temples that dominated the centre. The largest of these basilicas was built over (the now sanctified) Peter's tomb where it stood for one thousand years before it was replaced during the Renaissance. It became, and it remains, the focus of Roman Christian devotion.
But on Constantine's death, Rome was still a city divided between Paganism and Christianity. It was now down to the Popes. Pope Damasus I was a smooth talking adulterer, a 'tickler of the ears of middle aged women', but also a poet who used his poetry to create propaganda for Rome's holy graves and for Christianity itself.
Crowds flocked to see the poems he'd had inscribed on the graves inside the catacombs, perhaps unaware that they were being 'sold' Christianity in doing so. Emboldened by this neat move, Damasus I claimed Rome for St Peter and St Peter for Rome. As Peter had been martyred in Rome this meant he was a Roman (he'd been born in Bethsaida in the Golan Heights in modern day Syria).
Saint Peter's martyrdom gave his heirs, the Popes, special authority but this would not mean Rome would become an impregnable fortress. In the fifth century the Huns arrived on the Italian peninsula, displacing the Goths who had been living as refugees on the borders of the Roman Empire. Desperate, hungry, Goths exchanged their own children for food but the mean Romans fobbed them off with dog meat
Alaric I, first King of the Visigoths, and his troops besieged Rome and tried to cut a deal with the Romans. They wanted land of their own but the Romans refused. "The thicker the grass, the easier to scythe it down" said Alaric, who began to do just that. It resulted in an impasse, in starvation, and in dead bodies filling the streets of Rome, and, eventually, Alaric and forty thousand Goths bursting in to the Eternal City. Which meant plunder, rape, murder, and all the kinds of things you'd expect from a barbarian horde. These Goths were, after all, Aryan Christians. It wouldn't be the last time in the history of the world that Christians would go round killing each other.
Rome had fallen and St Augustine of Hippo, the theologian from Numidia (roughly modern day Algeria), said it was because the city was steeped in sin from its Pagan past. Yes, he blamed a war between two Christian tribes on the Pagans!
By now the Roman Empire had been split in two and Justinian, who led the Eastern Roman Empire from Constantinople, desired to reunite it. Vigilius was bribed to be Justinian's pope, the first of the Byzantine papacy, but he was ineffectual and weak and was sent back to Rome having failed to do Justinian's bidding for him.
The papacy hit its lowest ebb and the city of Rome soon followed. Within a generation another Germanic tribe, the Lombards, had arrived. Aqueducts were crushed and the Roman water supply flowed away from the city. Rome was down to a population of 90,000. It was a beleaguered outpost. Yet "cometh the hour, cometh the man" (says Sebag Montefiore, warming to his theme).
The papacy hit its lowest ebb and the city of Rome soon followed. Within a generation another Germanic tribe, the Lombards, had arrived. Aqueducts were crushed and the Roman water supply flowed away from the city. Rome was down to a population of 90,000. It was a beleaguered outpost. Yet "cometh the hour, cometh the man" (says Sebag Montefiore, warming to his theme).
The man that 'cometh' was the super rich aristocrat Gregory who had made it clear he'd actually prefer a life of quiet contemplation to the hassles of heading up the Catholic church. He was ordained against his will and eventually elected Pope. Going along with my theory that anyone who wants to be a manager, or in charge of anything, should never be allowed to be, Gregory turned out to be excellent at the job in hand.
He excelled in planning, he excelled in finance, and he excelled in diplomacy. He struck a truce with the Lombards and set up welfare centres across the city. He did what most of us would imagine Christians are supposed to do. Which meant missionary work as well!
Gregory had been impressed by an Anglo-Saxon slave boy on sale at a Roman market, a fair bit to unpack in that sentence - different times, eh?, and felt that these people were not so unlike the Romans after all, perhaps they could be converted. Christmas 597AD in England saw ten thousand Angles baptised so, clearly, he was on to something. He brought Christianity to Britain and even though, by papal standards, he seems a good egg, it's him we still have to blame.
Gregory's missionary success meant that pilgrims from northern Europe began arriving in Rome, and these ones weren't coming to see classical monuments. They wanted to see sights relating to martyrdoms and, it seems, the gorier that martyrdom the better. A black market began offering the wizened body parts of dead saints even though Gregory himself had decreed that contact with the bones of saints would bring about instant death. Most of them would have been forgeries anyway, so it turned out not to be such a big deal.
On this Gregory was a tad hypocritical. Gregory himself had relics sent to faraway bishops to strengthen papal authority. When Gregory died in 604AD he was interred in St Peter's, his epitaph read "God's consul". He'd left Roman Catholicism the most powerful institution in western Europe and was now 'free' for as much 'quiet contemplation' as he wanted. Blissfully unaware of the new threat that faced Rome, and Christianity. You knew it was coming. Islam.
Arab forces had captured Jerusalem in 637AD and Rome feared it was next. To strengthen itself against the Abrahamic upstarts the Romans made an alliance with the Frankish king Charlemagne who, in 800AD, was made Holy Roman Emperor. In 846AD the fears that had begun nearly two centuries ago were made real. Arab forces attacked Rome and looted St Peter's basilica.
In response, Pope Leo IV erected the 40ft high, 12ft deep Leonine Walls and, as often with a city or culture under siege, the Romans within these walls started to turn on each other. Popes began torturing and killing each other (honestly, these Christians, you can't trust them anywhere). In 879 Pope Stephen VI ordered the exhumation of a previous pope, Formosus. Stephen had not been a fan of Formosus so he had his corpse tried for 'violation of canon law'.
Found guilty (no shit), Formosus's dead body was stripped naked, his fingers were chopped off, and he was tossed unceremoniously in to the Tiber. This was the new normal. Both in Rome and in Christianity
By the time of the early tenth century, the Theophylact family dominated papal Rome. There were a confusing large number of them, too many even for Sebag Montefiore to focus on individually. He focuses instead on the female Theophylacts, who were seen as depraved maneaters who dominated numerous kings and emperors. Blame the women, that's the way!
Popes were strangled, family members murdered each other, plotting thrived, morality was corrupted, and things, as they do, fell apart. The holy city was, yet again - this is as repetitive as counting rosary beads, on its knees. Charlemagne's successors marched south from France to attack Rome. The pope at the time, Gregory VII, published the Dictatus papae which declared that papal authority was absolute.
It caused the Investiture Controversy, a dispute between Gregory VII and the Holy Roman Emperor, the Saxony born Henry IV (yes, the regicidal numbers can get a bit confusing, welcome to the world of privilege) who wasn't keen on this absolute authority business at all. Gregory VII forged an alliance with the Normans and that too backfired. The Normans occupied Rome, Rome soon became, again, a blazing inferno (has any city been burnt down more often?), and the popes abandoned Rome to seek the protection of the kings of France.
By 1350AD, Rome was a desperate backwater dominated by French kings who forced the election of a French pope, Clement V, who then daringly moved his residence to France. Avignon? No, deadly serious.
Crime thrived in the near abandoned city of Rome. Aristocratic gangsters, principally from the feuding Orsini and Colonna families, dominated. The population fell to 30,000, it had been one million strong in its Imperial heyday, and the poet Petrarch called the place "the rubbish heap of history".
Salvation came from St Catherine of Siena. St Catherine was so devout it was said that Jesus' wounds bled from her body. She believed the pope had betrayed Christianity by abandoning Rome and she made it her life's mission to bring the papal seat back to Rome, to save both the church and the city. After a multitude of letters to Avignon had received no reply, Catherine travelled there herself to confront, directly, the pope. Whatever she said worked because, in 1377, she returned to Rome with the pope in a triumphant procession.
That wasn't the end of it though. In Avignon the French king elected his own pope, the 'antipope'. The papal line got confusing. There were the popes in Rome, the antipopes in Avignon, and, at times, even a third 'pope' - in Pisa. They called it the Western Schism and, notwithstanding the fact there are still rival popes/antipopes out there now, it was, perhaps surprisingly, the feuding gangsters of the Colonna family who, in 1417, resolved it in Rome's favour.
Oddone Colona was elected, by his own family, as pope and became Martin V (not sure what's wrong with being Pope Oddone?). Martin V is often viewed as the first truly Renaissance pope but he inherited a city that was still in an awful mess and a papacy that was terribly vulnerable. Martin V, and his successors, had much to do.
They rebuilt Rome on an epic scale. The aim was to make it the most magnificent city on Earth, the capital of the world. Grandiose domes rose and sumptuous palaces were built all, presumably, on the ill gotten gains of gangsterism. The most merciless of the Renaissance popes was Alexander VI, a member of the notorious Borgia family, a family who'd murder their own for power. This is Rome. This is Christianity.
Machhiavelli's favourite was Cesare Borgia, Alexander VI's son and henchman, whose victims could be found floating dead in the Tiber each morning. Cesare inspired Machiavelli's The Prince. Other Borgia popes were notorious for their adultery and for fathering many different children with many different women. Orgies were held and the man who fornicated with the most women was awarded the prize of a pair of gloves!
In response, Pope Leo IV erected the 40ft high, 12ft deep Leonine Walls and, as often with a city or culture under siege, the Romans within these walls started to turn on each other. Popes began torturing and killing each other (honestly, these Christians, you can't trust them anywhere). In 879 Pope Stephen VI ordered the exhumation of a previous pope, Formosus. Stephen had not been a fan of Formosus so he had his corpse tried for 'violation of canon law'.
Found guilty (no shit), Formosus's dead body was stripped naked, his fingers were chopped off, and he was tossed unceremoniously in to the Tiber. This was the new normal. Both in Rome and in Christianity
By the time of the early tenth century, the Theophylact family dominated papal Rome. There were a confusing large number of them, too many even for Sebag Montefiore to focus on individually. He focuses instead on the female Theophylacts, who were seen as depraved maneaters who dominated numerous kings and emperors. Blame the women, that's the way!
Popes were strangled, family members murdered each other, plotting thrived, morality was corrupted, and things, as they do, fell apart. The holy city was, yet again - this is as repetitive as counting rosary beads, on its knees. Charlemagne's successors marched south from France to attack Rome. The pope at the time, Gregory VII, published the Dictatus papae which declared that papal authority was absolute.
It caused the Investiture Controversy, a dispute between Gregory VII and the Holy Roman Emperor, the Saxony born Henry IV (yes, the regicidal numbers can get a bit confusing, welcome to the world of privilege) who wasn't keen on this absolute authority business at all. Gregory VII forged an alliance with the Normans and that too backfired. The Normans occupied Rome, Rome soon became, again, a blazing inferno (has any city been burnt down more often?), and the popes abandoned Rome to seek the protection of the kings of France.
By 1350AD, Rome was a desperate backwater dominated by French kings who forced the election of a French pope, Clement V, who then daringly moved his residence to France. Avignon? No, deadly serious.
Crime thrived in the near abandoned city of Rome. Aristocratic gangsters, principally from the feuding Orsini and Colonna families, dominated. The population fell to 30,000, it had been one million strong in its Imperial heyday, and the poet Petrarch called the place "the rubbish heap of history".
Salvation came from St Catherine of Siena. St Catherine was so devout it was said that Jesus' wounds bled from her body. She believed the pope had betrayed Christianity by abandoning Rome and she made it her life's mission to bring the papal seat back to Rome, to save both the church and the city. After a multitude of letters to Avignon had received no reply, Catherine travelled there herself to confront, directly, the pope. Whatever she said worked because, in 1377, she returned to Rome with the pope in a triumphant procession.
That wasn't the end of it though. In Avignon the French king elected his own pope, the 'antipope'. The papal line got confusing. There were the popes in Rome, the antipopes in Avignon, and, at times, even a third 'pope' - in Pisa. They called it the Western Schism and, notwithstanding the fact there are still rival popes/antipopes out there now, it was, perhaps surprisingly, the feuding gangsters of the Colonna family who, in 1417, resolved it in Rome's favour.
Oddone Colona was elected, by his own family, as pope and became Martin V (not sure what's wrong with being Pope Oddone?). Martin V is often viewed as the first truly Renaissance pope but he inherited a city that was still in an awful mess and a papacy that was terribly vulnerable. Martin V, and his successors, had much to do.
They rebuilt Rome on an epic scale. The aim was to make it the most magnificent city on Earth, the capital of the world. Grandiose domes rose and sumptuous palaces were built all, presumably, on the ill gotten gains of gangsterism. The most merciless of the Renaissance popes was Alexander VI, a member of the notorious Borgia family, a family who'd murder their own for power. This is Rome. This is Christianity.
Machhiavelli's favourite was Cesare Borgia, Alexander VI's son and henchman, whose victims could be found floating dead in the Tiber each morning. Cesare inspired Machiavelli's The Prince. Other Borgia popes were notorious for their adultery and for fathering many different children with many different women. Orgies were held and the man who fornicated with the most women was awarded the prize of a pair of gloves!
To these popes, power was the point of the papacy, not piety. Julius II, who took control of the papacy in 1503, wanted to restore Rome to its ancient splendour, to be its Julius Caesar. It's the reason he chose the name Julius. He became known as the fearsome pope or the warrior pope but as well as his military might, he also assembled an army of artists.
Raphael incorporated philosophers and mathematicians like Aristotle, Plato, and Euclid into his paintings to show how the new Rome was equal to the great civilisations of antiquity. Michelangelo, with the Sistine Chapel ceiling, usurped even Raphael. For his troubles, Julius II beat Michelangelo with a stick. Michelangelo gave as good back.
As Harry Lime said in 1949's The Third Man:- "In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias,
they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced
Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland,
they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and
peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock".
Sebag Montefiore is so awed by the beauty of the Sistine Chapel ceiling he starts narrating in sotto voce. For Julius II, however, it appears to be simply part of an ongoing process to refurbish Rome in Renaissance glory. In 1505 he had the basilica of St Peter's destroyed. His plan was to build a bigger and better one in its place - but demolishing Rome's most beloved building? The one that made Rome the seat of Christianity!
The rebuilding lasted one hundred and twenty years and another twenty popes and it cost, of course, an absolute fortune. But how did they pay for it? The selling of induglences was a practice that had been around since the 6c, but now they were beginning to seriously monetize it. You could even cough up for sins you'd not committed yet, giving carte blanche, no doubt, to all sorts of ungodly behaviour.
Many Christians were outraged. They'd been relatively silent about all the murder and orgies but the absolution of sins through financial recompense was a step too far. The German theologian professor and monk Martin Luther loathed these Roman ways, their forgiveness of sin, their lack of chastity, and their admiration for Pagan art. He called the pope an 'agent of the devil' and his protest, the Ninety-five Theses, was nailed to the door of the All Saints' Church in Wittenberg, Germany.
An act that gave the world Protestantism, the greatest ever challenge to papal supremacy. So quickly did this particular, and still extant, schism accelerate that by 1527 the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, had threatened to slice the pope, Clement VII, into pieces. After a spell imprisoned in Castel Sant'Angelo (formerly Hadrian's mausoleum), Clement, by now starving, blind in one eye, and afflicted by liver disease, escaped to Orvieto.
Rome diminished further in the following two decades until, in 1546, the Sack of Rome took place. Rome fell into the hands of the Ostrogothic king Totila. The city's greatest ever catastrophe had been brought about by the follies of the Renaissance popes. They'd both built, and destroyed, a great city and now Romans were reduced to eating nettles, dogs, mice, and even each other's shit.
Even Pope Paul III, the then current pontiff, agreed that Rome had to take responsibility for its own undoing. A reformation needed to take place and that reformation needed to be underpinned by a somewhat dull and dutiful adherence to both austerity and chastity.
Paul III's successor, Paul IV, wanted to tear down ancient monuments and had nude Renaissance artworks and statues covered up with fig leaves, giving him the sobriquet the fig leaf king. Under these new puritans, homoesexuals were burnt alive, Jews were confined to the ghetto, and the fight against the growing Protestant movement took place on the battlefield as much as in the pulpit or the art galleries.
The Roman Catholic church created a new military wing, the Jesuits (inspired by the preachings of the Basque nobleman, Ignatius of Loyola), whose mission it was to take the Catholic message across the world, as far as America and Africa. Everyone who could not be converted could simply be killed. If you've ever wondered where ISIS get their ideas from you need only look at the history of their fellow Abrahamic travellers.
While their murderous doctrine spread out around the globe, the bishops of Rome were busy prettifying their city again and, following the Renaissance, the new style was the Baroque. The most feted Baroque artist was Gian Lorenzo Bernini, a man who had proved his Christian credentials by permanently scarring his unfaithful partner's face with a razor blade. Turn the other cheek, but only so you can get sliced up.
Bernini and his pope, Urban VIII, built much of what we see when we visit Rome now. Bernini's 'best bits' were considered to be The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa in the Santa Maria della Vittoria and, in the new, and now finally completed, St Peter's Palace, the Baldacchino. Inspired by the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem (and later to inspire Nicholas Hawksmoor's St Mary Woolnoth), as if to say Rome is the new Jerusalem, this is the holiest city on Earth. St Peter's, even today, remains the largest church on the entire planet.
The next big challenge to Christianity and Catholicism came in the form of rising 19c ideologies, Republicanism and Nationalism. France had become a secular republic and the Genoese activist Giuseppe Mazzini was leading a campaign for Italian unification. Mazzini wanted Rome as the new Italian capital and if he was to succeed, he would end papal rule forever.
In 1849 Mazzini's troops, led by General Giuseppe Garibaldi, descended upon Rome. But Pope Pius IX had, of all people, the French emperor Napoleon III on his side and was able to, almost immediately wrest back control of Rome from Garibaldi. Italy was unified but Rome remained separate, independent.
But when Napoleon III fell, in 1870, the French withdrew and Italy entered Rome. The new, and first ever, king of Italy, Victor Emmanuel II made Rome his capital. Secularism had finally taken, at least nominal, control of Rome. On the king's death the huge, and much unloved by Romans (they call it the typewriter, it reminded me of a wedding cake), Altare della Patria monument was built in the centre of Rome, where it dominates to this day, to honour him.
The stand off between state and church lasted until Mussolini took power. When you consider the church's historic, two thousand year long, abuse of power it comes as no surprise that they didn't see fascism as a problem. As Doug Stanhope once joked Pope Benedict XVI's Nazi past shouldn't have been the issue, but his Christian one. People shouldn't say "that new pope's a Nazi" but "that new Nazi's a pope".
Mussolini understood that the Roman Catholic church could add authority to his fascism and, both desperate and, as ever, bereft of moral fibre, the church was happy to go along with this. The Lateran Pact was signed by both the new Kingdom of Italy and The Holy See, and the Vatican, the world's smallest state, was created. A country within a city. An anomaly borne from years of power games, lying, killing, and murder and yet one that exists within the confines of one of Earth's most fascinating, most beautiful, most evocative, and most historical cities. A place I would dearly love to visit again.
Christianity is revealed not to have become the world's most dominant religion through piety, adherence to morality, or even charitable acts but, in fact, due to two millennia of murder, power games, corruption, torture, forced conversion, and striking deals with some of the most nefarious people that ever lived. Let's leave its monuments standing but, slowly, dismantle the medieval blood lust it has allowed to seep into both out lives and our discourse. Let's look at Baroque and Renaissance churches, let's listen to gospel music, and let's admire the art of Michelangelo and Leonardo - but let's not believe all the bullshit in the bible anymore. We're too good for that.
Christianity is revealed not to have become the world's most dominant religion through piety, adherence to morality, or even charitable acts but, in fact, due to two millennia of murder, power games, corruption, torture, forced conversion, and striking deals with some of the most nefarious people that ever lived. Let's leave its monuments standing but, slowly, dismantle the medieval blood lust it has allowed to seep into both out lives and our discourse. Let's look at Baroque and Renaissance churches, let's listen to gospel music, and let's admire the art of Michelangelo and Leonardo - but let's not believe all the bullshit in the bible anymore. We're too good for that.
Sebag Montefiore did a good job, a very academic one - and one, thankfully, with no historical reconstructions - leave that to the Sealed Knot, of telling, simplifying even, the complicated, twisting, turning, oft-repeating itself story of the Eternal City. It may have looked a cushy gig but he still dealt with it in style - and, surely, any Roman worth their salt would appreciate that. Sono pazzi questi Romani.
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