Chapter III
Who Ruled Rome?

The question of who rules in any relationship is a terribly difficult and complicated one. This is immediately apparent to anyone with the slightest relevant experience. In the earliest and most obvious relationships, in the family, between lovers, it is always, in the end, after the most imaginative and penetrating definition, impossible to say who controls, who dominates. It is only less complicated (because the evidence is less complete), not less difficult, when the relationship is historical. It also seems less complicated when the relationship is communal, partly because seemingly repetitive multiplicity disguises complexity, because in large groups men are more easily seen to be acting in stereotyped patterns, to fall into categories and classes, to be relatively blunt and obvious objects with gross needs and fears.

Historians have sometimes made the power relationships between medieval leaders and followers, landlords and tenants seem simple. (With a wink, they say that of course we know where the power lay.) But this simplicity can be defended, if at all, only in extreme cases—when the labor market was noticeably unbalanced; when defense depended upon the control of a weapon, a place, a specific hoard. In most medieval communities the pattern of rule was complex. The pattern must be stylized in order even to talk of ruler and ruled. Admitting that stylization, the ruled must cooperate for the relationship to exist; they must in some negative way at least consent, must find some relative advantage in being ruled. This is not at all to suggest any disguised democracy, at least not of any attractive and recognizable sort, in medieval government. It is to suggest that it was particularly difficult for medieval rulers, especially distant ones, to implement their rule, impossible for them to do it, really, without obviously effective threats, bribes, or advantage to the subject.

This general uncertainty clearly applies to the city of Rome in the thirteenth century. But thirteenth-century Rome had its own unusual difficulties and simplicities. There are thirteenth-century places of

which one can say, this is an independent commune, or this is a part of the kingdom of England or France, or this is a community whose lord is the duke of Normandy—always remembering the difficulties in defining those statements. But this direct simplicity, again probably always misleading, is not available for Rome. Was it subject to the pope, to the emperor, to a local noble oligarchy, to a communal government? The emphasis of one's answer would certainly change from period to period within the century, but it would generally have to be curiously uncertain and mixed. And this Roman peculiarity is matched by, complemented with, another. Rome, "unable to become a stable commune, yet the capital of empire and church," seems to have been queerly slack in its governmental and communal organization.^[1] In some lights it seems almost not to have existed, to have been only an ideal answer to the constant mental necessity for a city: "Arthur had to have a Camelot," and Peter's men had to have Rome.^[2] The structure of gild, citizenship, nobility, party, electorate is startlingly nebulous in thirteenth-century Rome.

All this uncertainty is unnerving. But it has advantages. The absence of an easily identified ruler and of a neatly observable governmental organization encourages the viewer to ask more fundamental questions, to look at a slightly deeper level into the organization of this community, to try to find out what did hold it together. There is in thirteenth-century Rome peculiarly little superstructure to conceal the real, perhaps the real economic, nature of the town. (Unfortunately the reality which is not obscured is, because of inadequate evidence, not blindingly compelling.)

Although one cannot give the insubstantiality of Rome an easy governmental name, it did, as a governmental unit, exist. It was a community with citizens and denizens, with nobles, courts, and officials, and its constantly repaired wall. It had a government. It had a seal. It had its own money, the denari provisini senatus , of the type of Champagne (which had been used in Rome particularly between 1154 and 1184), issued by the senate after 1184, with Roma caput mundi inscribed on its obverse and Senatus P. Q. R. on its reverse.^[3] Most significantly perhaps, Rome had an army, a militia.^[4]

Much of the shape and form that the community really found for itself seem to have been found when the army was active against the armies of neighboring competing towns, against Tivoli in the twelfth century and against Viterbo in the thirteenth. The Roman army was a mixed body, not very clearly visible, at least as feudal and mercenary as it was municipal. Still, in mustering its army, Rome was aware of itself

and its common interests, interests distinct from those of Tivoli, Viterbo, and the pope. In its growth in the school of neighborhood Latin wars, this in many ways communally backward medieval Italian city echoed oddly the growth of great Rome. "Viterbo," Gregorovious wrote, "was the Veii of the Middle Ages to the Romans; they hated the town with a hatred bordering on frenzy."^[5]

The focus of Roman government throughout the thirteenth century (and, in fact, at least from the relatively spectacular communal revolutions of the mid-twelfth century, consolidated in Clement III's peace of 1188) was the senate with its senators. It was the focus in the sense that whoever controlled the senate had already gained, in some very signal way, control of Rome. It was also the focus in the sense that the authority of virtually all municipal offices and commissions stemmed from, or passed through, the senate. In a way then, one can say that thirteenth-century Rome was ruled by, or at least through, the senate, and that that sacred name, the "S" of SPQR, was the mold and mirror of Roman governance, the repository for ideas of communal order, a sort of governmental Neoplatonic l ógoV . The senate summoned the army. The senate made treaties. The senate established weights and measures—like the "palm of the senate." The senate pronounced legal decisions.

But the substance and the position of the senate were very strange. It lay between the mixed and changing controlling powers above it and the slack, ill-organized municipal government beneath it. It itself was of a pliable substance. It suffered quick, stunning changes of size and shape. Within a few years during the pontificate of Innocent III (1198–1216) its size varied from one to fifty-six and back again. This indecision is classically preserved in a very formal document, the form of the oath which Angelo Malabranca, the then senator, swore in 1235, that he and his successors would make their successors swear to abide by his treaty with Gregory IX. "Each senator," Malabranca swore, "would compel his successor, or successors, if there should be more than one. . . ."^[6] —in 1235 the Roman senate's size was so unfixed that the senator could not predict whether it would have one member or more than one member.

Nothing of the senate's position or of the actual government of thirteenth-century Rome can be understood without rehearsing, at least briefly, a little outline of thirteenth-century Roman constitutional-political history (although it has been told very often before.)^[7] The outline itself will remain unintelligible, at the level of meaningless words, if some of its points are not probed a little more deeply.

The treaty of 1188 between Clement III (a Roman, Paolino Scolari of the rione Pigna) and the city of rome established a lasting, but not clearly detailed, pattern for the relationship between the pope and the city. The pope recognized the senate's existence as an approved institution; the senate recognized the fealty it owed to the pope; the pope promised, besides one hundred lire a year for the city's walls and one-third of the city's "money," to give to the senators and the other municipal officials their accustomed emoluments. Thus, at the accession of Innocent III the senate seemed a clearly established body. The senate of Innocent's immediate predecessor Celestine III (1191–1198) seems, like his own, to have suffered grave fluctuations in size. It varied between fifty-six "elected" members and the one active ruling senator, Benedetto Carushomo, the bridge restorer. Giovanni Capocci and Giovanni Pierleone seem to have been among Celestine's other single senators.^[8] In the difficult but interesting years between 1198 and 1205, to which one must return for a slightly fuller examination, there was sometimes a senate of one, sometimes of two, and sometimes of fifty-six. From 1205 until 1238, through the rest of the pontificate of Innocent III, through that of Honorius III (1216–1227), and most of that of Gregory IX (1227–1241), there was regularly one senator. During the remaining years of Gregory's pontificate there were two senators, until in his last year Gregory made as his only senator Matteo Rosso Orsini, who after the pope's death ruled Rome as its "Guelf" dictator until he was joined as senator by Giovanni Poli (a former senator and a member of the Conti family). Under Innocent IV (1243–1254), who succeeded the short-lived Celestine IV (October–November 1241), there seem sometimes to have been one, sometimes two senators until the senatorship of Brancaleone degli Andalò, who came to power in 1252. His dictatorship would seem to mark a change in the nature and significance of the office.

For this whole period, the half-century from 1198 to 1252, the essentially annual procedure of senatorial elections is extremely obscure. The pope seems sometimes merely to have appointed the senator or senators, although even in these cases there was almost surely always some sort of popular acclamation that represented election. It is clear that in some cases the pope did not appoint; the elected senator could not have been a man whom he would have chosen. But even in these cases there can hardly have been the sort of popular election that narrative sources have been thought to imply because there is no observable workable electoral organization. There is certainly in this period some experimentation with election through medians and some

use of rioni for electoral purposes. There was talk in Arnold of Brescia's time of two thousand popular electors.^[9] Still, all the evidence is very vague and unsatisfactory. Although there seems to have been some real sense in thirteenth-century Rome of the difference in meaning between the words "citizen" (civis ) and "denizen" (habitator ), and although there were certainly fourteenth-century regulations concerning the way in which foreign merchants might establish citizenship, there really seems to have been no clearly defined body of citizens in thirteenth-century rome. (Although one may of course argue that the evidence for such a body is lost, the remaining evidence seems to me to point in the opposite direction.) What the sources tend to talk about in Rome (beyond governing councils) is an undefined populus shouting in the piazza of the Capitol. This sort of body cannot effectively elect. It can only approve.

But, although it is extremely difficult to say how a senator was elected, it is not at all difficult to say what sort of man was elected senator. The senator was a member of a powerful Roman family and faction. He was Pandulfo de Suburra, Pandulfo de Giudice, Annibaldo degli Annibaldi, Giovanni Poli, Luca Savelli, Angelo Malabranca, Oddone Colonna, or Matteo Rosso Orsini. He was clearly the visible peak of a force dominant in Rome, papal, antipapal, half of a compromise couple, or something less blatantly political and more complexly familial. But he was, however chosen, the voice of real and dominant power in Rome.

In the second half-century, from 1252 to the death of Boniface VIII in 1303, things were much more obvious and direct. After Brancaleone's experiments with setting up a serious communal state, which must be looked at separately, there was an aristocratic, particularly an Annibaldi, reaction. Brancaleone died in 1258. He was succeeded for a short time by his uncle Castellano. In 1259 he was succeeded by two senators favored by the pope, Alexander IV (1254–1261); they were an Annibaldi and an Orsini, and they in turn were succeeded by another Annibaldi and a Savelli, then by a Conti and an Orsini, then a Colonna and a Poli (in each case one senator was a papal relative).

This renewed aristocratic-papal domination was troubled and insecure. It coincided with renewed attempts to hand over the senatorial chair to foreigners (if Brancaleone and Emanuele Maggio, who interrupted his rule, are remembered to have been foreigners), but foreigners of different type. The two great candidates of 1261 were the Hohenstaufen claimant Manfred and the English Richard of Cornwall, king of the Germans and brother of Henry III. Richard of Cornwall

was not merely the "Guelf" candidate but also the candidate of a pair of cardinals with English connections: John of Toledo, cardinal priest of San Lorenzo in Lucina, and Ottobuono Fieschi, cardinal deacon of Sant'Adriano. Their maneuvers make it clear that in 1261 there was enough of an electoral process to suggest bribes and propaganda—but then of course so would the collecting of a party even without election.^[10] Still it is ironic that this most tantalizingly half-revealed election, at least after the pontificate of Innocent iii, occurred as the electoral senate (whatever it had been) was dying. It was the Annibaldi cardinal, the ranking member of this potent mid-century papally related (to the Conti), local family, who supported the senatorial candidacy of Charles of Anjou. And it was Charles who not only took the Regno from Richard, or his nephew Edmund, and Manfred, but the senate from the aristocratic families of Rome—or at least he changed their role in it. From the time of the negotiations of 1263 until the Sicilian Vespers of 1282 (and their Roman echo in 1284), Charles of Anjou dominated the Roman senate, as he did all central and southern Italy, either by controlling it directly or indirectly or by shaping its reaction against himself.

Charles is remembered as a man who disliked sleep and avoided laughter. He seems to have been singularly unlovable, impenetrable, even for a medieval king. But he was in many ways a very efficient ruler. Arnolfo's imaginatively plain, strong statue of him on the Capitol is great in the way he was great. It is full of powerful authority. Charles himself seems, interestingly, to have been lacking in all the qualities that made and make his brother Louis IX attractive. He was direct but opaque. If he wanted a city like Rome, he threatened it with his army and his fleet in the river. If he wanted to rid himself of a royal rival, Corradino, he executed him. When he came to Rome and accepted the senatorial office he established himself in the most obvious palazzo, the pope's Lateran, and antagonized Clement iv who might otherwise have been even more of a royal puppet. (Charles later moved to Quattro Coronati.) Still, in connection with all this Charles, with his external force, seems in some ways to have ruled Rome remarkably well, to have given it much the sort of government it required. He took his responsibilities seriously, and he interpreted government broadly. When Innocent V lay dead aput Urbem, ubi habemus regimen , Charles thought that it was his job, one of the duties that his really ruling the city entailed, to see that the dead pope had a fitting sepulcher. "Victorious he climbed the Tarpeian rock and the stones of

the Capitol."^[11] But like everything else that he did, he did it in a way eventually unbearable to human sensibilities.

The French popes, Urban IV (1261–1264) and Clement IV (1265–1268), were both supporters and dependents of Charles of Anjou, but they wanted some measure of independence from him (although Clement iv complained that Charles was too economical, plain, and spare in the men whom he first sent to govern Rome). The popes did not want merely to replace a gigantic Hohenstaufen ogre with an equally gigantic and threatening Angevin ogre. They wanted to stand between Charles and the secular forces of central Italy. Urban had at first insisted that Charles, if he accepted the throne of Sicily, not accept the senatorial chair at Rome or that of any podestà. But Urban found alternatives to Charles more repulsive, and he withdrew his original stipulation; he then forbade Charles to accept the senate for life, but rather, regardless of his oath to other Roman supporters, to hold it at the will of the pope and for a limited period. This sort of nervous negotiation dominated much of the history of Charles's relationship with the city. It has left its traces in double letters and corrected drafts. It makes odd contrast with the direct quality of Charles's actual rule which began in 1264 with his sending a prosenator and Provençal knights to take over the Capitol and the city.^[12] He himself arrived and was invested in June 1265.

In 1266 after the defeat of Manfred, the pope demanded that the reluctant Charles resign the senate. In May he did. Disputes between the pope and the newly elected senators, Luca Savelli and Corrado Beltrami Monaldeschi (of Orvieto), particularly over ecclesiastical debts to Roman merchants, began immediately. In 1267 a rising of "the people" installed a "popular" government under Angelo Capocci, captain of the people and member of an extremely interesting Roman political family. Capocci chose as senator Arrigo of Castille, a rich, romantic, military cousin of Charles of Anjou. Arrigo's relations with the pope were strained even before he took Rome (or followed it) to the camp of Corradino, the new Hohenstaufen contender against Charles. Arrigo's fall followed the fall of Corradino in 1268 (although Arrigo's prosenator had not been willing to give the fleeing Corradino the protection of the Capitol), and Charles of Anjou returned to full power, through his ruling prosenators in Rome. He ruled for ten years.

Then in 1278, with the election of the Orsini pope, Nicholas iii, the Roman nobility took the senate to itself again. Nicholas gained recognition of the papal states from the new emperor, Rudolf of Habs-

burg, and in his famous senatorial constitution he forbade the election of future senators who were foreign potentates or the close relatives of foreign potentates, with the specific proviso that he did not mean to exclude the Roman nobility. As a pope and as an Orsini, and in him the two are often indistinguishable, Nicholas created local cardinals (Orsini, Malabranca, Colonna), and, having thoroughly informed himself about the position of the senate with documents whose transcriptions are preserved, he recalled local power to local hands. To an Orsini senator succeeded a Colonna and a Savelli, and to them a Conti and an Orsini.^[13]

Nicholas III died in August 1280. He was succeeded the next February, in another reaction, by the French pope, Martin IV (1282–1285). Nicholas's last senators, again a Conti and a Savelli, calling themselves "senators and electors ordained by the magnificent Roman people," gave the rule of the senate for life to Martin in March, not as pope but as an individual man.^[14] In April Martin granted the senate to Charles for the duration of Martin's life. But early in 1284 the Romans, led by an Orsini faction, made bold by Angevin difficulties in the south, stormed the Capitol, killed the French garrison, imprisoned the French prosenator, and recognized Giovanni Cencio Malabranca, an Orsini relative, brother of a cardinal, as captain of the people.

After a short period of renewed constitutional experimentation, at least with names, and the reconciliation of Annibaldi and Orsini (whose fight lay at the very center of the 1284 revolt), within the year 1284, the pope presented the city with two senators, an Annibaldi and a Savelli. Martin IV was succeeded by Honorius IV (1285–1287). Honorius was a Savelli of Rome, the son and brother of senators. Granted the senatorship, he gave it to his brother Pandulfo, one of Martin's senators.

The Savelli ruled Rome. Their localness, their wisdom, their popularity, and perhaps their relative weakness compared with Annibaldi, Orsini, or Colonna made their rule a successful and easy one. But the pattern for the remaining years of the century is in them clearly established. The papal signor , using the concentration of power first seized by Brancaleone and then made conventional by Charles of Anjou and transferred to papal hands by Nicholas III, ruled Rome through the senate and through a senator or senators who represented his family or a combination of family interests (as in 1292) that would make the greatest possible interests of his own family bearable to a preponderance of Roman power-bearing families. The solidity of the pattern is

clear under Nicholas IV (1288–1292) because he was a client rather than a member of the family he represented, the Colonna. Even under the most sordid pope, Boniface VIII (1292–1303), this need not be a sordid system. Boniface's first senator was again Pandulfo Savelli. It was to Boniface's advantage to have Rome ruled peacefully (if that peace aided rather than interfered with Caetani ambitions).

Before Boniface's election two interesting interruptions had occurred in the papal-senatorial pattern. During the disturbed papal vacancy after the death of Nicholas IV, the city of Rome seems to have fallen into a violent, murderous, economically destructive (and pilgrimage-destructive) chaos. For a time there was no senator. Then in the autumn of 1293 two interesting senators were chosen, a Stefaneschi and a Sant'Eustachio, members of two eminently respectable and not highly controversial Roman noble families of the (very high) second order. The vacancy itself ended with the short peculiar papacy of Celestine V (July–December 1294). Celestine was, among other things, a tool of Charles II, the son of Charles of Anjou. His papacy threatened Rome with the return of the Angevins. It consolidated momentarily the reacting Roman families, at least long enough for them to accept a Caetani.

Now surely the glaring point about all this senatorial history (even admitting the significant change to a sort of controlling signory in about 1252) is that the principal governmental organ of thirteenth-century Rome, the senate, was a shapeless, formless, variable thing. It responded to local and foreign popes, to popular uprisings, to Hohenstaufen and Angevin emperors and kings, and repeatedly to the tough, propertied noble families of Rome. (When the senate is seen as having a classic form at all in the thirteenth century, an odd vision, it is the form of a pair of ruling nobles—an Orsini and an Annibaldi.) This is all another way of saying that the thirteenth-century senate and Roman government in general were unobstructive and flexible and responsive. That was their genius.

If one dips within the narrative of senatorial history at a few points, examines a little more closely something of its texture, one moves a step closer to understanding the forces to which Roman government responded. One of the most revealing periods in the century and at the same time, and connectedly, one of the most difficult to understand is the first half of the pontificate of Innocent III, particularly the years from 1202 to 1205. Innocent III began his rule of Rome strongly. The exact events of his coming to power in Rome are somewhat confused. But he seems successfully to have refused to give a cus-

tomary money gift to the Romans and to have controlled, through a subject median, the selection of the senator. In the autumn of 1201 he wrote of Rome, "by the grace of God we hold it in our power."^[15]

There had already been some signs of difficulty. The pontificate was born, like many others through the century—it was a state of Roman nature—with as its enemies the nepotistically favored relatives of the late pope, in Innocent's case the Orsini. And, equally a state of Roman nature, it was burdened with the hungry relatives of the new pope, in this case particularly Innocent's brother, the notorious Riccardo Conti. There were, further, two vocal leaders of the opposition to Innocent's control of the city, and countryside, two former senators with famous family names, Giovanni Capocci and Giovanni Pierleone. They seem to have been men with some demagogic powers, and so doubly dangerous because to family faction they could attach a temporarily spirited mob. Innocent was also forced to face early in his pontificate a recurring, dangerous external problem, the intermittent Roman war with Viterbo. That Innocent supported Rome in the first encounter between Rome and Viterbo has been interpreted as an indication of his sensing his weakness within the city in spite of good signs and brave talk.

The elements which threatened Innocent's peaceful rule exploded in 1202 after, but not perhaps as a very direct result of, a second Viterbo war in which Innocent was suspected of having tempered the treaty so that it favored the Romans less. The explosion was a complicated one, bursting in its confusion in various directions, with various centers, at various levels. It was both a civil war (if the pettiness of thirteenth-century Roman disturbances deserves that pretentious name) and a constitutional crisis (if the word "constitution" is not too pompous in this primitive setting). Like Roman fireworks, it was loud, quick, spectacular, diverse, and led to nothing.

But in spite of its chaotic quality, a repetitive image dominates any description of the affair. It was conducted around, within, next to, the towers of Roman noble families. Towers were built; towers were destroyed; towers were threatened not only with siege machines but with other towers. The most tantalizing of towers was the one of Pandulfo of the Suburra's which was called fagiolum, the "bean" (or perhaps the "beech" or the "cloth"—curtain); the great central symbol of the whole affair was Riccardo Conti's Tor de' Conti.^[16] It threatened and dominated; it was hated and opposed. It was said to have been built with illicit funds taken from the church by Innocent III and given to his brother. Its bulky base still stands, mammoth even after its par-

tial destruction in a mid-fourteenth-century earthquake; it controls the path from the Lateran to the Vatican and the Capitol to the Colosseum; it looms over the Forum of Nerva.

Towers stood for family and faction. At the center of the affair were the Conti and the Orsini. But they were surrounded by other families, the Frangipane and the Pierleoni, the great declining families of the twelfth century, the Capocci, quickly upwardly mobile, the Annibaldi, rising to increased prominence through their marriage connection with the Conti, and the family of the Suburra, loyal to Innocent. The hatred between Conti and Orsini, natural as the immediate economic circumstances made it, had deeper roots. There was, the Gesta Innocentii III says, old rivalry between the family of Celestine III's father, the Boboni, and the family of Innocent III's mother, the Romani de Scotta, a Roman city family.^[17]

The dispute burst out under Innocent when, in his absence, the Orsini attacked the city holdings of his relatives. Pandulfo of the Suburra, as Innocent's senator, tried to prevent further trouble by exiling troublemakers of the two parties, one to the area of Saint Peter's, the other to Saint Paul's. An Orsini cousin (Teobaldo di Benedetto di Oddone), who visited them often, was murdered on the road between Saint Paul's and the city. The Orsini tried to rouse the city "to excite the furor of the people" against Innocent and Riccardo, particularly by conducting, or trying to conduct, an elaborate funeral for the murdered man, publicly mourning and lamenting before a papal palace and before Riccardo's house.^[18] The never very serene surface of conventional Roman aristocratic behavior was broken by the breaking of houses and towers.

The second provocative incident or set of incidents which led in fact to greater violence was in a way less central to the most smarting problem of Innocent's early pontificate (that is, the Conti-Orsini rivalry), but it was also in a way more generally significant and indicative of problems less confined to the relationship between specific families, although it itself grew out of a relationship between two specific families. It pointed more clearly to the disturbances which naturally surrounded the fall of some fortunes and the rise of others—or more exactly the changing of fortune from one family to another. It was also more flamboyant.

It grew out of the fact that the Poli family, who held of the papacy large tenements in the campagna but whose fortunes had fallen disastrously, had borrowed money to sustain themselves from Riccardo Conti. They could not repay him. Riccardo planned to recover his

losses by having a Poli heir marry his daughter—presumably as a step toward the Conti absorption of Poli holdings. The Poli agreed and then reneged. Innocent and Riccardo moved toward the confiscation of Poli holdings. The Poli reacted histrionically (in order, the Gesta says, to arouse the people). They howled their poverty and dressed in rags. They scurried naked through the streets in distorted penitential processions. They made a foray on Saint Peter's at Eastertime and disturbed the divine offices with their clamor and what the Gesta calls "blasphemies." They threatened and insulted Innocent as he proceeded crowned through the city.^[19] And they handed their property, like ancient client kings, over to the senate and people of Rome. The Poli as they fell provoked the furor they intended. They provoked a tower war. They did not in the end injure the Conti in any clearly noticeable way, nor topple them from power (although they must have made them more cautious). Within a few years the Poli inheritance was safely in Riccardo's possession. In the next generation the Conti of the Poli estates had taken the name Poli, and seem, ironically, to have identified themselves with the interests of their estates, to have become Poli rather than Conti, able to oppose Conti popes.^[20] In this the Poli had won, or had a Poli prototype of Marxist theory.

These outbursts were accompanied and, essentially, followed by temporary adjustments in the senatorial constitution. The existence of a single senator disturbed the dissidents who sought a return to the fifty-six, whom it was believed would less directly represent papal interests. Innocent sought in his usual placating manner a usual technique, a resort to medians. But the opposing parties broke into two groups. The pro-papal party led by the ex-senator Pandulfo, held the Capitol; the antipapal party dominated by Giovanni Capocci moved to the area around the church of Santa Maria domne Rose (in approximately the present location of Santa Caterina dei Funari), in the church and in the house or dome or tower of their partisan Giovanni Staccio. They captured medians and pressed for the selection of at least two senators favorable to them and their rebellion.

In the spring of 1204, Innocent III, having returned from illness and to Rome, tried to pacify the conflicting parties and named a new median, Giovanni Pierleone, who named a distant relative as senator. But the dispute broke out again in late spring, and the dissidents, meeting again at Santa Maria domne Rose, chose a senatelike group of their own, the boni bomines de communi. Giovanni Capocci's power increased, and the war of the towers raged, particularly around the Capocci center near San Pietro in Vincoli (where the Capocci towers now

stand) and around the Suburra towers on the Magnanapoli. Although the war went well for the dissidents during the summer, it then turned against Capocci, because, it is thought, his overbearing leadership annoyed his compatriots or frightened them. With the turn of fortune, the rebels, as well as the papalists, agreed to a treaty. Arbiters were selected for arranging a pattern of senatorial selection. Eventually it was agreed (in an essentially pro-papal, 1188-type decision) that fifty-six senators should be elected (with Innocent agreeing to accept this part of the decision but suggesting that it was unwise and unworkable). By the spring of 1205 the old system had returned, and Innocent was able to choose directly a single senator. He chose Pandulfo.

Some of the cries of those involved in Innocent's battles were the last cries of the condemned; some, like the Orsini's, were the cries of those trying to keep their heads above water until the more affluent times of a more favorable pope or a more propitious alliance. They were the cries of family faction. In this they predict the end of the century as well as announce its beginning. In 1303, the dying Boniface VIII, in the Vatican, perhaps half-mad, the victim of his own grandiose Caetani plans, brutally beaten by the Colonna and the French, saw the city as a complex of family places. He was caught, a prisoner in the Orsini Vatican; he longed for escape to the Lateran, where the Annibaldi, the enemies of both Colonna and Orsini, ruled. The turbulence of 1303 like the turbulence of 1203 was family war—and at least two of the dominant disputing families were the same in both years.

There were also significant differences. The event of 1203 proved both the sagacity and strength of Innocent III. In 1303 the pope was truly beaten, and the year can be seen not unreasonably as marking the death of the old roman papacy—although not (with one of those repeating ironies which grace the history of the city) the death of Caetani family fortunes. (The importance of propertied senatorial Roman families, after all, preceded Gregory I's turning of his own family properties to the use of a newly imagined Roman bishopric.) But another significant difference between 1203 and 1303 points up the significance of the century's history, the century of Brancaleone, Charles I, and Nicholas III. In 1203 there was constant dramatic appeal to an admittedly poorly defined populace and there was constant manipulation of the senate which was inextricably involved with, and was the natural respondent to, political change. Neither populace nor senate was completely ignored in 1303—the senate was the Orsini place. But they were the senate and populace of a relatively secure, although not securely held, signory.

Boniface VIII's pontificate had contributed to this constitutional tightening and simplification, as well as to the continued inflammation of family disputes. The senators of Boniface VIII's great year, 1300, were Riccardo Annibaldi of the Colosseum and Gentile Orsini, successful men in war and peace, efficient rulers in a difficult although wildly profitable domestic year, men from great conventional senatorial families. At least two of their inscriptions, both impressive, can now be found on the Capitol. But it seems to me that their inscriptions make clear that they were both Boniface's men in what was in that year Boniface's Rome.

Although one could argue that the most interesting facet of the relationship between the pope on the one hand and the city and senate on the other was its developing clarity, one could argue equally forcefully that in spite of that development the crucial point about the relationship was its persistent lack of clarity. Boniface VIII himself, or his chancery, exposed this lack of clarity in a document so peculiarly revealing that it seems almost to have been invented for the purpose (and, in a contemporary political sense, it in a way obviously was). On October 23, 1298, from Rieti, Boniface VIII appointed two citizens of Rome and "noble men," Fortebraccio Orsini and Riccardo Annibaldi, senators of Rome for the six months following the approaching feast of All Saints (November 1). He explains his power of appointing first in extremely high and theocratic style, the apostolic dignity, the ordering of the universe, the pope's responsibility for all the faithful living anywhere in the world, and his special responsibility in ruling the Roman people and his special affection for them, a people to whom he was not only vicar of Christ and highest pontiff as to all the others, but their own bishop. These Roman people also feeling a special affection for him, Boniface continues, in order specially to honor him, have according to the will of all bestowed on him for life the rule of the city to exercise himself or through others, prout in instrumento publico super hoc confecto et communis Urbis sigillo munito . . . continetur ("just as it says in the public instrument drawn up about this matter and sealed with the city's communal seal"). God's universal plan, the special relationship of the pope with the city, and the sealed public instrument together conspired to grant Boniface the authority to appoint the men whom he chose as senators, two nobles from potent families.^[21]

Although the change (and, in spite of Boniface's words, one cannot deny the real change) from Innocent to Boniface is traceable through the intervening century, it was not simple, obvious, or devoid of revealingly complex incident. The first step away from Innocent

would seem to have been a step in the opposite direction, toward a more freely elected (whatever that may have meant) senate. The relationship between Honorius III (1216–1227) and the city seems, like that of Honorius IV, his great-nephew, to have been relatively peaceful and easy. The Savelli were an ideal family, clearly local and urban, aristocratic but not overly powerful, rich and of course nepotistic but not abusively so, connected with the senate and increasingly with the people. Honorius III's existence probably encouraged the growth of relatively independent local government. The single serious urban disturbance of his pontificate (1225–1226) was provoked in part by the animosity of Riccardo Conti, Innocent's relict brother, and involved the senator Parentius, a man who was singularly free from papal influence and seemingly dependent for his support on civic sources.

The pontificate of Gregory IX, the second Conti pope, before 1235 also pressed Rome toward the realization of civic independence. Gregory's complete absorption in his war with Frederick II made him incapable of dealing savagely with Rome. In 1228 a "Ghibelline" rising in the city, heralded by an attack on the pope at the altar of Saint Peter's on Easter Sunday, drove the raving pope from the city. (He was summoned again after the terrible flood of February 1, 1230; and he further warmed the then frightened Roman hearts with gold.) Although Annibaldo Annibaldi, in 1231, acting against the heretics of Rome by senatorial edict, seems to have been completely in Gregory's control, or in complete sympathy with him, Rome showed real senatorial vigor and independence in the years from 1232 to 1234. Rome showed its independence under the leadership of two senators with unusually interesting backgrounds, Giovanni Poli, Riccardo Conti's pro-imperial son, and after him Luca Savelli, Honorius III's nephew. Luca's year (1234–1235) was one in which the city fought to control its senate and the campagna and planted again on its possessions boundary-stones marked "SPQR." The Vita Gregorii IX , hostile to the urban claims, talks with shock of the effort of the Romans (the people of "Rome, the gift of Constantine") to control the election of the senator, the minting of money, ovens for making bread, the fees for pasturing animals.^[22]

In 1235, under Senator Angelo Malabranca, the city returned to peace with, and subservience to, the pope; but it was a city that could see itself and its government more coherently and independently. With the dictatorship of Matteo Rosso Orsini, in the vacancy after Gregory's death, city government took another step. This in many ways repulsive, domineering "Guelf" ruled the city and formed alliances with neigh-

boring towns. He locked up the cardinals in the Septizonium and made them elect. Their imprisonment is one of the most brutal and sordid stories of thirteenth-century Rome; cardinals were dead and dying in the putrid enclosure. The English Robert of Somercote's body could not be disposed of properly. Guards stood above the cardinals' cubicles, a victim wrote, and showered them with urine.^[23] Matteo's rule was very clearly independent of an ecclesiastical superior. He was Rome's governor. This relatively coherent Roman unit, seen and in some ways understood, constantly honed on wars with Viterbo, was then prepared to be given into the hands of Brancaleone degli Andalò.

Brancaleone was a Bolognese knight who had fought for Frederick II, a man of good family and already of considerable experience when he was summoned by "the Romans."^[24] To them he brought the governmental idiom of northern Italy. Whatever the real source of Brancaleone's initial power in Rome, whatever the group who summoned him, it cannot have been the pope or, in the usual sense, the Roman nobles, because Brancaleone was so extremely independent of them both when in fact he was not hostile to them. He clearly tried to build up a Roman state independent of the controlling papacy (at times even condescending to, and protective of, the pope). This is shown both in Brancaleone's coins and in his attitude toward surrounding towns, Tivoli, for example, which he took for the city against the pope's will. Brancaleone's title, captain of the people, is also thought to have been significant, a proclamation of the basis of his power, a statement of those in whose interest he ruled. His supervision of the reorganization and ordering of the gilds was probably in good part an effort to build a workable non-noble basis for Roman government. His reputation and his acts alike argue his enmity to the Roman nobility. He is most famous as a destroyer of towers; according to Matthew Paris he had about 140 of them torn down.^[25] His putting to the gallows of two Annibaldi in his second captaincy (when his teeth had been set on edge by his imprisonment and maltreatment after his first three years of office) caused a shudder of amazement as far away as Matthew's Saint Alban's. After Brancaleone's death, the news of which was brought to King Henry III while he was staying at Saint Alban's, Matthew wrote: "He was truly the hammer and rooter of the haughty magnates and evildoers of the city, and the protector and defender of the people, and the representative and lover of truth and justice."^[26]

When, after his first three years, Brancaleone was replaced by Emanuele de Maggio, Emanuele, in contrast with Brancaleone, was said by Matthew to have cared only about pleasing the nobles, and par-

ticularly the Annibaldi. Matthew's Brancaleone was so loved by all the people that when he died in 1258 his head, according to Matthew (and Matthew thought that this was excessive), was put in a precious vase on top of a column and honored like a religious relic (and one recalls the orthodox fears about the dead Arnold of Brescia). When, between Brancaleone's two captaincies, the rule of Emanuele had proved too interested, a league of the popular party (confederatis . . . popularibus ), counseled by an English master-baker, a co-citizen of the rioting Romans (concivis eorum ), Matthew of Belvoir (a cell of Saint Alban's, it has been pointed out), rose and freed Brancaleone.^[27] When the pope excommunicated Brancaleone after he had maltreated the Annibaldi and their allies, he seems to have claimed the privilege of the Roman commune's officials.

None of this would make sense, go together, be understandable, if Brancaleone's rule had not been in some sense, as it has always been claimed to be, popular. But it is very easy to go too far with Brancaleone. Gregorovius in one of his most peculiar passages certainly did: "Were definite information concerning his government forthcoming, we should find that under him the democracy rose to greater power, and that the guilds attained a more secure position."^[28] About Brancaleone, definite information does not come forth easily, and disconcertingly much of it comes from Saint Alban's. It seems impossible to say who elected him, who supported him (except that it was certainly not the Annibaldi). The evidence suggests more his creation of gilds than their creation of him. He was pleasing because he brought order. He was able to produce order probably because he demanded and got a three-year office and noble hostages, and because he brought with him, like podestás elsewhere, his own court. He was a popular dictator. He had perfected, insofar as it was in his century to be perfected, the use of the powers of what has been called the popular party; he succeeded and surpassed Giovanni Capocci and Luca Savelli. What the party really was, we do not know. In Brancaleone the power of the "people" would seem to have reached both its apex and its end. He had in fact with his unified commune, and the taste for order that his successes encouraged, prepared the signory for Charles of Anjou's use.

One must constantly return to the enigma of the electorate, and put together the little pieces of evidence, and wonder what they mean. When Brancaleone died of a fever that came upon him as he was laying siege to Corneto, he was succeeded by his uncle Castellano, whom the citizens of Rome (cives Romani ) elected, it was said, because Brancaleone had told them to. This was done without the pope's assent, and

he, according to Matthew Paris, complained that even as a simple Roman citizen (simplex civis Romanus ) he ought to have been called to a senatorial election.^[29] Against this implication of real election ought to be placed the election of Martin IV as senator for life, an act performed by the outgoing senators as senators and electors "chosen by the magnificent Roman people." Again against this should be put the bribes for Richard of Cornwall's election. Gregory IX seems to have held the nomination after 1235; Nicholas III (in his Roman policy attacking the pretensions of Charles of Anjou) claimed it for the Romans. Clement IV, playing his coy games with Charles in 1266, said that the Roman people (Romanus populus ) was in possession, and had been for a long time, of the ordering (or "electing," ordinandi ) of the senate. Richard of Cornwall's Roman informants wrote to him in May 1261 that he had been elected "in the customary manner," by a large multitude of the people of Rome congregated in the Capitol (in Capitolio . . . Romani populi multitudine congregata ) and that he had been elected unanimously and harmoniously, except for the dissent of some sons of perdition. And the documents around his election suggest, at least, the importance of rioni . From the end of the century (1294) Cardinal Pietro Colonna wrote to Jayme II of Aragon to explain the facts of senatorial election, that in fact a popular election could not come to much without the support of the Orsini or the Colonna.^[30] Motivation in these incidents is not hard to understand. It is easy enough to see why these people said and did what they did, but it is virtually impossible to see what they were talking about or acting upon.

Again, beneath the pressure of Hohenstaufen and Angevin, the enriching power of the pope, the propertied (with, particularly, country seignorial and feudal property) power of the families like Orsini, Colonna, and Annibaldi who blatantly shared control of the city at times like the vacancy after the death of Nicholas IV, beneath all these, was there a coherent body of citizens, a privileged group within the general populace, in whom resided the sort of power and control that electors have? Was there an institutional, coherent, rational connection between the superficially dominant power groups and a broader popular group beneath them? The most frequent answer to these questions would seem to be, "There must have been." Rome, this theory goes, must have been like Siena, but in Rome the documents are lost. It is, on the basis of local evidence not lost, a queer answer and a queer theory. The local evidence seems to me to argue real institutional incoherence, a Roman populace (repeatedly but not always called populus, populi ) that could be gathered in a piazza to shout assent, like the

English country electorate before property qualifications. The old answers have been given, it seems to me, by historians who could not imagine a city in which the control by and of the populace was not urban institutional.

The word "citizen" (civis ) was certainly used in thirteenth-century Rome, as it was, for example, in 1281 of the witness Tommasio, called "once of Cera [Ceri?] and now Roman citizen (cive Romano )" or when, on his dated (1299) tomb of Cardinal Consalvo in Santa Maria Maggiore, Giovanni di Cosma calls himself "civis Romanus ."^[31] It means something in a document to find a man called a citizen of Rome and an inhabitant of Trastevere. But what? When, in about 1208, the Roman senator wrote to the consuls of Terracina telling them that it was insupportable that Roman citizens should be imprisoned there, in what way was he distinguishing from other men the specific men of whom he spoke? Nicholas III in his senatorial ordinance seems to define citizens of Rome as those who were born there, but it is an obliquely used definition.^[32] When, in a document of 1218, a habitator of Gallese sells days in a mill to two "habitatoribus alme urbis ," surely the document is telling us where these men lived, not anything about their citizenship status.^[33] Clearly, however, the mid-fourteenth-century collection of Roman statutes means something very specific when they establish which foreign merchants shall be understood to be Roman citizens—those who have in the city the greater part of their goods, movable and immovable, and a house in which they live continuously with their household—and they do again when they say that no one shall be considered a Roman citizen who does not have a house or vineyard, the house in the city, the vineyard within three miles of the city, and unless he has lived for three years in the city with his family or household.^[34] One may ask, even remembering the lateness of this evidence, what would be the purpose of this sort of definition if it were not for identifying a politically responsible group. The answer is crashingly obvious. The purpose of this sort of definition is to describe the men (specifically merchants) within the city who should be permitted to enjoy the commercial advantages (the advantages of relatively toll-free commerce) of citizenship.

Still, even in the thirteenth century, even among the shouting crowd on the Capitol, there must have been some definition. It is impossible to believe that women and children went to shout. But even that qualification is less absurdly obvious than one might expect. Who were children? Men under the age of complete majority, twenty-five? Although women would not have "voted" on the Capitol, was their po-

sition in Rome and the countryside not closer to men's than one might expect? Their property was, it would seem, carefully protected by law.^[35] They were active as guardians in a familiar, although not necessary, pattern: if the father died the child's guardian was his mother; if the mother was dead, the guardian was his grandfather; if the grandfather, his grandmother. The consenting witnesses in an act at a Roman castello could be described as "all the people of the castello, men and women (homines et mulieres )."^[36]

The populi Romani were summoned by trumpets and bell, by bell and trumpets, by bell and voice of herald, or by bell and trumpets and voice of herald to the piazza of the Capitol to be made into a parlamentum to respond to the senator, to vote unanimously to support his fight against the Colonna, to approve a treaty, to confirm the privileges of the canons of Saint Peter's.^[37] They were to perform a political act, to approve, and perhaps (at least of a fallen senator) condemn.

In 1255 Brancaleone summoned them to the Capitol and made them form a parliament in the accustomed way at the sound of bell and trumpets and voice of herald (fecisset in Campitolio ad sonum campane et bucinarum et voce preconis parlamentum more solito congregatum ).^[38] They were brought to the Capitol to "express the will of the Roman people," to say whether Oddone Colonna should be attacked with an army formed of a fifth part of the men or with a general army. But there were those in that parliament, according to the account sealed by Lord Pietro the chancellor, who wished to disturb the stability and peace of the city. And in the parliament, on the Capitol, they made noise, and they threw rocks. And after this incident, which caused grave confusion, the Lord Pietro put the question as to whether or not the senator Brancaleone should be permitted to act as he would, with full power, against Oddone and his accomplices and against those who had thrown rocks (because Brancaleone had said that this was too criminal to be overlooked); and no one whom Pietro could hear answered no. Even in this unlikely parliament the official verdict was unanimous. It is not really clear that a parliament could answer no, when the proper answer was yes. To be effective, it would seem, men of the ilk of these parliamentary dissidents would have seriously to riot or revolt. Then they could, or could help to, change government, as they (Romani plebei populum ) did in 1237 when they overthrew Giovanni Poli and replaced him as senator with Giovanni Cenci.^[39]

In his necessary quest for public opinion in Rome, the senator was of course not restricted to the crude instrument of the parlamentum .

Most obviously he had a council or councils. These councils could advise him so that he would not bring the parlamentum to a stage of actual revolt when he chose to call it. These councils obviously became more necessary as the senate itself changed from a large representative body of fifty-six or fifty to a body of one or two selected nobles, and even more when that body was converted to a single foreigner and his foreign prosenator—more, that is, to the extent that local counsel was needed at all, because a strong foreign army, when it was effective, lessened that need.^[40]

The phrase "consilium generale et speciale " has been thought to describe two representative institutions of different size, the generale large and the speciale small, which met to advise the senator in the church of the Aracoeli. This may sometimes have been the case, but it would seem likely that the phrase came to be a generally descriptive one for a full council and that although there were councils at the Aracoeli of very various sizes they were not very rigorously institutionalized.^[41] The senator summoned, it would seem, the citizens most appropriate to the occasion. In this his action would not vary much from that of many contemporary rulers. In this he would behave very much as he did when he found decision in legal disputes; he then summoned the appropriate judges, took their opinion, and proclaimed sentence (except that by the judges he was, conventionally, much more bound). But, however institutional, there is clear, and again unsurprising, use of council in thirteenth-century senatorial government even under Charles of Anjou, as in 1281 when the royal vicar Philippe de Lavène took counsel of the anziani and heads of gilds.^[42]

In an interesting example, Matteo Rosso Orsini, "Dei gratia alme urbis illustris " senator (the appointee of Gregory IX acting in 1242 during the vacancy after Gregory's death) proclaimed a treaty with Perugia and Narni. He did this with the council of the city gathered in the Aracoeli where it was customarily gathered (congregato Urbis consilio in domo Sancte Marie de Capitolio, ubi consuetum est more solito congregari ), at the mandate of the senator and at the petiton of the notary who was the syndic of the commune of Perugia. There were eighty-five of these councilors or counselors. They are not on the whole a surprising group. They include three judges, four notaries or scribes, and a lot of familiar names, four Annibaldi, a Capocci, a Malabranca, a Frangipane, an Astalli, a Sant'Eustachio, a Boboni, Cenci, Crescenzi, Surdi, Grassi, Rossi, a Capudzucca, Giovanni Poli (the only man given his usual, formal title comes before his name), a man identified as the

lord (or Dom) Bonaventura of the cardinal bishop of Porto. These men more than counsel, presumably, gave substance, the assurance of real local backing, to Matteo Rosso's "Guelf" treaty.^[43]

The council is not always described as responding unanimously. In 1241 the senators Annibaldo and Oddone Colonna, at the insistence of pope and cardinals, promised to return to the stipulations of the treaty between the pope and Angelo Malabranca and to protect ecclesiastical liberties.^[44] This action was taken at the Aracoeli, before "the councilors of the city fully assembled." After a full discussion (deliberatione plenaria ) the greater and wiser part gave their assent and approval (de assensu et voluntate maioris et sanioris partis ipsorum ). This very conventional medieval electing and approving formula is different from, but no more compelling than, "unanimously."

Rather more compelling in some ways is the description of another set of councils, in the year 1257, concerned with provisions of the treaty with Tivoli, and summoned by the foreign senator Emanuele Maggio.^[45] On Tuesday March 6 the general and special council of the city was assembled by bell and herald at the mandate of the senator, in the palazzo vecchio of the Capitol, to consider the enactments of previous special and general counselors (the phrase is turned around) from the time of Brancaleone. On Saturday March 10 another council was called, this time in the palazzo nuovo . The description of this council is suggestive. Its members were summoned by sound of bell and summons of summoner, a selective sort of summons. It was, the document says, the special council of the commune of Rome, to which were called the anziani and certain other provident men. The document refers back to the Tuesday meeting as a meeting of the general council, and it refers to that meeting's specification of the further special meeting of the senator "with special councilors and others" described this second time as "the senator with the special council and others who are not of the council (qui non essent de consilio ) if the senator wishes to call them." The next meeting, on Wednesday March 14, was of a general and special council of the commune of the city, again in the palazzo vecchio of the city, again at sound of bell and voice of herald. The "greater part" of the Saturday special council had approved the stipulations of the treaty; all of the Wednesday general council "with the exception of about two" approved. The plan was submitted to a parliament of the whole people by the senator because, he said, he wished in this to follow fully their voted will; they approved the submitted plan unanimously.

This 1257 document with its cluster of councils seems to be de-

scribing real and different things. While it does not distinguish a special and general council from a general council, it does distinguish both of these from a special council. In its talk both of anziani and of men who may be assembled although they are not of the council, it strongly implies a specific and known membership of the special council. Its distinction between the summons of the summoner for the expanded special council and the cry of the herald for the general council points up the fact that a bell and a cry assume that the auditors will know who is summoned; the members of the general council must have known they were members of it. Even the movement out of the Aracoeli and into the palazzo vecchio for the general and the palazzo nuovo for the special council gives the document a believable air—although the fact that the scribe did not know the correct date for his initial meeting may make one a bit cautious about too heavy a dependence upon his phraseology. The fact that the treaty plan was too intricate, practically, for a large body to do much with it but accept it or reject it makes if anything the distinction between councils seem more serious.

The whole mechanism of councils and parliament here does not of course suggest democracy. It operated during a very peculiar senatorship, that of the antipopular Emanuele between two senates of Brancaleone. The voting, with its everybody but about two, suggests nothing of serious division and counting, any more than does Emanuele's pious phrase to the parliament. What the document and the councils do suggest is more institutionalization than does most of the evidence from thirteenth-century Rome. It argues caution in denying as well as in accepting the existence of institutions. At least in 1257 the councils had some recognizable form, even if, in themselves, they had no independence—they came only at the senator's summons, and they voted yes.

In the list of the counselors of 1242 some men are called "lord" and some are not. This does not seem a completely random selection: all the Annibaldi are "lords," as is Giovanni Poli, the Boboni, the Frangipane, the Malabranca; Giovanni Capocci is not. The lords are not a convincing roster of nobility, but the notary presumably had something of the sort in mind. In fact, in spite of the blatant and overwhelming importance of the Roman nobility, its definition, like so much else in the Roman constitution, seems to have been vague, unless one limits the term to men with titles from external sources, and in that case the group loses its force in the context of the city.

There were consuls and proconsuls and later the honorific title "Magnificence."^[46] Early fourteenth-century (1305) antimagnate legis-

lation lists the names of Roman noble families. In the mid-fourteenth-century collection of laws there are specific legal restrictions on barons and baronesses. In the same collection, men elected to play in the Testaccio games and then not playing were forbidden to hold office for five years unless they could plead old age (were forty or over), illness, or other real incapacity. This suggests something of a game-playing, Testaccio-crunching, officeholding elite, as does Saba Malaspina's talk of nobles playing games on horses to celebrate Charles of Anjou's entry into Rome. These suggestions are confirmed by the collection of statutes' definition of cavallarocti for the purposes, as it says, of its own laws. They are men who have already held office as cavallarocti (knightly office?) within the city or who have played in the games of the Testaccio and Agone. It reinforces an impression gained from a rhetorical phrase, used for example by the senators Gentile Orsini and Stefano Colonna in 1306, talking of everyone coming into the Capitol, "Roman citizens, both noble and foot (cives Romani, tam nobiles quam pedites )." Nobles fought as well as played, it is assumed, on horses.^[47] But in spite of the extreme vitality of the thirteenth-century Roman nobility, and in cases of some families its seeming to last forever, the caste seems to have been covered with little controlling, defining superstructure. Who was a noble is almost as hard a question as who was a citizen. The nobility can certainly not be considered a crisp, edged governing class—but it must be admitted that the title is often used in contemporary documents with no sense of internal confusion.

From nobility one moves naturally to party. Were Romans clearly Guelf or Ghibelline? The answer must be a distinct no . Saba Malaspina might well lead one to the opposite conclusion with his talk of Arrigo of Castille's catching all the unsuspecting leaders of the "Guelf" nobility, like fish in a net, on the Capitol, and his talk of Giacomo di Napoleone Orsini as the dux and magister of the "Ghibellines." But the fact that Napoleone and Matteo Orsini and their connection, Angelo Malabranca, dominate the "Guelf" list suggests a difficulty even within Saba's text. The Orsini, through an early fourteenth-century Orsini cardinal, if report and assumption are correct, provided the most striking denial of Guelf-Ghibelline connection from the whole period. An Aragonese correspondent writing to Jayme II from Avignon on February 7, 1324, heard the cardinal reply to the teasing John XXII who had called him a Ghibelline, "Truly, Holy Father, I am neither Ghibelline nor Guelf, nor do I understand what the words mean. . . ." And the listening Aragonese heard further: "Truly,

Romans have many enmities and friendships, and they help their friends, whether they are Guelf or Ghibelline. They help and love their friends, but you will not find that any true Roman is either Guelf or Ghibelline." This, by itself, also goes too far, at least for the thirteenth century. It would be unreasonable not to note in Roman nobles political persuasions that could understandably be described by the two "party" names. Although these persuasions seem seldom to have been binding or consistent or to have spread to whole families, there were certainly men and even families who have a noticeable Guelf or Ghibelline aura. But, in general, political grouping and regrouping in thirteenth-century Rome was surprisingly facile, independent of ideology, and dependent upon momentary interest. Party is certainly not that which provides the seemingly missing firmness to the institutional structure of medieval Rome.^[48]

To pursue the meaning of government in thirteenth-century Rome one must return to the senator and his officials. As Halphen wrote, "La pièce essentielle de cette constitution était le sénat."^[49] By the thirteenth century, the senator's only rival, the prefect, had become ceremonial and hereditary, the decoration of a potent landed family (the Vico of Anguillara—the family of the Trastevere tower). One can look at a thirteenth-century senator. In a mosaic in the chapel of Santa Rosa in Aracoeli, Saint Francis, exposing his stigmata, places his hand on the shoulder of a small, kneeling, donor senator, before the enthroned Virgin and Child and a standing John the Baptist. In the Palazzo Colonna, in a mosaic from Aracoeli, Saint Francis, again with stigmata, between a Colonna column and Saint John the Evangelist, presents Senator Giovanni Colonna to the Virgin and Child. Both senators are dressed as senators with distinguishing decorations at their necks and on their hats, with red or purple robes and white collars.

The senators are also visible in repeated administrative act—repeated but far from continuous. Their most common recorded activity, as one would expect of medieval governors, is purveying justice. The sort of job the senator did can be seen in the litigation of a family in the rione Pigna.^[50] In March 1252 a woman named Luciana, the daughter of Bartolomeo di Giovanni Nasigrassi ("Fat Noses") and the widow of Giovanni, son of Niccolò Ciapi of the Pigna, was trying to get her portion of her dower lands and money back from her in-laws, the heirs of Niccolò Ciapi. On March 14 the palatine judge Tommaso de Oderisciis and the primicerius of judges Consolino di Giovanni Scannaiudei (who was also advocate in this case) gave their counsel to

the senator, Giacomo Frangipane. They advised him of the justice of Luciana's claim and they recommended his putting her in possession of her properties. On March 19 Frangipane ordered that the decision be sealed and that two named mandatories put Luciana in possession of specified properties in the Tuscolan highlands, houses in the Pigna (on two sides of which were the properties of a shieldmaker's heirs), and a vineyard outside the Lateran gate (on one side of which was the property of the Frangipane and on another the lane that ran to the mill of the Camera—Giacomo was dealing with neighbors, at least of his extended family).

On December 4, 1253, the same judge palatine, acting this time with the judge Stefano di Benedetto, confirmed the previous counsel and advised immediate execution. The two judges issued a formal confirmation on December 12 (in which Stefano was described as counselor in this case). On January 15, 1254, the then senator Brancaleone ordered that the counsel be sealed with the senatorial seal and that a named mandatory (not one of the earlier ones) invest Luciana with the same properties that she had theoretically been given two years before by Giacomo Frangipane.

This is the way senatorial justice worked. Selected judges heard the case. They proceeded, we can feel reasonably sure from the description of other cases broken in process, according to quite standard procedures established by Roman civil law.^[51] Having come to the point of sentencing, the judges instead wrote an advisory council. The sentence was issued and sealed by the senator who thus remained the official judge. This tight restriction could cause difficulties when the senator and his vicar were absent from Rome, so that in 1271 the practical governor, Charles of Anjou, made it possible for a judge to give sentence when the vicar was outside the city. Although this problem must have been considered earlier (as when in May 1254, Brancaleone, who used a vicar too, was governing with his notary in the senatorial pavilion in the Roman camp above Tivoli), it was particularly severe under Charles.^[52] The counsels presented to the senator or his vicar, in the thirteenth century, were regularly submitted by a palatine judge and one other judge.

The case of Luciana's dower points up the slowness of effective justice. Appeals and various sorts of recalcitrance could postpone the enforcement of a judgment. (We do not know that Luciana actually got the properties even in 1254.) But it is equally noteworthy that the fall of the old senatorial government and the accession of Brancaleone did not either halt or change the verdict in Luciana's case. (The sense of

continuity that one felt in Emanuele Maggio's handling of Brancaleone's treatment of the Tivoli treaty is confirmed.) In fact, the same judge palatine gave the same opinion to the successive senators. This impression of judicial continuity is confirmed by noting a counsel of 1250 given to the senators Pietro Annibaldi and Napoleone di Matteo Rosso Orsini.^[53] The 1250 counsel was given by the judge palatine Pietro, the son of the lord Consolino the primicerius , and his colleague was Tommaso de Oderisciis, advocate.

Judges were among the most important officials of the city of Rome. In the thirteenth century there were two main sorts of judges, palatine judges and judges called dativi or, by the end of the century, simply judges of Rome. The latter were judges drawn from a fairly large pool and commissioned for specific cases. The office of palatine judge is thought to have grown out of that of the old judge ordinary. There were seven judges ordinary, from seven offices in the papal household. It has been argued that the seven were replaced by one palatine judge—but this argument is made against surviving evidence which lists palatine judges in the plural. Although there seems to be only one to take the oath of 1235, there seem to be four of them in a witness list of 1257. By the end of the thirteenth century, particularly perhaps under Charles of Anjou, they had multiplied and become specialized; there was a judge palatine over appeals and other extraordinary cases (by 1328 his court sat by custom "in [on?] the podia of the Capitol"), a judge for widows and orphans and the poor, a judge of the camera of the city.

The judges were selected by the senator. In an interesting document of 1255, Brancaleone delegated to Arriverio "de Carbonensibus" the job of finding judges and notaries for the following year. In 1283 Charles of Anjou had southerners from the Regno among his eight judges as well as his other named officials.^[54] But by the end of the century, in 1299, the papal camera of Boniface VIII was still paying stipends to Roman judges. The pope paid thirty soldi , nine denari to the primicerius of the judges of the city and twenty soldi , six denari to each of forty-five judges. (He also paid a sum to twenty notaries and to the college of notaries.)^[55] When the pope had seized the signory he still at another level was involved in judicial administration in the antique way—perhaps nothing shows the lack of clarity in Roman administration more clearly, or more clearly reflects the persisting indecision about sources of authority of the sort seen in Boniface's appointment of senators.

Around the judges in Roman senatorial witness lists one finds

scribes and notaries.^[56] In 1202 Adamo d'Isola, scribe of the senate, and Cencio d'Isola, chancellor of the city (and elsewhere of the senate), appear together.^[57] In 1257 Emanuele's parliamentary process was recorded by Andrea Romanutii, scribe (scriba ) of the senate. It was witnessed by Invectardo, the notary (notarius ) of Emanuele the senator, and three other scriniarii , or local authorized notarial scribes. A 1233 Giovanni Poli ratification of the peace between Rome and Viterbo was recorded by Romano, scribe of the senate. The business of the pact between Rome and Tivoli in 1259 was recorded by Giovanni di Pietro Gualterii, scriniarius of the Roman church and "now" palatine notary. In 1255 in Brancaleone's disturbed parlamentum it was Pietro, chancellor of the city, who recorded the votes. When in May 1235 the senator Angelo Malabranca and his urban officials took their oath over keeping the peace with Gregory IX, at least five scriniarii palatini took the oath, although it was redacted by a scribe not identified as an urban servant.

In 1283 Charles of Salerno (writing for his father, Charles of Anjou) talked of twelve official urban notaries, four from the city and eight from the Regno. He placed them: two in camera; six in criminals; three in civils; one in appeals. In almost every way visible, Charles's urban administration seems slightly more adequate than other senators', but, in general, his twelve and Angelo's five give a sense of the size of the official Capitoline writing office which could easily be supplemented in a literate town full of scribes and notaries. The writing office also probably gives a fair idea of the general size of the official staff. Perhaps a better one comes from the information that Charles of Salerno wrote to his father's urban chamberlain in 1283, that sixty officials should eat from his, the chamberlain's, table.^[58]

There were other necessary officials of a wide range of dignity and importance from the bell-ringer and the two trumpet-blowers and the banner-bearers and the porters and doorkeepers on the one hand to the important chamberlain and the treasury-wardrobe keepers, of whom there were two in 1231, or the relatively dignified physician of 1283 on the other. There were summoners, guards, a senatorial seneschal.^[59] In 1306 the two senators appointed a new doorkeeper for life. He, Paolo de Nigris, is described as a Roman citizen. The document of appointment, written by Giovanni de Fuscis de Berta, notary and scribe of the senate, and intended to be sealed with the senatorial seal, says that Paolo is to receive all of the customary emoluments of the office from the camera and the senate. It explains why a new doorkeeper was needed; even in the lifetime of the deceased Egidocio di Nicola di Pie-

tro, keeper of the second door, there were terrible deficiencies in its keeping and also that of the third door, through which one gained access to the great hall of the Capitoline palace; it was notorious, through everyone who came to the Capitoline courts, that the doors were kept so poorly that shame rather than honor accrued for the senators and Capitoline officials. To regain order and decorum Paolo was appointed.^[60]

In 1235 twenty-eight men called iustitiarii , men involved in the carrying out of justice and the execution of sentences, took the oath.^[61] Some of them are identified as iustitiarii of a place, two of the Lateran, two de Porticu; some are themselves designated as of a place like Ponte or Trastevere; one was a Caffarelli, one a Curtabracha, one a Lombardi (Jacobus Henrici Lombardi), one Bartolomeo was called Bibolus, and one Paolo di Giovanni "Nasi Crassi" was almost surely the uncle of Luciana of the Pigna-Lateran-Tuscolan dowery and so almost surely himself a man of reasonable property.^[62]

These iustitiarii lead to the constant, pressing problem that must occupy any historian, the question of how the peace was kept in thirteenth-century Rome, insofar, as, of course, it was kept. The most helpful answer comes again from Charles of Salerno in 1283. He wrote to the chamberlain that he, the vicar, and the marshal (the focal official in these affairs) should decide if thirty mounted police guards were sufficient in keeping the city, and that, if they thought not, they might raise the number to fifty. Charles had troops who could do this job, and he had external sources of revenue which could pay them. Nothing is a better key than this fact to understanding Charles's success in governing the city. He did not need to rely on the urban budget scraped together from the rents and rights of the city, the money from salt, coinage, port tolls, rents from Jews, and judicial fines; thus, too, although they were controlled by an autocrat and were perhaps careless of local sensibilities, his officials presumably need not depend so heavily on tips and bribes.^[63]

One sees then that from the senator, the chief governmental official, radiates an administrative bureaucracy. This one might say, and I think not unconventionally, was how Rome was governed. But the senator's was a very feeble radiance, and the slightest serious thought makes one realize that this cannot have been an important community's government, if one means by government anything more than a simple administrative outline. The shape of the senatorial office was too indistinct, the control over the senator too undefined and variable, the hand of the senator in the community too short-fingered, for all this

to be called the real government of Rome. One asks hard, in this context, who ruled Rome, and finds always (except for brittle, limited periods) an unsatisfactory answer. No one ruled Rome. No group ruled Rome. Every possible resolution crumbles. The clarity of every answer becomes muddy upon examination. Rome in the thirteenth century, except for brief intervals, would seem not to have been ruled, not to have had rule. But we know that that is not true, because, whether or not there were sixty men at the chamberlain's table, the community functioned. It found for itself a coherent, profitable existence. This combination of frail government and continued existence should be made to have some value by the historian.

One must explore Roman government another way. That is not to say that one should not have taken the conventional path first. It is really helpful to know of Rome that official governmental thought was focused in a senator who echoed the ancient name (revived in the Romanesque twelfth century), who could be subservient to pope or emperor-king or "people," and who can in certain lights, at certain times, look very much like an ordinary Italian podestà. It is valuable to see that both city and senate are distinct enough for each to have a seal, to see that salt, coins, and pope all pay, that the Capitol was really used, that judges spoke through the senator. At the very least, official government is one face of, one way of expressing, real government. But having seen the seals and the doorkeepers, the traditional governmental outline, one can look again for interesting existents, see where arresting positive evidence remains, and then, even if the material is sparse, try to say what, in terms of this total community, this evidence means.

There is one group of governmental officials in thirteenth-century Rome that catches the eye immediately, because they existed, because of the intricate importance of what they did. They are the Masters, and Submasters and other officials, "of the Buildings of the City." It is extremely, and helpfully, curious to find in such a lightly governed community, this group supervising the way people actually lived, and built their houses, and threw away their garbage. These Masters, three in the surviving documents, supervised, in response of course to complaint, the examination of each offending area. They inspected documents and looked at the physical place. They, and in late century, by 1279, their judge, made "arbitration" or passed sentence, at the Capitol, at the bench in the portico where justice was returned, before witnesses, sometimes identified by rione , summoned by an identified curial summoner, listed in a document redacted by their own scribe or notary. If

their arbitrium was unacceptable, one of the parties could appeal to the senator (through whom from "the people" their power came), as the proctor of the nuns of San Ciriaco in Via Lata did to the senator Pandulfo Savelli in 1286 about building over an old wall of the nunnery.^[64]

A repeated problem, and a significant one, with which the Masters dealt was the encumbering of the accesses to Saint Peter's. In 1233 two of the Masters, one a Grassi and the other a dative judge, Pietro Malpilii, acting for themselves and with the power delegated by the third judge, a Boboni, acted in a dispute between the chapter of Saint Peter's and citizens of the Leonine city, over houses and other structures built out into the street that led to Saint Peter's, particularly in the piazza before the church and on the Ruga Francigene.^[65] The Masters went to the Leonine city and inspected the buildings with their own eyes. They looked at various pertinent instruments and at Leo IX's privilege to the basilica; they consulted the wise. They ordered that porch structures, porticos and loggias (proforula et porticalia ) which stuck out before the houses into the street by more than seven palmi had to be cut off and removed, and they ordered the Submasters to see that this was done.

In 1279 the Masters were again faced with encumbrances around Saint Peter's, particularly, this time, around the piazza itself, called the Cortina di San Pietro. The more active Masters were the scriniarius Deodato, and Giovanni Staccio, the son of Angelo the son of Giovanni Staccio—presumably the man whose house held the rebels against Innocent III. The Masters with their fellow went to the piazza and looked at the houses, one of which belonged to the heir of a miller, and another to the heir of a canon of Saint Peter's. After listening to advocates on both sides and after careful deliberation, particularly with the judge, Don Angelo di Pietro di Matteo, who was assigned to the Masters' office, they ordered that houses not project farther into the piazza than a line drawn between two houses, one of which belonged to Santo Spirito in Sassia. It was further ordered that projections be removed under penalty of a fine. But the fine was not to be applied immediately. The houses need not be torn down immediately, while "in these days" the papal court was staying at Saint Peter's, "because in these days the houses in question have as their tenants those who follow the papal curia." So execution was postponed until the departure of the pope. In 1306 the Masters were again concerned with the neighborhood. This time the Masters ordered their Submasters, one a notary, one a mason, to investigate the garbage-filled vacant lot across from Santo Spirito. It

was they who found the marble markers that identified Santo Spirito as the negligent owner.^[66]

Although the Masters' concern with Saint Peter's was significant, they were not concerned with it alone. They worried about the dye coming from the Jews' house near Santa Maria domne Berte , about the tower of Master Enrico the doctor (actually near Saint Peter's), about an obstructive portico belonging to an ex-Pavian in the rione Trevi, about the boundaries of San Sisto, about lands in the Isola di Porto. What is so very interesting about the office of the Masters is that it shows the ability of the Roman community, in important matters, to function in such a powerful and sophisticated governmental way. That this ability was the expression, at least sometimes, of the deliberate choice of the community, or part of it, to govern itself shrewdly in important matters is strongly suggested by the choice of the Masters as future arbiters over problems of construction and waste by consenting parties in private contracts.^[67] One finds, moreover, the prior and counselors of the saltpans, proceeding in a manner not unlike the Masters, in inspecting, acting, giving counsel, on the site of the salt workings.^[68] More blatantly impressive, one can see that in times of crisis the community could provide those boni homines, however elected, who met to adjust the "constitution," to save the city from chaos or tyranny.

Rome was clearly a city that, however lightly governed, could respond governmentally in time and area of real need. Salt counselors and boni homines together recall another interesting set of officials active in thirteenth-century Rome, the grasciari or grascierii (provisioners) who helped supply the city with its necessities—its grascia of wheat, barley, and pork. Significantly, the city was not completely responsible for this work, even insofar as it was a governmental function. In time of need, a pope like Martin IV could still feel and take the responsibility for provisioning the city, for buying grain in Sicily to be sold at a proper price in Rome, the semicharitable business to be in this case arranged by a canon of Saint Peter's and a brother of the hospital of Santo Spirito in Sassia.^[69] It is perhaps precisely in its areas of greatest governmental activity that a governmental monopoly is most noticeably absent. It is here that one sees most sharply the action of the pope, of the consuls of the two great gilds (even in a city with weak gilds). Again, in this weakly gilded city, it should always be remembered that gild statutes (at least surviving ones) predate urban statutes. In the middle of the century one already sees a judge of the merchants of the city (an officer who presumably linked gild and urban government) actively giving counsel—and giving counsel to the Masters of

Buildings. In 1255 the judge Pallone with his counselor, the now familiar Tommaso de Oderisciis, gave counsel to the Masters that they should prohibit the destruction, by a man named Romano "Citadini," of the equipment of a Santa Maria in Trastevere mill on the Trastevere side of the river. The action was provoked by a canon and proctor of Santa Maria, whose petition included a description of the course the counsel should take. The participation of the governed is firmly felt.^[70]

This participation can be seen in another way by moving through the confusion of papal with communal government in thirteenth-century Rome. Papal government offered Romans an alternative set of courts. A contemporary historian has written recently, "In the eyes of the commune of Macerata papal authority is nothing more than a potential judicial loophole."^[71] It was a loophole, and also something else, perhaps, more important for the men of Rome. The central Tuscan patrimony around Rome offered the layman an alternative. Only here, theoretically, could a case concerning violation of property come before papal ecclesiastical courts if both parties were laymen, and only if both were inhabitants of the Tuscan patrimony.^[72] This Tuscan privilege points up the potentialities of confusion between courts and laws in Rome. And, at least for the historian, the facts of cases can be very confusing. It is sometimes very difficult to tell why a case was tried by a court of papal delegates, a papal auditor, or a court responsible to the papal vicar of spiritualities in Rome and not by a senatorial court; and it is often equally hard, perhaps harder, to tell why a case was tried by a senatorial rather than a papal court. One is pressed toward thinking that in the eyes of the governed, of the contesting parties, the source of the court's authority need not be important. This, if it is true, and I think it is, is very revealing.

First one should glance at some of the ways in which papal courts offered themselves to thirteenth-century Romans. Early in the thirteenth-century collection of San Cosimato's documents, one finds a little letter of justice from Innocent III in Ferentino to his vicar, Guido Papareschi, cardinal priest of Santa Maria in Trastevere (Guido's family's neighborhood church), and to Hugh cardinal priest of San Martino.^[73] Innocent delegates to the two cardinals, as he had to the cardinal vicar orally, a property dispute of common form between the Roman Benedictine monastery of San Cosimato and the Roman church, also in Trastevere, of San Salvatore de Pede Pontis—a perfectly ordinary affair.

In a better explained case, from November 1212, Innocent is again active, this time proffering a decision of arbitration.^[74] A man

named Oddone Benencasa had sold half of a house commonly called the Benencasa Arch (Arcus Benencase) to the nobleman S. di Rainerio di Stefano (probably Stefaneschi). As part of the deal in the contract of sale, Oddone had promised not to sell or give away the other half of the house without S.'s permission on pain of no less than six hundred lire . But since Oddone had failed to secure S.'s permission when he alienated the house, S. demanded the money from the monastery of San Cosimato as Oddone's heir, because Oddone had entered the monastery and taken with him all his goods. It was opposed that because Oddone had brought his goods to the monastery and transferred them alive (inter vivos ), the monastery was thus in possession of Oddone's goods by right of gift not by right of inheritance, and so the monastery did not have the obligation that inheritance might bring, particularly because no action was taken at the time of the death of the donor, and because the caution of the civil law regulated to S.'s present disadvantage the collection of penaltis stipulated in contracts. Innocent, having considered the matter, offered that the 250 lire deposited with the senator in this case be returned to the monastery, but that for the sake of peace the monastery grant 150 lire to the noble S.

Neither of these cases gives one much sense of the presence of a physical court. Quite the opposite is true of a dispute between San Cosimato and a man named Giovanni Obicionis Calloboccoris (or Calloboccionis), in 1247.^[75] The case was heard by Beraldo, priest or archpriest of Santa Maria in Monterone, who acted under a commission from the papal vicar, Stefano, cardinal priest of Santa Maria in Trastevere. The proctor of the convent claimed victory in the case particularly on the grounds of their opponent's contumacy. The recorded hearing at the beginning of March has a peculiar physical presence because it was held in front of the church of Santa Maria in Monterone before a group of witnesses which included, besides a "Buckabella" and (more famous name) a "Buckamazii," a shoemaker, a blacksmith, and a water-drawer (or men who had chosen these as surnames). "In front of the church of Santa Maria in Monterone" is still a nostalgically medieval, although bustling, place (and very urban rather than papal), with the church's primitive, although seventeenth-century, façade facing the timeless dark Arco Sinibaldi surrounded by working artisans.

This place with this case shows the pope in the city. So in a less salubrious way does the working of the inquisition at Aracoeli, as in May 1300 from his cell there the inquisitor of the Roman province, Fra Simone de Tarquinio, made a Roman, Angelo di Pietro di Matteo,

his judge delegate in dealing with the disposition of certain Colonna properties confiscated by the inquisition because of the Colonna's political heresy.^[76] This place with this case shows the Caetani pope's hand moving the government of local property, actually moving on the senatorial hill, in the convent of the senatorial Franciscan church.

In general, however, the papal government in the city of Rome offered alternate courts to the normal urban ones for making official and reasonably permanent the transfer and division of property. The papacy also offered alternate seals for authentication—the necessary dressing of government—like the seal of the papal chamberlain and general auditor of causes of the papal camera with which he would validate an inspeximus .^[77]

With this in mind one ought to look back to the senate. What does the senate as court seem to be doing? Often it seems to be supervising, lending a seal of validity to the transfer of property. So the monastery of San Cosimato petitions, and on the basis of the petition, the palatine judge and his colleague the advocate give counsel to the senator to invest.^[78] If the investiture were to be a successful one, the negotiations which would make it generally palatable had almost surely already occurred. In an apparently slightly more elaborate case, Giovanni Colonna as senator wrote to the palatine judge Corrado da Offida ordering him to conduct an inquest over a San Cosimato property dispute in Marino.^[79] A dispute over San Cosimato's property boundaries had arisen earlier and then been settled by elected arbiters. The settlement had been officially preserved in a public instrument. But the established boundaries had, according to the convent, been violated and the markers disturbed. The judge, if he found the complaint true, was to return the situation to that which the arbiters had settled, after having reported his findings to the senatorial curia. Here the senator attempts to be the re-creator not the preserver of arbitration. If in property cases a senator found for one side, he was technically able to put the victor in possession of property, as in a 1300 case in which the urban mandatory, acting under the commission of a palatine judge, acting under powers of letters sealed with the seal of the senate, put the proctor of the hospital of Santo Spirito in Sassia in corporal possession of property.^[80]

The two pressing concerns of judicial government, property and violent crime, were of course not always separate. They are clearly connected, and connected with Roman "colonial" government, through the Tivoli properties of a murderer named Oddone di Giovanni Benencasa.^[81] (The murderer's Christian name and surname are identical with

those of the Oddone of the Arch, and properties from both arrived eventually in the hands of San Cosimato in whose archives both are preserved, but the early Oddone, who went into San Cosimato, died too early for them to be the same man. The two Oddones may have been relatives; their existence may be a coincidence, even if a dizzying one, the sort that produces archival headaches.) Oddone killed Bartolomeo di Benedetto di Bartolomeo. In punishment his property was confiscated and divided into quarters which were awarded "by the council of Tivoli according to the statute of the same city for murder."

We know about this because of the resale of awarded quarters. In November 1232 one part was being sold by the "consul of the Romans and count of the city of Tivoli" (Romanorum consul et Tyburtine civitatis comes ), Matteo Rosso Orsini. (Consul was a title and office that connected Roman nobility with subject places; the Orsini had held the consulship in Tivoli, at least intermittently, for some time; and they would continue to be involved with San Cosimato's Tivoli, actually Cassano, property.) Matteo resold his Benencasa quarter, for sixty lire , to four men, one of whom at least was a Benencasa, reserving any dower rights that Oddone's wife or daugher-in-law could show. In October, the senator, Giovanni Poli, and the justiciars of Tivoli constituted by the city by authority of the senate had sold for sixty lire the Benencasa quarter that had gone to the city (Rome). But surprisingly this presumably absent, if not dead, homicide himself appears in December—to receive property. In that month a citizen of Rome (Giovanni di Gregorio de Rufino) restored to Oddone and his heirs "all you have given to me" and also the cancelled and cut act of donation. Pretty clearly Oddone had, in a process not otherwise unknown in the thirteenth century, gotten rid of some of his property during (or before) confiscation and reclaimed it afterward. In June 1237 Oddone and his son Giovanni (whose name forms part of a familiar alternating pattern) with the consent of their wives Tyburtina and Maria sold property in Cassano in the territory of Tivoli to the monastery of San Cosimato for one hundred lire (Provisini senatus ). As late as 1276 the monastery was still acquiring property from the family; it then got a house in Tivoli from Donna Agnese the daughter of Giovanni di Oddone Benencasa, Oddone's granddaughter.

Murder did not make the Benencasa destitute, nor did it go unpunished by Tivoli's Roman masters. Whatever its cause, it resulted in an intricate rearrangement, but not a general dispersal of Benencasa property. Murder is a central and serious concern in the earliest Roman statutes, surviving as a collection from the middle of the fourteenth cen-

tury. Nothing is clearer in these statutes than the problem of defining what exactly murder was, when it had been committed, in mid-fourteenth-century Rome. In a sporadically violent society, one in which there was close identification between the government and powerful noble families and particularly one that was still very dependent upon the principle of self-help (even when government was used in civil cases) and war, killings of various sorts occurred. It cannot always have seemed wise to repay them with other killings; confiscation, even partially evaded, must often have seemed a shrewder deterrent to violence.

Still by the mid-fourteenth century, when the act of murder had been properly established, it was considered a capital crime. It joined a group of other crimes which the statutes, echoing their society as well as other communes and tradition, one must presume, viewed with particular horror: arson, incest, sodomy, rape, or kidnapping of a child.^[82] The edge of murder that provoked most horror was still murder within the family. "Abominable to God and man" was man's shedding his own family's blood, though not that, if immediate, of a patently faithless wife.^[83] The statutes, although capable of horror, were generally shrewd in their efforts to prevent violence, particularly widespread violence, and to protect property. It was a capital crime (in a statute attributed to specific senators and probably from 1312) to lead twelve armed men by night to the house of one's enemy, and all of the executed criminal's goods were to be confiscated. Similarly leading a band of between six and eleven men was not a capital crime; and the fine for it although very heavy was far from total confiscation—at least for the rich. For similarly leading a group of between two and five men the fine was very much reduced. Not only were punishments cannily graduated, but also collected fines were sensibly distributed. Sometimes part of the fine went to the maintenance of the city walls; sometimes half of it was to go to the camera of the city and the other half to the injured party. It was specifically provided that a murderer's house should not be destroyed (as a heretic's was after trial by inquisition), but rather that its value be divided, half to go to the city, half to the heirs of the victim. The statutes forbade, except in the case of specified major crimes, the use of torture.^[84]

In general the statutes use a pattern familiar in collections of medieval laws in trying to prevent repetition of crime and growth of violence. Repetition of the crimes of robbery and thievery and slow restitution are punished by heightened penalties: from fines, to cutting off an ear (as in the case of a second thievery), to cutting off a foot (in the third), to hanging (in the fourth). There is also a concern with age in

protecting the child under ten and one-half and giving lesser sentences, except for homicide, to children between ten and one-half and puberty (fourteen).

The statutes also show an interest in class that is connected without doubt with the general effort to keep over-mighty nobles from destroying the peace. Crimes were sometimes to be punished more heavily as the criminal ascended the class ladder. The purpose of this class-graduated legislation is most apporent in cases like the punishment for maintaining private prisons (least for an ordinary man who imprisoned someone for less than an hour, most for a magnate or his bastard who imprisoned for over two hours and did not pay his fine within ten days). In a tariff of offenses recalling the Anglo-Saxons, but in this changing them, a commoner who in a fracas caused another to lose his eye had to pay a fine of five hundred lire , but a knight had to pay three thousand; if the loss were of finger or toe, a commoner had to pay one hundred lire , a knight two hundred, and a more powerful magnate six hundred. False testimony also was graded, and, most interestingly, the production of a false instrument by a notary. (One might not have expected so many classes of notary.) A foot paid five hundred lire , a knight one thousand, and a baron or magnate four thousand; if he did not pay within his ten-day term he was to lose his right hand, and after conviction he could never be a notary again.^[85]

This mid-fourteenth-century Rome was a violent society. (It provoked a law that forbade, with a fine of one hundred soldi , shooting a bow or throwing a stone in the Aracoeli or any other church with glass windows.) The suppression of violence is always a government's job. (Of Charles of Salerno's notaries, six it will be recalled were used in criminal cases and three in civil cases.) Petty violence as well as grand is readily apparent in the Roman statutes. For "making a fig" at someone the fine was twenty soldi; for throwing anyone to the ground on purpose and with malintent, one hundred soldi; for throwing anyone into a well, one hundred lire; for saying insulting words, twenty soldi; for putting one's hand to a knife threateningly, forty soldi; for throwing stones, three lire; graduated fines, from fifty to one thousand lire, for striking someone in the face, depending both on the nature of the scar and the class of the criminal (with the face defined, ear to ear, top of forehead to end of beard); for breaking a tooth, ten lire (half to the camera, half to the toothless); for putting filth or dung or anything shameful in someone's mouth, twenty-five lire; for making fortifications for disturbing the peace of the city, one thousand lire .^[86]

Again, these statutes survive from the fourteenth not the thir-

teenth century. They are, as a collection, later than the statutes of Roman merchants and later even than the statutes of quite minor neighboring towns.^[87] But both crime and remedy must in many cases represent thirteenth-century custom. Some of the things we are told, the severe rights of punishment of a father over his family, for instance, must have been at least as true in the thirteenth century when extra-familial supporting institutions were in general less well developed. Animosity to dice-playing and its dangers (as opposed to the favored chess), sabbatarian laws for shops, things of that sort are less clear. Would the concern over having taverns close at the proper hour have increased from the thirteenth to the fourteenth century, or the protection of citizens' rights to fish, or the regulation of the sale of food? The fourteenth-century statutes enjoin anyone who keeps a pig in the city to keep it penned up so that it does not wander through the city. Because, another statute says, of the harm to beasts and men done by wolves and other ferocious beasts in the city, anyone who kills a wolf within the city will be paid ten soldi, outside of the city, five.^[88]

It is possible that the wolves and the pigs came, I suppose, only after the popes had gone to Avignon, possible too that the statutes are merely copies of those of other cities (but it would be odd to copy them in the absence of wolves and pigs). In general they suggest that a hundred years after the death of Innocent IV the city of Rome was a wild, messy, irregular place, in which wolves joined demagogues and the Colonna in their assault on public order; but they also suggest that Rome had a government which, effective or not, was accustomed to face these problems with some sagacity. It was a sagacity that faced even the problems of sex and marriage. The time and the accusers were limited in cases of forced seduction and adultery; while in cases of desertion a series of fines were established (and a reward for informers) to keep the husband at home, and particularly to keep him from living under the same roof as his concubine. Counterfeit husband and counterfeit coin were both opposed by the statutes, but, of course, with very different punishments; the mistress who made the one paid at worst ten lire; the coiner who made the other paid his life.^[89]

So when one asks what Roman government was, and one answers (as I will) on the basis of property, one must always remember the basic surging violence which Brancaleone, Charles of Anjou, and these statutes tried to answer. It was a violence which threatened property, and that threat in itself made violence undesirable. But it was also violence involved with property in many more ways than simply threatening it. It was violence, on its grandest scale, often supported by heavy

feudal and seignorial property in the contado. It was violence which fought to control office and property-granting power, the urban government, the papacy.

A major job of Roman government was, obviously, to act as an arbiter between conflicting powers, to help define for them their own general self-interest. This sort of governmental purpose and its slow realization by the greedy governed was made brilliantly clear a generation ago by Sir Frank Stenton's exposition of the English magnates' retreat from chaos under Stephen.^[90] Stenton's model is generally applicable, but its application to the Roman situation is particularly clear; one can watch the greedy governed more easily because there is so little (and such dispersed) government to hide them.

What was government in Rome? One can answer with cases and edicts. A dispute in 1239 between the canons of Santa Maria Nova and the monks of San Sebastiano shows what real government was.^[91] The two religious houses both had water mills in the country at a place called Marmorea or Mont'Albino. The problems that arose from their using the same watercourse in the same neighborhood had come to a head by May 1239, because of San Sebastiano's repairing and building of mills. The two houses were unable to arrive at a settlement of their conflicting claims over expenses and damages and over the watercourse and its direction, so the case was brought to litigation before Rainerio, the powerful cardinal deacon of Santa Maria in Cosmedin.^[92] Its particular problems had to do with the manner and expenses of constructing works to guide, divide, and rejoin the watercourse so that it could serve the mills of both efficiently without doing damage to either, and also with arranging a compromise partition of interest in a mill under construction. The two parties accepted their cardinal judge as arbiter in the case, and they bound themselves to accept his arbitration under pain of loss of two hundred lire. The cardinal set out general guidelines for a compromise which was to be defined further after their evaluations by two commonly elected master masons. The cardinal pronounced his compromise in the Church of San Clemente in Rome, in the presence of two proctor canons from Santa Maria Nova, two proctor monks from San Sebastiano, and a little court of which some members appear as witnesses: two proctors of bishops (Siena and Volterra), a monk of Saint Paul's, a member of the cardinal's household, the son of the painter Giunta of Pisa, and a member of Giunta's household.

Now, again, the happenings in this ad hoc court of Cardinal Rainerio, surrounded by this medley of witnesses, in a pretty little Roman church, seem to me to say what Roman government was all about, to

tell very specifically of the problems with which Roman government had to deal. It had to help its propertied subjects, individual or corporate, come to arrangements about the division, transfer, distribution, and use of their properties, to their own best mutual advantage. It had to give an air of legitimacy (a necessary not a frivolous air) and some assurance of permanency and record to the peaceful expression of power based on wealth. It had to present a forum or fora for the nondestructive settlement of dispute—settlement based essentially upon the realistic appraisal by the parties of their own interests and power. It had, and in this it shows its sophistication, to suggest experts, like the master masons, to help in definition. To sum up, it had to offer arbiters and a place for arbitration where compromise could sensibly, realistically, and respectably be arrived at.

The presence of arbiters and arbitration is everywhere apparent (and beside them are counselors giving counsel). But arbiters arbitrating are not, I think, except in form, so very different from judges judging. They are perhaps more legally flexible and more direct, but both record a peaceful definition of realized actual existents (a realization most convincingly established, perhaps, by the clause in individual contracts between consenting parties which agrees to renounce specific statute). The action of the cardinal for the two religious houses is not really very different from the case, for example, in which in April 1274, the iudex forensis Tuscie et Colline and a colleague judge give counsel to the urban vicar in a dispute between the monastery of San Silvestro in Capite and three men of Gallese all named John (and called in repetition "the three Johns") over a tenement in a place called Pomaro.^[93] San Silvestro wanted, and thought it could get, a clear decision, a victory, and sought judgment not arbitration—either because its right and power permitted this extravagance, or because the business of compromise went on outside the purview of court and documents. But there is nothing really to suggest that an urban vicar, even with the backing of Charles of Anjou, could enforce this sort of settlement if it did not basically correspond to the local fact of possession and power. It could give the settlement formality, memory, the splendor of the senatorial seal, summoners and mandatories, but not real force. Force depended upon acceptance. Neither the cardinal's act nor the vicar's seem very different from the ordinary recorded sort of arbitration like that of an arbiter chosen in 1215 by San Cosimato in Trastevere and Albascia, widow of Pietro di Angelo and guardian of his son.^[94] Their arbiter, in deciding the disposition of a Trastevere oven and garden, is performing the typical governmental act.

That there was a complexity of authorities (cardinals and vicars) for supervising these acts of government must generally have been a boon to the governed. Thus, the superficial confusion and complexity of authority that would seem to have denied effective government in Rome may have in fact offered a loophole to the Romans as papal government did to Macerata. They were not too firmly bound by one authority; they had room to maneuver. There is no reason to suppose that Romans were unduly confused by the various authorities "governing" them in the thirteenth century or that in choosing a court (cardinal's or vicar's) parties needed too much to worry themselves. They, in the end, had to find, with power and reason, the settlement to their own disputes. Any reasonable guiding and recording authority would have sufficed to make it formal.

This idea of the governed governing is reinforced by the fourteenth-century statutes. They stated convention, and they guided the Romans in governing themselves (although they may have done more besides). The statutes protected the landlords who leased their vineyards for a yearly rent of one-quarter of their new wine from fraudulent and depriving release, echoing the words of more than a century of contracts; the statutes thus stated, affirmed, offered governmental formality to existing convention. The statutes fought filth in public streets and piazzas: no one was to throw air-infecting garbage in public places, streets, or piazzas (with the exception of the river) under pain of paying a twenty soldi fine; no butcher was to throw offal in public places, except the river, on pain of a forty soldi fine. Informers, in both cases, were to get half the fine. The law was a little machine for self-government and self-policing.^[95]

Much of this is true of course of any medieval city or place. But in some ways Rome was peculiar, and its peculiarity was directly connected with its major sources of income. To understand this, it seems to me, one should return repeatedly to Angelo Malabranca's 1235 senatorial edict in protection of pilgrims.^[96] In it the senator is a herald's voice which points out community self-interest, the self-interest of a community whose prosperity depended upon income from pilgrims (indirectly from their donations and directly from their rents and purchases) and income from the papal court (directly from its rents and purchases, its largesse, and its distribution of office, and indirectly from its attracting to itself foreign diplomats, litigants, and petitioners). Malabranca proclaimed that his regulations were issued not only for the peace and tranquility of the inhabitants "of this happy city," but also for the comfort and benefit of all those coming to it, particularly those

who in their devotion sought to visit the doorstep of the basilica of the prince of the apostles.

To protect the pilgrims, the Romeseekers (peregrinos, Romipetas ), he issued restrictions, the violation of which would bring the wrath of senate and people and a fine of one gold pound (half for the city walls, half for the basilica). The senator said that he understood that in the area around Saint Peter's lodging-keepers forced pilgrims into their lodgings, even making raids upon those already settled elsewhere and forcing them to come along. There should be no more of this violent hospitality. Pilgrims should lodge where they wanted to, buy what they needed to, where they wanted to, and do it under the protection of the senate.

This, too, this act of Malabranca's was what Roman government meant. It meant the help of a wise ruler who could implement the definition of Roman palate for foreign money. It meant the controlling of greed so that greed could best be satisfied. But because the income which fed the greed was from such a curious source, not from the manufacture of cloth or the production of wool or oil, it did not particularly demand a rigorously institutional gild and commune sort of government. It could perhaps better respond to its flexible income flexibly.

Again and again the areas of firmness in Roman government and organization, good men producing order, the masters of the streets, consuls and judges of merchants, the control of garbage, the concern with housing and provisioning (including the excellent provisioning in 1300, a stunning job), show awareness of, and response to, the city's real economic needs. Its economic needs in terms of local land transactions, the control and use of powerful noble factions, and the protection of pilgrims, were suitably met by a "fluid system of political relationships." (And Roman government might be more readily understandable if it were seen against the pattern established by the study from which this phrase came, the pattern of medieval Muslim cities, whose organization, like Rome's, was not based on hard institutions. And yet with all this flexibility, admittedly, one sometimes seems aware of a sort of crusty underhive—as in the physical city—of institutional activity, only briefly visible, as some random document exposes it—of rectors of judges and of clergy, judges of Saint Martin or Martina, Inquisitorial registers.)^[97]

That Romans understood clearly the value of the presence of the pope is clear from their insistence (although not constant insistence) that he be present in the city. Brancaleone called Innocent iv to Rome and protected him there. That Romans were correct in their under-

standing is made clear, or seems to be, by, for example, the pathetic fall in rents of Hospitaller houses when the pope had gone to Avignon.

The shadow of the pope hangs over the whole century in Rome. It is a dark shadow under Boniface VIII, at the very end of the century, dark in a number of ways. One of its indications is the title used by the senator, Guido de Piglio, in 1303. He repeatedly called himself, Nos, Guido de Pileo, domini pape nepos, Dei gratia alme urbis senator illustris —pope's nephew first, senator afterward. But the overwhelming position of the pope, even the prepotente Boniface VIII, seems to have a different quality when the pope is seen to be, as he was, one of the chief financial assets of city and citizens—like a factory or a mine or a beach. What power he had over the city was in large part due to the financial advantage he brought it. (And, as a hostile observer noted, he was one man and could die.)^[98]

Who ruled Rome? One must answer, a complex of forces and properties and ideas expressed by urban government, by the papacy, by the local nobility. But if one thing ruled Rome more than another, it was surely money. Rome's rulers might fairly be said to have been the little denari provisini of the senate with their mocking caption: Roma caput mundi. Mockery recalls the verse of Walter of Chatillon, who, in a mocking refrain, had written royal laudes to "King Coin," laudes appropriate to the ruler of Rome:

Nummus vincit, nummus regnat, nummus cunctis imperat.^[99]