Chapter I
The Physical City

The total population of the city of Rome in the early thirteenth century has been thought to have been about thirty-five thousand. If this estimate is even close to correct, all the Romans of Rome could have sat down in the Colosseum, if it too had not crumbled and gradually fallen, if it had not turned itself into an exotic wildflower garden (still perhaps nurturing seeds from the paws and fur and fodder of ancient beasts) and into a center of dreams. The dreams—or nightmares—about the Colosseum were old by the thirteenth century, and their direction fixed. As long as the Colosseum should stand, Rome would stand; when it should finally disappear, so would Rome, and with Rome the world. So when for the year 1231 the Cassino notary and historian Riccardo of San Germano recorded a great and terrible earthquake which lasted for over a month, he told of its horrors, of the earth quivering around San Germano, of the clear water of fountains turning color, of the campanili falling from churches, of towers and houses, and the whole thing stretching itself out over the land from Capua to Rome, and terrifying people into penitence and flight, and the abbot of Cassino into ordering barefoot processions over all his lands. And Riccardo told very particularly of the Colosseum in Rome: Et tunc de Coliseo concussus lapis ingens eversus est ("And then, shaken from the Colosseum, a huge stone was disgorged"). The Colosseum and its stones were a center of men's attentions. Their fall was particularly watched.^[1]

But at the same time, this romantic and symbolic object was very casually used. In it, prominent Roman families fortified themselves as if it were a caved cliff. And in 1263 Fra Giordano, a Cistercian monk from Fossanova (whose brother, according to papal sources, was illegally holding papal lands) was living in a house at the Colosseum with his own grandmother.^[2] In the middle of the thirteenth century the old Colosseum-controlling family of Frangipane (too loyal, it has been thought rather oddly, to the emperor Frederick II) was replaced, but not too quickly and decisively, by the newer family of Annibaldi.

There in the Roman's Colosseum the Annibaldi might pretend their descent from great Hannibal. From there they could guard the roads to their country estates, and launch their sons on profitable careers at the curia, and immure their daughters in neighboring convents. The Colosseum, and its wildflowers, its dreams, its Annibaldi, and its renegade Cistercian with his grandmother, is a fair symbol of thirteenth-century Rome.

But although it is a fair symbol, the Colosseum is not a unique one. On the Celian Hill, in the ruins of part of the Acqua Claudia, one of the aqueduct courses that had brought fresh water from the distant countryside to the heart of the classical city, there lived, in the last four years of his life, until December 1213, a curious saint named John of Matha (or Giovanni or Jean of Mathe). John was one of the founders of the order of Trinitarians, the friars who wear a blue and red cross on the front of their white habits, not the most famous but the first papally approved of the great new orders of the very end of the twelfth and the first half of the thirteenth centuries.

John's biography has been romantically, and perhaps interestedly, elaborated in modern times, and much of his actual life is unsure. John is thought to have been born in Provence, to have studied in Paris, and, having grown increasingly pious, to have become a priest. While celebrating his first Mass, he saw a vision in which the Lord God held by His two hands two slaves, one black and the other white. The message that John saw into this vision, that he should do something to help free Christian slaves in Moslem captivity, molded his mind and formed his purpose. But at the same time John felt increasingly attracted to a life of eremitic withdrawal, and he withdrew to a country hermitage. Some time later John founded his order with the approval of Innocent III and began the serious work of redeeming slaves and rehabilitating them in hospitals. Although the initial center of enthusiasm for the new order seems to have been Marseilles, a point of debarkation from Africa, John himself eventually came again to Rome. There a house, convent and hospital, was founded around a piece of the Acqua Claudia, the Arch of Dolabella (built in the consulate of Cornelius Dolabella and Junius Silanus), and the old connected monastery of San Tommaso in Formis (Saint Thomas in the Watercourse). There John lived, a saint in an aqueduct, a hermit in a city, a recluse of the old French sort next to his new order's very modern, active work of Christ, saving the bodies as well as the souls of the destitute. John was a proto-Francis; and if the Claudia did not work as it once had, it gave Rome, and the world, a new sort of life-giving water.^[3]

The active hermit in the aqueduct (who is there remembered in thirteenth-century mosaic) is a second symbol of thirteenth-century Rome. The market of Sant'Angelo in Pescheria is a third. There, near the vast ruins of the Theater of Marcellus, ruins that formed the base of a family fortress for the Pierleoni and then for the Savelli, and actually within the ruins of the portico which Augustus had refurbished in honor of his sister Octavia and that had held a temple of Jupiter and Juno, the collegiate church of the Holy Angel offered for hire to the sellers of fish the antique marble stones in its "temple" portico. Sant'Angelo was the hub of Rome's great fish market, and there the busy sort of petty mercantile activity that gave Rome much of its surface vivacity was strikingly apparent. At Sant'Angelo, as at the Colosseum and San Tommaso in Formis, the life of thirteenth-century Rome was sewn into the ruins of classical Rome; the life of the present used the artifacts of the past to its own purposes. Rome was a place in which flourished, or at least existed, places with names like the Church of the Holy Savior of the Arch of Trajan, where branches of families identified themselves with the names of ancient monuments, by or in which they lived, and where a man could be unremarkably named Gregory son of Caesar.^[4]

Surrounding all the separate, smaller, used ruins of Rome were the great ancient walls, the walls built by the emperor Aurelian in the third century, with the Vatican additions erected during the ninth century by Pope Leo IV. Medieval Rome used the walls of ancient Rome (made Christian with crosses), but it used them in its own way, careless of their ancient purposes. Although thirteenth-century Rome burst through its gates and streamed, in suburban farms, fortifications, and churches, out along the roads leaving Rome, it did not fill at all densely the whole area, well over three thousand acres, enclosed by its walls. The greater part of this enclosed area was lightly inhabited, divided into small farms and even papal and monastic vineyards, decorated with churches and basilicas, punctuated by the towers and fortresses of powerful Roman families. The heavily populated part of Rome lay on the east side of the river between the bridge to Sant'Angelo and the bridge to the island. It touched parts of Trastevere and the Vatican, and to the east the Trivio and the Suburra; but for the most part it lay in the horn between the southwestern side of the Corso (then the Via Lata) and the river.^[5]

Any observer must notice repeatedly the contrast within the walls of medieval Rome between this crammed urban space and the other, vineyard city. The sense of the tightly filled part of the city is caught in

a chronicler's account of Boniface VIII's death: "The awareness of Boniface's death was brought to the people suddenly by rumor, quick in its enjoyment of bad news, rushing through the alleys and down the blind streets and making the whole shocked city reverberate with the sound of wailing."^[6] This old cramped city is not completely lost from modern Rome. Although much of medieval Rome has, even within the last century, been destroyed, there is in many parts of continuously occupied Rome a sort of crusty hive of medieval and early Renaissance (and sometimes ancient) undervaulting, the whitewashed workshops and storerooms of artisans, upon which Rome has built and rebuilt itself, allowing an occasional old wall or tower to remain, protruding through the modern building. Some streets and alleys, cut through by more modern regularizations, maintain in part their old, independent waywardness as do the Arco degli Acetari and the Arco di Santa Margherita off the Via del Pellegrino, and the Vicolo Savelli, the Vicolo del Babuccio, and the Vicolo della Cuccagna. One also feels the old city buried under the hillocks and humps of streets like the Via di Santa Maria in Monticelli and the Via di San Paolo alla Regola (although there was still in 1245 at least some little arable land in the Arenula near San Paolo), and like the streets that are now the Torre Argentina and the Funari, with their cobblestones undulating over centuries of life and garbage. One feels it too in the visible distance between Rome's present surface and its old surfaces, as at the Pantheon, in those Roman pits and pocks that cut down through the centuries. But it is also true that a better sense of the town life of medieval Lazio and perhaps even of Rome (if a provincial town can ape a great city) is found at Anagni where the middle ages have been less tampered with and the gray houses still lie one upon another.^[7]

Of the other Roman city, the vineyard one, less is left. One has some sense of it, particularly in autumn, on the Gianicolo, some around the Savelli fortress on the Aventine, or in the Forum. But rustic Rome is now too antique and romantic to recall very sharply the old practical farms.

The two different cities within the walls, different, but, as should become apparent, intricately connected, were of course not isolated from the great world outside. Beyond their connection with their immediate suburbs and short of their connection with all the provinces of the great church whose center they formed, they, as the composite city of Rome, had a very special, although certainly not always amicable, connection with a fairly large group of provincial towns. The papal curia itself was only intermittently at Rome. Perugia, Orvieto, Rieti,

Viterbo, Tivoli, and Anagni, as well as more distant places, were also papal capitals. Denizens of these towns, as well as Romans, became particularly involved with the papal court and, as scribes or butchers or spicers, moved about with the curia. In the other direction, Roman nobles who were at home in Rome in the Campo dei Fiori or the Mausoleum of Augustus or the Theater of Marcellus had major holdings and palazzi in smaller towns, and they had great country estates and fiefs throughout central Italy in places like Palombara, Palestrina, Terracina, and Ninfa. Roman monasteries and religious institutions controlled large portions of smaller towns like Sutri and Campagnano. So, in a way, a realistic map of Rome would not be bounded by the walls, but rather it would stretch out into the surrounding provinces in a series of superimposed networks following personal connection and the interests of real property.^[8]

Within the city there were physical divisions other than urban and rustic. The Tiber divided the city, but at the same time it, and its bridges, joined the city's parts, its three or four, not just two, parts, because the Vatican, with its Leonine walls, and Trastevere proper were not joined within the city walls. The river also gave the city at its center an island with a tradition of healing and a healing well. On the island and along the river's sides were landings, mills, and crowded and jealously guarded fisheries. The city had its seven hills. They were not always identified as the same seven hills, but the important number was seven. Numerology was more important than geography. Some of the hills, particularly the Capitoline and less so the Aventine, were important as hills in the thirteenth century.

Above topography there were man-made spaces and volumes, relatively inflexible and angular, ancient and new, which gave the city its internal physical structure, shape, and texture, gave it areas of physical resistance and extension—and sometimes paved them with mosaic. Beside the small squares and rectangles of towers, the cloisters of religious houses placed their great, measured squares and rectangles among the unruly streets and the irregular fields. The effect of these ordered spaces in the country is still visible and easily imaginable. Their effect in a crowded, disordered medieval city (even one like Rome, with at least small piazzas) must have been much more impressive; it must have been like the effect that mosques still have in the disorder of the medina at a place like Rabat.

Thirteenth-century Rome came to be divided into thirteen districts, or rioni. To the extent that these rioni defined voting places (and that extent is very unclear), their boundaries must have had some pre-

cision. But, in general, people talking of their rioni in contemporary documents seem only to be trying to tell the neighborhoods in which they live. There seems to be no consistency about when a man felt he should identify himself by his rione; sometimes he certainly used it as casually as he would a street or a hill, like Antonio of the Via Lata or Pietro of the Pincio. Further, most late thirteenth- and fourteenth-century rioni had double names (recalling their double pasts); people sometimes spoke of the rione Campo Marzio and sometimes of Santa Maria in Aquiro. There does not seem always to have been a clear distinction in contemporary minds between rioni and contrade, their smaller divisions, which may merely mean that rione (regio) was not a completely fixed formal term. So in the first half of the fourteenth century it is possible to describe a man as being of the rione Ripa or Sant'Angelo and another man as being of the rione or contrada Campo Marzio.

It is possible that if better records of thirteenth-century Roman games and contests in the Piazza Navona (then the Agone) or on the Testaccio survived, one could, with some effort, imagine a colorful picture of mutually exclusive and patriotic rioni battling for some sort of intraurban prize or glory. But the surviving evidence makes the rioni seem in themselves neither important nor colorful. They do sometimes more or less coincide with neighborhoods which do have some significance as centers for certain sorts of artisans or merchants. One can say of thirteenth-century Rome, for example, that the rione Sant'Angelo was the rione of fish sellers, that the rione San Marco (or Pigna) was particularly the rione of merchants and their botteghe, or shops. But the neighborhood of the Lombards, on the other hand, would seem to have been around the Pantheon (Santa Maria Rotunda), itself the intersection of three rioni: Pigna, Colonna, and Sant'Eustachio.

The evidence does not really suggest, either, that in this part of the middle ages the rione Trastevere was considered to be another city, as it may have been at other times, as in the mid-twelfth century, and as it has been thought to be by some historians. In the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, Trastevere does not seem to have been separated from the rest of the city in any peculiar or artificial way—except in the case of the double senators of 1306. So, for instance, in 1290 Angelo Malaspina is described in an ordinary way as a doctor of laws and a citizen of Rome of the rione Trastevere. What does seem important about rioni is that there were, or came to be, thirteen of them, a number which, with its multiples, played an important role in the organization of corporations and of the commune during parts of

the later middle ages. Thirteen rioni could mean all of Rome, as four corners has sometimes meant all of the world.^[9]

If the sense one has of Rome divided into rioni is palely abstract, this is not at all the sense one need have of a Rome divided into parts and looked at in other sorts of pieces. One of the most exciting religious corporations and religious ventures of thirteenth-century Rome was the combination of the old church of Santa Maria in Sassia and the new hospital of Santo Spirito in Sassia. Sassia was the old Saxon or English borgo, one of that series of borghi, or quarters, near the Vatican which maintained the names of the foreigners who had once clustered there. Santa Maria still retains, in paint, romantic memories of Anglo-Saxon kings; and in the thirteenth century it still had distinct English memories and at least slight English connections—King John was a donor to it, and in 1290 a Thomas Anglicus was a member of the community.^[10]

The hospital was organized and supported by Innocent III ("Holy Scripture teaching him"), who connected it with the new order founded by Guy of Montpellier for maintaining hospitals. Innocent arranged a yearly liturgical station at Santo Spirito, to which the Veronica, the great relic of the towel on which Christ's suffering face (according to the then increasingly accepted interpretation) had painted itself as He went to His crucifixion, should be carried by the canons of Saint Peter's from its home in the basilica. Innocent provided that on the annual occasion as many as one thousand paupers from outside the hospital and three hundred from inside it should each be given three denari, one for bread, one for wine, and one for meat. Innocent ordered that the station should occur on the first Sunday after the octave of the Epiphany when the gospel, until recently, was read: "Jesus went with his disciples into Cana in Galilee." The Veronica was to be carried in a reliquary of gold and silver and precious jewels and then shown to the people. The papal gift to the poor was meant to encourage others to give. And because man does not live by bread alone, but by the word which comes from the mouth of God, the pope with his cardinals was to come to the station and celebrate a solemn Mass and preach a sermon. Innocent's audience was to be fed in three kinds—carnally with food, sacramentally with the Eucharist, and spiritually with the food of instruction. Indulgences were to be granted to those who were present.

Innocent found the day's gospel text appropriate, as it in fact seems, but particularly because in the hospital of Santo Spirito the six corporal works of mercy echoed the six vats of water turned into wine,

vices turned into virtues, evil into good. Just as, moreover, Jesus came with his disciples to the marriage at Cana, so, preached Innocent, the effigy of Jesus Christ carried by the ministers of the church (the canons of Saint Peter's) came to Santa Maria and Santo Spirito in Sassia; just as the Mother of Christ was invited to the wedding, so here is the church dedicated to her. The establishment of the station involved the whole pious paraphernalia of thirteenth-century modernism—the face of Christ, His remembered life, the sacrament in the Mass, the corporal work, the active pope—in this new hospital set near the river, a little to the south, between the Vatican and the river.^[11]

Its location near the river is important at least to Santo Spirito's legendary history. By the end of the middle ages it was said that Innocent had been driven to the foundation of the hospital by a terrible dream about the Tiber, that fishermen who went to the river brought back nets full not of fish (or of men, exactly), but of the little bodies of dead babies unwanted by their sinful mothers. Innocent, as followers of Francis will recall, was a pope who attracted dream legends, but there are parts of the hospital's earliest rule which lend some substance to the story. Ejected orphan infants were to be nursed and cared for by the house, and poor pregnant women were to be freely received there and ministered to with charity. Moreover, sinful women who promised to remain chaste were to be given a haven, if they wished it, at Santo Spirito, through Holy Week and the octave of Easter. There were also to be little cribs in the hospital, so that the infants born of pregnant pilgrims there could lie commodiously and alone. But the hospital was clearly not designed solely for infants. One of the rule's most impressive chapters demands that once a week infirm paupers should be sought out through the streets or alleys and piazzas of the city (per vicos . . . et per plateas, phrases constantly used about the city), and brought back to Santo Spirito and diligently nursed and cared for. And in another place the reception of the sick is described. They were to be confessed, given Communion, and then taken to bed, and fed and cared for each day in charity. When the bell rang each day for dinner, each unoccupied brother was to rush to serve the poor, and each Sunday the priests and clerks, brothers and sisters of the hospital were to go through the hospital taking the Mass and the gospel and epistle to the sick. In this hospital dedicated to the Holy Spirit, where the Veni Creator Spiritus was sung, the illumination of the Spirit was meant to encourage a various physical charity.^[12]

Innocent gave his physical piety a physical setting. There is much more that is physical, particularly in instruments of gift and rent and

sale tied to specific places, which remains from Santo Spirito. Some of it makes strange contrast with Innocent's preached homily and regulating letter. In 1306, ninety-eight years after Innocent's act, the Masters of the Buildings of the City were forced to take action in response to complaints about conditions in the neighborhood of Santo Spirito. On the street to Saint Peter's, much frequented both by Romans and by foreigners, across from the gate of Santa Maria and Santo Spirito and opposite some of their houses, were some vacant lots or gardens and a charcoal pit. Into these vacant places so many people had thrown so much garbage and filth that the smell was horrible, revolting to the passersby on their way to and from Saint Peter's, and dangerous, it was thought, as a source of infection to the inhabitants of the hospital. (The chapter of Saint Peter's had repeated difficulties with the cluttered approaches to their basilica. In 1233 and 1279 they brought cases before the Masters of the Buildings against the denizens of the Leonine city in an effort to keep the streets, including the Ruga Francigene—"French Street"—and the piazzas leading to the basilica clear of projections added to buildings. At one point they were permitted to project into the piazza no farther than the portico of one of the houses of Santo Spirito and Santa Maria.) In the 1306 garbage case the Masters investigated, collected evidence, sent their submasters, one a mason, and a notary to the spot, and finally themselves went to find out who was responsible for the vacant land and who should close it and keep it clean. The answer was clear. Marking the boundaries of the vacant land were three pieces of marble, of which one was noted to be antique and one a little column that was marked with that cross which was the sign of the hospital of Santo Spirito. It identified the hospital as the responsible owner. This sign was also on the hospital's wax seal, and, as a medieval archival mark, it still identifies some of the hospital's fourteenth-century documents. It was the mark, "the banner of the cross" (vexillum crucis ), which the rule, without describing it, ordered brothers of the hospital to wear on their capes above their chests and on their cloaks on the left side. On the hospital, the cross with two transverse bars, the crux gemina , still marks Santo Spirito's part of Rome.

The business documents, the instruments dealing with real property, preserved by the hospital of Santo Spirito construct a detailed, but incomplete, map of the hospital's local neighborhood: who lived next to whom, in the borgo of the Frisians, on the corner of the streets leading to San Michele and to San Lorenzo "de Piscibus" (an intersection which was in a place just off the eastern end of Bernini's south colon-

nade); how the lot which was being transferred was held and how much it was worth; where its gardens were; and that, in this case, there was an attached piazza in front of it and that it itself was an inhabited house with a hut without a roof—or, in the fourteenth century, that a man from Gubbio rented a house from the hospital for seven florins a year, that the house was placed in the hospital's portico, that it had a sign of four faces on it. But the point about the real neighborhood of a place like Santo Spirito is that, although it had a local node, it was not in a physical sense restrictedly local. It is true that even outside their closest home (in the Arenula, outside the Porta San Pancrazio, or deep in the country) the brothers of the hospital found neighbors in the family Papareschi and the churches of Santa Rufina and Santa Maria in Trastevere, local neighbors in the sense that they were from Santo Spirito's side of the river. Still, Santo Spirito, like other corporations and families in the city, built up subsidiary neighborhoods far from the central sign of the crux gemina , as far away, in Santo Spirito's case, as Gallese and Nepi. The brothers, if we can trust their names, themselves came from as far away as Trani and Offida and even England. The center of their complex of neighborhoods of property was the chamber of the hospital in which the rents were received.^[13]

Around this center, if the fears predicted in the rule for the house and order were realized, the action was sometimes disturbingly picturesque—by it the neighborhood was enlivened. The house and order had of course to face the possibility of trouble, to be prepared to be charitable but firm, forgiving but cautious, to be careful in the weighing of evidence. They had to be prepared to treat properly the arrival of heresy, or leprosy, or magnates in a house—all to be treated appropriately, the first with vigor, the second with practical charity, the third with deferential propriety. The house had to beware of becoming a post exchange or a bank; the order had to be concerned with the problems of elections and buildings and burial and of brothers' wandering through the streets alone (for which they could be punished through their food and where they are it). The order had to avoid for itself the sort of sexual problems that might have arisen had married couples been admitted together, had the old and young been placed too closely together in dormitories, had men and women been allowed to serve each other too intimately (to wash, for example, one another's heads). Fornication committed by brothers and sisters of the house was a special problem, and for it, when it was a matter of public knowledge, there was a special remedy: public, very public, penance to be performed in the same town or vill where the fornication had been per-

formed, on Sunday after Mass, as the people were coming out of church. Rules were established for dealing with brothers who beat servants to the point of drawing blood—and the difference of blood from the nose and other blood was recognized. Further rules were established for dealing with any servant who argued with a brother and called him latronem or fornicatorem or Malefactorem —he was to be beaten through palazzo and cloister and ejected from the house; for dealing with any servant who had stolen (and been proved certainly to have stolen) goods of the house, and thus of the paupers—with the stolen goods tied around his neck, he was to be beaten through the palazzo to the portone , and then with bread in his hands he was to be thrown from the house; for dealing with servants who fought with each other clamorously to the drawing of blood and the use of weapons (and about whom this had been established by witnesses)—they were to be dragged through the hospital to the portone nude, beaten very hard with straps, and thrown from the house. These punishments of servants, more startling than those prescribed for the brothers of the house, but in a way comparable to those prescribed for the monks of English Eynsham convicted of its bootless crimes (sodomy, robbery, heresy), who were shot forth from its gate called the Wiket, must, if in fact instances of them occurred, have proved as arresting to pilgrims passing on the way to Saint Peter's as the smell of garbage.^[14]

Santo Spirito, in spite of its retained crosses and the popping servants of its rule, may seem an insufficiently evocative example of a local Roman neighborhood, lying too inconspicuous and undefined, too built-over, in the flat land between the Vatican hill and the river. The most conspicuous remaining medieval neighborhood in Rome is the greater Aventine, with its clear remnants of the domination of a single thirteenth-century family, the Savelli, with Honorius IV Savelli's remaining curtain wall, with Savelli tombs within the Aventine cluster of medieval churches of the newer orders, Premonstratensian, Dominican, with Saint Dominic's orange tree. The Aventine is distinct.

On the Aventine stood the monastery of Sant'Alessio, or more properly and formally Santi Bonifazio e Alessio. It still stands. From some angles, from the river, from across the city on the roofs of the Piazza Mattei, it looks much as it must have in the thirteenth century. In certain lights and in certain seasons, on April mornings as the birds fly about the trees that now stretch down from its heights to the river, Sant'Alessio is oddly, very oddly, reminiscent of Durham hanging above the Wear. Durham proctors in the later thirteenth century on their way to a Savelli pope on the Savelli hill, encrusted with the

Rocca Savelli and dominated by the churches that the Savelli patronized, must have felt a momentary illusion of enclosed, homely holiness before the strange monastery.

Whatever the thirteenth-century or the modern impression of the Aventine and its houses, they were not really self-contained or restrictedly local. Nor was Sant'Alessio, for example, without a very heavy burden of guarded real property. Sant'Alessio held the gardens around the monastery. It also held gardens, lots, and crypts under the monastery stretching down to the Tiber at that part of the Tiber's bank called, from its ancient ruins, Marmorata, with five fishponds or fisheries there, and the Palazzo Eufemia, and the lands around it down to the road that led to the Porta San Paolo and to the Testaccio and the lands around on the left hand back to the church of San Nicola de Aqua Salvia and to a place before Santa Prisca and around to the road that led back to the monastery, between it and Santa Sabina—a huge local swathe still suggested by roads in maps as late as Falda's of 1676. And because Euphemiam was Saint Alessio's father, in the Palazzo Eufemia and Falda the fourth and the seventeenth centuries seem joined. But Sant'Alessio holdings swept beyond this central conglomeration out the city gates—Porta Appia, Porta San Paolo, Porta Maggiore, between the Tuscolana Vecchia and the Tuscolana Nuova—and into the country and the distance, to mills, vineyards, towers, fisheries, saltbeds in Ostia, and shipwrecks far away. Properties brought goods and money back to the monastery. Three of the named fisheries on the Tiber ("Palatellum strictum," "Columpnellam," "Farum") were in 1278 rented for five years to two men from the rione Sant'Angelo and the rione Ripa for forty soldi a year and fourteen "lovely, fat shad with their roe" each April. And in 1271 one-half pezza of vineyard outside the Porta Appia was rented to a widow, the guardian of four children, for three and one-half soldi and one-half rubbio (perhaps four bushels) of onions to be paid each feast of the Assumption, and for one-quarter of the new wine at the vintage and one-half canister of grapes, and for food and drink for the monastery's representatives when they came to collect the dues. There were to be Tiber fish and Appian onions for the canons of the Aventine. The interests of Sant'Alessio were hardly more bound by their church and cloister than were the actions of Honorius IV by his Aventine wall. These Roman neighborhoods were not, for institutions, neat little mosaic tiles with sharp edges which could be fitted together to make a whole pattern.^[15]

Within the walls, across the neighborhoods, who lived in Rome, and how? It is quite conceivable that this might be the sort of question which could not be answered at all—or which could only be answered in terms of the great itinerant curialists or the more dramatic members of the greatest Roman families who spread themselves across the pages of chronicles and political history. Fortunately this is not the case for thirteenth-century Rome. One can, in a way, look inside their houses and see the Risabellas and the Clarastellas, the Giovanni di Pietros and the Pietro di Giovannis, James Shortarm called Four Feet and Francesco di Orlando, the man in the rione Colonna in 1269 with his century's name.^[16] One cannot see them in the intimate acts of their daily lives—pouring water from their pottery pitchers, eating their chickpeas, and perhaps their green sauce, their fried flowers, their torte di Re Manfredo of fresh fave , and drinking all those gallons of suburban wine—unless they appear as actors in the cast of a saint's life, a chronicle, in the testimony of a trial, or as models for a painting or mosaic.

What one can see of ordinary Romans, repeatedly and in detail, is any act or condition (and there are very many of them) connected with one characteristic Roman and human activity, the transfer of property. It sounds like a limiting phrase, and it is. But at best, one can be told even startling things in property transfers: that as a woman watched the Elevation in a Roman church (the Augustinian Hermits' San Trifone) she was so moved by religion that she vowed to give a great fortune to God and his paupers (but to God at Santo Spirito—where there were paupers—not at San Trifone), a fortune so great that the four thousand florins reserved from it for the nuns of San Lorenzo in Panisperna seemed a minor reservation. This moment of revelation is from what is essentially a charter—although it must be admitted that it is late, from the 1350s, and not the act of an ordinary woman, but rather of Margherita Colonna, the daughter of the Magnifico Stefano Colonna and the widow of the Magnifico Giovanni Conti.^[17]

The spiritual elation of a Roman widow at the Elevation of the Mass is not of course the sort of information that charter evidence gives

in abundance about Roman society and topography. The abundant evidence makes clear that Romans lived with their mothers-in-law, that is, that extended families of various generations lived together in one house, or half-house, although they might in fact hold various other properties as a group in other parts of Rome or the suburbs. It makes clear that they paid their rents to their landlords, or received rents as landlords, in both money and produce, and particularly in wine. It makes clear that tenements could be sublet, with the permission of the landlord and his retention of his right to ground rent, but that in the actual area of Rome there was seldom a ladder of more than two proprietors on a piece of land, and that often there was only one.

The simplicity of Roman vertical tenure makes contrast with its horizontal complexity. Reversions and usufructs for life were common. So in 1220 a woman who held a close with trees near San Biagio (San Francesco a Ripa) in Trastevere next to her own uncle's property granted its use for her son to an appointed administrator, reserving it for her own life and for her mother's, but also granting that should her descendants fail the property should go to the monastery of San Cosimato in Trastevere. In spite of the fact that, in some ways at least, the mixed Roman-Germanic law of medieval Rome was less favorable to women than that of classical Rome and that rural feudal tenements might be withheld from women—quia femine in feuda venire non possunt (in 1207)—the positions of women and minors were important and protected both in theory and practice in Rome; and this in itself encouraged horizontal tenurial complexity.

Inheritances, moreover, were frequently not divided. Extended families frequently held properties jointly so that they were tied together by their possessions as well as by their conventional living conditions, and sale or gift sometimes replaced part of the family and injected a stranger, or strange institution, into the joint holding. Individual men and women in thirteenth-century Rome were at least as much held together in groups (most normally in family groups) as they were divided by their real property. And much of a Roman's future life and future tenure was decided while he, or she, was a minor and thus a particularly restricted member of the family group. The actual pieces of land (often in half-forgotten, named places—"the Plain of the Palms," "the Three Columns") were of irregular size and shape, and of curiously various extensions above and below the ground (up into lofts and down into crypts and metal deposits), but they were regular enough so that the absence of a fourth side in the case of a triangular piece of land, for instance, was sometimes worth noting, so that

it would not seem that one boundary had been left out of a description.^[18]

Roman instruments of transfer also tell a lot about who lived next to whom and what their occupations were—that rolling abundance of shoemakers and notaries. The impression one derives from the instruments is overwhelmingly of a society not at all without class, but in which the classes, rather loosely defined, were, geographically, all closely intertwined. The effect, in palazzi and in neighborhoods, is rather like that of those Roman witness lists which put noble and butcher, scribe and smith, next to each other, just as they do the man from Palombara and the man from France.^[19]

The thirteenth-century Roman lived in a house with a garden beside and behind it, next to, or behind, the old wall of a monastery, San Silvestro in Capite, for example. He held his land with his family and paid a ground rent of two denari a year to the monastery. One of his neighbors was a notary or scribe, and the other was a set of four heirs. On the fourth side of his property passed the public road. Or he was a shoemaker living with his wife across from the portico of the Pantheon, with, for neighbors, a notary, a butcher, and a tower of the Sant'Eustachio family. If he had a last name, an agnomen turning surname, it began (surprisingly frequently) with Bucca or Bocca; every sort of mouth from beautiful to dark identified Romans, but whether they were called by the orifices of their persons or the doors of their houses (whether they were out of Lenore Kendall or Alfred Tennyson) is difficult to tell.

To get a real sense of what these documents of land transfer are like, and what sort of ordinary information they give, the sort of information from which these conventional thirteenth-century Romans can be built, one must look at the detail of a few ordinary documents. But it is of course true that these documents are less interesting and make less sense when they are seen in isolation than when they are seen in the context of a related known family or institution like the Orsini or San Silvestro in Capite. In 1245 a group of owners sold one pezza of arable land of five rubbi (one should think of a plot of no more than a few acres at most) in the Bravi outside Porta San Pancrazio at the Fontana Vulinna. The owners sold the land for thirty-seven and one-half lire . The neighboring property was held on two sides by the hospital of Santo Spirito, on the third side by the church of San Biagio (whose priest Gualterio was present for some part of the negotiations), and on the fourth by a man named Guido. The land was sold to a man named Accurimbono and his heirs.

The interesting part of this transaction is its sellers. They held the land jointly in five shares. One share was held by the church of Santa Maria in Trastevere (and nine clerks of the church, including three priests, consented to the action). The other four shares belonged to a collection of descendants of a man named Locrerengo, by then, 1245, dead. The document's description of the relationships of the sellers and their consenting relatives unveils a difficult genealogy of over thirty people in four generations and in the four collateral branches descended from Locrerengo's sons (that is, from the sons of Locrerengo the elder, for, although none of his sons was called Locrerengo, two of his grandsons were—a not uncommon Roman phenomenon). Locrerengo the elder had a son Giacomo, then dead, whose widow's name was Biancofiore. Giacomo and Biancofiore had had three daughters: Purpurea, Giacomina, and Buona, who herself had a child named Giacomo. Purpurea was also dead, and Biancofiore, the grandmother, was guardian of Enrico and Buona, two of Purpurea's children who were still minors. (Purpurea's other son, Bartolomeo, was not, for purposes of consenting to this transaction, considered a minor. Full majority arrived at twenty-five; but there were grades between the complete inability of the Roman infant and the freedom of the full adult.) Locrerengo's son Riccio, who had married a woman named Teodora, was also dead. One of Riccio's three sons was named Giovanni. Giovanni himself was dead in 1245, but his wife Giacomina survived, and she was the guardian of her three minor sons, Matteo, Petruccio, and Giovanni, who held and sold one of the five shares of the land in the Bravi. Giovanni's two brothers together held two shares. One share was held by Buonfiglio, a son of the older Locrerengo and husband of Oddolina. Locrerengo's other recorded son, Rufino, who had been married to Stefania, was also dead. From this marriage there appear to have come four children: Pietro, married to Adelascia; Locrerengo, married to Stefania; Rufino, married to another Stefania, which marriage had produced a daughter, Viola; and Giovanni.

From the actions of 1245 it is impossible to tell how this tangle of family had molded its interests in the Bravi property into their 1245 shape. One must suspect that this pezza of land outside the Porta San Pancrazio represented a fraction of a larger inheritance which was divided equally among a group of heirs and that if all the shares of the total inheritance were reconstituted this distribution would not look so strange. Nevertheless, the sense of intensely populated conglomerate ownership would survive. The repeated acts of consent that medieval Roman law advised, and also the joint holding, broadcast the proper-

tied reality of the family group. The additional presence of the nine clerics of Santa Maria in Trastevere, representing their share, makes clear that this sort of tenure did not forbid the entrance into this joint-stock landholding of nonrelated men or institutions.^[20]

Across Rome in the rione Trivio, or Trevi, almost twenty-five years later, in 1269, a matron named Angela was selling her tenure of a house with a garden to Rodulfucia, widow of Rainaldo Schibane, for eight lire less five soldi . The house is said to have been "by the church of San Giovanni de Ficocia," that is, just off what is now the Via della Panetteria where it is joined by the Via Maroniti, between the Trevi and the Tritone, in the Campo dei Arcioni. Angela held the property from the monastery of San Silvestro in Capite, which received two soldi for its consent to the transfer. The property was bounded on its four sides by the tenement of Angelo de Vento, who held from San Giovanni, by that of Lorenzo di Giacomo di Bartolomeo Caczocotti, who held from the monastery of San Silvestro, by the heirs of Tommaso di Giovanni Iaconi, who held the property behind, and, in front, by the public street. The witnesses included a Gottifredo de Monticello. The consenting prior of San Silvestro was Giovanni de Monticello, probably a man from the rione Arenula, but possibly from the prominent noble family that gave the church the antipope Victor IV. Of the other four witnesses, two were scribes or notaries (besides, of course, the redacting notary), and one was a shoemaker named Pietro di Benedetto. Angela herself was identified as the wife of Giovanni Macrapellis and the daughter and heiress of the dead Matteo da Sermoneta and his widow Sapia. Sapia, who was by this time remarried to Angelo di Stefano di Tebaldo, consented to the sale. It seems a small woman's world by the Ficocia.^[21]

This area near the Trevi was one of the neighborhoods in which San Silvestro in Capite had a number of holdings, and neighbors and principals reappear in various instruments. Just a week before Angela's sale, on January 8 rather than January 15—a pair of Monday—her neighbor Lorenzo di Giacomo di Bartolomeo Caczocotti had bought a house with a garden beside and behind it from Rainaldo di Egidio for seven lire, five soldi, with the promise of a yearly ground rent of four denari to the monastery of San Silvestro, to be paid on the feast of Saint John in the summertime. (The capite of San Silvestro is generally thought to be Saint John's head, which is San Silvestro's greatest relic.) San Silvestro was also paid a five soldi fee for its consent. The boundaries of this tenement were the tenements of Sapia (held of San Silvestro), Angela, Blasione, and the street. Rainaldo's

family appears—a wife Maria, a son Giovanni, and a daughter-in-law Rosa. Gottifredo was again a witness, as were Angelo de Vento (Angela's neighbor), the priest Donato of the church of San Salvatore in Onda (by the city side of the Ponte "in Unda," or "Ianiculensis," or "Agrippae"—now the Ponte Sisto), a marblecutter (marmorario ) named Nicola di Lorenzo Romanelli, and a shoemaker (this time a sutore not a calzolario as before) named Bonagura.^[22]

Lorenzo's document should be put next to the immediately preceding one (among those preserved by San Silvestro in Capite) in which a widow Romana, whose husband had been a shoemaker (or descended from a shoemaker or named Calzolario), is shown selling three pezze of vineyard and one-half of a wine-making vat to a man named Romano for fifty lire . The vineyard is described as being outside the Porta Nomentana or outside the Porta Salaria, at the watercourse called the Forma di San Silvestro, next to the forma, and bounded otherwise by a fontana, with the public road at the vineyard's head and the river at its feet. From this vineyard, instead of money, San Silvestro, not to be robbed of its rights over the land, was to receive one-fourth of each year's wine and each year three canisters of grapes.^[23]

In 1200 the abbey of San Silvestro had rented for twenty-nine years for a lump sum and an annual money rent a house with a garden behind it in the rione Colonna and the contrada Vigna to a mother and daughter, Altemilia and Hostisana. Their neighbors again form an interesting group: on one side, the heirs of a man named Gregorio di Lorenzo, who held their tenement from San Silvestro; on the second side, Oddone the Miller and the heirs of Benedetto Romano (or di Romano), who held from the monastery of Santa Maria in Campo Marzio; on the third side, Nicola and Bobolo, the bastard sons of Maccafora, who also held from San Silvestro; on the fourth side, a lane that ran to the street. The lane ran in and out of a little neighborhood of congested monastic tenements, with mother and daughter, heirs, bastards holding together.^[24]

These four San Silvestro documents suggest that tenants paid money rents within the city and rents in kind outside the city walls. As a general pattern, this would seem to make sense, but it was certainly not always the case. Sant'Alessio's shad and roe were from within the city, so were some rents in wine. In 1232 the monks of San Cosimato in Trastevere were attempting to establish a vineyard on a vacant piece of land in front of their monastery and within the walls of Trastevere. For the first four years of the tenure, which was meant to be perpetual, the new tenant, Sassone Ferrario (or Sassone "the smith"), was to hold

freely, but from the fifth year he and his heirs and assigns were to return each year to the convent one-fourth of the new wine and a measured canister (two palmi across and one semisso deep) of grapes. The vineyard-reestablishment, wine, and canister agreement ought not to be thought of as peculiarly monastic. In the 1270s Compagio di Giovanni Lucidi planned a similar rent on land which he himself had recently acquired outside the Porta Aurea in the Vatican near Santa Anna and which (probably) he was about to lose to the papacy. After four years of tenancy, the rent was to consist of one-fourth of the wine and two and one-half canisters from two pezze . In the agreement between San Cosimato and Sassone there is a clause which is usual in these Roman agreements; provision is made that if Sassone should find gold, silver, iron, lead, or any metal or stone worth more than twelve denari he should return half of it to the convent and keep half of it for himself.^[25] This common clause is really very prominent in Roman contracts; the sense of the rich ground full of useful and romantic treasure pervades the business of transfer and lease.

An arrangement somewhat similar to the one between San Cosimato and Sassone was made with Radulfo Carbonis in 1248 for land in the neighborhood of San Giovanni in Lombrica; the monastery demanded one-fourth of the oil and fruits and eventually one-fourth of the wine. (Like the Sassone agreement, the Carbonis arrangment was in purpose and style of the general emphyteusis type.) But one cannot generalize to the point of saying that in Trastevere payments were in kind. In a transfer of a house with a garden beside and behind it in the contrada Santi Quaranta (Quaranta Martiri or San Pasquale Baylon, at the corner of what are now the Via di San Francesco a Ripa and the Via delle Fratte di Trastevere), Barone di Paolo di Viola and his wife Regimina di Biagio di Romano Mellini, acting with the consent of her sister Caracosa and her sister's husband Pietro di Gregorio, received four and one-half lire from the buyer, Prassete di Giovanni di Pietro, saving always the rights of the charter of renewal (presumably after nineteen or twenty-nine years, or three generations, the term is not stated here) to the monastery. The instrument of renewal may have of course insured a yearly rent in kind, but there the abbot and monastery receive money—six denari —for their consent to the alienation of this house "of their right" in a neighborhood in which their rights were thick. In fact, neighbors on two sides of the Quaranta Martiri house held their property from the monastery—and on its fourth side the house was bordered by the street.^[26]

Wine and grapes were not the only rents in kind. In 1191 San

Silvestro in Capite had rented country property for money and an annual rent of one-half flagon of oil, the flagon to be three palmi in circumference, the palmo to be measured by the palmo marked in the stone at the door of the monastery. In 1198 the convent of San Cyriaco in Via Lata contracted beyond a money payment for a full and pleasant combination of annual rents in kind: twenty rubbi of good grain at harvest, one rubbio divided between beans and chickpeas, six salme of good wine, three manci of bundles of wood, all to be brought to, and inside, its cloister near the Via Lata (the Corso). In 1249 San Silvestro bargained to receive two one-pound saculas of wax or their money equivalent, in addition to its money rent for property outside the Porta Tiburtina.^[27]

Nor were all Roman holdings composed of real property in the narrow sense. As elsewhere, property could be in rights. So in 1218 two inhabitants of Rome bought two days (with their nights) in a river mill at Gallese, for six lire of Lucca. Three years later, other Romans bought the other five days of the mill (with equipment—a property of mixed nature) for fifteen lire of Lucca. (The price for a day had not changed.) River mills were an obvious and important part of the economy both in Rome and in the surrounding countryside, and the clauses with which mill tenants protected themselves against the devastations of floods and armies indicate the conventional instability, natural and political, of the countryside.^[28]

If one reads enough of these medieval contracts, the city and suburbs are repopulated with petty farmers in their gardens. The garden of the house with half a well by the church of San Nicola "de Melinis" is green again (where now there is only the broad, ugly grayness of the Arenula) in an instrument of the notary Nicola Mellinus, as three witnesses from the Giudea (or Giudia) and Cola Fusco watch a man from the rione Campo Marzio acquire property. And around San Nicola a little neighborhood of destroyed churches is returned (one might not guess in looking that there had once been so many more churches): San Valentino de Piscina, Santa Maria in Giulia (with its convent), San Salvatore in Giulia, San Nicola di Calcarario—and the Calcarario itself, the neighborhood where, in the middle ages, marble antiquities were, it is believed, remodeled or destroyed for modern uses, for lime, where now are cats, an underpass, where perhaps Caesar died, the enclosed, restored ruins of the republican temples, and the queerly rebuilt medieval tower of the Boccamazzi.^[29] Besides all that, in these documents, all over Rome one hears again the coughing and scraping feet of hundreds of financially interested in-laws.

The recovered greenness and in-laws cluster in one particular set of documents connected with a major, and famous, recovery of property in the 1270s. A rather beautiful inscription preserved in the Palazzo dei Conservatori in the Capitol (where it was brought in 1727) says that in the first year of his reign Pope Nicholas III (who was consecrated on December 26, 1277) had enlarged buildings in the Vatican and in his second year built the walls of "this pomerium "—this open space—the viridarium novum ; and one knows from a chronicle that he also made a fountain. Gregorovius wrote of this, rather excessively: "The feeling for nature thus again awoke, and for the first time for centuries, Rome saw a park laid out." Nicholas III's work at the Vatican required the acquisition of a number of small farms, like the vineyard of two pezze "next to the old walls of the Leonine city behind the sacred palace and the houses of the lord pope on which were built the latrines of the palaces." What the actual attitudes of sellers and buyers to one another was, it is impossible to say, but their negotiations caused two parts of Rome to meet face to face: on the one side were the clerks of the papal camera, professional accountants, and other hangers-on of the papal curia, like the papal scribe who was the rector of Sant'Egidio outside the gate (a repeatedly scribal church, which Boniface VIII would give to the basilica of Saint Peters); on the other side were the Romans who held the neighboring vineyards, and their families.^[30]

The actual sales and consents to sale, which stretched over some months, were regularly in two parts. The principal seller was brought before the acting chamber clerk at the Vatican, and there he sold his vineyard, often before curial witnesses, who obviously were present in their professional capacities, and also before other sellers. Later, a chamber clerk with witnesses and notary would present himself at the house in which the seller lived in Rome (because the sellers did not live on these pieces of vineyard) to gather the consent of the seller's wife and other interested members of his family. So, in April 1278 Nicola di Giovanni di Angelo de Amatiscis of the rione Parione appeared with his nephew Federico in the camera, and on the same day Nicola's wife Angela gave her consent at home. On May 1 Giuliano di Lorenzo di Pietro di Lorenzo de Cerinis and his brother Pietro of the rione Ponte (across the river from Castel Sant'Angelo) appeared in the camera, and then consent was given by Giuliano's wife in front of the house where they lived (the brothers' father was by this time dead, but theirs was at least a ménage of three). On May 5 Pietro di Ugolino de Speculo, also of the rione Ponte, for himself and in the name of his

brother Ugolino sold, and Oddolina, Ugolino's mother, and Giacoba, his wife, consented—the wife through her father Don Giacomo Rosso—before the brothers' house. The next day the brother Ugolino appeared for himself at the balcony or windows of the chamberlain's palazzo in the Vatican.

So, one after another, they appeared, people from the Piazza of the Botteghe ("shops") of Castel Sant'Angelo, from the Arenula and Campo Marzio and San Lorenzo in Damaso, the important Compagio di Giovanni Lucidi from Sant'Eustachio, actually from right by the Pantheon. And the clerk and the notary went out around Rome to the sellers' composite homes, to Bartolomea, Compagio's wife, and Aldreda, his son Giovanni's wife, at Compagio's house, to Donna Comitissa and Donna Teodora, the wives of the brothers Pietro and Paolo. They went to the house of Giacomo Magalocti, who had sold in his own name and that of his three brothers, Lorenzo Magalocti called Locti, Ponzello, and Tommaso called Sucio; and the three brothers and Teodora, Giacomo's wife, consented at home. An uncle-guardian, Andrea Barbarubea (or Barbarossa), who was related probably to another seller, Pietro Bursa de Barbarubeis of San Lorenzo in Damaso, sold for his nephew; and two nieces and their mother, Andrea's sister-in-law, consented at the ward's house. A sale by Matteo di Bartolomeo Bavosi de Malioczis was consented to at home by Constanza, his mother, and Froga, his wife. Besides the sense of life in the city, and besides the bringing together of Vatican and Pantheon, which these documents provide, they make clear certain points: Roman extended families lived together even when the family held more than one property; they lived in the city and held farms in the suburbs; the people who held these little farms (although not always of little value, as Compagio's sixty-and ninety-lire vineyards show) were not themselves, in the normal sense of the word, farmers.

One can in some part recover, and see, the actual physical houses in which these people lived, which they owned or leased. (Observable leased houses were generally held on long-term leases like a rush(?) house in the rione Colonna leased in 1234 for three generations.) The descriptions of houses between the Colonna and the Porta del Popolo (or Porta Flaminia or San Valentino) belonging to San Silvestro in Capite imply a rustic simplicity that is only somewhat surprising. Earth, rubble, and rush, and sometimes tile, would seem to have been the materials for building. The actual structures were sometimes simple sheds and lean-tos (although these may not actually have been much lived in), sometimes built over or adjoining dugout cellars.

Sometimes there were solared lofts, occasionally a tower and a cellar. On the other hand, in heavily populated Rome there is constant talk of gables, towers, and reused classical marble. Everywhere people used convenient classical remnants.

A rich sense of the texture of the second Rome, jumbled, reused, heavily urban, and, at the same time, ruined, is provided by thirteenth-century documents preserved in the archives of the family Orsini (the most spectacular and complicatedly visible branch of the Boveschi family). The late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Orsini were a prolific family with many branches of their own, and it was necessary for those branches repeatedly to divide and reassemble great segments of the entire family's holdings. In the late thirteenth century, moreover, parts of the family were involved in the aggressive collection of power and property, in their own aggrandizement. To them, with money available partly from office, including the highest office in Christendom, the urban center of the old city offered one worthy and natural arena for the accumulation of holdings. With the background of their Boveschi inheritance and linked Boveschi holdings, they could and did collect and consolidate a group of neighborhoods stretching in an intermittent chain from the rione Sant'Angelo in Pescheria (near, for example, what is now the Piazza Mattei and Sant'Ambrogio, by the de Galganis holdings and the palazzo "of the chancellor," and near the Piazza Giudea), through the Piazza dei Satiri and the Campo dei Fiori, out into the rione Ponte by the bridge to Castel Sant'Angelo and the Vatican.

The mélange of property types which they actually collected and consolidated must have suited their purposes perfectly, because the small neighborhoods which formed their great swathe were thick with stones and ruins and towers, fortifiable and fortified, and often high, ideal for the pursuit of "family wars." At the same time and in the same places were scattered shops, granaries, lots, habitable houses, and tenements which produced rent and other income. So, in a nicely balanced pattern, the Orsini could simultaneously support their wars and protect their incomes (although it should not be assumed that different Orsini were always on the same side in a war). The Orsini, insofar as they were urban, and urban Rome fit together so neatly that it becomes an intriguing but difficult puzzle to try to decide which more forcefully shaped the other.

The most strikingly evocative of the Orsini neighborhoods, in the documents and on the site itself, is probably that around the Piazza dei Satiri, or Zatri as it was called in the thirteenth century, a piazza which

still exists just off the curve of the remains of the Theater of Pompey, behind the church of Santa Barbara, near the Campo dei Fiori. There one can see the Orsini with their neighbors and predecessors and landlords, the de Tartaris, the de Stincis, and the church of Sant'Angelo in Pescheria (a landlord from a neighboring rione ). In the neighboring church of San Lorenzo in Damaso, in 1296, the noble Fortebraccio (di Giacomo di Napoleone) Orsini and four of his nephews acting also for two others (Orso, Leone, and Giovanni di Francesco; and Giacomo, Nicolò Comitis, and Fortebraccio di Napoleone) made proctors for themselves to lease or re-lease, at thirty-nine years, property from the church of Sant'Angelo in Pescheria. In this transaction, the church was represented by one of its canons, Malabranca de Galganis, and the vicar of its cardinal deacon. They intended to lease the trullum , or trullo , called the "trullum of Donna Maralda" (which Maralda or Marala, it has been suggested, was a wife of an Orsini of an earlier generation), and the place where the trullum was, and the arpacasella and the place where it was, together with the new tower "now" built there, and the palazzo next to it, and all the crypts and lots and properties of the other adjoining houses and piazzas and their appurtenances in the arc of possessions of the church. (The arpacasella has been connected with the arpacasa , the tower, according to Saba Malaspina, which Fortebraccio's "Ghibelline" father had among his ruins when he was supporting Arrigo of Castille and Corradino and opposing Charles of Anjou.) The old ruins of the arc of the theater had been joined perhaps by the new ruins of destroyed and confiscated "Ghibelline" fortifications, honeycombed with caves and fortified with a new tower. It is not really clear what in the description is tower and what ruined theater, what destroyed and what standing, but the texture and part of the shape of the used ruin are apparent. This complex of properties, caves, and heights was said to be in the rione San Lorenzo in Damaso, and to be bounded by a public road, by the road that went to Santa Barbara, by the Piazza Zatri, and on the fourth side by the garden of Francesco Tartari (or de Tartaris) and the heirs of Leonardo de Stincis. Two days later, the act of leasing took place at San Lorenzo in the presence of five members of the household of Francesco, the Orsini cardinal deacon of Santa Lucia in Selcis; the property's description was repeated, with the careful stipulation that the church of Sant'Angelo was not to lose whatever rights it had in the churches of Santa Barbara and San Martino (de Panarella).

Already in 1242 and 1263 Orsini had been engaged in collecting property around the arpacasella , acquiring from a Cenci one of the five

parts of the whole trullum , called the "trullum of Gregorio de Trullo," from the ground to its peak, with its ascents and descents, and the whole shop next to the greater ancient gate to the property, and half a house and half a garden behind the trullum , and a whole shop under the fondaco , known as the fondaco of Leone de Trullo, and property above and below on the side of the church of San Martino, and the vacant area next to the public road. In 1290 some of the de Stincis heirs, holding as a consortium , sold their share of the trullum "which was once Donna Merala's," that is, one-third of two-fifths, to Don Francesco di Napoleone Orsini (described at this time as a notary of the apostolic see), for seventy lire of the senate. The property was described as being in the contrada (in contrata) San Lorenzo as it was again (and also "in the parish of Santa Barbara") when Francesco Orsini, the notary, bought another one-fifth of the trullum ("once of Donna Marala") and one-fifth of the arpacasella , for one hundred gold florins. In this last case the neighbors are described as the sons and heirs of Giacomo and Matteo Orsini, the Tartari, the de Stincis heirs, and the public road. Angela, the wife of the seller, who was a Roman citizen named Angelo di Giacomo Rubei Catellini, consented to the sale, in the public street before Angelo's house (although the property had been in the Catellini family); and Francesco Orsini's proctor, the priest Egidio, rector of Santa Barbara, went to the trullum and arpacasella with Angelo and was physically invested with this Catellini fifth.

Although the descriptions of the trullum of Donna Maralda-arpacasella -Piazza dei Satiri properties are particularly evocative, they are not really unlike others in the Orsini documents. There are, for instance, the descriptions of the Mannetti properties in the rione Cacabario (in a neighborhood with a garden and a house belonging to the little church of Santa Maria in Publicolis) some of which came into Orsini hands in 1294 and was divided into thirds for Fortebraccio and his two sets of nephews. These properties were a collection of tower, oven, garden, and house. One house had a shoemaker in it and one a smith. A related Mannetti document of 1270 talks of the "Palatium Merulatum" with a kitchen and a stable below it, and also a house underneath it where a smith lived, and a scribe's house, and a house "de capite crucis" where a spicer lived, and a barbican, and holes or loops for shooting arrows through, and the arch of a tower, and a columned palazzo, and podia and benches, and stones and walks around the place. The document also contains regulations to be followed in dividing the property that concern the height of fortifications, walls, and barriers, and the disposition of liquid waste.

There are also the ruins of towers and houses called the "Baroncina" in the rione Sant'Angelo in Pescheria, with a granary and a cloister at the foot of the tower, and a walled lot, near San Salvatore de Baroncinis (on the Piazza Giudea on the side toward the Piazza Mattei) which Orsini (Giacomo di Napoleone and Matteo Orso) bought from Giovanni Cenci in 1271. At the same time the Orsini also got the ruins of the houses called "Quinque Palaria," houses with Jewish neighbors, and a house called "Hosterium," where Matrona Hebrea, Matrona the Jewess, lived next to a spicer and property of the church of San Salvatore de Baroncinis. There are, too, the de Galganis properties around the "Palatium Cancellarii" (of the Malabranca?) in the rione Sant'Angelo in Pescheria, near the present Piazza Mattei; their neighbors included the monastery of Santa Maria Massima, Pietro Conti, and Manuel Beniamin de Vitali, the Jew. With part of this complex, Donna Constanza de Galganis was invested through and by means of the gate of the steps of the palace and the door of the enclosure called "de Galganis" in August 1275. The list could go on, as consortium after consortium (family group after family group), and men and women, buy and sell these mixed pieces of urban Rome, the surface of which was covered with many things including very variously tenanted houses.^[31]

Some relatively simple late medieval houses survive in Rome, some not too fussily restored. There is a familiar house across from the church of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, and another one fairly close to it on the corner of the Vicolo della Luce and the Lungaretta. These houses are very noticeably made of brick and other classical remnants. That this sort of house seems to have followed an ancient Roman vernacular style is particularly clear in the case of houses with open-fronted shops beneath them. Their materials are very like those of contemporary churches like the Aracoeli. They repeatedly use a constantly visible and characteristic arch, like those now to be seen embedded in walls on the Vicolo della Luce or holding overstructures and covering passages as in the Vicolo Sinibaldi or the Arco dei Cenci. If one maintains a certain amount of reserve and preserves oneself from too facile an antiquarian enthusiasm, one can look with profit at the restorations of tall medieval houses at San Paolo alla Regola. A characteristic complex of tower, antiquity, and confused building remains at the Torre Margana near the Capitol, and close by there is a clearly observable specimen of reused material on the Via della Tribuna di Tor de' Specchi (no. 3A), a building which has been tentatively identified as a Boveschi tower.^[32]

A nice description of a fairly important house-complex survives from the early fourteenth century, from 1331, only a few years after the popes had gone to Avignon.^[33] The describing documents, themselves preserved in the capitular archives at Rieti, are the result of a disputed inheritance (that of Giacomo di Don Giacomo) within the rich and important family of Ponte, a family in fact established around the city side of the Ponte San Pietro (now Ponte Sant'Angelo), the bridge which led from the city to Castel Sant'Angelo and Saint Peter's, and from which the family undoubtedly took its name (although, perhaps indirectly, through the rione ). The Ponte family was of the very second importance (like, perhaps, the Sant'Eustachio, but without their known age) and was connected with both the Orsini and the Savelli. The 1331 description is included in a statement that invested with property Donna Andrea, the widow of Giacomo and the daughter of Giordano di Andrea Ponte. (She was doubly a Ponte woman.) The decision was based upon gifts inter vivos , dower agreements, and palatine and senatorial decisions stretching back more than thirty years.

The description of settlement required a description of Ponte urban properties. The properties described include a warehouse, an artisan's shop or storeplace in the fish market near the Capitol (and Sant'Angelo in Pescheria), a vineyard outside the Porta Castelli in the Prati near Castel Sant'Angelo, and a miscellany of places near the Ponte San Pietro: walled gardens, land with a house held by the church of Santi Celso e Giuliano, the holding of a tenant named Pietro de Palma, or la Palma (as in the local name of San Silvestro de Palma, the neighboring church), a tenement bordering on possessions of the Basilica of Saint Peter's, a piazza with a pergola, the river, the holding of Napoleone Orsini, the street to the Palma, and the water gate. One of these properties was a tower, the Torre de Rainone, with a garden next to it, and the gate between it and the adjoining palazzo.

But it is the adjoining palazzo that catches one's eye. It is described as a grand palazzo and house, colonnaded, with a garden and close, with solars and chambers above it, and a marble stone next to it, and with all its walls, at the foot of the bridge, and on the via sacra which led to the bridge.^[34] It sounds a signorile city scene. But insofar as it is signorile the scene is incomplete. The description goes on to the palazzo's shops, that of the scribe (or the son of a scribe) and the widow of the barber, the portico or shop of a man named Giovanni di Jonta (a sutore ), the house of a saddler and of a pruner, and the shop of a goldsmith, "which houses and shops and palazzo are all joined together in the rione Ponte San Pietro between the street of the bridge,

the street that goes to the Posterula (river-gate) Raynone, and the river Tiber." It is a beehive by the river, with the Ponte women, the barber's widow, the garden and goldsmith, all housed together by the tower, the ancient monument, and the "yellow" Tiber. It speaks, as do earlier Orsini documents, the physical involvement of various classes in medieval Rome. It tells clearly of the long heritage of those palazzi of modern Rome, the Costaguti, the Mattei, the Borghese, which, at least now that they have attained some age, shelter within themselves a similar variety. The Palazzo Costaguti, physically late Renaissance and after, is, as a way of life, very medieval Roman.

The picture of the Ponte palazzo comes from the beginning of the 1330s. There is not, I think, a similar picture of a relatively simple and domestic Roman neighborhood before the 1360's.^[35] One can know a lot about the thirteenth-century neighborhoods of the Orsini and the tenants of San Silvestro in Capite and San Cosimato. But the way in which Sant'Angelo in Pescheria comes alive in 1363 makes earlier things seem black and white and two-dimensional. Sant'Angelo's brilliance is due to the accidental survival from that and following years of the cartularies of the notary Antonio di Lorenzo Stefanelli de Scambiis, who worked, for the most part, around the area of the fish market and its church.

There are obvious dangers in using a fourteenth-century document for explaining the life of thirteenth-century Rome. By 1363 the popes had been in Avignon for fifty years. By then Sant'Angelo had known intimately the commune of Cola di Rienzo. It had not been ten years since Cola had been killed on the Capitol and his dead body hanged near San Marcello. It had not been twenty years since the Cola allegory crying "Angel, angel" from the fire had appeared on the very wall of Sant'Angelo. Cola had been born nearby in the Arenula, by the river, within sound of the mills, near the synagogue and San Tommaso of the Cenci (in an Orsini as well as a Cenci and Jewish neighborhood), fifty years before the composition of the notarial cartulary of 1363; Cola was himself a notary, and an observer of ruins.^[36] The scene at Sant'Angelo in 1363 is obviously the wake of Cola, not the world of Innocent III or Boniface VIII.

Still, the assembly, the total action at Sant'Angelo, which bursts from the notarial book, pulls together, as nothing earlier can, half-seen and half-understood earlier fragments. There is also every reason to believe that much was unchanged. The removal of the popes had of course made Rome poorer; and one must assume that Rome fifteen

years after the Plague was a great deal emptier than it had been in the year of the Jubilee. There is, in fact, real evidence that Rome declined after the departure of the popes in the early fourteenth century, and the belief is not solely dependent upon common sense, often a surprisingly poor historical tool. There survives, for example, in the Vatican, a book of the properties and houses of the priorate of the city of the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, from the 1330s.^[37] The report starts with the property of San Basilio in the city itself, and with two shops in the contrada Tor dei Conti, in front of the palazzi of Don Stefano Conti; it continues through thirty-one other houses and shops in the area of the Torre (which of course still stands) and against the hill that was then, and is now, called Magnanapoli (although not all of the houses' and shops' locations are specifically stated). Of the thirty-three houses and shops, eleven were vacant at the time of the account, and seven were paying rents considerably reduced from their accustomed ones. Of an expected San Basilio urban rental income of something over 118 or 120 florins, over 35 florins were not at the time of the report being returned. It makes a dismal sounding list: "Item, the house where Paulucio the ortolano ("gardener," "truck farmer") lives returns one and one-half florins; it was accustomed to return four and one-half florins" —item after item.^[38] It is a list that (although there were plenty of deserted vineyards in the thirteenth century) argues strongly against anything like a bursting local economic revival in early fourteenth-century Rome, one that would have made thirteenth-century Rome seem by comparison a sleepy little town; and this is well before the Black Death.

There is good reason to believe, from this sort of evidence, that Sant'Angelo in 1363 was not part of an unrecognizably more vibrant town than it would have been in 1300—and "vibrant" is the adjective that describes the distinguishing characteristic of life seen in Sant'Angelo's early notarial cartularies; in them Sant'Angelo sparkles and flashes like the fish it sold. The first cartulary exposes one of the characteristic qualities of the medieval city: its brisk, petty mercantile activity among the ruins. It makes clear that medieval Rome was not somnolent, not sleeping in its ruins; its decay was a decay of limited action and movement. This sort of action, it is true, may have been more apparent in 1363, more noticeable to an actual visitor, than it would have been in 1300, just because less else was going on. Similarly the jumble of classes may have been more relaxed in the Palazzo Ponte in 1331 than it would have been in 1300 because of the absence of curial

tenants. The removal of the curia had surely brought other people and types of people forward and made them more noticeable; again, it was Cola's time.

There was an important man, a pezzo grosso , in Sant'Angelo in 1363. He was Matteo de Baccariis, "noble" doctor of both laws, rich, omnipresent, with a complex of relatives present in and renting a complex of houses—like Mascio de Baccariis's house in the Ruga Judeorum ("the street—or passage—of the Jews") with Luca de Baccariis's house at its side and behind it the Porta de Baccariis. He was also a man who by the time of his death had collected a library rich in expensive books, particularly of both laws, the most expensive of which was a Speculum iudiciale (by that Guillelmus Durandus who lies in Santa Maria sopra Minerva) worth forty florins; he had, too, a valuable Bartolo on paper worth twenty florins. Matteo, although learned, was a man with a fat cigar—and he married well twice. Matteo brought pasturage in the country, arranged for his daughter's inheritance, acted as an advisor and an arbiter, as in a case between a Trasteverino and a Trastevere priest. As a canon of Sant'Angelo and a local innkeeper watched, Matteo's servant Francesco bought wine from a neighbor, wine stored in the neighbor's house in two vats, wine to be resold in the Piazza of the Lateran (out across the relatively empty spaces of the rioni Ripa and Monti).^[39]

Cast rather in the shade by Matteo and his family, but present in the cartulary, is the great local noble family, the Savelli, under and against whose great house-fortress, the Theater of Marcellus, the church and neighborhood of Sant'Angelo stood (and stand). Savelli involvement in the life of the city (which did not exclude involvement in the city's usury) becomes apparent, for example, through a family sale that was officially notarized near the church of Santa Maria in Campitelli late in the year. The principal, Magnifico Nicola di Magnifico Bucio Savelli, acting also for his brother Guglielmo, sold part of a cluster of properties in the rioni Ripa, Sant'Angelo, and Campitelli for two hundred florins to the heir of a notarial family (and cousin of a canon of Santa Pudenziana). The sons of Bucio Savelli had held their property jointly with the Magnifici Antonio and Luca Savelli, with Luca holding one-half, the sons of Bucio, and Antonio each one-fourth. The sale is interesting partly because the property included one-fourth part of the place in the Portico di Ripa where vegetables were sold and the place where the money changers stayed.

This sort of Savelli involvement is seen again in a transaction of a member of the family Grassi (a family connected with the tower which

still stands next to Sant'Angelo). This transaction, which took place at the monastery of Santa Maria de Massima (now Sant'Ambrogio), involved property in the Ruga Judeorum and also that "butcher shop or house with a place for keeping the beasts (remettitorio ) in the rione Ripa under the houses of the Savelli." (One need not see the Savelli leading the beasts to slaughter; but one must see clearly that the beasts by whom the great families, Savelli as well as Conti, were surrounded were not just the beasts of chivalry.) Although Savelli had long replaced the Pierleoni as the dominant local nobles by 1363, Pierleoni were still around, among them Lello di Donna Laura Pierleone, who had a tenement by the cloister of the palazzo of the cardinal of Sant'Angelo, and Don Pietro di Domenico Pierleone, who was a cannon of Santa Maria in Porticu.^[40]

Families great and small move around Sant'Angelo, but the people who move most are the fishmongers and their families. A number of these fishmongers can be watched leasing the stones for them to sell fish on. The ancient marble stones in front of the church of Sant'Angelo belonged by right to the church and its canons, and the canons rented them on long leases (although in the thirteenth century the approval of the cardinal deacon of Sant'Angelo, or his vicar, might also be sought for other long leases). So on July 4, for a term beginning in the following year, the canons received eleven florins for the lease of half of one of the church's stones, with a promise on the tenant's part of an annual rent of two florins a year on the feast of Saint John, and on the canons' part of re-renting on the same terms to the fishmonger's male heirs. These stones, before or under the templum of the church, surrounded by other similarly leased stones, sometimes held by two mongers jointly, were serious and valuable properties and were discussed in much the same terms as were shops and even arable fields and vineyards. Privately held stones near the church's collection formed part of local dowers, and they were important parts of sales and property transfers, as in that from a Grassi mother-in-law to a Grassi daughter-in-law involving the properties around the Torre Soricara next to the church—in an area that can be mapped out from the cartulary and looked at in its inhabited ruins today.

The piquancy of the fishmonger-stone documents is increased by the stones' mutilated survival in the Portico di Ottavia, and their unmutilated and visible survival in familiar prints—the road, the Porta of the Ponziani (a family involved in fishmongering), the Ponziani holdings, the Grassi tower, the templum of the church, the Grassi stones.^[41]

Fishmongers are constantly present, and in considerable number, witnessing all sorts of acts in and near the templum . A fishmonger returned the money that a Grassi woman had borrowed from a Trastevere lender. (They, reasonably, connect the two sides of their river.) In the church of Sant'Angelo two fishermen of Terracina accepted seven florins on deposit from a fishmonger named Pietro Corre, and they promised to send their fish to him in the accustomed way. Three other fishmongers, one the son of a scribe-notary and one from the adjacent rione Campitelli, witnessed the agreement. A Sant'Angelo man leased from Benedetto, the rector of the church of San Lorenzo in Piscinula, across the river in Trastevere, a fishery, or fish pond, in the Tiber, which belonged to the church, which was called the pond "in pede pontis Polçelle" of Trastevere, and which was next to another San Lorenzo pond. For ten years San Lorenzo was to receive on each Easter an annual rent of three florins and two shad with roe (laccias oviatas ) and two tender male shad (laccias lactinatas ).

The fishmongers' women appear, too; it is neither a cartulary nor a society that excludes women—a wife and mother is named future guardian of her children should her husband predecease her; if she should predecease him, his father is to be guardian, or if he has died, his wife, the children's grandmother. Women's (and not just fishmongers' women's) possessions appear—the ring of Paola, the fishmonger's widow, the chest of Sofia, the miller's wife. And three Renaissance-sounding nuns, Plasira, Laura, and Euphemia, appear in the medieval-sounding convent of Santa Heufemia.^[42]

One of the marble stones for selling fish under the templum , to which the canons of Sant'Angelo held their "ancient" rights and which they let in their accustomed way, a stone next to that held by the heirs of Giacobello di Paolo Grassi, and before which was the street, was described as being near the wall of Sant'Angelo where the image of Saint Christopher was painted. (Rome was a painted city.) Sant'Angelo of the fishmongers was not only a fish market; it continued to be and to seem to be a church, and some of the business of the prior and three (or more) canons was ecclesiastical. (Like the canons of similar local churches, the canons themselves seem generally to have been local or relatively local men provided by Urban v or his predecessors.) They could, as they did in May, deal with marble (and mosaic in private chapels) over men as well as under fish—although, even in sepulture, talk of a neighboring counter and shop, the church's shop, could creep in. A fishmonger and a Ponziano left in his will, along with

money for repairs at the Lateran, money for oil for the lamp of the image of the "glorious Virgin Mary" at the church of Sant'Angelo, as a neighbor named Ceccha left a striped tablecloth, or altar cloth, to the image of the glorious Virgin at Santa Maria de Massima, half a block away.^[43]

Actually ecclesiastical bequests from the rione Sant'Angelo, with a center in the close neighborhood and a heavy extension into churches connected with the neighborhood, spread out over much of the city (from Sant'Angelo, the Campitelli with its chapel dedicated to Saint Nicholas, and San Salvatore de Pedeponte, to the Lateran, Santa Maria Nova, the Aracoeli, Santa Maria sopra Minerva, San Callisto in Trastevere, and San Pietro in Montorio). These bequests, like the great preponderance of evidence from both the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries, argue against too rigid and narrow an interpretation of enclosing Roman neighborhoods.

Their argument against enclosure is reinforced by the actors in the scenes in the Sant'Angelo notarial book, and in the scenes themselves. They are not frozen in the templum of Sant'Angelo. They move to the courts on the Capitol and to the Campitelli with flashbacks and asides to places like the garden of Santa Maria domne Rose, where still or again there is an isolated stretch of green in the center of Rome between Santa Caterina and the Polacchi, to the fishery in the Tiber called "Locapraiello," to the Lateran. Although the fishmongers of Sant'Angelo dominate the scene, with a chorus of canons (and also an occasional solo by the chaplain) in the background, and the ceremonial progress of the indirectly vegetable-selling Savelli, there are plenty of strays: Sabba's daughter, the nun of Sant'Eufemia; Lello Buccabella, merchant of the Campitelli, a goldsmith from the same rione, and the merchant Gregorio di Enrico of Florence; the mobile population—two men from Marseilles now of Naples, Englishmen from the Biberatica, Constanza, a woman moved in from Ostia; the heirs of John de Montenoris (identified by his part of Rome) from the rione Sant'Eustachio; Cola the butcher of the Ripa, the butchers of Campitelli, and the Lady Symonetta, wife of Cola Conti butcher of Campitelli (and Cola seems to be a butcher's name as Nucio does a fishmonger's name); Antonio di Paolo de Corso from the rione Ripa; and millers, at least sometimes, from the Arenula, for the Tiber was a milling river; and clergy from Trastevere and the city side—canons of Santa Cecilia, of San Clemente, of Santa Maria in Porticu, from that order of canons which abounded in Rome. But at the center of these people, in

Sant'Angelo, were always the fishmongers, dominating the scene, like that member of the prominent family from beside the church, Paolucio di Lorenzo Ponziano called Capograsso, "the Fat-head."^[44]

The question of how restricted neighborhoods were, or could be, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries can be asked most sharply and in a way answered in terms of the Jews and the ghetto. The main point is perfectly clear; thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Roman Jews generally lived in a specific neighborhood or neighborhoods, but not in a ghetto. The ghetto was created in the sixteenth century by Paul IV (and opened again in the nineteenth century by Pius IX, both deceptively purposed popes). Paul's ghetto enclosed a neighborhood that had already been partly Jewish for well over three centuries.

Lack of enclosure should not imply that the Jew's life in medieval Rome was as pleasant as the Christian's; and it would seem that, in spite of the protective edicts of popes like Innocent IV, Gregory X, and Nicholas IV, most of the nonsense about papal protection of the Jews should be forgotten. It is very unlikely that the papacy could have protected the Jews from a really hostile society if it had wanted to. Besides, the popes' constant and sometimes hysterical emphasis upon a pure Christianity (which often enough meant Christianity completely untainted by current heresy or by support of a current antipapal figure like Frederick II, rather than Christianity in the exact pattern of Christ) must not have had a very beneficial effect upon the position of the Jews. The medieval Roman Jew would seem to have suffered a slight, prejudiced, informal inequality before the law when he was involved in processes not subject to his own law. The thirteenth century itself was not, to put it mildly, a century of unmixed benefit for the Jews of Western Europe, as is shown by Innocent III's great council at the Lateran with its insistence on identifying pieces of costume, by Louis IX's attitudes, by the expulsion from England, and by Elijah de Pomis's death in Rome. That is to say, it is absurd to pretend that the position of the Jew in the thirteenth century was an ideal one, one free from persecution, and that bad things only came with the Renaissance.

This said, it must be made equally clear that Jews did not live as outlaws or outcasts in the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Rome. Jews

could be papal physicians, as Isaac ben Mordecai was to Nicholas IV. In the early fourteenth century Jews were rewarded with Roman citizenship. In August 1280 the Jewish mystic Abraham ben Samuel Abu'lafia, originally from Saragossa in Spain, went to the pope's palace to convert Nicholas III, but Nicholas had died a few days too early. Christians who wanted to be protected from what they chose to consider to be Jewish incursions upon their rights took their cases to court; Christians and Jews might succeed each other to the tenure of the same piece of property. Jews could make wills.^[45]

The point is made quickly enough. In the thirteenth-century Orsini documents, Jews and Christians in the rione Sant'Angelo in Pescheria hold adjoining tenements casually and without comment. It is said of a heretic, admittedly, that his property was next to "the Jews," but this is only meant to describe his property's boundaries. In 1363 Luca de Baccariis, of the prominent Sant'Angelo family, rented a house of his in the Ruga Judeorum for a year to the Jew Sagaczolo di Bonaventura, also of the rione Sant'Angelo, for a rather high-sounding rent, perhaps, but not particularly high for this neighborhood. Luca himself held the property on two sides of the house; on the third side was the street, and on the fourth the Porta de Baccariis. The act of renting was performed before the house of the lawyer Matteo, the most prominent member of Luca's family. One of the witnesses was the priest Benedetto, rector of the church of San Lorenzo in Piscinula.

One hundred and twenty-five years earlier, in 1238, the Masters of the Buildings of the City made decision in a dispute between the church of Santa Maria "domne Berte," represented by the priest Gualterio, and four Jews, Acosiliolo, Nasaçolo his brother, Monayçolo, and Moscettulo. The priest had complained that the Jews were throwing dyes and dyed water out into the street in front of their house and that these then ran down to the church. The Masters condemned this practice. They ordered that if in the future the Jews should throw dyes and water dirty from dyes out in front of their house they should build an underground covered conduit that would not obstruct the street and that would carry the dye and water to the sewer (clavicam ). The Jewish dyers lost their case (near a neighborhood that is still Jewish and still involved in the cloth and clothing trades). A Jewish renter a few blocks away paid a rather high rent, and in this case it was only rent, for his house. But none of them was excluded from the community and its normal traffic, presided over by the Masters, witnessed by a priest. In 1363, without any noticeable sort of dramatic explosion, a simple act of property transfer could bring together a resident of the Piazza

Giudea and property on Monte Mario, at the head of the Prato San Pietro next to the road to the Ponte Milvio.^[46]

The Jewish neighborhood had once been in Trastevere. By 1309 the church of San Biagio de Cacabariis (near the Argentina) was in the middle of the Jewish quarter. A new synagogue had been built on the city side of the river after the ancient one was destroyed by fire in 1268—its anniversary became an annual fast day. The new neighborhood was established; the migration had been marked by the Ponte Giudeo ("Bridge of the Jews"). (The name had come to be applied to the Ponte Fabricio, the Ponte Quattro Capi, which still survives, crossing the left branch of the Tiber, connecting the rioni Sant'Angelo and Ripa with the medieval flank of San Bartolomeo on the island. The bridge still bears Fabricius's name, still carries its four heads, and still leads to, or from, the Jewish quarter.) The crucial movement to the new neighborhood could have happened between Benjamin of Tudela's visit to Trastevere in 1165 and the rebuilding of 1268, but it was probably earlier. The old neighborhood did not disappear completely. In 1300, the will of Tommaso da Ocre, cardinal priest of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, left ninety-seven lire to the heirs of Salamone Tadei da Roma, who lived near the palazzo of Santa Cecilia. The money was intended to repay what Salamone had spent to buy a house next to the cardinal's kitchens for the church. As late as 1404 the record of a transaction which took place in the curia judeorum, a court or piazza near Santa Cecilia, talked of the neighboring house of Coymello the Jew. There is certainly nothing to suggest that the new neighborhood had any of the romantic horror it came to have for Hawthorne, his "confusion of black and hideous houses, piled masses out of the ruins of former ages." In fact, Hawthorne's former palaces, which "possessed still a squalid kind of grandeur," had not yet, with the most inconspicuous exceptions, been built.^[47]

Another principle of forming neighborhoods and examples of neighborhoods so formed demand at least brief separate consideration. These are the neighborhoods of specific sorts of artisans. Of these one of the most noticeable on a map of Rome is a neighborhood which gave its name to a rione, a half-name to a double rione, the Ponte-Scortecchiaria (or scorteclari, scorticlaro, scorteclariorum ). The Scortecchiaria was the neighborhood of men, or people, who worked with, and dealt in, leather and hides. Almost as apparent a neighborhood is the Calcarario, the area of the workers who turned ancient marble into modern chalk, whose powder seems sometimes still to dominate the Largo Argentina, where provincial antiquarians and conservationists

like Henry of Winchester must have shopped in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and where for many centuries, but no longer except for Santa Lucia de Calcarario, a cluster of churches remembered the marble worker or chalkmaker in their names. The streets of this general part of Rome and the churches proclaim the neighborhoods of artisans, of candlemakers and keymakers and ropemakers and chainmakers. The beautiful twelfth-century campanile of San Salvatore alle Coppelle still identifies the place of the barrelmakers.

These names stretch back into an often specifically unidentifiable antiquity. The streets with which the names are connected have sometimes changed. This change is a general Roman phenomenon most famous in the case of the change of the Via Lata. In the middle ages the Via Lata was the name of the great Corso; it is now the name of the small street which goes along the side of the church of Santa Maria in Via Lata, itself named from the old name of the Corso where its façade is. But the convention of giving things names like "of the ropemakers" (funari ), even if those names have sometimes changed their locations (as the Funari has), makes clear the fact that Romans were accustomed to thinking in terms of clusters of specific sorts of artisans. Quite surely in thirteenth-century Rome there was some concentration of artisans and dealers, but equally surely there was, as there is in modern Rome, a scattering of every sort of trade in every part of Rome.

The Ripa di Roma, the shipping contrada on the lower right bank of the Tiber, the neighborhood where Saint Francis is said to have stayed, was unsurprisingly the home of sailors. These men are revealed in the late thirteenth-century senatorial investigations of the lingering results of earlier Genoese piracy, abduction, and confiscation, which had adversely affected the lives and goods of the sailors and their neighbors. These Ripa sailors appear before senatorial notaries and talk of the common maritime knowledge, gossip, and memory of their Trastevere contrada . Theirs seems to have been a unique neighborhood.^[48]

Meat, like ships and fish, is a separate and special case. There was a great butchering center by the Torre de'Conti, in what had been the Forum of Nerva. By the thirteenth century the place was called the Ark of Noah, one hopes with deliberate macellary reference from a Bassano sort of vision of the ark and not just from a confusion of names (or standing water, as Adinolfi thought). The size of the Ark's marketing operations is suggested by a single transaction in May 1295, when the curia was in Rome.^[49] This single sale brought to the Ark 124 sheep and 13 goats. The price that the seller, Pietro Cimino of

Rieti and his associates, charged the buyer, a man named Nicolucio di Leonardo of Perugia, who held properties in Rome, Rieti, and Perugia, for all this meat or potential meat was 116 lire . The transaction was enacted in Rome in macello Arce Noe in front of two witnesses from Orvieto and one from Viterbo (papal subcapitals which furnished men to the curia). One's romantic view of the Torre, the bastion of the Conti (the family of Innocent III, Gregory IX), a center of savage internecine war and human slaughter, must be modified to include its being surrounded by prosaic animal slaughterhouses functioning in order to feed people their lunches and dinners. Gregorovius's families who "only now and then burst forth with the wild din of arms" must have startled the sheep.^[50]

Through thirteenth-century Roman documents there is a rush of artisans, who are joined by laborers (in the sense that gardeners and farmers are laborers) and masters of various skills. Among these masters, medical doctors, notaries, and judges hold a special place. They formed a literate and peculiarly skilled sort of middle class, a special ballast in the rather unstable Roman community—men like, in 1263, Matteo the notary, son of the deceased Benedetto, notary and medical doctor of the Calcarario of Rome. Scribes and notaries like Matteo, who are present for the writing of every recorded transaction (preserving and identifying themselves with their memorable notarial signs), and often, too, serving as witnesses, mingle in every neighborhood with very various sorts of neighbors. Although they and their professional colleagues gave Rome a needed class as well as needed services, they could be the descendants of butchers and fishmongers, as a judge could be the descendant of a blacksmith. These notaries were often men of property with vineyards in the suburbs. They left considerable legacies—in 1246 the three daughters of Rainerio, who had been a notary in Trastevere, sold four pezze of vineyard outside the Porta Portese, in the "Tertio," to the monastery of San Cosimato for fifty lire .^[51]

That medical doctors should have been prominent inhabitants of thirteenth-century Rome is not surprising. Italy was one of the homes of medicine. Salerno was not too far from Rome. And in the thirteenth century malarial fevers were pressing upon the city (with its polluted rivers and shallow wells), threatening the swampy southern suburbs, darkening the hot summers as the Dog Star's madness gleamed from Orion's foot, and frightening neurotic and hypochondriacal curial clerks (although one sensible north German, at least, advised that mid-August was the best time for coming to Rome). The Tiber, partic-

ularly, life-giving, central, bringer of fish and trade, could be a killer river, as well as one that brought Rome's enemies, like Pisan ships in the twelfth century or the Provençal fleet under Charles of Anjou. Great floods brought death and filth to Rome, as in 1230, battering bridges, or in 1276, with a high-water mark that is still recorded in the Arco dei Banchi.

A town whose greatest denizen could make, or be believed to have made, a man a cardinal because he was a doctor good with fevers, would seem to provide a good market for physicians; Italian communes generally fought for doctors and offered them special privileges. When, in Rome, Nicola "One-Hundred Lire" (Centum libre ), Octabiano or Romano Zampo, called "lo Regio," the widow Buonasera, Gregory Tasca and Lancelot his brother, or the Lady Africa living in the contrada Campo degli Arcioni in rione Trevi, or the mother and son, Rosa and Angelo, living in half their house with the garden behind it because they had sold the other half, when any or all of them felt the heavy misery of the hot sickness coming upon them, they could know at least that they lived in a town full (if not full enough) of doctors. There was even a tower with a doctor's name, the tower of Enrico Medico by Saint Peter's. Two of Rome's doctors who were brothers both had sons who became famous Talmudic scholars. Besides Martin IV's cardinal doctor in the 1280s, an Englishman named Hugh of Evesham ("the Phoenix") with offices at San Lorenzo in Lucina, lesser doctors were involved in papal administration. In the 1240s, for example, the medical doctor Bartolomeo was chaplain to the papal vicar. Doctors, like notaries, were involved in the total community. They could hold vineyards and be the neighbors of shoemakers.^[52]

In the thirteenth-century lists of witnesses and neighbors in which these professional men join the ever present canons, priests, and other clerics, there is a great crush of identified workers—shoemakers and innkeepers and cooks; smiths and drawers of water; a combmaker; spicers in the Ponte; Francesco the tailor of the Via di Papa; Taliaferrus Ferrarius, whose trade seems clear: "Smith the smith"; cloth bleachers from Trastevere; abbatial knights and warehouse keepers; the painter Huguccio at San Silvestro in 1251; the miller in the cloister of Saint John Lateran; Pistoian merchant bankers at their shop; the son (Leopardo the clerk) and servant (Giovanni of Pisa) of the famous Pisan painter Master Giunta at San Clemente in May 1239; Cosmato, the (cosmatesque) marble worker, at Saint Peter's in the sala of the chamberlain in May 1279. They meet oddly—the shoemaker and the Capocci, the tailor and the Caffarelli. And they, again, like the notaries

and the doctors, do things and own things unconnected with their crafts or their neighborhoods: so the muratore ("builder") Matteo Vecclasolo buys a widow's vineyard outside the Porta del Popolo; an ortolano ("gardener") from the rione Ripa holds property outside the Porta at the Lateran. Crafts seem to appear out of the very ground, as when a widow and guardian of her son, on the one side, and the monastery of San Cosimato, on the other, fight over bake-ovens on Trastevere property—or as in a quite casual reference to the common charcoal pit.^[53]

But in spite of all this activity and all these presences crushing together to present themselves, there is little firm record of the real existence or activity of specific craft gilds and organizations in thirteenth-century Rome. In the century of the rising gild, Rome is queerly quiet. The two great old trade organizations were those of the cloth merchants (mercatores pannorum ) and the agricultural gild (bobacterii, more literally cowboys or perhaps ploughboys)—organizations which represented the purveyors of the first great commercial commodity, beyond bread and wine, and the major occupation, in a way, of a still very noticeably agricultural town. They were the crucial trades for people whose primary needs were still quite obviously eating and dressing. In the fourteenth century, by 1317, there were thirteen major gilds dominated by the two great old gilds. The gilds and their heads are said to have been important to the revolutionary "democracy" of Brancaleone d'Andalò, who came to power in 1252, and the heads of gilds were consulted in 1267. Representatives of corporations of merchants and shipowners had been particularly active in dealing with the Genoese in the twelfth century. Some historians have traced specific gilds and corporations to the thirteenth century—innkeepers, shoemakers, bakers, medical doctors, haberdashers, builders. It is perhaps easy to exaggerate the frailty of thirteenth-century Roman gilds, but only the corporations connected with the selling of cloth have any very persuasive, visible thirteenth-century reality.^[54]

The cloth merchants had an early local presence in their neighborhood of the mercato underneath the Capitol by the church of San Marco, in the area now dominated by the Victor Emmanuel monument. When they can be seen meeting, they meet in the church of San Salvatore in Pensili, where now is the Polish church of San Stanislao on the Via delle Botteghe Oscure ("the Street of Dark Shops"). By the mid-thirteenth century the merchants seem to have controlled five lesser gilds (the lanaroli, the bammacarii, the mercerii, the accimatores,

and the cannapacioroli ), and to have controlled themselves by fairly elaborate constitutions or statutes.^[55]

Statutes of this sort are almost always difficult sources for the actual behavior of the communities they purport to regulate. They are often derivative; they are often unrealistic. The statutes of the merchants of Rome are also, at least in their details, extremely hard to date. They come from a 1317 recension of a 1296 confirmation of mid-thirteenth-century enactments. Still, one can at least say that the gild of the merchants was in the thirteenth century building up an elaborate system of consuls and courts, regulations and almsgiving, a meeting place and a pattern of behavior. The statutes are most vivid in their regulations of how customers should be taken through the shops and how and where they should be shown cloth. If one merchant takes his cloth out to show it better to a customer, no other merchant is to try to show the customer his cloth until the first merchant's cloth has been fully looked at, rerolled, bound, and carried away. Only one merchant at a time was to move the customer from the dark shops to the light; cloths were not to be compared, and customers were not to be stolen. A greedy, competitive bazaar lives in the statutes, controlled by a community of merchants, so that the members of the community might profit more through regulated cooperation—but it cannot be clear exactly how this bazaar fits the bazaar of Rome.^[56]

The cloth merchants aside, the actual existence of individual gilds is less secure than that of the organizations of servants who served pope and curia. The glaring oddity about the gilds of this important city full of artisans, bankers local and foreign, people and trade, is their unimportance. Like the governmental organs of the city, they seem to have been very poorly and primitively formed.

The reason for this oddity lies in the nature of the city's importance and the connected source of much of its income. Rome was the most important, and the name, capital of an important, but still itinerant, court, the center, but not fixed center, of a great, worldwide government. It was also the cult center, and so the pilgrim and tourist center, of the Western world. Much of Rome's population was tran-

sient, and the transient population was the source of a great deal of Roman income. The chronicler who said that he saw, in the Jubilee year of 1300, two clerks at Saint Paul's outside the Walls, standing day and night with great rakes, raking in the coins left by pilgrims, wrote a bright metaphor of Rome's source of wealth.^[57] In this sense every Roman was Saint Peter's man, and Saint Paul's, and a chorus of lesser saints'. Saint Peter made him rich and made his wine sell at a better price. Rome was very far from being a stagnant little place like sixteenth-century Lincoln, preserving its elaborate gild structure within its walls, and it was also very far from contemporary Florence, with its burgeoning commercial growth, channeled, it would seem naturally, into the form of gilds. Rome was already, or was about to be, a city in which salesmen at booths around the Vatican—booths on the stairs, in the portico, and beneath the Navicella—sold painted replicas of the Veronica, as well as figs and tooth extractions. Also at the Vatican, within the boothed periphery, pilgrims could procure lead or tin badges with the images of Saints Peter and Paul on them (like one found recently in Dublin); the pilgrims got these badges, which would show that they had been to the doorstep of the apostles, from the canons of Saint Peter's whose monopoly in their manufacture had been confirmed by Innocent III. Commercial activity at the tombs of Saints Peter and Paul and around the Lateran court would seem, again naturally, to have found patterns more fluid than those of Florence or, later, Lincoln.

The press of Roman pilgrims has left almost palpable memories. One can almost feel (perhaps particularly in the Sistine Chapel in the summer) the terrible day at Saint Peter's when an English Benedictine monk was crushed and fatally injured there. William of Derby, the monk, a man of importance but not of spotless reputation, had, in the great year, 1300, come to Rome with three other monks, two of them priors, as he had been, and the third a monk from his own house, of Saint Mary's, York. William of Derby went to see the great relic of the Veronica. As everyone pressed forward to be near the relic, William was caught in the crowd. He was injured. His leg was crushed. He never recovered. He did not live to go home.^[58]

One can still feel the greed of the Romans as they watched these people falling into their nets. In April 1235 Angelo Malabranca, a Roman senator who had brought the commune back to peace with the pope, took pilgrims back under the direct protection of the senate and freed them from the trammels of the Roman secular courts. (This Angelo's son or grandson, Egidio, was by the late thirteenth century a San

Silvestro in Capite tenant of gardens in the rione Colonna—thirteenth-century Rome is an intricate tangle.) On September 15, 1235, Angelo acted to protect the peace and quiet of the city and all coming to it (his job, he said) and to save pilgrims from the violent avarice of innkeepers. The senator had heard that many inhabitants of the area around Saint Peter's had violently forced pilgrims and "Rome-seekers" to lodge in their houses and, even worse, had gone into other people's hospices and found pilgrims already quietly settled down there and then forced them to come out and lodge in their own inns. Innkeepers were forbidden this behavior by Angelo's edict. Pilgrims were to be allowed to stay where they wanted to, and to buy the things they needed where they wanted to buy them. Violators and molesters were to pay a fine, half of it to the canons of Saint Peter's for their daily commons, half for the repair of the city walls.^[59]

Contemporaries were overwhelmed by the number of pilgrim tourists. In 1300 the Florentine Giovanni Villani thought that a great part of the Christians then living, men and women, came and went; he further thought that there were 200,000 pilgrims within the city at one time. And Guglielmo Ventura, who was there and stayed for fifteen crowded days, said he saw a crowd so big that no one could possibly count it, but that the Roman rumor was that there were "twenty hundred thousand" men and women. Guglielmo says that he often saw both men and women trampled under other people's feet and that he himself was often in danger of being trampled. Guglielmo found the price of bread, wine, meat, and fish quite reasonable, but the price of lodgings and fodder for his horse very expensive. A contemporary Roman, Jacopo Stefaneschi, explained the abundance of food elegantly; he remembered the miraculous, the five loaves and two fishes, and compared the natural: the Lord will give his goodness, the land will give its fruit. But no one had any doubt about the fact that Rome in 1300 was very crowded; and no one has ever doubted that Romans profited from the crowd. Villani said that the Romans got rich from selling their goods. Gregorovius wrote, after describing the Jubilee year, "Immense profits . . . accrued to the Romans, who have always lived solely on the money of foreigners."^[60]

Less transient transients than the pilgrims were the members and followers of the Roman curia. Their presence or absence in a papal town was important enough; in Viterbo, papal and curial presence doubled rents.^[61] Great as households of functionaries, cardinals, and, particularly, the pope were, with their swarm of scribes, advocates, and accountants, it was not just they who swelled the population of Rome

when the curia was present. There were also those business pilgrims, who in various pursuits followed the curia—proctors and representatives of churches as diverse as Canterbury and Bari and of laymen, bringing the business of their principals before the papal court.

There were great prelates and their households. The newly elected archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Winchelsey, for example, arrived in Rome in May 1293. Nicholas IV had died in April 1292, and the cardinals had not yet chosen his successor. In spite of the fact that eight cardinals had already fled the supposedly dangerous Roman summer heat and gone to salubrious Rieti, Winchelsey found three cardinals in Rome. He dealt with the cardinals, but he found to his horror that his letters of credit from merchants in London were not accepted by curial bankers. He was forced to reestablish his credit. He left Rome quickly to seek other cardinals. Early in 1294 there was still no pope; at Eastertime Winchelsey and his group were back in Rome. In July 1294 the cardinals finally chose a pope, who was to be Celestine V. Celestine was consecrated near L'Aquila in late August. Winchelsey's election was confirmed, and he was consecrated near L'Aquila in early September. He then rushed home to Canterbury. But for two summers, with the intervening winter, Winchelsey and his itinerant household had helped to swell the group of curial followers, crowding, when in Rome, the crowded parts of Rome, drinking from the local vineyards. There were many households of Winchelsey's sort lodged about the curial towns. They complemented the more permanent foreign households, like that of Hugh of Evesham (the English physician-cardinal from 1281 to 1287) whose full, ambassadorial household was established near San Lorenzo in Lucina (or the household of Ottobuno Fieschi, of which fifty-three members can be named and identified).^[62]

But even the realization of the presence of these foreign households at the curia does not give an adequate notion of its drawing power. There were also all those tradesmen who followed it and its followers, people like Vanni di Nicola di Bruno of Viterbo, a butcher "who followed the curia," and Fico of Perugia, a poulterer "who followed the curia," whom we see, each in his Roman house, as Robert of Selsey, a Canterbury proctor, pays them their bills on December 23, 1266, pays them for chickens and capons, game and meat.^[63] Butchers and poulterers, like clerks, joined the curia in papal towns like Perugia, Rieti, Orvieto, and Viterbo and moved with it. Witness lists, like the one from the large sale of Rieti sheep at the Ark of Noah, are a litany of the towns which the curia visited. These local foreigners moved in and out of Rome, making its actual population rise and fall, bringing

to the city queer tempestuous periods of crowded, heavy trade and then of relatively slack emptiness.

The vineyard-owning residents of Rome and the shoemakers who profited from the presence of the transients seem pale beside them. Denizens, together with the less important transients, seen against the papal court itself, fade even more. They become a chorus without faces. And a chorus was probably what both pope and emperor wanted the populace to be as long as it sang approvingly. For the pope, particularly, the whole city probably often seemed no more than a setting for triumphal processions—and that could still reasonably be argued to be the city of Rome's greatest importance in the thirteenth century, at least if one accepts something of thirteenth-century values. Rome was the place which surrounded the pope's procession from the Vatican to the Lateran on the day of his coronation. These processions, of which the coronation procession is the greatest, in fact, like ribbons, tie together the neighborhoods and neighbors of the city of Rome. It is as if Ranke had invented them to do in physical fact what his own ribbons, tying together the two apostles on their columns across the city, the two fountains facing each other, did in fancy. They tie together the bundle with its disparate contents; and they emphasize the fact that all these people, whether local or transient, are economically, if not spiritually, Saint Peter's men—men of "lu baron san Piero."

One of the most brightly described of thirteenth-century papal processions occurred on November 15, 1215, while Innocent III's great Fourth Lateran Council was in session. The Western world, at least through proxy, was then present at the Lateran, listening to the establishment or clarification of the rules for its own behavior. The procession took the papal court across the crowded city and the river to the great old church of Santa Maria in Trastevere—great particularly in legend, for there, it was believed, a sacred spring of oil had flowed to announce the birth of Christ. Innocent III's procession went to Santa Maria to consecrate the church. Santa Maria had been rebuilt in the years after 1139 by the Trastevere pope Innocent II (a Papareschi), but it had not been very surely reconsecrated, and Innocent III took upon himself, at the height of his career, the duty of reconsecrating "Our Lady of the Flowing Oil." The procession moved to the blare of music, to a sound that "trumpeted" like an elephant. It was led by brilliantly dressed nobles. They were followed by a multitude of clerks and laymen. The chronicling contemporary who wrote of the procession moves in and out of and around Biblical phrases; he has Roman children join the procession, as he follows the familiar antiphon for Palm Sunday,

and he has them bear branches of olives as they shout their praises to the Lord unceasingly, saying, "as is the custom," "Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison." As the procession crossed the Tiber it found a Trastevere festa in the piazzas and the little streets, with lanterns, innumerable lanterns, hanging on cords, in their brightness competing with the light of day. Banners flew from towers and houses.

Guessing part of the itinerary, one can rewalk the procession any Saint Martin's week and look at the November morning haze romantically swathing the island and incompletely hiding the Aventine, covering the river, making pale the campanile of Santa Maria in Cosmedin. Some of the old towers remain on the island and in Trastevere—the Anguillara, Santa Rufina, part of the Mattei. The Gianicolo, Trastevere's enclosing hill, with its leaves changing and falling and heightening the color of the brick, bursts into the ends of Trastevere streets and over the corners of piazzas. At the end, still with the Gianicolo hanging above, is Innocent II's great church, with its façade half in light, its later campanile shining. Inside one finds more than Innocent III could find. In the apse Innocent would have seen only the twelfth-century mosaics above the level of Christ's lambs (and only the lambs, the city, and the feet of the saints on his far right as he approached could have sparkled in the morning light); Innocent could not have seen the lower mosaic panels, those by Pietro Cavallini, from the later thirteenth century.

In looking at the two sets of mosaics—the ones Innocent saw and the ones his century produced—one sees in style and line much of the whole nature of thirteenth-century history, the case within which the thirteenth century moved and what it did with its memories, particularly with its Byzantine memories, specifically, here, in its capital city. In the more restrained of the majestic, imposing twelfth-century mosaics (that is, not the mobile and fantastic Evangelists' symbols and prophets), under a patterned welkin, Christ and his mother, formally enthroned, are flanked by solemn, static saints. They fill, in a line, the cup of the apse. Beneath them the thirteenth century is busy with one of its sorts of interpretation of nature and life. In a series of frames, the human story of the life of Mary is told, but in a style in which the twelfth century, here, would not deign to, or could not afford to, talk, catching at the echoed life and artifacts of the observer, calling him with graceful angels' wings.

But the naturalism of the style, the seeming reflection of life lived, is in a way misleading. Almost every image in Cavallini's panels comes from some "established iconography." Even in the panel of the Nativ-

ity, which seems particularly freshly drawn from life, with its Joseph, its animals, its trees, its charming little dog sitting, every piece except the Taberna Meritoria itself (Santa Maria's miraculous ancestor, applicable really only here), seems to be in fact a rather standard piece of iconography. Much of it—the pipe, the tree by the stream—is Byzantine, and much liturgical. If the dog, who is at least relatively rare, could bark, he would bark to you in Greek, and probably something from the Orthodox Christmas rite. But this too is in a way misleading. The assemblage, the arrangement, the style are Cavallini's or of his time, or they are in part. He, like the Rome in which he lived (and in this he is its emblem), used the remaining, visible past to its own purposes.^[64]

There were lots of Roman processions, short ones and long ones, annual ones and occasional ones: the Candelora from Santa Maria Maggiore, the great, old, decorated Marian basilica on the Esquiline, wending into the city on the feast of the Purification; the king of the Romans' pretentious descent from Monte Mario on his way to be made emperor at Saint Peter's, with ceremony, sword, stirrups, and games, crosses and thuribles, and the singing of "Behold I have sent my angel."

The historian Saba Malaspina, to whose showy, patterned style the description of procession was, he must have felt, suited, wrote grandly twice of high royal reception-processions in the 1260s, one for Charles of Anjou, one for his opponent Corradino. Charles's fleet entered the Tiber, and then, "as is the custom," it was pulled to Rome. At Saint Paul's, Charles disembarked, and there he was met by a huge crowd of the Roman people (plebs ) of every sort, men and women, old and young, lay and clergy, and of various religious orders, carrying palms in procession and shouting "Osanna." The dancing of feet, singing of songs, and playing of instruments circled through the piazzas and streets of the city (and the old crowded city is recalled). And the nobles on horse played at their festive games.

A few years after Charles's triumphal entry, however, Corradino's entrance from the other side of the city evoked from Saba, to his Guelf confusion, an even more glorious description, rich in gems and drapery, of Corradino's reception by the fickle Roman people: Ecce venalis gens Urbis, plebs Gebellenia, the people of a city which had too frequently violated the honor of its ancient liberty with its harlot's games. As Corradino approached from the Prati of Saint Peter's, under Monte Mario, a wonderful sound of women playing on a multitude of musical instruments came from within the city, of women playing on cymbals and

drums and trumpets and viols. The city itself, along the path that Corradino took toward the Capitol, was decked almost unbelievably. Ropes and cords were thrown back and forth from opposing houses (and again one senses the crowded city—although the houses may well have had courts inside and gardens behind); and from these were hung not the customary laurels and branches but the richest of cloths of every description—in a society whose rich vocabulary of textiles and draperies reflects its major national commercial activity and, perhaps, concern. To the goldens and purples, the silks, the rich mantles and coverlets, towels and curtains, of work foreign and domestic, were added furs and jewelry with sparkling stones, all draping and swathing the path which Corradino would follow.^[65]

Rome was a city of processions. And its greatest repeated processions were papal. One can see some of them recorded still—by an eleventh-century painter at San Clemente, by a thirteenth-century painter at Quattro Coronati. Of these papal processions the greatest, again, was that of the pope's coronation. That procession tied together the two sides of the city, the Vatican's northwest and the Lateran's southeast. It went from wall to wall. It also tied together the two greatest churches in the West, the two basilicas that each claimed for itself a towering preeminence. The Vatican held in its crypt the precious relics of the greatest of apostles; it held the hand which had held the keys from which all Rome's modern power was seen to stem. It was Saint Peter's church. The Lateran was the world's cathedral. It was the most ordinary home of the pope. It was the reliquary of great, fantastic, and mysterious relics, from the ark of the covenant and from the life of Christ, Aaron's rod, the relic of Christ's circumcision, strange objects in thirteenth-century Rome, perhaps less compelling than they had once been, but compelling enough still to add to the holiness of the Holy of Holies with its portrait of Christ and with Pilate's stairs. Late in the thirteenth century, under the Roman builder pope, Nicholas III (Orsini), the Lateran's Holy of Holies (Sancta Sanctorum ) was rebuilt, and its holiness was reshaped and given the vitality of a current idiom. Both basilicas, both the Vatican and the Lateran, Saint Peter's and Saint John's, had essays written in their praise, each by one of its own canons, in the twelfth century. In them, great names and great memories (Constantine, the apostles) swirl around the "omnium ecclesiarum caput" at the Vatican and the Caput . . . mundi" at the Lateran.

Silver and ceremony, gold and porphyry, liturgy and incense deco-

rate the coronation procession from its beginning to its end—and grotesqueries. It is not simply pretty. As the description in the "Deeds of Innocent III" says, the whole city was crowned; there were incense, palms, flowers, songs. The "Life of Gregory x" talks of Gregory's going to the Lateran through a city that was like a bride, adorned with golden necklaces and shining in silken clothes.^[66]

The new pope moved across the city after his consecration by three cardinal bishops at the Vatican and his public wearing of both episcopal miter and royal crown. The pontificals of the thirteenth century describe the procession as being in seventeen parts, or layers. The first layer was that of the papal horse caparisoned, the second, a subdeacon carrying a cross, the third, twelve flagbearers with red banners and two with cherubim on lances. There followed groups of officials, scribes, advocates, judges, singers, and the deacon and subdeacon who had read the epistle and gospel in Greek, abbots from outside the city, bishops, archbishops, and abbots from the city, patriarchs and cardinal bishops, cardinal priests, cardinal deacons. Finally in the seventeenth group, the small, final, elevated one, came the pope himself, a subdeacon carrying a ceremonial cloth, and a servant carrying an umbrella —and also, in late century at least, the prefect of the city carrying more apparatus.

The procession moved past the great fortress of Sant'Angelo across the river through the rione Ponte and into the rione Parione. There, near the Orsini fortress in the Campo dei Fiori, the pope was met by the leaders of the Jews of the city who offered him their laws for his approval. The procession passed on through the towered, campaniled city to San Marco by the Mercato (the market still recalled by San Biagio al Mercato, peering out in restored ruin from beneath the Victor Emmanuel Monument) and on to Sant'Adriano (now again the, restored, curia of the ancient senate). Thus the procession that moved along the Via di Papa had passed under the Capitol from thickly inhabited commercial Rome to the "archaeological zone," to the ruined forum with its half inhabited but still potently symbolic arches (like the Arch of Septimius Severus with its tower) and its churches, by the Torre de' Conti, within view of the Palatine (a ruin of monastic farms and of the sinister pile of the Septizonio), around the Colosseum, near the Torre degli Annibaldi, and by San Clemente. At five stations the pope's chamberlains scattered coins to the crowds. Durandus says too that from Saint Peter's to the Lateran there were triumphal arches for the pope and that clergy stood censing with censers of incense and that

for this the Romans were paid thirty-five lire for the arches and the clergy thirteen and one-half lire for the censing—as they say in Rome, chi paga passa .

At the Lateran the new pope proceeded through the elaborate rites of taking over that part of his domain and its symbols to the final royal banquet where he sat alone. They were, some of them, curious ceremonies. The pope was seated upon an antique marble privy seat and then lifted up from it "like the simple out of the dust and the poor from the mire." He took coins from the lap of his chamberlain and threw them to the crowd as he uttered words that must occasionally have stunned, if not choked, a speaker or an auditor, "Silver and gold are not for me"—but it is the Roman, perhaps the Italian, genius (perhaps particularly in quotation) to avoid at the same time subtlety and candor.^[67]

The processions which crossed back and forth over the face of thirteenth-century Rome caught it only tentatively within a specific century. Their movements were filled with ancient gesture. They crossed a surface littered with curiously half-absorbed pieces of the past. This temporal complexity, this tentative grasp of the momentary present, this lack of chronological definition in the processions is like that exposed in the relatively modern language of some thirteenth-century contracts, as when in 1238 some baths (termas ) on the Palatine in the rione Biberatica were sold for seventy lire , baths from whose peaks, the document of sale specifies, war and peace could be made, against and with the right men (new wars and new alliances amid the ruins of ancient conveniences).^[68] Thirteenth-century Romans moved to their own purposes across a very used city. The antiquity of their ruins was embellished by the repetitive timelessness of nature. In the summers of every century, presumably, the birds skim the river by the island. In every spring daisies turn the grass around Sant'Angelo white; a rose blooms; the Gianicolo yellows with wildflowers. Year after year the capers shape their leaves, and blossom on the rocks. They must have blossomed as Innocent III and Gregory x listened to ancient, but not unchanging, liturgies.

There is a strange timelessness, too, about Roman games and

Roman songs. The most familiar Roman games took place on the Testaccio (the hill near the Porta San Paolo built of the shards of ancient amphorae) and in the Piazza dell'Agone (the Piazza Navona). Gregory x wrote of the Testaccio, and young Conradin's representative in the city saw its games. By the early fourteenth century Rome had turned into a place of elaborate courtly ritual; in one of its tourneys a Roman courtier courting a Lady Lavinia could appear carrying the device Io sono Enea per Lavinia ("I am Aeneas for Lavinia") and a Pietro Capocci, Io di Lucrezia Romano sono lo schiavo . Gregory x found the ribaldry and roughness of Carnival troublesome. It was a custom for roughly celebrating Romans to get alms in the papal palace in the evening on the last day of Carnival; each got a half piece of meat, a piece of bread, and a cup of wine. These ribalds behaved so coarsely that they kept genuine paupers from receiving alms and in fact forced them out of the palace. In order to subdue all this perverse merrymaking, Gregory tried to put more order into the almsgiving, to insure that one hundred platters of bread, one beef, and fifty casks of wine be properly distributed.

It was during Carnival that the Testaccio games occurred. They involved the pope and the prefect, drinking and demonology, men on horse and men on foot. On the day of the games, horse and foot rose, and after pranzo they drank among themselves. Then the foot went to the Testaccio, and the prefect took the horse to the Lateran. The pope, if resident, came from the palace and joined the horsemen. Together they rode to the Testaccio, and there they watched the games. Signs were made of the coming abstinence of Lent: "They kill a bear; the devil is killed, the tempter of our flesh. Bullocks are killed; the pride of our pleasure is killed. A cock is killed; the lust of our loins is killed—so that we may live chaste and sober in suffering of spirit, that we may be worthy to receive the body of Christ on Easter day." The formula describes a rite of animal sacrifice—and before the sacrifice the beasts were elaborately carted, with red cloth, through the city; and the Romans and their lusts were, in symbol, parted.^[69]

It is hard to tell what parts of the festivals of students, recorded from Rome's past, survived into the thirteenth century, what, for example, of the New Year's festival. On New Year's Eve, boys went out in the evening wearing masks and carrying shields. They drummed and whistled and danced about, went to houses, sought gifts, and ate. They ate beans that day (as still, in parts of the American South, one eats black-eyed peas on New Year's Day). The next day, on January 1, some of them went from house to house carrying olive branches and

salt, throwing handsful into the hearth fire, wishing joy and happiness, and with the constant implication of desired fertility, saying, "Tot filii, tot porcelli, tot agni"—for children, piglets, and lambs. And they were advised before the sun rose to have eaten honeyed beans or something sweet and all the year they'd find it sweet—without contention, case in court, or much hard work.^[70]

The boys' songs may be too early for the thirteenth century, the wiles of the country too late. It is difficult to know how early the surviving country saws and charms started, to know when men around Rome first believed that they should look for the weather to the peak of Monte Cavo or to the lightning over Maccarese:

Quando lampa a Maccarese
pija la zappa e torna al paese
{When there's lightning over at Maccarese,
take your hoe and go home to your paese.}

It is equally difficult to decide when men from the Roman countryside first fought witches in the dark by making a sign of the cross in the ashes or fought the evil eye (malocchio ) by putting three hairs and seven pairs of pips of grain in a half-glass of water, while saying something like the cantilena:

Sette fratelli carnali in vigna stava
tre zappava, tre vangava, e l'invidia schiattava
si prega la vergine Maria
la mandi via

{So that of the seven sets of grain brothers in the vineyard of hair, three are hoed, three dug, one, the invidious, pair cracked, and it, pray the Virgin, carries the malocchio away.}

Some of these verses are of course late; presumably the pea blossom, the fior di pisello, that tells of the beloved prisoner in Sant'Angelo is of the period of Scarpia rather than of the Orsini. But many of these songs and poems that once filled the Roman air are like the brick wall along the Via in Selcis or the ground-level rubble at the head of the Vicolo della Spada d'Orlando ("the alley of Roland's sword"), or near the top of the Via di Santo Stefano del Cacco, like old Roman houses and, particularly, like the farmhouses from which the lightning over Maccarese was observed. They are old; they are composite. It would take a lifetime of specialized learning or a laboratory of chemicals to date any specimen exactly, and that would not date the type.^[71]

Popular religious drama, related both to the liturgy of the processions and to the charms, is more fixed in time. Dialect plays, in Romanesco, about the Baptist, Saint Christopher, and the end of the world survive from the fourteenth century. By the end of the fifteenth century the Corporation of the Gonfalonieri was holding its sacred plays in the Colosseum. The sort of enthusiasm that both the plays and the Gonfalonieri activities represent is thought to have grown particularly from the religious excitement which reached a sort of crest in central Italy in the demonstration of 1260. It is a sort of enthusiasm intimately connected with heresy. Heresy was not absent from thirteenth-century Rome; it provoked a sharp reaction from Gregory IX which led to a disgusting scene of condemnation conducted by Gregory's senator, Annibaldo degli Annibaldi, in front of Santa Maria Maggiore in February 1231. And in 1266 heretics from the rione Sant'Angelo in Pescheria, a father and his son, Don Riccardo de Blancis and Pietro, were ordered to wear yellow crosses, two palms long and four digits wide, on their chests and shoulders, and to have their house torn down, a house that had "the Jews" (the Piazza Giudea?) on one side and the street to Sant'Angelo in Pescheria on the other. In a way, the sacred plays and the observable Inquisition which Franciscan friars acted out in the Aracoeli at the very end of the thirteenth century are twins, and twins partly in their lack of spiritual elaboration. The plays' actions seem very simple, and the great figures whom the Inquisition attacked were Colonna, whose heresy had to do with their reservations about Boniface VIII.^[72]

All the wisdom (and superstition) that floated through the Roman air was not folk wisdom. Thirteenth-century Rome gives every evidence of having been, in the simple modern sense, a very literate city. A man called a "master of grammar" can turn up quite casually as a witness to a document, as does, for example, the maestro Giacomo, doctor grammatice, in 1283.^[73] Rome was not a learned city in the sense that Bologna, Paris, and Oxford were learned; but much of the world's learning came to, and was employed at, its court. A studium was organized at the curia itself, and in 1303 Boniface VIII attempted to organize a university for the city. Roman cardinals sometimes had great and expensive libraries (one worth 1,787 florins). They also gathered around themselves households that contained not only men of diverse national and regional origin but also men with various sorts of skills and learning. Cardinals' colleges of chaplains were, insofar as they were institutions, learned institutions; and in this the cardinals emulated their papal masters. Late-thirteenth-century Rome was a suit-

able setting for a great scholar like the English Franciscan John Pecham. It was a city, an Italian city as well as a cosmopolitan one, where a great many people wrote, and not all of them were notaries or chancery scribes.^[74]

Although much medieval Roman building cannot be dated and, because of that, seems timeless, some major Roman monuments speak quite firmly in describing not just what the thirteenth century saw but what it built (and what it borrowed from the past as well as from Venice and the East). They also, in spite of the destruction of almost all of the Vatican and Lateran, give some real sense of the scale and quality and, in its way, classical dignity of particularly late thirteenth-century Roman civilization. Its greatness is clear at Santa Maria Maggiore. There, before its apse mosaic, even Gregorovius, who had a great many at least superficially unflattering things to say about the visual quality of papal Rome, was overwhelmed. He wrote: "The mosaic fills the building with a solemn golden splendour that is more than earthly. When illumined by the sunlight falling through the purple curtains, it reminds us of that glowing heaven, bathed in whose glories Dante saw SS. Bernard, Francis, Dominic, and Bonaventura. Then the spell of the work seizes us with its radiance like the music of some majestic anthem."^[75] If one sees the apse reflecting the glow of a great ceremony as on the annual August festa when a snow of white petals falls in the basilica, it is hard to react less ecstatically than Gregorovius did—although perhaps with a little less of the color and idiom of "O love, they die, in yon rich sky." The mosaic is a major work on a great scale. It is majestic and, as its sister in the Lateran must once have, it handles with majestic grace different pasts and different sorts of imagery (part copied or revisualized from the old fifth-century mosaic, part new)—the classical frolics in the rivers at its base, the central, then quite modern, coronation of the Virgin, the old saints, and the new friar saints, the vines and birds, and the great winged triumph of supporting angels. The mosaic has portraits of its two patrons, Pope Nicholas IV and Cardinal Giacomo Colonna, and is signed Jacobus Torriti Pictor (Jacopo Torriti). It was presumably begun before Nicholas IV's death in 1292 and was essentially finished before Boniface VIII's war with the Colonna, probably before 1296. It is not the only great mosaic remaining from its period in Rome: on the façade of Santa Maria Maggiore itself are the "Rusuti mosaics"; and there are the Cavallini mosaics in Santa Maria in Trastevere.

Cavallini worked in fresco as well as in mosaic at a time when Roman fresco reached a stunning zenith at, for example, Cistercian Tre

Fontane. At its most frivolously, but not unpleasingly, progressive, Roman painting incorporated Northern Gothic decoration as it did, for example, in canopies over saints at Cavallini's Santa Cecilia in Trastevere. More impressively it recalled, as did contemporary mosaic, old Roman style and matter. In brilliant and sophisticatedly employed hues it presented (and presents) to its viewer the natural limbs of men and animals moving in a visually understood nature. To the monks working in the fields of Tre Fontane, their painter, at the end of the century, presented his didactic series of upper storey frescos, with the ages of man, the senses, and biblical and moral exempla, in forms like those of a real, although bright, eagle teaching a real eaglet to fly and a real fisherman (remembering probably calendar Februarys) fishing for real fish.

Cavallini's own fresco of the Last Judgment (again with a flourish of angels' wings) is still in large part visible in the inner façade of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere. At Santa Cecilia, as at San Paolo before it, the pictorial creativity of Cavallini was joined (in 1293) by the sculptural and architectural creativity of Arnolfo di Cambio. At Santa Cecilia the two were brought together by the taste, imagination, and extravagance of a magnanimous patron, almost surely the French cardinal priest, Jean Cholet. At San Paolo in 1285 Arnolfo had built his first Roman ciborium, the piece of architecture with sculpture which forms a canopy over the high altar and thus over the celebration of the Mass and the Eucharist. The ciborium at San Paolo is, in the words of Julian Gardner, "the first comprehended reflection of French Gothic architecture in the Roman region." The succeeding ciborium at Santa Cecilia, as Gardner has explained, shows both a deeper comprehension of Gothic and a more serious Roman classicism, a combination which is itself one of the distinguishing characteristics of Roman art in the last two decades of the thirteenth century. Emblematic of this combination is the mounted saint (perhaps Tiburzio) who rides from the southwest corner of the Santa Cecilia ciborium's attic storey and whose horse seems to tie together the classical South and the Gothic North.

Arnolfo, although not Roman, was, with his workshop, the great sculptor of late-century Rome. His Roman work begins with the unfinished but tremendously powerful stone Charles of Anjou enthroned on the Capitol. It ends with his commissions from Boniface VIII, particularly for Boniface's sepulchral chapel at Saint Peter's in which the pope's tomb, in Gardner's words, "formed the focal point of an elaborate complex of mosaic, sculpture and wrought iron."^[76] Arnolfo's decades in Rome also produced the presepio figures for the Christmas crib

in Santa Maria Maggiore (where a precious relic of Christ's own crib is preserved) and, almost surely, the Vatican bronze Saint Peter who extends his toe to pilgrims' kisses and advertises the regal enthronement of the key-holding saint. Arnolfo also carved tombs, parts of which remain to stun the viewer with their beauty and power, like the fragments of Cardinal Riccardo Annibaldi's tomb in the Lateran and, above all, the figure of Honorius IV once in Saint Peter's but now in Santa Maria in Aracoeli.

"Conspicuous in Rome are the tombs."^[77] Almost as compelling as Arnolfo's own work is that by an anonymous sculptor who carved the figure of and draperies around Cardinal Ancher Pantaléon (d. 1286) at Santa Prassede. The work of Giovanni di Cosma may be artistically inferior, but it is very visible in Rome; and it presses upon the viewer the three-dimensional reality of thirteenth-century cardinals and cloth (and imagined angels) in Santa Maria sopra Minerva (Guillelmus Durandus, d. 1296), and Santa Maria Maggiore (Consalvus, Gonzalo Hinojosa, d. 1299), in Santa Maria in Aracoeli (Matthew of Aquasparta, d. 1302), and in Santa Balbina (a papal chaplain instead of a cardinal, Stefano Surdi). These serious, substantial images, with their heavy ceremonial shoes and their elegant draperies expose a view of life that could produce real solemnity. They also expose the fact that the curial cardinalate was magnetic to artists as well as to household clerks.

Certainly not all of the work of the late thirteenth century in Rome reached the level of Giotto, Cavallini, and Arnolfo. The pretty little church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, which Boniface VIII's nephew, Cardinal Francesco Caetani, redecorated (and decorated with his family's arms), is a good example of work at a lesser level. Here the derivative Deodato built a Gothicked ciborium in a church for which as for most Roman churches (of which one could argue there were surely enough) a total Gothic rebuilding was out of the question. But even, perhaps particularly, surrounded by the second rate, by Giovanni di Cosma and Deodato, one is aware of the prodigious, heavily patronized, and significant artistic creativity of late thirteenth-century (pre-Avignon) Rome. This activity was accompanied by conventional, repetitive decorative detail, for example, the stars of its spangled ceilings (as in the chapter-house of Tre Fontane and in the cave church off the Nomentana), the frieze of its borders (as in the mosaic panels in Santa Maria Maggiore and Santa Maria in Trastevere and on the old painted ceiling above the simulated consoles at Santa Maria in

Aracoeli), and the shapes of its stylized flowers and decorative pieces of building metal (of both of which good examples survive at Tre Fontane). The ecclesiastical furniture produced by late thirteenth-century creative activity joined the already characteristic aspects of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Roman churches—the constantly cosmatesque floors with their changingly shaped pieces; the archpriests' or bishops' thrones; the twisted (Jerusalem-remembering) paschal candles; the small tufa blocks; the brick campanili.

A great deal of the physical city of thirteenth-century Rome remains. Inside the miserable ring of modern suburbs which surrounds Rome, a few medieval towers still lift themselves. The Caetani fortress in the tomb of Cecilia Metella, although oddly restored, still dominates the Appian. The heart of the city is still commanded by Honorius IV's wall (at least a reworking of it). Although the once arched Corso and the Via di Papa may not, the island still looks in some part itself. The lestruction, or supposed destruction, of 140 towers in the 1250s and he long series of more recent modernizations might not have been expected to leave so much more that is medieval than those familiar jumbled parts, great or small, of hundreds of churches that reach back to, or beyond, the thirteenth century. A bridge, the Nomentano, and a gate, the Porta San Paolo beside the pyramid of Gaius Cestius, remain to show us what bridges and gates looked like. The city within the Aurelian walls, with its disparate but not cleanly divided neighborhoods, once tied together by processions and interlinking property interests, the thirteenth-century city of Saint Peter's men, would seem to survive in many places, but to survive without its men.^[78]

But sometimes the men themselves seem to jump out, or up, at you. Stand in the rear of Santa Maria in Aracoeli, and you see lying amidst the cosmatesque work a flat tomb. From it look up the hands, feet, face, and buttoned clothes of Luca Savelli's man, Matheus Scrinianus, who died in February 1313. He is stylized of course, but men are stylized. He seems more there, more really present, than the cardinals of the sculpted tombs, more to be a co-heir, to have a mother, and perhaps to have held a lean-to with a vineyard in the rione Colonna—less is demanded of him, in keeping the world's order, and he demands less than Ancher or Surdi. He was trying less hard, or less obviously and expensively, to impress. There are other men like Matteo; there is a fragment of one (who died in 1323) now plastered in the corridor wall of a palazzo (number 5) on the Via della Dogana Vecchia (and suspiciously close to Sant'Eustachio). At Santa Prassede

there is a splendid spicer, on the floor between the nave and the right aisle, with shoes like Matteo's, but dressed in the garb of a pilgrim to Compostella, with hat and shell.^[79] The inscription around his watching figure says: "This is the tomb of Giovanni da Montopoli, spicer. What you are, I was. What I am, you will be. Pray for me, sinner, do penance." You pray.