Chapter VI
The Spiritual Family

The thirteenth-century city was lashed together, made a unit, and at the same time divided, broken into faction by the powerful families who lived in and around it. The fact of the Colonna, the Orsini, the Conti, the Savelli, the Annibaldi, the Capocci glares from any history of thirteenth-century Rome. The physical quality of their tough familial reality still, through their relics, shapes neighborhoods in Christian-Democratic Rome: the Orsini in their queerly rustic garden hill of Monte Giordano; the Savelli on the Aventine and in the Theater of Marcellus; the Colonna in the area of their palazzo and their churches and their Mausoleum of Augustus; the Conti, the Capocci, and the Annibaldi in those towers around which the modern city moves. Family names and family signs are on alleys and in chapels. No one with an eye or ear can forget their past importance.

But there are families, spiritual ones, against which these carnal families, families of blood and marriage, can be made to seem transitory, almost momentary, aberrations, shuffled with later families, the more recent arrivals, the Borghese, the Odeschalchi, and the rest, and lost or shaded into relative obscurity. These tougher or longer lasting spiritual families (although subject, too, to fluctuation and failure even before the nineteenth-century suppressions) were, like the carnal ones, encrusted with property, subsisting on it and at the same time holding it together and giving it reason—like insects on wood, like relatively invisible insects on very visible wood. But in spiritual families the property was held together at its center, not by the relation between parents and children, uncles and nephews, husbands and wives, brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law, but rather by that between abbot and monk, abbess and nun, monk and monk, clerk and clerk, nun and nun, and by their relations with aspirants and devotees. The saint's cult and religious sentiment replaced the marriage bed and controlled lineage. Some of these religious families came very close to being immortal.

It is not simple modern affectation to talk of monasteries as fam-

ilies. Benedictine monasticism was an heir (as was the thirteenth-century Roman carnal family) of the old Roman family. The abbot was a father. Postulants rejected their natural families for spiritual families in one of the oldest (and sometimes most beautiful and sometimes most tiresome) pieces of repeated medieval rhetoric.

The rejection, in fact, was often incomplete. It will by now have become clear that the Colonna in a house of religion was still a Colonna. The noble families of Rome had a great deal to do with shaping the rich religious life of the thirteenth-century city, including the life of its religious communities. Individual families could dominate religious houses; although few dominated and infiltrated any house so completely as the Colonna came to dominate the house of San Silvestro in Capite.

The number of monasteries and collegiate religious houses in most medieval cities, and certainly in Rome, is startling to modern eyes. There is an early fourteenth-century (almost surely from between 1313 and 1339) list of Roman churches and their attendant religious and clerics which is called the Catalog of Turin (again, because it is deposited in the National Library in Turin).^[1] The list seems to have been composed by or for the "Roman Fraternity," the association of resident Roman clergy, a presumably knowledgeable group, so that, although there is no necessity to believe that it is perfectly accurate, there is no reason to believe that it is seriously inaccurate. The list is not quite of the period of this book; it was put together after the pope's withdrawal to Avignon. There are in it some additions to, as well as some lamented decay from (the reason, perhaps, for the list), the list that would have been composed in 1300. It seems safe, however, to assume that the Catalog is a fair outline of the religious settlement of Rome around the year 1300—again after a few decades of the lamented decay, due probably in large part to papal absence. In conclusion the Catalog sums up its findings: there were 414 churches in Rome; of these twenty-eight had houses of religious men or monks, and eighteen had houses of nuns. Twenty-five had hospitals. There were the churches of cardinals and papal chapels; and there were twenty-one collegiate chapels of three, four, five, or six canons. In all the churches there were 785 secular clerks, 317 men who were members of religious orders, eight abbots, 126 monks, and 470 nuns. With miscellaneous additions, 1,803 men and women of religion (excluding recluses) were to be found in Rome, probably five percent of the total population and a considerably higher percent of the adult population.

The entire city of Rome was divided by the fraternity into three

general divisions (Holy Apostles, Saints Cosmas and Damian, Saint Thomas), and these were divided, perhaps less formally, into regions of parishes and neighborhoods. The church which was the seat of one of the general divisions, San Tommaso dei Cenci, was called San Tommaso de fraternitate. San Tommaso is now never open, but a modern photograph shows that it contains a roughly incised stone which records its consecration by a cardinal with attendant bishops and its being indulgenced in 1243; the church was at least modestly active and appreciated in the thirteenth century. The fraternity itself was ruled over by rectors. A canon of Santa Maria in Trastevere, for example, was one at about the time of the composition of the Catalog, and a list of ten rectors survives from 1212. As a body, the clergy was sufficiently coherent to engage in legal dispute, as it did under Alexander IV with the basilica of Saint Peter's. Less formally, one would talk about "the Roman clergy," or "the clergy of Rome" assembled, for example, on the steps of the Capitol, as a 1266 document did and went on to enumerate: the prior and three Dominicans, the lector and many Augustinian hermits, and brothers of San Giacomo in Septimiano, many canons of Santa Maria Nova and the Lateran, many others, including named friars—a concept "the clergy of Rome" and very "virtual" representation.^[2]

In any neighborhood the cluster of resident religious was noticeable, sometimes in relative isolation, surrounded by vineyards and towers and other religious houses as on the Aventine, sometimes in the thick stew of the city, as in the Campo Marzio. The neighborhood of Santa Maria in Trastevere in a good example. It held a number of collegiate and religious churches. Santa Maria itself, besides its cardinal priest, had twelve canons (although one need not assume that all resided nearby). San Crisogono, a little to the east and closer to the river, had eight clerks besides its cardinal priest. San Callisto, just to the southeast of Santa Maria, had four clerks. A little farther to the east, San Cosimato had thirty-six Claresses and two friars minor; and up the hill (by the time of the Catalog) San Pietro in Montorio had eight brothers of the order of Peter of Morrone (Celestine V). Outside the gate, San Pancrazio had thirty-five Cistercian nuns. San Bartolomeo on the island had five clerks. In southeastern Trastevere, in the Ripa, San Francesco had fifteen friars, and Santa Cecilia, besides its cardinal priest, had ten canons. This was a neighborhood thick with clusters of friars, nuns, and secular clergy, but not of monks. This last absence is in part a Trastevere and a fourteenth-century accident; on the Aventine and Celian things still looked different, with monks at San Saba, Santa

Prisca, San Gregorio, and Premonstratensian canons at Sant' Alessio—monks, perhaps, required space. But also, on the whole, by the beginning of the fourteenth century, the less formal and restricting, and expensive, colleges of clerks, the more enthusiastic houses of friars, and the women's houses were more widespread, scattered more thickly, in Rome, than were the great old houses of monks. Still, the monks and their houses set the formal patterns for the others. They were at the heart of the old residual religious expression.

What was a Roman monastery? Saint Paul's outside the Walls (and once across a creek and by the river) remains to answer the questioner. It remains, admittedly, in strange condition. The great old basilica, rich with its ancient treasures, in size the second church in Rome, was burned and almost totally destroyed on a July night (between the fifteenth and sixteenth) in 1823 (as, in the familiar, dramatic story, Pius VII, who loved the church, lay dying and untold in the Quirinal).^[3] The basilica was rebuilt and reconsecrated: Gregory XVI consecrated the transept in 1840, and Pius IX the basilica in 1854; the atrium was added later. Of the huge church little, beyond approximate dimension, that remains is actually medieval. But the modern church, except in its sense of columned vastness, is so meticulously fatuous that it does little to divert the eye from that which is in fact medieval. The paschal candle, the remnant mosaic, the ciborium, and the cloister are vibrant cynosures within a vague linedrawing ecclesiastical sketch which itself gives, again, only a sense of line. At the head of the nave just to the east of the confessio where lies (it is piously believed) the body of the great Saint Paul (who was martyred nearby), before honorius III's mosaics (for which the pope summoned mosaicists from Venice), stands the thirteenth-century ciborium, or altar canopy. It is an Arnolfo di Cambio ciborium, done it says with the help of Pietro his assistant (the names Pietro Oderisi and Pietro Cavallini have been suggested without particular conviction), a collaborative work, completed in 1285, and suggestively, as in the case of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, closely connected with important Cavallini frescos (in this case lost).^[4]

The ciborium seen casually, at first, from the distance, can seem peekily frail and fussily insignificant. Watched, even from the distance, it grows impressive and aggressive and powerful. Seen close, with some patience and time, the ciborium becomes a fantastic work, capable of holding forever some part of the viewer's imagination. It encases its altar as finely as (but at greater distance than) a shell an egg. It is, though, a shell that opens in roses and bursts into pinnacle. At its inner corners, where vault springs from column, are attendant angels.

From the two western corners the angels hang, head down toward the altar, censing. The surprise and agitation of their movement, these visually, humanly articulate angels, is echoed in the twisted leaves, perhaps windblown, of one of the eastern ciborium capitals—leaves, some of them, very naturalistic after the late thirteenth-century style—and also in the twisted bodies of other angles who hold on the four sides the ciborium roses. In the four corners, on the outside of the ciborium, with their backs to the interior angels, stand men identified as Peter, Paul, Luke, and Benedict; and in bas-relief across the ogives from each other are, north and south, Adam and Eve in shame and Cain and Abel sacrificing. To the east are two figures called Constantine and Theodosius (a Biblical, imperial, monastic medley) and to the west, the abbot Bartolomeo offers a tabernacle to Saint Paul, for it was Bartolomeo who had the ciborium built here, fifteen years before the Jubilee when the famous coins would be raked at almost exactly this spot.

South from the thirteenth-century ciborium and mosaic, and outside, are the thirteenth-century cloisters. The cloisters (a gift, it would seem, from Cardinal Pietro Capuano of Amalfi) were completed under Abbot Giovanni before the year 1214. They were in part the work of Vassalletto who was also responsible for the similar and equally, or almost equally, beautiful cloisters at Saint John Lateran. The two sets of Vassalletto cloisters, like the two Arnolfo ciboria, help define (and in part, with them, chronologically, the beginning and the end) thirteenth-century Roman style. The Saint Paul's cloisters make a richly encased small formal garden (at least now), surrounded by its rows of double columns twisted after the manner of the literarily remembered temple at Jerusalem and encrusted with jewellike tesserae. (Early thirteenth-century surface seems hardly to have been able to resist tesserae.)

It is still possible to visualize the monks gathered there on a spring morning, perhaps on the feast of the Annunciation, March 25—the sun catching them in the cloister's northwest corner, the huge church behind them, they themselves safe, warm, and refreshed by the enclosed beauty, in their precious little coffer of a cloister, twisted and decorated, but clearly defined. On the feast of the Annunciation the countryside bursts with the season: the ground is white with daisies; the trees are turning green; the sun is strong but fitful; and the wind is strong and gusty. From the strong winds, in the strong sun, the monks could shelter in their cloister. There were, in the early fourteenth century, according to the Catalog of Turin, forty of them, if one

counted also those monks stationed in outlying manors and holdings. With this crowded claustral prettiness clearly in mind one should complicate Saint Paul's tone by remembering the evidence which Nicola of the City, a monk of Saint Paul's, gave at Boniface VIII's posthumous trial. Four monks had come to Boniface to denounce their abbot, Gauberto, as a heretic, accused even by the inquisitor Simone da Tarquinia; and Boniface had sent them away saying, "You are idiots; you know nothing." The testimony hardly admits the possibility of the constant harmony at Saint Paul's which a spring day urges one to re-create. The repeatedly reported, heavy Saint Paul's debts—involved, no doubt with its building—although not unusual for a thirteenth-century monastery, must sometimes, too, have darkened the sun.^[5]

Fortunately, two major documents survive from thirteenth-century Saint Paul's. They form a pleasing complement to the church's two major thirteenth-century architectural remains. One is approximately contemporary with the cloisters and one with the ciborium. With the earlier document, from May 1218, Honorius III took the abbey under his protection and confirmed the privileges which Innocent III had granted the monastery.^[6] These privileges included the abbot's right to his miter and his sandals, his right to bless, to choose ordaining bishops, and to be elected—his rights to a peacock's tail of showy and sometimes profitable honors; but privilege in this sense meant particularly the right to one's sources of income (although these sources were often, even usually, entangled with more spiritual or at least jurisdictional rights).

Honorius III's privilege starts with a central point: the monastic order, after the rule of Saint Benedict, should always be observed in the place of Saint Paul's. The privilege moves, eventually, to its enumeration of Saint Paul's holdings, going out from "the place itself, in which is located the most sacred monastery in which the holy body of the celebrated saint rests, and its borgo " and its mills and appurtenances, to holdings in Rome—the churches of Santi Sergio e Bacco in Suburra and San Nicola de Formis, rights to fish in the river at the Marmorata, other sources of income—to Ostia—the church of Santa Maria, saltpans, one-half of one pond and one-third of another—out to the Alban hills (to Albano and Ariccia), out the Nomentana, north and east to Terni, Todi, Amiterno, Civita Castellana, south to Velletri and Anagni. Saint Paul's was, and importantly so, a great network of properties, houses and towers, offerings to altars, villages, vineyards, and olive groves—a complex of receivable rents. Carlyle was absurdly mistaken in despising talk of carucates and charters in the description of a

monastery—they were monastic reality. What was a Roman monastery? It was a holder of properties. It is not the only answer, but it is an essential one.

A Roman monastery was always an owner of Roman property from which it got rents in both money and kind. But a Roman monastery was also, probably without any exceptions, an owner of property in and around provincial towns, particularly, but not only, in Lazio. As the owner of a hospital in Amelia, a house in Anagni, or mills in Tarquinia, the monastery of Saint Paul's played in specific instances a universal role; and it was a role integral to the very being of a thirteenth-century Roman monastery. The Honorius III privilege thus exposes Saint Paul's the great landlord; it also shows the vicar of Christ protecting Saint Paul's in this role.

The 1218 document reveals the great web of property stretching out from the monastery, attached to it, and supporting it, but in many ways external to it. The document from the other end of the century, from December 1287, two years after the completion of the ciborium, reveals the monastery's interior.^[7] Honorius IV had committed to Peregrino, bishop of Oviedo, and Paparono, bishop of Spoleto, the job of visiting and correcting the monastery of Saint Paul's. The two bishops, having examined the place, produced for it a set of constitutions. The constitutions do not of course describe the whole internal workings of the monastery; they speak only of those things about which the bishops found it advisable to say something constructive, about areas of laxity or areas of importance. The initial ordinance of the constitutions is in some ways its most central clause, because it deals with the old essence of monasteries—their round of liturgical prayer. The sacristan is ordered to provide sufficient artificial light for reading in the choir whenever it should prove necessary. This provision is central, but, except for its concern with expenditure, not all representative of the whole body of the constitutions.

What is characteristic of the statutes is the emphasis on the well-ordered communal life, in which an interest in propriety and modesty is combined with an interest in the welfare of the individual, fairness, economy, and, to a certain extent, charity. The concern with the monks' habits is a fair example of the tone of the statutes. Eleve lire (of the senate) were to be spent on the habits of each monk each year. On a certain day the cloth for all the habits was to be bought, all of the same value and color; the cloth bought should not exceed in value ten soldi the braccio . The habits should be conventional and conservative. Monks should not wander out of the monastery to get their own habits,

but rather the dean, joined by two or three others, should go out and bring back the cloth. The habits of obedientiaries, the monastery's officers, should not be of different color or better quality than those of the cloister monks. Old habits were to be given to the poor, unless there happened to be some among the monks who really needed them. If, by chance, the old habits were sold, the dean was bound to notify the convent of the price they had brought, and he was bound to use the money for the monastery's needs.

The constitutions are concerned with the state of the infirmary, an interesting office in the thirteenth century. This particular infirmary was on the advancing border of the malarial countryside south of Rome, so that it must have been important as a house for the sick. The infirmary was, quite beyond this, the office in many thirteenth-century monasteries where monastic restrictions on the eating of meat were evaded. Although there was a clear prohibition in the rule against the eating of meat, except for monks who were sick, many thirteenth-century monks, well and of full appetite, wanted their meat. A way of getting it to them was being worked out between the promulgation of Innocent III's renewed prohibition (Quum ad monasterium ) of 1202 and Benedict XII's considerable, in this matter, relaxation of the rule (Summi Magistri ) of 1336. Benedict XII permitted and regulated one of the ingenious evasions that carnivorous monks had evolved.^[8] (There were several which allowed them their desire, at least occasionally, without actually staining the monastic refectory with blood-gravy: a second dining hall, or misericord, for merciful eating; eating with the abbot; eating with the sick.) Benedict permitted the healthy, in relays, to join the sick to eat meat in the infirmary, and as a corollary permitted half the monks of a monastery to be absent from refectory meals at a given time. It is thus not surprising to find the infirmary prominent in monastic ordinances drawn up during the course of this development.

At Saint Paul's it was demanded that the infirmarian should be a fit and proper person from the monastery, appointed by the abbot with the consent of the convent. If his carefully audited income (controlled in a semiannual public accounting) should prove inadequate, other income was to be diverted to the infirmary. (A special statute deals with the problem of inflation and deflation so that the sums provided would be adjusted to the real not the nominal value of 1287.) If money was left over from the budget for medicines it was to be distributed for petty necessities. Dying monks were to leave their habits to the infirmary.

The cellarer and his Saturday accounts for the buying of the week's wood, garbanzo beans (chick peas), salt, pepper, saffron and other necessities were regulated. The diet, which the cellarer's purchases imply, sounds more palatable, even luxurious, when to it is added the diet implied by the statement that, although during abbatial vacancies business and change were to be restricted and waste avoided, the monks could eat things that were then given to them: chickens, hares, kids, wild boar, goats, and other meat. This diet was not to be consumed without thought for the poor. Two containers were to be placed in the refectory in which leftovers of food and wine from the monks' meals were to be put and saved for the poor; and the containers were never to be used for any other business. Presumably this arrangement was supervised by the lay brothers, or conversi, who alone were to serve in the kitchen.

The statutes also provided in a conventional way against the corruption which might come from monks' staying too long and improperly accompanied outside the monastery's walls and its communal atmosphere. All monks and obedientiaries and guardians of monastic properties were, if they possibly could, to live within the cloister, to return there after their day's work. If they could not return nightly, they were to live by twos or more. They were not to remain in any external administration more than a year at a time; other monks were to take their places so that they could return to the monastery. When they slept outside the monastery, two monks were to sleep in the same chamber, with no gaping space between their beds. (No woman was to enter any house or office of monks or abbot.)

Considerable space is devoted to punishment in the statutes. Lawless obedientiaries were to fast or to be deprived of office, some never to reassume it. Any monk or lay brother who conspired against the abbot or another monk was to spend two years in the monastery prison, the first year on bread and water, the second on bread and wine and beans or olives (unless the abbot granted a dispensation on grounds of health). At the end of the two years, if it seemed wise to the monks, the prisoner was to be expelled to another house of the order, if not, if he was to stay at Saint Paul's, he was to fast for two more years on bread and water on Saturdays and to be disciplined according to the magnitude of his crime. He was to have no voice in chapter or administration, and to take the last seat in choir and refectory for the whole of his life (or presumably until his sins were surpassed). Still, the accused monk or administrator was to be protected. No monk, on pain of excommunication to those who imprisoned him, was to be put in jail

or gravely punished unless his crimes were notorious and manifest or he had legitimately confessed or been convicted. (There is a little, a very little, air of Magna Carta in the close, conventional community.) Monks who ought to be jailed, moreover, were to be jailed in the monastery's own jail not farmed out. The jailbreaker was excommunicated ipso facto .

At the other end of the scale there was concern for learning, in a very mild sense of the word. The abbot was to provide a learned master, either secular or religious, to teach the monks some grammar. Illiterates and idiots (pace Boniface VIII) were not to be admitted to the community.

The abbot was bound to listen patiently to anything any monk felt it was important for him to say. The abbot was not himself to hold the abbey's seal. It was to be committed to keepers who would use it only with the convent's consent. The abbot was not, even with the consent of the abbey, free to grant away pensions. At an abbot's death an immediate inventory of his goods was to be taken so that his whole property could be presented to the new abbot, except his clothes, which could be given to the poor, and his bed, which could remain in the infirmary. His seal was to be broken.

The forty monks of Saint Paul's with their privileges and restrictions, their huge church, their pretty ciborium and cloister, made an abbey. It was a complex piece of property and of ordered relationships, a thing of vestments, of jail and infirmary, of pots of second-hand food for the poor. It aspired to (or it was hoped by others that it would aspire to) a conventional, habitual, prayerful, communal life of moderation in which the poor were remembered, literacy was maintained, and sex (and widely separated beds) avoided. The abbey was meant to maintain and order properly its income and expenditure. This large and slightly rustic example of a Roman Benedictine house maintained its cult—the important cult of Paul—around its relics. It was the sort of house to which smaller urban Benedictine houses like San Cosimato or San Silvestro in Capite might, in the early thirteenth century, have looked with envy—feeling that with sufficient income and numbers of postulants, and perhaps more imposing relics, they might approach its stature. Except for the abbot's supposed heresy and his enemies (and an effort at externally imposed reform thought to be overly harsh even by Innocent III), there is no evidence to suggest (unless one finds fresh conviction in its sculpture) that there was any sort of spiritual enthusiasm at Saint Paul's in the thirteenth century.

Saint Paul's shows no signs of enthusiasm. In this it is like most

other old, Italian, and, certainly, Roman monasteries. Their aspirations, when they are at all noticeable, were to decency and order. But what was true of the older monasteries was not at all true of the church, in its broader sense, as a whole. The thirteenth-century Italian church at its most extravagant peaks of shrill spirituality is the church of Margaret of Cortona and even of Angela of Foligno. Angela was born just before the middle of the century (slightly after Margaret).^[9] She came from one of those prosperous urban families which seem particularly characteristic of the little cities of mid-century Italy, and which seem to have been prolific, and naturally so, in producing saints who, joyously and with extreme expression, renounced their riches. Before Angela died in 1309 she had been wife and orphaned, childless widow. But happily so, although with some grief too, because, that she might follow the path of the spirit, she said, she had prayed God, Who did, to take from her the distractions of mother, husband, and children. (She stood naked of close relatives on the bare ground.) She traveled to Rome and prayed to Peter for true poverty. She walked with the Holy Ghost through the beautiful Umbrian countryside between Spello and Assisi; and He told her that He loved her better than anyone else in the Vale of Spoleto. Angela "burned" with the love of God. She was an extreme case, but the country which sustained her produced many gentler variants of her crazed enthusiasm—they swarmed like swallows in a Roman spring. Some of them were eventually considered heretics and some saints. Some can seem horrible as she herself can; some were as glorious and beautiful as (as Dante said) the sun. If their enthusiasm had a geographical center it was Italian Umbria, but it touched all of western Europe, and even, and variously (as Margherita Colonna and Celestine V testify), the jaded heart of western Europe, Rome.

To understand thirteenth-century enthusiasm, to transcend its natural limitations and see what in the imagination, in perfection, it could seem, one must look at Francis. To look at him, the most Christlike of Western saints, always brings pleasure, the experience of still palpable joy. It is also an invigorating historical experience. With him one has in hand an intricately informative but explosive key to the understanding of the substance of the thirteenth century. And one does not know which of the fragments that form our memory of him are factually exact about him. The sensation of Francis was so violent, perhaps, during and just after his life that his more hesitant followers who became his apologists and biographers seem to have been confused, seem to have been forced in their fallibility to screen, if unintentionally, from

human eyes the real Francis, to hide him behind their variously conventionalizing biographies, and also behind their own more, but variously, conventional, following lives, and sometimes to stylize him into an ideologue. Much of the narrative material from which a biography of Francis must be built is, in fact, so inextricably shuffled and confused that it can probably never be properly disentangled.^[10] Still a real man, although an extraordinary one, and perhaps a slightly different one for each reader, is irrepressibly present. One can say something more perhaps from the remembered stories of his close companions, written down two decades after his death, now carefully disentangled from surrounding material. One can see Francis, if in fragment, fairly clearly: Francis at the Portiuncula, at the last cell behind the house, next to the garden hedge, where the gardener had lived when he was alive, going by the fig tree near the cell, reaching to the cicada on the branch, saying "Come to me, my sister cicada," and "Sing, my sister cicada," an hour of singing then the placing of the little sister back on the fig tree, eight days, then freedom for the cicada and freedom from vainglory for Francis—ideas, faith, charity, religion, emotion, all intellectually muted, acted out, and twisted in sound and touch around the natural reality of the fig's branch.^[11]

For Francis knowledge was action. To know him one must see him kissing the leper, talking to the birds, driving the friars from their house in Bologna, surprising at their Christmas feasting the friars of Rieti, begging, eating grapes so that a sick friar would eat them, sick and wanting parsley in the evening, asking for Roman marzipan, making his Testament, greeting with joy his Sister Death. He must be seen keeping the morrow's vegetables from being soaked in hot water that no thought be taken for the morrow. He was, and it is crucial to see this in order to understand him at all, a man who believed literally in the message of Christ's life, believed in acting it out again physically, without too much worry about the study of texts, without the hindering "bag" of learning. Francis built at Greccio a real Christmas presepio with living animals. "He taught by example and by acted parables. . . ."^[12] He was a tactile and visible saint who loved God in the sun and the larks that flew, and who himself left stunned for their lives those men and women who had seen him, heard him preach, touched his clothes in the crowded square at Bologna. (Federigo Visconti, a distinguished archbishop of Pisa, member of a powerful family, friend to the world's great, could remember all his life the time in his youth when he and Francis were in the same Bologna piazza.) Francis's charisma was tactile and visual and full of wild joy.

Francis was a romantic. Quite literally, as has been brilliantly demonstrated, his life after Christ acted out the principles enshrined in medieval romance, the popular literature of his youth—"knights of the round table," the Emperor Charles, Roland and Oliver, and all the paladins. The personifications with which he surrounded himself—Sister Death—are very close to the allegorical figures of the enchanted forests. Most familiarly his Lady, the Lady Poverty, is the inverted figure of the Fair Lady of romance. His heroic acts—kissing the leper—are the inverted acts of heroism of the romantic hero (or, if the hero is Lancelot and the lady is Guinevere and the poet Chrétien, the inversion precedes the translation, and Francis is the act to the word in literally spiritual terms).^[13] To the more usual romance Francis is a deflection, but, in the retained idiom, about as sharp as "Auccasin and Nicolette."

Francis was born in about 1182 if not to riches at least to the relatively heavy and obvious wealth of an Assisi merchant's family. After his young conversion he found bourgeois wealth and bourgeois family both cloying and filled with guilt; but, in rejecting both, he retained, as in the case of the romance, their idiom. In the newly obtrusive jingling of money in his era's Italy, Francis worried with property and espoused poverty with constant violence.^[14] He said, "I do not want this skin {rug} over me anymore since through my avarice I did not want brother fire to eat it." Francis practiced at begging with the beggars at Saint Peter's in Rome; and he became a beggar. He would not be a thief, he said once on the way from Siena, and keep for himself clothes that another needed more; they were only a loan. (There is in this a tantalizing suggestion of Aquinas's related, if more arid, view of property—as well as of that of ancient Saint Martin.) Francis, and after him Clare, fought desperately against the forces of gift-bearing, conventional, embarrassed society, fought to keep the poverty of their orders absolute and tangible (but the lilies of the field are an affront to men in houses).^[15]

Preoccupation with poverty was a personal characteristic of Francis's, and in him it found a sort of Christian perfection. But it was also (and naturally in the obtrusive jingling) a preoccupation of his age and country. There was a current taste not only for extreme wealth and extreme poverty but for sensing and viewing the contrast between the two—between the begging Franciscans and the cardinals at their rich dinners in close juxtaposition to each other. "Lazarus and Dives" was a contemporary theme in painting; and the contrast seems to have been savored by real-life Dives rather in the way that in the fifteenth-

century North the living savored viewing the sculpted dead.^[16] Beyond being a stimulating and also reassuring sensation it gave some sense of sanctity to the sensation seeker.

A case in point is that of the Blessed Rainaldo, bishop of Nocera Umbra, who died in 1222, four years before Francis's own death.^[17] Rainaldo, in what he considered his compassion, took a little orphan pauper to raise in the episcopal palace. The boy was taught everyday before dinner to come to the bishop and then to each of his guests to beg from them and say, "For the love of God and the Blessed Virgin Mary, give alms to me a little pauper"; and thus, his holy legend goes, the saintly man kept alive the memory of Christ in his poor. This praised action of Rainaldo is surely related to that in rich and powerful men like Cardinal Ugolino (who became Gregory IX) which caused them to smile on Francis and his followers and to be pleased with their existence. It is a sentiment both conflicting with, and in a complicated way, complementary to, that which caused them, the rich and the powerful to quench the blazing poverty which sometimes seemed to threaten them (to threaten particularly their view of themselves), not merely to make it rich with gifts but also to discourage its existence.

Francis's poverty both met a taste and threatened the security of his own time; in both these ways it heightened and extended and symbolized existing or already potential tastes and fears and tensions. In this and other ways Francis was a phenomenon connected specifically with his own time. His literalness, externalness, both in his taste for action and in his appreciation of the visible, the outsides of things, was certainly related to a turning of sensitive and intelligent men's attentions to the actual nature of observable external forms. There is a clear bond, although certainly not a direct causal one, between Francis's viewing the outside world, as he moves through his various reported "lives," and Innocent III's proposed remedies for an always ailing church in his great council of 1215. For Innocent III thought was action too.

For both Innocent and Francis thought was also moral action. In this (in one case consciously and in one case not) they echoed the ideas taught by great teachers at Paris, the center of the intellectual world, at the turn of the century. Their Italian morality was clearly and closely connected with the practical morality, the pastoral theology, of Peter the Chanter and his circle.^[18]

Francis is thus in part explicable as a product of his time; he answered its needs and threatened its fears. He was the essence of its most

revisionist manner of perceiving. But his genius (and it was an intellectual, although not academic, genius with its superb understanding of the human psyche) formed the answer to temporal needs into something quite extraordinary, too attractive and too threatening to be borne. The whole succeeding century can be seen as an answer to him, an effort to emulate and at the same time to repress. Sometimes the reactions are joined—as in the building of the heavily materialistic basilica at Assisi, the weight and cost of which make sure (in irresistible image) that Francis is dead beneath it, or as in the career of Saint Bonaventura, in its spiritual and intellectual abstraction (not without beautiful paradox), its movement to contemplation.^[19] In the course of the century Francis became pious allegory, acceptable, fanciful, and relatively safe; his memory could be carried, at times, like a sweetly scented or lightly colored piece of cloth to distinguish the men of his order from those of other orders—although it never lost its potential revolutionary danger, its power to incite extremists or to elevate the lives of quite ordinary men. Submission to clerical power had been a central theme in Francis's teaching, and reverence for the Eucharist, the function of priestly office, but so had the consideration of office as a sort of property. There must always have been in some papal circles a nervous, haunting sense that Francis's possibly Christlike rejection of office was a threat; there must too have been queer, subconscious reactions to Francis's having bridged so beautifully what almost seems the natural chasm between morality and religion.

The essential connection between Francis and thirteenth-century Rome is that the ideas and people connected with him dominated movement in the religion both of the city and of the world. Franciscan persuasions presented themselves both to popes and to people (and held up the Lateran); they moved into monastic cloisters and even threatened religion's sleep in monasteries like Saint Paul's—although perhaps never in Saint Paul's itself. But Francis and Rome are also more personally, if less importantly, connected through the saint's having come to the city and spent some time there.

He came at the end of the first decade of the century for Innocent iii's approval of the friars' way of life. It is said that he stayed in the hospice of San Biagio in Trastevere, near the Porta Portese by what was by then the old Jewish cemetery. His cell exists still (it is piously believed) in what became San Francesco a Ripa, and also the stone on which he lay his head. The room is now dominated (insofar as it is not dominated by a baroque machine in which relics revolve) by a thirteenth-century portrait of Francis, attributed to Margaritone d'Arezzo,

and according to tradition commissioned by Giacomina de' Settesoli. Giacomina, it will be remembered, was Francis's Roman patrician disciple who, according to the "Mirror of Perfection" (after the writings of the companions), made him marzipan, after the Roman recipe and then called mostaccioli or mortariolum , for which he had asked as he lay dying ("She made it for me many times when I was at Rome")—marzipan made perhaps (one may at least think romantically) from a recipe from the kitchen of the family ruin (acquired in 1145) where old Cencio Frangipane had kept a leopard as a symbol of a quite recent but very different sort of Frangipane strength. Marzipan ties Francis to Rome as an orange tree at Santa Sabina does Dominic, and more credibly.^[20]

One of the ways in which the idealized Saint Francis was brought to Rome, and specifically to Roman monasteries, was simple and direct—much simpler, in fact, and more direct than really effective. Thirteenth-century popes, as guardians of the entire church, felt strongly the responsibility for maintaining in good order houses of religion, places especially devoted to the service of God. Innocent iii, Honorius iii, and Gregory ix were all distressed by the presence within the community of monastic houses, particularly old Benedictine houses, in various states of physical and spiritual decay. Gregory ix stirred up Roman nunneries; Innocent iii, and Honorius iii after him, hoped that the Benedictines could be reorganized rather after the fashion of the Cistercians, so that with connections between individual houses, with chapters and visitations, a real, constitutional order might develop. They hoped that this in turn might brace the slipping minor houses and keep them up to the standards of the better houses of the order. In Italy these popes and their successors went further. They not infrequently replaced the Benedictines in decayed monasteries with religious from orders which they considered reforming or reformed, who would, at least incidentally, again attract gifts to their churches and again "spiritualize" the monastery's existence as a nexus of property. The popes particularly favored the Cistercians and the Claresses or Minoresses, two female branches of the Franciscan order. To Rome for which (as the repeated harangues of papal letters tell us) they had a particular responsibility, the popes brought Franciscan women.^[21]

Saint Clare, from whom the Franciscan order or orders for women sprang, was in her more secluded way almost as extraordinary a figure as Francis. She was probably born at Assisi in about 1194. When she was seventeen or eighteen, in the lent of 1212, she heard Francis, "the herald of the Great King," preaching in Assisi. She met Francis several

times. On Palm Sunday, in full spring finery, she went to Mass at San Rufino, the Duomo (in part, and beautiful part, now as it was then); that night she fled into religion. After a series of flights and alarms in which she made a clear point of the rejection of earthly family (as Francis had and as he demanded of his own followers), but in which she was joined by her younger sister, and during which she was sheltered by Benedictines, Clare was settled by Francis at the chapel of San Damiano. Like Francis she drew followers, hers to San Damiano, and "she taught her sisters to forget their families, their home, and their country, that they might please Christ."^[22]

From the beginning, Clare, like Francis, was devoted to the most absolute conceivable poverty which limited possession to that which was needed for immediate and minimal subsistence. But although Clare encouraged Francis to active rather than secluded contemplation, her own house became one of strict enclosure (because women were not men). At first the nuns seem to have tried to live by their own labor, then by begging, but, in their essential enclosure, begging aided by attendant friars. Clare, like Francis, was full of Christian joy and courage, of optimism. She believed that God would help her, insofar as she needed help and insofar as it was to her spiritual advantage. She was not preoccupied with rules about food and dress (which in real poverty were, after all, absurd), nor was she morbidly afraid of the presence of men (friars) at the house, if they were a help, particularly a spiritual help. Her one great fear seems to have been that her nuns would be forced to give up poverty and accept property; and this fear shows her intelligence and her sense of the way the real world really works. In opposing property she could, if the stories are true, face cardinals as bravely as she could in other circumstances face Saracens. When Cardinal Ugolino said that if her vow stood in her way, that is if it were keeping her from accepting property, he could absolve her, she said, "Holy Father, absolve me from my sins if you will, but I wish not to be absolved from following Jesus Christ."^[23]

Clare's fight for poverty is reflected in the tangled history of the rules of the Claresses and the Minoresses. After an initial "formula" by Saint Francis, Ugolino produced a rule in 1218–1219 which took away any peculiar restrictions to poverty; this rule was followed by Innocent IV's rule of 1247. But in 1253, just before her death, Clare got Innocent IV's approval of her own rule, a rule of real poverty, at least for her own house. This rule, it is said, she kissed many times before she died. Victory seemed hers, and in a way Innocent's. But the French pope Urban IV, a man who has been admired for his shrewd and tough

administrative abilities, while referring to the acts of his Conti predecessors, Ugolino and Alexander IV, defeated Clare after her death.

In 1263 Urban promulgated two separate rules for followers of Clare, for the Damianites as they were generally called, and from his rules the nuns of the two Damianite persuasions took their different names—Claresses and Minoresses. Of the two rules, the one for Claresses was the general rule (called the Urbanist rule); that for Minoresses (called the Isabella rule) was designed for the French royal house of Longchamp, founded by Louis IX in 1255 and presided over by his sister (with the future French pope, Martin IV, as guardian). The Isabella rule was later extended to some other houses, the houses in England, the Colonna house in Rome. Besides a difference in tone between the two rules—the Isabella rule seems to be phrased more politely and has perhaps a little of that dreadful sycophantic air with which medieval clerks sometimes disgraced their communications to royal persons not currently excommunicate—there are some differences in the calendar of fasting and communicating, in the wording of the vows: the Claresses, for example, promised that they would observe the rule specifically to Clare as well as to God, the Virgin, Francis, and all the saints; the Minoresses did not. In general, however, the rules (elaborate for dress and fasting) were very similar for the two sets of plainly clad, black-veiled, cord-cinctured, generally enclosed nuns—and most noticeably similar in omitting talk of communal property. Looking back at this development of rule, one of the historians of the Minoresses has said, "Except then for those few houses which followed the practice of St. Clare, the Damianites . . . or Claresses were no more poor than any ordinary Benedictine nuns."^[24] They had been domesticated. They no longer threatened common pious assumptions. They still managed to look, however, in their relative newness, relatively pure, so that they still excited secular enthusiasm, and they attracted the donations that they might now accept. Thus they came to, or stayed in, Rome.

Two of the Roman houses to which Franciscan women came were great keepers of records. They are thus unusually visible both for the time before and after their change of order. They tell what monasteries were, in Rome, and how they were changed by the pressure of Franciscan enthusiasm. Both monasteries, or their places, still exist, although altered in form and without their Franciscans. Both are within the city walls and in very Roman-seeming—though distantly different—parts of Rome. One of the monasteries, San Silvestro in Capite, was at the northern edge of the thickly populated part of the city just a little

east of the Via Lata or the Via Flaminia (now the Corso) as it moved away from the Capitol toward the Porta Flaminia or the Porta del Popolo or, as the gate was called most frequently in San Silvestro documents, the Porta San Valentino. San Silvestro was in the rione Colonna (almost at the border of Campo Marzio) and near the Column of Marcus Aurelius, which it once claimed as its own. The second of these two monasteries, Santi Cosma e Damiano, or San Cosimato, as it is now known and was beginning then to be popularly called, was in Trastevere, south of Santa Maria, the great church of Trastevere, about halfway between it and the city wall, and so, of course, in the huge and unevenly populated rione Trastevere.

San Silvestro in Capite was one of those Roman monasteries which had been built by a papal family on one of its own tenements. In 757 Pope Paul I had succeeded his brother Stephen II to the papacy. It was in their house that the two popes, and particularly Paul, established the church and convent that would constantly honor and protect the relics of saints removed from the catacombs to the safety of the city—and particularly the bodies of the saintly popes Silvester and Stephen.^[25]

The church also received in its dedicatory title the name of Saint Denis perhaps in memory of a Frankish gift and connection. Thus the most regular name of the convent at the beginning of the thirteenth century was probably the monasterium Sanctorum Stephani, Dionisii adque Silvestri quod ponitur cata Pauli (or quod vocatur cata Pauli quondam pape ). But before the beginning of the century a relic more significant even than the two popes had come into the church's possession. The church held, it was, and is, piously believed, the head of one of the greatest of the saints, John the Baptist. In honor of this very special relic it is thought (although the sound cata Pauli ought to be kept in mind) the church's name changed and varied so that it was also called ecclesia Santi Silvestri lo capo de Roma or more regularly Santi Silvestri de capo , or de capitis , or, a little more grammatically, de capite.^[26]

By the thirteenth century the convent can be seen essentially, again, as an event, a continual celebration of its own preservation of two great relics, the body of Saint Silvester and the head of Saint John, with these surrounded by an impressive hoard of other relics, most prominent among them the body of the other pope, Stephen. This continuing celebration is emphasized by a long series of the monastery's documents dealing with their properties. Rent after rent was to be paid on the feast of Saint Silvester (New Year's Eve) or its vigil, or, more

often, on the feast of Saint John in the summertime (June 24). John's importance in the saintly galaxy is obvious. Silvester's importance, one may remember, was due to the significance and success which medieval ecclesiastics were able to see in his dealings with Constantine, as in the narrative frescos of the oratory of Saint Silvester at the church of the Quattro Coronati—repeatedly, in the thirteenth century, a governmental place.

Much of the thirteenth-century church and convent of San Silvestro has disappeared, as has certainly the semirustic air of a place now caught between the central post office and public transport capolinea . There are fragments of the old church outside, and the many-storeyed campanile surmounted by its brazen cock. It at least still pins to earth the old place. The church was drastically modernized by its cardinal (Johann Dietrichstein) at the end of the sixteenth century. Fortunately for antiquarians, as Dietrichstein was modernizing, Cardinal Cesare Baronio, the historian, was antiquing his titular church of Santi Nereo e Achilleo. Baronio got the old pulpit of San Silvestro. One can find it now either there or in neighboring San Cesare, it is not quite certain which. So for a sense of the old interior of San Silestro one can go across Rome to the pleasant, ancient-looking little church near the Baths of Caracalla, surrounded by privet and laurel, by pine, locust, and oleander, and by the roar of traffic. Inside (besides graceful sixteenth-century paintings, Leonine mosaics, talk of Gregory I, and evidence of sixteenth-century archaeology) one finds cosmatesque work that would recall the thirteenth century were it still in San Silvestro.^[27]

In the thirteenth century San Silvestro was, until 1285, a house of Benedictine monks. For it, as for any thirteenth-century monastery, it is seldom possible to establish the exact number of resident monks, although one can establish a minimum number from the names of monks who witnessed and consented to monastic grants; and sometimes the list of consenters does seem to imply that it includes the names of all the monks. In an 1198 list (which does not make this implication) one finds at San Silvestro the abbot, two priests, three deacons, one subdeacon, and three men whose orders are not specified and who therefore were probably not in major orders. There were then at least ten members of this little hierarchical group. In 1247 there were nine, in 1236, 1246, and 1249 eight, and in 1214 and 1269 seven. Often, even from very early in the century, there is evidence of only four or five monks, and occasionally of only three. It is thus not necessary to assume on the basis of the lists of only four monks in the 1280s, alone, that the monastery was then unusually small and de-

crepit. It was always, in the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries, small.^[28]

Except for two peculiar periods, the thirteenth-century Benedictine house was ruled over by an abbot. In the years from 1207 to 1210, Sergio, who had been called abbot in 1205, administered the abbey as "rector" and "administrator"; between 1269 and 1277 (after the translation of Abbot Gregorio to San Gregorio on the Celian and before the preferment of Abbot Matteo, who had been prior of the Sacro Speco in Subiaco) Giovanni di Monticelli presided over the abbey as prior. There were at least ten abbots in the thirteenth century, but of these the last three presided during the abbey's unstable years, 1277–1285. The length of earlier abbacies had varied considerably from that of Giorgio, which, at the end of the 1250s, cannot have lasted as long as four years, to that of Silvestro, who was abbot at least from 1200 to 1244, that is, at least twenty-four years.

This abbot Silvestro, who ruled the abbey for a quarter of a century catches one's attention. Unfortunately he cannot be recovered in biographical detail. He had a nephew who was also named Silvestro and who sometimes accompanied him; and the coincidence of names perhaps suggests a family particularly dedicated to the saint's own church and possibly a family from the immediate neighborhood. Abbot Silvestro himself was a priest of the house by 1218 and the house's chamberlain by 1219; he had been a monk since 1207. Silvestro's long abbacy was supported by the stewardship of Giovanni Muti, a monk by 1217, steward (yconomus ) by 1218 and again from 1226 or 1227 to 1236; by 1243 he had been replaced by Ylperino. At the end of its period of Silverstrine stability, the abbey was relatively full of monks, although shortly afterward, in 1249, it was fighting to recover from serious financial difficulties.^[29]

Silvestro and Giovanni Muti were not the only monks who were long connected with the abbey. Benedetto, for instance, who was prior from at least April 1249 to January 1258, was probably a monk in the abbey by 1228 and surely was one in the 1230s. San Silvestro was an abbey to which one could devote one's life; and the abbots from before the late thirteenth-century period of provisions (from 1277) seem regularly to have been monks of the house. It was not a large but it was a constant community.^[30]

The monks at the abbey's center were surrounded by other Romans attached to them by blood, devotion, occupation, tenure, or proximity. Besides the abbot Silvestro's nephew Silvestro, there was Gottifredo di Monticelli, who appeared as a witness under Prior Giovanni di

Monticelli, perhaps a relative, perhaps a neighbor from the Monticelli in the Regula across Rome by the river. There are oblates like Fra Pietro Ciarfo and Fra Matteo, in 1275, who had given themselves to the monastery. A servant of the monastery, abbatial cooks, officers in charge of houses, and pages or squires of the abbot witness documents along with various other artisans and officials not specifically (or specifically described as) abbatial, porters, taverners, gardeners, a marble worker, warehousemen, and the everpresent shoemakers and scribes.^[31]

The abbey's scribes, the notaries it used, are of special interest. They are visually present in their documents; the dog's head of Graziano's document of 1244; the crossed swords of Nicola Andree's document of 1236; the splendid stemma of Giovanni Berardi; the slovenly "S" of Sanguento; the elaborate monogram of Stefano di Lorenzo; and the curious buglike creatures of a series of notaries, of Angelo, Giovanni Rainaldi, and Giovanni. There is little to indicate that San Silvestro was the sole employer of its own notary, but the convent did use some of its notaries repeatedly so that they must have reckoned the convent among their regular customers. One of them, Castorio, who worked in the 1250s, was on occasion a business agent for the monastery. San Silvestro notaries seem to have been capable but not peculiarly so. They seem not to have kept a cartulary for the monastery, but they sometimes made multiple copies for greater security. San Silvestro's notaries, and its tenants and neighbors who were notaries, are, one will recall, representatives of a major Roman industry.^[32]

San Silvestro was, then, a group of people as well as a celebration of relics; it was also and probably most importantly a collection of property and of rights that were hardly, if at all, distinguishable from property. Its possessions reached far outside the city to Gallese, Sabina, Sutri, Orte, Bassanello, Vitorchiano, Vallerano, Aliano, Palombara—the sort of towns in which a number of Roman religious houses had acquired interests. These holdings were not infrequently densely concentrated: in 1230 the monastery granted away property in Gallese "bounded on all sides by monastery property except that a road passed its head and a ditch its foot."^[33] Closer to Rome, San Silvestro had property outside the Porta Pinciana in the Orte Pisce, or Pisscina, outside the Porta San Pietro near the Vatican at Oliveto, out the Via Tiburtina by the Ponte Mammole, on the Via Salaria at Silvaproba by the river, and, the property with which it dealt most often, its most important cluster of suburban holdings outside the Porta Flaminia, around its church of San Valentino, off the sharp western edge of Monte Parioli, between Rome and the Ponte Milvio. The monastery's

suburban property was outside the city's northern gates—the gates of the monastery's own side of the city. Finally, the monastery held houses and gardens within the city itself; but, as in the country, its holdings were concentrated in specific neighborhoods, in the rione San Lorenzo in Lucina-Campo Marzio, the rione Trevi, and its own rione Colonna. So from itself and the garden against its very wall, the monastery's property spread out to the neighboring rioni in its part of Rome, to areas outside the northern gates, to country towns. The administrative center of this system of properties was the convent cloister and the prior's chamber, its recording heart, where obedientiaries met and transacted business—and heart and extremities depended upon each other.

In what sort of business and property was the monastery involved? A miscellany of example answers. In December 1231, in the piazza at Bassanello, the monastery as one party and two men from Bassanello as the other accepted as their arbiter the podestà of Bassanello to define the division of income and the responsibility for repair (in case of destruction by army or flood) of a mill; and in the same month the podestà rendered a decision.^[34] In January 1261, before the Fonte Sepalis of Viterbo (the great Fonte Grande conventionally dated as having been begun in 1206 and finished in 1279), the steward of the monastery, with the notary Castorio present, granted to Rainucio, the son of Rainucio Carboni of Aliano, for three generations, for one hundred soldi and sixteen denari of Lucca to be paid each year on the feast of Saint Silvester, all the possessions which his late father had held in Aliano.^[35] In January 1258 a man named Pietro di Giovanni granted to a man named Pietro Grasso ("Fat Peter") a part of a salt sluice in the Campo Maggiore in Serpentarola in Annito Maggiore; and the notary Castorio redacted an instrument in which Pietro Grasso promised to give, for each year that he worked the salt, a tub of salt as rent to the monastery.^[36]

Early in 1279 the monastery's church of the Virgin at Cerreto, in the tenement of Castro Flaiano, had no archpriest because of the death of the last incumbent. According to what was then called the custom, the parishioners, as patrons of the church, were summoned at the sound of its bell for making a new archpriest, and, again according to the document, they unanimously conceded their power of election to the great lord Gentile, son of Bertoldo Orsini (himself within the year to become a senator of Rome). Gentile Orsini chose the subdeacon Enrico di Federico Sarraceni as archpriest; proctors were sent to the monks of San Silvestro for their confirmation of the election. The monks con-

firmed and ordered the archpriest's induction; and he swore to give them each year on the feast of Saint Silvester two good hares and two rubbi of grain, and on the feast of Saint Denis ten pair of good fat doves.^[37] In 1191 the monks granted away an olive grove, in the Sabina on the river Cutri and next to land that the abbey of Farfa held, for thirty denari Pavia and one-half barrel of olive oil each year on the feast of Saint Silvester (or by its octave), measuring the barrel at three palms around according to the palm measure on the stone at the gate of the monastery of San Silvestro itself.^[38] The little Roman monastery of San Silvestro helped to manage the estate of central Italy, and for its efforts, and in defense of its rights, it received its pennies, its oil, its hares, its doves, and its salt.

Occasionally a document ties together the monastery's rents and its internal life. In January 1214 the prior Sergio and his monks granted to a man with the Roman name Enea, to work it for nine years, a tenement of arable land outside the Porta San Pietro in the Oliveto next to holdings of San Biagio and Santa Maria in Via Lata. The tenement had previously been granted, in 1198, to Leonardo di Stefano di Paolo di Leone to work, for a promised annual rent of twenty rubbi of grain. In 1214 the monastery extracted from Enea a promise of not only the yearly amount of twenty rubbi (measured according to the rubbio of the monastery) to be brought to the monastery on the feast of the Assumption at Enea's expense, but also each year on the vigil of Saint Silvester's day (the day before the New Year's Eve) a good pig (unum bonum bustum porci—un buon' busto di porco ). The rents, the witnessing abbey cooks, the great feast of the sainted pope, the Christmas festival, the monastery beneath the campanile, all swim together in a savory image.^[39]

The monastery was, in the middle half of the thirteenth century, constantly occupied with its holdings outside the Porta Flaminia, around its church of San Valentino. These lands were the vineyards or wasteland appended to vineyards against the sharp edge of Monte di San Valentino, as that edge of Parioli was then called. These suburban holdings were cultivated by an identifiable community of men and women—sometimes involved with one another as is clear, for example, when in 1278 the tenant Pietro Buccafusca acts as proctor in the sale of his immediate neighbor's land or in 1266 when Gregorio di Cesare does. The constant rent demanded from these holdings, repeated as each tenant alienates his land to another, is one-fourth of the new wine and a canister of grapes at the vintage, as well often as five soldi, initially, for the convent's consent. The tenant was generally pro-

tected by a clause which allowed him a minimal residue of wine, and he was sometimes made to promise that he would give food and drink, as well as a vascatico, to the representative of the monastery who came for the wine. He regularly promised to return, in the conventional phrase, one-half of the value of any precious metal found if it was worth more than twelve denari of the senate. After three years of neglect, his tenement would revert to the monastery.^[40]

The monastery repeatedly tried to return deserted vineyards to production, as when in 1262 it allowed Giacomo Crescentii to alienate to Andrea di Giovanni di Andrea a waste vineyard next to his own vineyard with no rent to go to the abbey for the first four years of Andrea's tenancy so that he might restore the vines (after that Andrea was to return the conventional fourth part). In 1271, in a similar case, the monastery stipulated that if Nicola Musei should sow the deserted vineyard next to his own holding, a fifth part of the produce should come to the monastery. Certainly the monks were not feckless, or not completely feckless, landlords in dealing with their suburban vineyards. They used, moreover, their vineyards as a source of rent in kind, in wine, a constantly necessary commodity, which could help compensate should there be unfavorable fluctuations in the value of the currency of their fixed urban rents.^[41]

The monastery's properties within the city walls were, for the most part, houses or half-houses or huts or cellars, with gardens, or little gardens, behind them and often beside them—and in one case with a piazza in front of it. They were, as we have noticed, at the edges of Rome's heavily populated areas, for example around the churches of San Giovanni Ficocia and Santo Stefano de Arcionibus and close to property, with a monument, of Santa Maria in Campo Marzio (near the fountains Trevi and Tritone). There was also property in the walled country: the monastery was proprietor of what seems to have been a rush house with a garden behind it, on one side of which was the road that went to the "chancellor's garden" and on another a garden.^[42]

The monastery's houses were held by tenants—men, widows, families of heirs—for periods of three generations, nineteen or twenty-nine years, sometimes specifically in perpetuity. With the monastery's consent, for which the tenants paid, the tenants could alienate; and the new tenant accepted the old tenant's obligations to the monastery—normally the payment of a yearly rent on a monastery feast, particularly of Saint John, a yearly rent of something like four denari or pennies of the senate or two denari of Pavia (the currency

maintained in recurring rents even though the sale prices changed to the more regular provisini of the senate as the distance between the value of the two sorts of pennies seems to have increased, to the monastery's advantage, during the thirteenth century). It makes a regular and comprehensible picture.

The monastery's relations with its tenants were not always this simple. Sometimes the monastery, like other landlords, became involved in its tenants' debts or their arrangements of dowry. Sometimes the tenements themselves were of surprising complexity, like a house, with a small garden behind it, surrounded on all sides by abbey property, which the abbey held with Giovanni Mardonis and the heirs of Andrea Mardonis. In 1268 the abbey permitted a tenant to make division of half of the house with a man named Giovanni di Nicola. The abbey got twelve provisini for its consent, and also a promise of four provisini each year on the feast of Saint John. In the next year the abbey can be seen consenting, for two soldi Pavia and a Saint John's rent of two denari Pavia, to the division made by Giovanni di Nicola with Giacomo di Giovanni Tasconis and Mingarda his wife, while Giovanni Mardonis and the heirs of Andrea Mardonis still held the other half undivided. The proprietary structure of San Silvestro's part of the Colonna was, one can see, intricate.^[43]

But the regular action of San Silvestro was simple alienation of property, or the approval of simple alienation by its tenants; and in these simple alienations the abbey's notaries produced a series of sharp, simple snapshots of itself and its city. In September 1199, for example, the abbot Stefano, with a consenting monk, leased to Giovanni Petrioli, for three generations, a house with a small garden in the rione Trevi next to the church of San Giovanni della Ficocia (or Ficoccia or Ficozza) on the present Via de' Maroniti, between the Largo del Tritone and the Via della Panetteria. The house and garden were bounded by the holdings of Romana di Girardo, who held of the church of Sant'Agnese, by the church of San Giovanni, by a public road, and, at the back, by the tenement of the notarial scribe Giovanni Rainaldi. The witnesses include two brothers and the priest of San Giovanni and a Rainucio identified as a porter. The new tenant paid a sum of three soldi Pavia and promised a rent of a penny a year on the feast of Saint John. The document was written by a scribe repeatedly employed by San Silvestro, Stefano di Lorenzo (a quintessentially Roman, diaconal name). In 1246 Scotta, the widow of Pietro di Romano, sold to Matteo Vecclazolo, a mason, or muratore, a pezza of vineyard with half interest in a set of vats outside the Porta Flaminia at the Monte San Valentino,

against the side of the Monte, for seven and one-half lire of the senate and a promise to give the monastery one-fourth of each year's new wine and a canister of grapes each year at the vintage. Abbot Gentile consented to the sale and received five soldi for his consent.^[44]

In March 1250 Abbot Gentile and the convent renewed for nineteen years the lease to Angelo di Gregorio di Pietro Tosi, for himself and as a proctor for his brothers Paolo and Francesco, of a house-lot, with a shed on it and garden behind it and at its side, in the rione San Lorenzo next to a road, with the brothers themselves holding on one side and Giovanni di Giovanni Periculi on two other sides. For the renewal the abbey received two soldi of the senate and a promise of two denari of the senate yearly on the feast of Saint John. The witnesses included Biagio, the abbot's squire or page, his scutifer , Ognissanto, another scutifer , and Giacomo the usher. In October 1270, in the cloister of the monastery, Prior Giovanni and the convent renewed the lease to Angelo Paolo and Francesco, sons of Gregorio di Pietro Tosi, of a tenement this time described as a house with a garden beside and behind it, in San Lorenzo, by a street, and next to tenements of Giovanni di Giovanni Periculi on two sides, and a tenement of their own on another, again for two soldi of the senate (of "good" provisini ) and again two denari on the feast of Saint John. The witnesses to this agreement, written by the notary Carlo, included Agostino, a man described as an agent and procurer. The real names of real people (and their fathers and grandfathers) recur, in real neighborhoods, and in this case in one of remarkable stability.^[45]

These regular activities and gentle economic pleasures of San Silvestro, gentle perhaps to the point of insufficiency, were interrupted in 1285 when Pope Honorius IV cleaned out the monastery and scattered the surviving monks to other houses.^[46] About to be replaced by Minoresses and Colonnas, the days of the Benedictine Benedicts, Silvesters, Stephens, and Johns were over—although, and perhaps significantly, the incumbents of the last few years had the relatively alien names of Gerardo, Sighilnulfo, Angelo, Rainaldo, Leonardo, Pietro, Tommaso, and Giacomo, nothing to indicate a continuing attachment to the ancient saints. Nevertheless, in their last preserved act the Benedictines still formed the center of a little local community; in it, the renewal of the lease of a house in the rione Trevi, they were accompanied by Sisto, priest of Sant'Ippolito (a neighboring church to San Giovanni), by Petruccio, a servant of San Silvestro, and by Paolo, its cook.^[47]

Some of the signs that indicate approaching mortality—or change of hands—are apparent at San Silvestro in the half century

before its fall (although the most important sign, the apparent papal policy of turning small Benedictine houses over to other orders, has nothing specifically to do with San Silvestro). The translation of an abbot to another Roman house, the translation of Gregorio to San Gregorio by Clement IV is one sign. The long period (1269–1277) when the abbey had no abbot, but was ruled by its prior, is another sign. The preferment of a foreign abbot, Matteo from Subiaco, by John XXI in 1277, and Matteo's subsequent removal to Saint Paul's by Nicholas III in 1279 is a double sign. A further one is Martin IV's concern with the abbatial vacancy and election of 1283 and 1284. One sees the dangerous nervous agitation of short abbacies and papal involvement.^[48]

There is an earlier and more basic sort of sign preserved in an act from the year 1249. In that year, on April 27, the abbey alienated an important tenement. The monks listed themselves: Gentile, the abbot, Benedetto, the prior, Stefano, the chamberlain, Gregorio and Stefano and Nicola—all three subdeacons—the acolyte Gregorio, two priests—Placito and Giovanni—and Castorio, their scribe and proctor. They leased away a whole tenement of lands cultivated and uncultivated with the "Cripta Maria," vineyards, and gardens on the Via Tiburtina, east of Rome but on the Roman side of the Ponte Mammolo, to the Count Giovanni Poli (the Conti "heir" to the Poli estates). The tenement was next to one which Giovanni already held, and next to another which belonged to the church of San Lorenzo fuori le mura. For the alienation, the monastery was to receive fifty lire of the senate and a yearly rent of twelve denari and two containers of wax a year, each with an estimated value of twelve denari . Of the fifty lire, four less five soldi were given to Pietro Malabranca for the price of a horse; four lire were used for various necessities of the house, and five soldi were for the refutationibus of the denari . But the bulk of the sale money, thirty lire and twelve lire (and one notes a superficial failure of arithmetic), was used to pay back two loans for which the monastery had pawned belongings. Thirty lire were to go to the archpriest of Santa Maria Rotunda (the Pantheon) to recover the things the monastery had pawned to him: a gilt silver cross, another cross of silver with precious stones, two dorsals, two chasubles, and one cope; twelve lire were for another lender, Antonio, for the recovery of a gospel book, a book of epistles with silver binding-boards, and a red cope. The lease and the arrangements for recovery were recorded in an act drawn up in the curia of Stefano (de Normandis), cardinal deacon of Santa Maria in

Trastevere (1228–1254) and then papal vicar in the city, and before the vicar's vicar. Present were a number of men: Master Nicola of Trastevere; Bartolomeo, abbot of San Teodoro de Trebiano; Master Luca de Babuco; and Master Bartolomeo, medical doctor and chaplain to the cardinal vicar. The formality of this medically attended reordering of San Silvestro's possessions is an indication that the shame of its debt and pawning were publicly known—another danger signal for a small thirteenth-century Benedictine house. The sale also, in a different medium and at a different level, recalls the Annibaldi sale of lands—both houses were faltering, and both sold.^[49]

But in spite of these rather ominous indications of decay, Benedictine San Silvestro also showed signs of vigor even later in its life. In the year 1267, with great ceremony—and, no doubt, silver cross and red cope—the relics of the church (stone from the Holy Sepulchre, a relic of Calvary) were rearranged and made the center of public celebration, as many of them were translated from the chapel of Saint Denis to the new alter erected in honor of Saints Paul and Nicholas.^[50] It is possible of course that this was a last sad effort, this advertisement of relics, to attract veneration and support. Presumably, however, a monastery still this active, inhabited and endowed with precious and venerated relics, might have survived had it not been needed for other purposes, needed to house the followers of a new "saint." Presumably it was in the interest of the "saint," her followers, and her family that Honorius IV, in a surviving letter dated from Santa Sabina on November 2, 1285 could find that San Silvestro, already Minoress, had been vacant through the translation of its abbot to the Benedictine monastery of San Lorenzo fuori le mura, and had not been able easily to reform itself through the efforts of Benedictines. On the dorse of the papal letter, in that space where the name of the person or institution by, or for, whom the letter was procured customarily appears, in contemporary chancery hand appears "Cardinal' de Columpna"—the Cardinal Colonna.^[51]

Margherita Colonna had died in 1280, on, coincidentally, the Eve of Saint Silvester, December 30. Although Margherita had considered herself a follower of Saint Francis, and more particularly of Saint Clare, she had not been in any formal way a Claress or Minoress, nor was her community bound by one of the Franciscan rules. The community had lived together on Monte Prenestino in Colonna territory, women of enthusiastic virtue in the freshness of their vocations gathered around and bound together by the leadership of their saintly young noblewoman

—a princess, if not in name, on a hill, and a hill, too, over which she might have ridden in stately grandeur had she chosen. Margherita's position gave the community the security it needed.

With Margherita dead, things looked less certain, perhaps particularly to her own brothers and the more extended Colonna family. It was very much in their interest to keep her cult alive and clear, and to see that her community sustained itself in order. The nuns themselves, deprived of their protector, asked (at least formally) the aid of the cardinal bishop of Palestrina, Girolamo Masci, the future Nicholas IV, the former minister-general of the Franciscan order, a Colonna man.^[52] The cardinal talked to the pope, who accepted the nuns into the Isabella order of Minoresses, confirmed their elected abbess, Herminia, put them into the Franciscan province of Rome, asked six friars to serve them, and gave them the house of San Silvestro in Capite.

Thus prompted by two cardinals, a Colonna and a Colonna sympathizer, Honorius IV Savelli brought the little community from the Alban hills inside the order and inside the city. As the body of Margherita was brought down from the hill to her new church in the city, the bells in San Silvestro's campanile, then already a century old, rang out on their own accord to greet her arrival. The old monastery (with its tenements, rents, and privileges) and the new nuns had of necessity to adapt themselves to each other. They managed with disappointingly little strain.

The nuns were quickly busy about the monastery's business. In October 1287 the abbess and nuns consented to a tenant's sale of his tenement of his pezza of vineyard outside the Porta Salaria (at the Monte di Sacco Guiderulfi where the monastery had a cluster of vineyard tenements). The nuns were to get five soldi of the senate for their consent and one-fourth of the wine at the vintage. Earlier in the same year the nuns were renewing a grant for three generations in Bassanello, accepting lands in Gallese, and securing their hold over the church of San Pietro in Vitorchiano with its rights of baptism, burial, and tithe. Again in 1293—all the old business—Herminia and the convent approved the sale of his tenement by a priest, Pietro di Stefano di Romano di Giovanni; the tenement was a house by the road with a garden behind it in the rione Colonna, bordered on three sides by tenements which Pietro and his brothers held of the monastery and on another side by a tenement which the buyer, Edigio di Angelo di Malabranca, held of the monastery. For their permission the nuns received twelve denari and a promise of a continuing rent of two denari each year on the feast of Saint John in the summertime.^[53]

By 1298 the nuns were standing behind their grill, where, as they said, it was customary for them to stand and do their monastery's business, and consenting to this business. (By the early fifteenth century they would be explicit about which grill: the upper one next to and near the great altar, or the lower one by the gate of the monastery.) The effect is very odd. These nuns, who in the saint's lifetime seem like wildflowers blossoming on the Alban hills, sustained by visions and the love of God, around the almond tree in their garden, are now pressed behind their grill within the city walls. The effect is also odd when it's seen another way; these women, so withdrawn from the world that they look at the great altar of their church through a grill and sing behind it, come to the grill to meet witnesses and transact business. Cut away from the world almost completely, they are not cut away from just those affairs of the world which Francis and Clare had found, only a little time before, most corroding. The scene is a distillation of a great Christian tragedy. One feels in hearing it, too, something of the dissatisfaction one feels in hearing Madame de Cintré behind the grill of the Carmelite chapel in the Avenue de Messine, and at least for some of the same reasons.^[54]

It would have been consistent with apparent papal policy if the house of San Silvestro had been taken from the Benedictines and given to the Minoresses partly so that waning gifts and resources would again be stimulated by the presence in the old house of a seemingly brilliant new order, capable of attracting financial support. San Silvestro, like other houses in the order, was protected by Nicholas IV in his general privilege of immunity; even San Silvestro's enemy, Boniface VIII, assured the house, in 1298, of the Claress privileges. Again one feels a curious sensation, as one watches the repeated papal privileges for the followers of Francis, who had so seriously enjoined his own followers not to seek or accept papal privilege.^[55]

In fact San Silvestro was greatly enriched by its change of order, and almost immediately; but the enrichment was due primarily to Colonna not Franciscan connections. In 1290 a papal chamberlain, Pietro Colonna, son of Pietro Colonna, prepared his will.^[56] In it a fortunate legatee was the house of San Silvestro, ubi pauperes quedam spiritu moniales existunt; Pietro's grant of major holdings in the Colonna's part of Lazio, in the areas of Gallicano, Pantano, and Campo d'Orazio, made the poverty of these nuns even more spiritual. It was a grant which came with strings attached. One testamentary injunction, perfectly ordinary, although through the vicissitudes of time no longer observed, was that a perpetual chaplain should be attached to an altar

which should be erected and where he should be bound to say a Mass for the dead (including Pietro himself and his own) on Mondays and a Mass of the Virgin on Saturdays. Pietro also asked the nuns to receive as nuns, should the girls wish, his nieces, Bartolomea, daughter of his brother Fortebraccio, and the same brother's natural daughter, Angelella; Pietro also asked the nuns to accept Andrea, the daughter of a poor woman named Gemma from the Colonna town of Gallicano—perhaps another Colonna bastard, perhaps a poor girl who had attracted Colonna sympathies (and Pietro's attachment to Sant'Andrea in Gallicano where he chose to be buried may seem a clue). Pietro named as his executors Giacomo Colonna, cardinal deacon of Santa Maria in Via Lata (1278–1297, 1306–1318), Pietro Colonna, cardinal deacon of Sant'Eustachio (1288–1297) and of Sant'Angelo (1306–1326), and the Roman senator Giovanni Colonna (Margherita's biographer).

The Colonna neighborhood—their holdings at the mausoleum of Augustus, and the site of the hospital a member of the family was about to found at San Giacomo in Augusta, and the two cardinals' churches at Sant'Eustachio and Santa Maria in Via Lata—seems to close in around San Silvestro. It seems to, even more, when one considers some of the people attached to San Silvestro in these years. The nuns' notary and proctor and witness Antonino was clerk and canon of Santa Maria in Via Lata, Giacomo Colonna's church. Another proctor, Andrea, like one of the early nuns, is identified as coming from Affile in the Colonna hinterland between Tivoli and Palestrina.^[57]

Another of the nuns' proctors, the monk Angelo of the monastery of San Gregorio on the Celian, introduces a more provocative and elaborate connection.^[58] He may have been the Angelo who was a Benedictine monk of San Silvestro just before the Benedictine house fell. The San Silvestro-San Gregorio connection is indicated by the earlier transfer of Gregorio, abbot of San Silvestro, to San Gregorio. The Colonna connection is suggested by a story in Giovanni Colonna's life of Margherita. It is the story of a miracle which happened in a convent of nuns of Saint Benedict in Roiate near Subiaco (and again in the general Tivoli-Palestrina area of Colonna dominance). Through the invocation of Margherita, as the nuns watched, the boy, debilitated since infancy, was cured as an adolescent of the stone ("which shot out like a bean from a pea-shooter"). This boy, at the time of the telling, was Matteo da Roiate, a monk in the monastery of San Gregorio on the Celian in Rome; it may also be recalled that one of the last abbots of San Silvestro was a Matteo from Subiaco who passed through San Silvestro on the way to Saint Paul's.^[59]

The convent of San Silvestro directly and indirectly, in sure evidence and by inference, seems caught in a Colonna web, in neighborhood great and small, in family and familia close and extended. This is seen in the list of eight consenting nuns on a document of 1296; one, a leader in the house, was Giovanna, daughter of Giovanni Colonna, and another was Margherita, daughter of Oddone Colonna. There is a constant sense of surrounding family, and Colonna connections remained with the house a long time: in 1368 a Maria Colonna was abbess; in 1417 there were two Colonna nuns, Maria and Egidia—but there were also two Orsini, an Annibaldi, an Anguillara, a Caffarelli, two d'Antiochas, one of whom was abbess, and a woman called Nardola Colae Pauli Judei.^[60]

Cardinal Giacomo Colonna, the "founder" of the house, as a transcript of the pertinent document calls him, drew up rules for the house. They concern themselves with proper attendance at the Divine Office, with silence and propriety in dormitory and refectory, with the removal of the sick to the infirmary, and the care with which the cellarer should guard the food. The rules speak of a special privilege granted to the house of "conversations" between Mass and Terce and between siesta and Vespers. In spite of this laxness in terms of isolation and silence, the rules are very particularly concerned with the nuns' enclosure and their contact with the outside world. The use of the opening in the grill, through which the nuns received Communion, and particularly the rota, through which communications of various sorts came from, and went to, the outside world, were carefully regulated. The keepers of the rota were normally to appear at it together, and other nuns were not to dillydally near it. Nuns who went to the well to draw water were to do it silently, not with loud conversations or voices raised high enough to be heard by the outside world. Badly behaved nuns were to be punished, and for several offenses, by sitting upon the ground in front of the convent and eating a harshly restricted diet—a strange sort of punishment for followers of Francis.^[61]

San Silvestro, like much else, was involved in the war between Boniface VIII and the Colonna. Enraged by the Colonna and greedy for their goods, Boniface turned upon San Silvestro as a Colonna house, and in turn, no doubt, further enraged the Colonna. In December 1297 Boniface made the great Franciscan Matthew of Acquasparta protector of San Silvestro after he had deprived Cardinal Giacomo Colonna of the office that had been granted to him by Nicholas IV. Boniface also deprived Giovanna, the niece of Giacomo and Margherita, of the office of abbess. Boniface further deprived the monastery of its aris-

tocratic Isabella rule and gave it the plain Urbanist Claress rule—a change in some minor observances and an insult. The house was even further humiliated by being placed under the protection of the Orsini cardinal, Matteo Rosso, the protector general of the Franciscans. The convent resisted Boniface's injunctions and was excommunicated and placed under interdict by the pope.^[62]

In September 1303 Giovanna and her nuns and convent were freed from the disabilities which they had incurred for disobeying Boniface, and Boniface's injunctions were revoked. In December 1303 Benedict XI further ordered the restoration of confiscated monastery goods. In August 1318 John XXII appointed Cardinal Pietro Colonna to succeed Giacomo, then deceased, as the nuns' protector. And in 1322 the house was described by the papal chancery (echoing a petition) as one in which "very many of the family Colonna and their relatives are known to exist." To its church in 1347 the grieving Colonna widows stole with their three slain Colonna husbands, victims of Cola di Rienzo and objects of his wrath.^[63]

The house was again safely Colonna, propertied, and Minoress; and it faced a long, secure, if not particularly spiritually brilliant career. In the early fifteenth century, in 1417, the convent could count in itself at least twenty-one nuns (and say that they were at least two-thirds of the convent), and in the mid-sixteenth century, in 1558, at least thirty-six nuns. The Catalog of Turin described San Silvestro as a house with thirty-six nuns and two friars. And the 1323 will of the rich sister (concerned with her rings and desirous of being buried in San Silvestro) of a San Silvestro nun, Sister Agnese, which remembered both sister (twenty florins to be kept by her mother and given at Agnese's will for her needs) and house with lavish bequests (including red velvet for a chasuble for Mass), left ten florins, two for each friar, and forty florins, one for each nun. The problem seems for a while at least to have been the danger of too many rather than too few nuns. In a clause dated November II, 1322, and appended to Giacomo Colonna's rules, the abbess and nuns swore upon the altar of Our Lady never to give assent to the admission of any woman, regardless of her condition, to the house, if she raised the number over forty. The clause ends by restricting rather harshly the meaning of its phrase "of any condition whatsoever" by saying that the restriction does not apply to "the daughter of an emperor or a king or a prince or a duke or a marquess, etc."^[64]

On December 29, 1310, Abbess Egidia, with four nuns (Francesca of Sant'Eustachio, Francesca of Parioli, Francesca of Palestrina,

and Margherita of Palestrina) consenting for the convent, conceded to a priest (Francesco Custanzi of Perugia—one notes that the name of Francis is not forgotten) the church of Santo Stefano de Arcionibus and all its possessions for a yearly nonmoney rent at Christmas and Easter and the promised invitation to the friars of San Silvestro to celebrate Mass at Santo Stefano on Saint Stephen's day. The priest promised to avoid causing trouble between the convent and the people of Santo Stefano, and he was invested with the church's keys. In acts like these, and in these nuns, behind their property and their grill and their friars, the Franciscan revolution had been domesticated. (And by the early eighteenth century their kitchen in which they made pastries—presumably largely for external consumption—used ten thousand eggs a month.)^[65]

It was equally domesticated across the river at San Cosimato in Trastevere. The San Cosimato story is in fact very similar to the San Silvestro story, but it is the same melody in a different voice. San Cosimato's holdings were out different gates and in different towns; San Cosimato changed order at a different date and to a different branch of Franciscan nuns. Its social caste was at least slightly lower; and it was a convent of southwestern not northeastern Rome, of the right not the left bank. It is now in the center of Trastevere, still behind its handsome, columned, arched, gabled, brick (closed) gate, with its romantic, distorted cloister, its pretty garden, and, before it, its hideously butchered piazza continually disguised by the brightness of market days.

San Cosimato entered the thirteenth century already an old Benedictine house. Its part of Trastevere was relatively rustic; it seems to have been slightly more a country convent than San Silvestro. Vineyards as well as gardens came up to its monastery walls. In the thirteenth century the house was small but not pathetically so. Under Abbot Ugolino (1200–1219) it seems to have been healthy; at any rate its documents show no striking signs of disease. In 1209 there were at least seven monks and conversi: the abbot, the prior, the steward, two monks, and two conversi . In 1227 under Abbot Clemente there were still at least seven, five of the same seven. Under Abbot Massano in 1232 there were at least eight; but the proportion of conversi (lay brothers and, perhaps, in this case, novices) to choir monks complicates the picture: there were the abbot, the steward, one monk, and five conversi .^[66]

The monastery's properties centered around itself in Trastevere with holdings in neighborhoods called after the churches of San Callisto, the Quaranta Martiri (San Pasquale Baylon), and San Giovanni

Lombrica. Besides Trastevere vineyards, San Cosimato had houses and gardens, bake-ovens, and river mills. The monks were local proprietors and landlords; and they collected money from rents and permissions to alienate. When, for example, in a transaction we have already noticed, from October 1218, Barone di Paolo and his wife Regimina di Biagio Romani Mellini (with the consent of her sister Caracosa and the sister's husband Pietro di Gregorio) sold, for four and one-half lire of the senate, a house with a garden beside it and behind it (and all its appurtenances) in the contrada Quaranta Martiri, Abbot Ugolino (or Hobolino as the document calls him) got six denari of the senate for his consent. And the instrument (decorated with the scribe Angelo's scrinarial sign, appropriately a wing) notes that on two of the three tenanted sides of the tenement (the fourth was a public road), the tenements were held of the abbey of San Cosimato—it was a San Cosimato neighborhood.^[67]

San Cosimato's gates were the Trastevere ones of Porta San Pancrazio and Porta Portese, and the monastery held considerable holdings outside both. Some of the holdings still come with little fragments of narrative plot attached to them. In 1203 Abbot Ugolino bought from Tebaldo and Pietro, the son of Leone di Francolino, and from Giovanni and Romana, their minor siblings, and Scotta, their mother, four pezze of vineyard, with the attached land, and one vat on one of them, and with a common vat at the foot of another, for sixteen lire of the senate. The vineyards were in the Marcellis, or Bravi, an area just outside the Porta San Pancrazio (near now the American Academy). One plot was said to have had no fourth side because it was a triangle; neighbors were named, among them a holding of San Lorenzo on the Gianicolo.^[68]

The family of Leone di Francolino needed its sixteen lire —and San Cosimato (as one interprets it) helped them in, or took advantage of, their need. The family had to pay back the usuriously increased debts contracted by their father and husband when he was alive: to Teodora di Buonofilio and Guido Piperarola her husband (and a witness) eight lire capital, and twenty-four soldi interest (pro usuris ); to Pietro Roscimanni, four lire capital and twelve soldi interest. The remainder (two lire, four soldi ), they said, was to be used "for our very great and evident need." The continuing reality of that need (and San Cosimato's continuing involvement) is stressed by another alienation by Leone's heirs in the following February, in 1204. In it they gave as a pledge, and conceded, to the steward of San Cosimato a small piece (petiolum ) of arable land in the Marcellis Minimis, again outside the

Porta San Pancrazio, for thirty soldi of the senate. The land was on the public road and was between San Cosimato land and other land of the heirs of Leone di Francolino—one is watching the growth of one neighbor at the expense of another, of the institutional neighbor at the expense of the familial one. The thirty soldi is described as "what we owe the monastery for the grain it sold us to feed us." Among the witnesses to the alienation was a man called Nicholas "Bread and Wine" (Nicola Panis et Vinum), recalling in his perhaps rather ironic presence the good saint who succored the poor.^[69]

The Porta San Pancrazio was clearly a San Cosimato area. This is shown again in 1221 when Enrico, the son of Enrico of Sant'Eustachio, with the consent of Teodora his wife, sold to Abbot Clemente a vineyard in the Marcellis on three sides of which the tenements were held of San Cosimato. And from the Marcellis, San Cosimato got some at least of its wine.^[70] But the Porta Portese was San Cosimato country too, and particularly that part called "the plain of the palms." Some of the Porta Portese land was arable; and some of it marched with the fields held of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere.^[71]

The holdings of San Cosimato were by no means limited to the immediate area of Rome—like all major Roman families and all other observable Roman monasteries it was involved in the tenements of country towns. The area around Campagnano di Roma, about thirty kilometers north of Rome, just off the Via Cassia, can be thought of in the surprising detail of street and ditch and cave and gully, of vineyard and neighbor, because San Cosimato preserved a long and elaborate document of renunciation (to it) so describing parts of the place, with other places, drawn up at the time of Abbot Ugolino and his steward, Mauro. San Cosimato's was a complex holding connected with the church of Santa Maria de Prato, on the edge of the town, which a compromise had alienated to the priest Angelo in 1200, while retaining his obedience; and his obedience included providing hospitality to the monks. San Cosimato's verbal map of the Campagnano area is not really surprising because San Cosimato was a good keeper of records. San Cosimato had a cartulary (an unusual object in these parts), or at least it began a cartulary in the 1190s. In 1282, considerably after its change of order, it had a list of its lands in Sutri drawn up.^[72]

Sutri was in the early thirteenth century the town of San Cosimato's interests. These interests were tied to a subject institution, the hospital of San Giacomo (Santi Filippo e Giacomo) in Sutri. The monastery bought land in Sutri, and other property was given to it. In 1205, Finaguerra, the son of Giovanni di Sebastiano, gave to the house of

Santi Filippo e Giacomo, through the hands of Matteo its provost, himself and his goods—houses, vineyards, lands, gardens, arbors—for the redemption of his soul and the souls of all his relatives.^[73]

In 1220 San Cosimato continued to seem, as it had earlier in the century, a worthy recipient of gifts. If those gifts were acts of pure piety, then Cosimato must have seemed a worthy vessel of religion. If they were financial investments, insurance, annuities, then it must have seemed financially trustworthy and promisingly solvent. If, as is generally likely, they were a mixture of the two, then San Cosimato must have seemed to observers worthy of the trust that their mixed investment implied. It must have seemed at least stable. In 1203 the widow Bona made her son and her two daughters her legatees: to one daughter, Jacoba, Bona left what she had given her for a dowry, plus ten soldi; to her second daughter, Teodora, she left forty soldi (two lire ); to her son Pietro she left all her other goods and her lands which she had in Marcellis. But she left three lire (more than for her daughter) to San Cosimato for her soul.^[74]

In 1212 another widow similarly concerned for her soul arranged the disposition of her property for her soul's protection differently: she left the monastery of San Cosimato all her lands in the Marcellis which lay between those of the monastery and those of a man named Giovanni di Leone and his nephews (and at least one suspects that poor Giovanni di Leone di Francolino faced again and anew his Benedictine neighbors); the widow's lands were divided into two pezze . In October 1220 Giovanni di Benedetto and Marsilia his wife offered, for the healing and redeeming of their souls, themselves and their goods to San Cosimato, with the reservation of certain bequests (particularly for Giovanni's sister) and of the use of their goods for their lives, and with the arrangement that should Giovanni die of his current illness his great wine vat, full of wine at the time, should go to the monastery, and also twenty soldi for funeral expenses. In May of 1220, a man named Bentivenga had offered to God, to the monastery, and to its more local branch, San Giacomo of Sutri, himself, his wife Teodora, his son Cesareo, and all of his goods in Sutri (saving forty lire ), to take care of them and their bodies.^[75]

It was also in 1220, in October, that Teodora, daughter of Lord Obizione di Giovanni Ionaci and wife of Pietro Bonifilii, gave to her son Giacomo (and all her male heirs) her closed garden with its trees located by the church of San Biagio (Saint Francis's supposed hostel by the later church of San Francesco a Ripa) on a corner of the public road and the Vicolo San Biagio (across it from the church) and next to

her paternal uncle Pietro's tenement. She reserved its use for her life. She also provided the condition that should her sons die without children the tenement should go to the monastery of San Cosimato—for the remission of her sins and those of her dead—saving the tenement's use for life by her own mother, Maria. This arrangement of the property of a Trastevere-Ripa family, visible in its various actual and potential generations, was witnessed by Pietro, priest, and Girardo, clerk of another local ecclesiastical organization, the church of Santa Maria in Capella (now famous for its old campanile). What they watched is very interesting—the gift of the reversion of a tenement in one of Rome's future Franciscan centers, where Francis himself had supposedly stayed ten years before, to a house of Benedictine monks itself due within fifteen years to go over to a branch of the Franciscan order. In fact, in July 1229, Gregory IX ordered the monks, for the love of religion and the good of their souls, to give the church of San Biagio, which pertained to them but which, the pope said, was derelict, to the Franciscans who needed it—an ominous sign.^[76]

By August 18, 1234, Gregory IX (whose biographer explains his act by his devotion) had changed San Cosimato's order. Gregory had, after an initial flirtation with the Camaldolese, made San Cosimato a house of Damianites, a house of the followers of Clare, not yet ordered as they would be by their later rules. On that day Gregory appointed the Franciscan friar Giacomo the abbey's steward. The appointing papal letter is preserved in an appendix to an instrument which records Fra Giacomo's own appointing of Fra Paolo as the abbey's steward, an act and instrument dated April 25, 1235. The scribe, Marsilio, copied the Gregory letter, he said, because it was difficult to carry it about everywhere.^[77]

Marsilio's instruments are a clue to the nature of San Cosimato's change. Marsilio worked for the abbey both when it held Benedictines and when it held Damianites or Claresses. There is no significant change in his neat, lined, nicely written and decorated, trapezoidal instruments. They look the same, and they do the same sort of business. Except for the masculine names of the monks and the more plentiful feminine names of the nuns it would be impossible, for example, to tell which of two documents, one from 1232 and one from 1244, was Benedictine and which was Franciscan.^[78] The important point about the change was that it was very little change at all.

Some change, of course, there was. When in 1246, at the mandate of the papal vicar Cardinal Stefano, the bishop of Ascoli consecrated and gave indulgence to a new altar within the church dedicated

to the ancient patrons Cosmas and Damian, an inventory of relics was compiled.^[79] It included great relics (wood from the cross, part of the sponge from the Crucifixion, part of Christ's sepulcher and of the stone from which He ascended into heaven, clothing of the Virgin), pertinent relics (of Saints Cosmas and Damian and Cornelius), relics of the great saints (from Andrew's cross, Luke, Peter, and Paul), conventional Roman relics (Lawrence, Blaise, Sebastian, the Quattro Coronati, Linus, Valentine, many others), many virgins, Roman and distant, single and multiple. But the San Cosimato relic hoard also included by this date, by 1246, a relic of Saint Francis's stigmata. Similarly, by 1277, when Bartolomea di Gentile di Gentile di Pietro di Leone (just possibly a great-great-granddaughter of poor Leone di Francolino) became a nun of the house and offered all her goods to it through the hands of Abbess Giacoma, she explained the act as being out of reverence for Almighty God, the blessed martyrs Cosmas and Damian and of blessed Clare, and for the remission of all her sins. And as Francis and Clare had come to San Cosimato so, at least rather indirectly, had interests in Assisi tenements—in an elaborate papal transfer in 1238 San Cosimato got a church in the diocese of Porto from the monastery of Santa Maria Farneto in the diocese of Arezzo, while in exchange Farneto got a "monastery" in the diocese of Assisi.^[80]

The change of order also seems, as it must have been hoped that it would, to have stimulated the giving of gifts to the convent (and perhaps too, some acceleration in the transfer from directly held vineyards with income in kind to money rents—the progress of economic history may have been slightly prodded by the nuns' drinking, if they did, less than the monks). Certainly the change of order brought the abbey more professions. The numbers of the nuns are immediately higher than those of the monks were, although of course initially this merely means a larger plantation. A list, from 1244, names Abbess Giacoma and twenty-eight nuns, their names a litany of Roman saints with appropriate additions. One from 1261 names Abbess Francesca and thirteen nuns. One from 1273 names Humelia and six nuns. One from 1280 names Abbess Giacoma and twenty nuns. Some of the nuns stayed in the house a long time; the Donna Clarastella of 1244 still appears in 1273. Some of the nuns, like Bartolomea, in her profession, or Abbess Giacoma II, the daughter of Pandulfo of the Suburra, identify themselves. Those who are identifiable were from prominent Roman families (the Ponti, the del Giudice), not Colonnas admittedly, although the early-century gigantic Pandulfo of the Suburra was in some ways a more prominent and impressive man than any single Co-

lonna; there is, at least, nothing to suggest that San Cosimato was either modest or squalid. (But of course evidence of family is almost always evidence of prominent family, or it would be unrecognizable.) The house to which the nuns had come, moreover, already had respectable connections; the rich monk Oddone Benencasa (or Benencase) had brought, before 1205, half the valuable house called the Arco di Benencasa to the convent. San Cosimato's location in Trastevere should not in the thirteenth century indicate that the convent was in any way a particularly popular or vulgar one—nor unfortunately, as later Trastevere connections with the university might suggest, a learned one. In 1317 San Cosimato could still count among its something over twelve nuns (although, and one should not underestimate, the Catalog of Turin lists thirty-six nuns and two friars), both a Frangipane and a Scotti.^[81]

At about the time of the change in order a different and in some ways as significant change in the convent's connections occurred. The convent became increasingly interested and involved in tenements in and near Tivoli, a papal summer capital and so a sensible place to invest. (Rents, it will be remembered, doubled in Viterbo when the curia was there; and the market in Tivoli wine, grain, oil, meat, and figs, as well as houses, was undoubtedly very profitably stimulated by the curia's being in Tivoli.) The convent's new connection with an order, one that was increasingly well organized and one that had captured the sympathies of some of the keenest contemporary minds, including investing minds, probably helped it to rearrange its portfolio profitably (although the Tivoli profit was one to be unexpectedly stolen by the Babylonian captivity).

A particular Tivoli involvement at about the time of the change of order was with the murderous Benencasa (or Benencase) family. In June 1237, five years after the documents (preserved in San Cosimato archives) dealing with the transfer and confiscation of Benencasa properties after Oddone di Giovanni Benencase had murdered Bartholomeo di Benedetto di Bartolomeo, San Cosimato bought, for one hundred lire of the senate, through a mediating Tivoli neighbor, from Oddone and Giovanni his son, a Tivoli tenement at a place called Cassano. This may well have been part of the tenement which Oddone saved from confiscation by his rather shady, but not unconventional, use-transfer. The Oddone and Giovanni sale in 1237 was consented to by their wives Tyburtina and Maria. These witnessing, consenting wives, brought forward to avoid future legal snags, are interesting women, and interesting in their actions. In 1283 six Papareschi wives

and widows met in San Cosimato's cloisters to consent to a great Papareschi sale of country tenements north of Rome to the hospital of Santo Spirito in Sassia for four thousand lire . These sets of women thus not only witnessed the dismantling of great and less great Trastevere inheritances, they also witnessed the swelling properties of Trastevere (or at least trans -Tevere) religious houses with which their families had continued attachments.^[82]

San Cosimato's interest in Tivoli, once begun, was maintained through the century. In 1272 the convent was again involved with the Benencase. It then bought, for twenty-one lire, a vineyard with olive and fig trees at Cassano through Oddone's son Giovanni, acting as the monastery's proctor. One of San Cosimato's new neighbors was Giovanni di Pietro Pazzi, as his father had been a neighbor in the Oddone transfer of 1237. The generations of Benencase and Pazzi progressed around the properties held by the dead hand of never-dying San Cosimato. In 1278 Bibiano, or Viviano, Bartolomei, a frequently employed convent proctor, bought two Tivoli tenements with vines and olives for the convent. The tenements, which cost sixty and ninety lire, were procured with part of the five hundred lire which the monastery had from a major sale elsewhere of tenements with lands, rights, and men to Cardinal Matteo Rosso (who makes an Orsini connection for these Franciscans) through his proctor Pietro da Pofi—money which had been deposited with a Florentine merchant. In 1270 the convent bought a tenement near Tivoli from the Lady Bena, with her husband Bartolomeo di Giovanni consenting, for 160 lire, and paid 105 lire to the wife and the rest to her husband. In 1276 the convent (with its members listed) is seen granting a Tivoli tenement, an old vineyard with olives, through Viviano, to two Tivolese, Guglielmo di Guidone and his wife Resa, in perpetuity, on the condition that they make the tenement a productive vineyard and farm, and that their yearly return to the monastery include one-third of the new wine and of all fruits and grain and a canister of grapes.^[83]

Although San Cosimato turned its attentions to Tivoli, it did not forget Sutri. In December 1235 Famiano, "abbot, provost, and rector" of San Giacomo, was engaged in trading tenements in a quite accustomed way, as if nothing had changed in the home monastery. In 1239, however, the church rented out the church and hospital to two men with local Sutri interests, Cencio, the archpriest of Capranica, and Pietro Zilla, canon of Sutri, for eight years, for improving the place. The renters were to pay a yearly rent of thirty-four lire of Siena, if they could get to Rome safely. The days of payment in this instance rather

hilariously recall two of the basic reasons for the church's existence; the days were the feast of All Saints and the Sunday on which is sung, "I am the Good Shepherd."^[84]

Continuity, renovation, and rent, in themselves, were insufficient at Sutri. Sutri had a bishop; and against him the nuns wanted protection for their holdings. They got it from the pope. On January 12, 1260, Alexander IV ordered his "venerable brother" the bishop of Sutri to stop trying to make collections and exactions from San Giacomo and other San Cosimato churches and their properties. On April 26, in another letter which survives in two copies in San Cosimato's archives, Alexander ordered the bishop to stop molesting the possessions of San Cosimato, and he declared null and void any pertinent episcopal excommunications. In December Alexander had already asked for the convent the protection of Guido di Enrico, "citizen of Rome." These actions formed part of a pattern of papal privilege and protection, into which also fitted the way in which the convent was shielded from Saint Peter's in the Vatican, as in a letter for them from Innocent IV to the vicar cardinal of Santa Maria in Trastevere, which had, a surviving copy says, to be gotten again because of faults in its phrasing, and another in which it is harangued that Saint Peter's acted as if it had been drinking the accursed water. For procuring papal letters the convent used the Franciscan order's proctor, Bonaspes.^[85] As a member congregation in a new and privileged order and a Roman house directly subject to the pope, the convent was in a doubly advantageous position. It worked industriously to consolidate that position. That, in its quest for papal privilege and in its greed, it was violently violating the express and implicit desires of Clare and Francis seems to have been of no consequence to it. At San Cosimato the words of Clare and Francis could not be heard and understood, in this way, by 1260. Between that past and this present there was not that sort of communication, although Clare was only six years dead, although San Cosimato was still called Damianite and had not yet been sheltered by the protecting perversion of Urban IV's legislation, and although another memory of Francis was still alive in Greccio and the Marches.

In 1273 the nuns consented to a tenant's sale of his pezza of vineyard and as a compensation they accepted five soldi and a promise of one-fourth of the wine and a canister of grapes each year at the vintage. This is the sentence that describes in act the thirteenth-century Roman convent. In 1258 the convent consented to the sale by one tenant (Nicola Alexii) to another (Matteo Acti) of a tenement of vine and trees on a plot of about one pezza of vineyard outside the Porta Portese at

Tertium and adjoining another convent tenement. The sale brought to the seller three and one-half lire of the senate and to the convent five soldi for its consent and also the continued promise of one-fourth of the new wine which came from the place at each vintage, and everything else that had been promised in the old charter. In 1262 another tenant sold similarly another similar tenement, but within the walls of Trastevere and for seventeen lire ; the convent received five soldi and one-fourth the wine at vintage. In 1261 the convent itself leased a pezza of vineyard to be improved and one-third of a vat; it demanded nothing the first year, but one-fourth of future vintages, a canister of future grapes, and hospitality. The annals of thirteenth-century Roman monasticism (the preserved annals, one must note the possible distinction) are a list of vintages and saints' days with rents in wine and salt and grapes marked next to them.^[86]

The records of behavior in property are not all leases for three generations, leases for limited numbers of years or in perpetuity, exchanges, consents and approvals of tenants' leases, and loans; there are also records of disputes with other landlords, including other churches, with tenants, sometimes, as early as 1244, with large numbers of them who perhaps questioned the Claress succession, or who perhaps recognized it fully and found the Clares heirs to the old fights. Amid alienation and dispute, too, the acquisition of property went on; and some of it was connected with continuing religious sentiment. When in 1246 the convent bought four pezze of vineyard from the four daughters (Paola, Constantia, Theodatia, Agelia) of a Trastevere notary, Rainerio, they bought it with the fifty lire that a man named Graziano (probably a Frangipane) had left them for the salvation of his soul. In 1260, Donna Beatrice, wife of Jaconello, in his house, before witnesses including a canon of Santa Maria in Capranica, assigned to the proctor of San Giacomo in Sutri all the things which Janconello had in his house, one vat of wine in the house, and three vats, two empty and one full, in another house. (The possibility that the nuns drank less wine than the monks may not, by this point, seem a strong one.)^[87]

In 1256 Maria di Gennaro granted herself, the house in which she lived, and six lire from her goods to two friars, the abbess and three nuns, representing San Cosimato, for the salvation of her soul; and she reserved the control of her other goods and the use of her property for life, and she specified that, if her niece Clara should survive her, Clara should have the house to live in, but that any goods left when Clara died should go to the Clares' monastery.^[88] Maria's "house in which I live" reminds one forcefully that in the everyday life of ordi-

nary Romans these religious houses, which seem on the grand religious scale such horrifying failures, seemed nevertheless to offer security and promise of spiritual (if also perhaps animal) survival. In this, papal reformation had been successful, or at least not destructive; the old totems as well as the old aggregates of property still stood.

The problems of the two Franciscan nunneries, of San Cosimato and San Silvestro in Capite, are echoed in other houses, sometimes more grossly and litigiously, as at Sant'Erasmo sul Celio at the end of the century, where grave discord separated abbess, nuns, and the patron abbey of Subiaco. And the two movements of San Cosimato and San Silvestro were characteristic of their Rome—the dramatic movement of change of order; the repeated life-movement of dealing in property. In 1231, for example, Gregory IX gave Sant' Alessio on the Aventine to the supposedly relatively rigorous Premonstratensian canons. In April 1273 for a yearly rent Sant' Alessio leased in perpetuity to the nuns of Santa Maria Massima four pezze of vineyard outside the Porta Appia by Santa Maria "where the Lord appeared"—the Domine quo vadis? which touched the apostolic miraculous Roman past. Each of these two movements, that of 1231 and that of 1273, is a typical gesture.^[89] But the second is a gesture not merely typical in the life of the thirteenth-century Roman monastery but in that of thirteenth-century Roman landholders in general. The failure of the reformed monasteries to rise above the level of more general society allows them, as historical sources, to represent a very broad segment of society. In some ways, moreover, their representation and failure are infinitely more broadly representative. The disappearance of spirit into the wearing but absorbing tedium of daily economic life—the shuffling of papers and fixing of rents—is the human tragedy fixed in the exemplum of these hapless but long-lived institutions—pretentious in their ambitions but not more pretentious than the Christian soul.

More violent in their rejection of convention than the Claresses, more difficult at first to control and consolidate, and to fit into (from the official church's point of view) appropriate houses were the Augustinian friars. Their naked poverty and ecstatic violence were at home in Umbrian and Tuscan hills, but, at least as they were calmed and caught in administrative nets, they came too to Rome. They found a protector and tamer in Riccardo Annibaldi, cardinal and Roman, who fitted their pieces together into an order, and then saved the new complex from the dissolution of new orders. He also engineered the order's new involvement in the topography of Rome in the middle of the century. In or about 1250 Riccardo managed a complicated and important

settling for the Augustinians. He (according to their historian) got them the Franciscan church of Santa Maria del Popolo, at the rustic northern edge of Rome, just within the wall. The Franciscans got the senatorial church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli. The Aracoeli's Benedictines were dispossessed and sent to other houses. Few other monastic movements involved such prominent churches and such diversity of order. None makes more clearly the point of what was being done: the removal of relatively dead orders and the domestication of lively but difficult ones.

The partly domesticated, but even then relatively untamed or unhoused, black Augustinians were still swooping about the city late in the century when they were deposited also in the church of San Trifone (by Sant'Agostino). In May 1287 Honorius IV's plan for giving San Trifone to Santa Maria del Popolo and the Augustinians was still being worked out so that the clerks of the old secular establishment (whom Alexander IV had firmly limited to the number eight in 1255) should be financially compensated for their loss of church—and particularly so that Don Giovanni di Don Paolo Pietro di Jaquinto should. The Augustinians were to provide him for life with an appropriate house and twenty-six florins of gold a year (or a benefice that provided these things), the twenty-six florins to be paid in three installments a year, on the first of June, October, and February. For necessities like this the friar-hermits had gotten seven hundred lire of the senate for granting to Don Egidio di Paolo Roffridi, for forty years, the fruits of vineyards and other holdings of the church of San Trifone, including those outside the Porta San Valentino by the Milvian Bridge. These Roman Augustinians make an interesting assembly: lists from 1287 include thirty-two or thirty-three of them, of whom one, Walter, is English and one Florentine; two are from Gubbio, two from Orvieto, one from Siena, one Ascoli, one Lucca, one Narni, one Viterbo, one Anagni, one Genazzano; two on the other hand are called Roman, and several are from (if we can trust these name-identifications) specific Roman districts, two from the Mercato, one from the Monti, one from the Posterula, and one, Nicola, from the Calcarario. One of these Hermit gatherings was held in May in the complex of Augustinian houses which had been the houses of Don Edidio di Paolo Roffridi.^[90]

One must turn again to the Aracoeli—one must always return to the Aracoeli in thinking of medieval Rome; everything is gathered there: the altar itself and its memory, the senate, the mosaic, the floors full of senators and lined with cosmatesque work, the old brick of the unfinished façade, the Franciscans, and the chapels, from various

times, of a great collection of Roman families, the great and the senatorial names—Savelli, Orsini, Colonna, Capocci, Conti—and the names of neighbors—Margani, Delfini, Astalli, Mattei. In this very Roman place one of the century's great scenes of renunciation and conversion took place—in some ways the century's greatest scene in Rome.

Charles II of Naples had found out that one of his sons, Louis, that son in fact who had, it was thought, been destined to become King of Naples, had been moved by disposition and persuasion to reject all earthly blandishments and to desire only to follow the path of religion.^[91] A sense of him and his act of rejecting the crown are caught in one of the greatest, from any point of view, of fourteenth-century paintings, the Simone Martini in Naples.

Charles II himself was in his way both a responsible monarch and a responsible father. He eventually allowed his son considerable freedom. He allowed him to retire from the royal court at Castel Nuovo in Naples to the austere sea-bound whiteness of Castel dell'Ovo, there to read the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas which his father had given him and to cultivate the seed of Franciscanism planted in him by spiritual tutors in his youth. Charles insisted, however, that were Louis to enter the church he must enter it grandly and helpfully, and be a bishop—bishop, in fact, of Toulouse, a gift from Boniface VIII.

To accept office, Louis was allowed to go from Naples to Rome. There, meeting the pope, he demanded to be allowed to become a Franciscan as a price for accepting the wretched bishopric. Louis was privately received into the Franciscan order on Christmas Eve, 1296. But the secret was carefully kept from his father. Louis was to wear the habit only in private. On December 29 or 30 he was consecrated bishop of Toulouse with his Franciscan habit hidden under his robes. In early January he went back to Naples to see his family; he arrived on a mule. In late January he left his family to go first toward Paris then to Toulouse. By the end of January he had arrived in Rome. He got permission from Boniface VIII to be a Franciscan in public—Boniface's attitude toward Louis must have been extremely interesting. At the Aracoeli, on the feast of Saint Agatha, on February 5, 1297, he celebrated Mass, before a great crowd, of over one thousand people, it was said, including two important cardinals, the great Franciscan Matthew of Aquasparta and Giacomo of San Clemente, nephew of the pope. When the Mass was finished the cardinals came to Louis and said that he might then show himself a Franciscan. And immediately he stepped out of his robes and showed himself a Franciscan.

This step at Aracoeli, in a huge crowd, above the city of Rome, was taken into the fragile spring of a Roman February; and Louis's period of conversion was almost as short as is that first spring. He died in August 1297, involved in celebrating the Provençal cult (of the southern France of his boyhood not of his bishopric) of the Magdalen. But Louis's moment of glory, blazing in his plainness above the February Rome, was really glorious. What his episcopal life would have been no one can know. But he had, at all that distance, made a real renunciation, made Aracoeli in a way really Franciscan, carried, in a way, Assisi to Naples and to Rome, and to 1297. And he caught forever the attention at least of his brother and successor to the succession, King Robert the Wise, who, as a royal lay-preacher, would tell his subjects of Louis. Still, even with its beauty and clarity of scene if not of meaning, the gesture at the Aracoeli cannot make disappear the opposite, heavy gesture of accumulation at San Cosimato and San Silvestro. Theirs is the main plot line of this thirteenth-century sort of Franciscanization; and it is tragedy, at Rome as elsewhere.