Chapter VII
Last Wills and Testaments

Men in Rome knew they must die. Across the city, through the rioni and neighborhoods, fishmongers in Sant' Angelo, sailors in the Ripa of Trastevere, roe-eating Premonstratensians in Sant' Alessio, small farmers in their low houses north of San Silvestro, Orsini in their high, rebuilt, Theodoric-recalling ruins in the Theater of Pompey, all of them, and their wives and daughters, knew that death was the end, for each of them, of his earthly city.^[1] They feared death. They avoided what seemed its causes, and they sought what seemed its preventives. As they felt, in their age and sickness, and sometimes even in youth and health, the stealthy movement towards their faces of those angels' wings which, particularly by end century, they could see in their churches, and could see in Santa Maria Maggiore almost, in the mosaic itself, moving across the faces of Giacomo Colonna and Nicholas IV—like Maitland "in 1906 when, during his last illness, the mosquito nets around his bed were translated," except that Romans with mosquito nets would have gone more slowly to their deaths—they called to themselves seven witnesses and a notary; and they made their wills.^[2]

In his will, each articulate Roman testator tried to complete the structure of his life, to close its narrative with a proper ending, to achieve what had not been achieved and do what had been left undone, to secure his house, pay his debts, and do penance for his sins. He tried to find for himself (and his family) as much immortality in each world as the substance of his life (and his possessions) could afford. In this he moved in conventional paths to conventional acts—although not without that occasional rough originality which shows the individual beneath the type. His convention was informed by traditions, although not static ones, which he and his family and advisors and, perhaps particularly, his notary knew or assumed. Of his will's bequests and provisions, some, both conventional and individual, were specifically religious, the final (or so meant to be) physical expressions of a lifetime's complex of belief.

Religion, as Acton said, is the "first of human concerns"; and its expression in piety is probably the most consciously exalted, the most serious, of the ordinary man's intellectual activities, and the one in which his rational and irrational qualities of mind are most interestingly combined.^[3] So too Romans, in the pious acts of their wills and bequests, acted most interestingly, even when they were in fact guided by convention and cliché, although even in convention their piety seldom seems stale. Romans breathed the air of streets along which Francis walked early in the century, and Margherita Colonna and Altruda of the Poor, late, streets on which houses of the new orders—Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians, Carmelites, Friars of the Sack, Celestinians, and Silvestrines—were forming themselves.

The piety of thirteenth-century Rome did not, of course, exist in geographical or chronological isolation. Countless waves and winds and filaments tied it to the past, the future, and the outside world. Long before, in the north, Norbert of Xanten, like some gigantic electric prototype, and with him Robert of Arbrissel, had predicted the outlines of thirteenth-century piety; and John of Matha of the Trinitarians in Innocent III's Rome, at once hiding hermit in the aqueduct and active disciple in the hospital for freed slaves, clearly echoes them and at the same time establishes the type of the thirteenth-century Roman, and Italian, at least, religious enthusiast—that strange, tense, recurring combination, the active hermit. Between Norbert and Robert, at the end of the eleventh and beginning of the twelfth century, and John, at the beginning of the thirteenth, there flourished an "evangelical revival" which stirred the twelfth century and which has stirred again the perception of modern historians. In this revival the romance of poverty and humility grew, and it grew, in part, around the narrative of the life of a Roman boy, Alessio, son of the senator Eufemian, remembered in Rome in painting at San Clemente, in his father's stairs under which he supposedly lived and died, in the church and monastery which Honorius III rededicated to him on the Aventine (and in which the Premonstratensians ate their roe). Remembered in Rome and Roman in supposed origin, Alessio's fame spread through Christendom on the wings of a rhymed life:

Sainz Alexis est el ciel senz dotance
Ensemble o Deu, en la compaigne as angeles

with God before Roland and with less military virtues. Alessio's aspirations joined those "common to all religious reforms" from the eleventh

to the fifteenth century, "the desire to emulate the life and teachings of Christ and his apostles."^[4]

But within the general history of piety, in Rome as elsewhere, the period around 1200 was an extraordinary one. Then, in a peculiar way, in a new style of seeing and being (the simple sharpness of Francis's parsley), the New Testament—Matthew and Acts—began to come to life; and a domestic Christ started to eat at Martha's table. It was Innocent III as well as Francis. But when the cicada which had disturbed the peace of Innocent's camp at Subiaco, or her cousin, came at the Portiuncula, to the branch of the fig tree next to "the furthest cell next to the hedge of the garden behind the house," and Francis stroked her and said, "Sing, my sister cicada," she had clearly flown into a new bright world with Christ at its center.^[5] It was a world in which, at best, exhilarated men and women, with sharply observant eyes open to the physical present, tried to re-create the structure, the act, the idiom, the vocabulary of the gospel, to feed the poor, to visit the sick—to do what Innocent III tried to do at Santo Spirito, what Margherita Colonna would try to do in Zagarolo, to wipe Christ's face with Veronica and touch his side with Thomas. It was a world in which William of Rubruck, traveling to the Mongol East, would say in answer to a jeering question, that, like the soul in the body, "God is everywhere."^[6] Here, but perhaps in the lightly applied Word of country rusticity, the boy who would be Celestine V grew up; and from a painted cross, of a sort still familiar to us, from the school for example of Berlinghiero Berlinghieri, the painted Mary and John, whom the boy Peter of Isernia was still too simple to recognize, came down to him and read with him his Psalter, which his earthly mother was having him learn to read, so that she might have a second, and this time serious, cleric among her sons, in spite of the opposition of his brothers who had said "'it is enough that one of us doesn't work'—because in their castro no clerk worked."^[7] Through this countryside were spread, more convincing in their wooden impermanence, those affecting, sentimental depositions of Christ from His cross—those nail-ridden, stigmata'd feet—Tivoli, Norcia, Bulzi, and, most particularly, Volterra.^[8] Here Charles II of Naples, "inflamed by the Holy Ghost," would give a hundred beds in a hospital at Pozzuoli to Christ in His poor and dedicate a chapel to his century's model, the working sister Martha.^[9] This is the world of Franciscan literalness: "What is evoked by the crib, the rosary, the crucifix, is the Gospel in its literal sense"—Francis, his stigmata and his real Christmas presepio at Greccio with ox and ass, the Franciscan "spirituality of tenderness" (oddly and beautifully mon-

umentalized by Arnolfo at Santa Maria Maggiore);^[10] it is Ubertino writing "I was first the ass, then the ox, then the crib, then the hay. . . . He took me with him into Egypt."^[11] Nothing is more obvious in this century, in this world, than the friars; and they are cause, result, sign, emblem, victory, and defeat. They were propagandists for their kind of piety, but also they were popular because of it.

The lively piety, the piety of life, of the thirteenth century, and certainly of thirteenth-century Rome, turned itself toward the face of Christ. This glistening, Christocentric complexity moved itself, at least in Rome, I think, around a central trinity of things: the real face (sometimes more complexly real because iconic) of the living Christ the man, in all its sacred representations, but particularly in the Veronica; the real presence of the living Christ, God and man, in the Eucharist; and the real remembrance, the literal copying, of the living Christ's acts on earth—and the presence of Christ in the least of his brethren—in the corporal works of mercy. It was a piety, then, centered in the Veronica, the Eucharist, and the corporal works, the triad of Santo Spirito.

To live like Christ, in His presence, with His words, is very hard. From the beginning there was a subversion, a sublimation, a spiritualization, an institutionalization of the literal interpretation of the apostolic life. Few men can kiss lepers, or be absolutely poor, or even feed the hungry with their own hands, or love their neighbors in any direct and personal way; driven by Christian need they can instead found or support hospitals, join or support orders, live with Christ by contemplating His face or consuming His body. (And, of course, one could argue that it was the act, the leprous kiss, which was the real sublimation.) The sublimation was sometimes very ugly, as it was in the life of "Saint" Rainaldo, bishop of Nocera Umbra, who died in 1222, and who kept in his house a poor orphan boy who went about to the bishop's guests each day and said, "For the love of God and of the Blessed Virgin Mary give alms to me a poor little creature," so that all there present would be reminded of Christ in His poor.^[12] More frequently it led instead to the alternate beauty of hospitals and mystical devotion and, very prominently, devotion to the Eucharist.

Points of chronology and causal connections may remain in doubt; but no one can avoid the crucial importance of the Eucharist in popular devotion in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The disputants over detail converge in making terribly obvious the general point of the laity's desire to see the Host, to see the Man-God in the Mass—bells, candles, kneeling. "See the Body of Christ at the Consecration

and be satisfied! In the cities people ran from church to church to see the elevated Host. . . ."^[13] The new Elevation at the Mass, the feast of Corpus Christi, the miracle at Bolsena, the Franciscans' host-making machine in Mongolia, Francis himself worrying with pyxes in the provinces and with reverence for the Sacrament in his Testament, pyxes among the precious stones and golden strawberries of the papal treasury, Honorius IV crippled before the altar, the ambry clear to the nave of San Clemente, Innocent III's doctrine, and Boniface VIII's "heresy" conspire to press the point.^[14] The path is plotted which will lead to Thomas à Kempis and to Margery Kempe—Margery Kempe, who in her wildly extravagant, expressionist way, is explaining to us the quieter reactions of earlier and more reticent observers to the Consecration and the Elevation, and explaining, too, why Consecration, Elevation, and Eucharist (the Host fluttering in the priest's hands) are so central to the popular, relatively unlearned, particularly lay piety of the later Middle Ages, because they obviated any interference or explanation between the observed God and the observer.^[15] The Eucharist was direct, emotional, and divine. It was a center upon which fragmented lives and attentions could easily seem to focus. So in 1355 Margherita Colonna, the widow of the Magnifico Giovanni Conti, as she stood one day at Mass in the Augustinian church of San Trifone at Rome, was so moved at the Elevation of the Body of Christ, that she made a great vow of gifts (of lands and rights and vassalli ) to God and to the paupers of Santo Spirito in Sassia.^[16]

The Blood of Christ in the chalice, like the Host in the pyx, attracted too as its legend of the grail spread.^[17] (And in his will Cardinal Jean Cholet had one hundred gilt chalices sent to the dioceses of Rouen and Beauvais.) Blood was not unnoticed. In 1199 Saint Pietro di Parenzio, scion of a senatorial Roman family, minister of Innocent III, was killed by heretics in Orvieto. His "life" by John of Orvieto, romantic with its image of the tunic, ripping, wiping, its women's premonitions and tears, has the blood of its martyr collected, on a tunic, and put into a pyx—we are in the swing of the popularity of Lancelot's bloody sheets as well as the grail. One hundred and fifty years later Catherine of Siena savors the blood of Niccolo Tuldò of Perugia: "The fragrance of the blood brought me such peace and quiet I could not bring myself to wash it away." The Blood of the Eucharist as well as, although inseparable from, the Body, was very potent, as Bolsena's as well as Pietro di Parenzio's Orvieto makes clear.^[18]

But the potency of the Eucharist, although it might seem sublimation, did not necessarily detract from, and oppose, the other elements of

Christocentric piety. It might complement and support them, at least in thirteenth-century Rome, as it did in the minds and acts of Innocent III and Margherita Colonna. Nor should it be believed that, in the new enthusiasm, the old cults of Christianity and Rome were lost. The doorsteps of the apostles continued to attract the lovers of the poor. In the mosaics at Santa Maria Maggiore and the Lateran, new Franciscan saints joined the old, but the old remained. At San Cosimato, Clare and the Franciscan relics joined old saints and old relics. At the newly Franciscan great church of the Virgin (the thirteenth century's mother and queen), the Aracoeli, the "altar of heaven," found itself in a transept, but still present and honored.^[19] In 1316 the abbess of the convent of Santa Maria Rotunda in the diocese of Albano still found it wise to have certified (and translated from Greek into Latin) the presence in her church of old and conventional relics (and their indulgences) in connection with the consecration, or reconsecration, of the church's major altar, dedicated to the Virgin, and minor altars, conservatively dedicated to Saints John, Nicholas, Bartholomew, and Augustine.^[20] So, in the city of Rome itself, old Christian names and dedications remained as the new appeared.^[21] Still, in spite of this not unexpected conservatism, the shape of modernism in religion was very clear, as clear as the new emphasis in Franciscan parts of the Christian community on the indulgenced feasts of Mary, Francis, Anthony, and Clare.^[22] It was clear, and it was constructive: even in its institutionalization—with the spread of hospitals and relatively enthusiastic orders; even in the clogged, pedestrian daily lives of only partially committed laymen and laywomen—in their spiritual moments. It is, in fact, certainly not true in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Rome that religious enthusiasm could only end in heresy or the foundation of an order; it ended normally, as one would expect, in the sporadic acts of spiritually moved, but indecisively moved, men and women.^[23]

Among these sporadic acts, the making of wills was very prominent. The pious offerings of these wills have left their gorgeous residue not only, in some part, in the churches to which they were offered, but, more fully, in the necrologies of those churches, the books of anniversaries of the donors' deaths, and particularly in the necrology of the city's apostle's own great church, as a mid-fourteenth century (1335) will calls it, the church of Saint Peter's of the City (Ecclesia Sancti Petri de Urbe ).^[24] Even Boniface VIII, perhaps particularly Boniface VIII, who in his trial-self mocked immortality and the Eucharist, returned some part of the wealth he had extracted from the church to this church of Saint Peter's, and to the preservation of the sacrament

there. There, in the chapel which he caused to be built, or rebuilt, and which was dedicated to his papal namesake, Boniface chose to have his (admittedly effigied and self-remembering) sepulchre. He did not deny himself the pomp of death and burial. And angels of stone guarded his tomb.^[25]

Boniface (who is described in the necrology as "by nation a Campanian, from the city of Anagni, from the house of the Caetani, of great learning and eloquence") enlarged the number of canons and choral clergy, and provided for the continual saying of Masses at the altar in his "remarkable chapel" which, with his tomb and that of his nephew Benedetto Caetani, cardinal deacon of Saints Cosmas and Damian, was enclosed within an iron grill. Boniface furnished the chapel richly: a silver basin; four chalices with patens; two crosses of silver, one of jasper, and one of crystal; three pairs of silver candelabra and one of jasper decorated with silver and precious stones; a pyx of silver gilt, and two silver boats; two perforated silver ladles, or colanders; four pairs of silver cruets, of which one was gilt; three censers of silver, of which one was gilt; an icon or relief in ivory (cona de ebure ) "precious enough," with twelve stories from the New Testament; eleven chasubles of various colors in rich cloths; two copes; six dorsals (three of noblest Cypriot work); seventeen whole cloths of various colors and of Lucchese work; five gold embroideries of which one was of English and three of Cypriot work, and one had enamel decorations and whole figures of saints (nobilissimum ); four surplices or shirts with pectorals and embroidery of Cypriot work; three stoles and three manuals with Cypriot work; one pretty missal; one pretty breviary, noted, in two volumes; one small gradual, noted; twenty silk towels of German work (and the reader has curious memories of the great Boniface and of towels in Germany); three over-furs; two arcupanili; and because the bells had fallen down and broken, quickly a new and better wooden campanile had been built, and seven new bells been made, of the best, and double weight; and Boniface gave more not specified, besides the very lavish gifts and benefices, and properties to a value of almost fifty thousand florins, which he gave to the basilica as a whole. Clearly his priests need not sing naked the Masses for his soul (above his pretty missal), nor in a poor or little church; nor need, there, the sacred Host be touched by simple metals.^[26]

Obviously, not all even of Saint Peter's thirteenth- and fourteenth-century gifts were so lavish as those from Boniface, nor are all the names on its calendar of obits so important as his. On August 22 the canons remembered Romana, the widow of a scribe who had left

them four houses, one with the sign of a woman, one with a lion, one with an altar, and one with a priest, in Trastevere. On July 8 they remembered Rita, the daughter of Per Giovanni of the rione Ponte, a woman whose little nuclear family is recoverable in the necrology (her mother, Fasana, her brothers, Ciccho and Semprevivo—a curious necrology name—her sister, Perna) whose gifts included property in the piazza "Armenorum" by San Giacomo de Armenis, near the basilica, a house marked with a bow.^[27]

But some gifts, if not names, were even more distinguished than Boniface's, most notably those of his own cardinal, the rich Jacopo Stefaneschi, who was remembered on June 22. Among other munificent gifts—some drawn from incomes as specific as that from the house of Ciccha in the parish of San Lorenzo de Piscibus—Jacopo gave Saint Peter's the painting to be placed above the high altar of the basilica, painted by the hand of Giotto (de manu Iocti ) which cost 800 florins of gold, and also for the paradiso, or atrium, of the same basilica, the mosaic which told the story of Christ walking upon the waves and holding the hand of Peter so that he would not go under the water (the "Navicella"), done "by the hands of this same most extraordinary painter" (per manus eiusdem singularissimi pictoris ) for which Jacopo paid 2,200 florins. The Stefaneschi were a giving family; certainly Perna Stefaneschi, the widow of Stefano Normanni and the daughter of Stefano and Perna Stefaneschi, gave generously to Saint Peter's. And Bertoldo, Jacopo's brother, is recorded in the necrology of Santa Maria in Trastevere, "because he caused to be made the whole mosaic work of the Blessed Virgin in our tribune."^[28]

The Boccamazzi swarm in the necrology of Saint Peter's, as do, of course, the Orsini, with the Orsini nephew Cardinal Latino Malabranca, "who much loved our basilica and its servants and gave to us his palazzo with its cloister, houses, and vines placed next to the church of San Michele" and asked particularly that the canons celebrate the feasts of the great (Roman pope) Saint Gregory and of Dominic (the founder of Latino's order). And Boccamazzi and Orsini, like other people who knew the pleasures of family on earth, remembered their families in their prayers—"his daughter Letitia," "Masses for father, mother, brothers, nephews at the altars of San Biagio and Saint Mary Pregnant in the basilica."^[29]

An Orsini daughter gave the basilica holdings including a slaughterhouse and a bake-oven, and three great silk draperies to be hung each year in the basilica on the feast of Corpus Christi. The great Orsini pope, Giangaetano, Nicholas III "by nation a Roman, from the

family of the Orsini," as Boniface VIII would after him, erected an altar in honor of his papal namesake, consecrated his altar with his own hands, and chose, as Boniface would, to be buried beside his altar; as Boniface would too, but perhaps less obviously extravagantly, he furnished his altar with silver chalices and colored chasubles and other splendors. And he gave properties, including an orchard which had belonged to Compagio di Giovanni Lucidi, in the Prati—and for the church itself he gave much more: a golden cloth to make into a dorsal for the major altar, a most precious cope with images of the saints in English work, a tabernacle of silver with a pyx of gold for conserving the Body of Christ in the Supper of our Lord, and another pyx of silver for conserving the sacred Hosts, and a silver tube for the pope's obser-bendum of the Body of Christ, and a silver container for the Hosts, and a jeweled miter and a gold ring and much else besides. Nicholas's translation to his new tomb was also remembered at the basilica; and his death, also, was remembered at Santa Maria in Trastevere to whom he left fifty florins and two images, one of ivory and the other of silver "which now are in our sacristy."^[30]

Although the Orsini are very much present at Saint Peter's, the church was, again, Saint Peter's of the City, as well as Saint Peter's of the Orsini. Colonna, Ponte, Savelli, Sarraceni, Astalli, Frangipane are there. So are de Tartaris, with their gardens and buildings marked with their sign of the red cross, as in the contrada Satiri, and the parish of Santa Barbara—houses which had in the thirteenth century been normally identified by the people who lived in them, come increasingly in the early fourteenth century to have identifying signs on them like the house "with the sign of the man with the caraffe in his hand" (cum signo hominis cum carrafa in mannu )—a slight movement from people to place, which may seem to echo those major movements like "English" to "England."^[31]

In this warehouse of silver and silk (the draperies of this draperied and drapery-dealing—and sudarium —world) certain patterns do appear. In the first place, although it is true that families remain families dead or alive, in grants of land and in prayers for souls, it seems equally true that a good part of that wealth which wily Roman noble families extracted from ecclesiastical office, from the "church," went in fact back to churches in the form of lavish legacies. This was of course a sort of sophisticated investment for the family, but it was also a real return of "church" property. One observes a circular sort of movement. But the word "church" is not really an effective common noun. The action might in fact not be circular but rather a complicated

way of moving property from one ecclesiastical institution, one sort of cult or stimulant to piety, one place to another (as, in emblem, Fieschi carried north their titular churches). It could effect a change in the control of property, which would correspond to a change in religious taste. One cannot, however, successfully see or question this movement, define its arc, in necrology evidence; one can only see where the money, the silk and silver, the orchards and vineyards went. One can, however, if one cares to, see other sorts of pattern more successfully defined in necrologies. At Saint Peter's one must notice the endless emphasis on the Mass and the Eucharist. One cannot help noticing that what Cecco di Cola Gabose, a denizen of the portico of Saint Peter's, gave for his soul and his relatives' souls was a silver gilt chalice with a paten, of eight-ounce weight, and that what Ceccharello Cecholi gave for his soul and his relatives' was a chalice worth thirteen florins. One cannot help noticing the celebration of the consecration of the altar of the sudarium (November 23). One certainly cannot avoid noticing, although it is late (1350), the gift from three Venetians "because of their special devotion to the sacred sudarium, which is kept in the basilica, and shown, much to the consolation of sinners and the remission of sin's punishment, of a very beautiful and wonderful table of crystal," the wood-framed guard, which was in fact used for centuries, both to protect and display the Veronica. One cannot, that is, avoid noticing the attention paid to, the devotion to, the Real Presence of Christ in the Sacrament, and the real face of Christ on the towel.^[32]

The patterns of testators' attentions are much more fully apparent in their wills, and so are, if less clearly so, their transfers of property from one sort of insitution or cult center to another. Wills are formal documents; informality would have meant invalidity. They are often, almost surely, inexact descriptions of their testators' personal sentiments. How often did testators relatively carelessly follow contemporary fashions in legacy? How often did redacting notaries suggest to confused testators appropriate methods for effectively expressing piety? This sort of question must always be kept in mind (but its effect is not only negative—currents of conventional piety caught in a notary's cartulary are, very much, things historians want to know); sometimes the pattern of a will, Hugh of Evesham's, for example, gives these questions a partial answer.^[33] And, even when the waters have been appropriately muddied, wills are wonderfully expressive and informative documents. It is hard to think of any evidence (except a penitentiary's) which could so quickly expose men's souls, so neatly define their final duties and affections.

Sometimes, particularly early in the thirteenth century, Roman wills are short and reticent. Such a will is that of the widow of a man named Astone, which was written in 1212 by the scribe Angelo, whose angel's wings decorate the document both at its invocational incipit and at the terminal place of its scribal sign. In the surviving document, the widow simply named her heirs and gave to the monastery of San Cosimato all the land (divided into two pieces, or pezze ) which she had in the Marcellis, between the monastery's own land and the land of Giovanni di Leone and his nephew. The will shows the connection between a widow with a suburban farm and the monastery which owned a neighboring farm—that is essentially all.^[34]

In the wills of Pietro Lombardo di don Giacomo di Enrico Lombardo (Peter the Lombard), from 1281, and of Pietro Saxonis, or Sassone, merchant of the rione San Marco, from 1295, there is a drastically different sort of articulateness. It would be strange if this change were not connected with chronology, if one could not assume that, with exceptions, wills (and testators) were becoming more articulate. The assumption is buttressed by the increasing pace and volume of self-revelation by testators as wills move into the fourteenth century—but, of course, the number of preserved wills also increases.

Peter the Lombard's will was redacted by the judge and scribe Pietro Piperis, a man whose professional family ties together seemingly disjointed pieces of later thirteenth-century Rome.^[35] Peter the Lombard himself was not unwell, or at least he was "of sound body," when he wrote (although the presence in the will of his doctor, Pietro Romani, as a recipient of twenty-five soldi, in reward for his service to Pietro in his illnesses, suggests illnesses past, real or imaginary, as well as future); but the peculiar pattern of Pietro's familial heirs helps one to understand why he particularly would not want to die intestate. Pietro instituted as his heirs his brother Giacomo and his nephew Paolo, the son of his brother Giovanni, should they be alive at the time of his own death, and, if not, their male heirs. As for the rest of his family, he left money and / or property or life tenancies to an unidentified Giacomino Lombardo; to Teodora, the natural daughter of his brother Giovanni; to Margherita, his sister-in-law and the wife of Giacomo (forty soldi ); to Contissa, his aunt; to Constantia his sister-in-law, the widow of Giovanni (six lire ); to Gayta and Contissa, his own sisters; and to Ricka, his foster daughter. Although Pietro's own formal phrases clearly place potential male heirs before female ones, the presence of women in the will of this bachelor, or perhaps widower, is very noticeable; and his body of executors is composed of his sister Gayta

and two friars (one the guardian of the Franciscans at Aracoeli) and a priest. Natural earthly family is important in almost all wills; and it is in this one. (It is a family which had appeared many years earlier in rather different dimensions and extensions, with emphasis upon its female members, and with already a Constantia, widow of Giovanni, in a lease of property out beyond the Milvian bridge.) The difference in the size and nature of the bequests to the various members of the family is shaped by a group of not entirely recovered variables: convention, affection, guilt, need, duty.

Peter the Lombard's will shows no wives or children. He had to think harder about leaving his property. He left much to his family. But, although the natural family and this earth are heavily present in wills, it is here rather the provision for the afterlife and for the spirit that is particularly provocatively interesting. First, for his soul, and before his detailed family bequests, Pietro left one hundred lire, fifty of which were to be collected by his executors and invested by them in an olive grove with its appurtenances in Tivoli, or some other place which they would select, with the profits from it going to two churches which were once each other's Roman neighbors near the present site of San Luigi dei Francesi and the Palazzo Madama, a short distance from the Pantheon, the two churches of San Salvatore de Termis and San Benedetto de Termis Lombardorum ("of the Lombards"), in the second of which, before its altar, he chose to be buried. Both of these churches were named from the ancient Alexandrine baths, and both had tangled, obscure histories connected with the great abbey of Farfa, and one, San Benedetto, with both San Lorenzo in Damaso and Sant'Eustachio.^[36] The property's income was to go to the use of the churches for candles for the soul of Pietro and his relatives, and it was not to be alienated for other purposes. Pietro then dealt conventionally with debts and faults he might have had or committed (in an era when gained wealth was often a source of scrupulous worry, and in which financial involvements were intricate)^[37] and to a small group of personal bequest: twenty soldi to Giacomino, ten soldi to a mason (Florio Muratore); ten to a man named Giovanni Neke. He then moved to money for pilgrimage for his soul: forty soldi in subsidy of anyone going to the Holy Land within five years or for poor pilgrims going to the sepulcher of our Lord Jesus Christ; twenty soldi for anyone willing to go to Sant'Angelo Maggiore (Gargano); five soldi for anyone willing to go to Farfa (geographically a great falling off from the Holy Sepulcher, perhaps, but a place connected with the Termis churches).

Then Pietro turned, most interestingly, to his bequests to religious

people and institutions within the city: five soldi to the recluse of San Salvatore in Termis; fifty soldi to the neighboring church of Sant'Eustachio for buying a pyx with a silver cover, in which the sacred Hosts could be reserved; and money for a similar pyx for San Lorenzo in Damaso; thirty soldi for restoring the image of Saint Gregory (again Saint Gregory) on the wall of Santa Maria Rotunda (the Pantheon) opposite the house of the by now surely familiar Don Compagio di Giovanni Lucidi.^[38] Then Pietro moved to his medical bequest and that for his foster daughter (thirty-five soldi but connected with other provisions), perhaps significantly placed within the spiritual part of the will, and then to provision for his funeral should he die in the city (ten lire ). Again a pattern emerges: pilgrimage—and specifically to Christ's sepulcher; the pyxes for Christ in the sacrament; local and Lombard churches (and Gregory and a poor recluse)—Jesus Christ and the neighborhood. But three times as much for his widowed sister-in-law as for the Holy Land pilgrim.

The spread of Pietro Sassone's spiritual bequests is broader, and they are informative in an additional way.^[39] In fact, Pietro Sassone's life seems in several ways to have been broader than Pietro Lombardo's: he had had two wives, to the living one of whom he left the bed in which he lay, its two mattresses, and some sheets, and a home to live in as long as she lived there honestly with his son Edward, or until she remarried; this Pietro's name, familiar as it is in Rome, combined with the Christian name of his son Edward (Adwardus) may suggest a foreignness more distant than Lombardy. Pietro was, though, as he states in his will, a merchant of the rione San Marco (not itself very far from the Pantheon), the rione of merchants, and his bequests make clear his attachment to that local merchandising place. And Pietro Sassone's will, unlike Pietro Lombardo's, assumes death in the city; but it was probably the will of a man critically ill, within sight of death, "fearing," as he said, "the danger of death."

The pattern of Pietro's ecclesiastical attachments is perhaps clearest if his pertinent bequests are repeated in the order in which they fall within the will, after certain initial settings and comments. The will was redacted in the garden of the Aracoeli, with eight witnesses (seven and an additional one), including a clerk from Tagliacozzo, a man from Penne, and five friars, of whom one is called of Colonna and one of Santa Maria Rotunda, one of Bolsena, and one of Orvieto; the fifth friar, "Thomasso de Alto Sancte Marie," is in fact the recipient of three lire within the body of the will. Tommaso is one of five recipients of bequests within the "spiritual" area of the will; although he is the only

religious, two of the others, brothers, are specifically said to receive their bequest for the sake of Pietro's soul. One of these five recipients, Caradomna, is said to be Pietro's maidservant, and she is to get forty soldi . The heirs in the will are Edward and Sermonetta's womb if it should contain a son or sons (daughters were only to have 350 gold florins for dower and custody). The executors are Sermonetta and (as in the case of Pietro Lombardo) the guardian of the Franciscans at Aracoeli at the time of Pietro's death. The reserved gifts specified for Sermonetta are the stuff (silver, gold, scarlets, furs) of a rich (but not rich like the Stefaneschi) merchant's household, as well as land and income for life, and a measure of good oil each year (until she remarried).

Pietro left to the recluses of the city, ten lire (one should remember the equation of one lira to twenty soldi ); to the church of San Marco, where he wished to be buried, fifteen lire for its opere , or for the fabric; to the church of Santa Maria de Capitolio (that is, the Aracoeli), twenty-five lire for the opere ; to the church of Santa Maria de Minerva (that is, sopra Minerva), ten lire for the fabric; for the church of San Trifone, one hundred soldi (that is, five lire ) for the fabric; for the church of San Giacomo in Septimiano (on the Lungara), forty soldi for the fabric; for the hospital of San Matteo de Merulana, ten lire, for paupers there; for the friars of San Cesario de Palatio, twenty soldi (that is, one lire ); for the friars of San Giuliano, twenty soldi ; for Santa Maria Grottaferrata, ten lire for the fabric; for San Salvatore in Santa Balbina, forty soldi for the opere ; for San Giovanni di Mercato, twenty soldi for the opere ; for San Salvatore in Pensilis "de apothecis" (bottheghe —"shops"), twenty soldi for the opere ; for Sant'Andrea de Paracera (Paracenis) "de apothecis," for the opere , twenty soldi ; to the hospitals of the Termine and Santa Maria Rotunda, forty soldi , that is twenty each, for the paupers. Then after personal bequests, Pietro's will makes another provision of another order. If his heirs fail, they shall be replaced by San Matteo in Merulana, which shall have half, and Sant'Eusebio, "where are the friars of Fra Pietro da Morrone," which shall have the other half of his residual inheritance. These last two legacies, to the church of the hospital on the Merulana and the church with the new enthusiastic friars, are on a different scale and at a different level of contingency from the other bequests; they are obviously significant. For the other bequests, it has been important, I think, to observe their order in the will, but their size should be looked at, too.

If one considers the bequests in units of one lira , one can line them up this way:

The pattern of Pietro's selection is clarified. He is giving the Franciscans at their great city, senatorial church, in whose garden he is making his will and some of whose friars are witnessing it, lots more than he is giving any other institution (if his heirs survive him). But the Dominicans, the Augustinian Hermits, and the Silvestrines (the Benedictine order from the Marches recently shaped to a friarlike pattern)^[40] appear, respectively, in the third, fourth, and fifth order of his bequests; and Pietro also includes the Carmelites and the Friars of the Sack. Pietro obviously believed in the relative spiritual efficacy of friars and new and enthusiastic orders (although he obviously did not find them equally persuasive); and this belief is heavily underlined by his selection of the Celestinians (the order of Peter Celestine) in Sant'Eusebio as one of his co-heirs should his natural heirs fail and confirmed by his selection as his other co-heir of a hospital run by the friar-related Crucifers. Probably a (to Pietro) similar pattern is reflected in his scattering of lire to the recluses of the city.

San Marco, Pietro's selected burial church, the church of his rione , the recipient of his second largest grant, establishes his second, but not in strength of attachment, principle of selection. It and San Giovanni, San Salvatore, and Sant'Andrea are churches of Pietro's neighborhood and of his mercantile profession, of the Mercato and the Botteghe Oscure. The selection of Santa Maria in Grottaferrata seems to have been

another neighborhood selection, but the neighborhood of Pietro in another guise, as a landholder and controller of "my casale ," with neighbors including Angelo Saxonis or Sassone, Pietro Capocci de Papazurri, from whom he had bought land, the church of Cosmas and Damian, as well as the monastery of Grottaferrata, land perhaps connected with an Oddone Benencase to whose sons he left a bequest for his soul—lands by the road to Frascati. Santa Maria was Pietro's country ecclesiastical charity; but the heaviness of his bequest is not completely explained by the surviving evidence, although that evidence includes our knowledge of extensive contemporary redecoration at Grottaferrata. Perhaps Pietro had intended to be buried in its church had his illness come upon him in the country.

The next act of Pietro Sassone's spiritual bequests is to hospitals and their paupers, to institutionalized corporal works of mercy. His gift to San Matteo in Merulana is large, and it is emphasized by his making San Matteo his co-heir should his natural heirs fail. The principle directing his gift to San Salvatore in Santa Balbina is almost surely the presence there of one of Rome's most famous portraits of the living Christ, a relative, in significance, of the Veronica.

Pietro, then, endowed the friars and the new orders, hospitals for paupers, the portrait of the living Christ, his own neighborhood, and the churches of his profession. It is also noteworthy that, although he specified that his gifts for San Cesareo and San Giuliano were for the friars there and that the hospital gifts were for the paupers, all the other institutional gifts were specifically pro fabrica or pro opere . San Marco's money was pro opere sive fabrica , but all the others were one or the other, with the Aracoeli, San Salvatore in Santa Balbina, and the merchant churches getting pro opere . The distinction may be meaningless. But it could possibly imply a distinction between building and decorating, or furnishing, and it could imply that some of the churches were known to be actively involved in building campaigns, and thus even explain the size of Grottaferrata's gift. More surely, perhaps, both sorts of specification help reveal the cast of mind of a merchant, not without investment in land bought by himself, but attracted to things that were active and new.

Surviving Roman wills do not repeat one another as if they were written from a stenciled form, but lumped together they reenforce one another, substantiate one another's testimony about the spiritual affections and attractions of the denizens of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Rome. Hugh of Evesham, the English medical cardinal at San Lorenzo in Lucina, made a will which left money for the fabric of the

great Roman churches of Saint Peter and Saint John Lateran and for ornamentis for San Lorenzo and which stretched out to the places of Hugh's life—Oxford, Paris, and the places where he had or had had livings in the north and west of England. Besides fabric, and much more frequently, Hugh spoke of bread, or money and grain for bread, for paupers; he provided for poor girls who needed dowries and for bridges that needed to be built, and for hospitals and leprosaria —corporal, and active, works of mercy. He provided, too, for scholars, nuns, and recluses; and he distributed his books.

But Hugh's will is literally filled with gifts to the friars of three countries, of England, France (Paris), and Italy (Rome). To the friars of the place where he would die, an unknown town and so one in which Hugh would not have had personal favorites among the houses of friars (and in which he could assume the presence only of omnipresent orders), he left fifty pounds Tournois to be divided equally between the minors and the preachers, that is, the Franciscans and the Dominicans, and ten pounds for the Augustinian (Hermit) friars, as well as forty pounds to be divided between recluses and hospitals (the last a combination, repeatedly apparent, which recalls John of Matha and San Tommaso in Formis). But in Rome itself Hugh's division among the friars was different, forty pounds to be divided equally between the Franciscans and Dominicans, that is, twenty pounds each, but thirty pounds for the Augustinans, and fifty for the recluses; in the city he knew, he favored the Augustinians (because they were closer neighbors to San Lorenzo?) and recluses (because they were less caught in a hardening shell of property?). In Oxford, which he had known, he remembered the Carmelites as well as the Augustinians, but gave each only one-fifth of what he gave the Dominicans, and he gave the Franciscans only two-thirds of what he gave the Dominicans. And so his will moves from place to place, Paris, York, Beverly, Grimsby, Worcester, adjusting his gifts to the friars.^[41]

In contrast with Hugh's long and articulate will from 1286, is the short, reticent will from 1270 of "the noble woman Risabella (of Tagliacozzo), wife of the noble man Napoleone di don Giacomo di Napoleone Orsini," who left something to her mother, but who essentially put herself and the charity to be administered for her soul's sake in her husband's hands. But she did make one specific bequest for her soul's sake: "I will that my husband should give my breviary to Santa Maria de Minerva for my soul."^[42] The friars attracted the reticent and the garrulous alike.

As early as 1232, when Giangaetano Orsini, whose greatest gift

to religion was probably his daughter Margherita, the mother of Margherita Colonna, made his will, he had friar witnesses to it and was counseled in making it by the prior of the Dominicans at Santa Sabina.^[43] It is a will, rather nervously codiciled in 1233 and 1234, which suggests a life entangled in remembered sexual problems. It grants large sums of money for the souls of specific people; it grants money to paupers and money for repairing damage done to churches like Saint Paul's. As Hugh of Evesham would send money back to the places of his livings, Giangaetano left money to the men of his fiefs. Giangaetano's soul was intricately insured, even with two featherbeds to a Franciscan friary. The friars are omnipresent, but of course not alone: in 1285 Giovanni, son of the noble lord Pietro Romani, included Cistercians with his Dominicans, Franciscans, and Augustinians; and in 1290, in the will with which he enriched the Minoresses of Margherita Colonna's San Silvestro in Capite and gave the Franciscans of the Aracoeli, if he should die in the city, besides his body one hundred florins, Pietro Colonna gave money to other diverse institutions.^[44]

Pietro Colonna also granted money, fifty lire, and a house worth ten lire, to a woman named Perseta, who is described as the daughter of the then dead pauper of Gallicano named Chiara. In a will that at other points must deal with natural daughters, Perseta's sudden riches are suspect, but the description of her mother as a pauper, and even more the description within the will of the nuns at San Silvestro's as pauperes . . . spiritu trills in, in its slightly off tone, one of the recurring themes of this period's wills and piety, one obviously connected with the friars (and perhaps in Rome as in other places with the diocesan bishop), "the poor of Christ." So begins, essentially, the will of Crescenzio di don Leone di Giovanni de Giudice in 1271: "In the first place I institute as my heirs the poor of Christ" (pauperes Christi ); and so provides the will of Giovanni Frangipane de Septizonio, in 1266, that should he die without heirs the poor of Christ (pauperes Christi ) should become an heir. So, too, in 1272 Angelo di Paolo Bobone made his heirs the poor of Christ (pauperes Christi ), although this inheritance did not need to imply the bulk of an estate, and in Angelo's case the implication is that it might be only ten soldi, and that the pauperes' becoming heir was essentially a convenience to the structure of the will.^[45]

Wills often imply that the executors would know or select "the poor of Christ," so the reader in a distant century need not be told whom the testator has in mind. The identification of pauper may of

course come to us from the other side, if sometimes a little oddly, as when Margherita Colonna, as a "pauper Christi," declined to make a will. But the need for a convenient institutional receptacle for bequests to paupers had of course been more than adequately supplied, not only by the orders of poor friars, but even more specifically and exactly by hospitals for the poor. So, in disposing of two thousand florins in 1301, Filippo di Matteo di Pandulfo de Suburra could leave five hundred to the paupers at the hospital of San Matteo on the Merulana (and honor his father as well). Thus the wealth of Santo Spirito grew, and as its necrology makes clear, testators who wanted a closer connection with the poor and Christ than mere money could bring might leave pertinent specifics, as did a bishop who left his bed and bedclothes to the hospital, along with a silver chalice. The hospitals which men who lived in Rome remembered, moreover, could be far away, in Genoa, for example; and the taste for hospital bequests was not locally Roman. Hospitals in Pistoia, for example, were already beginning their "amazing growth."^[46]

The themes of piety that can be collected and observed in thirteenth-century Roman wills are blatantly exposed, their message intensified, and the number of wills which exposed them stunningly increased in the notarial cartularies of the 1360s from the collection of Sant'Angelo in Pescheria. One can focus one's attention first on the wills of two specific women, which are immersed in the cartularies' vast richness. Both of these wills are from 1364, and both from women then living, and thinking of dying, in central, urban Rome.

The first of these wills, written in April at the Aracoeli, is that of an apparently childless noblewoman, Donna Paola Savelli of the Ripa, who had taken as her second, and, one might guess, not entirely pleasing, husband, one of the Savelli. (And one should note again the repeated unevenness of life—not only the seemingly omnipresent widows and women taking second husbands, proclaiming, as they do, the hardiness of the female, but also the men with second wives. Life was not simply short in thirteenth-century Rome—that is not the point; it was short for some people, perhaps the great majority, but long for others, very uneven.)^[47] Donna Paola's will is obviously interested in protecting the spiritual memory of her first husband, Massaretto, who himself had had built a chapel in the monastery of San Gregorio. It is a rich will, with dresses pleated and sequined from head to foot, scarlet and satin, with a furred mantle and pleated belts, with pearls and sequins and silver gilt, tunics with red and ribbons with silver. It is also, and clearly connectedly, a will that worries very seriously over spiritual

matters. Donna Paola, who made her mother Perna her heiress, left for three roofless paupers of Christ, twelve denari each; for the repair of the Lateran (recently damaged), thirty florins; to the image of the Virgin at Aracoeli, her precious sapphire ring worth twenty florins and also twenty florins to the Franciscans there for singing Masses; to the brothers of Santa Maria Nova, where a sacred image was, forty florins and ten florins more for buying a silver chalice; to Santa Balbina, where a sacred image was, eight florins for decorating an altar; to the paupers of the hospital of Sant'Angelo of the Recommendatorum of our Lord Lesus Christ, one hundred florins of gold; to her husband's chapel in San Gregorio, a monastery popular in wills, one hundred florins for building and a weekly Mass; to nearby Santa Maria Guinizio, ten florins for an altar's decoration; to Santa Cecilia in her in-law's Monte Savelli, six florins; to a fishmonger's wife and a miller's wife, six florins, for which they were to make the devotion of visiting the limina sanctorum for the souls of the testatrix and her first husband, and more money for the souls of the two, to Altruda, a butcher's mother, and to a nurse and to a woman named Olive. It is a will which constantly insists that the ecclesiastical bequests insure future Masses for the souls of Paola and her first husband. And in order to finance her bequests, Donna Paola instructs her executors (who include the prior of Santa Maria Nova, the abbot of San Gregorio, the guardian of the Aracoeli, and the guardian of the society of the Recommendatorum ) to sell her sequined, pearled, pleated, scarlet, furred, red, silk with silver-barred wardrobe. Donna Paola's seven witnesses were seven friars (with names from places far from Rome, except one from Trastevere).

Less than a month before, Donna Agnese, the wife of the pezzo grosso of the rione Sant'Angelo, Matteo de Baccariis, made her will.^[48] Donna Agnese was Matteo's second wife; he had earlier been married to a Capudzucche. And Matteo had had a daughter by each wife. Matteo was also Agnese's second husband. She too had had a daughter by each spouse; and she made Andreotia, the daughter of her first husband, Ceccho Tatiotii, her universal heir (although much in the will depended upon Agnese's not producing male heirs in the future). The will suggests that Andreotia become a nun of San Lorenzo in Panisperna and take with her her cloth and furniture. Donna Agnese herself was a woman from a prominent family in the Campo Marzio, from the family and the piazza de Riciis; and she obviously maintained her attachment to both. Agnese left to San Nicola de Riciis (San Nicola dei Prefetti), a house; to the church and monastery of Santa Maria in Campo Marzio, a house and three lire for her soul; to the church of

Sant'Agostino (San Trifone's successor, which had been talked of in the previous year as the new church), ten florins of gold with the stipulation that Mass be celebrated every Saturday for a year in the chapel of Saint Catherine in Sant'Agostino where Agnese's family (progenie ) was buried; to Saint Peter's, the reversion of a house in the Vasca San Pietro; for the repair of the Lateran, twenty-five florins; to the hospital of Sant'Angelo of the society of the Recommendatorum of Jesus Christ, fifty lire, with the stipulation of an annual anniversary Mass by the society; twenty-five florins, too, were left for the poor, and twenty-five for the singing of Masses, and ten for the recluses (to the carceratis ) of the city, four soldi to each.

The patterns of these wills are repeated more modestly in the wills of wives of butchers and fishmongers and, perhaps, a little less effusively (and less in silk and sapphire) in the wills of their husbands, and a little more pompously in the roughly contemporary will of a canon of Saint Peter's who worried about the status of men who should carry him to his grave.^[49] These wills tend to be more specific than their thirteenth-century predecessors, to talk more of chapels and parishes, of institutional hospitals, of the decayed and burned Lateran, of detailed pieces of furniture and cloth. They repeat again and again their talk of gifts to paupers of Christ, to the friars' churches, to neighborhood churches, to specific societies and hospitals like San Matteo or Santa Maddalena at Santa Maria Rotunda, and particularly those of the confraternal societies of Recommendatorum (including that of the Blessed Virgin in the church of Quaranta Martiri in Trastevere), to specific images, or in honor of them, like the face of the Savior in the tribune of the Lateran, or the faces of the Savior at Farfa, or the Blessed Virgin on the island, in honor of saints like Gregory and Nicholas. They talk of candles to be lighted when the Blessed Sacrament is shown or elevated, and they talk of precious metals to touch the Body and Blood of Christ. The message of the wills from Sant'Angelo is amplified but not contradicted by wills from Santo Spirito, San Silvestro, and Sant'Agostino.

A Ponziano fishmonger leaves money (a florin) for oil for the lamp of the image of the "glorious Virgin Mary" (now, in our own times, restored) at Sant'Angelo in Pescheria, and he asks that when Masses are being said for his soul, twelve paupers should be fed from the money of his estate.^[50] In Sant'Angelo, too, a more pretentious neighbor worries with the arrangement of the new chapel, partly mosaicked, by the door next to the stand or counter of Giovanni della Piazza. An English woman in the Biberatica, Rosa Casarola (or Rosa Anglica Casarola, "English Rose"), includes in elaborate provisions for

her soul's safety, four parts of two houses for San Gregorio and remembers three paupers of Christ. A butcher's wife named Lella, from the Arenula, leaves her empty painted chest to her sister, a miller's wife, but she wants her new dress given to San Giacomo Septimiano (whose order seems to have kept it attractive) for a light to be lighted when Mass is said. Francesco de Tartaris gives the paupers of Santo Spirito rich tenements in Monte Mario, providing that they should keep there in the chapel of Sant'Angelo a priest to pray for his soul and those of his parents. One woman demands that a ring be sold immediately after her death, and another a dress, and one of them, a woman named Perna, asks too that a tablecloth of gold and four tablecloths of silk "which I have in my chest" be sold, and that the money be used for their souls' sakes. In 1323 a woman named Thedallina from the rione Monti and closely connected with San Silvestro, in which she chose to be buried, had left San Silvestro her red silk from which she wanted a chasuble made to be used at the Sacrifice of the Mass. And a woman named Ceccha from Sant'Angelo, who makes paupers her heirs and leaves a mattress with a pair of sheets to San Matteo Merulana, and another to Santa Maria Massima where she chooses to be buried, leaves to that monastery's figure of "the glorious Virgin" a striped tablecloth for her soul.^[51]

It is difficult to drag oneself away from these evocative, fourteenth-century pictures of soul and furniture and life which reveal the direction in which the more reticent wills of the thirteenth century are saying that they are moving, but let the consideration of the spiritual contents of one last will, that of a woman named Baccha from the rione Arenula drawn up in June 1364, sum them up.^[52] Baccha wished to be buried in Santa Maria sopra Minerva, and to the Dominicans there she left fifteen lire. She left much less, a single florin, to her parish church of San Benedetto de Clausura, for a candle to be lighted when the Body of Christ was exposed. She left a florin for someone who would climb for her the sacred stairs of the Lateran (to the life of Christ), and to someone who would make the customary devotions at San Lorenzo outside the Walls. She left money to a specific nun of Santa Maria in Giulia, a nunnery in her neighborhood, and money for the image of the virgin on the island in the Tiber, again, very close. She left money for paupers and orphans and Masses. And she left her tablecloth of gold and silk for Santa Maria in Giulia. The paupers, the friars, the neighbors, the image, the Body of Christ and the life of Christ are here. And, perhaps most strikingly of all, that splendid recurring theme of tablecloths turning into altar cloths.

These chests of silk and cloth of gold were for these Roman women, these givers of rings, obviously, treasure hoards (like the dragon's gold of an heroic age), stored away in part to give them celestial immortality. But they were stored by women with a quickened perception of Christ, the daughters or granddaughters of women who had been children when Altruda, their neighbor, walked among Christ's poor. It is unlikely that any of these women of the wills was another Margherita Colonna, but Margherita crystallizes and binds together more permanently in herself the perhaps fleeting aspirations which one finds in the testamentarily expressed souls of these self-confessing sinners, these hopeful donors of lighted candles and chalices and pyxes, these admirers of painted sanctity (gaining credit "only for recounting"), turning in mocking inversion of the Franciscan dream their silks and damasks into sackcloth.^[53] Their domestic, dying world remembers a Christ, who might walk in the door, come to dinner (or be a beggar like Lazarus outside), a Christ who could have known their table-cloths even before they were turned, as so many of them were, into altar cloths. The women were in fact dying Marthas.

Wills are obviously not the only means of access to this or any recorded society's piety. Other means fly to mind: the paths of pilgrimage, the patterns of iconography, the structure of prayer, the names of chapels, the conglomeration of acts, artifacts, and ideas which shape a life like Margherita's or a dedication like Innocent's at Santo Spirito. There is now at the Palazzo Venezia in Rome a recently restored, painted crucifix, the "cross of San Tommaso dei Cenci," which was made at the end of the thirteenth century and which was originally at the Aracoeli. It still reflects remarkably affectingly the piety of the Romans who first looked at it. At its top on either side of an enthroned divine figure, blessing, are the busts of unidentified saints, possibly John and Nicholas, the baptismal and papal name saints of the great Orsini patron pope, Nicholas III; the "Nicholas" particularly ties the painting to a conventional religious past. Beneath is exposed the family (and it should be thought of as that) scene of the crucifixion. There, decorated with cloth and sandals, the new plastic naturalism and personal, sentimental religion are powerfully combined; the combination exposed itself in the Franciscans' and Rome's Aracoeli. The cross is very persuasive.^[54] But wills, in their connection with death, have a special strength. They are a particularly nice token of that piety which hovers over a community like a guarding genius, a distillation of a community's feelings of guilt and inadequacy and fear, as well as of hope and wonder. Thirteenth-century Rome's piety seems to collect its spirit, to

collect itself, like that figure of Rome in later map-drawings which weeps among her less personal and more secular ruins.

Rome's piety gives a curious unity to this weakly gilded, weakly governed city with its indecisive neighborhoods; it gives a curious luminosity to this "great solid fact of the past," through which Innocent III rode like Constantius II, a human statue, but a thirteenth-century statue with burning eyes and active mind.^[55] Piety collects Rome's families in a new way and gives another dimension to their structure; Appian onions, Tiber roe, Savelli beasts, Santo Spirito settle themselves, in its light, into a sort of related significance which is an understandable and believable, not just fragmented and incoherent, way of life. The pieces and parts find within themselves (for us) a common formal distinction; they exist within a more comprehensible, imaginable historical space, because the people with whom they are connected say prayers that we can understand. We can allow these people to sit down and eat their fritate of sambuco flowers. We can savor, in mocking it, Gregorovius's mockery when he writes: "There is no better satire on all the most exalted things of earth, than the fact that Rome knew a time when her Capitol was given into the possession of monks who prayed, sang psalms, scourged their backs with whips and planted cabbages upon its ruins."^[56]

On a different level, with a different sort of seriousness, Romans sold replica images of the Veronica to pilgrims who had come to see their city's ruins and relics,^[57] to feel the pleasure of discriminating among the three names given to the horsed Marcus Aurelius at the Lateran, or to sense the exhilaration of the danger of poison and cheating as they did business at the curia. The petty Roman businessmen who dealt with these pilgrims seem to have been sharp, self-observant, and sharply observed by their obscurely selected rulers, like that Angelo Malabranca who, in 1235, regulated their greed, to its own profit. Rome, for all its romance, necessary romance, of jumbled, buried relic and treasure and for all the surface incoherence of its urban institutions, seems to have been a precociously self-regulating community. The quick smallness of its repeated and observable financial transactions, when they were small, equipped the men resident within its walls, perhaps, with the sophistication requisite for this behavior. In all probability the heavy burden of, and heavy profit from, bureaucracy and court quickened the Romans' understanding of the tourist trade, and the tourist trade formed at least a partial pattern to the Romans for making profit from bureaucracy and court.

Among the denizens and citizens of Rome, within this profit-

making machine, the most apparent mold of order was the family (and related institutional consortia ), and the most imposing mold of order was the great family. In its idiom, Roman organization, Roman politics, and even Roman neighborhood are most convincingly discussed. The great families, the Colonna, the Orsini, their fellows, controlled areas, but not solid areas, of Rome and of the campagna . Groups within families bought and sold, they mated their young and sent them to the church. They did this with a knowledgeable self-interest and a relative lack of concern about hierarchical dignity and above all a quick metropolitan tempo which was perhaps peculiar to them and their situation. But their power was based on wealth in land in the country, with its dependent laborers and seignorial income, and land in the city, with its profit in rents (and on both sorts of land the families had fortresses with which they expressed a source of power more primitive than, and as basic as, wealth). The source of Roman family wealth and power was thus ordinary, conservative, conventional; but the extension of family wealth, the sort of extension which led to greatness, was local and peculiar and was dependent upon office, particularly the office of pope and cardinals, but also all the smaller connected offices of the papal curia. The families themselves were loosely and difficultly organized. Neither did they include in their nexus of power and influence and friendship all their own genetic members, nor did they exclude men of different name or even different blood. Still the heart of the family, its nucleus, was a domestic family of parents, children, siblings, cousins, participants in the life of the same domestic household with jointly held property. It was a relationship as central to this organization as the relationship of lord to man was to conventional feudalism.

The revolutions of thirteenth-century Rome can be described in family terms. But although the great families changed position within the century, and the relation of great family to community changed too, the family itself and its way of getting and maintaining wealth and power changed very little—except perhaps in the brilliance of individual performances: Orsini acquisitiveness, Colonna eccentricity, and reckless Caetani speed.

For reasons which will have become apparent of this bazaar and vineyard, court and cult centered city, the interests of great family, of Colonna and Orsini, often and in many ways coincided with the interests of members of those similarly but more modestly constructed families of shoemakers, notaries, vine-growers, shopkeepers, by whose houses their own were surrounded and even infiltrated. As they shared the same impulses to piety and the same ages and senses (those painted

at Tre Fontane), they shared, eventually, the same sources of satisfaction for their greed (and the same victims). "Gold and silver" were similarly "not for" them. Although they played different roles in militia and council, they were both represented by militia and council within the same walls, around the same ruins. Nobles, citizens, and denizens shared interest as Romans. They shared, too, with their predecessors and successors, admitting appropriate change, the city seen from Montorio, a place that could seem another Cana in Galilee (at least at Mass and siesta time), the place of Saint Peter's men, but also a militia'd, coined, notaried, traditioned, always dying, liturgied, mosaicked, lizarded, walled, physical place:

the tile-clad streets, the
Cupolas, crosses, and domes, the bushes and kitchen-gardens
which, by the grace of the Tiber, proclaim themselves Rome of the Romans, . . .