We call it the Eternal City, but the truth is that it was almost extinct. The proud capital of the Roman Empire, which had over a million inhabitants, a huge figure for Antiquity, began the 15th century with only about twenty or thirty thousand. Florence doubled its population; Genoa tripled it; Milan quadrupled it. Beyond Italy, Granada or Paris had 100,000 souls.
The decline of Rome, which began abruptly at the end of the Late Empire, had continued throughout the Middle Ages. The transfer of the papal see to Avignon, in 1309, almost dealt the mortal blow. Seven popes ruled Christendom from French territory while Rome languished.
The timid return of Gregory After enormous diplomatic efforts, the mess was unraveled in 1417 with the unanimous election of Martin V, of the ancient Colonna family, and the reconciliation of the Western Church.
The Rome that Martin V found upon his return was in ruins, with entire neighborhoods empty. The small population was crowded on the banks of the Tiber, in an extremely unhealthy environment. Garbage rotted in the streets, people gave improvised uses to once emblematic buildings and public spaces.
In the next hundred years, Rome rose from its ashes. She did so looking to the past, to the classical splendor of its deteriorated monuments, but also to the present and the future. Urbanizing and beautifying the city was a priority for most of the Renaissance pontiffs, and not only for aesthetic reasons.
The prestige of the papacy was at stake. Türkiye consolidated its dominions. Powerful states disputed the leadership of Europe, among them, France, Naples and an incipient Spain, whose monarchs would aspire first to govern the peninsula and then to direct the Holy Roman Empire. Rome, mirror of Christianity, had to live up to it.
To prevent the highest religious institution from once again being at the mercy of a king, as it had been that of France during the Avignon period, the pope gradually became an earthly monarch himself. Strengthening the Papal States was a priority.
A professional army was established, the first in Italy, with a captain general of the Church in command, who was often a relative of the pontiff. Sixtus IV reached an agreement with the Swiss Confederation to hire mercenaries; Julius II definitively converted them into his personal guard.
Even today the Swiss Guard wears the colors of the Della Rovere house in its livery. Because, although the papal monarchy had the peculiarity of not being hereditary, in practice it was, during this period, in the hands of a few Italian families.
The popes of the Renaissance were Medici, Farnese, Colonna, Piccolomini. Even the Borgias, upstart foreigners, connected with the great houses.
To secure the favor of the council, the only body capable of amending the pontiffs, they created cardinals from their own family, sometimes at absurdly early ages. When they did not take the habits, their nephews and natural children contracted advantageous marriages and subterfuges were used so that they could inherit property.
Earthly power requires money. Hence, the popes of the 15th and 16th centuries, in addition to collecting taxes in their territories, did not hesitate to do business with the divine and the human. In Renaissance Rome there were enormous amounts of streets to clean up, churches to rebuild and antiquities to maintain. One of their main sources of income was pilgrims. The relics worked as a star incentive.
Martin V understood that he had to put the municipal street supervisors under his jurisdiction. Sixtus IV granted them a salary and the power to expropriate homes in exchange for compensation, a very useful resource for converting the narrow medieval streets into avenues. In 1587, the city had grown so much that, with Sixtus V, the two supervisors became twelve.
Even so, there was no shortage of neighborhood opposition to these reforms. During the possesso, the first papal procession after each coronation, it was not unusual for the crowd to rebuke or try to stone the new pontiff. Noble families also had to adapt to measures such as the prohibition of medieval lodges, large porches where, in the Middle Ages, ostentatious banquets were held before the eyes of half the city. The new Renaissance palaces would choose other ways to impress the plebs.
Improving access to the Vatican was one of the priorities since Nicholas V moved his residence there. He did it for two reasons, one practical and the other propaganda: to seek a better accommodation than the dilapidated Lateran Palace and to locate himself eloquently near St. Peter’s Basilica.
Three streets led to it, the Via Recta (an ancient Roman road that crossed Piazza Navona), the Via Papale and the Via del Pellegrino, which passed through the Campo dei Fiori and the Capitol. Sixtus IV connected the Porta del Popolo, where most pilgrims entered, with the Ponte Sant’Angelo by means of a new street which he called, not surprisingly, via Sistina. In order to decongest Sant’Angelo, he also built the Ponte Sisto, the first to cross the Tiber since Antiquity.
This custom of naming civil works with one’s own name was extended to Alexander VI and his Via Alexandrina, the first straight street of the modern era; to Julius II and his Via Julia, the longest straight street since the imperial era; to Leo X and the Leonine road, which was to lead to his unfinished family palace; or Clement VII and his via Clementia, commissioned by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger and extended by Paul III, who automatically changed its name to via Paolina Trifaria. Humility was not exactly the favorite virtue of a Renaissance holy father.
Even so, not everything was reduced to pomp and vanity. The urban investment was part of a larger plan, a heavenly plan. As Nicholas V made clear on his deathbed, it was about contributing “to the exaltation of the power of the Holy See throughout Christendom.” And when it comes to boasting about primacy, there’s nothing like bringing up the former imperial glory.
The sycophants on duty were quick to make the connection, emphasizing, for example, that Sixtus IV had transformed Rome “from a city of brick into one of stone, just as Augustus had turned the city of stone into one of marble.”
The link between past and present was Constantine, who was said to have ceded Rome and the Western Empire to the pope by refounding Constantinople in the 4th century and embracing Christianity. There was even a supposed document that attested to it, and although the humanist Lorenzo Valla had already demonstrated that it was a forgery from the 8th century, it was convenient to keep the legend alive.
Rome, the caput mundi, or capital of the world, was to be, at the same time, a new Jerusalem and a warning to future aspiring emperors: nothing more imperial than the Church itself, which must always remain above any worldly authority. For this reason, the new popes enthusiastically embraced the Renaissance, which, beyond its aesthetic virtues, constituted an effective propaganda program. Restoring monuments or erecting churches and palaces that emulated classical architecture served as a reminder of the eternal bond sealed by Constantine and Theodosius.
Paul III commissions Michelangelo to renovate the Capitol. A bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, dating from the 2nd century, is placed there on an oval pedestal. The philosopher Caesar becomes a symbol of papal authority.
Later, Sixtus V crowned the columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius with statues of Saint Peter and Saint Paul. Not content with this, he moved the Egyptian obelisk from the ancient Gaius circus to the center of St. Peter’s Square, almost a century before Bernini’s renovation that would give it its current appearance.
The sacred and the pagan go hand in hand without complexes. Hercules and Apollo are associated with the figure of Christ, Hadrian shares a fresco with Saint Peter and Saint Paul in the Castel Sant’Angelo, Alexander VI recovers two statues of Castor and Pollux mistaking them for representations of Alexander the Great and his horse, Julius II transfers the Laocoön to the Vatican Belvedere… The message is clear: the great ancient civilizations and their achievements were nothing more than a prelude to the coming of Christ. The magnificence of the Church gives them continuity.
All this pageantry, however, was very theatrical. When push came to shove, the Renaissance popes were forced to juggle to preserve their independence. In the countries of northern Europe, there was discontent over the nepotism, waste, worldly pomp and flagrant corruption of the Roman curia. Losing them considerably reduced the income of the Church and led the popes to military campaigns to consolidate or expand the Papal States, which in turn required increasing the fiscal pressure on the papal vassals, which fueled the vicious circle of discontent.
The dance of alliances and betrayals with neighboring powers was not without setbacks either. Clement VII lost a fight with Charles V that led the city to disaster in 1527, the date of the Sack of Rome. The troops of the leader of the Holy Empire massacred the Swiss Guard, and the pope was forced to flee to the fortress of Sant’Angelo through a secret passage.
The corpses piled up in the streets caused epidemics that ended up decimating even the invaders themselves. The people fled in disarray and, with them, the great artists of the papal court.
In 1542, Paul III founded the Roman Inquisition. A year later the long Council of Trent was convened. Winds of austerity, discipline, containment and censorship begin to erase the worst abuses of the clergy from the map, in the hope of stopping the expansion of Protestant doctrine. This collective effort at righteousness was to end a golden era.
It is true that the second half of the Cinquecento would continue to see the creation of fabulous works of art, but the spirit of the Counter-Reformation would soon dull the brilliance of the first Renaissance. Rome would rise once again, but the Vatican would never again look so much like Mount Parnassus.
This text is part of an article published in number 619 of the magazine Historia y Vida. Do you have something to contribute? Write to us at redaccionhyv@historiayvida.com.
