CHAPTER XI.

CONTINUATION OF CAUSES OF DILAPIDATION.

THE rising importance of the new city accelerated the ruin of the old. From the time that Rome again became worth a contest, we find her citizens in arms, sometimes against each other, sometimes against the pretenders to the imperial crown. The spirit of feudalism had distracted her inhabitants. Adalbert and Lambert, the Dukes of Tuscany and Spoleto, were invited to inflame the civil furies,* and in the beginning of the tenth century, Alberic, Marquis of Camerino, had obtained the dominion of Rome, and the hand of the famous Marozia.† The expulsion of Hugo, king of Burgundy and Italy, the last of the three husbands of that "most noble patrician," by Alberic the son of the first, and the repeated assaults of the city by the expelled tyrant, are not to be forgotten amongst the causes of dilapidation. The assumption of the imperial

* A.D. 878, according to the Annali d'Italia. † A.D. 910 to 925.

Muratori calls Marozia "Nobilissima Patricia Romana," and appears to disbelieve a part of the "laidezze e maldicenze" charged to her by Luitprand, the repository of all the pasquinades and de

crown by the first Otho, in 962, and the revolts of the Roman captains, or patricians, with that of Crescentius, against Otho the Second and Third,* had renewed the wars in the heart of the city, and it is probable had converted many of the larger structures into ruins or strongholds.

The next appearance of the monuments is when they had become the fortresses of the new nobility, settled at Rome since the restoration of the empire of the west.†

famatory libels of the times.-Annali d' Italia, ad an. 911, tom. v., p. 267. Marozia had one lover a Pope, Sergius III.; and her son by him, or more probably by her first husband, Alberic, was John XI., Pope from 931 to 935. Guido, her second husband, Duke or Marquis of Tuscany, was master of Rome from 925 to 929; and Hugo, her third husband, from 929 to 932. Alberic, her son, reigned as patrician and consul from 932 to 954; beat away Hugo from Rome in 932, in 936, and perhaps 941, and although he had married the king's daughter, contributed to his expulsion from Italy in 946. His son Octavian reigned as patrician, or as Pope John XII., until 962.

* Romani capitanei patriciatus sibi tyrannidem vindicavêre.-See Romuald Salern. Chronic. Muratori. annali, tom. v., p. 480, ad an. 987. The Romans revolted in 974, 987, 995, 996. Crescentius stood a siege against Otho III., and was beheaded in 998; and another revolt took place in 1001, at the coronation of Conrad II. In 1027 the Germans and Romans again fought in the city.

The Frangipani, the Orsini, the Colonna, were certainly foreign, and perhaps German families, although they all pretended a Roman descent. The first when reduced, in the beginning of the seventh century, to Mario, a poor knight, Signor of Nemi, published their tree to identify their family with that of Gregory the Great, "del quale si prova il principio e il fine ma vi è una largura di 200 anni in mezzo.”—See Relation di Roma del Aimaden, p. 139, edit. 1672, which may be consulted for some short but singular notices respecting the Roman families.

Some of these monuments were perhaps entire, but it is evident that some of them were in ruins when they first served for dwellings or forts: such must have been the case with the theatres of Marcellus and of Pompey. How they came into the hands of their occupiers, whether by grant of the Popes, or by seizure, or by vacancy, is unknown; one instance has reached us in which Stephen, son of Hildebrand, consul of Rome in 975, gave to the monks of St. Gregory on the Cælian mount an ancient edifice called the Septem solia minor, near the Septizonium of Severus, not to keep, but to pull down. The character of those to whom the present was made, and the purpose for which it was granted, will account for the ruin of the ancient fabrics in that period. The monks were afterwards joint owners of the Coliseum,† and the columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius were put in the possession of religious communities, who abandoned them to total neglect. Whatever were the means by which they

* Mittarelli, Annali Camaldolesi, tom. i. Append. num. xli. Coll. 96. "Donatio templi de Septem soliis minoris facta a Stephano filio quondam Ildebrandi consulis et ducis eidem Johanni abbati. Id est illud meum templum, quod septem solia minor dicitur, ut ab hac die vestræ sit potestati et voluntati pro tuitione turris vestræ quæ septem solia major dicitur ad destruendum et sumptus deprimendum quantum vobis placuerit.”—p. 96, edit. 1755.

† See notice of the Coliseum.

The Aurelian column was made over to St. Silvestro in capite, and a singular inscription is to this day seen under the porch of that church, in which those who should alienate the column, and the offerings, are excommunicated by the authority of the bishops and

obtained possession, the Orsini, in the XIth and XIIth centuries, had occupied the mole of Hadrian, and the theatre of Pompey; the Colonna, the Mausoleum of Augustus, and the Baths of Constantine. The Conti were in the Quirinal. The Frangipani had the Coliseum and the Septizonium of Severus, and the Janus of the Forum Boarium,* and a corner of the Palatine. The Savelli were at the Tomb of Metella. The Corsi had fortified the Capitol. If the churches were not spared, it is certain the pagan monuments would be protected by no imagined sanctity, and we find that the Corsi family had occupied the Basilica of St. Paul,† without the walls, and that the Pantheon was a fortress defended for the Pope.‡

cardinals, and "multorum clericorum, atque laicorum qui interfuerunt."

I saw it on the spot in 1817. A copy of it is given in Dissertazione, &c., p. 349. The date is 1119. There was a keeper of the column in 193, shortly after it was built. The column of Trajan was in the care of St. Niccolò, and the new senate and people, in 1162, ordered that it should not be wantonly injured under pain of death and confiscation. See Dissertazione, pp. 355, 356. Yet the Antonine column threatened to fall when repaired by Sixtus Quintus. See De Columna Triumphali Commentarius, Josephi Castalionis ad Sixtum V. ap. Græv. tom. iv. p. 1947. "Erat valde confracta et multis in locis non rimas modo verum et fenestras amplissimas, vel portas discussis marmoribus duxerat ;" and the base of the column of Trajan was under ground until the time of Paul III.

* This was called Turris Cencii Frangipani, and the remains of a fort are still left upon the summit.

↑ Annali d'Italia, ad an. 1105, p. 344, tom. vi.

See notice of the Pantheon.

When, in the eleventh century,* the quarrels between the Church and the Empire had embroiled the whole of Italy, Rome was necessarily the chosen scene of combat. Within her walls there was space to fight, and there were fortresses to defend. We read accordingly, in the annals of those times, of armies encamped on the Aventine, and moving from the Tomb of Hadrian to the Lateran, or turning aside to the Coliseum or the Capitol, as if through a desert, to the attack of the strong posts occupied by the respective partizans of the Pope or the Empire. Gregory VII. may have the merit of having founded that power to which modern Rome owes all her importance, but it is equally certain, that to the same pontiff must be ascribed the final extinction of the city of the Cæsars; a destruction which would have been classed with the havoc of religious zeal, did it not belong more properly to ambition.† The Emperor Henry IV., the troops of the Pope's nephew Rusticus, and the Normans of Robert Guiscard, were more injurious to the remains of Rome, from 1082 to 1084, than all the preceding Barbarians of every age. The first burnt a great part of the Leonine city, and

*It is the opinion of Mr. Nibby (Mura di Roma, p. 125) that the great changes in the topography of Rome did not take place till the eleventh century; up to that period the streets had the ancient directions. The gates were the same as in the old times, and the houses were built upon the edifices of the imperial city.

+ Annali d'Italia, ad an. 1082, 1083, 1084, tom. vi. p. 273 to