By the 7th century, the ‘grandeur that was Rome’ had faded, thanks to wars, sackings and plagues. Power had shifted eastwards. Yet the lure of the Eternal City drew pilgrims and tourists along an ancient route, says Matthew Harffy, author of Shadows of the Slain. He describes early medieval Rome for Historia.
Shadows of the Slain sees the hero of my Bernicia Chronicles, the Northumbrian warrior Beobrand, escorting a group of pilgrims to Rome.
The route they follow is based on the traditional pilgrim’s way from France, known in Italy as the Via Francigena (‘the road from France’). It was also documented as the ‘Lombard Way’, and was called the Iter Francorum (the ‘Frankish Route’) in the Itinerarium sancti Willibaldi, an eighth-century record of the travels of Willibald, a Bavarian bishop.
.jpg)
Aside from the natural obstacles and the risk of bandits and brigands on the roads, to make the journey even more interesting, what is now modern-day Italy was then a patchwork of kingdoms and provinces. Italy did not become a single nation until 1861, at which time less than 10 per cent of its citizens spoke Italian.
When Beobrand and the pilgrims finally reach Rome, they do not find the fabled city at the apogee of the Roman Empire. They are confronted by Rome in the middle of the 7th century, a city devastated by a couple of centuries of Barbarian sacks and countless natural disasters.
Rome in the early medieval period was very different from the image popularised by films such as Gladiator. That depiction is of the city when the Roman Empire was at its peak. However, multiple sacks and sieges, floods, earthquakes and plagues, had seen an incredible decline in the city’s population. Rome went from over a million inhabitants in AD300 to fewer than 50,000 in the 7th century.
The aqueducts were destroyed during the Ostrogoth siege in the mid-6th century, and the subsequent lack of fresh water was partly to blame for the city’s contraction closer to the Tiber, leaving great swathes of land as disabitato, ‘uninhabited’.
It is this landscape of historic monuments in ruins, cattle grazing between the crumbling columns of once majestic temples and palaces, that Beobrand and his friends encounter.
It would still have been remarkable and on a scale like nothing they would have encountered before.
Reminders of the grandeur of the past were around every corner. The great domed Pantheon that had been converted into a church, the Baths of Diocletian (so huge and elaborate that the building was believed to have been an emperor’s palace), the massive track of the Circus Maximus, with its splendid white marble triumphal arch, and of course, perhaps the most iconic of all Rome’s buildings: the amphitheatre that we know today as the Colosseum.
Despite the city’s slide from its former grace, by the mid-7th century pilgrimages to Rome were becoming more common, and there was already a trade in pilgrim guidebooks and itineraries, such as Notitia Ecclesiarum Urbis Romae, that described all of the churches, shrines and catacombs to visit.
Roman law forbade burials within the city’s walls and by the second century AD, the huge numbers of dead had led to vast subterranean catacombs being carved from the volcanic tufa rock. These catacombs, some with several levels and literally miles of tunnels, became a huge draw for visitors.
As the years progressed, many of the basilicas were enlarged and the remains of martyrs and saints removed from the catacombs and housed in more luxurious surroundings within the city limits. In the 7th century though, while the number of pilgrims was growing, they had not yet become the big business of the later medieval period.
That did not stop enterprising people from making money from wide-eyed tourists, selling them everything from the aforementioned guidebooks, to collections of ampullae — small vials of oil from the lamps burning in the tombs of saints and martyrs.
Today, if we think of the Pope, we imagine his residence in the Vatican. In the 7th century, if a pilgrim wished to see the Bishop of Rome, they might find him at the pontiff’s Roman residence, the Lateran patriarchium. It was extended and refurbished extensively in the late 8th century into a true palace from which the pope could exercise not only spiritual but also temporal authority. The papal household did not move to the Vatican until 1279.
The Christian Church at this time was split between the Eastern (Byzantine) and Western sides of the Roman Empire. The pontiff resided in Rome, but the patriarch of the Eastern Church, and the emperor himself, were both based in Constantinople.
The Eastern Empire’s influence in Italy was centred in the city of Ravenna and controlled what was known as the Exarchate of Ravenna, essentially a Byzantine province governed by an exarch.
To further muddy the waters, while ostensibly all being part of the same Christian Empire, there were emerging theological frictions between the pope, patriarch and emperor.
Shortly before Beobrand’s arrival, Pope Martin I had clashed with Emperor Constans II by not waiting for imperial ratification of his consecration as pontiff. Martin then proceeded to infuriate the Patriarch of Constantinople by summoning the Lateran Council of 649 where over a hundred bishops condemned Monothelitism, its authors, and the writings by which Monothelitism had been promulgated.
If you haven’t heard of Monotheletism before, you are not alone! It is what could appear to be a minor theological point that was taken exceedingly seriously by everyone in the clergy for hundreds of years.
.jpg)
You might be forgiven for thinking they should have had more important things to worry about, but I doubt the likes of the pope and the patriarch would have found it easy to forgive you! In essence, Monotheletism holds Christ as having only one will, as opposed to having two wills (divine and human).
The Lateran Council’s condemnation of Monothelitism did not sit well with the patriarch of Constantinople, or Emperor Constans II, both of whom were Monothelites and had pushed for the doctrine to be adopted by all factions of the Church.
Martin must have felt strongly about all of this, because he quickly published the decrees of the Lateran Council in an encyclical, a letter from the pope to all bishops across the world. Constans responded by ordering the Exarch in Ravenna to arrest Martin.
In Shadows of the Slain, Beobrand is quickly embroiled in the city’s rivalries, intrigues and machinations. It is a strange world, fraught with danger, where he cannot be sure who is friend or foe. After such a long journey from Britain, he might have hoped for a chance of a well-earned rest and some sightseeing, but that wouldn’t make for a very exciting tale, and such is not Beobrand’s destiny.
Rome, as perilous and deadly as she is beautiful, tests Beobrand and his Black Shields to their limits and, for some, the Eternal City will become their final resting place.
Shadows of the Slain by Matthew Harffy is published on 5 December, 2024. It’s the 10th novel in his Bernicia Chronicles.
Matthew grew up in Northumberland, where the rugged terrain, ruined castles and rocky coastline had a huge impact on him. He now lives in Wiltshire with his wife, their two daughters and a slightly mad dog. As well as writing the Bernicia Chronicles and A Time for Swords series, he presents a podcast, Rock, Paper, Swords!, with fellow author Steven A McKay.
You may enjoy some of Matthew’s other Historia features:
Greek Fire, the early medieval weapon of mass destruction
Al-Andalus: Islamic Spain in the 8th century
From slave to queen: an extraordinary medieval woman
Battling with history: how to write fight scenes and battles in historical fiction
Images:
- Part of the Roman Forum from Splendore dell’antica e moderna Roma by Giacomo Lauro, 1637: National Library of Poland via Wikimedia (public domain)
- Map of the Via Francigena: Paulusburg for Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
- Arch of Constantine and Colosseum with sheep grazing in foreground from Six large views, four of Rome, and two of the Roman countryside by Stefano della Bella, 1656: the Metropolitan Museum (public domain)
- The Virgin and Child, wall painting from the Roman catacombs, 4th century: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Apse mosaic, Sant’Apollinare in Classe, Ravenna, c533–49: Steven Zucker for Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
- Solidus of Constans II (obverse): Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)
