The Roman Church has always had a tendresse for early-Christian virgin martyrs, the prettier the better. One of the earliest of them, the most honored, and the only one to have a pilgrimage church dedicated to her, was the fourth-century Saint Agnes, whose faith remained steadfast through trials (inflicted, according to one version, during the persecution by Diocletian, whereas others claim it was that by Decius) that would have sunk any ordinary virgin. She was twelve or thirteen. No sooner had the imperial edict for Christianity been published than she publicly declared that she was a Christian. First the enraged pagans tried to burn her to death, and as a prelude stripped her naked; but she was able to cover her body and hide it from the onlookers with her flowing hair, which miraculously grew to an immense length before the very eyes of witnesses. Then a pagan judge threatened to consign her to a brothel—but when a young man cast lascivious looks on her, God struck him blind. Finally, she was dispatched with a sword. A shrine was built on the place of her martyrdom, on the edge of what is now Piazza Navona. Gradually Sant’Agnese in Agone (as it came to be known) was added to by the faithful, and then by architects working for those papal sponsors the Pamphili family, the greatest of whom was Francesco Borromini.
Of Rome’s seven major pilgrimage churches, the “old” Basilica of Saint Peter was by far the most important. First, and most obviously, it was believed to be the shrine of the Apostle Peter, whom Christ had entrusted with the task of maintaining his Church. Here, from Charlemagne in 800 C.E. onward, emperors were crowned; they were not recognized as emperors throughout Europe unless they had undergone the papal rituals of Saint Peter’s. Here, important treaties were signed, sealed, and deposited on the apostle’s tomb. Here, Romans and all foreigners went to pray for intercession.
This first Saint Peter’s—destined to be torn down in the sixteenth century, and then gradually replaced by the enormous basilica which occupies its site today—was largely built of the pieces of demolished ancient Roman buildings. These recycled fragments were known as spoglie, “spoils” or “leftovers,” and from the fourth century until the thirteenth, this process of gradually building a new Rome from the recovered, refurbished, and recycled fragments of antique buildings was the biggest single industry the city had. Medieval Rome did not merely rise on the site of ancient Rome; it was, quite literally, made from its remains. The first Saint Peter’s was the most important example of this process, but medieval Rome had more than twenty major churches—Santa Maria in Trastevere and Saints Cosmas and Damian being only two of these—built around salvaged Roman colonnades. The two most important of them were Constantine’s: the cathedral, San Giovanni in Laterano, and the first Saint Peter’s. The Lateran had two sets of recycled columns: some forty big granite ones, each thirty feet tall, in the nave, and forty-two much shorter ones of verde antico marble from Thessaly dividing the aisles. Though all vestiges of the first Saint Peter’s were lost in the demolition of the church, the architects’ records show that its forty-four main columns were recycled shafts of gray and red granite, cipollino, and other marbles.
Ancient Roman builders had been fond of using highly colored marbles for their shafts, terminating in white Composite capitals. Color was a sign of preciousness, particularly since colored stone had to be brought a long way; there was none in the environs of Rome. The stone came from all over the Empire: red porphyry from Egypt, green serpentine from Sparta, giallo antico from Tunisia, pavonazzetto from Turkey. These imports were ostentatiously expensive in ancient Roman times, and hardly any cheaper in medieval Christian times—but the skilled labor force needed to shape them, which no longer existed, was not needed for these ready-mades. In any case, with the weakening of the Empire and its navy, blocks of exotic stone could no longer be brought to Rome from the outer parts of the Empire, and medieval builders could not have used them. So “found” column shafts had to be employed. Some were exported from Rome to distant parts of Europe. When the Emperor Charlemagne was creating his Palatine Chapel at Aachen in the late 780s, his builders brought luxurious ancient marbles, and in particular whole columns, from Rome and Ravenna. And sometimes, in an effort to assert a more metaphorical connection between the ancient Romans and Charlemagne, they faked it: some of the “Roman” capitals in the chapel at Aachen are actually Carolingian imitations of spoglia, made on the spot.
There is no doubt that, for the early-medieval faithful, the presence of ancient Roman columns supporting God’s “modern” Roman house signified continuity—the passage of Rome’s lost authority to Christianity. It must have contributed powerfully to the sense that the first Saint Peter’s was the true center of the true faith.
As a result, a kind of “third Rome”—which to the pious soon became the first Rome—grew up around the pilgrimage church of Saint Peter’s. Known as the Borgo, it centered on the Castel Sant’Angelo, that huge, drumlike fortification built around the original tomb of Hadrian. It was defined by the “Leonine walls,” a line of enclosure dating from the time of Pope Leo IV (reigned 847–55), which ran from the Castel Sant’Angelo up to a point behind Saint Peter’s, turned, and descended to the bank of the Tiber. These defined and sheltered the Città Leonina, or Borgo, consisting of the basilica, the smaller churches, papal apartments, monasteries, living quarters for the clergy, and hostels for pilgrims: a clutter of buildings which, because of their papal associations, enjoyed an ill-defined juridical independence from the rest of Rome which continued until the late seventeenth century. This independence was an origin of what became, by law, the separation of Vatican City (which corresponded, more or less, to the Borgo) as the last vestige of the Papal States.
As early as the ninth century, the Borgo had five hostels for pilgrims, six monasteries to serve these hostels and the basilica, and temporary cells, a warren of them, attached to the basilica for hermits and the poor. But by the thirteenth century, the Borgo had swollen to become the undisputed tourist center of the city—“the Via Veneto of ancient Rome,” in Richard Krautheimer’s words. It had so many rival inns that their owners competed to steal one another’s guests by force, which must have led to some picturesque and noisy squabbles on the piazzas.
Beyond the Borgo were the sectors of Rome known as the abitato and the disabitato. The abitato was where people lived, worked, and worshipped. The disabitato was a kind of suburban desert, where nobody wanted to be and invaders came to grief. A chronicler in 1155 recorded how, on the edges of the disabitato, half the army of Barbarossa had been killed by “green snakes, black toads and winged dragons … whose breath poisoned the air as did the stench of rotting dead bodies.”