John Osborne is one of the leading scholars on the art of Rome in the early medieval period, having published a range of important articles and books since 1979. The volume under review is a sequel to his 2020 book, Rome in the eighth century, picking up from where that book left off. It is a work of meticulous scholarship, full of close detail, yet also wide-ranging, using material culture to set Rome into the wider political and economic contexts of the ninth-century Western European and Mediterranean worlds.
The book opens in the year 801, with Pope Leo iii optimistically contemplating life after his coronation of Charlemagne on Christmas Day in 800, and it closes in 898–9, with Pope John ix struggling to restore the Lateran basilica, and the invasion of Italy by the Hungarians. These vignettes flag that the book is, in many ways, a papal history of Rome. Between these dates, Osborne explores the ways in which the city, especially in the person of the popes, developed power, both temporal and spiritual, in the shifting world of the ninth century. Like the earlier volume it is structured chronologically in chapters framed around papal reigns, and a key source is the biographies of the popes found in the Liber pontificalis, set alongside papal letters, and the texts of contemporary historians. But most important is the material evidence – from public buildings (religious and secular) with their decorations in a variety of media, to metalwork (votive crowns for instance), textiles and manuscripts, from archaeology and from the records of antiquarians – and the story that this material tells about ninth-century Rome.
In Rome in the eighth century, Osborne argued for a political break between Rome and Constantinople, with the coronation of Charlemagne as perhaps the culmination of the process of establishing Rome as a ‘papal state’. He picks up the story here with the picture initially of a city in which Carolingian military might enable the popes both to assert themselves over a rebellious and quarrelsome local aristocracy and to plan to regain territories in Italy long regarded as Roman. The early ninth century as a whole saw a significant increase in trade and prosperity across the Mediterranean and Carolingian worlds and this was apparent in Rome. It was a wealthy city, supported by a hinterland producing food for the city, a centre of trade in luxury goods such as silks, and (at least in the opinion of its rulers) the centre of the Christian world, the place to which all pilgrimage roads led. The papacy of Paschal i (817–24), chapters iii and iv of the book, was perhaps the high point in this story in terms of material remains – new churches, lavishly decorated in mosaics (still visible in the churches of Sta Prassede, Sta Maria in Domnica and Sta Cecilia), filled with ‘new’ relics, and perhaps most pertinently, containing images and monograms of the pope himself displayed at central points. But gradually, as Osborne shows, this world fell apart. By the 840s, the Carolingian empire was enmeshed in civil war, opening a space for the political factions in the city to gain more power, and Rome came under increasing and increasingly successful attacks from the Muslim forces of North Africa and Sicily, interference from the emperor in Constantinople, and, at a distance, the knock-on effects from and continuing threat of Viking raids on Francia. By the end of the century Rome was a poorer city, popes seeming almost penniless, struggling even to re-roof the Lateran. Economic and political pressures had reopened the way for internal squabbles and factional rivalries in the city itself. The old order was ending with a ‘whimper’, a point that Osborne describes as one of the most economically and politically challenging in Rome’s entire history.
Tracing the story and the reasons for this decline in the city’s fortunes is a key story of the book. A central question is how much cultural activity was there in the city over this period and what does that cultural activity suggest. Osborne takes the view that the downturn in cultural activity visible in the sources reflects a real downturn, not the chance of survival.
Another central narrative picks up on the relationship between Rome and the Byzantine Empire. Though popes allied themselves with Carolingian power, Osborne argues that this did not change cultural attitudes: Rome still had considerable contact with Byzantium, particularly after the end of Iconoclasm and the triumph of Orthodoxy in 843. Osborne sees this as visible in material culture, especially mosaics, painting and manuscript illumination, where the style is ‘Byzantine’ in appearance rather than ‘Carolingian’. But he underlines that Rome was never a part of the Carolingian Empire and should be understood as an independent state, situated between east and west, north and south, and borrowing from all, whilst remaining rooted in its Apostolic Roman past.
Other discussions of the history of Rome – secular and religious – in the Middle Ages do not place material culture front and centre. A central argument is that visual display had a significant role to play in displaying and indeed exerting authority; a key methodological argument is that there is history in art. Osborne’s point is that we can learn as much from material remains as from written sources, that, for example, Pope Paschal’s Sta Prassede and its mosaics tell us more about him than the Liber pontificalis does. Historians of politics have tended to overlook the evidence of material culture, and historians of art to ignore the political context of art. In this book, art is not a backdrop or a decoration but central to speaking about politics, theology, the economy. That the pictures are in colour throughout is significant in this context: they matter enough to be properly published.
What is also hugely important is Osborne’s own extensive personal knowledge of Rome. He opens up a variety of sites and sources that have not really been exploited before, and certainly not pulled together in this way, to build up a picture of the ninth-century city unavailable anywhere else. The analysis of the church of Sta Maria de Secundicerio (the converted Temple of Portunus) and its wall paintings, and the Oratory of Formosus, for example, from the late ninth century, located for some reason in the substructures of the Temple of the Deified Claudius, and reported only by Giovanni Giustino Ciampini in 1689 are only two examples from many.
But we are left hanging: what happened next? We await the promised Rome in the tenth century to take the story on.
