Medieval Rome was the biggest, richest and most conscientiously ancient city in Europe up to the twelfth century. The people of Rome lived among ancient ruins, which appear in property records as ‘cryptae’ and with more-or-less accurate identifications in the twelfth-century Mirabiliae. Romans also lived around the ancient churches enshrining the bodies of the apostles and other saints, churches so famous that people came from the entire Christian world to venerate them. The ponderous notion of Urbs, the City, the name used since antiquity to distinguish Rome from any other, means that medieval Rome has always been studied as an exceptional subject. It is usually seen as a place that loomed so large in medieval imaginations, and which served so consistently as a model for other places, that it could never be analysed conventionally. Not only its past set it apart, but also its extremely powerful, vociferous bishops and the enormous institution of the medieval papacy which, like the ancient Aurelian walls, encircled and defined the medieval city.

Wickham sets out to tell the history of medieval Rome from scratch, starting with landscape and geography and determining the relationship between city and countryside. He has reviewed every document from the period, re-examining property transactions, legal cases, chronicle accounts and letters. In so doing, he has revealed some not-unforeseen biases in the state of our knowledge and set out to correct them. Wickham has taken palpable pleasure in deflating not only the so-called classical tradition of Rome's imperial grandeur but also the medieval popes and their arguments with emperors. This book shows that in and of themselves, these two key machines for so much medieval history were not actually that meaningful in the working of the city. This is a book about Romans and their lives, the urban rentiers and the ‘middle elite’ craftsmen, their popular festivals, their brick tower-houses, their onion farms and farming guilds, their dour clerical landlords and the gang-land clashes between factions and families in the city's seven neighbourhoods. This is a book about Rome at times despite the popes and about Rome as a city in Italy, in particular in the years leading up to the formation of urban communes, with much in common with Milan, Naples, Genova and Pisa.

What was different about Rome, though, was the papacy. Leaving aside matters of doctrine or cult (and this book does push these matters to one side) the pope and his household were a massive economic force for Rome and the Romans. The churches of Rome, both collectively and individually, had very firm holds on the block of agricultural lands around Rome, the Lands of St Peter. Unlike other parts of Italy, where land was sold and subdivided, around Rome it was leased out to families or institutions which managed the rent collection and upkeep, and then returned to the churchmen who owned it after three generations. These lands fed the city, churchmen, tradesmen and paupers alike, with grain, wine, oil, salt and food, and the churches took in rent. These full bellies and cash flow encouraged money-lending, bribes (standard fare for papal dispute resolution) and eventually specialist middlemen who sold or distributed goods and specialist craftsman. Medieval Rome shows this pattern with new clarity, using the evidence of the leases themselves, the early advent of surnames indicating specialization and the production of things like fine glazed pottery finewares at Rome.

The circulation of wealth also led to massive patronage of Roman churches throughout this period, to pay for their gold mosaics, decoration, marble floors, antique columns and Roman bricks extracted from defunct ancient buildings. Patronage of these buildings, as the discussion of the S. Clemente frescoes makes clear, was not exclusively from churchmen. The middling classes of butchers and artisans also spent money to display their conspicuous piety, especially a new brand of asceticism and the cults of early saints, some of whom were Roman and most of whom were post-apostolic examples of pious living beyond the time of Christ. This kind of veneration has often been considered a hallmark of the ‘reform’ led by Gregory VII and other popes across the eleventh century, who strove to separate the lives of churchmen from the secular world, preventing emperors from investing in ecclesiastical offices and professionalizing the priesthood. The flipside of this coin was the promotion of a certain kind of lay piety, distinct from that of bishops or abbots, and successful artisans and new rentier groups in eleventh-century Rome were happy to promote this brand of sacred history in the city's churches.

Wickham's book makes clear that medieval Rome should not be taken as exceptional; it must be analysed like any other city, with attention to its economy, aristocracy and intellectual life and how the confines of the urban environment charged alliances and enmities. His clear-headed analysis undermines long-held attitudes that Romans continually reframed their world in relation to ancient imperial glory and that Rome was the papacy. Theology and orthodoxy had little to do with the power of the church at Rome. Rather, the economic structures of the church's landholding which redirected aristocratic competition away from land acquisition and the clientele networks that families developed with neighbourhood churches meant that the means by which Romans attained wealth and status may always be traced back to the church, and its head, the pope, but not in the way we always thought it was.