Peter Partner, Renaissance Rome 1500-1559; A Portrait of a Society

Peter Partner, Renaissance Rome 1500-1559; A Portrait of a Society, University of California Press, LTD. London, 1976

Rome was far from the greatest even of the Italian cities of the early sixteenth century. Naples was far more populous; Florence and Venice had more developed and decorous traditions of urbanism and civic life. Rome was a mere reflection of the power and the ostentatious courtly life of its bishop. (Chapter Two, The Economic Basis of Roman Life, pg. 47)

Rome neither produced nor manufactured goods of primary importance. (47)

The typical Roman industries were luxury and service industries: jewelers, silversmiths, painters, me-[47]dallionists; bankers and innkeepers; masons, architects, land speculators. The hub of Roman life was the Roman court, a great service industry dedicated to the administration of the clergy of Catholic Europe. Round this primary activity revolved all the rest. Roman life was the life of the court in a way typical of no other city of the time, save perhaps of Madrid in the later part of the sixteenth century. The French poet Joachim du Bellay wrote that Roman life consisted of courtiers and bankers, … (47-48)

Banking dominated the economic side of Roman lay life. (49)

…the Apostolic Chamber collected dues from places as far afield as Scotland and Poland. (49)

Bankers…advanced large sums to the popes on the security of the “assignment” of the spiritual revenues. They made loans of a more old-fashioned kind on the security of papal jewels and treasures. They kept their fingers firmly in the profitable pie offered by the sale of papal offices, in which they facilitated individual or corporate investment. … Little wonder that bankers settled in Rome from all the important banking centres of Italy—especially from Florence, Genoa and Siena—and from the German firm of Fugger. (49)

To see the remains of ancient Rome, and to acquire Roman “antiquities” for his own use, were gradually becoming normal desires of an educated man of means. It is true that the popularization of this trend did not begin until the mid-century. For the first half of the sixteenth century the printers were still bringing out only new versions of the medieval Marvels of the City of Rome for the popular market; antiquarian accounts of Roman antiquities existed, but they were written in Latin. Only in 1556 did Lucio Mauro’s Le antichita della citta di Roma begin the stream of guide-books written in the vulgar tongues. (55)

Most of the richer classes of Rome were landowners in the Roman Campagna in one way or another. The clergy themselves, in so far as they were attached to or profited by the great spiritual corporations of the city, owned enormous tracts of land in the Campagna. (65)

The urban aristocracy, much of which would not a century earlier have called itself noble, was a landowning class more than a merchant class, though the great banking families must be excepted. But the bankers were also landowners, … (66)

“Only a minority of the Roman people are Romans.” The Roman Capitoline official, Marcello Alberini, the diarist of the Sack of Rome, supplies with this remark they key to the understanding of Roman society. Sixteenth-century Rome was a city of immigrants, which in turn lived off a floating population of pilgrims and tourists. Of roughly 3,600 Christian heads of households in the Roman census of 1526-1527 whose place of origin is known, only 747 (23.8 per cent) originated in Rome or in the papal provinces lying to the north and south of the city [The Roman “census” of 1526-1527 was published by Gnoli in Archivio della Societa Romana di Storia Patria, XVII (1894).] Of the remainder, 57.6 per cent came from other parts of Italy (including Sicily, Corsica and Sardinia), and 18.6 per cent originated outside Italy. The information is far from complete, as only in 40.6 per cent of Roman Christian households in the census is the place or origin of the householder indicated or easily ascertainable. But it seems reasonable to treat this 40.6 per cent as a random sample, and reasonable also to assume their households to have been predominantly Roman. If we do so then we may assume that not more [75] than a quarter of the population resident in Rome in 1526-1527 had been born either in Rome or the Roman Campagna. / (Chapter Three, The Roman People, 75-76)

The pontificates of the Aragonese popes Calixtus III (1455-1458) and Alexander VI (1492-1503), and the contiguity of the Aragonese Kingdom of Naples, led to the Spanish colony in Rome being the most important linguistic element among the non-Italians. The largest occupational groups were Spanish officials in the Roman court and Spanish prostitutes, … (76)

…apart from the few priests of the English College only one Englishman and one English woman are recorded in the Roman census of 1526-1527. Germans, on the other hand, were numerous and powerful in Rome. (76)

It would be wrong to call the Jewish community in Rome immigrant, since its origins there were more ancient than those of the Christians. But Jewish immigration into Rome in the Renaissance period was so heavy that in 1524 Pope Clement VII was appealed to by Roman Jews to settle the quarrels between “Italian” Jews and “ultramontane” newcomers. The 1,738 Jewish mouths recorded in the 1526-1527 Roman census represent about 3.1 per cent of the total population. The immigrant Jews had come, usually after persecution or expulsion, from places all over the western Mediterranean—from Sicily, Naples, Provence, Aragon, Castile, Portugal, and even from Muslim Tunis. Some of these immigrant families, such as the Lattes of Montpellier, were rich and powerful; others were poor artisans. Jewish occupations in Rome included those of the bankers, the doctors and musicians of the papal court, tailors, clothiers, old clothes and junk merchants, and furniture dealers. There were learned but far from opulent rabbis. (77)

Of the peninsular Italian population in Rome the north Italian element was much the largest, and was equal in size to that of the indigenous Romans. (77)

The Tuscans… numbered about 12.5 per cent of the Christian population, roughly half the number of indigenous “Romans”. …Wealth, taste and power, not labour or craftsmanship, were the essence of the Tuscan position in Rome. … The Tuscan bankers, of whom there were twenty of thirty major firms, had almost a stranglehold on Roman city life and on papal finance. They were not merely bankers in the modern sense but “merchants”; they dealt in luxury textiles, held the monopoly concession of the papl alum mines at Tolfa, acted for the pope and the civic authorities in provisioning Rome with grai, acted singly or in concert to handle the papal mint (the Zecca). / The less rich Tuscans plied occupations which on the whole fitted in with those of the great. Tuscans were jewelers, sculptors, painters, deals in objects d’art, booksellers. (79)

The two great catastrophes—the Sack of Rome in 1527 and the Siege of Florence in 1529-1530—dealt a great blow to Tuscan power in Rome; in fact it might be argued that what was ended by the Sack was not Renaissance Rome but Tuscan Rome. But Tuscan wealth and power were too firmly entrenched to be destroyed. Tuscans continued to control the papal court until Pope Clement VII died in 1534. Even after his death the Tuscan families with one foot in banking and another in papal administration, like Gaddi or Strozzi, remained powerful. (80)

…in a city like Rome in which only a quarter of the population had put down substantial roots, the displacement effected by plague could have been just as important as losses directly due to sickness. We know that many painters, architects and men of letters left Rome because of the plague of 1523, and that by no means all of them had returned by 1527. (81)

The total population of Rome in the census of 1526-1527 is given as in the region of 54,000 “mouths”, a figure which excludes unweaned babies. (82)

The estimated figures for Roman population after the Sack are very modest. The great floods of 1530 and the disastrous harvests of 1533 and 1538-1539 impeded Roman recovery. In 1530 the Roman population was perhaps 32,000, in 1545 45,000, and even in 1560 not [82] much over 50,000. Not until 1580 did population reach the level of 80,000, which it may well have already touched under Leo X, and not until 1600 did it top the 100,000 mark, which brought it to the population level of contemporary London. (83)

In general the classes were mixed throughout Rome. Cardinals and nobles would let out rooms on the ground floor of their palaces to traders and prostitutes, or lease wooden stalls in the squares surrounding their palaces to small dealers. (84)

With the single exception of building construction, Rome was a city of service industries. Perhaps the most important of these was domestic service, though it is hard now to find more than fragments of information about the way servants lived. Hordes of domestics must have been housed in the five hundred or so inns, boarding houses, taverns and wineshops, and in fifty-odd households containing more than fifty persons. (87)

Inns would normally offer their clients beds and some sort of bed-covers and sheets. But there were also large numbers of tavers and dosing houses which accepted poor folk who slept on straw paliasses. The straw might be provided by the host, or might be bought by the pilgrim direct from the strawsellers in the outer atrium of St Peter’s. (88)

It is hard to say that, apart from building, Rome had any major industries at all. It would be nearer the mark to call most of them crafts. (89)

One thing dominated Renaissance Rome even more than it had classical Rome: the horse. All the great houses of cardinals and magnates, not excluding that of the pope himself, possessed enormous stables. (96)

There is little wonder that the contrast between the splendour of Rome’s past and its humble agricultural present was a commonplace of Renaissance poetry. “Aurea templa, bouum Pascua facta vides” : the sites of the golden temples are made into pasture for oxen—so the papal cipher clerk, Trifone Benci, saw the city. “The countryman hoes and reaps, and drives his plough among royal trees; flocks now—no, they grunt!—in those golden scenes where the songs of mortals were heard by the gods.” This was how the sixteenth-century poet Chiabrera described the peasants as they worked their fields on the Esquiline and Coelian hills, under the shade of the great pine trees. Renaissance literary men felt that Rome had returned to its condition before Romulus and Remus founded in city. “Nostris temporibus Roma est, quod fuit ante Remum” (Benci). Flocks roamed the Roman hills as they had done before Rome existed, and Benci and du Bellay could ironically quote Ovid’s treatment of a Rome more ancient than the Republic. (96)

Rome contained an abnormally high ratio of male to female population, partly because of the large number of clergy, but also because the immigrant nature of the population led to large numbers of immigrant males being present without their families. Aretine attributed to Pasquino the opinion that the invasion of Rome by Florentines under the Medici popes led to Florentine wives being abandoned by their husbands, and he suggested that the Florentine government should issue an order that no one could stay in Rome without his wife: … cause for prostitution… (98)

…the majority of prostitutes in Rome were common tarts who were the meretrices publicae of medieval life rather than the re-named “courtesans” of the Renaissance. They differed from their medieval predecessors in being allowed to solicit from their own houses instead of being confined in brothels; they would wolf-whistle and call for custom from their windows. They could circulate freely in the streets, in public places, and in churches. They would often dress as men, either for reasons of sexual provocation or to avoid the attentions of the police. The tradition of easy-going morals in Rome was strong, and even after the Counter-Reformation very little was done to reduce the numbers and social importance of Roman prostitutes. The seventeenth-century diarist John Evelyn was much struck by their boldness. (99)

The gentlemen visiting Rome was prone to return home, as du Bellay observed, without either his money or his beard, for syphilis and its antidotes made the hair drop out. The diseased spared few who exposed themselves to it, … Syphilis was treated as an “incurable” disease, although some cures were obtained, by syphilitics were those mainly catered for by the new hospital of S. Giacomo for incurable diseases. (100)

Religious feeling exists in the moral climate of which it is a part. In early sixteenth-century Italy that climate was one of disillusion. The prevailing mood of the lettered classes was one of cultivated skepticism, though not of specifically irreligious skepticism. The literary tool of some of the greatest masters was irony: in the case of Ariosto this irony was applied to the chivalrous literary conventions of courtly society: in that of Machiavelli and Guicciardini the irony was applied to political life. (Chapter Seven, The Spirit of a City and the Spirit of an Age, 201)

There is no reason to believe that any inherent Catholicism of the Italian soul was responsible for the failure of organized Protestantism to develop in Italy. The intellectual and religious ferment affected the Italian clerical and learned classes as much as those of other countries. The reasons for the failure of Italian Protestantism were social and political. Only in one or two small centres like Lucca and Ferrara was there any real tolerance for heretical opinions. Italy is a striking instance of the iron law of sixteenth-century Protestantism, that whatever the degree of discontent with orthodoxy, an organized heretical church could not come into existence without the consent of the secular authorities. That consent could only be given on political terms: in Italy such terms did not exist. The guardian of Italian religious orthodoxy was the same as the guardian of Italian political conformity: the military tyranny of the Hapsburgs. Before the Council of Trent the desire of the popes to preserve orthodoxy of belief exceeded the effectiveness of the means at their disposal; heretical clergy often flourished under the papal nose. The real guarantee of orthodoxy in Italy was Hapsburg power. Small aristocratic enclaves of heretical thought could survive, like the circle of Juan Valdes and Giulia Gonzaga at Naples, or that of the Duchess of Ferrara. So could small pockets of millenialists and Anabaptists. But openly organized Protestant churches hardly existed in the Italian peninsula. (213)