Rome 1300: On the Path of the Pilgrim (review)

Late in the year 1299 pilgrims imbued with expectations of plenary indulgences began to congregate in Rome. As the Church had never marked the advent of a new century with an indulgence, Boniface VIII had no provisions in place for granting one. However, as the new year wore on and the pilgrims' numbers continued to swell, on February 22, 1300 (the feast of St. Peter's Chair), Boniface responded to popular demand with a papal bull decreeing the first Roman Jubilee. The new celebration offered a full indulgence to all those Christian faithful who came to Rome to worship at the basilicas of the city's patron saints, Saint Peter's and Saint Paul's Outside the Walls. Having no Christian precedent for such an event, Boniface and his theologians drew on a Jewish tradition described in the Old Testament (Lev. 25:10-12) in which a Jubilee celebration, a sacred year, was declared every fifty years so that people could return to their ancestral lands in order to allow fields to fallow, to emancipate their slaves, to make restitution, and to forgive their enemies. Boniface VIII borrowed the word and the concept for his new celebration but modified the time-frame: the Christian Jubilee would occur every one-hundred years.

The Jubliee of 1300 was a phenomenal success: the Florentine chronicler Giovanni Villani tells us that 200,000 people flocked to Rome to pray at the tombs of Saints Peter and Paul; the poet Dante Alighieri was probably among them. By 1350 the Jubilee cycle was shortened to the original fifty years of theJewish feast. Later still, the cycle was halved so that the Jubilee would occur every twenty-five years, the calendar on which the celebration is still observed. The year 2000 marked the first millennial Jubilee and was the occasion for the publication of this handsome text, Rome 1300, a vademecum for the historically-minded modern pilgrim. Herbert Kessler and Johanna Zacharias have endeavored to recreate Rome as it was in 1300 through description and analysis of contemporary topography, monuments, and ritual ceremonies. In an effort to aid the understanding of the modern pilgrim, the authors have conjured a medieval female pilgrim in whose footsteps we readers walk and through whose eyes we discern the traces of Rome's medieval monuments and religious life. So as not to disturb the textual invocation of Rome circa 1300, Kessler and Zacharias have made the editorial decision to discuss only the medieval art and architecture in place by the late thirteenth century, saving measured discussion of the later history of the sites for the informative photo captions accompanying the 225 illustrations, many of them in lustrous color plates. It is an admirable enterprise. Much still remains of medieval Rome's paintings, sculptures, frescoes, mosaics, metalwork, icons, relics, and architecture, but it is all too often concealed or obscured by the work of subsequent centuries indifferent and even hostile to the style and aesthetic choices of the Middle Ages. To conceptually strip away centuries of celebrated accretions in order to see Rome's medieval monuments in relation to one another and within their own context is a formidable achievement. The results are worth the effort: the topography and monuments of the Christian capital come into sharper focus, a setting that in turn facilitates the reconstruction of the city's unique religious life as it unfolded within the holy places that came to be synonymous with Rome's urban geography.

Over the course of six chapters, Kessler and Zacharias recreate that unique religious life by constructing two narrative journeys for their pilgrim, each of which serves to demarcate and describe discrete sections of Rome's sacred space. The first follows the pilgrim's footsteps as she enters Rome from the southeast through the Porta Maggiore, making her way along the Aqua Claudia toward the papal precinct of St. John Lateran. There, in a rather desolate and uninhabited neighborhood, the...