Medieval Rome: Stability and Crisis of a City, 900–1150 by Chris Wickham (review)

Already published as Roma medievale. Crisi e stabilità di una città, 900–1150 (trans. Alessio Fiore and Luigi Provero (Viella, 2013)), this book has been greeted with considerable enthusiasm and acclaim. Publication in Italian made sense, as most specialists in the field are continental scholars or must be able to read Italian. Publication in English suggests a bid for a wider readership and it is from this viewpoint that I address the book. Non-specialists will find it demanding but, if they persist, extremely rewarding, for its methods as much as for its results.

The book deals with the problems of ‘pre-communal’ Rome. Its period begins with a late Carolingian crisis, involving Arab incursions into Lazio, factional violence, and the murder of popes. It ends with the surmounting of a longer crisis (1050–1150), the breakdown of Rome’s traditional system of government, and the establishment of the papal Curia and the Senate, new types of political structure. But this ‘storyline’ is not Chris Wickham’s subject. His subject is a series of interlocking facets of the workings of the city – its social, economic, cultural, and political structures – explored and reconstructed in great detail and with supreme methodological awareness mostly from a small and patchy collection of archival documents, ‘building blocks originally destined for quite other purposes’ (p. 11). Herein lies the book’s originality, as well as the hurdles its minute analyses of detail present to the non-specialist reader.

The teasing of information, hypotheses, and explanations out of the documents is enabled by deft manipulation of wider contexts and driven by the posing of bold questions. It is one of Wickham’s aims to work through comparisons: ‘Rome cannot be understood except comparatively’ (p. 3). The comparators are the larger northern cities of Lombardy and Tuscany, but also some southern ones. The comparative perspective yields a Rome with a unique and complex economy, owing to the size of its hinterland (a direct source of agricultural surplus) and its complete control over the Agro romano, largely owned by churches and leased. The city itself was not unproductive. In the tenth century, it was the largest in Europe but had fallen behind by 1300. Artisans and merchants were more present than elsewhere in Italy before 1150; the documents allow the creation of ‘snapshots of artisanal activity and specialization’ (p. 141).

A particularly interesting section of Chapter 2, ‘The Urban Economy’, focuses on the urban fabric. Here, Wickham draws on recent archaeology and Étienne Hubert’s Espace urbain et habitat à Rome du X^e siècle à la fin du XIII^e siècle (Ecole française de Rome, 1990), to modify Krautheimer’s sharp distinction between the abitato and disabitato. His tour of the well-documented regions of eleventh-century Rome (‘small and bustling’) demonstrates an unparalleled differentiation between them in character, social makeup, and economic focus and prosperity and lays the foundations for his two chapters on the elite strata: Chapter 5, ‘Urban Aristocracies’, and Chapter 6, ‘Medium Elites and Church Clienteles: The Society of Rome’s Regions in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries’.

Wickham regards these as ‘in many respects the central chapters of the book’ (p. 181). By squeezing the restricted documentation as hard as he can for information on prosopography, the holding of titles and offices (with important remarks on terminology), wealth, property, place of residence, and castle ownership, Wickham in Chapter 5 traces changing social patterns and political roles through the rise and fall of thirteen families (e.g., the Tuscolani, ‘Crescenzi’, Frangipane, Pierleoni). In Chapter 6, he looks at a sample of five medium elite families and three regions. One key interest and special feature of Rome is the importance of regional politics, an issue taken up again in the last, powerful, chapter, ‘The Crisis, 1050–1150’, where Roman collective politics are...