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

Medieval Rome—poor, depopulated, politically volatile, with a succession of popes almost as swift as the succession of late Roman emperors—has served historians, since the fifteenth century, as a benighted foil for the glories of the Renaissance. But, as Wickham shows in this meticulously detailed book, epochal transformations were taking place in Rome during the years between the visit of Charlemagne, who came to the city peacefully in 800 to be crowned by the pope, and that of Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV, whose advent in 1084 led to pitched battle in the streets between imperial and papal troops. The growth of local industry, the formation of a distinct middle class, and the creation of a civic government led to the commissioning of remarkable works of art and architecture. In Rome, then, as elsewhere in Europe, there really was a twelfth-century Renaissance.