City of Saints. Rebuilding Rome in the Early Middle Ages by Maya Maskarinec (review)

Of Rome’s multiple layers of history, perhaps the least apparent—that is, the most difficult for the visitor to locate today—is that of the early Middle Ages, between the fall of the Roman empire and the coronation of Charlemagne in 800. Most of the buildings dating from this period either underwent massive changes, were enclosed within later structures, or simply disappeared. In the first chapter of City of Saints, Maya Maskarinec takes the reader on a walking tour through mid-eighth century Rome, pointing out sites and buildings, some of which exist in part, others that can only be imagined. This lyrical, engaging, direct, and compelling narrative powerfully sets the stage for the chapters that follow. The city she describes is alive with merchants, pilgrims, and clerics, all going about their business while contributing to a vibrant Rome flowering anew following the devastation of the Gothic wars in the fifth and sixth centuries. The unique, sacred topography of the city comes to life in this chronicle of the transformations wrought over the course of the sixth to ninth centuries. It makes for fascinating reading, for the author manages to illuminate a period notoriously described as “dark” in Roman and indeed, Italian history.

Key to understanding the author’s goal is the subtitle: Rebuilding Rome in the Early Middle Ages. Maskarinec’s superbly nuanced study shows how diaconiae (charitable institutions), new churches, and translated relics helped reshape Rome into the new capital of Roman Christianity springing from within the depleted imperial city. During this period Roma gradually shifted from secondary status under the Byzantine leadership in Constantinople to its own, burgeoning relevance via a range of agents, from monks to pilgrims to Byzantine administrators who transported saintly relics, especially “foreign” ones, from throughout the Mediterranean to Rome, thereby enhancing and amplifying its sacred topography. The brisk movement of relics could only occur once barriers against such practices had been breached around the very beginning of the period under study. Maskarinec argues that the veneration of foreign saints who had not been martyred in Rome marked the slow process whereby Rome wrested preeminence from the eastern capital, at the same time endowing the city with new saints, new churches, and diaconiae. While the papacy contributed to this change, Maskarinec demonstrates the greater richness and complexity of a process in which the pope constituted only one agent of change. This fresh perspective depends upon analysis of the limited remaining documents, including hagiographies and the Liber Pontificalis, without shortchanging close study of the sites themselves, the buildings, inscriptions, frescoes and decorative apparatus. The author’s command of the sources is impressive, as is her ability to translate and explain obscure texts but especially, bring to life forgotten events.

From sites within the Aurelian walls and often atop fragments of classical antiquity, a sacred topography only visible today in highly limited fashion slowly emerges. The early churches in and around the Roman Forum, were established under Byzantine administrators and dedicated to “foreign” saints such as Cosmas and Damian and Teodoro. Eastern saints appeared on the Palatine and Aventine hills, where individual, local merchant patrons established diaconiae such as that of S. Giorgio al Velabro, and aristocrats underwrote new churches such as S. Sabina. Early on, Byzantine administrators were responsible for the diaconiae, followed by members of the city’s elite, foreign monks, pilgrims, and finally by exponents of Carolingian monks, traders, and rulers over the course of the eighth and ninth centuries. Especially compelling is the analysis of the frescoes at S. Maria Antiqua, where a “panorama of saints” arrayed individual and carefully individualized figures from eastern and western Christendom around an imperial Christ. The specific saints and popes emphasized their role in buttressing the preeminence of the Roman church even while acknowledging the ties to Byzantium.

Over time, the efforts of many who brought relics from throughout Christendom to Rome set it up as the home of all saints...