In the summer of 968, an ambassador from the Saxon king Otto I had an audience in Constantinople with Nikephoros II Phokas (r. 963-969), the basileus ton Rhomaion, “emperor of the Romans.” Nikephoros opened the audience by castigating the emissary, Liudprand of Cremona, for Otto’s deposition of the Italian king Berengar, his seizure of the city of Rome, and his attempt to arrogate Byzantine cities to himself. Liudprand refused to be cowed and offered an acid rebuke to the emperor: “Your power was dozing, I think, as well as that of your predecessors, who are considered emperors of the Romans in name alone, not in reality.” [1]
This momentary breach of diplomatic protocol was hardly the first collision between mutually exclusive claims to Roman imperial authority in the Mediterranean, but it neatly anticipated the next five centuries of relations between the emperors north of the Alps and east of the Adriatic. Liudprand’s reproof illustrates the challenge all rulers of the Roman Empire in the Middle Ages faced. The word “Roman” had transformed into a metonym, especially after the city ceased to be the center of imperial administration in the third century CE. But the emperor’s legitimacy remained tied to Rome and the Romans, so his distance--geographic, cultural, linguistic--from the city would always prove problematic. Otto’s successors eventually faced the same charge with which Liudprand had indicted Nikephoros. Like the Byzantines, eventually the Germans would be accused of being Roman in name only. How could these foreigners, on the far side of the Alps, claim to be emperors of Rome and the Romans? And what did those inhabitants of Italy think and say about such claims?
This historical problem is explored with erudition and ingenuity in a new volume edited by Anne Huijbers, emerging from a conference held in Rome in 2018. Across eleven chapters (written in English, German, and Italian) as well as a brief introduction and conclusion, Huijbers and her collaborators introduce a cast of new historical actors, troves of unpublished materials, shrewd insights, and compelling conclusions. It is a rich collection of essays that transcends the conventional Sammelband and should serve as an invitation, indeed a demand, for further work on this exciting topic.
The volume challenges conventional accounts that have diminished the vitality and relevance of the empire--meaning exclusively the Holy Roman Empire--and imperial discourse in late medieval Italy. Huijbers’ introduction and Claudia Märtl’s conclusion anatomize the blind spots and fixations of nationally and linguistically blinkered historiographies. Anglophone scholarship long treated the empire as a kind of stain, a litmus test that revealed thinkers as either medievals in thrall to a senescent and obsolete universalism, or incipient moderns embracing republicanism. Meanwhile, Italian and German long subjugated the late medieval empire to nationalist teleologies: either as a phase in the long project of Italian unification, or an early impediment to the normative path to state formation.
Len Scales offers a historical counterpart to Huijbers’ historiographical introduction, surveying nearly 150 years of Roman-German emperors and their engagement with Italy. Intensifying commerce, diplomacy, and intellectual exchange compensated for a slower pace of imperial visits to Italy after 1250. When the emperors did come to Italy, it was with smaller retinues and greater sensitivity to ceremonial occasions. These changes chart the emperors’ changing conception of Italy--no longer a territory to dominate and exploit, but rather one to be ruled in absentia, through the office of imperial vicariates. Scales’ attention not just to texts, but to art and ritual, allows him to show that Italy remained a site for the celebration of a kind of heady, universal kingship, emperor as imitator Christi, radically different from the culture of monarchy in Germany.
The first group of papers examines the semantic and conceptual horizons of imperium and res publica. The focus here remains fixedly, admirably, on historical actors and their categories. Carole Mabboux traces the polysemic history of res publica across the Middle Ages, arguing that the concept was a moral, rather than an institutional, category. As such, its values of political self-determination and resistance to tyrannical authority were wholly compatible with the values imperial advocates attributed to the institution. Anna Modigliani’s chapter offers a compelling example of the legitimating conjunction of such ideas--liberty, empire, and res publica--in Cola di Rienzo’s first “political adventure” in Rome between 1346 and 1350. Part zealot, part grifter, di Rienzo peppered his political writings with appeals to the res publica; yet, as his symbolic acts conveyed, he enacted a resurrection of the empire, with himself as itsprinceps, rather than a restoration of the Roman republic and its institutions of participatory government. Only in the aftermath of di Rienzo’s disgrace and ignoble death at the hands of a Roman mob does Modigliani see the first halting steps toward the institutional conception of res publica--a participatory regime exclusive of monarchies like the Roman Empire--that would become increasingly visible among some humanists in the quattrocento. Rienzo’s dream, like Petrarch’s, was an empire centered once more in the city of Rome. As Juan Carlos D’Amico shows, it was shared by other nostalgists in the second half of the fourteenth century. Among these was Fazio degli Uberti, whose long didactic poem, Dittamondo, was written during the reign of Charles IV (r. 1355-1378). Rome, as D’Amico shows, was personified as an aged and embittered wife, lamenting her recent fortunes and longing for a spouse to restore the halcyon days of her early life. In place of an emperor who will “fish only for himself,” as she reproaches the Greeks and Germans, Rome desires an Italian monarch.
A second group of chapters turns to the engagement of jurists and humanists with the prerogatives and person of the emperor. Daniela Rando uses a rich corpus of manuscript material to reconstruct the discussions among jurists in Padua in the early fifteenth century. These academic disputes illustrate, perhaps ironically, that they were not purely abstract and theoretical. Questions about the emperor’s rights before coronation, the limits of his sovereignty, and his obligations to the pontiff were highly topical to teachers and students, who aspired to (and often led) careers at imperial or ecclesiastical courts. Rando’s studium is no ivory tower, but a proving ground for combatants in the ideological and political warfare among papalists, conciliarists, and imperialists. From schoolrooms and learned debate, Veronika Proske examines the symbolic acts, ceremonies, and oratory celebrating Sigismund’s coronation in Rome in 1433. Amid the discord of the Council of Basel and urban unrest in Rome, the emperor and pope staged a convincing display of concord that strengthened the position of each. For Sigismund, though, the visit was instrumental rather than inspirational. Despite the assiduous labors of humanists who celebrated the new emperor in oratory, poetry, and music, Sigismund seems to have remained unmoved by the ancient and imperial legacy of the city. Riccardo Pallotti surveys the encomiastic oratory of humanists during Frederick III’s two journeys to Rome (in 1451-1452 and 1468-1469). These speeches reveal the sinews of imperial influence in Italy, which bound the emperor to cities like Ferrara, Naples, and Venice. Such oratory also illustrates how the threat of the Ottomans had subsumed the contentious issues of the early fifteenth century disputed in Padua. Pallotti closes his chapter with a remarkably thorough list of extant orations, largely unpublished, written primarily for Frederick III’s two Romzüge. These three chapters, particularly rich in unpublished material and methodological vigor, collectively challenge arguments that the Roman Empire’s relevance and appeal had begun to wane in the early fifteenth century. Instead, we see that whether it pertained to jurists or humanists, councils or crusades, the empire remained a crucial institution for Italy.
A final section examines the historiography of empire. As Heike Johanna Mierau argues here, the Roman Empire and its rulers lent structure to medieval conceptions of time, history, and salvation. The popularity of pope-emperor chronicles, of which the most famous was Martin of Troppau’s, granted the empire an immanence and relevance in Italy in spite of the emperor’s long absences from the peninsula. The format of these chronicles emphasized the joint rule of emperor and pontiff, the continuities of imperial rule over more than a millennium, and the solitary, uncontested nature of imperial monarchy. Huijbers extends these arguments to a couple of more obscure historians of empire. Giovanni Mansionario and Benvenuto da Imola show how humanist historiography could endorse the Holy Roman Empire and imperial designs in Italy. Huijbers argues that these two early humanists--whose histories still lack modern editions--helped professionalize and popularize imperial histories in the fourteenth century. Exploiting ancient coins and imperial biographers such as Suetonius, these historians depicted contemporary emperors as successors to Augustus and Constantine, liberators of Italy rather than its oppressors. As Huijbers incisively concludes, this lineage was both a boon and a burden: it legitimated the German emperors and their ambitions to control Italy, but also set them against a background which often made them look pallid in comparison.
If Mierau and Huijbers detail the ways historians could manifest the continuities between the ancient and medieval empire, the last two chapters trace the protean depictions of late medieval emperors and their Italian adventures. Rino Modonutti explores the entangled lives of the Paduan humanist Albertino Mussato and Emperor Henry VII. Across poetry, prose, and practical politics, Modonutti traces this complex relationship, as Mussato struggled to reconcile his devotion to the institution of the empire with his deep ambivalence amid Henry’s failure to restore Paduan liberty. Modonutti sees Mussato’s enduring esteem for Henry, in spite of his flaws, as a product of their entwined fates, symbolized by the garland of honor each was accorded: the monarch’s crown for Henry, the poet’s laurel for Mussato. Alexander Lee reconstructs the many robes cut for Ludwig IV by humanist historians between the emperor’s coronation in 1314 and his condemnation by Flavio Biondo in his Historiarum ab inclinatione Romanorum imperii in the middle of the fifteenth century. Over nearly 150 years, Lee shows Ludwig’s reputational drift from a guardian of liberty to a bloody-minded villain, a “criminal and monstrous creature” as Coluccio Salutati described him. As humanists took stock of his invasions of Italy and his assaults on John XXII, Ludwig’s signal virtue seems to have been his ability to function as a kind of seismograph for imperial attitudes among humanists, a “measure of empire” as Lee puts it. Claudia Märtl closes with a useful conclusion offering historiographical, methodological, and historical observations around three “complexes”: tradition, people, and events.
The volume’s virtues are numerous. It moves beyond the canonical writers on the Roman Empire familiar from the history of political thought--Dante, Marsilius of Padua, Petrarch--to bring a range of new orators, historians, and poets into the conversation, many of whose writings remain unpublished. Multiple chapters attend not only to the literary dimensions of imperial engagement, but to social and political interactions, as well as to the symbolic communication occurring in the piazza, the schoolroom, and the council chamber. We see fervent advocates of the Roman Empire, as well as detractors; but perhaps most intriguing are those figures such as Mussato, who struggled to reconcile the ideal and the reality of the late medieval empire.
Like any volume, of course, the book has shortcomings as well. The coherence of the volume would have been strengthened by a provisional attempt to synthesize these disparate studies: what are the regional, chronological, and political trends discernible across these two centuries? It ranges widely, but has (unavoidable) lacunae: liturgy and visual arts are largely absent. So too are the material remnants of the Roman imperial past and the antiquarian impulse to collect and analyze them that began to grip Italy in the fifteenth century (Mansionario’s coins excepted). Nor do we see mention of the apocalyptic expectations, so often expressed in visions of demonic or salvific emperors, that swirled amid the trauma of plague, schism, and social disruption.
Throughout, the book’s explicit premise--that the Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire in this period were conceptually coterminous--remains largely unchallenged. But there are a few places where we can see cracks in the edifice. Di Rienzo and degli Uberti would seem to envision a kind of insurgent Roman Empire, a new institution based in Rome, unaffiliated with and no longer beholden to Germany and its electors. At such moments, it is more difficult to see how the Holy Roman Empire and the Roman Empire are isomorphic. As di Rienzo and degli Uberti show, behind the deceptive unity of the Roman Empire lurked discord over who, where, and how this empire ought to be ruled. We need only look to Constantinople in this period to see another political culture centered upon claims to Roman imperial authority: first the Byzantines, then the Ottomans. These rulers too were bitterly accused of arrogating imperial authority, in a manner reminiscent of Liudprand of Cremona. One broad argument of the book is that we should treat imperial discourse and activity in Italy not as part of a “distinct and separate, southern sphere,” in Scales’ phrase, but deeply entangled with parallel discourses and activity to the north. As Scales puts it, “here, as elsewhere, we need to envisage a more interconnected world” (33). This trenchant observation, I would argue, not only informs this book, but points like a compass to even more expansive frameworks in the future beyond Germany and Italy. Huijbers and her contributors show us both how much work they have accomplished in restoring vitality to the late medieval empire--and how much still lies ahead.
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Note:
1. See Liudprand of Cremona, Legatio, ed. Joseph Becker, MGH SS rer. Germ. 41 (Hanover, 1915), 5, p. 178: “Dormiebat, ut puto, tunc potestas tua, immo decessorum tuorum, qui nomine solo, non autem re ipsa imperatores Romanorum.”