by Alizah Holstein
A pandemic has swept the land, talk of apocalypse abounds. A charismatic political figure with a penchant for opulence and known for captivating the populace with speeches about reviving the old empire is embarking upon his second stint in power. In his crosshairs is the political establishment, and under his rule the social order shows signs of fissure.
The story rings familiar, but is it? The year is 1354. The place, Rome.
When we swoop in for a closer look, other details begin to emerge. The apocalypse as it was imagined in late medieval Italy looks different from today’s. Less water, more fire. Though maybe this is my own personal apocalypse speaking, rooted in the southern New England landscapes I know best; where I see only downpours and rising sea levels, Californians might well look into the future and envision a fireball. Four horsemen featured prominently in the medieval imagination, and alongside the extinction of mankind on earth, they would also usher in a new age, one in which justice and peace prevailed in the heavenly city, the New Jerusalem.
The political figure who wants to Make Rome Great Again is Cola di Rienzo, and if you’d lived in Europe before the twentieth century, chances are you’d have known who he was. Machiavelli praised him, and Napoleon retreated from Moscow with his story tucked in his carriage. Byron eulogized him as a radiant figure, Hitler found his charisma inspiring, and Mussolini was warned he’d end up assassinated and strung upside down by an angry mob just like Cola, and lo and behold, he did. Opera fans will recognize Cola as the revolutionary “tribune of the Roman people, “a young man clad in velvet tights whose heroic stand against the depredations of an unchecked elite class was the subject of Rienzi, Richard Wagner’s first opera to hit the charts. Late in life, the composer came to feel ashamed of his youthful score. It was too “Italian”—a descriptor Cola would have eschewed for himself in favor of the more local “Roman.” Neither adjective was revolutionary, but taking the title “tribune” really was, because no one had done it for nearly a thousand years. It recalled the ancient office of the tribune of the plebs, devised to check the power of senators and leading magistrates.
Cola took a long string of other titles, too, and wore crowns made of silver and pearls. None of these made him any friends among the city’s noblemen, who mocked him on the best of days and plotted his demise every other. But it turns out there was an attention economy in the 1300s too, and these finely considered details of public image and political objective got him noticed, remembered, and an astonishing amount of support, above all from the poet Petrarch, his closest friend and confidant. Cola wanted things for Rome that were widely understood in the Italy of his age as good: government based on the fair application of law and embodying the virtues of reconciliation, mercy, and justice. In May 1347 he staged a coup and declared a new dating system: “Year One of the liberated Republic.” That the coup was bloodless speaks to the extent of his political talents; that he saw fit to restart the clock reveals the altitude of his hubris.
Despite his taste for opulence (and perhaps explaining it), Cola di Rienzo had been born into Rome’s working poor. His family ran a tavern on a sandy bank of the Tiber centuries before that river knew the discipline of an embankment. Come to think of it, Cola, too, might have had visions of rising water and rushing torrents. He lived in a great city then at the nadir of its existence. About 25,000 people in his day lived within the city walls—roughly equivalent to the population of current-day Martha’s Vineyard in wintertime. Try to imagine it, the Colosseum hulking massive and dark like a UFO crashed to Earth and long abandoned. Really what had abandoned Rome was the papacy, leaving in 1304 and eventually settling in Avignon, a city then in the Holy Roman Empire, and close to France. To get noticed, Cola read and read, and learned to beat the Roman noblemen at their own games: not only politics, but Latin too. He in fact went far beyond them, becoming a notary, an expert in Latin literature, and the only person in Rome capable of reading the ancient inscriptions on ruins around the city. This gave him knowledge, and such knowledge—of language and law—was power. He taught history to the noblemen, reminding them that political power derived ultimately from the people. It was a lesson they had conveniently forgotten. He became a humanist, one of the first, before there was even a word for it. Konrad Burdach, the late-nineteenth-century German philologist, considered Cola one of “the three great pioneers of humanism.” The other two, to his mind, were Dante and Petrarch.
In the 1970s, historian Barbara Tuchman held the fourteenth century up to her own. In the ongoing, large-scale calamity of the Hundred Years’ War she saw a “distant mirror,” a refracted image—distorted but recognizable—of her own century. I like this idea of one age cooly regarding another across the channel of time, sizing it up for similarity and difference. It’s perhaps like regarding a photo of ourselves as young children. (A photo being, in essence, a mirror to which has been added the dimension of time). In that photo we recognize our face as a whole, though our features are none of them the same. But something imperishable in that young face lives on.
If Tuchman, gazing into her distant mirror, glimpsed the Hundred Years’ War, we may well, in ours, see Cola di Rienzo. In his story we recognize the naïve hope, harbored by some, of restoring perceived lost greatness, and the questionable belief that a single individual can (or should) solve the problems of the age. The future, as ever, remains inscrutable, and the past, at best, an indirect analogy. As the human story repeats in familiar patterns of infinite variation, may we keep the mirror in our sights and accept the lessons that history has to offer.
***
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.