From Tribune of freedom to Rome's enemy, this is his story.
Around the middle of the 14th century, a man, known today as Cola di Rienzo , set in motion a series of events that could have led to the birth of an Italian state even before the very end of the Middle Ages, however, his ambitions and, according to some, his delusions of omnipotence led him to open confrontation with the Roman nobility , the papacy and the empire, transforming him from a hero of the Roman people into an enemy of Rome. His was a meteoric rise and just as rapid was his descending parable which in less than a decade brought him first to the apex of Roman power, with the title of Tribune of Liberty, and subsequently to the excommunication, a first arrest, an evasion, a second arrest, then to the title of Roman Senator and finally, to his violent and dramatic demise, beheaded and hung upside down by a crowd, he remains indifferent.
This is the story of Cola di Rienzo, a man who dreamed of Italy and tried (in vain) to unify it, five centuries in advance.
The historical context
We are in the fourteenth century, Italy does not exist politically, it is extremely fragmentary between autonomous municipalities, republics, principalities, lordships and imperial possessions, we are in years in which, even the papacy was split and the seat of ecclesiastical power had been transferred in Avignon. Talking about Italy in those years was pure utopia, the only Italy that existed was the Italy of culture, art and literature in the Italic language, which by now mature, was beginning to take shape and travel through the countless courts of the peninsula. / P>
The removal of the Roman curia, transferred to Avignon, had brought hunger and misery to the eternal city, and this both within the Aurelian walls and in the countryside, in the lands outside the walls, populated by peasants and desperate people subjugated by the growing power of the local barons. Men of power who, in the absence of the curia, had assumed and strengthened their power over the city.
The Colonna families , Orsini , Savelli , Accounts and Annibaldi they were the true and sole masters of Rome, and in turn, between alliances and clashes, they would hold more and more positions of power, both in imperial and papal terms.
In this situation, in this historical context, today extremely clear, but at the time extremely chaotic and ambiguous, it is easy to imagine what the highest ambitions of the notables who controlled Rome might have been. Control the city and leave Rome to rebuild what was the greatest nation in history in the ancient world, rebuild the empire, or rather, bring the imperial crown back to Rome.
In those years Rome apparently had a central role in imperial dynamics, and the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire were still required to travel to Rome to be consecrated emperors, to acquire imperial dignity, however, the descent of emperors to Rome was a formal practice that it had nothing to do with royal power and Rome, now deprived of the pontiff, was completely placed on the edge of the empire.
In that world, at that time, in that Italy, as already said, talking about Italy was a utopia, but someone dared to do so, someone had a vision, someone dared to imagine a united Italy, and planned to carry out in that peninsula, the whose natural borders are extremely defined and second, perhaps, only to the borders of Great Britain, who, at that juncture, hypothesized and tried to restore Italy its ancient imperial dignity and to make it once again the city of the Caesars (Rome) effective and royal seat of imperial power.
If history had continued on this path, probably in the fourteenth century, Italy too, like France, Spain and the United Kingdom, would have achieved its national unification before the end of the Middle Ages, and the face of the modern age, of Europe. and the world, it would probably have changed considerably. But that didn't happen.
However, someone tried to set this process in motion, even if, with hindsight, we know that it failed miserably and Italy would only be unified five centuries later.
We are around the middle of the 14th century, more precisely on the eve of Pentecost (May 19) in 1347, in the Piazza del Campidoglio, a popular conspiracy began aimed at ousting the Roman municipal militias, controlled by the notables, masters of Rome.
The rise of Cola di Rienzo
At the head of the conspirators who started this "popular" insurrection (anachronistic term, I realize) there was a man in the century Nicola di Lorenzo Gabrini , in medieval Roman dialect “ Cola di Rienzi ”And known today in history with the name of Cola di Rienzo . He, on May 20, after spending the night in prayer in the church of Sant’Angelo in Pescheria , left, at the head of an armed procession, in the direction of the senatorial palace, overlooking the square of the capitol and arrived in the square, "talked the crowd", as the chroniclers remind us, with his oratory skills worthy of Cicero, Tito Livio, Seneca and Tulio and Valerio Massimo, obtaining the approval of their political program by the municipal assembly, obtaining full political and military powers and subsequently, on May 24, receiving the title of Tribune of freedom, peace and justice, liberator of the Holy Roman Republic .
This episode could remind someone of the rise of Caesar or the rise of Octavian Augustus or even the birth of the Roman republic in 1848, an episode with which in fact there are many affinities, also because as for the Roman republic, the Holy Roman Republic of 1347 was short-lived.
The goal of Cola di Rienzo clear and known to his contemporaries, he aspired to make Rome once again the real seat of imperial power and to do so it was necessary to take some fundamental steps, the first of these was the removal of the barons who were robbing on a land in turmoil.
Already on May 20 Cola di Rienzo had obtained to limit the power of the district lords, requiring them to remove the banners displayed on the homes of the lords who controlled the city districts. Subsequently Cola proposed a project for the unification of Italy, extending Roman citizenship to all the inhabitants of the Italian peninsula, a fact that made him hostile to papal friendship. Some chroniclers also report a rapid and progressive departure of Cola di Rienzo from reality, telling that, after a Mass at the Lateran, the tribune went to sleep in the baptismal font of the cathedral, a gesture that was reported as an attempt to emulate an alleged immersion of Constantine and, upon awakening him, he was consecrated by the bishop, Knight of the Holy Spirit.
The decline of Cola di Rienzo
The chronicles concerning Cola di Rienzo are full of episodes out of the ordinary and well beyond the limit of madness, but it is not clear whether it was actual madness, episodes of open confrontation with traditional and imperial institutions which were then politically exploited. to discredit the figure of Cola di Rienzo, a bit like it also happened in the first century after Christ in Caligula, whose "war" in the senate, led the chroniclers, of senatorial tradition, to paint the Roman emperor as a madman.
In any case, at the end of November 1347, some members of noble Roman families, including Stefano Colonna and some members of the Orsini family who had previously supported him, were arrested and on 20 November, the municipal militias, controlled by Cola di Rienzo, inflicted on the militias of notables an important, but ephemeral, defeat in the battle of Porta di San Lorenzo .
For reasons still unknown to us today, the defeated enemies were allowed to flee, so that they could take refuge in the castles of the Roman countryside, to reorganize and rearm. Probably Cola di Rienzo hypothesized that these, once defeated, would no longer threaten Rome and would not return, but this was not the case, and his indolence and, according to chroniclers, inadequacy, saw the beginning of the political decline of the tribune, the whose extraordinary oratory skills seem not to have translated into an effective administrative capacity and in the end, Cola di Rienzo was excommunicated by a papal legate forcing him to flee.
Initially Cola di Rienzo found refuge in Naples, later he returned to Rome now again under the control of the Orsini and Colonna and, precisely the Orsini, who most of all had felt betrayed by the actions of Cola di Rienzo, ordered his arrest forcing him to imprisonment in the cells of Castel Sant'Angelo, where he remained for about a year before being able to escape in an extremely daring way and find refuge at the hermitage of the spiritual brothers on the Majella (in Abruzzo).
There Cola di Rienzo was convinced that the only man capable of restoring order and peace on earth was the emperor, so he left for Prague where, despite the excommunication, he managed to be received by the then "king of the Romans" and subsequently (from 1355) emperor, Charles IV of Luxembourg.
In their meeting Cola di Rienzo asked the future emperor to lead an army to march towards Rome and against the papacy. The emperor's response was a new arrest by Cola di Rienzo, an arrest that was very welcome to the then Pope Clement VI.
Despite his imprisonment, Cola di Rienzo managed, thanks to his Roman contacts, to obtain a transfer, in 1352, to the palace of the popes in Avignon where, once again thanks to his oratory skills, he managed to obtain the sympathy and friendship of the Cardinal Guy de Boulogne and the new pontiff, Innocent VI, who had ascended to the papal throne in 1352, who, intending to resume control of Rome, revoked all the accusations made against the former Roman tribune, freeing him and sending him to Rome, escorted by the papal legate Egidio Albornoz.
Cola di Rienzo triumphantly entered Rome, welcomed by the crowd on 1 August 1354, where he was quickly branded as a man of the pontiff and left practically alone, by his former supporters and allies, in the clash against the Colonnas that soon brought the city of Rome. under siege.
The battle for control of Rome ended on 8 October 1354 and with it, the dream of a politically united Italy would have been extinguished, at least for a few centuries.
The epilogue of Cola di Rienzo
On the night of 8 October Cola di Rienzo was forced to barricade himself at the senatorial palace, following a popular uprising, probably fomented by Colonna, Orsini and Savelli, however the walls of the building were unable to protect him and the crowd furious for the Excessive taxes set fire to the building.
Thus ends the story of Cola di Rienzo, a man who dreamed of Italy by antagonizing notables, popes, emperors and popular masses. His death, however, did not happen in the flames of the senatorial palace. According to the chroniclers of the time, in fact, Cola di Rienzo managed to escape, disguised as a plebeian and seeking refuge in the crowd, where, however, someone still managed to recognize him by his huge gold bracelets and so the man once a hero acclaimed by the Roman people, was captured, hit and lynched by the crowd that subsequently exposed the decapitated corpse, hung upside down in front of the church of San Marcello in via Lata, not far from the palazzo dei Colonna and after two days, the corpse now in putrefaction, was burned, not far from the Mausoleum of Augustus.
Bibliografia e Fonti
R.Bordoni, G.Sergi, Dieci secoli di Medioevo, Einaudi editore
C.Frascati, Cola di Rienzo. Roma, 1347. La folle vita del rivoluzionario che inventò l'Italia, Mursia editore
Cola di Rienzo, Epistolario di Cola di Rienzo, Torino, Bottega d'Erasmo, 1966.
A.Collins, Greater than Emperor: Cola di Rienzo (ca. 1313–1354) and the World of Fourteenth-Century Rome, University of Michigan Press, 2002. DOI:
10.1017 / S0038713400000324