Emperors such as Augustus might have made Rome a city of marble, but the stones that still stand mainly bear the names of its popes. Across Rome, pontiffs are memorialised in their hundreds, on monuments pious and functional. From photographs framed behind tills and tote bags swinging from stalls, the faces of some beam out in full technicolour.
For centuries, the pope was both head of the Catholic Church and prince of the Papal States, with a government overseeing worldly matters from tax to prisons and ports. Although the popes’ political authority over Rome ceased in 1870 when the city was captured as the capital of the new nation of Italy, the papacy did not become one of Rome’s many decaying artefacts. Even today, in a city of ruins, the papacy endures.
The relationship between Rome and its popes is now nearly two millennia old. Speaking to Romans recently, it appeared remarkably intact: ‘It is not Rome that hosts the pope’, my (atheist) interlocutor explained: ‘It is the pope that hosts Rome.’ Rome - the capital of a republic in which most people do not attend Church regularly - is a city that appears to be inextricably tied to a man calling himself the Vicar of Christ. The city itself and some of its residents make their link to the popes seem almost foreordained. The first Christians in Rome, however, would never have predicted the emergence and survival of the papacy there.
When early Christian leaders such as Paul and Peter arrived in Rome in the mid-first century, it was an imperial capital that moved at the whim of its pagan gods. Below Jupiter and Mars sat emperors who were either ignorant of or - increasingly - hostile to the first followers of Jesus. Meanwhile, the Roman Christian Church was in its infancy, meeting in the homes of private people, such as the immigrant tentmakers Priscilla and Aquila.
If there was any significant city for them, it was thousands of kilometres away in Jerusalem where Jesus had died just decades before. By contrast, Rome was a thoroughly unholy place for Christians. Even Paul was drawn to the city for largely worldly reasons: the native of Tarsus (in modern-day Turkey) was facing trial and, as a citizen of the Roman empire, had appealed to his ‘Caesar’.
Like many early Christians, Paul found no sympathy from the emperors. He was executed, probably where the Abbey of the Three Fountains now stands. St Peter met an equally brutal end near Nero’s racetrack on the Vatican Hill. According to tradition, he was crucified upside down. We could forgive Peter’s Roman contemporaries if they failed to recognise the gravity of that brutal event. Nonetheless, with Peter’s execution the relationship between Rome and the papacy began. According to the Gospel of St Matthew, Jesus himself had chosen Peter to build his church on earth. After the apostle breathed his last in Rome, its bishops claimed that his blood elevated their diocese to a position of supreme authority.
If Peter was the rock on which Christ had built his Church, Rome, where he had died, was now its head and heart. In the centuries to come, Bishops of Rome insisted on this primacy in letters, fiery disputes and inscriptions carved into stone. Many Christians would accept them as popes: the most authoritative of all bishops globally. For most Romans, however, they remained insignificant well into the third century, distinguishing themselves only when their beliefs led them to clash with pagan custom and Roman law. The Christians whom they led were equally marginal, populating lowly quarters such asTrastevere and emerging furtively to venerate the bones of St Peter in the dust of the Vatican Hill.
It is hard to conceive of these humble beginnings at the pope’s Apostolic Palace today. Making my way down frescoed corridors to see a cardinal on the eve of then US president Trump’s 2017 visit, I noted an air of nonchalance about the imminent arrival of the leader of the free world. When Trump met Pope Francis, the ‘great honour’ was, apparently, the president’s. He was keen to present an image of accord after clashing with the pontiff over immigration and environmental issues. At the meeting, the pope’s demeanour seemed contrastingly cool. On policy, he held his line, gifting Trump his book on ‘politics for peace’, as well as his statement on climate change.
Francis’s actions were nothing new: popes have admonished worldly leaders since late antiquity. Yet, if he knew his history, Trump might have been tempted to remind the pope that political figures played a key role in elevating pontiffs to the platform from which they now address the world.
In 313, the Emperor Constantine made Christianity legal through the so-called ‘Edict of Milan’. The moment is often presented as a watershed, ending the legal persecution of Christians in imperial territory. In reality, change was less clear-cut: persecution re-emerged in some regions and the permanence of Constantine’s conversion to Christianity is up for debate. In any case, it would take some decades for Rome’s powerful elite to follow suit.
On the streets of Rome, however, a transformation began immediately: the pope was given a palace and Constantine raised the West’s first cathedral, the Lateran Basilica, over the barracks of soldiers who had supported a recently vanquished enemy. Atop the bones of St Peter n theo Vatican, he built the first basilica to the saint - a monument that would transform that remote spot into a global centre of Christianity and, at the height of the popes’ powers, world diplomacy.
Many of the early cornerstones of Christian Rome can still be seen today. Over the centuries, they have been embellished and joined by streets to host processions and pilgrims from every corner of the world. In travertine, paint and gold, smaller shrines have appeared along these thoroughfares.
Leaving their homes to pray, shop or gamble, Romans would soon encounter testament after testament to the Christian faith. Increasingly, holy sites also bore witness to papal power. After the imperial court left Rome for Constantinople, popes and wealthy Christians replaced the emperor as the city’s great patrons of architecture. By the time that the Western Empire fell in the late fifth century, the successor of Peter had emerged as a pastor and representative for the city of Rome. Unlike that of their ill-fated imperial patrons, the popes’ authority did not rest on the fickle fates of the world. While emperors relied on armies, popes met their enemies at Rome’s gates and warned them that an assault on their city would be an attack on St Peter himself.
As hearts and minds across Europe were converted to Christianity by missions sent out from Rome, both politicians and humbler pilgrims made long, often treacherous, journeys, to visit the city of the popes. At the turn of the eighth century, two successive Kings of Wessex renounced their thrones to pray and die in Rome. The city’s magnetism intensified in the medieval period when popes promised to forgive even the gravest sinners who came to confess and pray. By that time, the city itself appeared to be imbued with holy powers, coming not from the fallen emperors but the Christians whom they had killed.
Housed in altars, buried in walls, framed in gilt sunburst, the body parts of martyrs were said to heal wounds, physical and spiritual. As early as the fourth century, popes like Damasus I had written the stories of saints such as the Roman teenager Agnes into the bowels of the city, penning poems about their murders and inscribing them in churches and tombs. By the Baroque period, these holy figures had burst out of the catacombs, manifest in marble statues that appeared both human and utterly divine. Painters of the period also narrowed the gulf between heaven and earth, depicting celestial skies populated by saints such as Ignatius Loyola, who had lived in Rome just a hundred years before.
Even in today’s Rome of global chain stores, it seems that holy souls inhabit streets and shrines. Locals such as Chiara Corbella Petrillo, who died in 2012, are even invoked as Servants of God. Worldly leaders such as Constantine paid for much of the marble, but the stones that still characterise the city were shaped by the stories of ordinary mortals who became extraordinary through acts of faith.
The popes have ensured that these stories remain vivid to inspire devotion and awe. Most have surely done so in faith. Yet survival is also a compelling motive. Standing on the Vatican Hill, the pontiff can never forget that it was the death of one such saint that transformed unknown bishops into popes, placing them into a narrative that started with Jesus and that ties them eternally to the city of Rome.
City of Echoes: A New History of Rome, its Popes and its People by Jessica Wärnberg is published by Icon Books
