ABSTRACT
The capital of an ancient empire and the center of the Roman Catholic Church,Rome, the Eternal City, now seems as durable as the Colosseum. In the four-teenth century, however, that Eternal City seemed to tell a far different tale. The ancient monuments designed for a population of one million looked out over huge tracts of deserted land. The 50,000 inhabitants of fourteenth-century Rome huddled together in an area their ancient ancestors had shunned for centuries: the flat flood plain of the Campus Martius, enclosed within a bend of the river Tiber and subject to the river’s devastating surges. Fourteenth-century Rome told a tale of pagan pride brought low, of imperium, the divinely ordained right of command, “translated” to French and German kings under the auspices of a Holy Roman Empire that was proverbially neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. Under pressure from powerful French cardinals, the papacy itself had moved from Rome to Avignon, leaving Rome a depressed provincial capital, dwarfed by its thriving maritime neighbors, Naples, Pisa, Venice, and Genoa.
