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Medieval

Jewish, Christian and Muslim Culture

Encounters
in Confluence and Dialogue

Medieval Encounters 17 (2011) 495-511 brill.nl/me

Viewing Rome from the Roman Empires

Emily Albu*
Classics Program, 715 Sproul Hall, University of California,
Davis, One Shields Avenue Davis, CA 95616, USA
*E-mail: emalbu@ucdavis.edu

Abstract
Twelfth-century German and Byzantine emperors vied with each otherand with the
popes in Romefor imperial status, each of the three seeing himself as the legitimate heir
of ancient Roman imperium. From the court at Constantinople, historians Anna Komnene
and John Kinnamos leveled a venomous critique against the west, surveying Rome through
the lens of religious disputes, Crusade, and the hated Latin presence in the East. The
Byzantine narratives have left a gritty view of their contemporary Rome, a violent and cruel
city of illicit popes and anti-popes, anarchy, and barbarism. The Peutinger map, by con-
trast, seems but an innocent relic of the past, a map of the inhabited world as known to the
pagan Romans. Typically considered an ancient Roman artifact and product of Roman
culture, the surviving map actually dates from the very end of the long twelfth century.
Produced in Swabia, it continued the anti-papal assault as a fresh salvo in a long-lived
Battle of the Maps between Church and secular Imperium. This display map, like its lost
prototype, advertised the supreme authority of Roman imperial power with claims much
more venerable than those of the papacy. Its visual narrative implicitly contradicted the
power of papal Rome by foregrounding ancient Rome as the centerpiece of an intricately
connected oikoumene, a world that should be ruled by Romes German heirs. For Germans
as for Byzantines, Rome still mattered. Even while assailing a resurgent imperial papacy,
neither secular emperor nor their courts could ignore the power exercised by pagan Rome
and papal Rome over twelfth-century imaginations.

Keywords
Byzantium, John Kinnamos, Anna Komnene, Peutinger map, Swabia, papacy

Rome, Byzantium and Swabia. In the twelfth century the bonds among
these three locations ran deep, as German and Byzantine emperors looked
to Rome for validation of their respective claims, each seeing himself as the
legitimate heir of Roman imperium. The persistence and force of these
claims speaks to the peculiar and enduring resonance of Old Rome.
Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI : 10.1163/157006711X598820
496 E. Albu / Medieval Encounters 17 (2011) 495-511

Yet contacts with contemporary Rome, seat of the imperial papacy and
a sometimes fractious populace, further provoked and indelibly colored
invocations of Old Rome.
Anna Komnene, the celebrated historian, offers a distinctly Byzantine
understanding of Rome.1 A brief comparison with the history of her com-
patriot, John Kinnamos, allows us to highlight the attitudes common to
Byzantine intellectuals, court, and populace.2 For a German perspective,
the Peutinger map of the Roman world from Britain to Sri Lanka proves
uniquely revealing, both as a piece of sophisticated propaganda and as a
genuinely visual view.3
Anna Komnene needs little introduction. A Byzantine princess born in
the purple (as she liked to remind her readers), eldest child of the emperor
Alexios Komnenos (1081-1118), she attempted to succeed him at his
death.4 She enlisted some family members in her effort, but her brother
John took the imperial ring from his fathers finger as the old emperor lay
dying, seized the throne, and locked his sister in a nunnery where she
wrote the Alexiad, an epic history of her fathers reign.5 Her work preserves
an impassioned judgment of Rome as observed from the court in mid-
twelfth-century Constantinople.6
In vivid contrast to Annas purple prose, the Peutinger map appears to
offer a dispassionate representation of a world centered on Rome. It dis-
plays the inhabited lands known to the Romans, elongated to fill a space

1
Anne Comnene, Alexiade, ed. and trans. Bernard Leib, 4 vols. (Paris, Les Belles Lettres,
1967); English translations here are from Edgar R.A. Sewter, The Alexiad of Anna Comnena
(Baltimore, MD: Penguin, 1969).
2
Joannes Cinnamus, Epitome rerum ab Ioanne et Alexio Comnenis gestarum, ed. Augus-
tus Meineke (Bonn: Weberi, 1836). Passages quoted here are from John Kinnamos, Deeds
of John and Manuel Comnenus, trans. Charles M. Brand (New York, NY: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 1976).
3
For images of the map see http://www.cambridge.org/9780521764803, produced in
conjunction with Richard J.A. Talbert, Romes World: The Peutinger Map Reconsidered (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
4
She notes her pedigree from the outset: I, Anna, daughter of the Emperor Alexius and
the Empress Irene, born and bred in the Purple. . . . (Preface 1.2)
5
Anna was writing between 1143 and her death c. 1155.
6
On her life, work, and era, see Thalia Gouma-Peterson, ed., Anna Komnene and her
Times, Garland Medieval Casebooks (New York, NY: Garland, 2000). The classic work is
Georgina Buckler, Anna Comnena: A Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929; repr. 1968).
E. Albu / Medieval Encounters 17 (2011) 495-511 497

nearly 672 cm wide and 33 cm high.7 Textbook illustrations and scholarly


commentary typically present it as an ancient Roman artifact. The surviv-
ing map, however, dates from the end of the long twelfth century.8 The
medieval mapmaker was clearly working from an earlier version already
missing its first leaf or leaves. He mistakenly capitalized place names that
have actually lost their opening letters, written on the previous leaf. We
cannot know, however, how closely this mapmaker replicated his model in
other respects or when that earlier map was produced.9 In any case, the
twelfth-century mapmaker clearly aimed to make his production look
authentically Roman. Why would a Swabian scriptorium create such an
archaizing map? We will soon return to that question.

The View from East Rome


Though we have come to call the eastern empire Byzantine, Anna and her
contemporaries of course called it Roman as theirs was the remnant of
the old Roman empire that had survived the German incursions of late
antiquity. Protected by its fortuitous location along the Bosphorus and
Marmora and by its formidable walls, Constantinople declared itself the
New Rome, true heir to the power and prestige ceded by Old Rome when
Constantine moved the imperial capital in the early fourth century. Anna
insisted on the subordination of that Old Rome to Constantinople in
every respect, civil and religious. She stated this position at a dramatic
point early in her narrative (Alexiad I.13.4):

The truth is that when power was transferred from Rome to our country and the
Queen of Cities, not to mention the senate and the whole administration, the senior
archbishopric was also transferred here. From the beginning the emperors have

7
The Austrian National Library in Vienna now conserves this beautifully colored arti-
fact (MS Lat. 324), not far from where it was created.
8
Medievalists identify the long twelfth century as c. 1050-1215. Recent studies
have dated the map to between 1175 and 1225, most likely close to the year 1200. In
my ongoing work on the map, I now believe we can narrow the range to a very few years
following 1204.
9
I have presented the arguments that the original was more likely Carolingian than
Roman: Emily Albu, Imperial Geography and the Medieval Peutinger Map, Imago Mundi
57 (2005), 136-148; Albu, Rethinking the Peutinger Map, in Cartography in Antiquity
and the Middle Ages: Fresh Perspectives, New Methods, eds. Richard Talbert and Richard
W. Unger (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2008), 111-119.
498 E. Albu / Medieval Encounters 17 (2011) 495-511

acknowledged the primacy of the Constantinopolitan bishop, and the Council of


Chalcedon especially raised that bishop to the place of highest honour and subordi-
nated to him all dioceses throughout the world.

This gives a partisan spin to the twenty-eighth canon of the Fourth


Ecumenical Council (451 CE), which assigned equal privileges to patri-
arch and pope. With papal reform and the ascendancy of the papacy in the
eleventh century, Byzantines had been countering papal claims with
increasingly anti-Roman vigor, as here in Annas account.
It is not surprising, then, that Anna has inserted this statement into the
midst of a vitriolic diatribe against Pope Gregory VII (1073-1085), whom
she never deigned to name, preferring to call him the abominable pope
(Alexiad I.13.7).10 In this section of her history, she has taken a close look
at the bitter conflict between Gregory and Henry IV of Germany.11 Anna
had a fair enough understanding of the charges brought by each party
against the otheragainst Henry, accusations of simony and the appoint-
ment of unworthy archbishops; and against Gregory, claims that he had
usurped the apostolic chair without Henrys permission. Since in her
opinion both of them had appropriated authority uniquely Byzantine
(in her vocabulary, of course, Roman), Anna took care to vilify both sides.
Henry, she suggested, had overstepped the bounds of decency by using
the most insulting and reckless language, threatening to expel the impos-
ter pope by force if he did not quietly step down. (Alexiad I.13.2) But news
of Gregorys retaliation against Henrys envoys, dispatched to the Roman
synod in February 1076, shocked Anna and provoked this response:

When the pope heard these words, he immediately expended his wrath on the envoys
sent by Henry. To begin with, he outraged them savagely, then cut their hair and
beards, the one with scissors, the other with a razor, and finally he did something else
to them which was quite improper, going beyond the insolent behaviour one expects
from barbarians, and then sent them away. I would have given a name to the outrage,

10
As Georgina Buckler noticed, the Alexiad does not name any pope. Buckler, Anna
Comnena, 307.
11
The son of the German emperor Henry III was only six years old when his father died in
1056, leaving him the kingdom of Germany. His ambitions set him against Pope Gregory VII
(whom he deposed in 1076, having convened a synod of German bishops for that purpose)
and against German princes (who elected a rival king that same year). Henry presided over
a second synod, which elected an antipope, Clement III. When Henry captured Rome in
1084, Clement crowned him emperor. Twenty years later his son, the future Henry V, led
a rebellion that forced his abdication.
E. Albu / Medieval Encounters 17 (2011) 495-511 499

but as a woman and a princess modesty forbade me. What was done on his orders was
not only unworthy of a high priest, but of any man at all who bears the name of Chris-
tian. Even the barbarians intention, let alone the act itself, filled me with disgust; if I
had described it in detail, reed pen and paper would have been defiled. The very fact
that we cannot endure to disclose or describe even a small fraction of what was done,
will be sufficient evidence of this barbaric outrage and the character of men ready to
commit any crime, any deed of daring. (Alexiad I.13.3)

Anna continued in this vein for several paragraphs, inveighing against


the supreme high priest . . . who presided over the whole inhabited world
[oikoumene] (according to the claims and belief of the Latinsanother
example of their arrogance). (Alexiad I.13.4) This is the point where Anna
paused in her invective to insert the Roman papal claim and the counter-
claim of New Rome as legitimate heir of Roman imperium, both secular
and sacred. Then she resumed where she left off, suggesting that the popes

outrage inflicted on the ambassadors was aimed at him who sent them, not only
because they were punished, but because the particular form of chastisement was
novel, the invention of the pope himself. By his actions he hinted that the state of the
king was utterly despicable, as if some demi-god were holding converse with a demi-
ass. Such, I think, was the purpose of these shameful acts. The pope, having used the
envoys as I have described and having sent them back to the king, provoked a terrible
war. (Alexiad I.13.5-6)

The war, of course, touched directly on Byzantium because Gregory allied


with Robert Guiscard, duke of Apulia and Calabria and the Norman
enemy of Alexios Komnenos and his empire. So the pope, in Annas eyes
and in the opinion of many other observers, medieval and modernsank
further by his association with a ruthless villain. When the Normans
entered Rome in May 1084 to rescue the beleaguered pope, they may or
may not have willfully sacked and burned the city. Contemporary chroni-
clers had their own reasons for assuming or asserting the worst.12 Recount-
ing that pact between pope and Norman duke, Anna registered her
contempt for both parties but especially for Gregory: the abominable
pope (when I think of his inhuman act there is no other word I could
possibly apply to him), the abominable pope with his spiritual grace
and evangelic peace, this despot, marched to make war on his own
kindred with might and mainthe man of peace, too, and the disciple

12
Louis I. Hamilton, Memory, Symbol, and Arson: Was Rome Sacked in 1084?,
Speculum 78, no. 2 (April 2003): 378-399.
500 E. Albu / Medieval Encounters 17 (2011) 495-511

of the Man of Peace. (Alexiad I.13.7) This is noteworthy sarcasm even for
Anna Komnene.
The act that allegedly led to the unholy alliance of Gregory and Robert,
however, did not happen as Anna imagined. Her story of unspeakable
mutilation is altogether untrue, virtually the opposite of the actual event.
In fact, the messenger sent to Rome from Henry and the German bishops
did barely escape with his life when he demanded, before the pope and a
synod of 100 bishops, that Gregory abdicate the papal throne. It was the
popes benevolent intercession, though, that saved him.
Some scholars have defended Anna, arguing that she could not have
investigated the accusations since Byzantium and the papacy were no
longer in normal communication with one another.13 Yet Anna had her
western sources, and in the half century between the event and her writing,
she might have interrogated them about this episode. And though she
sometimes did express uncertainty about unverified information, in this
instance she presented outrageous charges as unquestioned truth. These
allegations must have rung true to her because they perfectly suited her
belief that the pope was a barbarian capable of the most barbaric treatment
of envoys. While she has reserved special vitriol for Gregory, who has
attracted numerous terms for barbaric and savage in this passage, the
papacy often received her sneering contempt. For Anna, Gregory merely
represented the worst of a miserable lot.
I have repeated Annas account of eleventh-century events in detail
because her venom and prejudice neatly represent prevailing views in
twelfth-century Constantinople. Anna, like many of her contemporaries,
viewed eleventh-century Rome through the prism of heated religious dis-
putes, Crusade, and the hated Latin presence in Byzantium. Despite
attempts at religious reconciliation and Latin-Byzantine alliances against
Muslims in her own lifetime, Annas history shows the persistence of anti-
Roman feelings, enflamed by the eleventh-century resurgence of papal
power and the papal reassertion of universal claims. No fan of the
Germans, Anna released them from the harshest criticism in this narrative,
mainly because the pope and the Normans seemed to her so much
more villanous.
A reading of John Kinnamos history illustrates the prevalence of Annas
opinions of both Rome and the western claimants to Roman imperium,
Christian and secular. He began his history precisely where Anna ended,

13
See, for instance, Buckler, Anna Comnena, 308.
E. Albu / Medieval Encounters 17 (2011) 495-511 501

with the death of Alexios and the accession of Annas brother, John II
Komnenos (1118-1143). Kinnamos intended to continue through the
reign of Johns son, Manuel I (1143-1180), but the end is missing in the
surviving thirteenth-century manuscript, which breaks off in 1176.14
A well-educated bureaucrat who went on campaign with Manuel Kom-
nenus, Kinnamos shared Annas dedication to his Christian empire and
emperor. As Charles Brand concluded, his real religion was the empire
and the emperor: the empire as Gods vehicle for unifying mankind,
the emperor as the chosen leader for His people . . . conceptions which he
shared with the population at large.15 Like Anna Komnene and their
compatriots, John Kinnamos insisted that the authority of Old Rome,
as he habitually called that city, had passed long ago to New Rome, Con-
stantinople.16 And like Anna, he pressed the point in a digression, in his
case as Manuel clashed in 1163 with Stephen III, whom the German ruler,
Conrad III (1138-1152), had proclaimed king of Hungary (Histories V.7).
While rehearsing the reasons why Conrad was deluded in thinking himself
the Roman emperorand why Conrad was therefore deceived in consid-
ering himself a legitimately anointed kingJohn explained that the title
of empire disappeared in Rome a long time back, when Odoacer
and then the Goth Theodoric retired Romulus Augustulus in 476.17
John evoked the sixth-century historian Prokopios to demonstrate that
Theodoric always called himself king, and never emperor. The later barbar-
ian tyrants in the west likewise had no legitimate claim to the title
imperator, the equal to his basileus.

. . . [barbarian kings] usurp the highest peak of authority and confer the imperial dig-
nity on themselves. This piece of drunken folly required explanation. Now they rashly
declare that the empire in Byzantion is different from that in Rome. As I consider this,
it has repeatedly caused me to weep. The rule of Rome has, like a piece of property,
been sold to barbarians and really servile men. Therefore it has no right to a bishop
now, much more, to a ruler. (Histories V.7)

14
The sixteenth- and seventeenth- century manuscripts all descend from this single
exemplar.
15
Brand, Deeds of John and Manuel Comnenus, 2.
16
For palaia Roma (Old Rome) see, for instance, Histories II.12.
17
Histories V.7. Never formally crowned emperor, this first Hohenstaufen king of
Germany did however assert imperial privileges, provocatively using the imperial title in
his correspondence with the Byzantine emperor.
502 E. Albu / Medieval Encounters 17 (2011) 495-511

Here John Kinnamos turned immediately to address the man who dared
abuse the [title of ] bishop, while he [the western emperor] falsifies [that
of ] emperor. (Histories V.7) For John, as for Anna, both pope and
western emperor have corrupted the imperial ideal that each falsely
claimed for himself. Certainly their venomous quarreling validated the
Byzantine case: on this point Kinnamos chastised the bishop ferociously
for treating the Romans emperors as his servile squires, a ritual service
that even Frederick Barbarossa performed. (Histories V.7) For Kinnamos,
imperial and Christian dignity were inseparable, as exemplified first by
Constantine and by emperors in Constantinople ever since.
Like Anna Komnene, John Kinnamos could become outraged and even
overwrought when considering the nexus of claimants emanating from
Old Rome. For East Romans the issue was especially fraught. They had to
evoke Old Rome as the source of their empires authority. In response, the
western opposition could insist that Constantinople was not after all really
Rome, the ancient seat of empire and, through Paul, of Christendom.
John Kinnamos argument from historical evidence (i.e., Theodorics title
and Procopiuss attestation) and sophisticated logic (i.e., western separa-
tion of inseparable authority) could not fairly compete with the simplicity
of the western claim: the occupation of Rome itself. In the previous
century, a resurgent papacy and German imperium had challenged
Byzantine authority even as the first Crusaders began the incursions
into ancestral Byzantine territories, menacing Constantinople. In Johns
own day, the might of Frederick Barbarossa, the contemporary king
of the Germans who subdued Rome itself in battle (Histories V.9)
and took for himself the privileged rank of emperor of the Romans,
reheated the argument and renewed the focus on Old Rome. Manuel sent
his agents there to intercede in local affairs, bribing the people and work-
ing to persuade the bishop to resist Fredericks claims and accept Constan-
tinople as the seat of imperial and Christian authority (Histories VI.4).
The ultimate failure of that enterprise and Barbarossas threatening gesture
of engaging in the Third Crusade further fueled the animosities between
East and West.
While Rome was a powerful player in Kinnamos imagination, as in
Annas, the center of political and military might in the west had in fact
long since moved north among the Germans. German emperors perhaps
as far back as Charlemagne challenged Roman papal authority in various
ways, even on the battlefield, as when the forces of Henry IV and
E. Albu / Medieval Encounters 17 (2011) 495-511 503

Gregory VII clashed in 1080.18 More subtly, the two sides engaged in a
long war of propaganda, including a campaign I have come to call the
Battle of the Maps.19

Roman Church versus Western Roman Empire in the Battle


of the Maps
No world maps survive from the era of the old Roman empire. The extant
textual evidence suggests that whatever world maps the empire produced,
these were officially authorized and created to display the Roman impe-
rium, the extent of imperial control. With weighty authority, however,
Judeo-Christian scripture came to offer a powerful challenge to that impe-
rial monopoly. The creation story in Genesis, universally disseminated
through popular sermons and learned commentaries, taught that God
gave the earth to mankind for the use of human beings.20 Christianity
intensified the argument: if God entered the physical world through the
incarnation, and dispatched his disciples throughout the world with the
exhortation to spread the Gospel among all peoples, then surely every
Christian had the right to see or even display the earth that those holy men
traversed and converted to Christianity. Christian world maps prolifer-
ated. The widely copied Beatus maps, fifteen of which survive in tenth- to
fifteenth-century manuscripts, for instance, proclaimed Gods plan still at
work in the world.21
The distinctive Christian maps of the Middle Ages provide textbook
illustrations familiar to many students. Commonly called T-O maps from
their circular form inscribed with a T that separates the three continents of

18
Cf. Alexiad 1.13.8-9
19
The following section introduces the argument more fully developed in Albu,
The Battle of the Maps in a Christian Empire, forthcoming in City-Empire-Christendom:
Changing Contexts of Power and Identity in Antiquity, ed. Claudia Rapp.
20
Gen. 1:26-30.
21
This number excludes the lost map of the Biblioteca del Monasterio at the Escorial
but includes the newly found map in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan. The definitive
study is by John Williams, ed., The Illustrated Beatus: A Corpus of the Illustrations of the
Commentary on the Apocalypse, 5 vols. (London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 1994-2003).
For more on Beatus maps and other world maps of the Middle Ages, see Evelyn Edsons
invaluable Mapping Time and Space: How Medieval Mapmakers Viewed their World
(London: British Library, 1997).
504 E. Albu / Medieval Encounters 17 (2011) 495-511

Europe, Asia, and Africa, they often feature Jerusalem near the center.
Their orientation is typically to the east, looking up toward the holy lands
of Christendom, with the Garden of Eden at the very top, tantalizingly
still part of the visible world.22 These maps present the earth as an ordered
Christian universe (Fig. 1).
The secular alternatives are less well known. Drawing on the geographi-
cal knowledge of Greco-Roman antiquity, those maps directly contested
the Christian world view. Charlemagne kept a world map in his palace
(along with silver maps of Constantinople and Rome), perhaps as a
response to the one commissioned by Pope Zacharias (741-752) for the
dining room at the Lateran Palace.23 That Lateran map played a significant
role within a larger artistic scheme illustrating papal claims to universal
power, as Marcia Kupfer has shown.24 Charlemagnes son, Louis the Pious,
clearly understood the symbolism of his fathers world map. Among the
items designated in Charlemagnes estate for sale to support the poor, this
one alone Louis purchased to hold as his own. When Louiss son Lothar
inherited his grandfathers world map, he found himself compelled to
break it up and distribute the pieces to powerful nobles, in a desperate
attempt to keep some semblance of universal power by offering to share it.25
All the players in this drama must have grasped how directly the map
representedin some authoritative way even wasthe imperium.
The Peutinger map is the sole survivor from this tradition of maps drawn
to show the imagined reach of a Roman imperial authority. Its script
reveals a writer schooled in greater Swabia, working between 1175 and
1225.26 It is easy to understand why that land, home to the Hohenstaufen
line of German Roman emperors, would have reproduced this map as

22
On the long-lived efforts to locate the Garden of Eden in space and time, see the
beautifully illustrated volume by Alessandro Scafi, Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven
on Earth (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
23
Le Liber Pontificalis: Texte, introduction et commentaire, ed. Louis Duchesne, 3 vols.
(Paris: E. Thorin, 1886-1957), 1:432.
24
On the Lateran map and papal claims to universal power, see Marcia Kupfer, Medi-
eval World Maps: Embedded Images, Interpretive Frames, Word and Image 10 (1994),
262-288. I have repeated this explanation from Emily Albu, Imperial Geography and the
Medieval Peutinger Map, Imago Mundi 57, part 2 (2005), 136-148.
25
Einhard, Vita Karoli Magni, ed. and trans. Evelyn Scherabon Firchow and Edwin
H. Zeydel (Coral Gables, FL: University of Florida Press, 1972), chap. 33. Thegan, Vita
Hludowici Imperatoris, chap. 8, ed. Rudolf Buchner, Quellen zur Karolingischen Reichsge-
schichte, 3 vols. (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1955), 1:222.
26
Martin Steinmann, Paleography, in Talbert, Romes World, 76-85, at 83-84.
E. Albu / Medieval Encounters 17 (2011) 495-511

Figure 1. Beatus of Libana. Commentary on the Apocalypse (eighth century). This tenth-
505

century version, from the Girona Beatus, takes rectilinear form to fill two sheets. Girona, Museo
de la Catedral, Num. Inv. 7(11), ff. 54v-55 (Prol.Bk.II). (Photograph by Josep Ma Oliveras.
Reproduced with permission from the Museo de la Catedral, Girona, Spain.).
506 E. Albu / Medieval Encounters 17 (2011) 495-511

the long twelfth century came to a close. The struggle against an increas-
ingly imperial papacy would logically have provoked a German prince to
commission such a display map as part of his program promoting the
ancient rights of Roman emperors.
Display maps were only one element in competing media campaigns
also featuring ceremony, liturgy, architecture, frescoes, mosaics, statuary,
and papal thrones.27 The artistic program of San Clemente in Rome, for
instance, rebuilt during the reign of Pascal II (1099-1118) and probably
dedicated during the papacy of Gelasius II (1118-1119), advertised the
papal view. The apse mosaic features the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah
in ancient Roman dress. Isaiah holds a scroll reading: vidi Dominum /
sedentem super solium (I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne; Isaiah 6:1).
The placement of the papal throne at the base of the apse reinforced this
linkage of Ecclesia to papacy, symbolizing the authority of the Church
over the Empire.28
Pope Innocent II (1130-1143) continued Calixtuss program by staging
imperial ceremonies and displaying imperial art. In the Lateran basilica
Innocent decorated a room with scenes depicting his coronation of the
Emperor Lothar.29 The frescoes and their accompanying inscription rein-
terpreted the ceremony, provocatively suggesting that it converted the
emperor into the popes vassal. This portrayal so angered Frederick
Barbarossa that he implicated it in a papal plot, as he wrote to the German
bishops in 1158:

In the chief city of the world God has, through the power of the empire, exalted the
Church; in the chief city of the world the Church, not through the power of God, we
believe, is now destroying the empire. It began with a picture, the picture became an
inscription, the inscription seeks to become an authoritative utterance. We shall not
endure it, we shall not submit to it; we shall lay down the crown before we consent to

27
Mary Stroll, Symbols as Power: The Papacy following the Investiture Contest (Leiden: E.J.
Brill, 1991), xv. For more papal examples, see Ingo Herklotz, Gli eredi di Costantino: il
papato, il Laterano e la propaganda visiva nel XII secolo (Rome: Viella, 2000).
28
Stefano Riccioni, The Word in the Image: an Epiconographic Analysis of Mosaics of
the Reform in Rome, Institutum Romanum Norvegiae, Acta ad Archaeologiam et Artium
Historiam Pertinentia 24 (N.S.) (in press), 93. I thank the author for sending me this article
in press, which here summarizes the discussion in Stefano Riccioni, Il mosaico absidale di
San Clemente a Roma. Exemplum della Chiesa riformata (Spoleto: Fondazione CISAM,
2006), 3-6, 23-34, 80-81.
29
Peter C. Claussen, Die Kirchen der Stadt Rom im Mittelalter 1050-1300, S. Giovanni
in Laterano (Corpus Cosmatorium II.2 ) (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2008).
E. Albu / Medieval Encounters 17 (2011) 495-511 507

have the imperial crown and ourself thus degraded. Let the pictures be destroyed, let
the inscriptions be withdrawn, that they may not remain as eternal memorials of
enmity between the empire and the papacy.30

Pope Adrian IV (1154-1159) attempted to mollify Barbarossa with a


promise to expunge the offending picture and words, though some of the
paintings survived into the sixteenth century, reminders of an era when
popes displayed symbols of their imperial ambitions.
To answer such decorative programs, Hohenstaufens in the generations
following Frederick Barbarossa were most likely to have commissioned a
map displaying the expansive Roman route network. Elected King of the
Romans by the German princes in 1152, Barbarossa sought the imperial
title held by Charlemagne and Otto the Great. To legitimize that title
he demanded a coronation like theirs, performed at Rome by the pope.
In 1155 Adrian IV reluctantly complied in exchange for Fredericks
help against Romes unruly residents. As Roman emperor, Barbarossa
aggressively asserted his inheritance of universal rule from the Caesars not
only through Charlemagne and Otto in the west, but also through Con-
stantine and Justinian in the east. Having proclaimed himself the divinely
appointed sole Augustus of the world, he took the Cross and joined the
Third Crusade in 1189. As he traveled toward Byzantine lands, he
exchanged insulting letters with the Byzantine emperor, each claiming
the imperial title for himself.31
When he died en route, his heirs continued his dream of an expansive
Roman empire. Fredericks eldest son, Henry VI, won the kingdom of
Sicily through his marriage to its heiress and was gathering a fleet to sail to
Constantinople and reconquer Jerusalem when he died, aged only 32.
Henrys youngest brother, Philip, duke of Swabia in 1196 and king of

30
Otto of Freising and Rahewin, Fredericks biographers, include this letter in Ottonis et
Rahewini Gesta Friderici I imperatoris, III, 10, eds. Georg Waitz and Bernard von Simson
(MGH, Scriptores rerum germanicarum, 46 ) (Hannover-Leipzig, 1912), 177; The Deeds
of Frederick Barbarossa by Otto of Freising and his Continuator, Rahewin, trans. Charles
C. Mierow (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1953), 193.
31
The Historia Peregrinorum, compiled around the year 1200, records the Byzantine
emperors salutation from the Emperor appointed by God, the most holy, the most excel-
lent, the most powerful [and] sublime ruler of the Romans, heir to all the world and to the
great Constantine, addressed merely to the great prince of Germany. The Crusade of
Frederick Barbarossa: The History of the Expedition of the Emperor Frederick and Related Texts,
trans. Graham A. Loud (Crusade Texts in Translation, 19) (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 75.
508 E. Albu / Medieval Encounters 17 (2011) 495-511

Germany in 1198, married Irene Angelina, daughter of the Byzantine


emperor Isaac II. This alliance implicated Philip deeply in the intrigues
that led to the Fourth Crusade when Isaacs brother imprisoned him and
seized the imperial throne. Irenes brother, Alexios Angelos, fled to the
west, seeking military force to restore his fathers imperium. He made his
way to the Swabian court, which also attracted Philips cousin, Boniface of
Montferrat, whom Alexios persuaded to lead the Crusade that would top-
ple Constantinople in 1204. As for Henrys son, Frederick II, only three at
his fathers death, he eventually traveled to the Holy Land himself, where
he was crowned King of Jerusalem in 1229 before returning west to strug-
gle against Popes Gregory IX (who excommunicated him) and Innocent
IV (who plotted his destruction and declared him deposed as emperor).
Philips last years and the formative years of Frederick II alike were con-
founded by the powerful papacy of Innocent III (1198-1216), who worked
diligently from Rome to thwart Hohenstaufen ambitions. Innocent proved
himself the maker of kings and emperors, extending his triumphs also
against pagans in the Baltic, over Muslims in Spain, andwith a Latin
Patriarch installed in Constantinople in 1204against Orthodox Chris-
tians in the east. He was arguably master of Christendom, lord over
the secular princes who had long contested papal dominance. He and his
successors vilified and harried the emperor, fostering the hostile attitude
that would lead to the public execution in 1268 of the last Hohenstaufen,
Conradin, grandson of Frederick II.
Internal evidence on the map suggests a date during Innocents reign, in
the years immediately following the Fourth Crusade.32 An accumulation
of Hohenstaufen ambitions and frustrations led to the production of the
map we call Peutingers, displaying the inhabited world as a universe
potentially traveled and controlled by the Roman emperor centered in
Rome. This map both restores the territories of an expansive Roman
imperium and asserts the secular primacy of imperial over papal Rome,
affirming a stronger claim to lands and peoples.

Rome and the Peutinger Map


This explains the pagan Romanitas of a world map oriented to the north
rather than to eastern Eden. Rome may have been at the center of the full

32
Emily Albu, The Medieval Peutinger Map (forthcoming) presents that evidence.
E. Albu / Medieval Encounters 17 (2011) 495-511 509

map, before the first sheet or sheets were lost from the prototype. Jerusa-
lem, the focal point of many Christian maps, here lies near the lower mar-
gin of the ninth segment (of eleven surviving), identified as formerly
called Jerusalem, now Aelia Capitolina, its Roman name. The common
two-tower symbol assigned to Aelia Capitolina also marks 428 other minor
towns and villas, like nearby Jericho and Bosra. Just below old Jerusalem,
the mapmaker has depicted the Mount of Olives. This is a rare Judeo-
Christian incursion into a largely pagan landscape, where rivers, lakes,
islands, mountains, regions, and peoples keep their ancient names. Through
this vast terrain run nearly 70 000 Roman miles of roads. All the roads are
ancient, built when Rome was acquiring and controlling its empire. The
creator of the Peutinger prototype has plotted their paths, copying from
Roman itinerary lists the mileage neatly recorded in Roman numerals.
This antiquated Roman route network, indifferent to medieval realities,
dominates the twelfth-century map, a visual reminder of the Roman impe-
rium that a medieval Roman emperor might yet recover33 (Fig. 2).
Along these roads icons of varying design and complexity identify towns
and spas, places to change horses and to find a meal or a bed for the night.
Among these symbols, three stand out: the larger and more detailed forms
identifying the cities of Roma (4B5), Constantinoplis (8B1) and Antio-
chia (9B4). Commentaries on the map typically describe each of these
distinctive vignettes as the personified tyche, the ancient and traditional
fortune representing each city. Most likely the tychai of these cities did
serve as models for their images. Yet on the surviving map the imperial
cities of Roma and Constantinopolis have come to look like medieval
emperors.34 Their depiction suggests scribal deviation from an ancient
archetype. This is true as well for Antiochia, a symbol that Richard Talbert
considers post-original, whose insertion overcrowds the available space.35
For their part, the pictorial symbols of Rome and Constantinople make
a powerful statement. From his throne at Constantinople, the emperor
points to the orb in the outstretched hand of Constantine, the colossal
statue atop the nearby pillar. The emperor at Rome also sits enthroned,
gazing at the orb that he holds in his outstretched right hand. Like the

33
On the practical and symbolic importance of the Roman route network, see Emily
Albu, The Medieval Peutinger Map (forthcoming).
34
Annalina and Mario Levi, Itineraria picta: Contributo allo studio della Tabula Peutinge-
riana (Rome: LErma di Bretschneider, 1967), 156.
35
Talbert, Romes World, 124.
510 E. Albu / Medieval Encounters 17 (2011) 495-511

Figure 2. Imperial Roma on the Peutinger map, with its harbor at Ostia
and with twelve principal roads radiating from the city. Reproduced by
permission. NB/Vienna, Picture Archive, Tabula Peutingeriana, Segm. 4
(detail). This figure is published in colour in the online edition of this
journal, that can be accessed via http://www.brill.nl/me.

Roman roads, these prominently displayed orbs highlight imperial domin-


ion over the earth. Does Romes direct possession of the orb subtly affirm
the authenticity of Romes sovereignty, against the assertions of Constan-
tinople, whose imperial figure merely points to the orb in the statues
hand? With Constantinoples gesture and Romes direct custody of the
orb, the mapmaker may have been answering claims of the Byzantine
Empire as well as the imperial papacy (Fig. 3).
If only the mapmaker had shifted its center to Constantinople, Anna
Komnene would have sympathized with its ideology and the invocation of
Old Rome. Her narrative presents a bleak view of near contemporary
Rome, whose bishops and princes neither possessed nor deserved the
authority transferred to Constantinople centuries before. Yet despite its
presumptuous papacy and illegitimate claims to power, Rome still mat-
E. Albu / Medieval Encounters 17 (2011) 495-511 511

Figure 3. Constantinople on the Peutinger map. Reproduced by permis-


sion. NB/Vienna, Picture Archive, Tabula Peutingeriana, Segm.7
(detail). This figure is published in colour in the online edition of this
journal, that can be accessed via http://www.brill.nl/me.

tered to both Roman empires. Byzantines and Germans alike might dis-
dain the popes arrogant claim to preside over the whole inhabited
world (Alexiad 1.13.4), but they could not ignore the power exercised by
pagan Rome and papal Rome over twelfth-century imaginations.

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