Maskarinec, Maya City of Saints: Rebuilding Rome in the Early Middle Ages (University of Pennsylvania Press) The Middle Age Series, Philadelphia 1 320 2018
Without renouncing specialism, Maya Maskarinec's concise and clear prose succeeds in putting in plain words how Rome turned into the epicentre of the Christian world, (also) by adopting foreign saints and incorporating them in its shrines and liturgical celebrations between the 6th and the 9th centuries. Although mainly concentrated on Rome, a geographical and cultural "triangulation" made of Byzantium, Rome, and Francia, is considered in the book to illustrate the circulation of saints through relics and hagiographical accounts (p. 5). The examination of saints "from abroad" (e. g. p. 3, 6), especially but not exclusively from the eastern Mediterranean, is deemed by Maskarinec an ideal viewpoint to verify how Rome re-cast its own identity, from capital of a huge empire to the capital of a kingdom which had no boundaries on earth and in heaven.
The protagonists of the book, however, are not only the popes, since they were not the only agents of this re-shaping of the city into a Christian capital, as an "ecosystem of sanctity" or a "storehouse of saints" (p. 6). A variety of lay officers, secular clerics, monks, pilgrims, etc. were active part in the moves of saints' cults and their relics across the Italian peninsula, the european continent, and the wider Mediterranean, and in Rome were eventually part of foreign communities with specific devotional focuses. This is the case, for example, of a certain Eustathius mentioned in an inscription immured on the façade of Santa Maria in Cosmedin—under the same tourist-trodden porch which has the famous Bocca della Verità. The inscription records the donations he made to the church to support the poor. Eustathius is also known for having been a papal representative in Ravenna under Pope Stephen II (752–757). As noted by Maskarinec, the inscription deserves being reconsidered in that it offers a glimpse of one of the foreign communities of Rome and their devotional practices. Not only does this inscription address the Virgin Mary as queen of heaven, thereby echoing Greek liturgical texts. But the donor had once held the Byzantine post of dux. Moreover, when he commissioned the inscription, he was the dispensator of a diaconia bearing a name, Cosmedin, reminiscent of the Constantinopolitan monastery of Cosmidion dedicated to saints Cosmas and Damian, not far from the Marian shrine of the Blachernae. Based at Santa Maria in Cosmedin was also the schola Grecorum, that is an association of "Greeks" established to guarantee mutual support among its members just like other foreign scholae. These elements have suggested Maskarinec that Eustathius probably wanted to be remembered as part of a community that "at least to a certain extent, identified with—and strove to maintain a connection with—its 'Greek' past" (p. 94), including the cultural focus on the Virgin Mary. Also the fact that the Liber Pontificalis recalls that Pope Hadrian (772–795), nephew to a Byzantine officer, would shortly later restore the church, is seen by the author as indicative of the fact the association of this church with the "Greek" culture and community was actively nurtured by those who felt part of it (p. 96). In sum, by bringing together evidence from various scholarly realms, Maskarinec manages to offer an intriguing cultural-historical reading even of well-known elements of the early medieval Rome.
The book is articulated in eight chapters, of which the first introduces to mid-eighth-century Rome, on the occasion of Good Friday in year 752, under Pope Stephen II. The chapter sets the main of several stages on which the narrative of the book unfolds: the Forum and the Palatine Hill, two important spaces of the city which witness to the evolution of the city's imperial and early Christian legacy. The author further examines them in Chapter Two and Chapter Three in order to see how new saints (for example, Sergius and Bacchus) responded to, and eventually triumphed over the formidable Roman legacies embodied by the Forum, the main public space of ancient Rome, and the Palatine, the official seat of the imperial power. As the following chapters, also Chapter One relies on a competent as much as an imaginative reading of primary sources—some of which examined in specific appendixes—which are used to layer "saints' stories onto the Roman landscape" and reconstruct "the fluid relationship between saints, places, and their stories" (p. 9).
Chapter Four analyses the area on the left Tiber's bank, which was traditionally linked with trade, travellers, foreigners, and charitable institutions. Here we find, among the various cases examined, the previously mentioned Santa Maria in Cosmedin. Chapter Five moves up on the Aventine Hill, a safe haven for eastern political and religious refugees, where since early imperial times was a safe haven for aristocrat and wealthy residents, and where in the period of concern for this book, "affluent and cosmopolitan communities cultivated idiosyncratic saints whose cults reveal a dialogue concerned with the tensions between the local and universal dimensions of Christianity" (p. 100). On the Aventine, the saints Sabina and Serapia, whose geographical origins remained blurred in their passio, become the emblem of an idealised, Mediterranean Christianity (p. 105). The author analyses the importance of the discovery in 2010 of a fresco in the narthex of the basilica of Santa Sabina, which has received a great deal of attention by scholars of Rome. In it, the Virgin Mary holds her Child in a halo of light, according to the Byzantine iconography of the Πλατυτέρα τῶν Oὐρανῶν or "more spacious than the heavens," which seems to have appeared in the 6th century in the eastern Mediterranean. In the fresco, the Virgin is flanked by Peter, Paul, two female saints, possibly Sabina and Serapia, three clerics, which thanks to an inscription discovered a few years later and declaring the image to be an ex-voto, have been identified. They were the archpriest Theodore, the priest George, and the very Pope Constantine (708–715). In 680–681, Theodore and George attended the 6th Ecumenical Council in Constantinople in the role of official papal legates of Pope Agatho to discuss the on-going monothelete controversy. Most probably chosen by the Agatho for their acquaintance with the Greek-speaking eastern Mediterranean, they reveal their devotion towards the two little known martyrs Sabina and Seraphia, as well as their gratitude to the Virgin for assisting their return to Rome, and for nurturing their hopes in her future intercession before God. Although dated by the inscription to circa three decades after the council, the former papal envoys may have been prompted by Emperor Philippikos Bardanes' recent backing of monotheletism in 712–713 to commission this painting. These prelates were part of a circle of "Greek" clerics which since the period of Agatho promoted an entente cordiale with the Byzantine emperor after the monothelete controversy (c. 640s–680 s), shaping the relation of Rome not only with Byzantium as a polity, but in practice asserting Rome's centrality in Mediterranean Christianity—a circle whose activity and agency still needs to be fully assessed.
Chapter Six is concerned with how the popes engaged in acquiring and memorialising relics of foreign saints in ecclesiastical buildings in Rome, including the chapel of San Venanzio at the Lateran and the Santi Quattro Coronati. The basilica of St Peter's—which "could claim the bones of Peter himself as its foundation" (p. 124), the foundation of the Church—becomes the stage for displaying a "collectivity of sanctity" (pp. 117, 124–130) when Pope Gregory III (731–741) erects an oratory in the corner of the triumphal arch on the southern side of the nave, dedicated to All Saints and establishes their feast day on 1 November. This collection of relics, literally embodying a "collectivity of sanctity," to quote Maskarinec, was presided over by an image of the Virgin, probably painted, with a gold diadem encrusted with gems, a necklace, and earrings, as the papal chronicle recalls. The author rightly says that the pontificate of Gregory III, "together with those of his predecessors and successors," was pivotal in shaping Rome as custodian of Christian values and cults, and epicentre of sanctity (p. 125).
In Chapter Seven, the circulation of Roman relics in Francia, especially in important monastic centres, offers the opportunity to see how Rome and its sanctity were memorialised outside Rome, "transplanting Rome saint by saint" (p. 145) and building new sacred landscapes, adding fresh insights on the Carolingian acquisition of relics previously explored by scholars such as Patrick Geary and Julia Smith.
Chapter Seven investigates how "the idea of Rome as storehouse of sanctity" had culminated well beyond Rome itself through the lens of a martyrology compiled by the Frankish aristocrat Ado, bishop of Vienne in Provence in the mid-ninth-century. While usually a martyrology is a list of saints and martyrs to be commemorated, Ado adds excerpts from their passiones which support their sanctity and his choice for them. Among the innovations registered in his martyrology, "the most decisive—and most audacious—revision," was his addition of the feast of All Saints on 1 November, which he links to the conversion of the main pagan temple of Rome, the Pantheon, to the cult of All Saints presided by the Virgin, in the early 7th century on the part of the pope with imperial permission. Thus, Ado manages to give the feast "an aura of Roman, and imperial, legitimacy" (p. 167).
Six appendixes offer material to those willing to read further on issues touched upon in previous chapters, after having usefully reminded the reader, in Appendix One, of "saints from abroad" introduced in Rome between the sixth and the ninth centuries (p. 173–180).
In conclusion, the book of Maya Maskarinec is an enjoyable read for scholars of Rome but also for a general audience interested in the history of the city in its complex transition between late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, which ultimately consecrated it as the epicentre of Christianity.
By Francesca Dell'Acqua
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