Cola di Rienzo

Cola di Rienzo was born in Rome in 1313, in the riverside district near the Tiber where his father Lorenzo kept a tavern and his mother worked as a laundress and water carrier ^[1]. His name is a Roman contraction of Nicola di Lorenzo, the son of Lorenzo. After his mother's death he was sent to relatives in Anagni, a small town southeast of Rome, where he spent much of his youth and received an education unusual for a boy of his class ^[2].

He learned Latin well enough to read Livy, Cicero, Seneca, and Valerius Maximus, and he developed an obsession with the physical remains of ancient Rome. Contemporary accounts describe him wandering among the ruins, copying and translating the inscriptions on arches, tombs, and broken columns that most Romans of his day ignored ^[1]. The contrast between the marble evidence of the ancient city and the violent, depopulated Rome of the fourteenth century shaped everything he later attempted.

The Rome he returned to as a young man was in a miserable state. The popes had moved to Avignon in 1309, taking the papal court and its money with them, and the city was left to feuding baronial clans, above all the Colonna and the Orsini, whose private armies fought in the streets ^[3]. Cola trained as a notary, a respectable legal profession, and married the daughter of another notary. A personal grievance sharpened his politics: his younger brother was killed in the street violence, and the killer was never punished, an injustice Cola said he would one day avenge on the disorder itself ^[2].

In 1343 the Roman commune sent Cola as part of a delegation to Avignon to congratulate the newly elected Pope Clement VI and to plead the city's case: the Romans wanted the pope to return, and they wanted the Jubilee, first held in 1300, repeated in 1350 rather than after a full century ^[1]. Cola's speeches before the papal court caused a sensation. He denounced the barons who misgoverned Rome in language so bold that the Colonna faction at Avignon nearly ruined him, but Clement VI was impressed and eventually named him notary of the civic chamber of Rome ^[3].

At Avignon he also met Petrarch, the most celebrated writer in Europe, who shared his reverence for ancient Rome and became his most famous supporter. Petrarch later addressed letters to Cola urging him on, and hailed his revolution when it came ^[4].

Back in Rome from 1344, Cola used his official position to build a following. He was a gifted showman as well as an orator. He commissioned allegorical paintings on public walls showing Rome as a widow in mourning and as a ship in a storm, images that ordinary Romans could read even if they could not read Latin ^[1]. He lectured crowds on a bronze tablet bearing the ancient law that had conferred power on the emperor Vespasian, arguing that sovereign authority belonged to the Roman people and had merely been delegated. The barons mocked him as a clownish fantasist. He let them laugh while he organized ^[2].

On the morning of Pentecost, May 20, 1347, Cola marched to the Capitol in armor, accompanied by about a hundred armed supporters and the papal vicar, after a night of vigil and masses. Before a large crowd he proclaimed a new government of the buono stato, the good estate, and read out ordinances promising equal justice, protection of roads and pilgrims, relief for widows and orphans, and a citizen militia ^[1]. The barons, caught off guard, withdrew from the city. Cola took the title of tribune, deliberately reviving the ancient office that had protected the Roman plebs ^[3].

For several months the experiment worked remarkably well. Contemporary chroniclers report that the roads around Rome became safe for the first time in living memory, that courts sat and punished powerful men, and that grain supplies were secured ^[2]. The most notorious baronial strongholds inside the city were opened, and heads of the great families were made to swear obedience to the popular government. News of the revolution spread across Italy, and Cola wrote to the cities of the peninsula inviting them to send representatives to Rome, sketching a vision of Italian unity under Roman leadership that had no precedent in medieval politics ^[4].

Success enlarged his ambitions and his theatricality. On August 1, 1347 he was knighted in a lavish ceremony during which he bathed in the porphyry basin where, according to legend, the emperor Constantine had been baptized, an act many contemporaries found blasphemous ^[1]. Two weeks later he was crowned tribune with six wreaths in a rite blending Roman, Christian, and prophetic symbolism. He then summoned Pope Clement VI and the rival claimants to the imperial title to appear before the Roman people, effectively asserting Rome's authority over both pope and emperor. Avignon, which had tolerated him as a useful check on the barons, began proceedings against him ^[3].

The barons struck back in the autumn of 1347. On November 20 a force led by members of the Colonna family attempted to enter Rome at the Porta San Lorenzo. The citizen militia routed them, and several Colonna, including the son and grandson of the aged patriarch Stefano Colonna, were killed in the fighting ^[1]. It was the greatest military victory of Cola's tribunate, but he squandered its moral effect with vindictive celebrations over the dead, which alienated many Romans ^[2].

By December his position had crumbled. The papal legate declared him a heretic and rebel, his taxes had grown unpopular, and his nerve failed at the decisive moment. On December 15, 1347, after roughly seven months in power, Cola abdicated and withdrew from the city without a fight ^[3]. He spent more than two years hidden among Franciscan hermits of the strict Fraticelli movement in the mountains of the Abruzzi, absorbing their apocalyptic prophecies of a coming age of the Holy Spirit, ideas that reshaped his sense of his own mission ^[2].

In 1350 he traveled in disguise to Prague and presented himself to Charles IV, king of Bohemia and future Holy Roman Emperor, urging him to come to Italy and reform church and empire alike. Charles, unwilling to shelter a condemned rebel, held him in comfortable imprisonment and in 1352 surrendered him to the papal court at Avignon ^[1]. There Cola was tried and expected death, but his fortunes turned once more. Petrarch and others spoke for him, and the new pope, Innocent VI, elected in December 1352, saw a use for the famous tribune: as an instrument against the very Roman disorder he had once fought ^[4].

Innocent VI absolved Cola and attached him to the mission of Cardinal Gil de Albornoz, the soldier-cardinal charged with recovering the Papal States for the absent papacy ^[3]. Named senator of Rome, Cola entered the city in triumph on August 1, 1354, cheered by crowds who remembered the safe roads of 1347 ^[1].

The second government lasted barely ten weeks. Cola was no longer the lean visionary of his first tribunate: witnesses describe him as heavy, prematurely aged, and drinking hard ^[2]. He was also short of money, having borrowed from the mercenary captain Fra Moriale (Montreal d'Albarno) to raise troops. Rather than repay him, Cola arrested the condottiere on charges of banditry and had him beheaded, keeping his treasure, an act of expedience that shocked even hardened contemporaries ^[1]. New taxes on wine and salt, arbitrary arrests, and the execution of popular figures drained away his support with astonishing speed.

On October 8, 1354 a crowd gathered at the Capitol shouting for his death. Cola tried to address them from the balcony as he had so often done, but stones and fire drove him inside. He attempted to escape in disguise, cutting his beard and blackening his face, but was recognized, reportedly by the gold bracelets he had not removed. He was stabbed to death at the foot of the Capitoline stairs, his body dragged through the streets, hung by the feet, and finally burned, the ashes scattered ^[1].

The fullest contemporary account of Cola's life comes from an anonymous Roman chronicler writing in the Romanesco dialect within a generation of his death, a vivid text that preserves both the excitement and the absurdity of the tribunate ^[2]. Petrarch's letters kept his memory alive among humanists, and later scholars have treated Cola as an early example of the Renaissance recovery of antiquity applied to politics: he read ancient inscriptions not as curiosities but as a program for government ^[4].

His afterlife in modern culture has been extraordinary for a medieval politician. Edward Bulwer-Lytton's 1835 novel Rienzi, the Last of the Roman Tribunes made him a romantic hero across Europe, and Richard Wagner turned the story into his 1842 opera Rienzi, one of the composer's first major successes ^[5]. In the nineteenth century, leaders of the Italian Risorgimento invoked him as a forerunner of national unification, and a bronze statue of Cola by Girolamo Masini was erected in 1887 on the slope of the Capitoline Hill, near the spot where he was killed ^[6].

Historians remain divided about who was Cola di Rienzo at his core: a genuine reformer destroyed by circumstances, a prophet convinced of a divine mission, or a demagogue undone by vanity. Modern studies, including Ronald Musto's examination of his apocalyptic religion and Amanda Collins's work on his Roman context, argue that all three readings capture part of the truth ^[3][7]. Among the enduring Cola di Rienzo facts is this: for a few months in 1347, a tavern keeper's son made the courts of Europe take seriously the idea that the Roman people could govern themselves and lead Italy. That idea outlived him by centuries.