Cola Di Rienzo

Cola di Rienzo (b. c. 1313–d. 1354) was a notary and diplomat, friend of Francesco Petrarch, and learned student of classical Antiquity. On 20 May 1347 he established a new communal government in Rome, toppling without violence the regime of the factious barons. He soon took on the titles of “tribune” in revival of ancient Rome, and “miles Spiritus Sancti” (“soldier of the Holy Spirit”) to indicate the dawning of a new, apocalyptic age. His new buono stato gained the support of a wide range of Roman social and economic groups, while the neighboring city-states soon allied with Rome. In Avignon Pope Clement VI first supported him and then—threatened by Rome’s new claims to legitimacy—actively worked with the barons to topple his government. Exiled in late 1347, on 1 August 1350 Cola made his way to the court of Charles IV in Prague, to persuade the emperor to reestablish his seat in Rome along with the pope. Delivered to Avignon on 1 August 1352, and imprisoned to stand trial for heresy, he was exonerated and sent to Rome as a papal senator on 1 August 1354. On 8 October 1354 he was murdered atop the Capitoline in an uprising organized by the Colonna and most likely supported by papal legate, Cardinal Gil Albornoz. New research methods and theoretical frames have moved away from the class-bound and nationalist analyses of the 19th century that viewed Rienzo as the unbalanced working-class populist. Interpretations also vary according to sources deployed. Those relying chiefly on the narrative account of the Anonimo romano’s classically inspired psychological and emotional portrait see the tribune as overreaching and unrealistic. Those that also deploy Rienzo’s and the papacy’s diplomatic correspondence and contemporary chroniclers place him into the normative communal thought of the Trecento. Meanwhile, the rise of 21st-century populisms has brought new scrutiny to Rienzo’s buono stato. While scholars of the Renaissance privilege philological and political methodologies, medievalists also examine Trecento public ritual, crime and punishment, sacred and secular urban space, patterns of patronage and clientage, Trecento visual culture and propaganda, claims of papal and secular legitimacy, and Trecento historiography. Rienzo’s period is also yielding important results in the reexamination of Roman archives, especially notarial registers, and their importance for the reevaluation of Roman social and economic networks, communal memory and forgetting, and the survival of his communal reforms into the Quattrocento.

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