History as a story, a story of a city with a famous past that has in many senses been preserved. Matthew Kneale, who is an accomplished novelist, elicits this past through the story of seven moments when the city was under siege and sacked. The result is a view of history that is unique in my experience and one that does justice to the city itself. ( )

How do you write a history of a city as old as Rome for the layperson that isn't 600 pages long? I couldn't resist Kneale's approach, even if he does have to stretch the definition of a sacking to make it work.

According to ye olde Wikipedia, Rome has, indeed, been sacked seven times--but Kneale rolls up the attack by the Vandals in 455 in the chapter on the Visigoths' attack and treats Totila's two sackings in 546 and 549-550 in one chapter. From the brutal sackings of the earlier years--most of which involved wholesale murder (and worse), destruction, looting, and rape--Kneale moves to the comparatively tamer sieges/occupations of Rome by the French in opposition to Garibaldi and his liberal movement for a unified Italy, and by the Nazis. This is not to belittle the loss of life that did occur in the later events--but given the cultural cred that Rome had achieved by the 1800s and 1900s, it didn't suffer as much as it did in 1592 (and dang, did it suffer in 1597).

Still, if you're going to write a history of Rome, you can't just stop in the 1500s, which was a big part of why I picked up this book--I wanted a concise history that went beyond the Roman Empire (good thing I wasn't familiar with the traditional seven sackings or the subtitle might have put me off). The only downside to Kneale's slight reinterpretation rather than a full-scale overhaul is that change accelerates as the years move on, so that the jumps from 1527 to 1849 and from 1849 to the 1930s feel so much greater than any of the others. I'm not familiar enough with Italian history to know if there were other invasions that might have qualified for a new list of sackings, so maybe Kneale's choices in the modern era were limited.

Each chapter follows a formula that, far from feeling formulaic, was extremely helpful: We start with a map of Rome in the year of the sacking; part I opens with an anecdote and the historical and political background; part II zooms in on everyday life and culture of the era, usually with some variation of, "if a traveler from the last sacking could see Rome now..."; and part III tells us about the siege/invasion/sacking itself.

Much of this book was new to me and gave me much to appreciate when/if I make it to Rome. Kneale is an expat who clearly loves his adopted city and gave us plenty of things to look out for.

Quote / Thought Roundup

12) I was impressed to learn that Rome didn't just sprout up out of an existing village the way many other cities did. Kneale tells us that there was a large-scale effort to level the ground between the hills by importing dirt to create the Roman forum. If only they'd thought to lay it out a bit more neatly!

54) Apparently Julius Caesar banned carts from the streets of Rome by day to prevent gridlock...though that made for noisy nights! As New York considers traffic control methods, I hope someone on the urban planning committee knows a little history.

Chapter 1 felt a bit thin on info about Rome--it felt like most of the info about 390 BCE came in Chapter 2 during that part II comparison to life in 410 CE.

106) Is it a spoiler if it's history that happened 1500 years ago? Anyway, this one shocked me: though the sources may exaggerate, apparently Rome sat nearly empty for 40 years after the Ostrogoth sacking in 550. Considering that it had previously been one of the most populous cities in Europe, even at its low ebb, this completely bowled me over.

One thing that struck me in general was that the waves of invaders came from all over Europe and some always settled down to stay. Italian Americans take such pride in their Italian roots, perhaps with particular affection for their ancestors' regions, but Italians themselves seem like an incredibly diverse lot. I remember talking with some coworkers while visiting British colleagues listened in amusement as we ran through our varied (if mostly European) backgrounds, eventually commenting that they were "just British". Kneale's book really drove home for me how we shouldn't just take an assumption like that for granted.

123) I'm going to risk quoting this one because it's a fantastic image:
[In 1021, Rome] was a kind of Gulliver's Travels town, where tiny houses existed among vast ruins. Many Romans lived actually inside the ruins...making their homes in the broken remains of thousand-year-old apartment blocks, in long-dry baths, and in the storerooms and corridors of abandoned theatres and stadiums. The colosseum was now the city's largest housing complex.
What a sight to imagine. Is that an archeologist's dream, or their nightmare? There must be so many competing academic specialties every time a new dig starts...

135) It was interesting to learn that for much of Rome's history Jews were *relatively* well-treated by the church because of their connection to Jerusalem and the Old Testament, to the extent that some rabbis actually advised the popes. It goes so counter to everything that I've learned about the anti-Semitic rhetoric spread by the Catholic church. Of course, if there's benevolent racism, I'm sure there's such a thing as benevolent anti-Semitism, too, and Kneale does give some examples of awful treatment. With the rapid papal turnover, the cultural whiplash between being respected and protected by some popes only to be reviled and disgraced by others must have been exhausting. Still, the periods of relative protection probably explain why Rome had one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe.

151) In the 1150s, the new senate set up a guard to try to protect the ruins of ancient Rome from further destruction. Yay!

204-204) The 1527 sack was brutal, but even the lay-soldiers had a little smarts. Some, who found a Renaissance artist at work, chose not to castrate or kill him but to press him into painting for them. I was most impressed that in the middle of a sacking, soldiers avoided looting banks so that their captives would be able to withdraw ransom. I mean, why settle for a ransom--why not just loot all the money from the banks? Okay, maybe they weren't so smart after all...

I can't remember what page this was on, but Kneale points out that Henry VIII made his request to divorce Katherine of Aragon shortly after the 1527 sack of Rome. I can't believe that this was never once mentioned in all the books I read during my Tudor historical fiction phase! It would have been huge news in the Christian world--Kneale compares it to September 11--and even speculates that the pope might have been game to appease Henry if the request had come before the sacking.

334 & 352) The Holocaust comes to Rome...and German diplomats Weizsacker and Mollhausen did more to try to stop the roundup of Jews than the unconcerned Vatican did. I'd heard that Pope Pius XII was useless, but dang--to have Nazis do more than you to save Jewish lives? I was also impressed at how many Roman Jews survived the war compared to other parts of Europe. According to Kneale, over 10,000 of Rome's population of 12,000 made it--an unacceptable number of deaths in any situation, but practically a miracle for the Holocaust. As he puts it, "Centuries of cynicism and distrust of authority had borne fruit" in the comparatively large number of ordinary Romans willing to protect innocent people. Of course, he notes, there were plenty of Nazi collaborators, but compared to what happened in much of Europe, Rome's story seems remarkable.

So that's it! If you want a crash-bang introduction to the history of Rome, this book is a pretty good one. Just accept that you will probably struggle to keep some names straight, especially in the years of high leadership turnover in the 1100 and 1520s, and that the later years are going to have some big time jumps. ( )

Easy, entertaining read that provides a picture of Rome in seven different periods of time. You learn a bit about the culture/politics and how Rome has changed since the last chapter. ( )

Highly readable summary of Roman and Italian history told through seven key sackings which the author sees has turning points or as having a lasting impact. Great characters fill the pages including Celts, lots of Goths, Normans, Landsknechte and Garibaldi's red shirts. ( )

An interesting idea...a history of Rome looked at through 7 sackings over 2000 years.

The structure of the book is to look those who would doing the sackings, the sacking itself, the impact on Rome and its peoples and in the later chapters commenting on the differences that residents of an earlier Rome would see when looking at the latest Rome.

Rome is probably my favourite O/S city, though having only visited it twice.

So I was looking forward very much to this. But was a little disappointed. It was both more detailed as to the sackings themselves and less on the description of Rome and the impact on Rome. It was almost as if the emphasis was more a history of Roman sackings than of Rome (the city) itself.

And there was to my mind annoying habit of repeating phrases (particularly in describing a person), examples included references:
- to the syphilitic Pope Julius 11 on each of pages 173, 174 and 175
- to the "hiker Roland G Andrew" on pages 299 and 300
- [ ]

I suppose not a large issue, but a little grating.

Big Ship

27 January 2018 ( )