vanished.
It was around the churches and other religious buildings that the remaining population of common people was now clustered. These people squatted in the former palaces of the great, or had built squalid hovels from reused blocks.
As we crossed the Tiber and approached the central districts, we began to see people in the street. They shuffled about, mostly in rags, shopping at little stalls that sold spoiled fruit and old clothes and dried fish so stinking it would have turned a dog’s stomach.
Here and there, I did see people dressed in respectable clothes. I even saw a covered chair carried by four slaves. But persons of quality, I later found, usually stayed indoors until the sun was well and truly up, and the more dangerous human trash had vanished until the return of darkness.
We even went by a few of the great houses that hadn’t been given over to the poor. Heavily fortified, all remaining ancient elegances bricked up, they glowered blankly over the streets they faced.
We passed into what had once been a grand square hundreds of feet across, in which the central decorative column was toppled over and lay in broken sections, and the buildings on two sides were burnt out. Here, we were accosted by about a dozen raddled old whores and some scabby rent boys. They dragged themselves behind us, offering their services. Though dwarfed by the surrounding vastness, the noise of their cries was the first we’d heard since passing through the gate.
Come, lie with me, O pretty lad!
And give me money and be glad
Some ancient creature of probably female sex struck up, though I thought long after it might have been a eunuch. The song was taken up by a few others, building to a choral detailing of inventive though unlikely pleasures.
Maximin ignored the various prostitutes. I gave them a momentary glance. I hadn’t had a fuck in months, nor a wank in days. But I could easily resist these charms. I kicked one of the boys over as he came too close, and half drew my sword as one of the whores held up supplicating hands that seemed almost to drip contagion.
Such was the posterity of the great Populus Romanus that once had set the world to order. Such was the fallen magnificence of a city that had once been adorned with the plunder of the world.
10
At length, we reached the Lateran, which lay on the far side of the city from where we’d entered. Part of it, indeed, was joined to the southern wall. It stood out from its surroundings in bright, jarring glory. Many centuries ago, it was built as a palace for some noble family. Then it was confiscated by one of the emperors and used as government offices. Then it was given – I think by the Great Constantine – to the pope in his capacity as bishop of Rome. Since then, it had been altered and extended to become the main residence of the pope and the administrative heart of the Roman Church and all those churches that looked to Rome for guidance.
It loomed before us in a jumbled mass of porticoes and arches. The square in front of it was crowded with beggars and other scum. I could smell their diseased bodies at twenty feet. Fortunately, they saw the glower on my face and kept a reasonable distance.
First, we presented the letters of introduction that Bishop Lawrence had given Maximin. These were accepted by a priest sitting at a desk in the great reception hall behind the gate. A fat creature of uncertain age and sex, he looked at the battered but still sealed letter with plain contempt. ‘His Holiness is away from Rome. Nothing can be transacted in his absence. Come back next month,’ he drawled, reaching for another dried fig.
A few silver coins bought better manners. He told us he would do what he could, and we should return the following afternoon.
Next stop was the Church Bank, housed in one of the cellars. Armed guards stood outside a monumental brick arch that led down into what I cannot imagine once had been. Now, it was brightly lit and filled with dark, sharp Syrians, who darted here and there among parchment ledgers and sheaves of papyrus. Every movement threw up clouds of dust into the dank, unventilated air of the bank.
This was my introduction to banking. I hadn’t at all liked Maximin’s idea when we’d unloaded the horses and dragged those bags into the Lateran. I was appalled when he said we should hand it all over to these shifty Orientals. I said it would be safer with the whores outside. It still took some explaining to me what a good idea banks were.
Of course, it all depends on where you bank your cash. I lost a small fortune when the Saracens took Antioch. Every bank in the city closed its doors as the cash boxes were plundered. I did in the end get some of it back from Omar – but only after shedding my foreskin in a pretence conversion, and then he paid in silver that took forever to carry away.
Not that I did too badly from the deal. When that pig of an Emperor Constantine – the present one, that is – caught me out and confiscated my house and fortune and tried to have me blinded, I still had something beyond his reach in Antioch. It paid for my escape and the bribes along the way. It still pays for little delicacies that I have sent to me in Jarrow, along with the occasional new book and quire of papyrus. I have a great-grandson who looks after this. I have never seen him, but I understand he is a perfect little Saracen.
But the Church Bank was an excellent choice. Handling and backed by the vast revenues of the Church, it has never closed its doors. Not even when, about thirty years after opening my account there, Exarch Isaac marched over from Ravenna to plunder the Lateran, did the bank suspend its activities. It is the greatest if least observed power of the West. In those days, it was still flexing its muscles as the imperial hold on Italy slackened. Even so, it transacted an immense business. Money came in from the papal estates all over the West and in the Empire. Money went out.
Recently, the pope had taken over the costs of Roman defence. After the last big siege, about ten years previously, Pope Gregory had made a separate peace with the Lombards under which he paid them five hundred pounds of gold every year. There was the cost of a food dole for the dirty parasites in Rome. There were bribes to state and Church officials in Constantinople. There was the occasional sub to the emperor himself when his finances became desperate – that is, every few months.
Entering Rome with twenty-eight pounds of gold in the saddlebags and two around my waist, I’d thought we were unimaginably rich. The Syrian clerks didn’t turn a hair as I dumped bag after bag onto the table. They opened a few bags at random, tested the coin, and just weighed the rest. Most of it went unopened into another vault even deeper underground. They gave us a little parchment book with our names and addresses and the weight of the amount deposited. Being still a distrustful barbarian, I kept hold of the two pounds I’d killed for. All the while, big boxes of coin came back and forth, each one accompanied by a sheet of papyrus covered in writing by many hands.
Now to our lodgings. Back in Canterbury, Maximin had been given an introduction to some monastery nearby the old Praetorian Camp. This would give us a floor to sleep on and our bare fill. But we had gone somewhat up in the world in the past few days, and Maximin saw no sinful indulgence in revising our arrangements.
‘Let us give our places to some other poor souls who cannot afford what God has placed within our reach,’ he’d explained in Tarquini, as he sent ahead. ‘So long as we do not enjoy it to the exclusion of our spiritual needs,’ he’d added with a monitory wave of his finger, ‘it is our duty to take what luxury God has made possible.’
‘Indeed,’ I said, with an attempt at meekness. I was wondering where the brothels might be, and what excuses I’d be able to make to get away from Maximin.
Luxury for him was the house of Marcella on the Caelian Hill, with a fair view from its roof down to the southeastern wall and the country beyond. Looking away from this, one could see the still noble shell of the Imperial Palace on the Palatine.
Usefully close to the Lateran, the house was a sizeable place, in a district still populated and reasonably wealthy and therefore unruined. Two storeys high, it was built around a central garden. The external walls were as blank and windowless as a fortress’s. There was a double gate in, which showed that Rome had never been a very peaceful city. Other similar houses lined the street on both sides. The paving stones were unbroken, and were kept clear of weeds and rubbish.
All within was delightful. The rooms were light and airy. There was fresh plaster on many of the walls. The
