Rome pilgrim leader
Rompilgerführer are fonts that to guide a visit to the city of Rome and its sanctuaries (churches, chapels, places of memory, relics , indulgences serve etc.).
Pilgrimages to Rome in the 1st millennium
Pilgrims have been recorded for Rome since the 2nd and 3rd centuries ; the so-called red wall on Peter's tomb in the Vatican is covered with graffiti.
Since the 5th century there have been descriptions of which churches a pilgrim could find inside and outside the city. There were also descriptions of the city, its churches and antiquities that were not directly intended for use by pilgrims, such as the Einsidlense Itinierarium from the 9th century, which had long been regarded in research as a pilgrim guide. Pilgrims also wrote down reports of their journeys together with itineraries of the same, for example Sigeric of Canterbury , who visited Rome in the years 990-994. In addition, descriptions have been preserved that do not have the character of a pilgrim's report, but give information about the ecclesiastical topography of the city, according to the travelogue of the Jew Benjamin of Tudela (Spain, Navarra) from the 3rd quarter of the 12th century.
During the time of the Crusades , the number of pilgrims to Rome dropped significantly, the way to the center of Christian history, to the holy places of the life and death of Christ, was open again; there was also competition from other sanctuaries, of which Santiago de Compostela was certainly the most important.
Pilgrimages to Rome after 1300
While the Roman pilgrimages had subsided in the 12th and 13th centuries, the number of pilgrims skyrocketed in 1300. According to Cardinal Stefaneschi's report, even the Curia was surprised by this development: The proclamation of the Holy Year was - the Cardinal continued - an ecclesiastical reaction to a movement “from below”, that is, the people's longing for salvation; According to medieval chroniclers, around 200,000 people visited the city this year.
In the following, it was precisely those jubilee years that determined the rhythm of the streams of pilgrims to Rome: For each holy year, a more than significant increase in the number of pilgrims can be observed. But the number of pilgrims who visited Rome in the meantime also remained consistently high.
The Holy Year 1500 under Alexander VI. then meant a temporary high point in the jubilee years; the now well organized pilgrimage allowed hundreds of thousands of pilgrims to visit the city. For this event, thousands of copies of pilgrim guides in different languages were produced in Rome (Latin, German, French, Spanish, Italian). But the age of the classic medieval pilgrimage ended with the Sacco di Roma in 1527 and the Reformation , and the medieval pilgrim guides also gave way to another form of travel literature.
The pilgrim guides
The Einsidlense itinerary
Manuscript Codex 326, a script from the 9th century, is kept in the library of Einsiedeln Abbey , the so-called Itinerarium Einsidlense , directions for pilgrims to Rome. Its author is not known, not even whether he himself was a pilgrim to Rome or just compiled his collection from older reports.
The itinerary is arranged according to individual routes through the city, so almost a modern travel guide. A schematic map of late antique or early medieval Rome probably served as an aid to the author. Divided into twelve routes, the itinerary describes the ancient and Christian or the once pagan and now Christianized monuments of Rome: Route I - A porta sci Petri usque ad scam Luciam in Orthea ; Route II porta sci Petri usque ad portam Salariam ; Route III leads to A porta Numentana etc. Roman Forum ; Route IV a porta Flaminea usque Via Lateranense ; Route IV from the porta Flaminea (now in Piazza del Popolo ) to the forum ; Route VII A porta Aurelia usq. ad portam Praenestinam ; The VIII. Route A porta sci Petri usque porta Asinaria Even if there is no actual pilgrimage report in the Itinierarium, it belongs in the broadest sense as a description of medieval Rome to this group.
Mirabilia Romae - Graphia Libellus - Historia Romana
The so-called Mirabilia Romae are often a collective term in which not only the actual Mirabilia, but also the Mirabilia Romae vel potius historia et descriptio urbis Romae, as well as the Indulgentiae ecclesiarum urbis Romae and the Stationes ecclesiarum urbis Romae are included. The oldest manuscripts of the Indulgentiae date from the 12th, those of the Stationes from the 8th century; a broader tradition for both does not begin until the 14th century. Already at the time of their appearance around the middle of the 12th century, the scriptures bear the name Mirabilia Romae. Their earlier text is so uniform that an original text could be reconstructed from it. The dating of this original text varies in research from the end of the 10th to the middle of the 12th century. It is undisputed whether parts of the Mirabilia are older than the 12th century; an early form of mirabilia cannot be preserved without a primary or secondary tradition. Attempts were also made to relate the emergence of the Mirabilia to the renovatio of the Roman Senate as a renewed interest in ancient Roman history; this thesis is largely invalid today.
The first part of this original text lists the ancient buildings of the city - wall, towers, gates, etc., in some cases supplemented by their geographical location. In its second part, the Mirabilia deal with legends that refer to ancient buildings, such as Augustus' vision of the birth of Christ for the Capitol and the Church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli .
The third part of the Mirabilia is a kind of city tour in which above all ancient temples and palaces are mentioned in a topographical, non-systematic classification as in the first part; however, there are some deviations that cannot be included in this tour.
The Mirabilia are also certainly not written as a travel guide for a pilgrimage audience: On the one hand, the main interest of the script lies more in ancient than contemporary Rome - which is often only used for topographical classification - and, on the other hand, pilgrimages to Rome were at the time of its creation the Mirabilia has not yet assumed any greater proportions. The earliest Hss. Of the Mirabilia are also large-format and therefore unwieldy for the use of a traveler. Nine Miedema describes the Mirabilia as "more of a directory of ancient buildings and legends of Rome"; it would have the "character of a reference work or a description of the ancient splendor of the city", behind which the actual Roman topography recedes. Fictional and real topography mix in the mirabilia and give the fictional locations a claim to reality.
Graphia Aureae Urbis Romae
The Graphia Aureae Urbis Romae are a combination of the Mirabilia and the Graphia-libellus. After a legendary history of the founding of the city of Rome through Romulus as a descendant of the Trojan refugees, it brought a text derived from the Mirabilia; the third part dealt with the imperial court ceremony (Graphia-libellus). The latter is essentially dependent on Isidore of Seville Etymologiae. The time of origin of Graphia as such a combination of Mirabilia and Graphia-libellus is to be set after 1156.
The Indulgentiae urbis Romae
Since the middle of the 12th century, descriptions of the Roman churches, their relics and the indulgences available in them have been available, which since the 14th century bear the title Indulgentiae ecclesiarum urbis Romae . These are available in a broad tradition, but are not uniform among each other, which is why it is assumed that they originated independently of each other in different places.
The 14th century brought a great boom in the production of the indulgentiae, not least because of the first holy year 1300; In the 15th century, the descriptions of the churches were expanded with legends, and they also went into more detail on the relics and sights of the individual churches.
The first dated print of the Indulgentiae dates from 1475; However, this is much shorter than the manuscripts and incunabula : it only includes the seven main churches and a few other churches. Like all early Latin prints of this genre, it comes from Rome itself.
The text of the Indulgentiae was still in circulation in the 16th century, but at that time it lost its breadth in the tradition: with the Reformation and the infamous Sacco di Roma in 1527, the pilgrimage to Rome clearly lost its attractiveness since the 1620s , not least because of the indulgence practice that is available. Only with the Counter-Reformation did the pilgrimage to Rome and Rome ( Filippo Neri ) revive.
literature
- Nine Robijntje Miedema, The Mirabilia Romae. Investigations into their transmission with an edition of the German and Dutch texts , Tübingen 1996
- This., Mirabilia urbis Romae. The Roman churches in the late Middle Ages according to the Indulgentiae ecclesiarum urbis Romae , Tübingen 2001
- This., Rome pilgrim guide in the late Middle Ages and early modern times. The Indulgentiae ecclesiarum urbis Romae (German / Dutch), edition and commentary, Tübingen 2003
- Kerschbaum & Gattinger, Via Francigena - To Rome on foot, ISBN 3-200-00500-9 Verlag EUROVIA, Vienna 2005
- Gerlinde Huber-Rebenich / Martin Wallraff et al. (Editor), Mirabilia Urbis Romae - The Miracles of the City of Rome. Introduction, translation and commentary by ... Herder (Freiburg) 2014. [Latin text and first complete German translation]