COLA DI RIENZO. — Born in Rome in 1313, died there following a riot on 8 October 1354. He was a notary and a man not lacking in classical culture, though acquired and retained in a chaotic and uneven manner. His first significant political activity was the mission he undertook in 1343 to Avignon, when, sent by the Roman government (the popular regime of the Thirteen Good Men), he attempted to persuade Clement VI to return to Rome and to proclaim the Jubilee for 1350; the Jubilee was obtained, the visit to Rome accepted but postponed. During his stay in Avignon, Cola obtained the position of notary of the urban chamber, and, more importantly for his future political work, he was encouraged by the proximity and friendship of Petrarch in his nostalgia for ancient Rome and its libertas.
Returning to Rome, Cola intensified his vision of a reunited Italy restored as the center of a renewed Empire, where the tradition of ancient Rome blended with his own Augustinian theocratic ideals. Allied with the people and the merchants, his subtle opposition to the power of the barons culminated on 20 May 1347 with the suppression of baronial authority and the granting of political power to him; the Pope sanctioned this by appointing him and the papal vicar as rectors of the City and district (27 June 1347).
Cola reorganized the administration, justice, and public safety of the city, expanding Rome’s effective jurisdiction over the province. Initially rector of the city, he later styled himself Tribune and was able to act authoritatively because the people loved him and part of the nobility had come to support him.
To realize his Roman dream, Cola summoned delegates from the Italian states, attempting to forge a unified Italian alliance of all political forces; the cornerstone of this union was naturally the imprescriptible right of the Roman people as the repository of imperial authority. Indeed, bypassing any possible authorization from the representatives of the Italian states, Cola proclaimed that the Roman people had effectively resumed in its hands the authority as head of all Italy. And since every Italian is a Roman citizen, he consequently had the right to vote in the imperial election; thus, a general election for an Italian emperor was to be held at Pentecost 1348.
Cola’s dream collapsed due to opposition from some Italian states (especially Florence), jealous of their sovereignty, and the disavowal of the Curia, which, though initially approving Cola’s work as a suppressor of baronial pretensions, now sided again with the barons, fearing that the realization of Cola’s attempt would destroy the Church’s rights over the papal territories. On 12 October 1347, the Curia commissioned Cardinal Legate Bertrand de Deaux to assume control of Rome (the same cardinal was tasked with putting Cola on trial). On 20 November, Cola, unable to quell a riot due to the apathy of the people who once acclaimed him, left Rome; he went to the hermitage of Mount Morrone, and later (1350) was in Prague with Charles of Bohemia, urging him to assume the imperial crown, but Charles imprisoned Cola (who had been excommunicated in 1347–48), then handed him over to Clement VI (1352), who kept him imprisoned in Avignon.
With the new pope Innocent VI, Cola’s fortunes improved, as he was sent to Rome as a forerunner of Albornoz’s restoration attempt. On 1 August 1354, Cola, as papal representative, entered Rome amid great acclaim; opposition from the barons and the subsequent decline in his popularity, due to a tyrannical policy and heavy taxation, left him isolated, and in a riot he was killed by the people.
Cola’s personality is complex: a dreamer, a man of impulse. Overrated by rhetorical tradition, his true proportions must be reduced; he lacked a clear political awareness of penetrating the actual reality of the historical situation, which was not yet ripe for his attempts at Italian unification—an ideal that, moreover, was largely sentimental-literary, since Cola, logically, had no concept of the nation in the modern sense. The idea of imperial Rome and the Roman people as the repository of imperial sovereignty merged in him with the idea of spiritual Rome, in a vision of a *renovatio* that reflected the millenarian preaching of the Fraticelli, though lacking their ardent spirit of penance and charity, precisely because in Cola the work of the Holy Spirit was seen and felt primarily as operating in the political society rather than in the *Corpus Christi mysticum*. Moreover, in him every eschatological ideal solution was more formalistic than mystical. Cola was a victim of the contradictions of an age of transition from Christian-Roman universalism to pre-humanistic individualism.
The revival of classical antiquity was one of the most ardent and conscious motives in Cola: he could write with pride of having learned to despise “vita plebeya” and of having cultivated his soul for the noblest enterprises; rejecting all other occupations, he devoted himself solely to “lectiones rerum imperialium antiquarum et praeclarissimorum virorum memoriae,” filled with those ideals and feeling compelled to act upon them: “nichil actum fore putavi, si, quae legendo didiceram, non aggrederer exercendo.” Only thus did he have the chance to be feared by the powerful and beloved by the people (*Briefwechsel*, part 3b, pp. 203–204).
