COLA di RIENZO. - Born in Rome in 1313, died there following a riot on 8 Oct. 1354. He was a notary and a man of no small classical culture, even if acquired and retained in a chaotic and uneven manner. His first important activity in the political field was the mission he carried out in 1343 at Avignon, when, sent by the Roman government (the popular regime of the thirteen Good Men), he tried to urge Clement VI to return to Rome and to have him proclaim the jubilee for 1350: the jubilee was obtained, the visit to Rome accepted but postponed. During his stay at Avignon C. obtained the post of notary of the Urban Chamber, and, what matters more for his future political work, he was comforted by the closeness and friendship of Petrarch in his nostalgia for ancient Rome and its libertas. Having returned to Rome, C. sharpens his myth of an Italy returned to unity and made once more the center of a renewed Empire, where the tradition of ancient Rome mingles with his own theocratic Augustinianism. Having allied himself with the people and with the merchant class, his subtle work of opposition to the power of the Barons culminates on 20 May 1347 with the crushing of baronial power and with the granting of political power to him, C.; the Pope sanctioned the matter by appointing him and the papal vicar rectores Urbis et districtus (27 June 1347).
C. reorganized the administration, justice and civic security, and extended Rome's effective jurisdiction over the province. At first rector of the city he then had himself called tribune, and was able to act authoritatively because the people loved him and part of the nobility had ended up supporting him.
In order to realize his Roman dream, C. convokes at Rome the delegates of the Italian States, in an attempt at an Italic union uniting all political forces: the fulcrum of this union was naturally to be the imprescriptible right of the Roman people as depositary of imperial authority; indeed C., bypassing any possible authorization by the representatives of the States of Italy, proclaimed that the Roman people effectively took back into its own hands the authority as head of all Italy. And since every Italian is a Roman citizen, he consequently has the right to vote in the imperial election: therefore the election of an Italian to the imperial office was to be proclaimed for Pentecost of 1348.
But C.'s dream collapses because of the opposition of some Italian States (Florence above all) jealous of their own sovereignty, and because of the disavowal of the Curia, which, although at first it had looked favorably on C.'s work as a suppressor of baronial claims, now again supports the barons, fearing that the realization of C.'s attempt would destroy the rights of the Church over the pontifical territory. On 12 Oct. 1347 the Curia instructs the cardinal legate Berrando di Deaux to assume the government of Rome (the same cardinal had the task of bringing C. to trial). On 20 Nov., having failed to master a tumult because of the apathy of that people which had once acclaimed him, C. leaves Rome; he goes to the Hermitage of Monte Morrone, then (1350) is at Prague with Charles of Bohemia to urge him to assume the imperial crown, but the latter imprisoned C. (who had been excommunicated in '47-'48), and ceded him to Clement VI (1352), who held him prisoner at Avignon.
With the new pope Innocent VI, C.'s fortunes rise again, because he is sent to Rome as the forerunner of Albornoz's attempt at restoration. On 1 Aug. 1354 C., as papal representative, enters Rome to great acclaim; the opposition of the Barons, and the consequent loss of his popularity caused by a tyrannical policy and heavy taxation, leave him isolated; and in a riot he is killed by the people.
C.'s personality is complex, a dreamer, a man of impulse. Overvalued by a rhetorical tradition, his proportions must be reduced; he did not have a clear political awareness of penetrating into the actual reality of a historical situation not yet ripe for his attempts at Italic union, a union which moreover is chiefly on a sentimental-literary plane, since there is in C., logically, no concept of nation in the modern sense of the word. The idea of imperial Rome and of the Roman people as depositary of imperial sovereignty joins and blends in him with the idea of spiritual Rome, in the vision of a renovatio, which has reflections of the millenarian preaching of the fraticelli, though deprived of their ardent spirit of penance and charity, precisely because in C. even the work of the Holy Spirit is above all seen and felt as operating in political society and not in the Corpus Christi mysticum. Moreover, in him every ideal eschatological solution is more on a formalistic than a mystical plane. C. is the victim of the aporias of an age of transition from Christian-Roman universalism to pre-humanistic individualism.
And the resurgence of classicism is among C.'s most ardent and conscious motives: he could write with pride of having known how to despise «vitam plebeyam» and of having cultivated his mind for the noblest enterprises: having rejected every other occupation, he had given himself «soli leccioni rerum imperialium antiquarum et probissimorum virorum memorie»; filled with those ideals he felt he had to act inspired by them: « nichil actum fore putavi, si, que legendo didiceram, non aggrederer exercendo »; only thus did he have the possibility of having been terrible to the powerful and dear to the people (Briefwechsel etc., part 3, pp. 203-204).
Bibliography7 works
Massimo Petrocchi