HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

MEDIEVAL URBAN HISTORIOGRAPHY 339of a series of bishops. 54 Now, at Rome, abandoned by its bishops,some unraveling had opened in this church tradition, unexpectedlygiving life and strength to a secular and popular historiographicalthread, nourished by cultural suggestions and by the nostalgia oraversions of intellectuals.Unlike the works of Villani, which were many times re-elaboratedand perfected both stylistically and in terms of informative contentsand expositive criteria, the Roman Cronica, 55 long thought anonymousand only recently attributed to Bartolomeo di Jacopo daValmontone (beg. 14th century–after 1360), 56 has been handed downto us in a text that is incomplete, much less revised, and structurallyimbalanced, as well as fragmentary. The work, written between 1357and 1358, with an addition in 1360, was composed first in a Latindraft, then vernacularized into Romance for purposes of publicity,since it was addressed with clearly ideological finality to a large publicof the chronicler’s fellow-citizens. He, recognizable from his autobiographicaltestimony as being from the aristocratic class and astudent of medicine at Bologna (ca. 1338–39), reveals an unusualclassical culture and a particular predilection for Titus Livy as hismodel of exemplary history. 57 In his pathetic re-evocation of theRoman tradition of the City, the author of the Cronica aims to describethe sufferings of contemporaries in the grave crises that Roman institutionsand society had undergone, with a strong polemical and antiaristocraticspirit, particularly against the cardinal family of theColonna. Rome and the lands of the Patrimony are frequently atthe center of his attention, although sometimes in the context ofrelations that combine the Italian and European worlds and findsits most incisive biographical expression in the figure of Cola diRienzo and his failed utopian adventure. 58 Events internal and externalto Rome, narrated in a rambling fashion from 1327 to 1354, intwenty-eight chapters, and based on personal memories, written documents,and oral testimony of contemporaries, would console hisconcives, re-evoking the great past of Rome and recalling the imaginationof the readers to the expectation of ever-imminent and important54For this ecclesiastical production of universalistic pattern in the main sees ofthe Italian peninsula, see Capitani (1988), 772–76 and bibliography.55Anonimo Romano, Cronica, ed. Porta.56Miglio (1995), 187; cf. note in asterisk.57Anonimo Romano, Cronica, ed. Porta, vii–xi.58Anonimo Romano, Cronica, ed. Porta, passim.