The Perfect Heresy by Stephen O’Shea Read Free Book Online Page A

that medieval Romans had seen fit to build onthe antique archway, the southernmost served as a belfry for the church of SS. Sergio and Bacco, where Lotario had served his cardinalate. The area of the Roman Forum had been the young man’s home in the city, where he had mastered the intricacies of its turbulent civic politics. A few hundred yards from the church of SS. Sergio and Bacco, midway between Trajan’s Column and the Colosseum, the new pope would commission a tower, the Torre dei Conti, as a great statement on the ambitions of his family. Lotario’s brother Riccardo would build the tower to protect the Conti’s new turf on the slopes leading to the Viminal Hill. The brown-brick monolith, called “unique in the world” by an astonished Petrarch, dominated the Capitol and the Quirinal, and would still do so if an earthquake in 1348 had not cut its height by half. Today it continues to loom over Nerva’s Forum, a reminder that Lotario not only raised his family from obscurity to greatness but also gave Rome the fleeting impression of once again being the capital of the world.
    Beyond the Colosseum, past the flank of the Celian Hill, the procession headed to its final destination amid the well-tended fields of the papacy’s private domains. The basilica of St. John Lateran, the grandest and oldest of Rome, was built some 850 years earlier by the emperor Constantine, who donated the land and the adjoining palace to the Church from the private estate of his wife, Fausta. It was Constantine who decreed Christianity a legitimate Roman cult. His mother, Helena, had the staircase from Pontius Pilate’s quarters in Jerusalem hauled to the Lateran Palace. The pope could climb the twenty-eight steps of the Scala Santa in imitation of Jesus whenever the responsibility of his office weighed too heavily.
    His parade finished, Lotario dismounted and entered St. John Lateran, his cathedral as the bishop of Rome. The churchwas a treasure house of relics, the celebrity memorabilia of an age when faith outshone fame. Lotario had no doubt seen the Lateran’s collection: the heads of St. Peter and St. Paul; the Ark of the Covenant; the Tablets of Moses; the Rod of Aaron; an urn of manna; the Virgin’s tunic; five loaves and two fishes from the Feeding of the Five Thousand; and the dinner table from the Last Supper. The pope’s private chapel held the foreskin and umbilical cord of Jesus. Lotario’s beliefs, like those of the millions he now led, were rooted firmly in the material.
    The Lateran Palace, where a banquet awaited the procession’s participants, had been the principal residence of the popes since Constantine’s Fausta was forced to find other lodgings some eight centuries earlier. Yet Lotario was aware that the Lateran now stood marooned in an archipelago of Frangipani strongholds around the Celian Hill. He was determined not to be cowed or held captive here; thus it was he who definitively nudged the papal court to where his triumphant day had begun, near the tomb of St. Peter on the grounds of the Vatican.
    From summers of childhood in the Campagna to this portentous day in the winter of 1198, Lotario’s life had shaped him into a leader of unshakable convictions. He had been a boy when, in 1173, a pope in temporary residence in his hometown of Segni had proclaimed the murdered Thomas Becket a saint. Just thirteen, living with his family atop Gavignano, Lotario must have absorbed the lesson behind that beatification: No one must ever trifle with the Church. Becket went on to become the supernova of the medieval clerical firmament; when the apostate King Henry VIII robbed his tomb in the sixteenth century, he would make off with almost 5,000 ounces of gold. Lotario’s destiny lay between the base calculations of ordinary monarchs and the exalted peaks of sainthood.
    As Pope Innocent III, he had now been given, in his words, “not only the universal church but the whole world to govern.” In many quarters of