On a hermit, a slap, and the strange history of an office nobody quite invented

 

Travel through Anagni, Segni or Alatri and the plaques accumulate. Here a pope was born. Here another was elected. Here a third held court while Europe waited to hear what he had decided. For a visitor unfamiliar with the story, the density is puzzling. This is a stretch of quiet hill towns in inland Lazio, not an imperial capital. Why does it turn up so often in the history of an office that, in theory, belonged to Rome?

Answering that means going back further than any of these towns, to a question that rarely gets asked out loud: who actually decided there should be a pope in the first place?

 

An office nobody signed into existence

 

Nobody did, not in the way a king is crowned or a president sworn in. The papacy grew rather than started.

 

In the first centuries of Christianity, Rome was one bishopric among many, governed the way most of the early Church was governed: bishops in their own cities, consulting each other, meeting in councils when disputes needed settling. Rome's bishop carried unusual prestige almost from the beginning, for reasons that were partly religious and partly geographic. Tradition held that both Peter and Paul had been martyred in the city, and Rome was, after all, the capital of the empire the new religion was slowly working its way through. Prestige is not the same thing as authority, and for a long time nobody in Rome was claiming to outrank every bishop everywhere.

 

That changed gradually, and unevenly. Bishops of Rome such as Damasus, in the fourth century, began arguing more forcefully that Rome's link to Peter gave the city's church a standing the others lacked. By the time of Leo the Great, in the fifth century, the idea that Rome's bishop spoke with a unique inherited authority was being stated plainly, even if other major churches were not yet prepared to agree. The title "pope" itself, from the Latin for "father," had been used loosely for bishops across the Christian world before it settled, over centuries, onto the Bishop of Rome alone. In 607, the Byzantine emperor Phocas is recorded as recognising Rome's bishop as head of all the churches, which is as close as the story gets to an official founding date, roughly six centuries after the fact.

 

What turned this spiritual precedence into an actual government was a separate development, and a later one. In 756, the Frankish king Pepin the Short granted the Pope territory in central Italy, and a bishop became a ruler of a state as well as a shepherd of souls. Ciociaria's own long entanglement with that state, the Papal frontier that once ran straight through this landscape, and what daily life looked like on either side of it, is a story told at length elsewhere in this collection, in The Border That Divided Italy and Why So Many Churches?. What matters here is simpler: once the Pope had a territory to govern as well as a Church to lead, where a pope came from, and who his family was, stopped being incidental information.

 

Why here?

 

Rome in summer was not a healthy place to be. Heat, poor drainage and the mosquitoes that came with both made the city dangerous for anyone who could avoid it, and the papal court frequently could. Towns in the hills nearby offered cleaner air and a short journey home, and Anagni, perched above the Sacco valley, became one of the favourites. Powerful local families noticed. A family with land, money and a foothold in the Church could, with patience, produce not just a bishop but a pope, and the towns of Ciociaria did this often enough that Anagni is still sometimes called the City of Popes.

 

Four medieval popes were born there: Innocent III, Gregory IX, Alexander IV and Boniface VIII. Three of the four belonged, by blood or by the useful fiction of blood, to the same family.

 

A dynasty that called itself uncles and nephews

 

Innocent III, elected in 1198, came from the Conti di Segni, a noble family with land in the hills around Anagni. He was, by most accounts, one of the medieval papacy's most formidable occupants, expanding its political reach further than almost anyone before him. His own family connections did not end with his death. His nephew succeeded, decades later, as Gregory IX. Gregory's nephew succeeded, in turn, as Alexander IV.

 

Historians have long noticed how often a medieval pope's "nephew" turns out to be doing rather more for him than a nephew typically would, and how frequently the word conceals something closer to "son." Clerical celibacy existed in theory throughout this period and was not always observed with great rigour in practice, and referring to an illegitimate child as a nephew was a discreet, well-understood convention. Whether any specific Conti pope fathered a child cannot be shown from the surviving evidence, and it would be unfair to the men in question to claim otherwise. What can be said is that the word we now use for favouring one's relatives, nepotism, comes directly from nipote, Italian for nephew, and that the Conti di Segni provided the practice with one of its most efficient working examples: three popes, one family, across more than half a century.

 

The fourth of Anagni's popes belonged to a rival family entirely, and needed no nephews to make history. He needed only a very bad afternoon.

 

The slap

 

Boniface VIII, born Benedetto Caetani, spent much of his pontificate at war with the ambitions of the French crown. In 1303, that quarrel came to his own doorstep. Armed men acting for King Philip IV of France entered Anagni and seized the elderly pope in his own palace. Legend holds that one of them, Sciarra Colonna, struck him across the face. Whether an actual blow landed has never been settled, and the episode is remembered in Italian simply as lo schiaffo di Anagni — the slap of Anagni — regardless. Boniface was released within days by townspeople who had no intention of letting their own pope be carried off, but he was dead within a month, and the confrontation is generally treated as the moment the medieval papacy's claim to stand above kings finally ran out of road.

 

Boniface reappears more than once elsewhere in this collection: as the pope who drank Fiuggi's water for his kidney stones, and as the pontiff to whom local legend attributes a fondness for tomato-and-ragù pasta he could never actually have eaten, since the tomato had not yet reached Italy in his lifetime. He was, by any reasonable measure, a man people wanted stories about.

 

He was also, however briefly, a jailer.

 

The pope who did not want the job

 

A decade before the slap, in July 1294, a conclave that had failed to elect anyone for over two years reached for the least controversial solution available: a hermit.

Pietro da Morrone had spent most of his adult life in the mountains of Abruzzo, living the sort of austere religious existence that made him famous for holiness and famous for nothing else. He was around eighty years old, had no interest in Church politics, and had to be persuaded to accept the position at all. He took the name Celestine V.

 

It did not go well. Celestine had no experience governing anything larger than a hermitage, and the machinery of the papal court quickly outpaced him. After five months, he did something no pope had done before: he issued a decree confirming that a pope could resign, and then resigned. Cardinal Benedetto Caetani, who had reportedly encouraged the abdication, was elected within days and became Boniface VIII.

 

Boniface's problem was obvious. A living former pope, however unambitious, was a living rallying point for anyone who wanted to challenge his own election. Celestine, for his part, wanted nothing more than to return to his mountain and be left alone, and made a run for it. He evaded capture for months, moving through remote country, before an attempt to cross the Adriatic was turned back by a storm. He was caught near Monte Gargano and handed over.

 

Boniface had him confined in a narrow room in the tower of the Castello di Fumone, a fortress standing on the highest inhabited point in Ciociaria, in the Monti Ernici above the Sacco valley. Celestine died there within the year, in May 1296, not quite eighteen months after abdicating a position he had spent five months failing to enjoy.

 

Dante, writing shortly afterwards, is widely believed to have placed Celestine in Hell for it, among those who made "il gran rifiuto" — the great refusal — condemned not for any specific sin but for having the chance to do good in the world and declining it. The Church took the opposite view entirely and canonised him a saint in 1313. Both judgments have survived for seven centuries without managing to cancel each other out.

 

Even Celestine's death has refused to stay settled. For generations a hole in his skull fed rumours that Boniface had finished the job with a nail through the head. A forensic examination carried out in 2013 concluded that the damage had been made after death, on a skeleton rather than a living skull, closing the murder theory without quite closing the case in the popular imagination. Fumone still stands, still privately owned, and can still be visited — the small tower room included.

 

A hermit and a lawyer

 

It is difficult to imagine two men less suited to sharing a story than Pietro da Morrone and Benedetto Caetani. One wanted nothing to do with power and was punished for saying so out loud. The other wanted a great deal of it and lost everything the moment a foreign king's men decided he had gone too far. Between them, in the space of a single decade, Ciociaria produced the only voluntary papal resignation in history before 2013, the only recorded manhandling of a reigning pope by foreign soldiers, and a prison sentence handed down by one pontiff to his own immediate predecessor.

 

None of it happened in Rome. All of it happened within a short ride of Anagni's own cathedral, in towns that today draw more attention for their walls, their frescoes and their food than for the men who once ruled half of Christian Europe from inside them.

 

The office itself outlived every one of these quarrels, as it was more or less designed to. What Ciociaria's contribution shows is less about the institution than about the people who occupied it: men elected for reasons that ranged from genuine conviction to family advantage to sheer exhaustion on the part of the cardinals doing the choosing, thrown into a role that promised enormous authority and delivered, at least twice in this small corner of Italy, a violent slap or a locked tower door instead.