Water in the World: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Access and Sustainability

Regina Aquarum and Respublica Sancti Petri: Water in Late Carolingian Rome

DIGS 222

This paper examines the intersection of water usage and water rights and the stability of political power in the Roman state during the second half of the ninth century. Paolo Squatriti, the preeminent environmental historian of early medieval Italy, has referred to the Rome throughout that period as the regina aquarum, queen of waters, as its aqueducts and river continued as cornerstones of its relative economic vitality. The late 800s is an interesting but neglected period in Rome’s history; during the previous two centuries successive popes had constructed a stable state in central Italy, playing an important role in legitimating Carolingian rulers’ claims to the imperial crown, and in return receiving significant economic largesse. As the ninth century went on, the popes had asserted even more of a role in bestowing the imperial crown. However, after about 850, imperial power, and, seemingly as a consequence, papal power disintegrated, as numerous claimants vied for the throne, and Rome’s politics descended into chaos, with eleven papacies between 882 and 904. At the same time, throughout the peninsula, water rights and usage were in the midst of a process of patrimonialization; since about 700, resources considered public goods under the Roman Empire had been falling into private hands and were becoming considered the property of social elites, both lay and ecclesiastical. Utilizing an abundant secondary literature (overwhelmingly focused on high politics), the scant but telling primary sources (mostly charters and court cases), and the growing wealth of archaeological data, this paper examines the degree to which the Republic of St. Peter participated in this transfer of public water rights into private hands, and the degree to which late Carolingian Rome’s usage and treatment of water reflected or even affected its growing political turbulence.