The worst of the persecutions of Christians — under the emperors Valerian and Diocletian — occurred around 250 to 313, after which the storm lifted. The persecutions largely came to an end when the Roman Emperor Constantine (c. 300–337) rose to power.42 After his 312 victory at Milvian Bridge, where he claimed to see a cross in the sky with the words, “In this sign you shall conquer,”43 he took control of the western Roman Empire and, together with the emperor of the East, published the Edict of Milan, thus granting Christians the freedom to worship.44 Later, when he gained control of the whole Roman Empire, Constantine moved the capital from Rome to Constantinople. He apparently remained a pagan for most or all of his life, but he acceded to the requests of his Christian mother, Helena, and allowed a church to be built over the site traditionally held to be Peter’s grave near the top of Vatican Hill.45
The planned church needed a level foundation, and Vatican Hill was anything but flat. Peter’s purported grave stood near, but not at the top, surrounded by the family tombs of numerous prominent families. Desecration of these burial sites would generate widespread hatred of the emperor. The Romans — perhaps history’s greatest engineers — solved the problem by filling the hill with millions of feet of fill around the numerous existing pagan tombs.46 The effect was to create a vast, hidden, underground necropolis, which would remain frozen in time and space under the new church.
Roman Family Tombs
The supreme memorial to a Roman family’s dignity and history was its family tomb, containing the ashes, busts, and portraits of generations of family members, many going back hundreds of years. In Rome, the basic social unit was the family. The pater familias — the senior male — had the power of life and death over all family members and was in turn himself responsible to the Republic for their actions. Much of the standing and dignitas of a citizen was his family’s standing. The family tomb thus became, in effect, a museum of family history (and with it the history of Rome), designed to celebrate ancestors while impressing passers-by with the family’s gravitas. The most well-known entrance to Rome — the Appian Way — was lined on either side by many of the family tombs of the great families of Roman history, such as the Julia, Scipii, Horatia, Cornelii, and Graccii families.47 It is no accident that the poet Thomas Babington Macaulay portrays the legendary Roman hero Horatius, facing certain death defending a bridge in Rome, proclaiming:
To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds
For the ashes of his fathers
And the temples of his gods?48
Centuries of looting began with the Visigoths’ conquest and sack of Rome in 410, followed by the Vandals in 455, the Saracens in 846, and the Germans in 1527. The great family tombs of the Appian Way were reduced to ruins.49 With the barbarian invasions, the Empire died. Rome became a city of ancient ruins, the Colosseum half collapsed, the Forum and Senate House mere rubble, and famous baths and homes now merely stones and fading memories. But the family tombs under the Vatican had a different fate. As civilization in the West died to a flicker with the great barbarian invasions of the Roman Empire, even the memory of the legendary surviving family tombs inadvertently preserved by Constantine under the Vatican disappeared. Because of Constantine’s engineering, they (unlike the tombs on the Appian Way) survived the great invasions of Rome. Unknown to the invaders, they remained wholly intact as they had been in 337 when they were buried beneath the newly constructed basilica. The outside world knew only of a few legends and ancient writings in the Vatican archives about Peter’s grave. The rest of the tombs beneath the basilica were left suspended in time and space.
Outside, the world changed. The capital of the Empire was moved to Constantinople, where it would exist for one thousand years until the Turkish conquest in 1453. Eventually the capital of the Western Empire would move again, this time to Ravenna. Rome moved from the center of the Roman world to its periphery. In the late fourth century, the Roman legions, once the dominant military force of the world, were shattered — first by war between themselves. Then waves of invaders, like wolves sensing the weakness of their prey, brought the Empire in the West to an end. The Visigoths under Alaric shattered the Roman armies while looting Rome. They were followed by the Vandals, whose name survives as a description of their habit of pointless destruction. Because of faith or superstition, these hordes did not destroy the wooded St. Peter’s Basilica itself, although the Vandals certainly stripped and looted it. But with the death of all involved in the construction of the church, the destruction of the great families of Rome, and the eradication of almost all written records relating to St. Peter’s (as well as almost all those who could read them), the waves of destruction passed through Rome and the West leaving the forgotten tombs buried underneath St. Peter’s unknown and untouched.
When literacy and learning began to return to the West, there were no records left to tell the popes or Michelangelo, Raphael, the Medici, or Bernini that a few yards beneath their feet lay one of the greatest surviving storehouses of Roman art and history in the world. Ironically, the tombs hidden below the feet of the famed Renaissance painters and sculptors held early versions, some 1,500 years old, of many of the same themes embraced by Titian, Botticelli, Rubens, and many great painters. Leda met the Swan and beautiful Venus reclined in the dark-filled tombs unknown to the world.
The New Basilica
St. Peter’s Basilica, as constructed, was built of wood and measured over 340 feet in length. It was completed around 337 and became the focal point of Christianity for 1,200 years. In the wooden church, much of the history of the West occurred. It housed events such as the crowning of Charlemagne as Emperor of the West in 800. Numerous kings and emperors were enthroned and buried there. More than two hundred popes over one thousand years were elected and then enthroned within its walls. They ranged from saints and heroes to the Borgia popes indifferent to the spiritual. But the long parade of popes and history did not disturb the ancient tombs underneath the basilica. The tombs continued their long sleep, unknown to the world. Although for most of its life located outside Rome’s walls, defenseless and made of wood, the old basilica, while often looted, was amazingly never burned or destroyed.
Around 1450, it became apparent that the one-thousand-year-old wooden church was beginning to collapse. Popes Nicholas V and Julius II were determined to replace the old St. Peter’s with a new, immense basilica. Old St. Peter’s had survived the Vandals and the Saracens, but it did not survive the grand reconstruction plans. The historic St. Peter’s was almost totally destroyed, mindlessly obliterating wonderful artwork, sculpture, and crypts, many dating back one thousand years.
Among the destroyed works of art were frescoes and mosaics created by Giotto and other masters of the late Middle Ages. Tragically, these works survive now only in ancient accounts and scattered fragments. The tombs of more than one hundred popes were eradicated, along with other burial sites and memorials. In fact, the destruction wrought by the construction vastly exceeded that caused by time and even the waves of looters. Thankfully, the builders did leave intact the old altar and foundations, simply building over them. Beneath it all, the Necropolis continued its thousand-year sleep, remaining unknown and untouched through the construction of the immense new church.
Pope Julius II, the moving force behind the new St. Peter’s, intended to have a vast tomb for himself on the main floor of the new basilica. The tomb was to be constructed by Michelangelo. Although Michelangelo constructed a much reduced model of the vast tomb Julius intended, it was placed in a different church after Julius’s death, and Julius never rested there. Instead, in an illustration of the vagaries of politics, pomp, and power, the immensely powerful Julius was buried without a monument of any kind in the floor of the Vatican. Today he
