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Abandonment of Tusculum
ancient Latin and Roman city and archeological site in the Alban Hills of Latium, Italy
- 1191
- Europe
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ancient Latin and Roman city and archeological site in the Alban Hills of Latium, Italy
Fetching the article from Wikipedia…
Tusculum, later Tuscolo, was a city founded by the ancient Romans in the Alban Hills, in the Latium region of Italy, about 3 km southeast of modern Frascati. Under the Roman Empire, Tusculum was known for its many great and luxurious patrician country villas close to Rome, notably the villas of Cicero and Lucullus. From the 10th to the 12th century, it was ruled by the Counts of Tusculum. The city was largely abandoned in 1167 and razed in 1191.
Tusculum is located on Mount Tusculum on the northern rim of the Alban volcano crater.
The summit of the hill is 670 m (2,200 ft) above sea level and affords a view of the Roman Campagna, with Rome lying 25 km (16 mi) to the north-west. It had a strategic position controlling the route from the territory of the Aequi and the Volsci to Rome which was important in earlier times.
Later Rome was reached by the Via Latina (from which a branch road ascended to Tusculum, while the main road passed through the valley to the south of it), or by the Via Labicana to the north.
Most of the ancient city and the acropolis and amphitheatre have not yet been excavated archaeologically.
According to legend, the city was founded either by Telegonus, the son of Odysseus and Circe, or by the Latin king Latinus Silvius, a descendant of Aeneas, who according to Titus Livius was the founder of most of the towns and cities in Latium. The geographer Philipp Clüver discounts these legends, asserting that the city was founded by Latins about three hundred years before the Trojan War. Funerary urns datable to the 8th–7th centuries BC demonstrate a human presence in the late phases of Latin culture in this area.
Tusculum is first mentioned in history as an independent city-state with a king, a constitution and gods of its own. When Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, the last King of Rome, was expelled in 509 BC, and failed to win back his throne by making war on Rome, he sought refuge with his son-in-law Octavius Mamilius, one of the leading men of Tusculum. The Mamilii claimed to be descended from Telegonus, the founder of the city. Mamilius commanded the army of the Latins against the Romans at the Battle of Lake Regillus, where he was killed in 498 BC. This is the point at which Rome gained predominance among the Latin cities.
The first stable settlement has been identified by excavation in the acropolis area and dates to the 10th century BC, but it is from the 7th-6th centuries BC onwards that there is clear archaeological evidence of a well-organized settlement with growing relations with other Latin peoples in the region. The city developed on the slopes of the acropolis and particularly in the forum area, where a series of substantial and important buildings began to appear.
The city walls can be dated between the 5th and 4th c. BC from the type and technique of construction, as visible on the North slope of the hill.
According to some accounts Tusculum subsequently became an ally of Rome, incurring the frequent hostilities of the other Latin cities. In 460 BC a Sabine named Appius Herdonius occupied the Capitol. Of the Latin cities, only Tusculum quickly sent troops, commanded by the dictator Lucius Mamilius, to help the Romans. Together with the forces of the consul Publius Valerius Poplicola they were able to quash the revolt.
In 458 BC the Aequi attacked Tusculum and captured its citadel. Because of the assistance given Rome the previous year, the Romans came to their defense, and helped regain the citadel, with soldiers under the command of Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, who defeated the Aequi at the battle of Mount Algidus.
In 381 BC, after an expression of complete submission to Rome, the people of Tusculum received the franchise from Rome. Tusculum became the first "municipium cum suffragio", or self-governing city. The Tusculan citizens were therefore enrolled in the "Tribus Papiria". Other accounts, however, speak of Tusculum as often allied with Rome's enemies, the last being the Samnites in 323 BC. Major urban development followed the granting of municipal status to the city (381 BC) and its annexation within the Roman sphere of influence, evidenced by the progressive rise of members of the leading Tusculan families to the highest Roman political offices.
In Sulla's civil war Tusculum supported the Marians but after Sulla's victory in 82 BC it suffered extensive devastation and the punishment of becoming a veterans' colonia. Major building renovation dates from this time when monumentalisation of the forum took place and parts of the city wall were rebuilt.
In 54 BC Cicero said: "You are from the most ancient municipium of Tusculum, from which so many consular families are originating, among which even the gens Iuventia; all other municipia (together) do not have so many (consular families) coming from them".
Varro wrote about the laws of Tusculum: "New wine shall not be taken into the town before the Vinalia are proclaimed".
The town council kept the name of senate, but the title of dictator gave place to that of aedile. Notwithstanding this, and the fact that a special college of Roman equites was formed to take charge of the cults of the gods at Tusculum, and especially of the Dioscuri, the citizens resident there were neither numerous nor men of distinction.
In Roman times the city had expanded into two parts: the acropolis with the temples of the Dioscuri and Jupiter Maius, and the main city along the ridge of the hill where the main street passes through the forum to the theatre.
The villas of the neighbourhood, of which 36 owners are recorded in the Republican era and 131 villa sites identified, had indeed acquired greater importance than the town itself, which was not easily accessible. By the end of the Republic, and still more during the imperial period, the territory of Tusculum was a favourite place of residence for wealthy Romans. Seneca wrote: "Nobody who wants to acquire a home in Tusculum or Tibur for health reasons or as a summer residence will calculate how much yearly payments are".
In 45 BC Cicero wrote a series of books in his villa in Tusculum, the Tusculanae Quaestiones. In his time there were eighteen villas in the area. An example is the so-called villa of Lucullus, which later belonged to Flavia gens, which was built in terraces on the slope of Tusculum facing Rome: the vast terrace now underlies virtually all the historical centre of Frascati and his mausoleum is visible in the Torrione di Micara near Frascati.
The Imperial period was the city's golden age and from the reign of Tiberius, a vast program of systematisation and embellishment of the monumental centre was undertaken. Whilst in the Flavian period a slow decline of the city is noticeable, significant building activity included modifications and transformations of various buildings surrounding the forum such as the theatre and in the Temple of Mercury. The last phase of urban expansion was in the Hadrianic period with the construction of the amphitheatre, houses and thermal baths.
Much of the territory (including Cicero's villa), but not the town itself, which lies far too high, was supplied with water by the Aqua Crabra.
The last archaeological evidence of Roman Tusculum is a bronze tablet of 406 AD commemorating the Consul Anicius Petronius Probus and his sister Anicia.
From the 5th to the 10th century there are no historical mentions of Tusculum. In the 10th century it was the base of the Counts of Tusculum, an important family in the medieval history of Rome. They were a clan system whose first mentioned member is Theophylact I (died 924). His daughter Marozia married Alberic I, Marquis of Spoleto and Camerino, and was for a while the arbiter of political and religious affairs in Rome—a position which the Counts held for a long period of time. They were pro-Byzantine and against the German Emperors. From their clan came several Popes in the period between 914 and 1049.
Gregory I of Tusculum rebuilt the fortress on the Tuscolo hill, and gave as a gift the "Criptaferrata" to Saint Nilus the Younger, where the latter built a famous abbey. Gregory also headed the rebellion of the Roman people of 1001 against the German Emperor Otto III.
After 1049 the Counts of Tusculum Papacy declined as the particular "formula" of the papacy-family became outdated. Subsequent events from 1062 confirmed the change of the Counts' politics, which became pro-Emperor in opposition to the Commune of Rome. Tusculum had in this time several notable guests: Henry III, Holy Roman Emperor, and his wife Empress Agnes in 1046, the Pope Eugene III from 1149, Louis VII of France and his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1149, Frederick Barbarossa and the English Pope Adrian IV in 1155.
In 1167 the Roman communal army attacked Tusculum (Battle of Monte Porzio), but it was defeated by the Emperor-allied army, headed by Christian I, Archbishop of Mainz; in the summer of the same year, however, a plague decimated the imperial army and Frederick Barbarossa was forced to return to Germany.
From 1167 the residents of Tusculum moved to the neighbours (Locus) or little villages as Monte Porzio Catone, Grottaferrata and mostly to Frascati: only a little group of defence troops remained in the old city.
When in 1183 the Roman army again attacked Tusculum, Barbarossa sent a new contingent of troops to its defence. The Commune of Rome was however able to destroy the town on 17 April 1191 with the consent of Pope Celestine III and the consent of Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor, son of Frederick Barbarossa. Roger of Hoveden wrote "lapis supra lapidem non remansit" (not a stone upon a stone remained), indeed the Roman Commune's army took away the stones of the walls of Tusculum as spoils of war in Rome.
After destruction the land of Tusculum became woodland and pasture lands. The buildings destroyed in Tusculum became a big open quarry of materials for the inhabitants of the neighbouring towns of the Alban Hills.
The summit of the Tusculum ridge is the site of the acropolis, the roughly elliptical perimeter of which was surrounded by walls, most of which have survived to a maximum height of 2 m: these were in square tuff masonry, polygonal masonry, or double curtain walls in tuff blocks. Four gates opened into the acropolis, the most important of which, facing north-east towards the settlement below, was defended by an imposing bastion in square tuff masonry strengthened in the Middle Ages, linked to a long straight stretch of wall that ran west for over 30 m.
Inscriptions from the 1st century BC, discovered in 1901, refer to two temples dedicated to the Dioscuri and Isis. In ancient times the slopes of the acropolis were used as tuff and flint quarries, creating, among other things, a chasm in the ground.
The forum lies near the top of the hill at 629 m above sea level, and was the most monumental part of the ancient city even if smaller, at 55x36 m, than other cities.
In the Archaic period, the forum probably originated as a market square located at the crossroads of important roads on the edge of the town: perhaps something similar to the Forum Boarium in Rome.
Towards the end of the 4th or beginning of the 3rd century BC, an imposing terracing wall 35 m long, 2.5 m thick and 9 m high of tufa blocks was built in opus quadratum on the right flank of the archaic fountain, and a similar wall along the southern edge of the city. These walls served to create a large platform of approximately 60 x 90 m upon which the first forum of Tusculum was situated.
On the opposite side the limits of the forum were represented by a building approximately 20 x 10 m with a colonnaded façade. The forum was also edged by the so-called Curia of the Tusculan Senate of 10 x 7 m in square tuff masonry dating back to the 5th or 4th century BC.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Tusculum”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.