2023-10-04 04:43:40
In the 6th century, bread and circuses came to an end. The emergence of Christianity in the Eternal City caused the shows at the Colosseum, known at that time as the Flavian Amphitheater, to be cancelled. This is how José Soto Chica explains it in ‘Late Antique and Visigoth Hispania’. In his text, the doctor in Medieval History states that “the so-called ‘ludi circensis’ and races, which enjoyed great popularity among the society of the Lower Empire” had been the subject of harsh condemnations for decades. The main criticisms were that these activities unleashed base passions and that, in them, human blood could be spilled. That marked the swan song of the building as it was known to date.
A thousand plans
From then on, the main function of the Colosseum disappeared, and it had to be reconditioned for a thousand and one uses. The need for buildable land in Rome, a city nestled between walls, meant that not a centimeter of land could be wasted. To begin with, it began to be used as a holy field in which the most popular citizens were also cremated. Later, a chapel was built inside to give it greater religious symbolism. But that was only the beginning. Over the years, stones were extracted from its walls to build new homes and the marble was removed to produce quicklime.
The Colosseum became a disaster for the city that had once been the pride of the Empire. Between the 6th and 16th centuries, people filled the hypogeum with earth and debris, planted orchards, stored hay in the sand, and dumped manure inside. In the upper amphitheater, the long, huge halls were taken over by all kinds of merchants, priests, blacksmiths, shoemakers, glue makers and priests. It was valid for everything. Back in the 12th century, for example, the powerful family Frangipani He used it as a fortress, although it did not last long. Meanwhile, sorcerers slipped between its walls at night to summon demons, as they were convinced that it was an ancient temple to the sun.
As if that were not enough, as the centuries passed, the catastrophes seemed to ally against the Colosseum. To begin with, and as specified by the authors of the ‘Historical Atlas of the Middle Ages’, several earthquakes that occurred in the years 801, 847 and 1349 caused significant damage to the building. To the point that the last one demolished part of the structure facing towards the Mount Celio. The earthquakes were combined with a large fire that, in the 3rd century AD, destroyed a series of upper wooden levels that the amphitheater had. This cocktail of tragedies gave him the image he maintains today.
In any case, with the arrival of the 16th century the Vatican wanted to restore order and considered a series of new uses for the Colosseum. Pope Sixtus V, For example, he raised the possibility of converting it into a wool factory that, once active, would hire the prostitutes of Rome to give them work and get them off the streets. Furthermore, he dreamed of building homes on top to accommodate prostitutes. On his behalf, Cardinal Altieri, nephew of the Pope Clemente X, suggested that bullfights be held within it. None of them were accepted; the first, due to the high cost it involved. «In the end, in 1714, Clement XI “He organized a saltpeter factory inside, whose main raw materials were manure and garbage,” explains Stanford Mc Krause in ‘Life in the Roman Empire’.
Current appearance of the ABC Roman Colosseum
Seeing the Colosseum turned into a kind of manure bucket was too much for Pope Benedict XIV. He was the one who, back in 1749, turned the building into a sacred place by consecrating it to the Christians who had been martyred inside. A historical error, since it has not yet been possible to demonstrate that torture occurred on them in the amphitheater. Furthermore, he finally forbade it to be used as a factory or for sorcerers and merchants to loiter in its corridors.
Later high pontiffs set out to bring it back to life by reinforcing its walls and clearing its interior of vegetation. The different phases of the recovery of the Colosseum have been addressed by Sonia Gallico in ‘Rome and the Vatican City’. In her words, it was Pius VII who began its restoration in 1806. Under his orders, architect Rafaelle Stern “designed and built an eastern buttress with brick walls to stabilize the arches, which were collapsing.” Leo XII He did the same on the opposite side and, years later, Pius IX rit destroyed the interior. Although it was Benito Mussolini, that dictator who longed to recover the glory of the old Roman Empire for fascist Italy, who definitively completed the works in the 1930s.
bitter beginning
But the black history of the Colosseum did not happen from the 6th century onwards. The amphitheater was cursed from the moment it was built. According to all types of nineteenth-century historians – including the monk Ferdinand Freiherr von Geramb and Marien Vasi – this building was built with Jewish prisoners captured by the emperor. Tito Flavio Vespasianeither. To be more specific, between 12,000 and 20,000 of these prisoners were sent to Rome to be used as slaves.
This is confirmed, among others, by the Spanish researcher José María Zavala in his work ‘The Secret Pages of History’: «Vespasian began building the Colosseum in the year 69 AD, and Tito finished it twelve years later. In reality, there were four years of intense work with the help of twelve thousand captive Jews taken to Rome by Titus after the conquest and destruction of Jerusalem, many of whom later perished in the arena, devoured by wild beasts in public games. “This is how Caesar paid his helpless slaves.” As if those were not enough affronts, the Colosseum was also financed with part of the wealth looted from the prisoners.
How Vespasian came to be with this huge number of slaves has its point. According to the chronicler Flavius Josephus, the emperor arrested them after taking Jerusalem. In the words of a classic author, a million people died during the siege and, after the conquest, thousands of survivors were captured and scattered throughout the Empire as slaves. The philosopher and scholar Thomas A. Idinopulos reveals in his work ‘Jerusalem’, that “those who survived the massacre envied the dead,” since those who were in good physical condition were sent to “the mines of Egypt or Sardinia.” or to “build a great canal whose excavation in Corinth had been ordered by Nero.”
The strongest were turned into gladiators and, lastly, the women and children were sold as slaves. The specific number of prisoners is revealed by the Roman chronicler himself:
«All the prisoners who were captured throughout the war totaled ninety-seven thousand, and those who perished in the entire siege were one million one hundred thousand. Most of these were Jews, but they were not natives of Jerusalem, since people from all over the country had gathered for the Feast of Unleavened Bread, when they were suddenly surprised by war. Consequently, at first the narrowness of the place led to a destructive plague and later a ravenous hunger. The number of inhabitants in the city is deduced from the census taken in the time of Cestius.
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