under what Pope and Emperor the Church of St. Peter was founded; but besides the unanimous voice of tradition, all that can be gathered on the subject from the Acts of the Church, added to the testimony of the oldest chroniclers, lead us to the conclusion that it dates from the time of Constantine. The _Liber Pontificalis_ states that at the request of Bishop Sylvester the Emperor erected a basilica to St. Peter in the Temple of Apollo, and enclosed the body of the Apostle in an irremovable coffin of bronze of Cyprus. _The Temple of Apollo in Vatican Territory_ is certainly only known to legend; but later excavations have shown that the Church of St. Peter was founded near a sanctuary dedicated to Cybele, whose rites were long celebrated in Rome, and survived even after the time when Theodosius knelt at the grave of the Apostle. Legend relates that Constantine himself inaugurated the foundation by turning the first _spadeful of soil_, of which, moreover, he carried _twelve basketfuls_, in honour of the twelve Apostles. Whether the Circus of Caligula was already destroyed, or whether this occurred during the construction, we do not know; it is, at least, certain that the basilica was built _on one side of the Circus and out of its materials_. This site was especially chosen for the Church of the Prince of the Apostles as having, according to tradition, been the _scene of his crucifixion_, and further sanctified to Christianity by the martyrdoms which it had witnessed under Nero.”

Constantine, in 324 A.D., made Christianity the official religion of the world, and his basilica lasted with ever-increasing splendour till after the Reformation. Eighty-six of the two hundred and fifty-eight Popes were buried in it, and one of them, Paul II., had the most glorious tomb in all Italy. I can hardly conceive a supreme artist like Bramante destroying it, but destroy it he did. He deserves his nickname of “the ruiner” (_il Rovinante_).

Constantine.

A.--Exterior. B.--Interior. ]

The church at Rome which gives us the best idea of Old St. Peter’s would be San Clemente, if the Irish College kept the _atrium_ open; but San Clemente, for all its beauty and immense antiquity, is a small affair. We can understand Old St. Peter’s better by comparing it to the basilica of S. Ambrogio at Milan. Gregorovius has told us of “the broad flight of marble steps leading up to the _atrium_, upon which was the platform where St. Peter’s successor received the successors of Constantine, when the latter came to pray at the grave of the Apostle, or at the later date to receive the Imperial Crown at the hands of the Pope.” These admitted to a superb _atrium_ or fore-court, one hundred and seventy feet long, and almost as wide, which was encircled by a colonnade and opened into a huge basilica over three hundred and thirty feet long, consisting of a lofty nave terminating in an apse, four aisles, and a transept, which projected slightly beyond the aisles and divided the nave from its apse. This transept was probably raised above the level of the nave like the transept of the great friar’s church of Santa Croce at Florence, and made the church a “T” shape, instead of cruciform, like our cathedrals. The nave was enormously high, one hundred and twenty-five feet, and lighted with a clerestory above the architrave, which rested on nearly a hundred monolith columns of the most precious marbles taken from heathen temples. A double aisle on each side was divided by a row of columns: the roofs were of wood.

Of the original Constantinian Church Gregorovius gives as unflattering a picture as Mr. Frederic Harrison in his _Theophano_ quoted above: “The great church was erected in haste. The execution and the workmanship were bad, and the style from the first barbarous; the apse and outer walls were built from materials collected at random; the architrave, which rested upon the columns within, was pieced out of antique fragments, and even the ancient pillars of marble or granite, ninety-six in number, did not correspond in either capitals or bases. Slabs of marble from the Circus, on which the original inscriptions or Pagan sculptures still remained, served for the threshold. We are surprised to find in the earliest basilica of St. Peter the characteristic peculiar to so many of the present churches in Rome, namely, the presence of Pagan relics in the shape of fragments, and patchwork of ancient marbles. The interior, which was entered by five doors opening into five naves, was large and of imposing dimensions. The light descended into the lofty central nave through small arched windows disclosing the rough rafters of the roof, and flickered, now on a pavement formed of a patchwork of ancient marbles, now on high walls as yet unrelieved by mosaics.”

But in process of time the interior became a glory of mosaics and marbles, and in the preciousness of its materials, the flash of gold and mellowness of colour, must have rivalled the two gems of Christendom--St. Mark’s and the Royal Chapel at Palermo. Its façade was decorated with a mosaic representing the Lamb of God, between animals symbolizing the Evangelists, and at each end of its gable was a huge bronze peacock, the emblem of immortality. According to Klaczko, the _atrium_ was filled with a profusion of flowers and trees--palms, cypresses, olives, and rose trees--and ornamented on all sides with a handsome Corinthian portico. At the right of the church door rose a slender and lofty bell-tower, of the age of Charlemagne, with a queer little pointed steeple. But the great feature of the _atrium_ was the famous Cantharus, or fountain of lustration, in the centre. “It was a magnificent fountain, surrounded by eight porphyry columns, and protected by a gilded roof, with a great display of dolphins, peacocks, and dragons on it. A colossal pine-cone in bronze, reputed to have been brought from Hadrian’s mausoleum, formed the core of the fountain.... Dante, to give a measure of the formidable Nimrod, the founder of Babylon, whom he encounters in the lowest circle of the Inferno, says that the giant’s head appeared to him ‘long and large as the pine-cone of St. Peter’s in Rome, and the rest of him to correspond.’” This pine-cone and the peacocks are still preserved in the Garden of the Pigna, which is surrounded by the Sculpture Galleries of the Vatican. It was of this fountain that S. Paulinus of Nola, quoted by Gregorovius (Hamilton’s Translation), wrote: “Where the _atrium_ expands into an entrance hall, adorned by the fountain which, refreshing our hands and lips with its welcome flow, gurgles under the shadow of the massive bronze cupola with its four pillars, forming a mystic circle round the gushing waters. Could there be any ornament more befitting the entrance to the church, preparing, as it does, all who come in for the sacred mysteries that await them?”

Pope Saint Damasus added a Baptistery to the _atrium_ in 366; we know from a poem of Prudentius that it had very fine mosaics. In it was placed the famous chair of St. Peter, which has, since the time of Alexander VII. (1655-1667), been preserved in the Tribune of St. Peter’s.

Another building outside the main basilica was the famous _Templum Probi_, which occupied approximately the site of the present sacristy, and was the mortuary chapel of the Anicii, “the celebrated senatorial family which had embraced Christianity earlier than any other in Rome,” and which numbered among its heads Gregory the Great himself. Anicius Probus, four times Prefect of Rome, who shared the Consulship with the Emperor Gratian, the last great Mæcenas of Rome, was buried in it in the beautiful sarcophagus which is now preserved in the Cappella della Pietà of St. Peter’s. Junius Bassus, whose glorious sarcophagus is in the crypt of the great basilica beside the tomb of the Apostle, was also a member of the family. Near this was the imperial mausoleum built by the Emperor Honorius for his wives Maria and Thermantia, the daughters of Stilicho, which was turned by Pope Stephen II. into a circular chapel in honour of S. Petronilla. I have referred to it in the chapter on the Sistine Treasure. “In the time of Honorius the ancient basilica of St. Peter was a large and elongated brick building, the gable of which, surmounted by a cross, rose over the pillared, cloister-like vestibule” (Gregorovius). It was Honorius who persuaded the Emperor Heraclius to bestow upon St. Peter’s the famous gilt bronze tiles of the finest temple Rome ever had--that Temple of Venus and Rome, of which the remains at the end of the Forum still fill us with astonishment, and which even the Vandals had spared. This was the death-warrant of the Temple. “Its tiles were removed to cover the roof of St. Peter’s, and scarcely a Roman but rejoiced, scarcely one who bewailed the ruin of one of the finest monuments of antiquity” (Gregorovius).

Another great building Pope was Hadrian I. (772-795), the friend whose name is inseparably linked with that of the mighty Charlemagne, by the famous epitaph preserved in the porch of the present St. Peter’s: the Emperor aided him generously in his benefactions. But he was a restorer and embellisher rather than an originator. His principal work was the restoration of what must have been one of the finest architectural ornaments of Rome--the great portico which led from the Ælian bridge--remains of which are still embodied in the Bridge of Sant’ Angelo--up to Old St. Peter’s. It was he who restored the mosaics of Old St. Peter’s, and covered the floor of the shrine with heavy tiles of silver and the walls of the inner shrine with plates of gold embossed with scenes from the Bible; overlaid the altar with wrought gold; and erected statues in massive gold to Our Saviour and the Virgin, St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. Andrew. “Everything else,” says Gregorovius, “was done with the same lavish splendour. Tapestries of purple and gold were hung between the columns of the nave at festivals. At Christmas and Easter, on the feast of each of the two Apostles, and on that of the Pope, the huge lamp, known as the _great Pharos_, or lighthouse, was lit. This lamp, which hung suspended from the silver cross-beams of the Arch of Triumph above the shrine, was also the gift of Hadrian, and with its one thousand three hundred and seventy lights well deserved the name bestowed upon it.”

Vaticano.”_]

The place of Pope Hadrian’s great portico as an architectural link between the Tiber and St. Peter’s is taken by the noble fifteenth-century Archi-Ospedale di Santo Spirito, erected for Sixtus IV. by Caprina--mellow old brickwork filling the site of the inn for pilgrims which the King of the West Saxons had erected for pilgrims from England in 717, and which was burnt twice, first by the Saracens, and afterwards by Frederick Barbarossa. Vast numbers of Anglo-Saxon pilgrims came to Rome: at least three Saxon Kings died there.

The heroic but barbarous Cadwalla, King of the West Saxons, in 689, after covering himself with glory in war, determined to go to Rome and be baptized by the Pope; he was baptized under the name of Peter on Easter Eve, clad in white and with a lighted taper in his hand, and was buried in the _atrium_ of St. Peter’s. His epitaph is still in existence, and does not at all tally with Professor Freeman’s judgment of him. The example was contagious: only twenty years later two other English Kings, Coenred of Mercia, and Offa, King of the East Saxons, went to Rome, not only to be baptized, but to give up their crowns and possessions and become monks. “Their long waving hair was cut off and dedicated to St. Peter; their royal youth was buried in the white frock of monasticism, and the princes from Arthur’s heroic island deemed themselves fortunate in being permitted to disappear from sight, amid a swarm of obscure monks, in one of the convents near St. Peter’s, with the prospect of a grave in the _atrium_ of the basilica, and a place among the blessed in Heaven” (Gregorovius).

But these monarchs are of small importance compared with the great Alfred and the mighty Canute, the most famous respectively of our Saxon and of our Danish Kings, both of whom visited Rome. Indeed, Alfred was there twice. When he was four years old, his father, Ethelwulf, sent him, it is thought in charge of St. Swithin, the masterful Bishop and rainy Saint of Winchester, to the Warrior Pope, S. Leo IV., who built the vast walls round the Vatican, which still tower above the gardens of the Popes. Leo not only took him for “Bishop’s son” or godchild, but hallowed him as a King (which, as Freeman says, was a curious proceeding, considering that England had nothing to do with Rome, and that Alfred was the younger son; nor did it prevent three of his brothers occupying the throne before him). Alfred returned to England, but two years later, when Ethelwulf, having made his country secure against the Danes and given a tenth of his goods to the Church, himself made a pilgrimage to Rome, he took Alfred with him.

Ethelwulf allowed the Pope to crown him, and determined, “for the welfare of his soul, to send yearly to Rome, out of his private income, the sum of three hundred marks, one hundred of which were destined to fill the lamps of St. Peter’s with oil on Easter Eve and the morning of Easter Day, one hundred for the same service at St. Paul’s, and one hundred were a present to the Holy Father himself. From this annual donation proceeded the so-called Peter’s penny, or Romescot”[8] (Pauli).

He also rebuilt the “Saxon Schools,” which had, as mentioned, twice been destroyed by fire, and gave enormous gifts to St. Peter’s. Both on his way there and his way back he stopped at the Court of Charles the Bald, grandson of Charlemagne, whose beautiful young daughter Judith he married on the second occasion. Who knows what seeds of greatness may not have been planted in the mind of the child Alfred by that double visit to Rome, and that double visit to the Imperial Court? In Rome he stayed for more than a year.

Rome seems at any rate to have had a profound influence on Canute, who, as ruler of England and the Scandinavian kingdoms, was a more powerful monarch than either Pope or Emperor. This was in the year 1027, when the Emperor Conrad was crowned at St. Peter’s at Easter, and walked from the church to his palace between two Kings, Canute and Rudolph of Burgundy, who were present at the coronation.

Canute, who was liberal in his gifts, showed his influence by inducing the Pope to free the English School at Rome from all taxes. But the most remarkable feature about his visit to Rome was the famous letter to the English from Rome, which is one of the greatest letters in all literature, and can only be compared to the last testament of St. Louis, as he lay dying of the plague at Carthage. From it we know that Canute visited the tomb of St. Peter, and was moved to the vow of repentance which changed him to such a just King in the latter part of his reign.

The coffers of the Pope were overflowing with the offerings of the pilgrims. The Saxons had a church, Santa Maria, on the site of S. Spirito, and the church of S. Michele in Sassia, though entirely rebuilt, is the church of the Frisians.

In the eleventh and twelfth centuries St. Peter’s, like the Pantheon, was often used as a fortress. The great Pope Alexander III. stood a siege of eight days in it from Frederick Barbarossa. The _atrium_ and the tower of Santa Maria in Turri at the head of the staircase were fortified. At the close of eight days the fortifications were so battered down by Frederick and his allies from Viterbo, that the garrison laid down its arms to save St. Peter’s from destruction. Then Frederick installed his Anti-Pope, Paschal III.

The _atrium_ and narthex were used for those who were not full members of the Church--catechumens, penitents, and others; the fountain was for ablutions, like the fountains in the courtyard of Turkish mosques and Japanese temples. The nave and aisles were occupied at services by the laity who were full members of the Church; the raised transept by the clergy and persons of distinction; the presbyters of the Church sat on a circular bench running round the wall of the apse; half to the right and half to the left of the Bishop’s throne, which occupied the exact centre, as it still does in more than one of the Roman basilicas.

The Confessio, containing the tomb of the martyr, generally sunk several feet below the level of the floor, here as in S. Giorgio in Velabro, and other primitive basilicas, stood just in front of the apse. This is important, because the tomb of St. Peter is, with the exception of the floor of the basilica of Constantine, the only part of Old St. Peter’s which exists undisturbed.

One must not imagine that the gold lamps (nearly a hundred in number) which burn in front of the burial-place of Peter, the rock upon whom the Church is founded, or the glittering oriental alabaster to be seen to-day, go back to the times of the old basilica, much less of Constantine, but the grille in front of the tomb, though not Ancient Roman, is of respectable antiquity, for it was put up by the last great Pope but one, Innocent III. (died 1216), who imposed his tyrannical will, not only on our weak King John, but on the mighty Philip Augustus of France, whom he separated from his lovely and beloved Agnes of Méran: so was the _Fenestella Confessionis_. Of the actual tomb of St. Peter one can see nothing. It is more than ever concealed since Clement VIII. had it walled over. It occupies approximately the spot beneath the Papal altar. Constantine had the remains enclosed in a great coffin of gold-plated bronze, and placed in a vault lined with gold, beneath lamps which, like the lamps hung round the Confessio of the present church, were never extinguished. There was an altar above the shrine, and over it rose a little temple on six porphyry columns. This kind of temple over the altar is a feature of most of the old basilicas which have survived.

The word basilica is only properly applied to the ancient Roman churches whose distinguishing mark is the altar in the centre of the church, at which the celebrant stands facing the people, like the Papal altar in St. Peter’s. As a consequence, basilicas have their High Altar at the west end. In the Middle Ages, Klaczko tells us, people were never weary of endowing this tomb and altar with every imaginable splendour of gold and gems; the numerous spoliations they suffered from Saracen, and even Christian, invaders, could not discourage the generous piety of the faithful.

After the Saracen sack of the ninth century S. Leo IV. covered the High Altar with plates of gold set with precious stones and enamelled portraits like the paliotto of S. Ambrose at Milan, gave golden tables, one of which alone weighed two hundredweight, a silver crucifix set with diamonds and amethysts, weighing seventy pounds, a silver ciborium, with columns weighing three-quarters of a ton, and a cross of gold encrusted with pearls, emeralds, and opals, which weighed half a ton: not to mention vases, censers, lamps of gold and silver, jewelled chalices, lecterns of wrought silver, silver doors, rare tapestries and hangings, robes and altar-cloths of silk and velvet set with pearls and precious stones and covered with golden embroideries. It was nothing particular to have a golden ciborium set with the most precious stones. We know that Ethelwulf, the father of King Alfred, bestowed gifts, consisting of a gold crown of four pounds’ weight, two dishes of the purest gold, a sword richly set in gold, two gold images, silver-gilt Saxon urns, stoles bordered with gold and purple stripes, white silken garments for celebrating the Mass, decorated with figures, and other costly articles of clothing required for the services of the Church.

Narratives of the period never cease dilating upon the immense treasures gathered there--tabernacles, ciboria, crosses, vases, candelabra, cherubs, and statues. There was a porphyry balustrade, surmounted by alabaster columns with an architrave of silver, decorated with chalices, _fleur-de-lys_, and translucent vases; in the centre there was an arcade surmounted by a golden Christ, attended by tall silver angels. The alabaster columns were spiral, and were surrounded by carved vine sprays; according to tradition they came from the Temple of Solomon. It was these, says Klaczko, which gave Bernini the idea of his frightful baldacchino (three of them are preserved in the present basilica). He believes that Giulio Romano’s fresco in the Vatican Stanze, known as the Donation of Constantine, is a representation of the Old St. Peter’s. “The scene takes place in the old basilica. In the background, in front of the High Altar, there are visible the twisted columns standing upon a stylobate, and supporting an architrave from which are suspended lamps. Is the production exact at every point? This I should not dare to affirm; but it is the work of Giulio Romano and his companions; it dates from a time when the chancel was yet standing.” Raffaelle evidently had this balustrade in his mind in his tapestry of the beautiful Gate of the Temple of Jerusalem.

pupils of Raffaelle, in the Stanze. Showing the interior of Old St. Peter’s. _From Pistolesi’s “Il Vaticano.”_]

Old St. Peter’s consisted then of a great court, with a splendid fountain in its centre, surrounded by a rich mass of vegetation, as sad as cypresses and as gay as roses, in its cloister garth; and with the cloister itself, like the narthex, filled with the tombs of early Popes and Kings. More than fourscore Popes were buried in Sylvester’s basilica, and it was only after the lapse of centuries that they were allowed to crowd into the church. The early Christians considered it irreverent to erect tombs in the churches themselves: the ancient Romans did not allow burials in the city bounds at all. St. Peter himself was buried in the ancient Roman fashion, alongside of one of the great roads leading out of Rome, the Via Cornelia, selected as the scene of his martyrdom.

The façades of both _atrium_ and church glittered with mosaics like the façade of Santa Maria in Trastevere to-day. Against the exterior there was an agglomeration of convents, minor churches, hospitals, and houses, clinging to it like barnacles to a rock which is submerged at high tide. As this hive of buildings stood on its lofty terrace, approached by marble steps and backed by the towered and battlemented castle of the Popes, in the fifteenth century, it was an Italian Nüremberg.

Inside the church the number of mosaics is inconceivable to those who have not seen St. Mark’s or the Royal Chapel at Palermo, especially noteworthy, as we know from the paintings preserved of it in the crypt of St. Peter’s, being those of the Holy Lance. The mosaics of the great Triumphal Arch went back to Constantine, who placed upon it the inscription which recited the supremacy of St. Peter.

Five gates gave access to the nave and the four aisles; the outside gate on the left was called the _Porta_ or _Janua Judicii_, by which the dead were carried into the church. The massive gate in the centre was called the _Porta Argentea_, which was covered with silver plates. Next to it on the right was the _Porta Romana_, which was reserved for the Roman people; and on the left the _Porta Ravignana_, or _Ravennata_, because it was reserved for the inhabitants of Trastevere descended from the garrison sent from Ravenna by one of the Exarchs. The outside gate on the right, the _Porta Guidonea_, was used by the pilgrims.[9]

body of St. Gregory the Great in the foreground, and the dome of the present Church rising behind. Painted by P. Brill.]

Old St. Peter’s, with its _atrium_, was as long as the great church of to-day, and its width was not greatly less. It was venerable beyond all other churches in the world, not only for its hoary architecture, rich with the velvet touch of a thousand years, and its avenues of tombs of the great of the earth in mosaics and marbles; it was rich beyond all other churches in relics of martyrs and apostles, yes, even of the Saviour Himself; and the gold and silver offerings of the loyal and devout, which had accumulated in the centuries since the last sack of Rome. It was richest in sentiment and association, for it had been Christianity’s Holy of Holies, where the successors of St. Peter had been enthroned, and had issued their messages to the world from the time--almost the hour--that Constantine made Christianity the religion of the Empire over which he ruled. In it Gregory the Great (died 604) was borne to the tomb inscribed with the Conversion of England. In it Boniface VIII. (died 1303), who died with unbeaten pride, was laid in the incomparable sarcophagus by Arnolfo di Lapo, which is still the glory of the crypt, though the actual sarcophagus is all that remains of his magnificent mortuary chapel: and in it Innocent III. (died 1216), while smiting Europe with a rod of iron, found time to leave noble monuments in bronze and mosaic.

Old St. Peter’s was the outward and visible sign of the Apostolic Succession. Here people could tread the stones trodden by the Christians in the day of Constantine, who exulted in the fulfilment of the prophecy that the earth should be the Lord’s.

It looked as if it had not been built by the hands of men, but moulded by time. The holiness which had accumulated in this building exceeded even the holiness of the Temple of Jerusalem. So many years, so many sacrifices, so many memories, so many remains, of what was most sacred or most famous had been garnered into it. It is hard to believe that any Christian man would have dared to lay his hand on the church where nearly a hundred of the successors of St. Peter had been laid in the expectation that there they would rest till the Last Trump. But in the fifteenth century, the melting-pot of the Middle Ages, it began to be whispered that the old church was worn out and must come down. The best that can be said for those who repeated it is that Nicholas V. (died 1455), the founder of archæology, the first of all the Popes to love and try and save the treasures of antiquity, of which they were the heedless heirs, was convinced by the arguments of the Florentine architect Alberti,[10] and began to build a new church round the old. He broke off his work. Was it because his heart failed him?

Julius II. (died 1513) took up the work. To him nothing was sacred but the prestige of the Popes. He was, like Nero, consumed with a desire to rebuild Rome on an unprecedented scale, and by a curious coincidence St. Peter’s stands on the site of the Gardens and Circus of Nero. Nero was accused of burning Rome to secure a site for his building operations. Julius II. did not go so far; he only broke up the church, which had been the cradle of Christendom for nearly twelve hundred years, in such indecent haste that the tombs of eighty-six of his predecessors were reduced to rubbish heaps. He could not even spare the masterpiece of Mino da Fiesole, the mausoleum of Paul II.

With the destruction of Old St. Peter’s the misfortunes predicted by the ancient superstition for anyone who disturbed the tomb of St. Peter seem to have overtaken the Papacy. Old St. Peter’s was the tabernacle of all Christendom, the present church is hardly more than the tabernacle of Southern Christendom.