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The conclusion brings the major characteristics of Roman political culture together and discusses the implications of the approach. It sketches some of the connections between the seven cases. It addresses the question of the extent to which Roman political culture changed over time. The boundaries of the subject in space and time are delineated in order to investigate to what extent it is justifiable to regard Roman political culture as a single, homogenous entity. It discusses the implications of the spread of Roman political culture over the rest of the institutional landscape. The emergence of an alternative, Christian discourse is sketched, focusing on the way it appropriated elements of traditional political culture. It addresses institutional longevity: how can we explain the continuation of political institutions that served no apparent political function?

This concluding chapter highlights Pope Boniface IX's engagement with Rome following his ascent to the papacy in 1389. Boniface's accrual of goodwill early in his papacy culminated in the concession to him of dominion over Rome in 1398. Ultimately, the production of social distinction and political legitimacy through the practices described in this book—practices not dependent on communal institutions—was so successful that Rome's political elites lost interest in defending the autonomy of the Roman commune, ceding power willingly to the papacy. It was this transformation of Roman political culture that ultimately enabled the transformation both of Rome and its place in future politics. Appreciating this frees one from a misleading sense of Roman history born from the pens of fifteenth-century humanists and, by so doing, fundamentally alters Rome's place in the political history of Italy and of Europe.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the political history of Rome. Rome's communal traditions and their emphasis on the city's autonomy were long-standing and vital. Yet, by the turn of the fifteenth century, the autonomous Roman commune was gone, replaced by papal dominion. Its institutions remained as mechanisms of papal governance, but the absence of autonomy or meaningful ideological commitment makes any appearance of communal vitality illusory. This transformation is notable in its own right, but its aftermath endows it with critical importance. Despite sometimes rocky relations with the city and its inhabitants, it was by and large from Rome that the popes would consolidate their power over the ever more robust Papal States, which have come to serve as an important case study for the emergence of early modern European states in general; for the evolution of sovereign power; and for the process and limits of secularization. This consolidation of papal power began in the fourteenth century and continued in the mid-fifteenth century, accelerating with the end of the Western Schism and the papacy of Martin V. Though the papacy is commonly credited with Rome's transformation, the book demonstrates that such an understanding of Italian, papal, and Roman history misses a fundamental, homegrown transformation of Rome's political culture, which preceded and enabled the consolidation of papal power.

This chapter describes the economy of violence. Through a theatrical form of ritualized peacemaking, Roman elites managed private violence, claimed justice and peace as characteristic of Roman political society, and claimed for themselves a unique capacity to sustain this rightly ordered social world. Such peacemaking was the domain of the political elite but under their guidance was participated in not only by prominent male citizens but by women, noncitizens, and even Jews. Performed on the city's streets, these rituals make clear the importance of the circuit between the Roman political elite and the city's diverse political society. They also reveal the gradual decentering of communal institutions. Nowhere is the legitimization of power in a political society that transcends the civic realm clearer. It is in these rituals that the transformative potential of Rome's new political culture becomes most apparent, as they gradually produced a distinct new Roman elite with a new kind of claim to the virtues of good governance.

This chapter explores the second major challenge facing Rome's ruling elite: the transformation of the ruling group itself. It looks at the two visions of Rome that defined the city's early fourteenth-century political culture: the Rome of the barons and that of the nonbaronial urban elite. This long-standing ideological conflict was waning by the mid-fourteenth century, as formal rivals for power in Rome began to come together to form a new composite ruling group. The chapter then reveals this transitional moment through an analysis of the unique testament of a Roman baron, Francesco di Giovanni Romani Bonaventurae. Like all testators, Francesco feared death and prepared for it, but he did so in a highly unusual way, a confessional way that allows one to glimpse how the complexities of mid-fourteenth-century Roman politics could be instantiated in a single life. The chapter also studies court cases and other documents revelatory of his character as well as his relationship to Rome and to his political rivals there.

The conclusion emphasizes how the historians discussed throughout the book responded intellectually to one another and established a sort of dialogue among themselves. The investigation of the development of Roman historiography in an integrated manner aims at a more vital and comprehensive approach to Roman cultural and intellectual history