Conclusion: An Imaged City

This volume originated in a conference, “Twelfth-Century Rome, Mirror of the Mediterranean Religions;” that conference was initiated by the realization that while historians have long recognized the imaginative force of Rome within Christendom, they have not placed those notions within the broader context of the importance of the city across Mediterranean communities and religions in this transformational period When placed in that context, the city’s force as a sacred city is subtly altered. Its sacral character becomes contested and redefined within that broader context, often retaining an almost magical quality. This allows us to see twelfth century Rome and its renewal in a broader perspective, not only as essential to a “Western” identity, a notion of the West that came to exclude the southern and eastern Mediterranean as properly its own, but as a part of the whole Mediterranean culture. The goal of the conference and the volume was to explore a neglected portion of that imaginary community and to expand our understanding of Rome’s mythography as it was constructed throughout the Mediterranean world and beyond. In that context, Rome can be understood once again as an object of pan-Mediterranean desire and imagination