The Tiara in the Tiber. An Essay on the damnatio in memoria of Clement III (1084-1100) and Rome’s River as a Place of Oblivion and Memory

Abstract

From classical antiquity forward, a tradition developed in Rome of throwing the corpses of one’s political enemies into the Tiber as an act of damnatio memoriae or deletio memoriae. Clement III (Wibert of Ravenna) met this unenviable fate. Pope Paschal II ordered that his remains be exhumed and thrown into the Tiber so that no trace of him would remain, either for future liturgical remembrance or for veneration by his followers, who regarded him as a saint, rather than as a dead antipope. This essay asks whether Clement’s «burial» in the Tiber was carried out clandestinely or as an act of high political symbolism: a purification ritual witnessed by the public. It also sketches the lines of this tradition from the Roman period to the present, underlining the specific political contexts in which such acts of intended damnatio and deletio memoriae occurred. The word «intended» is crucial, as the Tiber, paradoxically, often turned out to be not so much an instrument of oblivion, which erased all memory of the condemned, as the stage upon which a particular tradition of recollection took shape. By means of public political acts and rituals purportedly undertaken to delete memory, memories of dead political enemies were instead rendered inelible by forming – always before the public eye – a negative or deliberately defaming memory, a damnatio in memoria.