Northcoast Antiquarian

From Ovid’s Sulmona to Benedict’s Rome

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The general type is familiar, and common, enough. Two examples are illustrated below. The similarities with my coin will be obvious, as will be the dissimilarities.

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The similarities between my coin’s obverse and the general type are obvious and immediate. All three obverses present a mitred, front-facing papal bust within a beaded border, identified by encircling legends: VRB PP on the Urban piece, mARTInVS on the Martin piece, and S. PETRVS on mine. The reverses, too, share marked similarities: four rather heavy-looking letters are set as a central device in a cross-like pattern at the cardinal points, with pellets placed in the four diagonal angles and at the center, forming a saltire cross, all enclosed within a beaded border. Each coin’s outer legend, too, lends further identification of its origin: for Urban’s coin, an inscription declaring origin, IN ROMЯ; for Martin’s, one naming the see, S PЄTRVS; and for mine, one naming the sovereign, R KROLVS T (Rex Karolus Tertius).

The dissimilarities are subtle but significant. Urban’s and Martin’s obverse legends name a reigning pope in each instance, making it easy to identify the authority issuing the coins. Mine names, on its face, only S. PETRVS P and at first blush one would identify this as Saint Peter the Apostle, the first pope, making identification of the issuer difficult as the coin is not of such antiquity. But we shall return to the true identity of this Saint Peter momentarily. The reverses have marked dissimilarities also. The center lettering on Urban’s and Martin’s coins spells VRBI, an unambiguous declaration that these coins are products of the City, that is, Rome. My coin’s central letters, S M P E, are cryptic by comparison, revelatory only to a those familiar with Ovid’s Tristia, specifically 4.10.1–4:

Ovid, Tristia 4.10.1–4:

Ille ego qui fuerim, tenerorum lusor amorum,
     quem legis, ut noris, accipe posteritas.
Sulmo mihi patria est, gelidis uberrimus undis,
     milia qui nouiens distat ab urbe decem.

That man I was, you know him from these lines,
the playful poet once of tender loves
receive this, posterity, and learn his name.
Sulmo is my homeland, rich in ice-cold springs,
ninety miles distant from the city’s gates.

The four letters S M P E reflect the initial letters of four words from the poem: Sulmo Mihi Patria Est — the opening words of the couplet’s third line. Ovid, writing the autobiographical Tristia from exile on the Black Sea around AD 12, gives his birthplace before he gives almost anything else about himself. Whoever cut the die for this coin took that line and folded its initials into the same cross-and-saltire device that, on other bolognini, named nothing more than the City, Rome. These letters on this bolognino therefore tell us that the coin was struck at Sulmona.

The choice of these letters on the reverse also reveals the identity of the S. PETRVS on the obverse. He is Sulmona’s own Saint Peter, Pietro da Morrone, born Pietro Angelerio, hermit of Monte Morrone a few miles outside the city walls, elected and crowned Pope Celestine V in 1294, canonized in 1313 as San Pietro Celestino, and venerated ever since as the town’s own son raised to the papacy. Thus, the coin’s obverse names its saint; the reverse names its town; and the coin’s issuing authority, Charles III di Durazzo, KROLVS of the encircling reverse legend, is almost incidental to the coin as it is a coin about Sulmona, not the king who issued it.

Celestine V, as noted above born Pietro Angelerio and known from his hermitage on Monte Morrone as Pietro da Morrone, was, prior to being elected and serving as Catholic pontiff for five months in 1294 AD, a monk and a hermit who founded the Celestines, a branch of the Benedictine Order that survived until the 18th century. He was elected pontiff in the Catholic Church’s last non-conclave election after a two-year impasse without a pope. Though his reign was short, and many of his acts were canceled by his successor, two extraordinary edicts survived from his reign: his confirmation of the right of a pope to abdicate and his reinstatement of conclave regulations established by Gregory X’s bull Ubi periculum.

On December 13, 1294, a week after confirming that pontiffs could abdicate, Celestine V himself resigned, stating that he desired to return voluntarily to his monastic, pre-papal life. Unfortunately, his successor, Boniface VIII, fearing that the former Celestine V would be installed as an antipope against him, imprisoned his predecessor in the castle of Fumone, where he died on May 19, 1296. Pietro Angelerio, the man who had been pontiff Celestine V, was canonized by Pope Clement V on May 5, 1313.

It cannot go unnoticed that Pope Benedict XVI proclaimed a Celestine Year in 2009–2010 to mark the eight-hundredth anniversary of Pope Celestine V’s birth, and in July 2010 knelt before Celestine’s relics in Sulmona’s own cathedral. Whether those gestures were, in retrospect, unwitting rehearsal for his own resignation in 2013 — using the very mechanism of abdication Celestine had established seven centuries earlier — is a question the record does not settle. But the resonance, once noticed, is difficult to set aside.

Thus, the coin I have attributed to Sulmona becomes, becomes, in the end, a hinge between two distant moments: Ovid’s line, composed around 12 AD, cast in cipher on the coin’s reverse; and the papal practice of resignation reshaped by the man on the coin’s obverse, invoked, seven centuries later, by the next pope to resign, Benedict XVI, in AD 2013. This humble bolognino, struck sometime between 1382 and 1385 AD, stands as a hinge across a resonance spanning, in the end, two thousand and one years, from Ovid’s Sulmona to Benedict’s Rome.