The Colonna and the Orsini, two of Rome’s oldest families, have both claimed Julius Caesar as an ancestor.
The Massimo say they descend from Quintus Fabius Maximus, the general who wore Hannibal down in the third century BCE.1
When Napoleon asked Prince Massimo if his family really came from Fabius, the prince answered that he couldn’t prove it, but the story had been going around the family for twelve hundred years.2
What these families inherited from the Roman aristocracy was its playbook.
They held land and married for advantage. They stayed close to the most powerful institution in the city, and they outlasted every government that tried to replace them. My argument is that the families known as the black nobility are extensions of the old Roman ruling class and that they still hold power today through banks, foundations, palaces, and the Order of Malta, the sovereign Catholic order that stands beside the papacy.
In my book The Hidden Hand: Wealth, Power, and Control from Pharaohs to Corporations, I argue that a handful of Roman patrician family lines, the same houses that ran the Republic’s networks of patrons and clients, found a new and lasting home inside the Papal States during the Middle Ages. The families that survived did what the Church did after Rome fell. They stopped depending on any one office and wove themselves into the institutions around them.
Looking back, in the Roman Republic, a patron backed his clients in court and sometimes gave them their daily food. In return, they visited him every morning in a ritual called the salutatio, and he counted on their votes in the public assemblies. By the first century BCE, the bond was hereditary. In 123 BCE, the tribune Gaius Gracchus passed a law that sold grain to Roman citizens at a fixed low price. Cicero later wrote that the common people loved the law and the property owners opposed it. My reading is that cheap public grain threatened the private dependence that patronage ran on, since a client who could buy cheap bread had less reason to look up to one powerful man. The medieval barons ran the same scheme from their hilltop castles. The Colonna trace their line to the counts of Tusculum in the tenth century. Their recorded history starts around 1100 with Pietro, lord of Colonna. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica‘s best guess is that he was a brother of Pope Benedict IX.3
In 1870, Rome’s aristocracy lost its uniform but kept everything else. On the morning of September 20, 1870, Italian artillery blew a hole in the Aurelian Walls near the Porta Pia. Soldiers of the new Kingdom of Italy poured into the city, and a papal government that had ruled central Italy for about a thousand years came to an end. Pope Pius IX pulled back behind the Vatican walls. He refused to recognize the kingdom and called himself a prisoner.4
Rome’s old families had to pick a side. Some went over to the new royal court, and the city called them the white nobility. Others shut their palace doors and dressed in black to mourn the pope’s lost kingdom. Romans called them the nobiltà nera, the black nobility.5
How does a ruling class survive when the state that created it dies? My book names four mechanisms that elites have used for five thousand years to stay on top. Coercion is force or the threat of force. Alignment means separate institutions backing each other up without anyone giving orders. Amnesia wipes out the memory of how things used to be, so the present setup feels like the only one possible. Conflict keeps ordinary people fighting each other instead of looking up. The black nobility used all four.
