[00:00] Everybody knows the Colosseum. And everyone 
knows that this part of the Colosseum…looks
[00:07] a lot better than this part. So what happened? 
How and why did half of the greatest Roman
[00:13] amphitheater vanish? Sounds like a job for…
Questions about Ancient Greece and Rome
[00:19] (you were afraid to ask in school). As 
usual, I’m Dr. Garrett Ryan. And today,
[00:24] I’ll be talking about the history of the 
Colosseum during the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
[00:29] For almost 500 years, the Colosseum was 
the Roman Empire’s most impressive arena.
[00:34] Emperor and emperor sponsored spectacles 
to astonish and delight the Roman people.
[00:40] Exotic animals from the farthest reaches 
of world were hunted with gilded spears.
[00:46] Criminals were devoured by bears 
in elaborate mythological charades.
[00:50] The Empire’s greatest gladiators dueled 
on bloodstained sands. And so on.
[00:56] Over its half-millennium of use, the Colosseum 
underwent a long series of renovations.
[01:02] The most important took place in the early 
third century, when a fire destroyed the
[01:06] entire upper deck of seating. It took the 
emperors five years to restore the building,
[01:11] and signs of hasty repairs are still visible all 
along the north wall. Later, over the course of
[01:16] the fifth century, a series of earthquakes caused 
serious damage that was never fully repaired.
[01:21] The spectacles held in the Colosseum 
also changed over the centuries.
[01:25] The most impressive spectacles, unsurprisingly, 
were held during the Empire’s salad days.
[01:30] To celebrate his victory in Dacia, for example, 
Trajan celebrated a whopping 123 days of games,
[01:37] in the course of which 5,000 pairs of gladiators 
fought and 11,000 animals were killed.
[01:43] From the early mid-third century onward, 
the quality of the games started to slip.
[01:48] The later Roman emperors were poorer and 
more distracted than their predecessors,
[01:53] and tended to spend most of their time 
and money far from the city of Rome.
[01:58] It also didn’t help that most 
of the more exciting animals
[02:01] had been hunted to the point of scarcity, and 
that the price of gladiators was always rising.
[02:07] Eventually, the gladiatorial combats stopped 
altogether. According to a later legend,
[02:12] a monk leapt down to the arena, and tried to 
stop a gladiator from killing his opponent.
[02:18] The enraged spectators then stoned the 
monk to death. Upon learning of this,
[02:23] the emperors ended the combats. Or so the 
legend goes. Reality was probably less dramatic.
[02:31] Although Christian disapproval was 
one cause of the decline in combats,
[02:35] the fact that the emperors were no longer paying 
for them seems to have been equally important.
[02:40] Whatever the reason, the last gladiators fought in 
the Colosseum sometime in the early fifth century.
[02:47] The beast hunts, however, continued. 
They lasted longer, in fact,
[02:52] than the Western Roman Empire itself. The last 
hunts were sponsored by the barbarian kings
[02:57] who succeeded the emperors. These kings, however, 
had little interest in the games, not least
[03:04] because it was difficult to justify staging 
them for Rome’s steadily shrinking population.
[03:10] The final recorded hunts in the 
Colosseum were held in the year 523.
[03:15] Within a few centuries, all understanding 
of the Colosseum’s function was lost.
[03:20] Some claimed it had been a temple of the Sun, and 
had originally been crowned by a vast golden dome.
[03:27] Others thought that it had been a 
temple dedicated to all the gods,
[03:31] and that a gigantic statue of Jupiter 
had originally stood in the Arena.
[03:36] The strangest legends revolved around the Roman 
poet Virgil, whom medieval legend transformed
[03:41] into a great magician. Virgil, it was said, had 
built the Colosseum with the help of his demons,
[03:47] and used it as a theater for necromancy.
Part of the confusion derived from the fact
[03:52] that the Colosseum was already half-ruined 
at the beginning of the Middle Ages,
[03:56] and steadily fell apart over the course of 
the next millennium. Earthquakes were the
[04:00] main natural cause. Like any tall masonry 
structure, the Colosseum was susceptible to
[04:06] seismic damage. And thanks to a quirk of geology, 
part of the building was especially vulnerable.
[04:12] The Colosseum’s massive concrete foundations 
only go down to bedrock on the north side
[04:18] of the building. On the south side, the foundation 
rests on waterlogged sediment. This unstable
[04:23] subsoil amplified seismic shocks, and gradually 
brought about the collapse of half the building.
[04:30] The Colosseum’s greatest enemies, 
however, were the Romans themselves.
[04:35] The building’s walls were built of 
a fine limestone called travertine,
[04:38] and its seats were made of marble. Both 
stones were attractive to medieval builders.
[04:44] Marble and travertine were not 
only easy and attractive to re-use;
[04:47] they could also both be burnt in 
kilns to make lime for mortar.
[04:51] Pillaging of the Colosseum’s stone began even 
before the final games were staged in the arena,
[04:56] and continued on a massive scale 
for more than a thousand years.
[05:00] The Colosseum wasn’t just a quarry. For much of 
the Middle Ages, hundreds of people lived in the
[05:06] ruinous vaults and passageways. There were houses 
complete with courtyards and little gardens.
[05:13] There were shops with wooden awnings 
and storage lofts. There were stables,
[05:17] there were churches, and at one point there 
was even a full-blown fortified palace.
[05:23] Remarkably, many of the Medieval 
Colosseum’s inhabitants were lime-burners,
[05:27] who spent their days tearing apart the 
building in which they were squatting.
[05:32] Thanks largely to their efforts, the Colosseum 
became an increasingly inhospitable place to live.
[05:38] Finally, in 1349, an earthquake brought down the 
entire south half of the Colosseum’s circuit wall,
[05:44] forming a colossal pile of rubble. Over 
the next four centuries, this heap,
[05:50] colloquially called the Colosseum’s Thigh, 
built half the churches of Renaissance Rome.
[05:56] In 1452, a single busy contractor carried 
off more than 2,500 cartloads of stone
[06:04] After all these centuries of earthquakes and 
pillaging, it might seem surprising that anything
[06:08] is left of the Colosseum. The reason so much 
remains, remarkably, is that part of the building
[06:13] was protected. As mentioned earlier, the north 
side of the Colosseum was always less susceptible
[06:19] to earthquake damage. It was kept from being 
pulled apart by scavengers, however, by the popes.
[06:26] The north side of the Colosseum happened to face 
the processional route connecting the Lateran
[06:30] Palace with the Vatican. The popes seems to have 
deliberately preserved this part of the Colosseum
[06:35] as a monumental backdrop for their parades. 
Not that every pope agreed; as late as the
[06:41] sixteenth century, Pius V proposed demolishing the 
arena’s remains. But most pontiffs, fortunately,
[06:48] insisted on preserving this fragment 
of Rome’s greatest ancient building.
[06:53] So, there you have it: we have half a Colosseum 
because earthquakes and the popes spared it.
[06:59] If you’d like to learn more about the Colosseum, 
I now offer virtual guided tours exploring the
[07:03] building and the Roman games. You can 
visit toldinstone.com to learn more.
[07:09] In the meantime, as always, thanks for watching.