In the spring of 1460, Tiburzio’s men seized the Pantheon to compel the release of one of their own. The ancient temple, long consecrated as a church, offered a sanctuary and a fortress at the very heart of Rome. All around it, the populace had no choice but to reckon with the company’s demands. A prisoner had been taken; to wrest him from the hands of justice, his confederates placed an entire quarter under threat. They secured his deliverance. Tiburzio might well have fancied he had just mastered the art of commanding the city.
The captive went by the moniker of *l’Innamorato*—the Lover. The name possessed a certain grace that the indictment wholly lacked: he stood accused of abducting a young woman upon the eve of her nuptials. He had been surrendered to the magistrates; his companions, taking refuge at Palombara, had ridden in haste to his rescue. This episode, preserved in the chronicles and revisited by Ludwig von Pastor, casts the affair at once in its double light: the fierce solidarity of an armed troop, but also a public challenge hurled at the government’s capacity to punish.
Tiburzio and his brother Valeriano belonged to a lineage already marked by earlier retribution. Their father, Angelo di Maso, allied by marriage to Stefano Porcari, had perished in the aftermath of the conspiracy of 1453. Porcari’s name remained bound to an attempt to cast off the papal yoke from Rome. To his adversaries, he was a conspirator justly struck down; to those who shared his ambition, a martyr fallen in the cause of liberty. The brothers thus inherited both a domestic bereavement and a legacy whose true meaning remained bitterly contested.
Pius II was absent from Rome. His absence stripped the city of the curia, of a substantial portion of its revenues, and of the sovereign’s living presence. The municipal conservators retained their offices, the baronial houses their palaces and allegiances, the bands of youths their weapons. None of these rival powers sufficed on its own to maintain a common order. Petitions and grievances made their way to the Pope; he, in turn, suspected the Roman magistrates of deliberately tolerating the disorder to force his return.
In his dispatches that spring, the Pontiff rebuked them for suffering such violence to endure. He had no wish to appear as though street brawls dictated his movements. Yet the crisis reached far beyond the Roman thoroughfares. The war for the Kingdom of Naples set the house of Anjou against the house of Aragon; the Pope supported Ferrante, with the backing of Milan. Barons hostile to his rule found in this wider conflict both alliances and opportunities. At Palombara, Jacopo Savelli provided a shelter from which Tiburzio’s companions knew well how to profit.
This stronghold outside the walls allowed them to ride into Rome, display their force, and then withdraw at will. Within the city itself, other factions formed or gravitated toward them. Bonanno Specchio emerged among their chieftains. Hostile accounts paint a picture of fortified redoubts, nocturnal sallyings, pillaging, and an insolent youth that made the citizens pay dearly for its audacity. A tower near San Lorenzo in Lucina, and later the Palazzo Capranica, stood among the bastions they seized. In these portraits, Tiburzio appears as a kind of uncrowned king.
Yet what he held was far less a city than the mere capacity to disturb it. The households that yielded to his demands swore him no fealty. The neighbors who maintained a sullen silence before his armed men had never promised to fight beside them. The triumph at the Pantheon may have fostered this delusion: wresting a concession from frightened magistrates seemed to suggest the citizenry stood with the band. It proved only that, on that particular day, the price of resisting them was judged too dear.
Toward the close of summer, the maneuvers of the condottiere Jacopo Piccinino rendered the peril acute. His troops menaced the Roman countryside; the Pope’s enemies seemed poised to unite an external military assault with an internal insurrection. A prisoner, Luca da Tozio, yielded declarations under examination concerning a plot to unbar the city gates. Tiburzio and his followers were said to be tasked with opening the way for the warlord. For the papal government, the issue was no longer merely quelling urban tumult, but averting the fall of the capital itself.
Pius II turned his face toward Rome. He made his entry in early October, attended by horsemen furnished by the Duke of Milan. His return altered all calculations before a single blow was struck. The curia promised the revival of commerce; the magistrates found their sovereign authority restored; the patrician families could treat directly with the ruler. Youths who had taken part in the disturbances hastened to join the welcoming throngs. The very shoulders upon which Tiburzio had hoped to lean an uprising were now bearing the pontifical litter, as recorded in the theatrical pages of the Pope’s *Commentaries*.
Tiburzio was at Palombara when Bonanno Specchio was taken in Rome toward the end of the month. He sought to repeat the exploit that had succeeded in the spring: to gallop in with his partisans, raise a tumult, and compel a rescue. But the political season had turned. When he called upon the young Romans to rise, he met with no answering echo. Infessura records the chilling retort that marked his isolation: the time was past.
This time, the ministers of justice found citizens willing to lend them aid. A hue and cry took the place of an insurrection. Tiburzio was taken, together with several of his men; the rest sought safety in flight. His final attempt, undertaken in the name of loyalty to a brother-in-arms, had delivered him into the hands of the very power whose will he had broken only months before.
Papal chronicles attribute to him confessions of a grand design to overthrow the government, sack the palaces of the wealthy, and fulfill prophecies presaging the fall of the sacerdotal rule. These, to be sure, are the testimonies of the victors. The sentence, however, was no mere literary flourish: on October 31, 1460, Tiburzio, Bonanno, and several companions were hanged on the Capitoline Hill. The city was given proof that deliverances extorted by the sword would not be repeated without end.
The death of their leader did not instantly pacify the countryside. The baronial fortresses, military rivalries, and economic hardships remained. Other members of the band were put to death the following year. Tiburzio had sought to forge a sovereign power out of his mobility and brazen daring; he was broken the moment the citizens, the magistrates, and the Pope found it more profitable to unite than to submit. From the Pantheon to the Capitoline, his history is written in the shifting of allegiances. He had believed he was returning to deliver a prisoner. He had returned to another Rome.