Sassoferrato (part 4): Sentinum

The churches of Sassoferrato were beautiful and its museums interesting, but the real reason I wanted to visit the town was that in its vicinity the famous ancient town of Sentinum was situated. This was the site where, in 295 BCE, the Romans and their allies defeated a coalition of Celtic Senones and Italian Samnites. The Battle of Sentinum is sometimes exaggeratedly referred to as a Battle of the Nations (La Battaglia delle Nazioni). Granted, the Romans were up against a large anti-Roman coalition in which several Etruscan cities and Umbrians participated as well. However, contrary to the claims of certain travel guides, the Etruscans and Umbrians did not take part in the actual Battle of Sentinum. Two smaller Roman armies made incursions into Etruscan and Umbrian territory. With these actions the Romans managed to rip the grand coalition apart. The Etruscans and Umbrians abandoned the Samnites and Senones and rushed back to their homes and hearths to save as much as possible. At Sentinum the decisive battle then took place between the main Roman army and the Celto-Samnite force.

The Battle of Sentinum

The Romans were led by the consuls Quintus Fabius Maximus Rullianus and Publius Decius Mus. The battle of Sentinum remained undecided for a long time. At some point the Roman and allied cavalry gained the upper hand, but the Celts then responded by deploying a secret weapon: chariots. Celtic chariots were important status symbols for noble Celtic warriors, but they were in fact used in battle too. A chariot was manned by a driver and a warrior. The former controlled the vehicle, while the latter hurled javelins, jumped off the cart to engage in combat and then jumped on it again and drove away if he was hard-pressed. The horses used by the Romans panicked when they heard the rattling of the Celtic vehicles and the Roman horsemen and their allies were driven off. The rout of the cavalry subsequently increased the pressure on the Roman, Latin and Italian infantry.

Publius Decius Mus had deployed the fifth and sixth legion on the left wing, opposite the Senones. His wing bore the brunt of the fighting: losses here were at least four times higher than on the other wing. When his lines were about to collapse, the consul decided to sacrifice himself. He devoted himself to the deities of the underworld and then charged home. Decius was quickly killed, and thus he followed in his father’s footsteps: the older Decius had sacrificed himself in a similar fashion in 340 BCE during the Latin war. Although one of their commanders had now fallen, the Roman lines held, and on the right wing Fabius managed to push back the Samnites. He then ordered the elite Campanian horsemen to attack the Celts in the rear, followed by the principes (the older, more experienced soldiers of the second line) of the third legion. The consul promised to build and dedicate a temple to Jupiter Victor if the attack succeeded.

And the attack did succeed. The Samnites were destroyed at their camp and their commander Gellius Egnatius, who also happened to be the architect of the grand coalition, was killed in the fighting. The Senones for their part proved to be no match for the furious Campanians and vengeful Roman infantry. According to Livius the Samnites and Celts together lost 25,000 men, not including another 8,000 men taken prisoner. But Roman losses were significant as well: 8,700 Romans, Latins and other allies had fallen. The consul Fabius was awarded a triumph for his victory. The slain consul Decius Mus was, for obvious reasons, not granted a similar honour, but in modern Sassoferrato a street has been named after him, the Via Decio Mure. That street ends at the Via Fabio Rulliano, and just south of the built-up area there is even a Via Gellio Egnazio, named after the fallen Samnite general.

The Battle of Sentinum was of major historical significance. After the battle the Romans were able to complete their conquest of all of Italy south of the river Arno in no more than a decade. The Senones were subjugated and their land was colonised. In the south the Romans managed to decisively defeat the Samnites and then brought all the Greek city states in the peninsula under their control.

From Sentinum to Sassoferrato

The history of Sassoferrato can roughly be divided into three parts: Sentinum before the arrival of the Romans, Roman Sentinum and lastly medieval Sassoferrato. It is assumed that pre-Roman Sentinum, where the Battle of Sentinum was fought, was situated somewhere in the plains between the rivers Marena and Sentino. However, archaeological traces of the settlement have not yet been found. It is conceivable that in the years following the battle a new Roman settlement was founded in the area, for instance after the tribune of the plebs Gaius Flaminius had the popular assembly adopt a bill about the distribution of land in the Ager Gallicus in 232 BCE. However this may be, the first version of Roman Sentinum was destroyed during the Bellum Perusinum, a war that broke out in December of 41 BCE. By now the so-called second Triumvirate was active, consisting of Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus (the adopted son of Julius Caesar and the future emperor Augustus), Marcus Antonius (Mark Antony) and Marcus Aemilius Lepidus. Relations within the Triumvirate were, however, anything but cordial. While Antony was in the East, his wife Fulvia began stirring up trouble in Italy. In doing so she closely collaborated with Antony’s brother Lucius Antonius.

Lucius was consul in 41 BCE and drove the unpopular Lepidus from Rome, but was subsequently himself driven back to Perusia (modern Perugia) by Octavianus, who continued to besiege him there. Lucius Antonius was forced to surrender in February of 40 BCE. His life was spared and Fulvia was able to flee to Greece, but after the capture of Perusia many senators and equites among the defenders were murdered on the orders of Octavianus. The city itself was almost entirely destroyed, and so was poor Sentinum. Early in the war, Octavianus had already tried to take the town by force, but his attempt had failed. As Lucius Antonius had by now taken Rome, Octavianus left his right-hand man Quintus Salvidienus Rufus at Sentinum to conduct the siege. As the commander of the besieged – falsely believing that the whole enemy army had left – had subsequently begun pursuing Octavianus, Rufus could easily capture the town. Sentinum was looted and burned to the ground.[1]

After the destruction of 41 BCE Sentinum was rebuilt. Traces of this Roman Sentinum are still visible at two locations just south of Sassoferrato. The two locations together form the archaeological park of Sentinum, which can be visited as part of a guided tour. Visitors can of course also go and have a look without a guide, but then they have to content themselves with peeking over a fence. At the location known as Civita we see, in the first place, the remains of a complex of Roman baths that measures 3,850 square metres. Especially the remains of the large swimming pool or natatio are very impressive. Adjoining the swimming pool was the hot bath or caldarium. One of the other rooms was used as a cold bath or frigidarium. Visitors can also see some pieces of a cardo minor and a decumanus minor, the secondary roads that ran through Sentinum from north to south and west to east respectively. A small two-room building has been identified as a foundry. At the second location, Santa Lucia, there are also remnants of a thermal complex. It was located just outside the town and covered a space of 7,000 square metres. Sentinum appears to have been rather prosperous during the Imperial era.

This all changed in Late Antiquity, roughly in the late fourth or early fifth century. Famine, disease, insecurity, incursions by foreign peoples and especially the arrival of the Longobards in 568 led to the gradual abandonment of Sentinum. The settlement proved to be indefensible, and its citizens packed up their things and moved into the hills. In the second half of the twelfth century a group of aristocratic families built a castle on a hill north of ancient Sentinum, an event that led to the birth of a new settlement, Castello. The castle drew people from the surrounding area, who settled in the lower part of the new town, which became known as the Borgo. A decree dated 5 March 1200 contained provisions about the relations between the aristocracy and the citizens, and thus between Castello and Borgo. And that is why the year 1200 is considered the birth year of Saxum Ferratum, “Iron Rock”, which quickly became Sassoferrato in Italian. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the town was dominated by the noble Atti family, but after the murder of Luigi degli Atti in 1460 Sassoferrato formally became a free comune. In the end, however, it was the Pope in Rome who was calling the shots in Sassoferrato, which was, after all, part of the Papal States. A reminder of their power is the citadel or Rocca, built in the 1360s by cardinal Gil Álvarez Carrillo de Albornoz (1310-1367), who was also the warhorse of popes Innocentius VI (1352-1362) and Urbanus V (1362-1370).

Archaeological museum

The small archaeological museum of Sassoferrato has found accommodation in the Palazzo dei Priori from 1355. Here we admired various finds from Sentinum. As it turned out, we happened to be the only visitors that day. As a consequence, the lady from the tourist office had to open the museum specially for us. She then left again and we had the museum entirely to ourselves. “Just let me know when you are finished”, she said… The museum is not very large, but it has an interesting collection of sculptures, inscriptions and mosaics. From Civita, for instance, comes a second-century mosaic featuring Europa and the bull. From about the same era dates a mosaic of a griffin with a fish tail, which was once part of a larger mosaic (14 by 9.80 metres), found in 1922. The mosaic was kept in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale delle Marche in Ancona for a long time, but it has now come home again.

A mosaic that will probably never return to Sassoferrato, is the famous Aion mosaic from ca. 200. It was found in 1806 and was once part of the floor of a Roman domus. The mosaic was named after Aion, the god of eternity. He is depicted inside a kind of hoop featuring the signs of the zodiac. On the ground sits Tellus or Terra, goddess of the earth. The four children surrounding her are the four seasons. Shortly after the mosaic was found, it was claimed by Eugène de Beauharnais (1781-1824). He was the son of Joséphine de Beauharnais and, as a consequence, a stepson of her second husband, Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1805, Napoleon had appointed Eugène viceroy of Italy, which was then a French puppet state. When this state collapsed in 1814, Eugène fled to Bavaria, where his father-in-law Maximilian was king. Eugène died in 1824, Maximilian following him to the grave the next year. In 1825 Eugène’s widow, Augusta, gifted the mosaic to her brother, the new king of Bavaria. It was this Louis I of Bavaria who, in 1827, ordered the mosaic to be detached in Sassoferrato and taken to Munich, where it has been in the Glyptothek since 1919. Visitors to the archaeological museum of Sassoferrato have to content themselves with a copy on the floor, which by the looks of it was made of linoleum.

One of the best attractions of the archaeological museum is a scale model of the Battle of Sentinum. Several hundred miniature soldiers engage each other on a realistic miniature battlefield. The soldiers themselves have also been made with great attention to detail. Romans, Senones and Samnites look nothing like the caricatures that we usually see in Hollywood movies. The makers of the soldiers appear to have been inspired by the work of, among others, Peter Connolly (1935-2012), a military historian who was also a talented illustrator.

Note

[1] Cassius Dio, Book 48.13.