Roccaporena names two peacemakers each Lent to stop the valley's killing

ROCCAPORENA, Umbria, 1406 AD — On the first Sunday of Lent, in the parish church at Roccaporena, the priest names one man and one woman out of the congregation. For the next twelve months their work is to settle the village’s quarrels before the quarrels turn into killing. He has named the same two people over and over, Antonio Lotti and his wife, Amata Ferri. The feud they were appointed to head off has now reached their own family: their son-in-law, Paolo di Ferdinando di Mancino, was ambushed and killed on the path a short walk outside the village.

The office is not the priest’s invention. The statutes of the free commune of Cascia make named private citizens responsible for making peace between families at war with one another, or at least for stopping them from massacring one another. Cascia governs this valley from a walled hill town two and a half miles east. What Antonio and Amata work against is the valley’s own rule for a killing. The dead man’s family is owed a death in return, and it does not have to fall on the man who struck the blow: killing one of his relatives settles the account just as well.

Antonio and Amata go to a quarrel as soon as they hear of one and stay with it until the two sides are speaking again. The village treats their decisions as if God had made them. The valley calls the two of them the Peacemakers of Jesus Christ. They are not a noble family, only a comfortable one, and what standing they have here comes from the office. They are getting old, and they have one child, a daughter, Saint Rita of Cascia. St. Rita told Antonio and Amata that she wanted to enter religious life. The two of them wept and begged her not to leave them alone in their old age. St. Rita stayed.

Roccaporena is a few dozen houses on a patch of level ground at the bottom of a basin, with a mountain hanging over it. From the east there are only two ways in, narrow roads on either side of a sheer rock with the river at its foot. The sun comes up late here and goes down early. The village church has no font, so newborn children are carried the two and a half miles up to Cascia to be baptised. More than forty towns and villages of these mountains are governed from that walled town.

Under its consuls Cascia keeps a standing troop of soldiers, whose duty is to defend the town and, when the consuls judge it necessary, to attack. In the first years of the schism, with two men claiming the papacy at once, Cascia threw off the government of the Holy See. It has ruled itself since, at war without a break with Norcia, Leonessa, Monreale, Aquila and Cerreto. People were murdered and robbed in the town after the rebellion, houses were looted and burned, many families were ruined and the religious houses left wrecked. The war with Leonessa ran a full twelve months, and would have run longer if the Trinci of Foligno had not stepped in and got the two sides to make peace.

In 1397 AD Antonio and Amata found their daughter a husband: Paolo di Ferdinando di Mancino, a young man of the valley, already a man of arms. They wanted a man who would keep her near them, and children who would keep the family from dying out. The towns of Italy were split between two parties, the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, and Cascia had held with the Guelphs, the party of the Holy See, since 1260 AD. Paolo was a Ghibelline.

The family moved out of the village to the Mulinaccio, a property of Paolo’s with a larger house and a grain mill he could run himself. Around 1406 AD, on the path a short walk outside Roccaporena, he was ambushed and stabbed to death.