Old St Peter’s Basilica

The Emperor Constantine has a great basilica built over the tomb of St Peter. It has five aisles, a transept and a forecourt, and holds thousands of people.

The basilica became the basic form of the Western church for the next thousand years.

During the first centuries, Christians gathered in private houses and often faced persecution. When Constantine won the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312, a victory he attributed to the God of the Christians, Christianity became a permitted and soon a favoured religion. The Church now needed large assembly spaces. The pagan temples were unsuitable; they were dwellings for the image of the god, not built for a congregation. Instead the choice fell on the basilica, Rome’s old hall for law courts and markets, a long space with colonnades and an apse. Constantine first had a basilica built at the Lateran as the bishop’s church, and then one on the Vatican Hill, where according to tradition Peter had been buried after his martyrdom.

The site was difficult. The church had to stand exactly over the small shrine marking the grave, on a slope occupied by a Roman cemetery. Huge quantities of earth had to be moved and the tombs filled in to create a level surface. The basilica was given a tall central nave, four aisles and a transept in front of the apse, where the grave lay. The columns were taken from older buildings and were therefore of different kinds and colours. The roof was an open timber truss. In front of the church lay a large forecourt with colonnades and a well, where a large bronze pine cone stood as a fountain. Construction began in the 320s and continued after Constantine’s death.

Old St Peter’s became the most important shrine of the Western Church and a goal for pilgrims for a thousand years. Here Charlemagne was crowned emperor in 800, and popes and princes were buried in and around it. But in the 15th century the walls began to lean and the building was in poor condition. The popes planned a rebuilding, and in 1506 Julius II laid the foundation stone of the new church. The old one was gradually demolished, and the last parts disappeared in the early 17th century. We know it from drawings and descriptions made before the demolition. The bronze pine cone still stands in one of the Vatican’s courtyards. The basic form of the basilica became the model for Europe’s churches, from Lund Cathedral to the small parish churches.