The Renaissance

  How could the Romans, who had hardly heard of Adrian, forgive such an affront? The populace denounced the cardinals as madmen, as “betrayers of Christ’s blood”; pamphleteers demanded to know why the Vatican had been “surrendered to German fury.”16 Aretino composed a masterpiece of vituperation, termed the cardinals “filthy rabble,” and prayed that they might be buried alive.17 Pasquino’s statue was covered with lampoons. The cardinals feared to show themselves in public; they ascribed the election to the Holy Ghost, who, they said, had so inspired them.18 Many cardinals left Rome, fearing both the contumely of the people and the ax of ecclesiastical reform. For his part Adrian calmly completed his unfinished business in Spain, and notified the Curia that he could not reach Rome before August. Unaware of the splendor of the Vatican, he wrote to a Roman friend asking that a modest house and garden be rented for his residence. When at last he reached the city (which he had never seen before), his pale ascetic face and lean frame awed observers into some reverence; but when he spoke, and it appeared that he knew no Italian, and talked Latin with a guttural accent all the world away from Italian melody and grace, Rome fumed and despaired.

  Adrian felt himself a prisoner in the Vatican, and pronounced it fit for the successors of Constantine rather than of Peter. He discontinued all further decoration of the Vatican chambers; the followers of Raphael, who had been working there, were dismissed. He sent away all but four of the hundred grooms that Leo had kept for his stable; he reduced his personal servants to two—both Dutch—and bade them bring his household expenses down to one ducat ($12.50) a day. He was horrified by the looseness of sex and tongue and pen in Rome, and agreed with Lorenzo and Luther that the capital of Christianity was a sink of iniquity. He cared nothing for the ancient art that the cardinals showed him; he denounced the statuary as relics of idolatry, and walled up the Belvedere Palace, which contained Europe’s first collection of classical sculpture.19 He had a mind to wall up the humanists too, and the poets, who seemed to him to live and write like pagans who had banished Christ. When Francesco Berni, in one of his bitterest capitoli, satirized him as a Dutch barbarian incapable of understanding the refinements of Italian art, literature, and life, Adrian threatened to have the whole tribe of satirists doused in the Tiber.20

  To lead the Church back from Leo to Christ became the devout passion of Adrian’s pontificate. He set himself with blunt directness to reform such ecclesiastical abuses as he could reach. He suppressed superfluous offices with sometimes inconsiderate and indiscriminate vigor. He canceled the contracts that Leo had signed to pay annuities to those who had bought church offices; 2550 persons who had purchased these as an investment lost, so to speak, both principal and interest; Rome resounded with their cries that they had been defrauded; and one of the victims tried to kill the Pope. Relatives who came to Adrian for sinecures were told to go back and earn an honest living. He put an end to simony and nepotism, scored the venality of the Curia, enacted severe penalties for bribery or embezzlement, and punished guilty cardinals with the same treatment as the humblest clerk. He bade bishops and cardinals go back to their sees, and read them lessons on the morality that he expected of them. The ill repute of Rome, he told them, was the talk of Europe. He would not accuse the cardinals themselves of vice, but he charged them with allowing vice to go unpunished in their palaces. He asked them to put an end to their luxuries, and to content themselves with a maximum income of 6000 ducats ($75,000) a year. All ecclesiastical Rome, wrote the Venetian ambassador, “is beside itself with terror, seeing what the Pope has done in the space of eight days.”21

  But the eight days were not enough, nor the brief thirteen months of Adrian’s active pontificate. Vice hid its face for a while, but survived; reforms irked a thousand officials, and met with a sullen resistance and the hope for Adrian’s early death. The Pope mourned to see how little one man could do to better men; “how much does a man’s efficiency,” he often said, “depend upon the age in which his work is cast!”—and he remarked wistfully to his old friend Heeze: “Dietrich, how much better it went with us when we were living quietly in Louvain!”22

  Amid these domestic tribulations he faced as honorably as he could the critical problems of foreign policy. He restored Urbino to Francesco Maria della Rovere, and left Alfonso undisturbed in Ferrara. Ousted dictators took advantage of the pacific Pope and again seized power in Perugia, Rimini, and other Papal States. Adrian appealed to Charles and Francis to make peace, or at least accept a truce, and to join in repelling the Turks, who were preparing to attack Rhodes. Instead, Charles signed with Henry VIII of England the Treaty of Windsor (June 19, 1522), which pledged them to make a concerted assault upon France. On December 21 the Turks took Rhodes, the last Christian stronghold in the Eastern Mediterranean, and it was rumored that they were planning to land in Apulia and conquer disorganized Italy. When Turkish spies were captured in Rome the trepidation mounted to a point that recalled the city’s fear of invasion after Hannibal’s victory at Cannae in 216 B.C. To quite fill Adrian’s cup of gall, Cardinal Francesco Soderini, his chief minister and confidante, and a principal agent in his negotiations for a European peace, plotted with Francis a French attack upon Sicily. When Adrian discovered the plot, and learned that Francis was massing troops on the border of Italy, he abandoned neutrality and leagued the papacy with Charles V. Then, broken in body and spirit, he fell sick and died (September 14, 1523). His will left his property to the poor, and his last instructions were that he should be given a quiet and inexpensive funeral.

  Rome greeted his death with more joy than if the city had been saved from capture by the Turks. Some believed that he had been poisoned for art’s sake, and a wag attached to the door of the Pope’s physician an inscription Liberatori patriae SPQR— expressing the gratitude of the “Senate and People of Rome to the Liberator of the Fatherland.” The dead pontiff was blackened by a hundred satires; he was accused of greed, drunkenness, and the grossest immorality, and every act of his career was transformed into wickedness by malice and ridicule; now the surviving freedom of the “press” in Rome prepared by its excesses its own unmourned demise. It was a pity that Adrian could not understand the Renaissance; but it was a greater crime and folly that the Renaissance could not tolerate a Christian pope.

  VI. CLEMENT VII: THE FIRST PHASE

  The conclave that met on October 1, 1523, fought for seven weeks over the selection of Adrian’s successor, and finally named a man who by universal opinion was the happiest possible choice. Giulio de’ Medici was the illegitimate son of that amiable Giuliano who had fallen a victim to the Pazzi conspiracy, and of a mistress, Fioretta, who soon disappeared from history. Lorenzo took the boy into his family and had him brought up with his sons. These included Leo, who, as pope, dispensed Giulio from the canonical impediment of bastardy, made him archbishop of Florence, then a cardinal, then the able administrator of Rome and the chief minister of his pontificate. Now forty-five, Clement was tall and handsome, rich and learned, well mannered and of moral life, an admirer and patron of literature, learning, music, and art. Rome greeted his elevation with joy as the return of Leo’s gulden age. Bembo prophesied that Clement VII would be the best and wisest ruler that the Church had ever known.23

  He began most graciously. He distributed among the cardinals all the benefices that he had enjoyed, entailing a yearly revenue of 60,000 ducats. He won the hearts and dedications of scholars and scribes by drawing them into his service or supporting them with gifts. He dealt out justice justly, gave audience freely, bestowed charity with less than Leonine, but with wiser, generosity, and charmed all by his courtesy to every person and class. No pope ever began so well, or ended so miserably.

  The task of steering a safe course between Francis and Charles in a war almost to the death, while the Turks were overrunning Hungary, and one third of Europe was in full revolt against the Church, proved too much for Clement’s abilities, as for Leo’s too. The magnificent portrait of Clement in his early pontificate,
by Sebastiano del Piombo, is deceptive: he did not show in his actions the hard resolution that there seems limned in his face; and even in that picture a certain weak weariness shows in the tired eyelids drooping upon sullen eyes. Clement made irresolution a policy. He carried thought to excess, and mistook it as a substitute for action instead of its guide. He could find a hundred reasons for a decision, and a hundred against it; it was as if Buridan’s ass sat on the papal throne. Berni satirized him in bitter lines prophetic of posterity’s judgment:

  A papacy composed of compliment,

  Debate, consideration, complaisance,

  Of furthermore, then, but, yes, well, perchance,

  Haply, and such like terms inconsequent.…

  Of feet of lead, of tame neutrality….

  To speak plain truth, you shall live to see

  Pope Adrian sainted through this papacy.24

  He took as his chief counselors Gianmatteo Giberti who favored France, and Nikolaus von Schönberg who favored the Empire; he allowed his mind to be torn in two between them; and when he decided for France—only a few weeks before the French disaster at Pavia—he brought down upon his head and his city all the wiles and forces of Charles, and all the fury of a half-Protestant army unleashed upon Rome.

  It was Clement’s excuse that he feared the power of an Emperor holding both Lombardy and Naples; and he hoped, by siding with Francis, to secure a French veto on Charles’s troublesome idea of a general council to adjudicate the affairs of the Church. When Francis came down over the Alps with a new army of 26,000 French, Italians, Swiss, and Germans, seized Milan, and besieged Pavia, Clement, while giving Charles assurances of loyalty and friendship, secretly signed an alliance with Francis (December 12, 1524), brought Florence and Venice into it, and reluctantly gave triumphant Francis permission to levy troops in the Papal States and to send an army through papal territory against Naples. Charles never forgave the deception. “I shall go into Italy,” he vowed, “and revenge myself on those who have injured me, especially on that poltroon the Pope. Some day, perhaps, Martin Luther will become a man of weight.”25 At that moment some men thought that Luther would be made pope; and several of the Emperor’s entourage advised him to contest the election of Clement on the ground of illegitimate birth.26

  Charles sent a German army under Georg von Frundsberg and the Marquis of Pescara to attack the French outside Pavia. Poor tactics nullified the French artillery, while the hand firearms of the Spanish made a mockery of Swiss pikes; the French army was almost annihilated in one of the most decisive battles of history (February 24–5, 1525). Francis behaved gallantly: while his troops retreated he plunged forward into the enemy’s ranks, making royal slaughter; his horse was killed under him, but he kept on fighting; at last, thoroughly exhausted, he could resist no more, and was taken prisoner along with several of his captains. From a tent among the victors he wrote to his mother the message so often half-quoted: “All is lost save honor—and my skin, which is safe.” Charles, who was at this time in Spain, ordered him sent as a prisoner to a castle near Madrid.

  Milan reverted to the Emperor. All Italy felt itself at his mercy, and one Italian state after another presented him with diverse bribes for permission to remain in existence. Clement, fearful of invasion by the imperial army, and of revolution against the Medici in Florence, abandoned his French alliance, and signed a treaty (April 1, 1525) with Charles de Lannoy, Viceroy of Naples for Charles, pledging Pope and Emperor to mutual aid; the Emperor would protect the Medici in Florence and accept Francesco Maria Sforza as imperial vicar in Milan; the Pope would pay Charles, for past affronts and future services, 100,000 ducats ($1,250,000?),27 which were badly needed for the imperial troops. Shortly afterward Clement connived at a plot by Girolamo Morone to free Milan from the Emperor. The Marquis of Pescara revealed it to Charles, and Morone was jailed.

  Charles treated captive Francis with feline procrastination. After softening him with almost eleven months of courteous imprisonment, he agreed to free him on the impossible conditions that the King should surrender all French rights, actual or alleged, to Genoa, Milan, Naples, Flanders, Artois, Tournai, Burgundy, and Navarre; that Francis should supply Charles with ships and troops for an expedition against Rome or the Turks; that Francis should marry Charles’s sister Eleonora; and that the King should surrender his eldest sons—Francis, ten, and Henry, nine years old—to Charles as hostages for the fulfillment of these terms. By the treaty of Madrid (January 14, 1526) Francis agreed to all these conditions with solemn oaths and mental reservations. On March 17 he was allowed to return to France, leaving his sons in his place as prisoners. Arrived in France, he announced that he had no intention of honoring promises made under duress; Clement, with the support of canonical law, absolved him from his oaths; and on May 22 Francis, Clement, Venice, Florence, and Francesco Maria Sforza signed the League of Cognac, pledging them to restore Asti and Genoa to France, to give Milan to Sforza as a French fief, to return to each Italian state all its prewar possessions, to ransom French prisoners for 2,000,000 crowns, and to bestow Naples upon an Italian prince who would pay a yearly tribute of 75,000 ducats to the king of France. The Emperor was cordially invited to sign this agreement; if he refused, the new League proposed to war upon him until he and all his forces were driven from Italy.28

  Charles denounced the League as violating Francis’ sacred oaths as well as the treaty that Clement had signed with Lannoy. Unable to go to Italy himself at this time, he commissioned Hugo de Moncada to win back Clement by diplomacy, and, that failing, to stir up against the Pope a revolution of the Colonna and the Roman populace. Moncada performed his mission nicely: he brought Clement into an amicable agreement with the Colonna, persuaded the Pope to disband the troops that were guarding him, and allowed the Colonna to continue organizing a conspiracy to capture Rome. While Christendom so exercised itself in treachery and war, the Turks under Suleiman the Magnificent overwhelmed the Hungarians at Mohacs (August 29, 1526), and captured Budapest (September 10). Clement, alarmed less Europe should become not merely Protestant but Mohammedan, announced to the cardinals that he was thinking of going to Barcelona in person to plead with Charles to make peace with Francis and join forces against the Turks. Charles at that time was equipping a fleet whose purpose, it was said in Rome, was to invade Italy and depose the Pope.29

  On September 20 the Colonna entered Rome with five thousand men, and, overriding feeble resistance, plundered the Vatican, St. Peter’s, and the neighboring Borgo Vecchio, while Clement fled to Castel Sant’ Angelo. The papal palace was completely stripped, including Raphael’s tapestries and the Pope’s tiara; sacred vessels, treasured relics, and costly papal vestments were stolen; an hilarious soldier went about in the white robe and red cap of the Pope, distributing papal benedictions with mock solemnity.30 On the following day Moncada restored to Clement the papal tiara, assured him that the Emperor had only the best intentions toward the papacy, and compelled the frightened Pope to sign an armistice with the Empire for four months, and to pardon the Colonna.

  Moncada had hardly retired to Naples when Clement raised a new papal force of seven thousand troops. At the end of October he ordered it to march against the Colonna strongholds. At the same time he appealed to Francis I and Henry VIII for aid; Francis sent dilatory excuses; Henry, absorbed in the difficult task of begetting a son, sent nothing. Another papal army, in the north, was kept inactive by the apparently treacherous Fabianism of Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino, who could not forget that Leo X had ousted him from his duchy, and was not especially grateful that Adrian and Clement had let him return and stay. A braver leader was with that army—young Giovanni de’ Medici, handsome son of Caterina Sforza, heir of her dauntless spirit, and called Giovanni delle Bande Nere because he and his troops had worn black bands of mourning when Leo died.31 Giovanni was all for action against Milan, but Francesco Maria overruled him.

  VII. THE SACK OF ROME: 1527

  Charles, still remainin
g in Spain, and moving his pawns with magic remote control, commissioned his agents to raise a new army. They approached the Tirolese condottiere, Georg von Frundsberg, already famous for the exploits of the Landsknechte—German mercenaries—who fought under his lead. Charles could offer little money, but his agents promised rich plunder in Italy. Frundsberg was still nominally a Catholic, but he strongly sympathized with Luther, and hated Clement as a traitor to the Empire. He pawned his castle, his other possessions, even the adornments of his wife; with the 38,000 gulden so obtained he collected some 10,000 men eager for adventure and pillage and not averse to breaking a lance over a papal head; some of them, it was said, carried a noose to hang the Pope.32 In November, 1526, this impromptu army crossed the mountains and descended toward Brescia. Alfonso of Ferrara repaid the papacy for its many efforts to depose him, by sending Frundsberg four of his mightiest cannon. Near Brescia Giovanni delle Bande Nere was shot in a skirmish with the invaders; he died at Mantua on November 30, aged twenty-eight. No one remained to hinder the Duke of Urbino from doing nothing.

  Frundsberg’s rabble crossed the Po as Giovanni died, and ravaged the fertile fields of Lombardy so effectively that three years later English ambassadors described that terrain as “the most pitiable country that ever was in Christendom.”33 In Milan the imperial commander was now Charles, Duke of Bourbon; created constable of France for bravery at Marignano, he had turned against Francis when the King’s mother, as he felt, had cheated him of his proper lands; he went over to the Emperor, shared in defeating Francis at Pavia, and was made Duke of Milan. Now, to raise and pay another army for Charles, he taxed the Milanese literally to death. He wrote to the Emperor that he had drained the city of its blood. His soldiers, quartered upon the inhabitants, so abused them with theft, brutality, and rape that many Milanese hanged themselves, or threw themselves from high places into the streets.34 Early in February, 1527, Bourbon led his army out of Milan, and united it with Frundsberg’s near Piacenza. The conglomerate horde, now numbering nearly 22,000 men, moved east along the Via Emilia, avoiding the fortified cities, but pillaging as it went, and leaving the countryside empty behind it.