When it became clear to Clement that he had no sufficient forces with which to stop these invaders, he appealed to Lannoy to arrange a truce. The Viceroy came up from Naples, and drew up terms for a truce of eight months: Clement and the Colonna ceased their war and exchanged their conquests, and the Pope provided 60,000 ducats with which to bribe Frundsberg’s army to stay out of the Papal States. Then, nearing the end of his funds, and supposing that Frundsberg and Bourbon would honor an agreement signed by the imperial Viceroy, Clement reduced his Roman army to three hundred men. But Bourbon’s brigands shrieked with fury when they heard the terms of the truce. For four months they had endured a thousand hardships only in the hope of plundering Rome; most of them were now in rags, many were shoeless, all were hungry, none was paid; they refused to be bought off with a miserable 60,000 ducats, of which they knew only a small part would trickle down to them. Fearing that Bourbon would sign the truce, they besieged his tent, crying, “Pay! pay!” He hid himself elsewhere, and they plundered his tent. Frundsberg tried to calm them, but was stricken with apoplexy in the course of his appeal; he played no further part in the campaign, and died a year later. Bourbon took command, but only by agreeing to march on Rome. On March 29 he sent messages to Lannoy and Clement that he could not hold back his men, and that the truce was perforce at an end.
Now at last Rome realized that it was the intended and helpless prey. On Holy Thursday (April 8), when Clement was giving his blessing to a crowd of 10,000 persons before St. Peter’s, a fanatic clad only in a leather apron mounted the statue of St. Paul and shouted to the Pope: “Thou bastard of Sodom! For thy sins Rome shall be destroyed. Repent and turn thee! If thou wilt not believe me, in fourteen days thou shalt see.” On Easter Eve this wild eremite—Bartolommeo Carosi, called Brandano—went through the streets crying, “Rome, do penance! They shall deal with thee as God dealt with Sodom and Gomorrah.”35
Bourbon, perhaps hoping to satisfy his men with the enlarged sum, sent to Clement a demand for 240,000 ducats; Clement replied that he could not possibly raise such a ransom. The horde marched to Florence; but the Duke of Urbino, Guicciardini, and the Marquis of Saluzzo had brought in enough troops to man its fortifications effectively; the horde turned away baffled, and took the road to Rome. Clement, finding no salvation in truce, rejoined the League of Cognac against Charles, and implored the help of France. He appealed to the rich men of Rome to contribute to a fund for defense; they responded gingerly, and suggested that a better plan would be to sell red hats. Clement had not hitherto sold appointments to the college of cardinals, but when Bourbon’s army reached Viterbo, only forty-two miles from Rome, he yielded, and sold six nominations. Before the nominees could pay, the Pope could see, from the windows of the Vatican, the hungry swarm advancing across the Neronian Fields. He had now some 4000 soldiers to protect Rome from an attacking host of 20,000 men.
On May 6 Bourbon’s multitude approached the walls under cover of fog. They were repelled by a fusillade; Bourbon himself was hit, and died almost instantly. But the assailants could not be deterred from repeated attack; their alternatives were to capture Rome or starve. They found a weakly defended position; they broke through it, and poured into the city. The Roman militia and the Swiss Guards fought bravely, but were annihilated. Clement, most of the resident cardinals, and hundreds of officials fled to Sant’ Angelo, whence Cellini and others tried to stop the invasion with artillery fire. But the swarm entered from a confusing variety of directions; some were hidden by the fog; others so mingled with fugitives that the Castle cannon could not strike them without killing the demoralized populace. Soon the invaders had the city at their mercy.
As they rushed on through the streets they killed indiscriminately any man, woman, or child that crossed their path. Their bloodthirst aroused, they entered the hospital and orphanage of Santo Spirito, and slaughtered nearly all the patients. They marched into St. Peter’s and slew the people who had sought sanctuary there. They pillaged every church and monastery they could find, and turned some into stables; hundreds of priests, monks, bishops, and archbishops were killed. St. Peter’s and the Vatican were rifled from top to bottom, and horses were tethered in Raphael’s stanze.36 Every dwelling in Rome was plundered, and many were burned, with two exceptions: the Cancelleria, occupied by Cardinal Colonna, and the Palazzo Colonna, in which Isabella d’ Este and some rich merchants had sought asylum; these paid 50,000 ducats to leaders of the mob for freedom from attack, and then took two thousand refugees within their walls. Every palace paid ransoms for protection, only to face later attacks from other packs, and pay ransom again. In most houses all the occupants were required to ransom their lives at a stated price; if they did not pay they were tortured; thousands were killed; children were flung from high windows to pry parental savings from secrecy; some streets were littered with dead. The millionaire Domenico Massimi saw his sons slain, his daughter raped, his house burned, and then was himself murdered. “In the whole city,” says one account, “there was not a soul above three years of age who had not to purchase his safety.”37
Of the victorious mob half were Germans, of whom most had been convinced that the popes and cardinals were thieves, and that the wealth of the Church in Rome was a theft from the nations, and a scandal to the world. To reduce this scandal they seized all movable ecclesiastical valuables, including sacred vessels and works of art, and carried them off for melting or ransom or sale; relics, however, they left scattered on the floor. One soldier dressed himself as a pope; others put on cardinals’ hats and kissed his feet; a crowd at the Vatican proclaimed Luther pope. The Lutherans among the invaders took especial delight in robbing cardinals, exacting high ransoms from them as the price of their lives, and teaching them new rituals. Some cardinals, says Guicciardini, “were set upon scrubby beasts, riding with their faces backward, in the habits and ensigns of their dignity, and were led about all Rome with the greatest derision and contempt. Some, unable to raise all the ransom demanded, were so tortured that they died there and then, or within a few days.”38 One cardinal was lowered into a grave and was told that he would be buried alive unless ransom were brought within a stated time; it came at the last moment.39 Spanish and German cardinals, who thought themselves safe from their own countrymen, were treated like the rest. Nuns and respectable women were violated in situ, or were carried off to promiscuous brutality in the various shelters of the horde.40 Women were assaulted before the eyes of their husbands or fathers. Many young women, despondent after being raped, drowned themselves in the Tiber.41
The destruction of books, archives, and art was immense. Philibert, Prince of Orange, who had succeeded to the quasi command of the undisciplined horde, saved the Vatican Library by making it his headquarters, but many monastic and private libraries went up in flames, and many precious manuscripts disappeared. The University of Rome was ransacked, and its staff was scattered. The scholar Colocci saw his house burned to the ground with his collections of manuscripts and art. Baldus, a professor, saw his newly written commentary on Pliny used to light a camp fire for the pillagers. The poet Marone lost his poems, but was comparatively fortunate; the poet Paolo Bombasi was killed. The scholar Cristoforo Marcello was tortured by having one fingernail after another pulled out; the scholars Francesco Fortuno and Juan Valdes slew themselves in despair.42 The artists Perino del Vaga, Marcantonio Raimondi, and many others were tortured and robbed of all that they had. The school of Raphael was finally dispersed.
The number of deaths cannot be calculated. Two thousand corpses were thrown into the Tiber from the Vatican side of Rome; 9800 dead were buried; there were unquestionably many more fatalities. A low estimate places the thefts at over a million ducats, the ransoms at three million; Clement judged the total loss at ten million ($125,000,000?).43
The sack lasted eight days, while Clement looked on from the towers of Sant’ Angelo. He cried out to God like tortured Job: Quare de vulva eduxisti me? qui utinam consumptus essem, ne oculus videret— “Wh
y didst Thou take me out of the womb? Would that I had been consumed, that no eye had seen me!”44 He ceased to shave, and never shaved again. He remained a prisoner in the Castle from May 6 to December 7, 1527, hoping that rescue would come from the army of the Duke of Urbino, or from Francis I, or Henry VIII. Charles, still in Spain, was glad to hear that Rome had been taken, but was shocked when he heard of the savagery of the sack; he disclaimed responsibility for the excesses, but took full advantage of the Pope’s helplessness. On June 6 his representatives, possibly without his knowledge, compelled Clement to sign a humiliating peace. The Pope agreed to pay over to them and the imperialist army 400,000 ducats; to surrender to Charles the cities of Piacenza, Parma, and Modena, and the castles of Ostia, Cività Vecchia, Cività Castellana, and Sant’ Angelo itself; he was to remain a prisoner there until the first 150,000 ducats had been delivered, and was then to be removed to Gaeta or Naples until Charles should determine what to do with him. All those in Sant’ Angelo were allowed to depart except Clement and the thirteen cardinals who had accompanied him. Spanish and German soldiers were put in charge of the Castle, and kept the Pope nearly always confined in a narrow apartment. “They have not left him ten scudi worth of property,” wrote Guicciardini on June 21.45 All the silver and gold that he had salvaged in his flight was surrendered to his captors, to make up 100,000 ducats of his ransom.
In the meantime Alfonso of Ferrara seized Reggio and Modena (to which Ferrara had age-long rights), and Venice took Ravenna. Florence expelled the Medici a third time, and proclaimed Jesus Christ king of the new republic. The whole edifice of the papacy, material and spiritual, seemed to be collapsing into a tragic ruin that awoke the pity even of those who felt that some punishment was deserved by the infidelities of Clement, the sins of the papacy, the greed and corruption of the Curia, the luxury of the hierarchy, and the iniquity of Rome. Sadoleto, peaceful in Carpentras, heard with horror of Rome’s fall, and mourned the passing of those halcyon days when Bembo and Castiglione and Isabella and a hundred scholars and poets and patrons had made the wicked city the home and summit of the thought and art of the age. And Erasmus wrote to Sadoleto: “Rome was not alone the shrine of the Christian faith, the nurse of noble souls, and the abode of the Muses, but the mother of nations. To how many was she not dearer and sweeter and more precious than their own land!… In truth this is not the ruin of one city, but of the whole world.”46
VIII. CHARLES TRIUMPHANT: 1527–30
Plague had visited Rome in 1522, and had reduced its population to 55,000; murder, suicide, and flight must have reduced it below 40,000 in 1527; now, in July of that year, plague came back in the full heat of summer, and joined with famine and the continued presence of the ravaging horde to make Rome a city of horror, terror, and desolation. Churches and streets were littered anew with corpses; many of these were left to rot in the sun; the stench was so strong that the jailers and prisoners fled from the castle parapets to their rooms; even there many died of the infection, among them some servants of the Pope. The impartial plague struck the invaders too; 2500 Germans in Rome died by July 22, 1527; and malaria, syphilis, and malnutrition cut the horde in half.
The opponents of Charles began seriously to think of rescuing the Pope. Henry VIII, fearing that an imprisoned pontiff might not grant him a divorce from Catherine of Aragon, sent Cardinal Wolsey to France to confer with Francis on measures to liberate Clement. Early in August the two kings offered Charles peace and 2,000,000 ducats on condition that the Pope and the French princes should be freed, and that the Papal States should be restored to the Church. Charles refused. By the treaty of Amiens (August 18) Henry and Francis pledged themselves to war against Charles; soon Venice and Florence joined this new league. French forces captured Genoa and Pavia, and sacked the latter city almost as thoroughly as the imperialist army had sacked Rome. Mantua and Ferrara, dreading the present French more than the distant Charles, now joined the league. Nevertheless Lautrec, the French commander, unable to pay his troops, dared not march upon Rome.
The Emperor, hoping to restore his grace in Catholic Christendom, and to cool the ardor of the growing league, agreed to release the Pope, on condition that Clement should give no aid to the league, should at once pay the imperialist army in Rome 112,000 ducats, and should give hostages for his good behavior. Clement raised the money by selling red hats, and by granting the Emperor a tenth of ecclesiastical revenues in the Kingdom of Naples. On December 7, after seven months of confinement, Clement left Sant’ Angelo, and, disguised as a servant, made his way humbly out of Rome to Orvieto, apparently a broken man.
At Orvieto he was lodged in a dilapidated palace whose roof had cavea in, whose walls were bare and cracked, whose floors admitted a hundred draughts. English ambassadors visiting him to get Henry a divorce found him huddled in bed, his pale emaciated face half lost in a long and unkempt beard. He spent the winter there, and then moved to Viterbo. On February 17 the imperialist horde, having received from Clement all that he could pay, and fearing further decimation by disease, evacuated Rome and moved south to Naples. Lautrec now brought his army down with the hope of besieging Naples; but his own troops were thinned out by malaria, he himself died, and his disordered forces retreated to the north (August 29, 1528). Losing all hope of aid from the league, Clement offered his full surrender to Charles; and on October 6 he was allowed to re-enter Rome. Four fifths of the houses had been abandoned, thousands of buildings were in ruins; men were amazed to see what nine months of invasion had done to the capital of Christendom.
Charles seems to have thought for a while of deposing Clement, annexing the Papal States to the Kingdom of Naples, making Rome the seat of his empire, and reducing the pope to his primeval role as bishop of Rome and subject to the emperor.47 But this would drive Charles into the arms of the Lutherans in Germany, would court civil war in Spain, and would arouse France, England, Poland, and Hungary to resist him with their full and united power. He abandoned the scheme, and turned to the idea of making the papacy his dependent ally and spiritual aid in dividing Italy between them. By the treaty of Barcelona (June 29, 1529) he made substantial concessions to the Pope: the principalities taken from the Church were to be restored; the Medici relatives of the Pope were to be re-established in Florence by diplomacy or force; even Ferrara was now promised to the Pope. In return the Pope agreed to give Charles the formal investiture of Naples, to allow the imperial armies free passage through the Papal States, and to meet the Emperor at Bologna in the following year to settle between them the peace and organization of Italy.
Shortly thereafter Margaret, aunt of Charles and Regent of the Netherlands, met with Louise of Savoy, mother of Francis, and, with the aid of various ambassadors and legates, formulated the treaty of Cambrai (August 3, 1529) between Emperor and King. Charles released the French princes for a ransom of 1,200,000 ducats; Francis renounced for France all claims to Italy, Flanders, Artois, Arras, and Tournai.48 The allies of France in Italy were left to the mercy of the Emperor.
Charles and Clement met at Bologna on November 5, 1529, each now convinced that he needed the other. Strange to say, this was Charles’s first visit to Italy; he had conquered it before seeing it. When he knelt before the Pope at Bologna, and kissed the foot of the man whom he had dragged in the dust, it was the first time that these two figures—the one representing the Church in decline, the other the rising and here victorious modern state—had ever seen each other. Clement swallowed all pride, forgave all offenses; he had to. He could no longer look to France; Charles had irresistible armies in both southern and northern Italy; Florence could not be recovered for the Medici without imperial troops; the aid of the Empire was needed against Luther in Germany, against Suleiman in the East. Charles was generous and prudent: he kept essentially to the terms of the Barcelona agreement made when he was not so unchallengeably strong. He forced Venice to restore all that she had taken from the Papal States. He allowed Francesco Maria Sforza, on paying a large indemnity, to keep ruin
ed Milan under imperial watching; and he persuaded Clement to allow the cowardly or faithless Francesco Maria della Rovere to keep Urbino. He forgave Alfonso his recent association with France, and rewarded him for aiding the march on Rome by letting him retain his duchy as a papal fief, and giving him Modena and Reggio as imperial fiefs; in return Alfonso paid the Pope 100,000 badly needed ducats. To consolidate these settlements Charles summoned all the principalities to join in a union of Italy for common defense against foreign attack—except by Charles; that unity for which Dante had pled to the Emperor Henry VII, and Petrarch to the Emperor Charles IV, was now achieved through united subjection to a foreign power. Clement blessed it all, and crowned Charles Emperor with the iron crown of Lombardy and the imperial-papal crown of the Holy Roman Empire (February 22–24, 1530).
The alliance of Pope and Emperor was sealed with Florentine blood. Resolved to restore his family to power, Clement paid 70,000 ducats to Philibert, Prince of Orange (who had kept him prisoner), to organize an army and overturn the republic of rich men that had been set up there in 1527. Philibert sent on this mission 20,000 German and Spanish troops, many of whom had shared in the sack of Rome.49 In December, 1529, this force occupied Pistoia and Prato, and laid siege to Florence. To expose the assailants to Florentine artillery the resolute burghers destroyed every house, garden, and wall for a mile around the city fortifications; and Michelangelo left his sculpture of the Medici tombs to build or rebuild the ramparts and forts. The siege continued mercilessly for eight months; food became so scarce in Florence that cats and rats brought some $12.50 apiece.50 Churches surrendered their vessels, citizens their plate, women their jewelry, to be transformed into money for provisions or arms. Patriotic monks like Fra Benedetto da Foiano kept up the spirit of the people with fiery sermons. A courageous Florentine, Francesco Ferrucci, escaped from the city, organized a force of three thousand men, and attacked the besiegers. He was defeated with the loss of two thousand of his soldiers. He himself was captured and brought before Fabrizio Maramaldi, a Calabrian who commanded the imperial cavalry. Maramaldi had Ferrucci held helpless before him while he repeatedly drove a poignard into him until the hero died.51 Meanwhile the general whom Florence had hired to lead its defense, Malatesta Baglioni, entered into a treacherous agreement with the besiegers; he let them into the city, and turned his guns upon the Florentines. Starving and disorganized, the republic surrendered (August 12, 1530).