TEN
Martin Luther had come to Rome in 1510 on business for his Order. Shocked by what he saw, he was confirmed in his belief that the Church must be radically reformed. The city itself disappointed him: it was hard to recognize ‘the footprints of ancient Rome, as the old buildings were now buried beneath the new, so deep lieth the rubbish, as is plain to see by the Tiber, since it hath banks of rubbish as high as twice the length of a soldier's spear’. He found the Renaissance atmosphere of the city thoroughly distasteful. He loathed Aristotle, yet here men considered him almost on a par with the Fathers of the Church; and they seemed to consider such ornamentations as those in Raphael's Stanze, in which Christian and pagan themes mingled in outrageous harmony, as worthy of regard and study as Holy Writ. They equated beauty with goodness; they supposed the pursuit of happiness on earth could be reconciled with the hope of eternal salvation. While the Pope went ‘triumphing about with fair-decked stallions, priests gabbled Mass’. ‘By the time I had reached the gospel,’ Luther complained, ‘the priest next to me had already finished and was shouting, “Come on, finish it, hurry up!”’ He had been thankful to return to Germany.
Pope Leo had eventually excommunicated Luther and had hoped that the supremely powerful Emperor Charles V, who was also King of Spain and Naples as well as ruler of the Netherlands, would, as a good Roman Catholic, bring the heretic to trial and have him executed. Although there would have been strong opposition in Germany to such a drastic move against the Reformation, the Emperor was prepared to act against Luther provided he obtained something in exchange: he asked for the support of the papacy in his intended attack against France's remaining possessions in Italy, including Milan which King Francis I had seized in 1515. A bargain was struck. The Emperor's army marched against the forces of Francis I, Milan was occupied and the French were obliged to retreat towards the Alps. The French King, however, had never supposed that once papal affairs were in the hands of the suspicious and hesitant Medici, Clement VII, the understanding between the papacy and the Emperor would remain secure; and he was right. After repeated changes in his vacillating and convoluted policies, the Pope did decide to ally himself with France; but this naturally antagonized Charles V who, having defeated the French once more, took action to forestall the threatened anti-imperial league.
As a first step he instructed his envoy, Ugo di Moncada, to approach the unruly Cardinal Pompeo Colonna, who had vociferously opposed Clement VII's election in the hope of becoming pope himself. Colonna was easily persuaded to raise a strong force of mercenaries and retainers, to march through the Borgo and to attack and pillage the apostolic palace as a self-styled deliverer of Rome from papal tyranny. Driven to seek safety by flight into Castel Sant’ Angelo, Pope Clement was further humiliated by being compelled to sign a treaty abandoning the anti-imperial alliance and pardoning Colonna. But as soon as he could, he broke the treaty, sent papal troops to ravage the Colonna estates, declared the family outlaws and all their titles forfeit. In a rage so intense that he trembled at the very mention of Pope Clement's name, Cardinal Colonna offered the services of all the men he could muster to Charles V's viceroy at Naples.
These were not the only enemies that Clement's faithless and irresolute policies had raised up against the papacy. For a huge army of German Landsknechte, mostly Lutherans, assembled by the Emperor's brother, Ferdinand of Austria, had marched across the Alps, declaring their determination to wreak vengeance upon the Roman anti-Christ. Led by the fat old veteran, Georg von Frundsberg, and undeterred by torrential rain and blinding snowstorms, they advanced into Lombardy, and defeated and killed the skilfulcondottiere, Giovanni delle Bande Nere, head of the junior branch of the House of Medici. Joined in February 1527 at Piacenza by the main body of the Emperor's army of Spaniards, Italians and an international force of lancers under the renegade Constable of France, Charles, Duke of Bourbon, the German Landsknechte converged upon Rome.
Warned by his secretary, Gian-Matteo Giberti, that they were ‘on the brink of ruin’, the Pope tried to come to terms with the commanders of the advancing armies, now well over 20,000 strong. The prospect of a large indemnity tempted them; but theLandsknechte refused to be denied the opportunities of pillage. They rounded upon their leaders, shouting that they would not go back until they had had their way with Rome; and in the tumultuous uproar Georg von Frundsberg was seized with a fit of apoplexy and had to be carried off helpless to Ferrara. The march then continued under the nervous direction of the Duke of Bourbon who was as much the servant as the master of the undisciplined, heterogeneous forces he commanded. These forces, half-starved, their ragged uniforms soaked by torrents of rain and the swirling waters of the mountain streams through which they stumbled, holding hands in gangs of thirty, drew ever nearer to Rome, excited by thoughts of plunder.
Rome was certainly an easy prey to any large band of marauders. The sprawling walls, constantly repaired but never now formidable, still enclosed the huge area occupied by the capital of the ancient Empire. Unlike other large early-sixteenth-century towns in Italy, within the city walls were vineyards and gardens, waste grounds and thickets in which deer and wild boar sought shelter, villas and shapeless ruins covered with ivy and eglantine from whose dense foliage pigeons clattered out in their hundreds. The wooded hills of the Palatine, the Caelian and
34. Imperial troops parody a papal procession and blessing during the Sack of Rome.
the Aventine were dotted with farmhouses and convents and with those crumbling monuments that had served as quarries for many generations. West of the immense bulk of the Colosseum sprawled the long, marshy, scrub-covered expanse of the Campo Vaccino with only a few columns of antique temples to indicate that this cowherds' pastureland had once been the classic Forum. The Capitol, bristling with towers and battlements, and the fortified ruins in the valley below were awesome reminders of the lawlessness and family feuds of the recent medieval past. Indeed, Rome was still essentially a medieval city. Since the dawn of the Renaissance many fine new churches had been built in Rome, among them S. Maria del Popolo, S. Agostino, as well as S. Giovanni dei Fiorentini and S. Pietro in Montorio. Splendid new palaces and villas had been built in the city too, apart from the Palazzo della Cancelleria, the Venezia, the Farnese and the Villa Madama. In the Borgo were the Palazzo Soderini, the Penitenzieri1and the Palazzo Castelli (Giraud-Torlonia). Across the river in the Ponte Rione were the Palazzo Lante ai Caprettari,2 the Palazzo Cicciaporci3 and the Palazzo Cenci.4 In the nearby district of Parione were the palaces of the Massimi.5 And in the area, at that time open, between the Porta S. Spirito which led into the Borgo and the Porta Settimiana which was the entrance into Trastevere, Baldassare Peruzzi had built a splendid villa for Agostino Chigi.6
Yet the Rome which lay between the Corso and the Tiber and in the transpontine quarter of Trastevere, the Rome in which most of its people still lived, was the Rome of the Middle Ages, a Rome of alleys and dark lanes, a maze of courts and passages with the occasional church and fortress rising above the little houses that crowded down to the river where they overhung the muddy waters and could be entered by boat.
In this part of Rome, and in the Ponte Rione where could be found the houses of the bankers and merchants, jewellers and silversmiths, booksellers and courtesans, lived and worked most of the fifty to sixty thousand people of Rome. A large proportion of these inhabitants were foreigners, many of them Jews living in the rioni of Regola, Ripa and Sant’ Angelo; about seven thousand of them were Spaniards; and some were French, several of these congregating in the streets leading off Piazza Navona where they carried on business as pastrycooks and confectioners. There was also a numerous German community working in inns and butchers’ shops and in the printing industry which had been originated in Rome by their fellow-countrymen in the previous century.
Foreigners and natives alike were mostly occupied in making or supplying the ordinary needs of life; few were now craftsmen. Many, about three in every hundred, lived by prostitution, either by the arts and skills of a courtesan such as the lovely Clarice Matrema-non-Vuole who could recite by heart all Petrarch and most of Virgil and Ovid, or by the earthier charms of girls like the one who gave Benvenuto Cellini syphilis.
The cosmopolitan nature of Rome's population added to the problems of the city's defence. Many citizens believed that they might just as well be ruled by the international Emperor as by the Italian Pope who had, in any case, made himself extremely unpopular by the financial measures which his circumstances had forced upon him. Indeed, the caporioni had such difficulty in persuading the able-bodied men of their districts to turn out in obedience to the tapping of the drum that only six out of the thirteen rioni could produce a muster at all; and many of those on parade were of doubtful use, the most trustworthy having already been appropriated for the protection of private property. Even to close the bridges proved an impossible task, for Renzo da Ceri, the experiencedcondottiere appointed to lead the defence, was prevented from doing so by Roman people whose business interests required them to be left open.
The Pope seemed as paralysed by indecision as the Roman people were indifferent to his fate. The imperialist army was almost within sight of the gates before he asked for financial help from the Commune – and was told that he could have it only if he raised twice as much elsewhere. It was not until a week after this that he raised money himself by selling cardinalates to six rich men – and making more fuss over this, so Francesco Guicciardini, his lieutenant-general, said, ‘than over ruining the papacy and the whole world’. And it was not until 4 May, when the enemy were advancing up Monte Mario and his villa there was being taken over for officers' quarters, that he summoned the Great Council of Rome to a meeting in the Church of S. Maria d'Aracoeli where he assured them unconvincingly that the crisis would be over in a few days but that in the meantime the citizens must do their best to defend themselves.
His commander, Renzo da Ceri, had already reinforced the weakest parts of the Leonine Wall and had erected defensive works inside the Vatican; but with so few troops at his disposal, he had little hope of keeping the enemy out of a city whose delegates would have attempted to negotiate a separate peace had he allowed them to leave it. With only 8,000 armed men, including 2,000 Swiss Guards and 2, 000 former members of Giovanni de' Medici's Bande Nere, he awaited the arrival of the inevitable herald from the imperialist camp as the bell on the Capitol rang the tocsin throughout the night.
The herald's demand for surrender and the payment of a huge indemnity was recognized by both sides as nothing more than a customary preliminary to the assault which Bourbon could not have prevented his hungry, half-naked men from launching even had he wanted to. When he spoke to them before the attack, ‘he had not even reached the end of his oration’, so one of his officers recorded, ‘before an excited and joyful murmur began to fill the camp, from which it could be guessed that for that multitude every hour to be endured before the assault would seem like a century’.
The inevitable attack began at about four o'clock in the morning of 6 May 1527 with an outburst of harquebus fire on both sides. An assault on the wall between Porta del Torrione and Porta S. Spirito and two diversionary feints were made at the same time upon the Belvedere and Porta Pertusa. This first assault was repulsed with heavy losses; but then a thick mist arose from the Tiber, and the defenders, their artillery now virtually useless, were reduced to throwing rocks, shouting at their unseen enemy, ‘Jews and infidels, half-castes, Lutherans’, and to letting off the occasional shot.
One of these stray shots from a harquebus hit the Duke of Bourbon who was carried away dying to a nearby chapel by the Prince of Orange, an adventurer in the Emperor's service. The news of Bourbon's death caused elation among the defenders, who left their posts and dashed through the streets of the Borgo crying, ‘Victory! Victory!’ It also caused momentary despondency in the imperialist ranks. But the Germans and Spaniards soon rallied and, having mounted scaling-ladders made from vine poles under cover of the thick mist, they were soon clambering over the breaches and, vastly superior in numbers, were pushing the defenders back. The Swiss Guards fought bravely and so did some of the Roman militia, the Bande Nere and the students of the Collegio Capranicense7 who had dashed to the defence of the walls and had all been killed. But many of the papal troops either deserted to the enemy or joined the crowds struggling to escape across the Tiber over the bridges, on which scores of people were crushed to death, or in overloaded boats that capsized, throwing many more into the river.
The Pope ran for safety along the stone corridor that led from the Vatican to Castel Sant’ Angelo, glancing down through the apertures at the havoc below, his skirts held up by the Bishop of Nocera so that he could run the faster. ‘I flung my own purple cloak about his head and shoulders,’ the Bishop said, ‘lest some Barbarian rascal in the crowd below might recognize the Pope by his white rochet, as he was passing a window, and take a chance shot at his fleeing form.’ Thirteen cardinals and some three thousand fugitives also reached the castle; but others, desperately trying to reach safety before it was too late, were caught on the drawbridge as it was raised and fell into the moat.
Rome was now at the mercy of the imperialist troops. Gian d'Urbina, the cruel and arrogant commander of the Spanish infantry, infuriated by a pike wound in the face inflicted by a Swiss Guard, rampaged through the Borgo, followed by his men, killing everyone they came across. ‘All were cut to pieces, even if unarmed,’ wrote an eyewitness, ‘even in those places that Attila and Genseric, although the most cruel of men, had in former times treated with religious respect.’ The Hospital of S. Spirito was broken into, and nearly all those who were cared for there were slaughtered or thrown into the Tiber alive. The orphans of the Pietà were also killed. Convicts from the prisons were set free to join in the massacre, mutilation and pillage.
The imperialists stormed over the Ponte Sisto and continued their savagery in the heart of the city. The doors of churches and convents, of palaces, monasteries and workshops were smashed open and the contents hurled into the streets. Tombs were broken open, including that of Julius II, and the corpses stripped of jewels and vestments. The Sancta Sanctorum was sacked; the Host stamped and spat upon; relics and crucifixes ridiculed or used as targets by harquebusiers. The head of St Andrew was cast contemptuously to the ground and that of St John kicked about the streets as a football. The Holy Lance that had speared Christ's side and had been presented to Innocent VIII was paraded through the streets of the Borgo on the spear of a German soldier; St Veronica's handkerchief was offered for sale in an inn; the Emperor Constantine's golden cross was stolen and never recovered; so were the tiara of Nicholas I and the Golden Rose of Martin V. Romans who took shelter in churches were slaughtered out of hand. ‘Even on the high altar of St Peter's,’ according to one contemporary account, ‘five hundred men were massacred, as holy relics were burned or destroyed.’
Men were tortured to reveal the hiding-places of their possessions or to pay ransoms for the sparing of their lives, one merchant being tied to a tree and having a fingernail wrenched out each day because he could not pay the money demanded.
Many were suspended for hours by the arms [wrote Francesco Guicciardini's brother, Luigi]; many were cruelly bound by the genitals; many were suspended by the feet high above the road or over the river, while their tormentors threatened to cut the cord. Some were half buried in the cellars; others were nailed up in casks or villainously beaten and wounded; not a few were branded all over their persons with red-hot irons. Some were tortured by extreme thirst, others by insupportable noise and many were cruelly tortured by having their teeth brutally drawn. Others again were forced to eat their own ears, or nose, or their roasted testicles and yet more were subjected to strange, unheard-of martyrdoms that move me too much even to think of, much less describe.
The Spaniards were the most brutal, it was generally agreed. ‘In the destruction of Rome the Germans were bad enough, the Italians were worse, but worst of all were the Spaniards.’ They practised ‘unheard-of tortures to force their victims to disclose where they had hidden their treasures’. And they were not always successful, it seems; years afterwards casks and vessels of buried money were discovered, suggesting that the owners had died before they could recover them.
Those who professed to support the imperial cause suffered with the rest, and none was safe from capture and demands for ransom. Neither S. Giacomo,8 the Spanish church in the Piazza Navona, nor the church of the Germans, S. Maria dell' Anima,9 was spared. Nor was the palace of the imperial ambassador, where two hundred refugees were hidden, nor the Palazzo dei SS. Apostoli,10 which was occupied by the mother of one of the imperial commanders, Ferrante Gonzaga. Over two thousand people, more than half of them women, who had been given refuge in the Palazzo dei SS. Apostoli, were made to pay ransom. Most officers had little authority over their men and stood by helpless when they did not condone, encourage or even participate in the atrocities: one German commander boasted his intention of eviscerating the Pope once he had laid his hands on him.
Some priests were, indeed, eviscerated. Others were stripped naked and forced to utter blasphemies on pain of death or to take part in profane travesties of the Mass. One priest was murdered by Lutherans when he refused to administer Holy Communion to an ass. Cardinal Cajetan was dragged through the streets in chains, insulted and tortured; Cardinal Ponzetti, who was over eighty years old, shared his sufferings and, having parted with 20,000 ducats, died from the injuries inflicted upon him. Nuns, like other women, were violated, sold in the streets at auction and used as counters in games of chance. Mothers and fathers were forced to watch and even to assist at the multiple rape of their daughters. Convents became brothels into which women of the upper classes were dragged and stripped. ‘Marchionesses, countesses and baronesses,’ wrote the Sieur de Brantôme, ‘served the unruly troops, and for long afterwards the patrician women of the city were known as “the relics of the Sack of Rome”.’
As the invaders grew exhausted by their excesses, Cardinal Pompeo Colonna rode into Rome with two thousand followers on 7 May. Moved to tears by the sight of Rome, he opened his palazzo as a place of refuge, and did what he could to control his men – but they too were uncontrollable. They ran through the city, eager to plunder anything which the imperialists had disregarded, ‘carrying away even the ironwork of the houses’ and, so the Duchess of Urbino was told, ‘raking together the chattels of the poor’. ‘They were peasants, dying of hunger,’ the Cardinal of Como said, ‘and they sacked and robbed all that the other soldiers had not deigned to harvest.’
The number of people killed in the Sack of Rome was never determined. ‘We took Rome by storm,’ one of the German invaders reported laconically, ‘put over six thousand men to the sword, seized all that we could find in the churches and elsewhere, burned down a great part of the city, tearing apart and destroying all copyists' works, all letters, registers and state documents.’ A Spanish soldier claimed that he had helped to bury almost ten thousand corpses on the north bank of the Tiber and that a further two thousand had been thrown into the river. A Franciscan friar confirmed that twelve thousand people had been killed, and added that many lay unburied. In places they were piled so high they blocked the streets.
By the beginning of June, when St Peter's had been turned into a stable, the church of the Florentines into a barracks and the oratory of the nunnery of S. Cosimato11 into a shambles, when palaces had been stripped bare, the Villa Madama had been almost destroyed and many other houses burned to the ground, when the Sapienza had been ruined and precious libraries and pictures lost for ever, Rome was a city of despair. Through it the stench of ordure and of decaying corpses was wafted by the early summer breeze and, mingling with the noxious smell of open drains and sewers, aggravated an epidemic of plague.
In Rome, the chief city of Christendom [a Spaniard wrote], no bells ring, no churches are open, no Masses are said, Sundays and feast-days have ceased. Many houses are burned to the ground; in others the doors and windows are broken and carried away; the streets are changed into dunghills. The stench of dead bodies is terrible; men and beasts have a common grave and in the churches I have seen corpses that dogs have gnawed. In the public places tables are set close together at which piles of ducats are gambled for. The air rings with blasphemies fit to make good men – if such there be – wish that they were deaf. I know nothing wherewith I can compare it, except it be the destruction of Jerusalem. I do not believe that if I lived for two hundred years I should see the like again.
From the windows of Castel Sant' Angelo which Benvenuto Cellini, according to his own fantastic account, saved virtually single-handed by his own ‘unimaginable energy and zeal’, Pope Clement looked out repeatedly for some sign that the army of the anti-imperial league was on its way across the Campagna to his relief. But each day he was disappointed, for the army, commanded by the Duke of Urbino, a general of unsurpassed prudence, remained rooted in Isola Farnese about ten miles north of Rome; and by 7 June the Pope had made up his mind he must capitulate. Required to surrender large areas of papal territory, he was not permitted to leave the castle until an immense ransom had been paid, and months passed while wearisome negotiations were conducted. In December the imperial troops, driven out of the city by plague and hunger, returned after plundering the Campagna. They threatened to hang their captains and cut the Pope to pieces if they did not receive their arrears of pay. When he heard this the Pope decided he must try to escape without delay; and on 7 December, with the connivance of an imperialist commander, he managed to do so. Disguised as a servant in a cloak and hood with a basket over his arm and an empty sack on his shoulder, he made his way to the episcopal palace at Orvieto, where an embassy from Henry VIII of England, which had sought him out to obtain his authority for the King's divorce from Catherine of Aragon, found him ‘in an old palace of the bishops of the city, ruinous and decayed… the chambers all naked and unhanged and the roofs fallen down’.
Beset by worry, pitiably thin and shrunken, almost blind in one eye, his liver diseased and the pale skin of his bearded face tinged with yellow, the Pope remained at Orvieto, while the imperial troops continued to occupy Rome. It was not until 11 February 1528 that, their arrears paid at last, they moved out; and not until October that the Pope rode back to the Vatican.
It was a devastated city that he saw. ‘Rome is finished,’ decided Ferrante Gonzaga the day after the Pope's return. ‘Four fifths of it is quite uninhabited.’ It was estimated that over 30,000 houses had been destroyed – almost as many as remained – and those that did still stand faced out upon streets filled with rubble and, even now, with the stench of putrefaction. The population had been reduced by half, and most of those who still lived in the city were compelled to live on charity. Trade had come to a halt; shops were deserted. Only three of Rome's more than a hundred apothecaries and herbalists still carried on business and it was believed that as many as 12,000,000 gold ducats had been lost. Much had been saved, of course. Philip of Orange, who had taken up quarters in the Vatican (where he was robbed by Landsknechte), managed, by posting reliable guards, to ensure that the Vatican Library and Raphael's Stanze were kept from harm. The body of the Duke of Bourbon which was laid in the Sistine Chapel helped to protect the paintings there. Many relics were preserved by being buried in secret places. But the catalogue of losses, which included the Raphael tapestries in the Vatican and the stained-glass windows of Guillaume de Marcillat in St Peter's, made mournful reading. So did the list of scholars and artists who had left Rome for other cities.
Parmigiano had fled to Bologna where he was joined by the philosopher Lodovico Boccadifferro and the engraver Marcantonio Raimondi. Giovanni da Udine, who had helped Raphael with the Vatican Loggie and the Villa Madama, had returned to Udine. Vicenzio da San Gimignano had returned to Florence; and Giovanni Battista Rosso Fiorentino settled in Perugia before moving to France. Polidoro da Caravaggio had fled, only to be murdered in Messina. Jacopo Sansovino had left Rome for Venice where he was appointed City Architect. Fabio Calvo, the translator of Vitruvius, Paolo Bombace, the Greek scholar, Paolo Bombasi, the poet and Mariano Castellani, the writer, had all perished in the sack. The grammarian, Julianus Camers, had committed suicide. The poet, Marcantonio Casanova, had been seen begging for bread in the streets before dying of the plague. Peruzzi had been tortured, forced to paint the dead Duke of Bourbon, released, recaptured, tortured again and robbed, before escaping to Siena where he became Architect to the Republic.
The man blamed and vilified for this disastrous dispersion lingered on in the Vatican, ill and almost blind, until, in the late summer of 1534, he contracted a fatal fever. Few mourned for him. He had, so Francesco Vettori said, ‘gone to a great deal of trouble to develop from a great and respected cardinal into a small and little respected pope’. Indeed, his death, so a Roman correspondent informed the Duke of Norfolk, was ‘the cause of rejoicing’ in the city. In St Peter's, where his body lay, intruders transfixed it with a sword and his temporary tomb was smeared with dirt. The inscription beneath it, ‘Clemens Pontifex Maximus’ was obliterated and in its place were written the words ‘Inclemens Pontifex Minimus’. Had it not been for the intervention of his nephew, Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici, the body would have been dragged round the streets on a meat-hook. Rome seemed once more to have returned to the barbarity and desolation of the Dark Ages.