CHAPTER XIV
The deaths of Louis XII and Ferdinand of Aragon within little more than a year of each other brought two young men, still relatively unknown, to the forefront of European affairs. They could hardly have been more unlike. King Francis I of France was twenty years old at the time of his accession and in the first flush of his youth and virility; he would have been a far better husband for young Mary Tudor than his poor cousin Louis, just as she would have been a far better wife for him than was Louis’s prim and pious daughter Claude. He was already an accomplished ladies’ man: not particularly handsome perhaps, but elegant and dashing, with a quick mind, a boundless intellectual curiosity and an unfailing memory which astonished all who knew him. He loved spectacle and ceremonial, pomp and parade; and his people, bored by a long succession of dreary, colourless sovereigns, took him to their hearts.
Charles of Habsburg, born in 1500 to the Emperor Maximilian’s son Philip the Handsome and Ferdinand and Isabella’s daughter Joanna the Mad, had inherited neither of his parents’ primary attributes. His appearance was ungainly, with the characteristically huge Habsburg chin and protruding lower lip; he suffered also from a bad stammer, showering his interlocutors with spittle. He had no imagination, no ideas of his own; few rulers have ever been so utterly devoid of charm. What saved him was his innate goodness of heart and, as he grew older, a tough sagacity and shrewdness. He was also, in his quiet way, quite extraordinarily tenacious, wearing away those who opposed him by sheer determination and endurance. Though by far the most powerful man in the civilised world, he never enjoyed his empire in the way that Francis I enjoyed his kingdom–or, presumably, Leo X his Papacy–and when he finally abandoned his throne for a monastery, few of his subjects can have been greatly surprised.
His inheritance was vast, but it was not all undisputed, nor did it all fall to him at the same time. First came the Low Countries, formerly Burgundian, which his grandfather Maximilian had acquired through marriage to Mary of Burgundy. After the death of his father in 1506 Charles had been brought up by his aunt Margaret of Savoy, regent of the Netherlands; from the age of fifteen he had ruled them himself. Already by that time his mother, Joanna, now hopelessly insane, was being held under the restraint that she was to endure for more than half a century; technically, however, she remained Queen of Castile, while Ferdinand ruled as regent in her name. On Ferdinand’s death, despite her condition, he left her his own crowns of Aragon and the two Sicilies, awarding the regency to Charles. The government of Castile, on the other hand, he entrusted to the octogenarian Cardinal Archbishop of Toledo, Francisco Ximenes–though one of the Archbishop’s first acts was to proclaim Charles king, conjointly with his mother.
The young King who, at the age of seventeen, landed on the coast of Asturias and saw his Spanish kingdom for the first time was still a Netherlander through and through, utterly ignorant of the habits, the customs, even the language of his new subjects. He did not make a good start. The Spaniards saw him as the foreigner he was, and deeply resented the hordes of Flemish officials who now flooded the country. Rebellion was never far below the surface. Ximenes, who had done everything possible to smooth Charles’s path, was elbowed aside by the Flemings and not even allowed a meeting with his new master; he was simply ordered back to his diocese. Two months later he was dead, and Charles was in full authority throughout the country. He did his best, as always; but he was quite unable to control his ambitious and endlessly grasping countrymen, while the Spanish cortes left him in no doubt that he was there on sufferance, and would be tolerated only so long as he did its bidding.
Francis I, at the outset of his reign, had a very much easier hand to play than Charles: his early successes in Italy stand out in sharp contrast to Charles’s first tentative and ill-starred steps in Spain. Francis had revealed his Italian intentions clearly enough when, at his coronation, he had formally assumed the title of Duke of Milan; by July 1515 he had assembled an army of over 100,000 to make good his claim; and on 13 September he and the Venetians together inflicted a crushing defeat on a papal–imperial army–composed largely of Swiss mercenaries–at Marignano (now Melegnano), a few miles south of Milan. Francis himself fought in the thick of the battle, and was knighted on the field by the almost legendary Bayard, the original chevalier sans peur et sans reproche.130 He took formal possession of Milan three weeks later. Then, in December, he met Pope Leo at Bologna where, reluctantly, the Pope surrendered Parma and Piacenza; in the summer of 1516 he made a separate peace with Charles at Noyon, by which Spain recognised his right to Milan in return for French recognition of the Spanish claim to Naples.
His relations with two of the three main protagonists were now satisfactorily settled. There remained the Emperor Maximilian. Now politically isolated, he too was obliged to come to terms with France–and also with Venice, in whose favour he abandoned (in return, it must be said, for a substantial down payment by the Republic) his claims to all those lands that he had been promised at Cambrai, including his cherished Verona. Thus, eight years after the formation of the League, Venice had recovered nearly all her former possessions and resumed her position as the leading secular Italian state. These agreements, if they did not bring permanent peace to Italy, at least afforded a welcome breathing space: the year 1517 was the quietest that most Italians could remember. This is not to say that it was devoid of interest; no year that began with the capture of Cairo by the Turks and ended with Martin Luther’s nailing of his Ninety-Five Theses to the church door at Wittenberg can be written off as easily as that. But the impact of these events, momentous as they were, was not immediate, and the people of Lombardy and the Veneto were able, then and in the twelve months following, to rebuild their shattered homes, resow their devastated fields, and sleep at night untroubled by terrors of marauding armies, of rape and pillage and blood.
Then, on 12 January 1519, the Emperor Maximilian died in his castle at Wels in Upper Austria. The succession of his grandson Charles was by no means a foregone conclusion. The Empire remained elective. There were many who preferred Charles’s younger brother, the Archduke Ferdinand. A still more formidable rival was Francis I–who, in the early stages of his candidature, had the enthusiastic support of the Pope. (Henry VIII of England also at one moment threw his cap into the ring, but no one took him very seriously.) Fortunately for Charles, the German electors hated the idea of a French Emperor; the Fuggers–that hugely rich banking family of Augsburg–lined as many pockets as was necessary; and at the last moment Pope Leo abandoned his opposition. On 28 June Charles was elected, and on 23 October of the following year he was crowned–not in Rome but in the old Carolingian capital of Aachen–as the Emperor Charles V. In addition to the Netherlands and Spain, Naples and Sicily and the New World, there now devolved on him all the old Empire, comprising most of modern Austria, Germany and Switzerland. Milan, Bohemia and western Hungary were to follow a little later. For a man of modest talents and mediocre abilities, here was an inheritance indeed.
Charles’s imperial coronation had repercussions both in Spain and in Europe as a whole. In Spain it vastly increased his popularity. The ruling class of Castile had, as we have seen, at first shown little enthusiasm for the foreign Habsburgs; but when their king was suddenly transmogrified, becoming overnight emperor of half the continent, he acquired a new respect among his subjects, who thenceforth identified themselves with both his dynasty and his destiny. No longer were they relegated to the remote southwestern tip of Europe. Their soldiers fought in Germany and the Netherlands, their writers and philosophers imbued themselves with the new humanism of Erasmus and his followers. At the same time, however, they were acutely conscious of being the one firm rock of Catholic orthodoxy which could support the Church against the heresies that were springing up in the north.
The coronation also completed the polarisation of continental Europe. The King of France was trapped in a vice, virtually encircled by the Empire; conversely, the Emperor found himself sovereign of a divided dominion, its two parts cut off from each other by a hostile state, and linked only by a neutral sea. From this moment onwards the two men were engaged in a deadly struggle for dominance in Europe and mastery of the western Mediterranean.
After the death of Sultan Mehmet II in 1481 Europe had breathed again. Mehmet had been a man of wide culture and scholarship. He had ordered Archbishop Gennadius, whom he had nominated as Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople, to write for him a treatise on the Christian religion; he had a considerable knowledge of Greek, inviting Greek scholars regularly to his court; and he had summoned Gentile Bellini from Venice to paint his portrait.131 But he was not known as Fatih–‘the Conqueror’–for nothing. His first and greatest triumph, the capture of Constantinople in 1453, had been only the beginning of a long succession of territorial acquisitions in the eastern Mediterranean, and, as we have seen, he was preparing yet another major offensive–against the Knights of St John in Rhodes–when his life was suddenly cut short. His successor, Bayezit II–who, though the elder, gained the throne only after a monumental struggle with his brother Cem132–was very unlike his father. He consolidated Mehmet’s conquests in the Balkans and appropriated the Venetian castles in the Morea, but with his much narrower mind he had no real interest in Europe–removing, for example, the Italian frescos that Mehmet had commissioned for the imperial palace and favouring instead the mosques, hospitals and schools that were so important an element of his fervent Islamic faith. His description by the Venetian ambassador–‘molto melancolico, superstizioso e ostinato’133–sums him up as well as any.
In 1512 Bayezit’s son Selim rebelled against his father and forced him to abdicate in his favour. (He may have poisoned him as well, since the old man died suspiciously soon afterwards.) Selim I, as he now became, was always known as Yavuz, ‘the Grim’. His first act as Sultan was to eliminate, as potential rivals to the throne, his two brothers and five orphan nephews–the youngest of whom was five years old–by having them strangled with a bowstring; he is said to have listened with satisfaction to their screams from an adjoining room. He then turned his attention to the east, directing his formidable energies against Ismail I, the founder of the Safavid dynasty in Iran, massacring some 40,000 and incorporating various Kurdish and Turkoman principalities in eastern Anatolia into his empire. His next objective was Syria, still in the hands of the Mamelukes. Aleppo, Damascus, Beirut and Jerusalem fell in quick succession, and on 24 August 1516, at the battle of Marj Dabik, he effectively destroyed the Mameluke dynasty; its penultimate sultan, al-Ghawri, died on the field. In Egypt al-Ghawri’s nephew Tuman Bey proclaimed himself Sultan and refused to submit, whereupon Selim marched his army across the Sinai desert and after one more particularly bloody encounter–at Raydaniye, near the Pyramids, in January 1517–captured him and had him hanged at the gates of Cairo. Six months later the Sherif of Mecca made voluntary submission in his turn, sending Selim the standard and cloak of the Prophet and the keys of the Holy Cities. At last, with Egypt, Syria and the Hejaz all acknowledging him as their sovereign, the Sultan returned in triumph to the Bosphorus. His empire was not only increased; it was transformed. Possession of Mecca and Medina made it an Islamic Caliphate; henceforth the Ottoman Sultans were to consider themselves protectors of the Muslim world.
Dying in September 1520, Selim was succeeded by the only male member of his family whom he had left alive on his own accession: his son Süleyman, then aged twenty-six. Of the four larger-than-life monarchs who bestrode Europe during the first half of the sixteenth century–the other three being the Emperor Charles V, Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France–Süleyman was arguably the greatest. He was, in his own oriental way, a son of the Renaissance: a man of learning and wide culture, himself a sensitive poet, under whom the imperial pottery workshops of Iznik (Nicaea) were at their most inspired and the imperial architects–above all, the great Sinan–adorned the cities of the empire with mosques and religious foundations, caravanserais and schools, many of which still stand today. Like his forebears, however, Süleyman was also a conqueror, whose overriding ambition was to achieve in the west victories comparable to those of his father in the east. Thus he was to swell his already vast empire with conquests in Hungary, the Balkans and central Europe–to say nothing of North Africa, where Tripoli was to fall to him in 1551.
But that was for later. Like all the early Ottoman Sultans Süleyman was a fervently pious Muslim, and it was not long after coming to the throne that he turned his attention to the Christian enemy he most hated: the Knights of St John, whose island fortress of Rhodes lay at his very doorstep, ten miles off the Anatolian coast. The Knights were comparatively few, with neither an army nor a navy any match for his own, but, as his great-grandfather Mehmet had discovered to his cost forty years before, they were determined fighters. In those forty years they had worked unceasingly on their defences, building huge angled towers that would permit covering fire along exposed sections of the walls, and strengthening the ramparts against the heavy cannon that had smashed those of Constantinople in 1453 and by which they themselves had been so nearly defeated in 1480. They would be hard indeed to dislodge.
Their Grand Master, Philippe Villiers de l’Isle Adam, a deeply religious French nobleman of fifty-seven who had spent most of his life in Rhodes, had received, within a week or two of taking office in 1521, a letter from the Sultan. In it Süleyman boasted of the conquests he had already made, including those of Belgrade and ‘many other fine and well-fortified cities, of which I killed most of the inhabitants and reduced the rest to slavery’. Its implications were all too clear, but de l’Isle Adam was not intimidated; in his reply he proudly reported his own recent victory over Cortog'lu, a well-known Turkish pirate who had tried unsuccessfully to capture him on his most recent return to Rhodes.
Then, in the early summer of 1522, there came another letter:
To the Knights of Rhodes:
The monstrous injuries that you have inflicted upon my most long-suffering people have aroused my pity and my wrath. I command you therefore instantly to surrender the island and fortress of Rhodes, and I give you my gracious permission to depart in safety with your most valued possessions. If you are wise, you will prefer friendship and peace to the cruelties of war.
Any Knights who wished might remain, without paying homage or tribute, provided only that they acknowledged the sovereignty of the Sultan. To this second letter the Grand Master returned no answer.
The island of Rhodes forms a rough ellipse, running from northeast to southwest; the city itself occupies the northeastern extremity. On 26 June 1522 the first ships of the 700-strong134 Ottoman fleet appeared on the northern horizon. More and more were to join this vanguard over the next two days, including the flagship carrying Süleyman himself and his brother-in-law Mustafa Pasha, who had marched down with the army through Asia Minor. Such was its size–not far short of 200,000–that it took over a month to disembark and assemble: an overwhelming force, it might be thought, when measured against some 700 Knights, even after their numbers had been swelled by contingents from the various commanderies of the Order throughout Europe, by 500 Cretan archers, by some 1,500 other mercenaries and of course by the Christian people of Rhodes. On the other hand, the city’s defences were immensely strong, perhaps even impregnable; and the Knights had spent the previous year laying in sufficient supplies of food, water and munitions to hold out for months.
In this type of warfare, moreover, life was always a good deal harder for the besiegers than for the besieged, since they had little protection either from the sweltering summer sun or from the cold and rain of winter. For the defenders, forced as they were into a passive role, the principal strain tended to be psychological; fortunately, however, there was endless work to be done. They had to keep a constant vigil over every foot of the wall, repairing damage as soon as it was inflicted and watching for any sign among the enemy below that might suggest the activity of sappers–for mining had become something of a speciality with the Ottoman armies, who well understood that many an impressive fortification was a good deal less vulnerable from the front than from beneath.
By the end of the month the heavy bombardment had begun in earnest, the cannon being even more powerful than those used against Constantinople, capable of hurling cannonballs almost three feet in diameter a mile or more. The Turkish army was now drawn up in a huge crescent to the south of the city; that of the Knights was divided into the eight tongues, each of which was responsible for the defence of its own section of the wall. The tongue of Aragon soon came under particular pressure, when the Turks began to throw up a huge earthwork opposite, from which they hoped to fire down into the city. Meanwhile, their sappers too were busy. By mid-September the Knights’ worst fears were realised: there were some fifty tunnels running in various directions under the wall. Fortunately they had been able to secure the services of the greatest military engineer of his day, an Italian named Gabriele Tadini. He constructed his own warren of tunnels, from which he could listen–with the aid of tightly-stretched drums of parchment which could pick up every blow of a Turkish spade–and frequently deactivate the enemy fuses. He could not hope, however, to succeed every time, and early in September a mine exploded under the English section, creating a gap in the wall over thirty feet across. The Turks poured in, and there followed two hours of bitter hand-to-hand fighting before the Knights somehow prevailed and the exhausted survivors retired again to their camp.
Some time towards the end of October, a Portuguese in the service of Andrea d’Amaral, the Chancellor of the Order–second in importance only to the Grand Master–was caught firing a message into the enemy lines to the effect that the position of the defenders was now desperate and that they could not hope to hold out much longer. Put to the rack, he made an extraordinary confession: that he was acting on the orders of d’Amaral himself. Such an allegation is hard to believe. The Chancellor seems to have been generally disliked for his arrogance; having expected the Grand Mastership for himself, he also cherished a deep resentment of de l’Isle Adam personally. But would he really have betrayed the Order, to which he had devoted his life? We shall never know. Put on trial, he refused to plead one way or the other, saying nothing even when brought to his place of execution and refusing even the comforts of religion.
The gist of the message, however, was all too true. By December the Knights were at the end of their tether. Well over half their fighting force was now either dead or hopelessly disabled. Although the Sultan was offering honourable terms, for a long time the Grand Master kept his resolve. Rather than surrender to the infidel, he argued, every last Knight should perish in the ruins of the citadel. It was the native Rhodiots who finally persuaded him that if he continued to resist the result would be a massacre, of Knights and people alike. And so at last de l’Isle Adam sent a message to the Sultan, inviting him personally into the city to discuss terms–and Süleyman accepted. It is said that as he approached the gates he dismissed his bodyguard with the words, ‘My safety is guaranteed by the word of a Grand Master of the Hospitallers, which is more sure than all the armies of the world.’
The negotiations were protracted, but on the day after Christmas 1522 the Grand Master made his formal submission. Süleyman is said to have treated him with the respect he deserved, congratulating him and his Knights on their tenacity and courage. A week later, on the evening of 1 January 1523, the survivors of one of the great sieges of history sailed for Crete. It is reported that the Sultan, as he watched them depart, turned to his Grand Vizir, Ibrahim Pasha. ‘It saddens me,’ he said, ‘to force that brave old man to leave his home.’
Meanwhile, in Italy, the old struggle between France and Spain continued. It might be more correct to say ‘between France and the Empire’, but Charles’s real interest in the peninsula was based on his Spanish heritage. Sicily, Naples and Sardinia he had all inherited from his grandfather Ferdinand, and he was determined to pass these on intact to his successors. He had no wish to acquire any further territory in Italy, and was only too pleased that the native rulers should remain in charge of their states, provided that they recognised the Spanish position and showed it due respect.
French influence, however, could not be tolerated. King Francis, for as long as he remained in Italy, constituted a challenge to the imperial hold on Naples and seriously endangered communications between the Empire and Spain. The Papacy, desperate to prevent either party becoming too strong, swung backwards and forwards between the two. Thus in 1521 a secret treaty was signed between Charles and Pope Leo, as a result of which a combined papal and imperial force expelled the French once again from Lombardy, restoring the house of Sforza in the person of Ludovico’s limp-wristed son Francesco Maria. Only three years later, however, in 1524, the new Pope Clement VII135 joined with Venice and Florence in an equally secret alliance with France against the Empire, and Francis, with an army of some 20,000, marched back over the Mont-Cenis pass into Italy.
In late October Francis recaptured Milan, then turned south to Pavia, where he remained through the winter, trying unsuccessfully to divert the river Ticino as a means of taking the city; he was still there four months later when there arrived an imperial army, led not by a Spaniard or an Austrian but by one of his own countrymen: Charles, second Duke of Bourbon, one of the most exalted members of the French nobility and the hereditary Constable of the Kingdom. Charles should have been fighting beside his king, to whom he was distantly related, but Francis’s mother, Louise of Savoy, had contested his inheritance and in a fit of pique he had sold his sword to the Emperor. He was now the imperial Commander-in-Chief in Italy. His army met that of Francis just outside Pavia, and on Tuesday, 21 February 1525, battle was joined.
The Battle of Pavia proved to be one of the most decisive engagements of European history. It was also, perhaps, the first to prove conclusively the superiority of firearms over pikes. The Swiss mercenaries–fighting this time on the French side–struggled valiantly, but their weapons, fearsome as they were, were no match for Spanish bullets. When the fighting was over the French army had been virtually annihilated; some 14,000 soldiers–French and Swiss, German and Spanish–lay dead on the field. Francis himself had shown, as always, exemplary courage; after his horse had been killed under him he continued to fight on foot until at last, overcome by exhaustion, he was obliged to give himself up. ‘All is lost,’ he wrote to his mother, ‘save honour–and my skin.’
He was sent, a prisoner, to Madrid, and Charles V was once again master of Italy. The decisiveness of his victory sent a tremor through the whole peninsula, which depended–or so it believed–on the balance of power; but the Emperor had other preoccupations. Eight years before, in 1517, Martin Luther had nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the church door at Wittenberg; three years after that, he had publicly burned the papal bull excommunicating him; and in 1521, at the Diet of Worms, he had effectively raised the standard of revolt against Pope and Emperor alike. The only hope of satisfying him, in Charles’s view, lay in calling a General Council of the Church to discuss reform; but what was the use of a General Council if all the delegates from France and her allies were absent?
Then there was Süleyman to be considered. News of the fall of Rhodes had been received with horror throughout the west. Where, men asked themselves, would the Sultan strike next? Certainly he would continue his advance against the forces of Christendom. How could he be halted except by a concerted Crusade, led by the Emperor and backed by all the Christian powers? But how, in the circumstances prevailing, could Francis of France ever be persuaded to lend his support to such an effort? How was such a Crusade to be launched while Europe was so bitterly and brutally divided against itself?
It was perhaps considerations such as these that persuaded Charles to trust his royal captive, and to release him, after a year of not uncomfortable confinement, according to the terms of an agreement which Francis had absolutely no intention of observing–even though he left his two sons as hostages for his good behaviour. In what was known as the Treaty of Madrid, which he signed on 14 January 1526, the King readily renounced all his claims to the long-disputed Duchy of Burgundy, to Naples and to Milan. (He also, incidentally, restored all the disputed lands to the Duke of Bourbon, ‘on condition that we never see him again’.) When Francis returned to Paris, however, and the terms of the agreement were made public, there was a general outcry. The Estates of Burgundy protested vociferously that the King had no right to alienate a province of the kingdom without the consent of its people. Pope Clement, too, was aghast; without a French presence anywhere in Italy, how could he hope to defend himself against Charles? Hastily he recruited Milan, Venice and Florence to form an anti-imperialist league for the defence of a free and independent Italy–and invited France to join. Though the ink was scarcely dry on the Treaty of Madrid, and though he and the Pope held widely differing views on Milan–the Pope favouring the Sforzas, while Francis wanted the city for himself–on 22 May 1526 the King, with his usual flourish, signed his name.
The League of Cognac, as it was called, introduced an exciting new concept into Italian affairs. For perhaps the first time, here was an agreement dedicated to the proposition that Milan, and so by extension all the other Italian states, should be free of foreign domination. Liberty was the watchword. Clearly there could be not yet be liberty for Italy, since Italy was still no more than a geographical expression; at the same time, it was clear to all the Italian signatories of the League that the only hope of resistance to the power of Charles V or Francis I lay in a settlement of their internal differences, a pooling of their resources and the presentation of a firmly united front to any would-be invader. The Risorgimento was still more than three centuries away, but here, perhaps, were the first glimmerings of the national sentiment that gave it birth.
It need hardly be said that Charles V did not view the League of Cognac in quite this light. To him it was a direct and deliberate challenge, and over the next few months relations between himself and the Pope steadily deteriorated. Finally, in September, two letters from the Emperor were despatched to Rome. They could hardly have been more outspoken if they had been written by Luther himself. The first, addressed personally to the Pope, accused him of failing in his duties towards Christendom, and Italy, and even the Holy See. The second, to the cardinals of the Sacred College, went further still. If, it suggested, the Pope refused to summon a General Council for the reform of the Church, it was the responsibility of the College to do so without his consent. Here was a clear threat to papal authority. To Pope Clement, indeed, it was tantamount to a declaration of war.
In and around Milan the fighting had hardly ever stopped; there must have been many Milanese who, on waking in the morning, found it difficult to remember whether they owed their allegiance to the Sforzas, the Emperor or the King of France. An imperial army had marched into the city in November 1525, and had spent the winter besieging the unfortunate Francesco Maria Sforza in the citadel. The League had sent an army under the Duke of Urbino to his relief, but largely owing to the Duke’s lack of resolution it had failed, and Sforza had finally capitulated on 25 July 1526. The news of his surrender had plunged the Pope into black despair. His treasury was empty, he was deeply unpopular in Rome, and his theoretical ally Francis was not lifting a finger to help him. Meanwhile, the Reformation was daily gaining ground and the Ottoman threat still loomed. And now, as autumn approached, there were rumours that the Emperor was preparing a huge fleet, which would land some 10,000 troops in the Kingdom of Naples–effectively on his own doorstep. More serious still, Clement was aware that there were imperial agents in the city, doing everything they could to stir up trouble against him with the enthusiastic help of a member of his own Sacred College, Cardinal Pompeio Colonna.
For well over two centuries Rome had suffered from the rivalry of two of its oldest families, the Colonna and the Orsini. Away in the Campagna the two were for ever at war, often bringing out considerable armies on each side. Both were enormously rich, and both ruled over their immense domains as if they were themselves sovereign states, each with its own cultivated court. Their wealth in turn allowed them to contract advantageous marriages; people still talked of the wedding festivities of Clarice Orsini with Clement’s uncle, Lorenzo de’ Medici, the most sumptuous of the fifteenth century. Even before these, however, the Orsini enjoyed what might be called a special relationship with the Papacy, by reason of the fact that all the principal roads leading north out of Rome passed through their territory. Successive Popes, therefore, had long taken care not to offend them.
This alone was more than enough to antagonise their rivals, whose outstanding representative in the 1520s was Pompeio Colonna. The Cardinal had begun life as a soldier and should probably have remained one. He had entered the Church only because of family pressures; never could he have been described as a man of God. Julius II, indeed, had refused to promote him, and Pompeio in revenge had taken advantage of the Pope’s serious illness in 1511 to stir up an insurrection among the populace, but his attempt had failed: Julius had recovered and stripped him of all his dignities. Surprisingly, it was the Medici Pope Leo X who had eventually admitted him to the Sacred College. His admission, however, only encouraged him to set his eye on the Papacy for himself, and any gratitude he might have felt towards Pope Leo was certainly not extended to Leo’s cousin and second successor. For Clement he cherished a bitter hatred, powerfully fuelled by jealousy, and a consequent determination to eliminate him–either by deposition or, if necessary, by death.
In August 1526 Pompeio’s kinsman Vespasiano Colonna came to Rome to negotiate a truce between his own family on the one hand and the Pope and the Orsini on the other. Pope Clement, much relieved, disbanded his troops–whereupon the army of the Colonna instantly attacked the city of Anagni, effectively blocking communications between Rome and Naples. The Pope had still not recovered from his surprise or had a chance to remobilise when, at dawn on 20 September, that same army smashed through the Gate of St John Lateran and poured into Rome.
At about five o’clock that same afternoon, after hours of heavy fighting, Clement fled along the covered passage that led from the Vatican to the Castel Sant’ Angelo. Meanwhile the looting and plundering had begun. As one of the secretaries of the curia reported:
The papal palace was almost completely stripped, even to the bedroom and wardrobe of the Pope. The great and private sacristy of St Peter’s, that of the palace, the apartments of prelates and members of the household, even the horse-stalls were emptied, their doors and windows shattered; chalices, crosses, pastoral staffs, ornaments of great value, all that fell into their hands was carried off as plunder by this rabble.
The mob even broke into the Sistine Chapel, where the Raphael tapestries were torn from the walls. Golden and jewelled chalices, patens and all manner of ecclesiastical treasures were seized, to a value estimated at 300,000 ducats.
With proper preparations made, a Pope could hold out in the Castel Sant’ Angelo for months; on this occasion, however, thanks to the incompetence of the castellan, Giulio de’ Medici, the fortress was completely unprovisioned. Clement had no choice but to make what terms he could. The ensuing negotiations were hard, but their results were less than satisfactory to Pompeio Colonna, who now realised that his attempted coup had been a failure. Not only had Pope Clement remained on his throne, but public opinion had swung dramatically against his own family. Rome had been plundered and the Colonna had–rightly–been blamed. In November Pompeio was deprived–for the second time–of all his dignities and benefices, and the leading members of his family suffered similar fates. The family of Colonna lost all its property in the Papal States except for three small fortresses.
Clement had indeed survived, but only just.
The Pope sees nothing ahead but ruin: not just his own, for which he cares little, but that of the Apostolic See, of Rome, of his own country and of the whole of Italy. Moreover, he sees no way of preventing it. He has expended all his own money, all that of his friends, all that of his servants. Our reputation, too, is gone.
So wrote another official of the curia, Gian Matteo Giberti, towards the end of November 1526. The Pope had good reason to be depressed. Strategically he was vulnerable on every side, and the Emperor was exploiting his vulnerability to the full. And now there came the news of the defection of Ferrara, whose Duke, Alfonso d’Este, had joined the imperialist forces. ‘The Pope,’ wrote the Milanese envoy Landriano, ‘seems struck dead. All the attempts of the ambassadors of France, England and Venice to restore him have been in vain…He looks like a sick man whom the doctors have given up.’ And still his tribulations were not over. On 12 December a Spanish envoy delivered a personal letter from the Emperor repeating his demand for a General Council of the Church, in defiance of Pope Clement’s wishes to the contrary. Early in the following year, there came the news that an imperial army under the Duke of Bourbon was advancing upon the Papal States.
Despite his treachery to his king, Bourbon was a charismatic figure, admired by all his men for his courage. He never shirked an engagement, and could always be found where the fighting was thickest, easily distinguishable by the silver and white surcoat that he always wore and by his black, white and yellow standard on which was emblazoned the word ‘Espérance’. Now, as he advanced southwards from Milan at the head of an army of some 20,000 German and Spanish troops, the citizens of all the towns along his route–Piacenza and Parma, Reggio, Modena and Bologna–worked frantically on their cities’ defences. They could have saved themselves the trouble. The Duke had no intention of wasting time on them. He led his army directly to Rome, drawing it up on the Janiculum hill, immediately north of the city wall; and at four o’clock in the morning of 6 May 1527 the attack began.
In the absence of heavy artillery, Bourbon had decided that the walls would have to be scaled–a technique far more difficult and dangerous than that of simply pounding them until they crumbled. He himself was one of the first of the casualties. He had just led a troop of German landsknechts136 to the foot of the wall, and was actually positioning a scaling-ladder when he was shot through the chest by an enemy arquebus. The fall of this unmistakable white-clad figure was seen by besiegers and besieged alike, and for an hour or so the fate of the siege hung in the balance; then the thought of revenge spurred the Germans and Spaniards on to ever greater efforts, and between six and seven in the morning the imperial army burst into the city. From that moment on there was little resistance. The Romans rushed from the wall to barricade their own homes, and many of the papal troops joined the enemy to save their own skin. Only the Swiss Guard and some of the papal militia fought heroically on until they were annihilated.137
As the invaders approached the Vatican the Pope was hustled out of St Peter’s and led for the second time along the covered way to the Castel Sant’ Angelo, already thronged with panic-stricken families seeking refuge. Such were the crowds that it was only with the greatest difficulty that the drawbridge could be raised. Outside in the Borgo and Trastevere, despite specific orders by their commanders, the soldiers embarked on an orgy of killing, cutting down every man, woman or child they encountered. Almost all the inmates of the Hospital of Santo Spirito were massacred; of the orphans of the Pietà, not one was left alive.
The imperial army crossed the Tiber just before midnight, the German landsknechts settling in the Campo dei Fiori, the Spaniards in Piazza Navona. The sack that followed has been described as ‘one of the most horrible in recorded history’.138 The bloodbath that had begun across the Tiber continued unabated: to venture out into the street was to invite almost certain death, and to remain indoors was very little safer; scarcely a single church, palace or house of any size escaped pillage and devastation. Monasteries were plundered and convents violated, the more attractive nuns being sold in the streets for a giulio each. Nor was any respect shown, even by the Spaniards, to the highest dignitaries of the papal curia. At least two cardinals were dragged through the streets and tortured; one of them, who was well over eighty, subsequently died of his injuries.
It was four days and four nights before Rome had any respite. Only with the arrival on 10 May of Pompeio Colonna and his two brothers, with 8,000 of their men, was a semblance of order restored. By this time virtually every street in Rome had been gutted and was strewn with corpses. One captured Spanish sapper later reported that on the north bank of the Tiber alone he and his colleagues had buried nearly 10,000, and had thrown another 2,000 into the river. Six months later, thanks to widespread starvation and a long epidemic of plague, the population of Rome was less than half what it had been before the siege; much of the city had been left a smouldering shell, littered with bodies lying unburied during the hottest season of the year. Culturally, too, the loss was incalculable. Paintings, sculptures, whole libraries–including that of the Vatican itself–were ravaged and destroyed, the pontifical archives ransacked. The school of Raphael was broken up; the painter Parmigianino was imprisoned, saving his life only by making drawings of his jailers before escaping to Bologna.
The imperial army, meanwhile, had suffered almost as much as the Romans. It too was virtually without food; its soldiers–unpaid for months–were totally demoralised, interested only in loot and pillage. Discipline had broken down: the landsknechts and the Spaniards were at each other’s throats. The only hope seemed to lie in the army of the League, under the mildly ridiculous Duke of Urbino. Given the present state of the imperialists he might well have broken into the city, rescued the Pope and saved the day; pusillanimous as ever, he did nothing. Eventually Clement was forced once again to capitulate. The official price he paid was the cities of Ostia, Civitavecchia, Piacenza and Modena, together with 400,000 ducats; the actual price was higher still, since the Venetians–in spite of their alliance–seized Ravenna and Cervia while the Duke of Ferrara made a grab for Modena. The Papal States, in which an efficient government had been developing for the first time in history, had crumbled away.
Even then, the fighting–now largely polarised between France and the Empire–continued. Peace, when it came, was the result of negotiations begun during the winter of 1528–29 between Charles’s aunt Margaret of Savoy and her sister-in-law Louise, mother of King Francis. The two met at Cambrai on 5 July 1529, and the resulting treaty was signed in the first week of August. The Ladies’ Peace, as it came to be called, confirmed Spanish rule in Italy. Francis renounced all his claims there, receiving in return a promise from Charles not to press the imperial claims to Burgundy; but France’s allies in the League of Cognac were left entirely out of the reckoning and were thus subsequently forced to accept the terms that Charles was to impose at the end of the year–terms which included, for Venice, the surrender of all her possessions in south Italy to the Spanish Kingdom of Naples. Francesco Maria Sforza was restored to Milan (though Charles reserved the right to garrison its citadel); the Medici, who had been expelled from Florence in 1527, were also restored (though it took a ten-month siege to effect the restoration); and the island of Malta was given in 1530 to the Knights of St John.
It was a sad and–to those who felt that the King of France had betrayed them–a shameful settlement. But at least it restored peace to Italy and put an end to a long and unedifying chapter in her history, a chapter which had begun with Charles VIII’s invasion of 1494 and had brought the Italians nothing but devastation and destruction. To seal it all, Charles V crossed the Alps for the first time for his imperial coronation. This was not an indispensable ceremony; his grandfather Maximilian had done without it altogether, and Charles himself, since his coronation at Aachen, had been nearly ten years on the throne without this final confirmation of his authority. The fact remained, nonetheless, that until the Pope had laid the crown on his head his title of Holy Roman Emperor was technically unjustified; to one possessing so strong a sense of divine mission, both the title and the sacrament were important.
Imperial coronations were traditionally performed in Rome. On landing at Genoa in mid-August 1529, however, Charles received reports of Süleyman’s steady advance on Vienna and at once decided that a journey so far down the peninsula at such a time would be folly; it would take too long, besides leaving him dangerously cut off in the event of a crisis. Messengers sped to Pope Clement, and it was agreed that in the circumstances the ceremony might be held in Bologna, a considerably more accessible city which still remained firmly under papal control. Even then the uncertainty was not over: while on his way to Bologna in September Charles received an urgent appeal from his brother Ferdinand in Vienna, and almost cancelled his coronation plans there and then. Only after long consideration did he decide not to do so. By the time he reached Vienna either the city would have fallen or the Sultan would have retired for the winter; in either case, the small force that he had with him in Italy would have been insufficient to tip the scales.
And so, on 5 November 1529, Charles V made his formal entry into Bologna where, in front of the Basilica of S. Petronio, Pope Clement waited to receive him. After a brief ceremony of welcome, the two retired to the Palazzo del Podestà across the square, where neighbouring apartments had been prepared for them. There was much to be done, many outstanding problems to be discussed and resolved, before the coronation could take place. It was, after all, only two years since papal Rome had been sacked by imperial troops, with Clement himself a virtual prisoner of Charles in the Castel Sant’ Angelo; somehow, friendly relations had to be re-established. Next there were the individual peace treaties to be drawn up with all the Italian ex-enemies of the Empire, chief among which–apart from the Pope himself–were Venice, Florence and Milan. Only then, when peace had been finally consolidated throughout the peninsula, would Charles feel justified in kneeling before Clement to receive the imperial crown. Coronation Day was fixed for 24 February 1530, and invitations were despatched to all the rulers of Christendom. Charles and Clement had given themselves a little under four months to settle the future of Italy.
Surprisingly, it proved enough. Well before the day appointed, Charles had laid the foundations of a pan-Italian league–a league which testified to the spread of imperial power across the length and breadth of Italy unparalleled for centuries past. And so the peace was signed; Clement’s League of Cognac and Charles’s sack of Rome were alike forgotten, or at least dismissed from minds; and on 24 February 1530, in S. Petronio, Charles was first anointed and then received from the papal hands the sword, orb, sceptre and finally the crown of the Holy Roman Empire. Something of a cloud was cast over the proceedings when a makeshift wooden bridge linking the church with the palace collapsed just as the Emperor’s suite was passing across it, but when it was established that the many casualties included no one of serious importance spirits quickly revived, and celebrations continued long into the night.
It was the last time in history that a Pope was to crown an Emperor; on that day the 700-year-old tradition, which had begun in 800 AD when Pope Leo III had laid the imperial crown on the head of Charlemagne, was brought to an end. The Empire was by no means finished, but never again would it be received, even symbolically, from the hands of the Vicar of Christ on Earth.