A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [100]
It never seems to have occurred to this pope that Rome itself was vulnerable to mayhem—that his fellow Christians might repeat the Visigothic sack of the Eternal City. Yet his alliances with France offended Romans loyal to the Holy Roman emperor, and as a Medici he had inherited enemies, among them Cardinal Pompeo Colonna, a feuder, a hater, and an ambitious prelate who had his eye on the papal tiara. Colonna plotted Clement’s assassination. Rallying imperialists, he led a raid on the Vatican in 1526. Several members of the papal household were killed, but the pope
Pope Clement VII (1478-1534)
himself escaped through a secret passageway built for this express purpose by the Borgia pope, who had been better at this sort of thing than he was.
The pontiff and the ferocious cardinal reached terms and the raiders withdrew, whereupon Clement, after granting himself absolution, hired a band of mercenaries and leveled Colonna’s properties. He felt victorious, and congratulated himself. Yet the sacrilegious behavior of the raiders should have warned him of worse to come. Donning the Holy Father’s robes while he escaped through the hidden passage, they had pranced about the piazza of St. Peter’s, mocking the Vicar of Christ. A papal secretary of state wrote the papal nuncio in England—where the devout King Henry VIII worried about the safety of His Holiness—“We are on the brink of ruin.”
The seeds of ruin lay in the ill-disciplined, famished, unpaid troops of Charles V, who had outfought King Francis’s army, crossed the Alps, and were at large in northern Italy. Led by the Constable de Bourbon, a French renegade, their spearhead was formed of Landsknechte (mercenaries) from central Europe, and the defenders heard a cry which one day would intimidate all Europe, the roaring “Hoch! Hoch!” of charging German infantry. As Protestants, these Teutons affected to despise the pope as a heretical ally of their enemy, but their chief inspiration was less lofty. It was greed: the prospect of plunder and ransoms in Florence and Rome, promised them by their commanders. Charles himself seems to have been unaware of this. His own reverence for the See of St. Peter led him to grant his foes an eight-month armistice in exchange for 60,000 ducats, to be distributed among his troops. It wasn’t enough. Enraged, believing themselves betrayed, men of the imperial army mutinied and marched on the capital of Christendom, given free passage and even food by Italian princes who had been victims of Medici popes. On May 6, 1527, they burst into Rome. One of the first victims of the assault was the Constable de Bourbon, killed by a sniper on the Roman walls. Any hope of disciplining the mutineers died with him. They pillaged house to house, murdering anyone who protested. Buildings were put to the torch. Then the dying began.
Clement, most of the sacred college, and many Curia officials found sanctuary in the fortress of Sant’ Angelo, though they barely made it—one cardinal was hauled to safety in a basket after the portcullis had been dropped. But the rest of the population was helpless. Women of all ages were raped in the streets, nuns rounded up and herded into bordellos, priests sodomized, civilians massacred. After the first, week-long orgy of destruction, more than 2,000 bodies were floating in the Tiber, some 9,800 others awaited burial, and countless thousands of corpses lay sprawled in the city’s ruins, their bloated, stinking remains eviscerated by rats and hungry dogs.
The soldiers had come for money, and they got it—between 3 million and 4 million ducats in ransoms alone. The rich were scourged, and the lucky, who could pay, freed. Those who produced no ransom were tortured to death. But the plunder did not stop there.