The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [75]
The ferocity and bloodthirstiness of the attackers “would have moved a stone to compassion,” according to a report in the Mantua archives, “written in a trembling hand.” The soldiers looted house by house, killing anyone who offered resistance. Women were violated regardless of age. Screams and groans filled every quarter; the Tiber floated with dead bodies. Pope, cardinals, Curia and lay officials piled into Sant’ Angelo in such haste and crush that one cardinal was drawn up in a basket after the portcullis was dropped. Ransoms were fixed on the wealthy and atrocious tortures devised to make them pay; if they could not, they were killed. Priests, monks and other clergy were victimized with extra brutality; nuns dragged to brothels or sold to soldiers in the streets. Palaces were plundered and left in flames; churches and monasteries sacked for their treasures, relics trampled after being stripped of jeweled covers, tombs broken open in the search for more treasure, the Vatican used as a stable. Archives and libraries were burned, their contents scattered or used as bedding for horses. Surveying the scene, even a Colonna wept. “Hell has nothing to compare with the present state of Rome,” a Venetian reported.
Lutherans of the feared Landsknechte delighted in the scene, parodied the papal rites, paraded through the streets in the rich vestments of prelates and the red robes and hats of cardinals, with a leader playing the part of Pope riding on an ass. The first wave of carnage lasted eight days. For weeks Rome smoked and stank of unburied corpses gnawed by dogs. The occupation lasted nine months, inflicting irreparable damage. Two thousand bodies were estimated to have been thrown into the Tiber, 9800 buried, loot and ransoms estimated at between three and four million ducats. Only when plague appeared and food vanished, leaving famine, did the drunken satiated hordes recede from the “stinking slaughterhouse” they had made of Rome.
It was a sack, too, of spiritual authority. The Vandals who perpetrated the sack of A.D. 455 were aliens and so-called barbarians, but these were fellow-Christians, propelled, so it seemed, by an extra lust in defiling the tarnished lords of the Church. Troy too had once believed in a sacred veil of protection; when the moment came, Rome counted on its sacred status but it was found to have vanished.
No one could doubt that the Sack was divine punishment for the worldly sins of popes and hierarchy, and few questioned the belief that the fault came from within. The aggressors agreed. Appalled by the event and fearing the Emperor’s displeasure at “these outrages on the Catholic religion and the Apostolic See,” the Commissary of the Imperial Army wrote to Charles V, “In truth everyone is convinced that all this has happened as a judgment of God on the great tyranny and disorders of the Papal court.” A sadder insight was articulated by Cardinal Cajetan, General of the Dominicans, reform spokesman at the Lateran, Papal Legate in Germany in the dealings with Luther: “For we who should have been the salt of the earth have decayed until we are good for nothing beyond outward ceremonials.”
Clement’s humiliation was twofold. He had to accept terms imposed by the victors and remain their prisoner in Sant’ Angelo until he found funds for his ransom, while at news of his helplessness, Florence promptly expelled the agents of Medici rule and re-established a republic. Elsewhere a shift of opinion against the scandal of an imprisoned Pope caused the Emperor to open the doors of Sant’ Angelo, whence, disguised as a merchant, Clement was escorted to a shabby refuge in Orvieto, where he remained, still hoping that France would come to redress the balance. In the following year, Francis came indeed, launching an army against Naples. When he was defeated