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By Root 1086 0

once again and again required to renounce all claims in Italy, the Pope was forced to come to terms with Charles V, now the undisputed master of Italy. In cold and penury, sleeping on straw, he journeyed to Bologna to reach the best agreement he could, with little room now for maneuver. He was obliged to invest Charles, as King of Spain, with the Kingdom of Naples and crown him as Emperor. Charles in return was to provide the military aid to restore the Medici to Florence. In one thing the Pope had his way: as Pope he still retained authority to refuse the General Council for reform that Charles wanted. His underlying objection was personal: a fear that his illegitimate birth, rather casually overcome by Leo, might be invoked to invalidate his title.

Clement’s major activity thereafter was a war to restore his family’s rule of Florence. Under Imperial command, the dregs of the troops that had sacked Rome were among those used to besiege his native city, which, after holding out for ten months, was forced to yield. He spent on this enterprise as much as Leo on Urbino and for similar purposes of family power. The problems of Medici succession, now resting on two dubious Medici bastards, one a mulatto, distracted him from the problem of the Protestant advance or any serious consideration of how the Church should meet it. In his last years the German states reached a formal divorce from the Papacy and formed the Protestant League.

Clement died despised by the Curia (according to Guicciardini), distrusted by monarchs, detested by Florentines, who celebrated his death with bonfires, and by Romans, who held him responsible for the Sack. They dragged his corpse from its grave and left it hacked and mutilated, with a sword thrust through the heart.

Terrible in its physical impact, the Sack had seemed unmistakable as a punishment. The significance of the Protestant secession took longer to register on the Church. Time and perspective are needed before people can see where they have been. Recognition by the Papacy of its misgovernment developed slowly. Midway in the pontificate of Clement’s successor, Paul III (the former Cardinal Alessandro Farnese), not quite thirty years after Luther’s overt break, with the summoning of the Council of Trent in 1544, the long laborious recovery “of what had been lost” began.

What principles of folly emerge from the record of the Renaissance six? First, it must be recognized that their attitudes to power and their resultant behavior were shaped to an unusual degree by the mores and conditions of their time and surroundings. This is of course true of every person in every time, but more so in this case because the mores and conditions of the Italian governing class of this period were in fact so exotic. The local determinants of papal conduct—in foreign relations, political struggles, beliefs, manners and human relationships—must be sifted out in the hope that abiding principles may appear.

The folly of the popes was not pursuit of counter-productive policy so much as rejection of any steady or coherent policy either political or religious that would have improved their situation or arrested the rising discontent. Disregard of the movements and sentiments developing around them was a primary folly. They were deaf to disaffection, blind to the alternative ideas it gave rise to, blandly impervious to challenge, unconcerned by the dismay at their misconduct and the rising wrath at their misgovernment, fixed in refusal to change, almost stupidly stubborn in maintaining a corrupt existing system. They could not change it because they were part of it, grew out of it, depended on it.

Their grotesque extravagance and fixation on personal gain was a second and equal governing factor. Once, when reproved for putting the temporal power of the Papacy before “the welfare of the True Church which consists of the peace of Christendom,” Clement VII had replied that if he had so acted he would have been plundered to his last farthing, “unable to recover anything of my own.” This may stand as the excuse of all