It didn’t have to happen. The pope might not have made an alliance with the king of France against the Holy Roman Emperor, to his eternal regret. He might have kept his hired mercenaries to fend off any possible attack on the Holy City instead of discharging them. He might not have trusted his belief that Christian soldiers would not pillage and plunder the Holy See and instead made provisions for his safety and that of the people of Rome. But he didn’t—and the rest is one of the least-known but most significant chapters in Western history: the sixteenth century Sack of Rome, far worse than anything the Gauls or the German barbarians ever wrought. We are paying the price for it still.
It is instructive to observe, in our survey of mostly Western military history, how large in our annals and imagination looms Rome and its sociomartial tradition. From the Greeks, the Romans learned the phalanx and, with refinements, turned it into the matchless offensive machine of the manipled legions. Despite their losses at Cannae and the Teutoburg Forest, the Romans demonstrated that high fertility and an indomitable will to win could handle most any reverses. The end of the Empire taught other lessons as well. It illustrated the folly of a declining native birth rate and generous immigration from inimical lands and peoples; and, mostly, it gave the lie to the notion of, in author Roger Kimball’s words, “the fortunes of permanence”: that what is here today, assuredly will still be tomorrow. It never is.
Even after Rome fell, however, it remained the ideal for centuries: Charlemagne attempted to restore the Caesars under the rubric of the Holy Roman Empire (“Holy” because the Catholic Church had effectively become pagan Rome’s successor supra-state), and both the Germans and the Russians named their supreme leaders after them: Kaiser and Tsar. For Rome has never died. Long after the Western Empire fell in the fifth century, its legacy lived on—in the East for another millennium—in both the manners and mores of the barbarians, principalities, and emergent nation-states that followed in its mighty wake. Its military tactics, its weaponry, its administrative skills, and, most of all, its engineering feats ensured its survival for centuries. Even today, Roman roads and Roman aqueducts still function.
But most of all, what lived on was the idea of Rome: the ideals of the Republic, combined with the might and majesty of the Empire, however degraded it became. Caesar, in history’s ultimate irony, was at once its redeemer and its destroyer. Ideals that were at first opposed to those of the minor Jewish sect of Christianity, until the Christians ultimately triumphed by their preaching and, even more, by the bravery with which they faced the most violent forms of torture and persecution from Nero to Constantine, who finally converted on his deathbed.1 And though the Empire lasted for less than a century after Constantine, in the end it was the popes who really succeeded to the throne, not the barbarians. The discipline, the sense of honor, and duty, and country, lived on long after Rome fell. The word “colonialism” is in much disrepute these days, but who can deny that Rome was the greatest colonial power that ever existed? Therefore:
How splendid they look, these Roman Vatican cognates of the guards at Buckingham Palace, sporting their striped Medici tricolor dress uniforms of red, blue, and yellow, flaring pantaloons, knee stockings and all, and armed with pikes, halberds, and swords. They are the world’s smallest army, first mustered for Pope Julius II in January of 1506, and the papal bodyguard ever since, recruited from the ranks of Swiss-born Catholic men all, between the ages of 19 and 30, with at least secondary-school attainment and having completed basic training with the Swiss military. Both the Romans and Hannibal feared their forebears, the wild but disciplined men of the mountains, whose valor was beyond question, and whose dedication to country has kept Switzerland safe and free of foreign occupation since it won independence from the Holy Roman Empire in 1499. The Swiss are the hedgehogs of Europe, and even today, despite their theme-park appearance, the Swiss Guard is not to be provoked or trifled with.
When Harry Lime (Orson Welles) disparages the Swiss in his famous speech from The Third Man—“In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace—and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock”—he sums up the conventional wisdom about the Swiss. It’s certainly true that in the realm of high culture, they have significantly underperformed: aside from watches—and cuckoo clocks!—what fine international goods do they still manufacture? The “gnomes of Zurich” mind the world’s hidden money, which is squirreled away behind the facades of the buildings along the Bahnhofstrasse. In Geneva, the striped-pants set disports itself at taxpayer expense along the shores of Lac Léman, while in Chiasso, just over the Italian border from Como, wealthy Italian families maintain refuges just in case Italy finally collapses. It never quite does, but one never knows.
There is the Swiss Army knife, of course: at once practical, useful, multipurposed, and, when necessary, lethal—much like Switzerland itself. And the Swiss Army, which comprises nearly the whole young male population of the country. Weapons are mandatory, and are stored in the home for easy access.2 Like the Americans, the Swiss take their tradition of an armed citizenry seriously, and the fact that neither Hitler nor Mussolini invaded them during World War II speaks to the respect the Swiss have won over the past half-millennium. It hardly matters whether the men speak German, French, Italian, or Romansch, a linguistic descendant of Latin—they are all Swiss. It is one of the few “diverse” countries in the world (unlike, say, Belgium or Canada) that actually works, despite its religious division between Protestant and Catholic, because every Swiss is a Helvetian first. The country is known as the Confoederatio Helvetica (CH is the national designation on European bumpers) for a reason.
Modern Switzerland began to come together as early as 1291, after the fall of both halves of the Roman Empire, as three of the mountainous, isolated cantons joined together in a confederacy for mutual protection against the expansionist Habsburgs. The Swiss defeated the Habsburgs in several pitched battles during the fourteenth century; thereafter their reputations and worth as mercenaries grew. Adapting military techniques from their Roman conquerors, the Swiss updated the phalanx with the addition of the pike and the halberd, which the Swiss Guard still uses today. With the coming of gunpowder, the traditional Swiss way of war was rendered suddenly obsolete in the face of the arquebus, but they adopted the musket readily enough and continued to fight on.
The Papal States were a considerable land power in the early sixteenth century, so Pope Julius II—born Giuliano della Rovere; he took the name in honor of Julius Caesar, making the link to early Rome explicit—recruited Swiss mercenaries to form the papal army. At that time, the Papal States occupied much of what is now central Italy as well as the territory around Avignon, and Julius had big plans for the temporal expansion of papal power. In this sphere the “warrior pope,” during his ten-year reign on the throne of St. Peter, ended the power of the Borgias, began the Christianization of the newly discovered Americas, and battled the French for control of Italy.
In the arts, he is perhaps most remembered today as the man who tore down Old St. Peter’s in Rome (built, tradition has it, on the spot where Peter was crucified, upside down, by Nero, the last of the Julio-Claudian dynasty) and replaced it with a newly commissioned grand basilica designed by Donato Bramante; as the patron of both Raphael and Michelangelo, Julius also commissioned the latter’s adornment of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,3 one of the most stunning achievements in the history of Western art.
In 1507, Julius II authorized the sale of indulgences, and thereby set in motion a series of events that would rock the Christian world and irrevocably alter the course of European history. For ten years, the sale of indulgences—basically, time off in Purgatory in exchange for money—bumped along, surviving Julius’s death in 1513, until Pope Leo X renewed the decree. Among the young members of the radical clergy in Germany was one Martin Luther, ordained a Catholic priest the same year Julius began his exercise in mixing the sacred and the profane. But it was only after Leo’s continuation of the practice that Luther was outraged enough to write and post his famous Explanation of the Ninety-Five Theses of 1518 on the doors of the Scholosskirche (Castle Church) in Wittenberg—his seminal j’accuse against the Roman faith that triggered the Protestant Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the Thirty Years’ War, and a host of other significant historical and religious developments—in which he directly attacked the sale of indulgences.
“Indulgence” was a key word. Many of the most conservative Catholics, especially in the north, were outraged by the lavish lifestyles of the Latin senior clergy, with their sumptuous lodgings, Lucullan appetites, exotic sexual practices, bastard offspring, and publicly displayed mistresses4; Julius II wasn’t the only true Julian scion among them. No wonder, the thinking went, the hypocritical clergy is so intent on lessening time in Purgatory: they need an escape clause more than anybody. Indeed, “Latinate” became a synonym for voluptuary excess. The Reformation was its perfectly understandable, northern reaction. The Alps are not only a climatological but an intellectual, moral, and emotional barrier as well.5
The Reformation sundered European Christendom. The split was religious, of course, but it went deeper. The Alps were the old demarcation between Rome and the German barbarians east of the Rhine and north of the Danube. There was a linguistic element as well, with the Germanic languages dominant to the north and the Latin tongues to the west and south. The Alps also profoundly affected the European weather, setting off the warm countries of the Mediterranean south from the cold, rainy, snowy, and dreary Gallic, German, and Scandinavian provinces to the north. Lutheranism was simply the division made visible, and dogmatic. To this day, the austere interiors of Protestant churches stand in stark contrast to the ornate sanctuaries of Italian and Spanish Catholicism.
As a glance at any map will show, the fault line ran directly through Switzerland. Luther was German, but the revolution he began quickly spread, not only through much of northern Germany (Bavaria stayed Catholic) but to the Lowlands (and, eventually, Britain) and into the German-speaking cantons of Switzerland, where men such as Huldrych Zwingli preached and fulminated so effectively that by 1523 the city of Zurich was officially Protestant.6
Out went celibacy—Luther was an avid heterosexual and fully enjoyed the perquisites of married love. “Kiss and rekiss your wife,” he wrote to his friend Nikolaus Gerbel, a Strasbourg jurist. “Let her love and be loved. You are fortunate in having overcome, by an honorable marriage, that celibacy in which one is a prey to devouring fires and to unclean ideas. That unhappy state of a single person, male or female, reveals to me each hour of the day so many horrors, that nothing sounds in my ear as bad as the name of monk or nun or priest. A married life is a paradise, even where all else is wanting.” In other words, Protestantism—in Germany, Switzerland, England, and elsewhere—was founded upon sexual freedom, if not to say license.
Sexual dysfunction fascinated Luther, and he advocated what we would consider very modern solutions to issues involving female sexuality, including the impotence of her husband (the wife should have sex with her husband’s brother, with any children as rightful heirs) and a woman’s right to a divorce, although he preferred bigamy as a more family-friendly solution. The pope, he declared, had no right to judge the God-given nature of human sexuality: “Let him set them up for himself and keep hands off my liberty.” Celibacy could only lead to “division, sin, shame, and scandal to be increased without end.” Rome-enforced clerical celibacy, nowhere to be found in the Bible, Luther regarded as “the Devil’s own tyranny.” For the early Protestants, “the Whore of Rome” had a very specific sexual connotation.
The other Swiss cantons were encouraged to convert to the new faith by John Calvin, a Frenchman, born Jehan Cauvin, who moved to Francophone Geneva, aligned himself with the German-speaking Lutherans, and fathered the Huguenots7 in France. Determinist in outlook, Calvin preached predestination, the paramountcy of scripture,8 and the moral evil of idols, including all church ornamentation. Soon enough, Switzerland, like the rest of Europe,9 was split into Catholic and Protestant denominations. The division would fester for nearly a century until it broke open into murderous hostility with the Thirty Years’ War.
Rome under Pope Julius still hovered among the ghosts of ancient Rome, the fragmenting Holy Roman Empire (largely German, or at least Frankish), and the emerging political realities of Europe. From the final defeat of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and the beginning of the line of barbarian emperors, the relations between the Germanic tribes and the Italians had been complicated and fraught. Some of the trappings and offices of Imperial Rome remained, including the consuls, but they were largely ceremonial; the real power was held by leaders such as Theodoric, the king of the Ostrogoths (the eastern Goths), who ruled in Rome while the Visigoths (the western Goths) dominated Spain, while the Vandals established kingdoms in North Africa, Sicily, and Sardinia.
As Western Rome fell, the power of the popes swelled. Prior to the end of the Western Empire, in 452, Leo I had ridden out to meet Attila the Hun, whose invasion of Europe had been checked by the Roman general Aetius and allied barbarian fighters at the Battle of Châlons, in Gaul, just the year before. Attila was still itching for a decisive fight as he approached the Eternal City, but Leo the Great somehow managed to talk him out of it. Whether through threats (unlikely), superstition (possible), or outright bribery (plausible), Leo, a native of Tuscany, got the Huns to spare the city. They withdrew, to be decisively defeated in 454 at Battle of Nedao in the Roman province of Pannonia (largely, present-day Austria and Hungary) by a coalition of Germanic warriors—many of whom had been settled inside the Empire as a reward, and who enthusiastically contributed to the Empire’s demise two decades later.
Still, even in its diminished state, Rome was always the big prize. To conquer Rome was the barbarian’s highest goal, and even after it was conquered, and yet still survived as the center of Christianity and Catholicism, it remained a potent symbol of Western power, cultural majesty, and religious veracity. To sack and rape Rome was to illustrate the West’s impotence; to eradicate her was proof of military and, to one subsequent faith, religious superiority.10
In the tumultuous aftermath of Julius’s death, the political, religious, and cultural divisions of Europe were stronger than they had ever been. The conflicts that had broken out all over the powder keg that was Western Europe—the region was in a near-perpetual state of war—demanded shifting alliances among the Habsburgs, the Papal States, and the Holy Roman Empire, which ofttimes crossed spiritual borders to advance temporal interests. When Clement VII was elevated to the papacy in 1523, he not only became the 290th pope, he also inherited a profoundly unstable geopolitical situation. Clement was caught between the demands of Francis I of France and the Holy Roman Emperor, the Habsburgian Charles V11—both Catholics. Clement threw in with the Kingdom of France to form something called the League of Cognac,12 hoping to rid Italy of foreign occupation. At the same time, Suleiman the Magnificent, the Turkish sultan, was beginning his rampages across Central Europe; the Ottoman Turks were pushing their way deep into Christendom from the east.
Matters came to an unexpected head in May 1527.13 Charles’s troops had defeated the French forces in Italy at the Battle of Pavia in 1525, even capturing the French king and forcing him to cede Italy, Flanders, and Burgundy to the Habsburgs. The problem was, the Habsburgian monarch had no money with which to pay his restive troops still in Italy. This was a common problem, not only in renaissance Europe but all the way back to the time of the Romans, when generals like Caesar sometimes raised, borrowed, or stole money in order to keep their soldiers happy. No matter how magnificent the emperor, monarch, or potentate, it seems that money was somehow always in short supply; accordingly, soldiers were often given a share of the proceeds of victory, via plunder, booty, and rapine.
Charles could not prevent his forces under the Duke of Bourbon from sacking Rome in order to pay his soldiers. While Charles himself took a dim view of Lutheranism, his imperial forces included many German Protestants (known as Landsknechte, and under the command of Georg von Frundsberg), as well as a sizable contingent of Spaniards and Italians, including the powerful cardinal Pompeo Colonna, the scion of a patrician Roman family with considerable temporal interests and a man who bore Clement, a Medici, little love. With his troops on the verge of mutiny, the Holy Roman Emperor turned them loose on Rome itself.14
Renaissance Rome may have been the center of an emerging cultural movement that would soon enough sweep over France, Germany, and England—not to mention the seat of the Vatican and the locus of the Papal States—but in the face of the armed might of the Habsburgs, it was essentially defenseless. By this time, the Romans had become lovers, not fighters. There was no one to stop the 34,000 imperial troops, including some 14,000 Germans and 6,000 Habsburgian Spaniards, from rampaging through the Holy City, stealing or destroying just about everything they could get their hands on. Art, artifacts, buildings, treasure, women—everything and everybody was fair game. The slaughter was tremendous, the wreckage appalling. Churches were desecrated, wealthy Romans held for ransom.
Rome had been sacked before, of course. The Celtic Gauls were at the gates of the city after the Battle of the Allia, just north of Rome, in 387 B.C., a defeat so humiliating that Livy concludes what we have of his History of Rome with this account15 of the defeat of the Republic before it had developed the Roman way of war:
The Gauls for their part were almost dumb with astonishment at so sudden and extraordinary a victory.… Presently the yells and wild war-whoops of the squadrons were heard as they rode round the walls. All the time until the next day’s dawn the citizens were in such a state of suspense that they expected from moment to moment an attack on the City.… Finally, the approach of the next day deprived them of their senses; the entrance of the enemy’s standards within the gates was the dreadful climax to fears that had known no respite.
Utter panic reigned in Rome. The able-bodied spirited away as many sacred objects as they could and fled the city, leaving the elderly behind. When the Gauls entered the undefended city, they at first suspected a trap. They couldn’t believe no one was raising a hand to stop them, and looked in awe upon the old men sitting peacefully in the porticoes of their homes, awaiting death. “So they stood, gazing at them as if they were statues, till, as it is asserted, one of the patricians, M. Papirius, roused the passion of a Gaul, who began to stroke his beard—which in those days was universally worn long—by smiting him on the head with his ivory staff. He was the first to be killed, the others were butchered in their chairs. After this slaughter of the magnates, no living being was thenceforth spared; the houses were rifled, and then set on fire.”
With the city in flames, and afflicted by famine and plague, the Gauls moved on the citadel. With no hope, the surviving Romans struck a humiliating bargain and ransomed themselves. “Woe to the vanquished,” cried the Gauls as they collected at least a thousand pounds in gold, and then attacked again. The Roman general, Camillus, who had been living in exile in Ardea, was named dictator, raised an army, and counterattacked while the drunken Gauls were sleeping off their despoliation. They fled, and Rome survived.
Rome remained safe from invasion for more than half a millennium. But a weakened Empire fell victim to the Visigoths in 410, presaging the coming end.16 Muslim Arab raiders appeared in 846 and sacked Old St. Peter’s basilica, but were stymied by the Aurelian Wall of the city proper, which had been built between 271 and 275 A.D. The Normans took the city shortly after the conquest of Britain, and this time the monuments of ancient Rome were not so lucky. But nothing approached the destruction visited upon the city in 1527—perhaps the least-remembered but most consequential event of the Renaissance. It was, in its way, as consequential as the Sack of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204.
Everybody knew it at the time. “What more criminal thing can be imagined than that those who had once been pledged to the Christian religion should exert themselves to destroy Her,” wrote the priapic Henry VIII in July 1527, when he was still “Defender of the Faith.” Others predicted that “there will be no business done at Rome for a long time and the city itself is so destroyed and ruined that until 200 years hence, it will not be Rome again.” In fact, this Sack of Rome brought an abrupt end to the Italian Renaissance, to the world of Michelangelo and da Vinci and Julius II that had existed just a few decades before. It would take the Italians another three centuries to recover. Rome’s barbarian chickens had come home to roost at last, destroying the remnants of a two-thousand-year-old civilization in their baleful wake.
Why was Rome, at this point, so easily conquered? The reason lies in the complexity of alliances and self-interests that characterized Europe in the sixteenth century as the nation-states began to rouse themselves, as the Holy Roman Empire began to disintegrate, as the conquest of the Americas (especially by the Spanish, who were developing a brutality in the Old World that they would soon transfer to the New) got fully underway, as papal temporal authority began to crumble, and as Europe hurtled toward the Thirty Years’ War. According to contemporary accounts, most of the moral onus rests upon Pope Clement VII himself, who never saw the danger coming.
An eyewitness and combatant during the struggle for Rome was none other than Benvenuto Cellini, the very definition, along with da Vinci, of a Renaissance man. Sculptor, goldsmith, soldier, poet, Cellini17 was manning the walls of Rome when the renegade army of Charles V attacked. As the Germans and Spaniards breached the walls, Cellini, as a member of the Medici papal household, was ordered to fall back across the Tiber to the safety of the Castel Sant’Angelo18:
I ascended to the keep, and at the same instant Pope Clement came in through the corridors into the castle; he had refused to leave the palace of St. Peter earlier, being unable to believe that his enemies would effect their entrance into Rome.
The nineteenth-century British writer T. Adolphus Trollope (younger brother of the novelist Anthony), who lived in Rome much of his life, was particularly harsh in his assessment of Clement. With Charles’s renegade troops making their way south through Italy, he wrote, “Pope Clement, with his usual avarice-blinded imbecility, had, immediately on concluding a treaty with the Neapolitan viceroy, discharged all his troops except a bodyguard of about six hundred men.”
The fate of Rome was no longer doubtful. Clement, who by his pennywise parsimony had left himself defenceless, made a feeble and wholly vain attempt to put the city in a state of defence. The corrupt and cowardly citizens could not have opposed any valid resistance to the ruffian hordes who were slowly but surely, like an advancing conflagration, coming upon them, even if they had been willing to do their best. But the trembling Pope’s appeal to them to defend the walls fell on the ears of as sorely trembling men, each thinking only of the possible chances of saving his own individual person. Yet it seems clear that means of defence might have been found had not the Pope been thus paralyzed by terror. Clement, however, was as one fascinated. Martin du Bellay tells us that he himself, then in Italy as ambassador from Francis I, hurried to Rome, and warned the Pope of his danger in abundant time for him to have prepared for the protection of the city by the troops he had at his disposal. But no persuasion availed to induce Clement to take any step for that purpose. Neither would he seek safety by flight, nor permit his unfortunate subjects to do so.
In short, the pope was paralyzed, by his own weakness, his inability to understand the strategic situation, and his foolhardiness in prematurely dismissing his mercenary troops, some of them the very Swiss who would soon battle so fiercely to save him and the papacy. At the last minute, he and his retainers fled across the Tiber via the Passetto di Borgo, a raised, covered passageway from the Vatican to the fortified Castel Sant’Angelo,19 overlooking the Tiber on its northwestern bank. Cellini describes the scene:
Night came, the enemy had entered Rome, and we who were in the castle—especially myself, who have always taken pleasure in extraordinary sights—stayed gazing on the indescribable scene of tumult and conflagration in the streets below. People who were anywhere else but where we were could not have formed the least imagination of what it was.
In short, thanks to papal malfeasance and Roman pusillanimity, on May 6 the nearly defenseless capital of Christendom—in the end, there were only about five thousand condottieri (militiamen) to defend it—had been overwhelmed, followed by an orgy of rapine and plunder that ultimately went on for ten months. Literally nothing was sacred to the invaders, especially to the German Lutherans, who had prepared for just this moment. Writes Trollope:
As for Frundsberg, he was a mere soldier of fortune, whose world was his camp, whose opinions and feelings had been formed in quite another school from those of his fellow-general; whose code of honor and of morals was an entirely different one, and whose conscience was not only perfectly at rest respecting the business he was bound on, but approved of it as a good and meritorious work for the advancement of true religion. He carried round his neck a halter of golden tissue, we are told, with which he loudly boasted that he would hang the Pope as soon as he got to Rome; and had others of crimson silk at his saddle-bow, which he said were destined for the cardinals!
Typically, those on the losing side saw their discomfiture as a sign of God’s displeasure; surely, they must have done something to deserve all this death and destruction. “The reader who bears in mind what Rome was—her vileness, her cowardice, her imbecility, her wealth, her arts, her monuments, her memories, her helpless population of religious communities of both sexes, and the sacred character of her high places and splendors, which served to give an additional zest to the violence of triumphant heretics—he that bears in mind all these things may safely give the reign to his imagination without any fear of overcharging the picture,” writes Trollope. “That it would have been better for Rome to have been taken by the Turks, when they were in Hungary, as the infidels would have perpetrated less odious outrages and less horrible sacrilege.”20
The carnage was described in vivid detail by Luigi Guicciardini (1478–1551), a Florentine and, like Clement, a Medici, whose memoir, The Sack of Rome,21 was written shortly after the events he describes in often vivid, authentic detail; his brother, Francesco, commanded the pope’s military.
But after some insincere negotiation with the pope’s representative, the Spanish and Germans, who had conferred by then, decided that they wouldn’t waste any more time or worry about being tired and hungry. Once they had discovered how confused and vulnerable the city was, they decided that they would take the rest of it immediately. Killing anyone they encountered, they began a terrifying slaughter. But since there was no one who resisted their fury, in a short while they became masters of this ancient, noble city, full of all the riches that the greediest and hungriest army could desire.
Here again the example of our predecessors puts us to shame, since nowadays four, six, or twelve thousand untrained foreigners, poorly armed and lacking leadership, harass, consume, and overpower this country of ours. And in response the wise give up hope and join the ignorant in declaring that there is no way for us to head off this scourge sent by the wrath of God, and that for our horrible sins we deserve such punishment and worse.
Worse is what Rome got.
Plunder, however, was not enough: this time the invaders had another objective: the capture of the Pope himself. And this is where the Swiss Guard comes in. As it happened, the Duke of Bourbon, the rabble’s nominal commander and a man much despised by historians,22 was killed in the initial assault. In his memoir, Cellini credits himself with firing the shot that killed the black sheep of the Bourbons:
“Since you have brought me here, I must perform some action worthy of a man”; and, directing my arquebuse where I saw the thickest and most serried troop of fighting men, I aimed exactly at one whom I remarked to be higher than the rest: the fog prevented me from being certain whether he was on horseback or on foot.… I discovered afterward that one of our shots had killed the Constable of Bourbon; and, from what I subsequently learned, he was the man whom I had first noticed above the heads of the rest.
Von Frundsberg was also absent, incapacitated by a stroke on the way to Rome while trying to tame his mutinous Landsknechte and hence hors de combat (he died, never having fully recovered, in 1528). Leaderless, the soldiers quickly turned into a vengeful mob.
After the death of Bourbon, there was some semblance of negotiation, but the stiff-necked Clement treated the army camped on his doorstep with supercilious contempt, curtly dismissing the Portuguese ambassador who was representing the Spanish investors. Blaming the cruel Spanish for the worst of the depredations, Guicciardini notes that at first the Germans were much more respectful of the articles of war—which, alas, involved “cutting to pieces anyone they came upon (an act that is very necessary in the first hours of a victory).” The Germans were also more respectful of women, unlike the “lustful” Spanish. But soon enough they, too, got into the spirit of things and an orgy of torture and plunder began, unequaled in the Renaissance and, likely, modern history as well.
How many courtiers, how many genteel and cultivated men, how many refined prelates, how many devoted nuns, virgins, or chaste wives with their little children became the prey of these cruel foreigners! How many calixes, crosses, statues, and vessels of silver and gold were stolen from the altars, sacristies, and other holy places where they were stored. How many rare and venerable relics, covered with gold and silver, were despoiled by bloody, homicidal hands and hurled with impious derision to the earth. The heads of St. Peter, St. Paul, St. Andrew and many other saints; the wood of the Cross, the Thorns, the Holy Oil, and even consecrated Hosts were shamefully trodden underfoot in that fury.
As might be expected, the Roman Catholic clergy were special targets; for the Germans, they represented the archenemies of budding Lutheranism; for the Spanish and the Italians fighting on the side of Charles V, it was payback time for the louche, hypocritical lives so many of the holy men had led. There was also an element of internecine Italian squabbling between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines,23 as well as between the Medicis and everybody else. It was all taken out in blood:
Many were suspended by their arms for hours at a time; others were led around by ropes tied to their testicles. Many were suspended by one foot above the streets or over the water, with the threat that the cord suspending them would be cut. Many were beaten and wounded severely. Many were branded with hot irons in various parts of their bodies. Some endured extreme thirst; others were prevented from sleeping. A very cruel and effective torture was to pull out their back teeth. Some were made to eat their own ears, or nose, or testicles roasted; and others were subjected to bizarre and unheard of torments that affect me too strongly even to think of them, let alone to describe them in detail …
When in the midst of such horror these savages wanted to amuse themselves, using similar tortures, they would force the prelates and courtiers to confess to their infamous and criminal habits. The obscenity and filth of their actions not only amazed and stupefied the foreigners, but forced them to admit that they would never have imagined that the human intellect could conceive of such shameful and bestial things, let alone do them.… I will not describe what happened to the noble and beautiful young matrons, to virgins and nuns, in order not to shame anyone. The majority were ransomed, and anyone can easily imagine for himself what must have happened when these women found themselves in the hands of such lustful people as the Spaniards. Since they devoted such energy and skill to the task of making their prisoners pay incomparable sums of money in order to escape from their hands, it is probable that they applied the same methods in order to insure the satisfaction of their hot and intemperate libidos.
One cannot imagine therefore an unbearable form of torture that their prisoners did not experience and endure many times for the sake of cruel and insatiable greed. How patiently these torments were borne by refined and delicate prelates and effeminate courtiers, is easy to imagine, if one realizes with what difficulty in good times, they bore, not the ills of the body, but the bite of a fly. And because many of these barbarians feared that their prisoners had not revealed to them all the money and valuables that they had hidden away, they forced their prisoners, even if they were high-ranking nobles, to empty with their own hands the sewers and other disgusting places where human excrement and the like were disposed of. Anyone can imagine how much pain and suffering that must have given to those who had always been accustomed to having their houses, their clothes, their bodies, and especially their boots perfumed with sweet and alluring scents.
The immense riches of the Roman nobility, preserved in their families for many centuries, were destroyed in an hour.… The sumptuous palaces of the cardinals, the proud palaces of the pope, the holy churches of Peter and Paul, the private chapel of His Holiness, the Sancta Sanctorum, and the other holy places, once full of plenary indulgences and venerable relics, now became the brothels of German and Spanish whores.
As a force of about 20,000 Spanish Bourbons and German Landsknechte approached the Vatican, the only thing between them and Clement were 189 members of the Swiss Guard, prepared to die rather than let the pope be captured. A pope would be worth a fortune in ransom, and besides, it was payback time for the Vatican’s alliance with the defeated French. But the Guard cared little for the political events swirling around it. The men had sworn a blood oath to guard the person of the pontiff with their lives, and they intended to keep it. Under the command of Capt. Kaspar Röist, they fought a prolonged, pitched last stand on the steps of St. Peter’s against the invaders.
It must have been one the bloodiest and most brutal battles since Cannae. The men of the Guard could not retreat; the Pope’s troops had to stand and fight and die, which most of them did. Of the original company, only 42 managed to survive long enough to conduct a fighting retreat24 into the Castel Sant’Angelo. Although we lack eyewitness descriptions of this battle itself, it is possible to reconstruct what might have happened from what we know of the Swiss military tactics of the time.
For one thing, the Swiss hated the Habsburgs; indeed, Swiss independence grew out of the Helvetian resistance to them,25 so it’s no wonder that the Guard would resist so fiercely. The idea of the Swiss citizen-soldier, with every man pledged and armed to fight for the defense of his landlocked, mountainous country, created as well a supply of mercenaries, who rented out their endurance, ferocity, and battle-hardened tactics to the highest bidders in Europe. The same people who had harassed the mighty Hannibal on his way to Cisalpine Gaul and Italy had little fear of anybody else. It was part of their code to take no prisoners, to kill or be killed, and everybody knew it.
Additionally, the Swiss were defensive fighters. As early as the Roman period, but certainly from the thirteenth century on, they had barricaded their mountain passes to create Letzinen (fortifications), and the Swiss soldiers were never happier than when the odds were against them. At the Battle of St. Jacob-en-Birs (1444), about a thousand Swiss held off a Habsburgian force of about 15,000 for four hours; they died to a man, but took twice their number with them. Armed with halberds, pikes, and swords, the Swiss in formation could repel any form of cavalry (horses would not charge into a rank of eighteen-foot-long pikes), and their other weapons were lethal at close range.
By 1525, though, the Swiss were already fading as an offensive fighting force. France’s defeat at the Battle of Pavia was caused by the failure of the Swiss pikemen to stop Charles V’s Spanish brigades on the French flank, in part due to the withering fire of the Spanish arquebusiers. The old pike squares—a descendent of the phalanx and the legions—could not compete with the combined firepower of the attackers.
So with the Germans and Spaniards pouring into St. Peter’s Square, the Guard did what it did best: starting at the Teutonic Cemetery and moving to the steps of St. Peter’s, it fought off the invaders by forming a moving square that could escort the pope to safety from the Vatican through the Passetto di Borgo and into the nearly impregnable Castel Sant’Angelo. The Helvetians managed to escort the pope into the old mausoleum, to join some cardinals and prelates who had had the good sense to escape to safety early in the battle. The rest, including Röist, died, but they took hundreds, if not thousands, of the invaders with them and thus ensured the pope’s survival.
Despite their heroics, Clement surrendered on June 6; the price was a ransom of 400,000 ducats and the concession of various papal territories. Charles thus won a free hand to expand his empire in Italy while strengthening his hold on Spain and Central Europe. The League of Cognac effectively collapsed. The freed but humiliated pope now toed the imperial line, crowning Charles the Holy Roman Emperor in 1530; he also refused the request of his erstwhile ally, Henry VIII, to annul the king’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon—who happened to be Charles’s aunt—thus precipitating the Reformation in England. Clement’s reign is one of the great disasters in papal history.
Guicciardini concludes his account with this doleful, but fully deserved, image:
One can easily imagine the anguish and torment of the pope, constantly seeing and hearing such a scourge of punishment raised against himself and against Rome. Like the rest of those under siege, he is suffering in fear that he will soon fall into the hands of cruel enemies, obviously thirsting for his blood. And though he enjoyed great honors and sweet pleasures in the past, now he is paying for them with humiliation and pitiful distress. If he ever considered himself a wise and glorious prince, now he must acknowledge himself to be the most unfortunate and the most abject pontiff who ever lived. And since it is his fault that the Church, Rome, and Italy all find themselves in such extreme danger, we can easily imagine that he often looks toward the sky with tears in his eyes and with the bitterest and deepest sighs demands: “Wherefore, then, hast thou brought me forth out of the womb? Oh, that I had died, and no eye had seen me!” [Job 10:18]
In short, the Sack of Rome was an unmitigated cultural and military disaster of the highest magnitude. It ushered in the wars of religion that plagued Europe for a century and more, and its ramifications are with us still, including the division of Europe along a north-south religious axis, and is currently reflected in the history and makeup of the European Union. It is not so ancient as we might suspect.
Today, new members of the Swiss Guard are sworn in on May 6, to honor the valor of their comrades of five hundred years ago; the ceremonies begin with an early Mass, a wreath-laying service, the taking of the oath, and conclude with a private audience with the pope. In the light of modern history, who is to say their services will not someday be needed again? One of the fallacies of modern historical interpretation is that what’s past is past, that it dies along with its protagonists. But does it? History has a longer arc than modernity might suspect. And it may not always bend toward “justice.”
Just ask the Romans.