Chapter VI: “I Must Perform Some Action Worthy of a Man”: The Last Stand of the Swiss Guard (1527)

0.     It was Theodosius who made the faith the official religion of the Empire in 380.

0.     Since 2007, and with some exceptions, ammunition must be kept in central arsenals. In a country of 8.5 million people, there are an estimated 1.5 million military-grade weapons in private hands.

0.     Memorialized on film in 1965’s The Agony and the Ecstasy, starring Charlton Heston as Michelangelo and Rex Harrison as the pope, and directed by the British director Carol Reed, back when “Carol” was still a boys’ name.

0.     The homosexual, youth-molesting scandals of the contemporary Catholic Church are an inverted echo of this period, and may well result in a similar schism, this time between observant Catholics who reject the “reforms” of Vatican II and the current curia. Sedevacantism looms.

0.     Viz, Thomas Mann’s short story “Death in Venice.”

0.     The inciting incident was Zwingli’s 1522 sermon in favor of eating sausages during Lent, “Von Erkiesen und Freiheit der Speisen” (Regarding the Choice and Freedom of Foods), which became known as the “Affair of the Sausages.” Moral: never come between a German and his wurst.

0.     The subject of a spectacular opera by Giacomo Meyerbeer, first presented in Paris in 1836. After the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572, and continuing into the early eighteenth century, thousands of French Huguenots fled to South Africa.

0.     One of the principal divisions between Catholics and Protestants, even today. Catholics, who regard the New Testament as the fulfillment of the Old (Hebrew) Testament, tend to regard the Jewish Bible as prologue; Protestants continue to revere it as Holy Writ.

0.     Henry VIII brought the Reformation to the British Isles via the Act of Supremacy of 1534, which made the monarch the head of the Church of England.

0.   Even today, Islam, in its ongoing battle against Christianity and Judaism, fantasizes about destroying and occupying Rome, to complete its conquests of Constantinople and Jerusalem. That the Eternal City still survives is a source of constant frustration.

0.   A prominent, but never seen, character in Verdi’s opera Don Carlos, the deceased emperor makes an implausible but dramatically decisive return from the dead at the opera’s end.

0.   Other members included England, independent Venice, the Duchy of Milan, and the Florentine republic.

0.   That same year, Henry VIII demanded a divorce from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, thus precipitating the split between Canterbury and Rome.

0.   Religion usually finished second in the political wars of the sixteenth century; in 1536, the French even made a formal alliance with the Ottoman Turks, which lasted off and on until Napoleon—how quickly Roland had been forgotten. The political situation in France today, with its surging Muslim immigrant population, is not entirely without precedent. In 1947, the Swiss historian and diplomat Carl Jacob Burckhardt called the Franco-Muslim alliance “the sacrilegious union of the lily and the crescent.”

0.   See Extract 9.

0.   The Visigoths under Alaric, having been Christianized, did a great deal of damage but spared the people who took refuge in St. Peter’s and other churches.

0.   The subject of an 1838 opera by Hector Berlioz, seldom performed today. It is not from the composer’s top drawer. The composer’s “Roman Carnival Overture” (1844) repurposed some of the opera’s more vigorous principal themes and manic energy to much greater effect.

0.   Originally built as the tomb of the Emperor Hadrian, it was completed in 139 A.D., a year after the emperor’s death. In Puccini’s opera Tosca, the eponymous heroine leaps to her death from its ramparts.

0.   The Eastern Empire general Belisarius had holed up in the fortress while retaking Rome and much of Italy from the Ostrogothic emperor in 537. According to the Byzantine Greek historian Procopius, who traveled with Belisarius, much of the statuary that adorned the mausoleum, however, was destroyed when the defending Byzantines smashed them and threw the rubble down upon the heads of the besiegers, who fled.

0.   Cardinal Wolsey, in a letter to Henry VIII, noted, “This day there is come letters from Venyce confyrming the same tydinges to be true. They write also that they have sackyd and spoylyd the town, and slayne to the nombre of 45,000, non parcentes nec etati nec sexui nec ordini; amongst other that they have murdyrd a marveillous sorte of fryars, and agaynst pristes and churchis they have behavyd thymselfes as it doth become Murranys and Lutherans to do.”

0.   Translated by James H. McGregor from the Italian edition of 1867.

0.   “A disgraced and ruined man beyond redemption,” says Trollope.

0.   The Guelphs sided with the pope, the Ghibellines with the Holy Roman Emperor.

0.   A forerunner of the Marines at Chosin: see Chapter XIII.

0.   Albrecht Gessler, the villain of the William Tell legend, was an Austrian Habsburg. Tell’s refusal to salute Gessler’s hat, his feat of crossbow marksmanship in splitting the apple atop his son’s head, and his subsequent killing of Gessler are all part of Switzerland’s origin story. They date from the late fifteenth century.