Pope Leo X (1513–21), who followed Julius after a short and trouble-free conclave untinged for once by simony, was born Giovanni de’ Medici, the second son of Lorenzo the Magnificent. ‘God has given us the Papacy,’ the thirty-seven-year old Pope is said to have written to his brother Giuliano soon after his accession, ‘let us now enjoy it.’ The words themselves may or may not be apocryphal; but they are an accurate enough summing-up of the new Pope’s attitude to his office, and indeed of his whole outlook on life. At the same time, they are open to misconstruction. It was not in Leo’s nature to enjoy his pontificate as Alexander VI had done. There were to be no orgies, no unseemly roistering. The sale of indulgencies and Church appointments went on as it always had – money had to be raised somehow – but, for all that, Leo remained genuinely pious: he took his religious duties seriously and fasted twice a week.
The fact remains that he was less a pope than a Renaissance prince. Homosexual like his predecessor, he was a cultivated and polished patron of the arts, far more magnificent than his father Lorenzo had ever dared to be. A passionate huntsman, he would ride out with an entourage of 300; an insatiable gourmet, he gave lavish banquets and willingly attended those given by his friends. In 1494, when his family was exiled from Florence, he had travelled to France, Germany and the Netherlands, where he had met Erasmus; but six years later he was back in Rome, rapidly acquiring political influence in the Curia, and by 1512 he had successfully re-established Medici control in Florence, of which he was to be the effective ruler throughout his pontificate.
He began as he meant to continue: with a procession from the still-unfinished St Peter’s to the Lateran, a procession that for sheer sumptuous extravagance surpassed anything Rome had ever seen. Though suffering agonies from fistula and piles, he rode on a snow-white horse escorted by 112 equerries – to say nothing of countless cardinals, prelates and ambassadors, and detachments of both cavalry and infantry, while papal chamberlains flung gold coins into the crowd. But even that was only the beginning. He ordered tapestries of gold and silken thread from Brussels – based on Raphael’s cartoons, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum – at a cost of 75,000 ducats, then willingly paid out double that sum for the festivities attendant on the wedding of Giuliano to Filiberta of Savoy, aunt of Francis I of France. He commissioned from Michelangelo a new façade for the church of S. Lorenzo in Florence, where three generations of his family were already buried, building a road running for 120 miles to a Tuscan quarry; and when this project had to be abandoned – the money ran out, and Leo complained, understandably, that the artist was impossible to work with – he instituted another: the Medici Chapel in the same building, which was finally to be completed during the pontificate of his cousin, Pope Clement VII.
And there was intellectual and scientific work also to be done. Leo revived Rome’s university, the Sapienza, which had not functioned for the past thirty years, appointing nearly a hundred professors and substantially increasing the number of subjects offered – which now included medicine, mathematics, botany and astronomy. He founded chairs of Greek and Hebrew, each with its own printing press. He even encouraged the theatre (until now non-existent in Rome), staging, among much else, a refreshingly sexy comedy by his close friend Cardinal Bibbiena.
Leo’s biographer, Paolo Giovio, saw his reign as a Golden Age. The city’s most powerful banker, Agostino Chigi, had erected a huge triumphal arch beneath which the procession passed, inscribed with the words ‘The time of Venus has passed, and the time of Mars. Now is the rule of Minerva.’ The Romans had no difficulty in identifying the reigns of Alexander VI and Julius II; the reference to Minerva, goddess of wisdom, was perhaps rather more problematical. Leo, highly educated and sophisticated as he was, could hardly have been described as wise. However many indulgences he sold, however many new offices he created, he remained permanently in hock to the bankers of Rome and Florence, and the papacy fell further and further into debt.
Politically, Leo was an incorrigible waverer. When in 1515 Francis marched on Milan the Pope joined the Holy League to resist him; but in the ensuing battle of Marignano – in which the French army destroyed that of the League – the papal troops, though entrenched only fifty miles away, took no part, and Leo subsequently hurried off to meet the victorious king at Bologna. The result, which he hardly deserved, was a concordat in which the Papacy surrendered Parma and Piacenza, but the continuation of Medici rule in Florence was assured.
Florence, however, was no longer enough. Leo had benefited from unbridled nepotism in his own youth, and did all he could to continue the tradition to the next generation. Two of his cousins and three of his nephews he had made cardinals; but for his favourite nephew, Lorenzo – the son of his deceased elder brother Piero – he intended something more: the Duchy of Urbino. The present Duke (he was Francesco della Rovere, nephew of Julius II) had rebelled in 1508 against his papal suzerain; now, in 1516, Leo simply excommunicated him, seizing and torturing the envoy whom the Duke sent to Rome to protest. The war that followed lasted for two years and cost 800,000 ducats; by the time it was finished Lorenzo – its intended beneficiary – was dead. (His daughter Catherine, however, was to win a far greater prize than Urbino; she married Henry, son and successor of Francis I, and became Queen of France.)
In the summer of 1517 Rome was rocked by the most scandalous, but at the same time the most mysterious, chapter in Leo’s pontificate. The Pope suddenly announced – and the announcement itself must have been embarrassing enough – that he had discovered a conspiracy by several cardinals, led by Cardinal Alfonso Petrucci (who was widely believed to be the Pope’s lover), to assassinate him. They had, it seemed, bribed a Florentine doctor named Vercelli to inject him with poison while operating on his fistula. Interrogated under torture, Vercelli not surprisingly confessed and was immediately hanged, drawn and quartered. Petrucci suffered similar treatment, and implicated a number of other cardinals. He too was sentenced to death. Because it was unlawful for a Christian to lay hands upon a Prince of the Church, he was strangled by a Moor, with a cord made of crimson silk. The lives of the other cardinals were spared – on payment of huge fines.
The accusations seem improbable in the extreme. All the accused cardinals had small grievances against Leo, but none had any that could be generally accepted as a motive for assassination. And even had they wished to murder the Pope, would they really have selected that particular method of doing so? Of them all, only Petrucci had made any attempt to flee; and yet, curiously enough, they all confessed. We shall never know the truth; popular opinion in Rome, however, persisted in believing that there had in fact been no conspiracy, and that Leo had fabricated the whole thing for the sake of the fines he was able to exact. At all events the papacy was still further discredited, and Leo’s subsequent creation of no fewer than thirty-one new cardinals, who together paid him half a million ducats for their red hats, did little to restore its prestige.
Nor, apparently, did the Pope have the faintest comprehension of how much that prestige needed restoring. Like many of his predecessors he paid lip-service to the idea of reform; reading of his pontificate, one tends to forget that for the first four years of it the Fifth Lateran Council was in progress. But the Council achieved virtually nothing. There was no sense of urgency in its deliberations, or any sign that it received any firm direction from the Pope. Meanwhile the shameless extravagance, the blatant marketing of indulgences and offices, the sexual shenanigans – for Leo had long since given up any attempt to conceal his preferences and was now positively flaunting his latest catamite, the singer Solimando, son of Prince Cem – all these abuses, and many others besides, had given still greater strength to the reform movement, and it was by now plain to any unprejudiced observer that, unless the Church were quickly to buckle down and clean out its own stables, a serious rebellion could not be long in coming.
It was on 31 October 1517 – just at the time when, in the aftermath of the Petrucci conspiracy, Pope Leo was appointing his thirty-one new cardinals – that Martin Luther nailed his notice to the church door at Wittenberg, announcing that he was prepared to defend, in open debate, ninety-five theses that claimed to establish the invalidity and illegality of indulgences.1 It would not have been a difficult task. The idea that spiritual grace could be sold commercially for hard cash was obviously nonsense; and in recent times new and improved indulgences had come onto the market. It was now possible, for example, to acquire them in respect of sins not yet committed: to lay up, as it were, a credit balance of advance absolution; alternatively, indulgences could be bought on behalf of deceased relatives; the more money paid, the shorter their time in purgatory.
By now the Church was teetering on the edge of an abyss; yet still Leo failed to see that Luther’s crusade was more than a ‘monkish squabble’. The man was clearly an irritation; but Savonarola had been a good deal worse, and was now almost forgotten. This tiresome German would doubtless go the same way. Meanwhile, in November 1518 the Pope published a Bull: all who denied his right to grant and issue indulgences would be excommunicated. But no one in Germany took any notice. Reverence for the papacy, as Guicciardini lamented, ‘had been utterly lost in the hearts of men’. Half-heartedly Leo tried to enlist the help first of the General of the Augustinian Order and then of Luther’s protector, the Elector Frederick of Saxony, to bring the monk to order; but neither attempt was successful. Then in 1520 he published another Bull, Exsurge Domine, condemning Luther on forty-one separate counts. This Luther publicly burned – and was consequently excommunicated. On 11 October 1521 the Pope bestowed the title Fidei Defensor2 – Defender of the Faith – on King Henry VIII of England, in recognition of his book The Defence of the Seven Sacraments against Martin Luther.
On New Year’s Day 1515 King Louis XII of France died in Paris. Just over a year later, on 23 January 1516, King Ferdinand of Aragon followed him to the grave. These two deaths brought two young men, still relatively unknown, to the forefront of European affairs. They could hardly have been more unlike. King Francis I was twenty years old at the time of his succession, and in the first flush of his energy and virility. He was already an accomplished ladies’ man – not particularly handsome, perhaps, but elegant and dashing, with a quick mind, a ready wit, a boundless intellectual curiosity and an unfailing memory which astonished all who knew him. He loved spectacle and ceremonial, pomp and parade; and his subjects, bored out of their minds by a long succession of dreary, colourless sovereigns, took him to their hearts.
Charles of Habsburg, born in 1500 to the Emperor Maximilian’s son Philip the Handsome and Ferdinand and Isabella’s daughter Joanna the Mad, had inherited neither of his parents’ primary attributes. His appearance was ungainly, with the characteristically huge Habsburg chin and protruding lower lip; he suffered also from an appalling stammer, and showered his interlocutors with spittle. He had little imagination, and no ideas of his own; few rulers have ever been so utterly devoid of charm. What saved him was an innate goodness of heart and, as he grew older, a tough sagacity and shrewdness. Though far the most powerful man in the civilised world, he never enjoyed his empire in the way that Francis I and Henry VIII enjoyed their kingdoms – or Leo X his pontificate.
At the age of sixteen, Charles (already ruler of the Netherlands) had assumed the regency of Aragon and the Two Sicilies on behalf of his mother, now hopelessly insane. Three years later came the death of his grandfather, the Emperor Maximilian. The Empire remained elective, and the succession of Charles was by no means a foregone conclusion. There were still many who preferred his younger brother, the Archduke Ferdinand. A still more formidable rival was Francis I – who, in the early stages of his candidature, had the enthusiastic support of Pope Leo. (Henry VIII of England also at one moment threw his cap into the ring, but no one took him very seriously.) Fortunately for Charles, the German electors hated the idea of a French emperor; the Fuggers – that hugely rich banking family from Augsburg – lined as many pockets as was necessary; and at the last moment Leo withdrew his opposition. On 28 June 1519 Charles was elected, and on 23 October of the following year he was crowned – not in Rome, but in the old Carolingian capital of Aachen – as the Emperor Charles V. In addition to the Netherlands and Spain, Naples and Sicily and the New World, there now devolved on him all the old Empire, comprising most of modern Austria, Germany and Switzerland. Milan, Bohemia and western Hungary were to follow a little later. For a man of modest talents and mediocre abilities, here was an inheritance indeed.
It is uncertain whether Pope Leo, when he withdrew his opposition to Charles’s coronation, entirely understood that by doing so he was giving his approval to the last stage of the polarisation of continental Europe. The King of France was now trapped in a vice, virtually encircled by the Empire; conversely, the Emperor now found himself sovereign of a divided dominion, its two parts cut off from each other by a hostile state. The result was inevitable: a long and deadly struggle between the two men for dominance in Europe and mastery of the western Mediterranean. The part that the papacy was to play in this struggle was to be largely concerned with maintaining the balance of power; but Leo’s own sympathies, despite his earlier support for Francis, were now firmly with Charles.
It was plain from the start that the young Emperor was not going to accept the presence of the French in Italy. He himself had no Italian ambitions except to maintain his hold on Sicily, Naples and Sardinia, all of which he had inherited from his grandfather Ferdinand; these he was determined to pass on to his successors. For the rest, he was only too pleased that the native rulers should remain in possession of their states, provided only that they recognised his position and showed it due respect. French influence, on the other hand, could not be tolerated. King Francis, for as long as he remained in Italy, constituted a challenge to the imperial hold on Naples and seriously endangered communications between the Empire and Spain. In 1521 the Emperor signed a secret treaty with Leo, as a result of which a combined papal and imperial force expelled the French once again from Lombardy, restoring the house of Sforza in Milan. This victory enabled the papacy to recover Parma and Piacenza, lost six years before.
For Pope Leo, here was a reason for celebration; but in the course of the ensuing banquet, which seems to have been more than usually riotous and lasted all night, he caught a chill that rapidly became a fever; and on 1 December he died. As a Renaissance prince he would have been superb; as Pope he was a disaster. In seven years he is estimated to have spent some five million ducats, and at his death was well over 800,000 in debt. At that time it was calculated that there were more than 2,150 saleable offices in the Vatican, worth some 3,000,000 ducats. Leo X had left Italy in its usual state of turmoil, northern Europe on the verge of religious revolution, and the papacy in the lowest depths of degradation.
Such was the state of the papal treasury after Leo’s death that the candles used at his funeral were the leftovers from that of Cardinal Gianantonio di Sangiorgio, held the day before; and such was the state of popular feeling against the Church that the thirty-nine cardinals who assembled for the conclave on 28 December needed a bodyguard to protect them.
Conclaves were well known to be uncomfortable things, but this was one of the worst. In the depths of a bitter winter, the Vatican was entirely unheated; several windows had lost their glass and had to be roughly boarded up. Most of those present had spent the greater part of their lives in conditions of extreme luxury; now they found themselves herded together, shivering in a dim half-light, with little to eat – their food was passed to them ‘at a round turning wheel made in the wall’ – and only the most rudimentary sanitation. On the sixth day, by which time one elderly cardinal had been carried out half-dead, the meagre rations were still further reduced. Few better ways, one might have thought, could be devised to encourage a quick decision; but almost at once there was deadlock. Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, with fifteen avowed supporters, at first seemed the favourite, but the sinister Cardinal Francesco Soderini turned the remainder firmly against him; Giulio then declared himself in favour of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese – upon whom, however, a similar hatchet job was now performed by Cardinal Egidio di Viterbo. As Egidio happened to be Alessandro’s confessor, the propriety of his diatribe was questioned; but the damage was done.
At this moment a letter was produced from the Emperor Charles V, warmly recommending his erstwhile tutor, a sixty-two-year-old Dutchman from Utrecht named Adrian Florensz Dedal. Hardly anyone in Rome had ever heard of him, but there: he had no enemies in the city and, given his age, was unlikely to last too long. After Pope Leo, perhaps a compromise candidate with (as far as anyone knew) a spotless reputation would be no bad thing. And did not a vote for him represent the best chance of escaping from a freezing Vatican back to their own warm palaces? And so, after fourteen nightmare days, he was elected on 9 January 1522.
Having deliberately delayed his departure owing to an outbreak of plague and then having travelled to Rome by sea, Pope Adrian (or Hadrian) VI (1522–3) – he made no attempt to change his name in the traditional manner – arrived only in August. He spoke no Italian, his Latin was incomprehensible and before the end of the year he had antagonised everyone: the populace, who considered him a northern barbarian; the Curia, who were furious at his refusal to distribute the usual benefices; Charles V, who had expected him to join his league against Francis I; and Francis himself, who actually stopped the transfer of Church money from France to Rome when the Pope arrested and imprisoned Cardinal Soderini for secretly plotting to hand over Naples to the French. Meanwhile he lived like a monk. Gone were Alexander’s courtesans, Julius’s armies, Leo’s catamites and banquets. Hadrian spent precisely one crown a day on catering and employed as domestic staff only his old Flemish housekeeper, who did all his cooking, washing and cleaning. For the art and architecture of the Renaissance he cared not a jot: he threatened to have the Sistine Chapel whitewashed, and the Laocoön – ‘an effigy of heathen idols’ – thrown into the Tiber.
It need hardly be said that his promised reforms all came to nothing. He failed to control the cardinals, who continued to live like fighting cocks; nor could he do anything to check the sale of indulgences, without which the Church would have faced bankruptcy. All his initiatives ended in disaster: his attempts to form a European coalition against the Sultan; his handling of the Reformation (whose importance he consistently failed to recognise, just as Pope Leo had before him); even his proposal – after the Turkish capture of Rhodes and the eviction of the Knights of St John – for a three-year truce over the whole of Christendom. When he fell sick and died in September 1523, little more than a year after his arrival in Rome, there was nothing but relief. It was to be another four and a half centuries before the election of the next non-Italian pope.
The cardinals’ relief was tempered, however, by the realisation that they would have to face another conclave. Fortunately, this opened in the autumn (1 October) rather than the depths of winter, but as usual the conditions worsened as time went on. From the beginning there was no heating, fresh air or natural light; then, towards the end of the month, the midday and evening meals were reduced to a single course; shortly afterwards the cardinals received only bread, wine and water. Once again, the argument for a quick election could hardly have been more persuasive; but feelings ran high, much was at stake, and it was fifty remorseless days before the choice was made.
The obvious candidate was Giulio de’ Medici, who was supported by the Emperor and consequently by the Spanish contingent; but there were many Italian cardinals – including Soderini (who had been instantly released on Hadrian’s death) and the powerful Pompeio Colonna – who were determined to do him down. The English were stubbornly and somewhat ridiculously backing Cardinal Wolsey; the French were divided. Back and forth went the arguments; devious conspiracies were hatched, and dark intrigues; intricate deals were planned, compromise candidates proposed and rejected. As it turned out, the cardinals could have saved themselves a lot of trouble, to say nothing of physical misery, because on 19 November the majority choice finally fell on the favourite, Cardinal Giulio, who somewhat surprisingly took the name of the brutal Antipope of the Schism, Clement VII (1523–34).3
Giulio de’ Medici was the bastard son of Giuliano, Lorenzo the Magnificent’s brother, who had been assassinated by the Pazzi in Florence Cathedral forty-five years before. Lorenzo had tracked down the mother and had persuaded her to allow him to bring up the boy as his own. Then, when Lorenzo himself died in 1492, Giulio was placed under the guardianship of Lorenzo’s second son, Giovanni. Since the guardian was only three years older than the ward, the two became close friends; and when Giovanni became Pope Leo X one of his first acts was to legitimise his cousin, making him a cardinal and effectively ruler of Florence.
Despite their mutual affection, the two could hardly have been more different. Leo was unusually ugly, with a huge head and a fat, red face; but he possessed a charm that many found irresistible. Clement, now forty-eight, was tall and slim; he might have been good-looking but for his thin, tightly compressed lips, haughty expression and almost perpetual frown. He was pious, conscientious, industrious; but nobody – with the single exception of his friend Benvenuto Cellini – liked him much. Guicciardini went so far as to describe him as ‘somewhat morose and disagreeable, reputed to be avaricious, far from trustworthy and naturally disinclined to do a kindness’. Anyone who thought that the election of another Medici signalled a return to the extravagant and easy-going days of Pope Leo was in for a disappointment.
It might reasonably be supposed that such a man would prove at least a competent pope. Alas, Clement was nothing of the kind. He was vacillating and irresolute, apparently terrified when called upon to make a decision. He might have made a moderately good major; as a general he was a disaster. Leopold von Ranke, the great German historian, dubbed him the most disastrous of all the popes, which – if one remembers the papacy in the tenth and eleventh centuries – seems a little unfair; the fact remains that the eleven years of his pontificate saw the worst sack of Rome since the barbarian invasions, the establishment in Germany of Protestantism as a separate religion and the definitive breakaway of the English Church over Henry VIII’s divorce.
Finding himself – as Hadrian had before him – caught in the whirlpool caused by the rivalry between Charles V and the King of France, Clement dealt with the situation even more clumsily than his predecessor. His first loyalty should clearly have been to the Emperor, to whom he largely owed his election; but in 1524 he joined with Venice and Florence in a secret alliance with France, and Francis, with an army of some 20,000, marched back over the Mont-Cenis pass into Italy. In late October he recaptured Milan, then turned south to Pavia, where he spent the winter, trying unsuccessfully to divert the River Ticino as a means of taking the city. He was still there four months later when there arrived an imperial army. The two armies met just outside Pavia, and on Tuesday, 21 February 1525, battle was joined.
The battle of Pavia proved to be one of the most decisive engagements in European history. It was also the first to prove conclusively the superiority of firearms over pikes. When the fighting was over the French army had been virtually annihilated; Francis himself had shown, as always, exemplary courage; after his horse had been killed under him he had continued to fight on foot until at last, overcome by exhaustion, he had been obliged to give himself up. He was captured and sent to Spain, where he remained for a year in not uncomfortable confinement; then Charles released him in return for his signature to what was known as the Treaty of Madrid, by which he renounced all claims to Burgundy, Naples and Milan. When he returned to Paris, however, and the terms of the treaty were made public, there was a general outcry. Pope Clement in particular was aghast: without a French presence in Italy, how could he hope to defend himself against the Emperor? Hastily he recruited Milan, Venice and Florence to form an anti-imperialist league for the defence of a free and independent Italy – and invited France to join. Though the ink was scarcely dry on the Treaty of Madrid, and though he and the Pope held widely differing views on Milan (the Pope favouring the Sforzas, while Francis wanted the city for himself), on 15 May 1526 the King, with his usual flourish, signed his name.
The League of Cognac, as it was called, introduced an exciting new concept into Italian affairs. Here, for perhaps the first time, was an agreement dedicated to the proposition that Milan, and by extension all other Italian states, should be free of foreign domination. Liberty was the watchword. It need hardly be said, however, that Charles V did not view the League in quite this light. To him it was a direct and deliberate challenge, and over the next few months relations between himself and the Pope steadily deteriorated. Finally, in September, two letters from the Emperor were despatched to Rome. They could hardly have been more outspoken if they had been written by Martin Luther himself. The first, addressed personally to the Pope, accused him of failing in his duties towards Christendom, and Italy, and even the Holy See. The second, to the cardinals of the Sacred College, went further still. If, it suggested, the Pope refused to summon a General Council for the reform of the Church, it was the responsibility of the College to do so without his consent. Here was a clear threat to papal authority. To Pope Clement, indeed, it was tantamount to a declaration of war.
In and around Milan the fighting had hardly ever stopped; there must have been many Milanese who, on waking in the morning, found it difficult to remember whether they owed their allegiance to the Sforzas, the Emperor or the King of France. An imperial army had marched into the city in November 1525, and had spent the winter besieging the unfortunate Francesco Maria Sforza in the citadel, and Sforza had finally capitulated on 15 July 1526. The news of his surrender had plunged the Pope into black despair. His treasury was empty, he was detested in Rome, and his theoretical ally Francis was not lifting a finger to help him. Meanwhile the Reformation was gaining ground and the Ottoman threat still loomed. And now, as autumn approached, there were rumours that the Emperor was preparing a huge fleet, which would land some 10,000 troops in the Kingdom of Naples – effectively on the Pope’s own doorstep. More serious still, Clement was aware that there were imperial agents in the city, doing everything they could to stir up trouble against him with the enthusiastic help of a member of his own Sacred College, Cardinal Pompeio Colonna.
For well over two centuries Rome had been split by the rivalry of two of its oldest families, the Colonna and the Orsini. Both were enormously rich, and both ruled over their immense domains as if they were themselves sovereign states, each with its own cultivated court. Their wealth in turn enabled them to contract advantageous marriages; people still talked of the wedding festivities of Clarice Orsini with Clement’s uncle, Lorenzo the Magnificent, as the most sumptuous celebrations of the fifteenth century. But the Orsini had long enjoyed what might be called a special relationship with the papacy, by reason of the fact that all the principal roads leading north out of Rome passed through their territory. Successive popes, therefore, had taken care not to offend them.
This alone was more than enough to antagonise their rivals, whose outstanding representative in the 1520s was Pompeio Colonna. The Cardinal had begun life as a soldier and should probably have remained one. He had entered the Church only because of family pressures; never could he have been described as a man of God. Julius II, indeed – who was even less of one – had refused to promote him; it was Leo X who had eventually admitted him to the Sacred College, but any gratitude that Pompeio may have felt was certainly not extended to Leo’s cousin. For Clement he cherished a bitter hatred, powerfully fuelled by jealousy, and a consequent determination to eliminate him – either by deposition or, if necessary, by death.
In August 1526 Pompeio’s kinsman Vespasiano Colonna came to Rome to negotiate a truce between his own family on the one hand and the Pope and the Orsini on the other. Clement, much relieved, disbanded his own troops – whereupon the army of the Colonna instantly attacked the city of Anagni, effectively blocking communications between Rome and Naples. The Pope had still not recovered from his surprise or had a chance to remobilise when, at dawn on 20 September, that same army smashed through the Gate of St John Lateran and poured into Rome. At about five o’clock that same afternoon, after hours of heavy fighting, Clement fled along the covered passage that Alexander VI had built for just such eventualities, leading from the Vatican to the Castel Sant’Angelo. Meanwhile the looting and plundering had begun. As one of the secretaries of the Curia reported:
The papal palace was almost completely stripped, even to the bedroom and wardrobe of the Pope. The great and private sacristy of St Peter’s, that of the palace, the apartments of prelates and members of the household, even the horse-stalls were emptied, their doors and windows shattered; chalices, crosses, pastoral staffs, ornaments of great value, all that fell into their hands was carried off as plunder by this rabble.
The mob even broke into the Sistine Chapel, where the Raphael tapestries were torn from the walls. Golden and jewelled chalices, patens and all manner of ecclesiastical treasures were seized, to a value estimated at 300,000 ducats.
With proper preparations made, a pope could hold out in the Castel Sant’Angelo for months; on this occasion, however, the fortress was completely unprovisioned. Clement had no choice but to make what terms he could. The ensuing negotiations were delicate, but their results were less than satisfactory to Pompeio Colonna, who now realised that his attempted coup had been a failure. Public opinion had swung dramatically against his own family. Rome had been plundered and the Colonna had – rightly – been blamed. In November the cardinal was deprived of all his dignities and benefices, and the leading members of his family suffered similar fates. Apart from three small fortresses, the Colonna had lost all their property in the Papal States.
Clement had survived, but only just. According to another member of the Curia, writing towards the end of November 1526:
The Pope sees nothing ahead but ruin: not just his own, for which he cares little, but that of the Apostolic See, of Rome, of his own country and of the whole of Italy. Moreover, he sees no way of preventing it. He has expended all his own money, all that of his friends, all that of his servants. Our reputation, too, is gone.
He had good reason to be depressed. Strategically he was vulnerable on every side, and the Emperor was exploiting his vulnerability to the full. The previous August Süleyman the Magnificent had won one of his greatest victories at Mohacs in Hungary. And now there came news of the defection of Ferrara, whose Duke, Alfonso d’Este, had joined the imperialists. ‘The Pope,’ wrote the Milanese envoy, ‘seems struck dead. All the attempts of the ambassadors of France, England and Venice to restore him have been in vain … He looks like a sick man whom the doctors have given up.’ And still Clement’s tribulations were not over. On 12 December a Spanish envoy delivered a personal letter from the Emperor repeating his demand for a General Council. Early the following year it was learned that an imperial army under the Duke of Bourbon was advancing on the Papal States.
Charles, second Duke of Bourbon, was one of the exalted members of the French nobility and the hereditary Constable of the Kingdom. He should have been fighting for his king, to whom he was distantly related; but Francis’s mother, Louise of Savoy, had contested his inheritance and in a fit of pique he had sold his sword to the Emperor. Despite his treachery he was a charismatic figure, admired by all his men for his courage. He never shirked an engagement and could always be found where the fighting was thickest, easily distinguishable by the silver and white surcoat that he always wore and by his black, white and yellow standard on which was emblazoned the single word ‘Espérance’. Now, as he advanced southwards from Milan at the head of an army of some 20,000 German and Spanish troops, the citizens of all the towns along his route – Piacenza and Parma, Reggio, Modena and Bologna – worked frantically on their defences. They could have saved themselves the trouble: the Duke had no intention of wasting time on them. He led his army directly to Rome, drawing it up on the Janiculum Hill immediately outside the city wall; and at four o’clock in the morning of 6 May 1527 the attack began.
In the absence of heavy artillery, Bourbon had decided that the walls would have to be scaled – a technique far more difficult and dangerous than that of simply pounding them until they crumbled. He himself was one of the first casualties. He had just led a troop of Germans to the foot of the wall and was actually positioning a scaling ladder when he was shot through the chest by an arquebus. (Benvenuto Cellini, who was present, goes a long way towards claiming personal responsibility.) The fall of the unmistakable white-clad figure was seen by besiegers and besieged alike, and for an hour or so the fate of the siege hung in the balance; then the thought of revenge spurred the Germans and Spaniards on to ever greater efforts, and between six and seven in the morning the imperial army burst into the city. From that moment on there was little resistance. The Romans rushed from the wall to defend their homes, and many of the papal troops joined the enemy to save their own skins. Only the Swiss Guard and some of the papal militia fought heroically on until they were annihilated.
As the invaders approached the Vatican, the Pope was hustled out of St Peter’s and led for the second time along the covered way to the Castel Sant’Angelo, already thronged with panic-stricken families seeking refuge. Such were the crowds that it was only with the greatest difficulty that the portcullis could be lowered. One cardinal had to be pushed in by his servants through a window; another was pulled up in a basket. Outside in the Borgo and Trastevere the soldiers embarked on an orgy of killing. Cardinal Giovanni Maria Ciocchi del Monte, the future Pope Julius III, was hung up by his hair. Almost all the patients in the Hospital of Santo Spirito were massacred; of the orphans of the Pietà, not one was left alive.
The imperial army crossed the Tiber just before midnight, the Germans settling in the Campo dei Fiori, the Spaniards in Piazza Navona. The sack that followed has been described as ‘one of the most horrible in recorded history’. The bloodbath that had begun across the river continued unabated: to venture out into the street was to invite almost certain death, and to remain indoors was little safer; scarcely a single church, palace or house of any size escaped pillage and devastation. Monasteries were plundered and convents violated, the more attractive nuns being sold in the streets for a giulio apiece. At least two cardinals were dragged through the streets and tortured; one of them, who was well over eighty, subsequently died of his injuries. ‘Hell,’ reported a Venetian eyewitness, ‘has nothing to compare with the present state of Rome.’
It was four days and four nights before the city had any respite. Only with the arrival on 10 May of Pompeio Colonna and his two brothers, with 8,000 of their men, was a semblance of order restored. By this time virtually every street in the city had been gutted and was strewn with corpses. One captured Spanish sapper later reported that on the north bank of the Tiber alone he and his companions had buried nearly 10,000, and had thrown another 2,000 into the river. Six months later, thanks to widespread starvation and a long epidemic of plague, the population of Rome was less than half what it had been before the siege; much of the city had been left a smouldering shell, littered with bodies lying unburied during the hottest season of the year. Culturally, too, the loss was incalculable. Paintings, sculptures, whole libraries – including that of the Vatican itself – were ravaged and destroyed, the pontifical archives ransacked. The painter Parmigianino was imprisoned, saving his life only by making drawings of his jailers.
The imperial army, meanwhile, had suffered almost as much as the Romans. It too was virtually without food; its soldiers – unpaid for months – were totally demoralised, interested only in loot and pillage. Discipline had broken down: Germans and Spaniards were at each other’s throats. Pope Clement, however, had no course open to him but once again to capitulate. The official price he paid was the cities of Ostia, Civitavecchia, Piacenza and Modena, together with 400,000 ducats – a sum that could be raised only by melting down all the papal tiaras and selling the gold and jewels with which they were encrusted; the actual price was higher still, since the Venetians (in spite of their alliance) seized Cervia and Ravenna. The Papal States, in which an efficient government had been developing for the first time in history, had crumbled away. Early in December the Pope escaped from Rome and travelled in disguise to Orvieto; it was there that he received ambassadors from Henry VIII of England, seeking their master’s release from his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. One of them reported:
The Pope lieth in an old palace of the bishops of the city, ruinous and decayed; as we came to his privy chamber we passed three chambers, all naked and unhanged, the roofs fallen down, and, as one can guess, 30 persons – riffraff and others – standing in the chambers for a garnishment. And as for the Pope’s bedchamber, all the apparel in it was not worth 20 nobles … it were better to be in captivity in Rome than here at liberty.
Where the annulment was concerned, the Pope – who had other things to think about – dithered as usual; the ambassadors returned disappointed.
Peace, when it came, was the result of negotiations begun during the winter of 1528–9 between Charles’s aunt, Margaret of Savoy, and her sister-in-law, Louise, mother of King Francis. The two met at Cambrai on 5 July 1529, and the resulting treaty was signed in the first week of August. The Ladies’ Peace, as it came to be called, confirmed Spanish rule in Italy. Francis again renounced all his claims there, receiving in return a promise from Charles not to press the imperial claims to Burgundy; but France’s allies in the League of Cognac were left completely out of the reckoning and were thus obliged to accept the terms that Charles was to impose at the end of the year – terms that included, for Venice, the surrender of all her possessions in southern Italy to the Spanish Kingdom of Naples. Francesco Maria Sforza was restored to Milan (though Charles reserved the right to garrison its citadel); the Medici, who had been expelled from Florence in 1527, were also restored (though it took a ten-month siege to effect the restoration); and the island of Malta was given in 1530 to the Knights of St John.
To those who felt that the King of France had betrayed them, it was a shameful settlement. But at least it restored peace to Italy and put an end to the long and unedifying chapter in her history, a chapter that had begun with Charles VIII’s invasion of 1494 and had brought the Italians nothing but devastation and destruction. To seal it all, the Emperor now crossed the Alps, for the first time, for his imperial coronation. This was no longer an indispensable ceremony; his grandfather Maximilian had done without it altogether, and Charles himself had been nearly ten years on the throne without this final confirmation of his authority. The fact remained, nonetheless, that until the Pope had laid the crown on his head, the title of Holy Roman Emperor was technically unjustified; to one possessing so strong a sense of divine mission, both title and sacrament were important.
Imperial coronations were traditionally performed in Rome. On landing at Genoa, however, in mid-August 1529, Charles received reports of Sultan Süleyman’s steady advance on Vienna; at once he decided that a journey so far down the peninsula at such a time would be folly. It would take too long, besides leaving him dangerously cut off in the event of a crisis. Messengers sped to Pope Clement, and it was agreed that in the circumstances the ceremony might be held in Bologna, a considerably more accessible city, which still remained firmly under papal control. Even then the uncertainty was not over: while on his way to Bologna in September Charles received an urgent appeal from his brother Ferdinand in Vienna, and almost cancelled his coronation plans there and then. Only after careful consideration did he decide not to do so. By the time he had reached Vienna, either the city would have fallen or the Sultan would have retired for the winter; in either event, the small force that he had with him in Italy would have been insufficient to tip the scales.
And so, on 5 November 1529, Charles V made his formal entry into Bologna where, in front of the Basilica of S. Petronio, Pope Clement was waiting to receive him. After a brief ceremony of welcome, the two retired to the Palazzo del Podestà across the square, where neighbouring apartments had been prepared for them. There was much to be done, many outstanding problems to be discussed and resolved, before the coronation could take place. It was, after all, only two years since papal Rome had been sacked by imperial troops, with Clement himself a virtual prisoner of Charles in the Castel Sant’Angelo; somehow, friendly relations had to be re-established. Next, there were the individual peace treaties to be drawn up with all the Italian ex-enemies of the Empire. Only then, when peace had been finally consolidated throughout the peninsula, would Charles feel justified in kneeling before Clement to receive the imperial crown. Coronation Day was fixed for 24 February 1530, and invitations were despatched to all the rulers of Christendom. Charles and Clement had given themselves a little under four months to settle the future of Italy.
Surprisingly, it proved enough. And so the peace was signed, and on the appointed day, in S. Petronio, Charles received from the papal hands the sword, orb, sceptre and finally the crown of the Holy Roman Empire. It was the last time in history that a pope was to crown an emperor; on that day the 700-year-old tradition, which had begun when Pope Leo III had laid the imperial crown on the head of Charlemagne, was brought to an end. The Empire was by no means finished, but never again would it be received, even symbolically, from the hands of the Vicar of Christ on Earth.
There remained the problem of Henry VIII’s annulment. The King was determined to get it: he desperately needed a son, which Catherine was increasingly unlikely to produce. Fortunately for him, there seemed to be a way out. Catherine was the widow of his elder brother Arthur, and canon law forbade marriage to a dead brother’s wife. Julius II had stretched a point and had given him a special dispensation to marry her; Henry now pleaded that the prohibition was the law of God rather than simply that of the Church. The dispensation was thus itself uncanonical and his marriage consequently invalid. His and Catherine’s inability to have a son was clearly a sign of divine displeasure.
For the Pope, one would have thought, the granting of the annulment was a small price to pay to keep England in the Catholic fold. There was, however, one insuperable problem: the King’s unwanted wife was the aunt of the Emperor whom he had so recently crowned. It was safer to declare Henry excommunicate; which, on 11 July 1533 – when Henry had forced Archbishop Cranmer to declare his marriage to Catherine null and void and had already married Anne Boleyn – Clement finally did. And Henry fought back. Defender of the Faith he may have been; but he now unhesitatingly broke with Rome and established the Church of England, placing himself at its head.
And yet, despite all his misfortunes – for many of which he had himself been responsible – the Pope never forgot that he was a Medici and a Renaissance prince. He was a patron of Cellini and Raphael, and he commissioned Michelangelo to paint the Last Judgement on the east wall of the Sistine Chapel, as well as completing his work on the Medici tombs in S. Lorenzo. His family had fought its way back into Florence in 1530, and the city was now ruled by Alessandro, generally believed to have been the bastard son of Lorenzo the Magnificent’s grandson, Lorenzo II.4 Now Clement, within a year of his death, achieved the only real diplomatic success of his career: a double marriage, linking the Medici with the two most powerful (yet always bitterly opposed) royal houses of Europe, the Valois and the Habsburg. The first of these was between Lorenzo II’s daughter Catherine and Henry, Duke of Orleans, son of Francis I and future King Henry II of France; the second was between Alessandro and Margaret of Austria, the natural daughter of Charles V. It was to officiate at the first of these that the Pope travelled to Marseilles in October 1533;5 when he returned to Rome at the end of the year he was already a sick man. He never recovered his health, and on 25 September 1534 he died.
1 Scholars now tell us that Luther never nailed it to the door, but distributed it in the usual way. They would.
2 The abbreviation Fid. Def. (or the initials F.D.) appears to this day on British coins.
3 See Chapter XVI.
4 Several historians, however, have suggested that he was the son of Clement himself.
5 Fourteen years later, his kinswoman was Queen of France. The second marriage was less successful, Alessandro being assassinated in 1537 by his distant cousin Lorenzino.