The Papacy Stays in the Family
WITHIN A MONTH of Leo X’s death at the end of 1521, the conclave to elect the next pope was held in Rome. His cousin Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici was widely expected to succeed him; it was common knowledge that he had been Leo X’s most able adviser, as well as manager of the pope’s financial affairs. The fact that Leo X had blithely ignored his cousin’s advice, on so many occasions, was widely seen as being responsible for the plight of the papacy – not the influence of Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici. On the contrary, Cardinal Giulio appeared to be everything that Leo X was not: he was handsome, thoughtful, saturnine and gifted with good taste. Despite this, many remained steadfast in their opposition to his candidacy.
Cardinal Giulio’s candidacy may have had powerful backers, for the Medici cousins had over the years cultivated influential friends in Rome, but they had also made powerful enemies. Cardinal Francesco Soderini for one was determined that there should not be a second Medici pope; and he was unexpectedly supported by Cardinal Pompeo Colonna, one of the thirty-one cardinals created by Leo X, who saw this as his own chance to be elected. When these two were supported by all the French cardinals, who were unwilling to forget Leo X’s treachery to their king, there was a stalemate.
Cardinal Giulio now chose to make an astute tactical move. He declared modestly that he was unworthy of such high office; instead, he suggested the little-known Flemish scholar Cardinal Adrian Dedel, an ascetic and deeply spiritual man who had been tutor to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Cardinal Giulio was sure that Cardinal Dedel would be rejected – on the grounds of his obscurity, his lack of political expertise and the fact that he was not Italian. The selfless suggestion that had been made by Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici would then demonstrate to all that he was in fact the ideal candidate. But this move backfired badly, Cardinal Giulio’s bluff was called and Cardinal Adrian Dedel was elected as Pope Adrian VI. When the name of the new pope was announced to the waiting crowds outside the papal conclave, the news was greeted with astonished disbelief – there were none of the usual cheers, just silence, followed by a mounting tumult of jeers and catcalls.
The common people had evidently known better than the cardinals what this election would entail, and the appointment of a pope who behaved just as a pope was meant to behave would prove a disaster for the city of Rome. There were no lucrative appointments, no carnivals and pageants, no lavish spending sprees; the pious Adrian VI took up residence in a minor chamber of the papal apartments and proceeded to live on a florin a day, rising to pray before dawn, and eating only a thin gruel served by his fierce old Flemish maidservant.The pope’s exemplary lifestyle was viewed by cardinals and citizens alike as barbarism; in their view this was typical northern European behaviour, just the sort of thing one would expect of an unsophisticated non-Italian. But worse was to come: the pope ordered all the cardinals and archbishops resident in Rome to leave the city and take up residence in the dioceses they represented (many of which they had never seen before). There followed a grim exodus from the Eternal City.
Economic life in Rome soon ground to a standstill; and as Vasari put it, many artists were left ‘little better than dying of hunger’. With the artists so reduced, other less privileged members of society were inevitably far worse off: cut-throats were reduced to beggary, pickpockets resorted to charity, prostitutes starved, and even the priests were forced into abstemious piety. Not unexpectedly, Adrian VI was to die in 1523 within two years of taking office; the official cause of death was recorded as kidney disease – almost certainly a euphemism for poisoning, an occupational hazard that had now probably accounted for six popes in succession.
This time Cardinal Giulio came to the conclave well prepared; but so also did his sworn enemies Cardinal Francesco Soderini and Cardinal Pompeo Colonna, who now had the public backing of Francis I as well as all the French cardinals. The result was another deadlock; bribes were offered and received, the usual covert promises were given – but still the stalemate remained. Days turned into weeks, then into a month, then into another, whilst outside the common people began to riot. Nobody could communicate with the cardinals in their sealed conclave, yet somehow news reached them that the rulers of Europe were growing increasingly dissatisfied at this hiatus. The Holy Roman Emperor and Henry VIII of England had made it known that they favoured another Medici pope; and now even Francis I of France agreed with them (convinced that Cardinal Medici would betray the emperor soon enough, and return to an alliance with France). After sixty days, the longest conclave in history, Cardinal Medici was duly elected and became Pope Clement VII.
Clement VII had been brought up in the Medici Palace, and had received the finest humanist education that Medici money could buy. At forty-five, he was old enough to remember dining at table with Lorenzo the Magnificent, sitting alongside the young Michelangelo and the future Leo X as they listened to the likes of Poliziano and Pico della Mirandola discussing philosophy and reciting poetry. Clement VII had inherited his murdered father’s good looks, though these tended to lapse into a dark scowl rather than a smile (see colour plates). He had also inherited something of his great-grandfather Cosimo de’ Medici’s skill with accounts, as well as a strong inclination to his legendary caution, making the new pope hesitant when it came to taking important decisions; and unlike his cousin Leo X, he possessed a deep understanding of art.
While Leo X’s lavish patronage had made Raphael rich, his younger and more careful cousin had encouraged the artist to extend himself. It had been Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici who had commissioned Raphael’s final masterpiece The Transfiguration, which had remained unfinished on his premature death at the age of thirty-seven in 1520. In this work Raphael went beyond his habitual grace and elegance to depict a vibrant and multifarious humanity awed by the miraculously transfigured Christ. It is a work of inner tension and brilliance, its lower darkness enclosing the airy lightness of the airborne Christ; and as such, it may be seen as an echo of Clement VIII’s own spirituality, for despite his worldly indecisiveness and often saturnine appearance, his inner life was illuminated by an unwavering faith.
Such characteristics may well account for his affinity to Michelangelo, who despite his deep and evident faith remained a problematical and unpredictable artist at the best of times. In the years before his papacy, Cardinal Giulio had supervised Michelangelo in his work on the Medici Chapel in Florence, and during his papacy as Clement VII he would commission Michelangelo to paint his Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel. According to Condivi, Clement VII was of the opinion that ‘the variety and grandeur would give a wide field for [Michelangelo] to prove the power that was in him’. Clement VII knew what he was doing, though he would not live to see this overwhelming fresco in all its completed glory (see colour plates). The hordes of judged humanity, some ascending, many cast down towards Purgatory and the fires of Hell, are recognisable as Renaissance figures. But this is no simplistic fire-and-brimstone medieval depiction; here is humanity, in all its guises, from saints to the most angst-ridden sinners. The painting stands as a reminder that even strong and self-confident humanists will have to face the final judgement; the Renaissance, for all its transformations, remained essentially religious, while the ideas that would begin to change this still remained in embryo.
Yet Clement VII was in surprisingly close contact with these ideas, and even more surprisingly he was deeply sympathetic towards them. It is known that his secretary Johannes Widmanstadius introduced the pope to the ideas of Copernicus, even delivering a lecture on the new cosmology in the Vatican Garden, which was attended by Clement VII and a number of his senior dignitaries. The contents of this lecture came from Copernicus’s Commentariolus, which was circulating privately at the time and contained ‘Theories of the Motions of Heavenly Objects from Their Arrangements’. Copernicus suggested that the movement of the stars and the planets was best explained by a stationary sun circled by the earth and the other planets, with only the moon circling the earth. This had profound implications, for it meant that the earth, and thus also human beings, were not the centre of God’s creation. The medieval idea that man was a microcosm of the macrocosmos (the universe) no longer held; the wealth of interpretation that had gone into this idea, and the meaning it gave to human life, vanished at a stroke. Also, Copernicus’s theory was significant in being the first major challenge to the ideas of ancient classical learning which had resurfaced with the Renaissance. This new theory opened the way forward for a novel way of thinking based on observation and experience: what would become scientific thinking.
Clement VII had no difficulty in accepting Copernicus’s heliocentric idea, and appeared to see no challenge to his faith in its implications; his Renaissance humanism was open to such progressive theories. Ironically, it would be Luther who rejected Copernicus; although the Reformation represented a progression beyond the constrictive hegemony of the Church, it also preserved many earlier Christian ideas. The Protestant faith that was born out of the Reformation retained intact many medieval notions of faith and learning, and when Copernicus’s ideas challenged those of Aristotle, Luther remained heavily on the side of Aristotle.
In the days before his papacy, the future Clement VII had been close to Leonardo da Vinci. He was too young to have witnessed Leonardo’s hypothetical stay at the Medici Palace in Florence, but he had certainly known Leonardo during his comparatively lengthy stay in Rome, which began in 1513 at the outset of Leo X’s papacy, when the new pope installed Leonardo in his own apartment within the Vatican. These were not good years for Leonardo, who was by now in his sixties and growing old grumpily; he was suffering from hypochondria, which was hardly helped by his extreme mistrust of doctors. He also became highly suspicious of the two German assistants whom Leo X provided for him, and was convinced that they were stealing his ideas. They in their turn reported Leonardo to the pope for ‘necromancy’, which was not strictly true, though they probably thought otherwise. In fact, Leonardo had merely been conducting anatomical researches, but the dissection of cadavers was not a pursuit that the Church wished to encourage, so Leo X banned Leonardo from this practice. It is also possible that Leonardo was having second thoughts about his youthful, though undeclared, atheism. His notebooks became filled with depictions of great deluges, which were prompted by his forebodings about a second Flood ‘that the wrath of God will visit upon the human race’. Even a towering Renaissance mind like Leonardo’s was vulnerable when it came to religion. The humanism of Poliziano, Pico and Botticelli had proved fragile, and they had all succumbed to Savonarola; Leonardo, on the other hand, seems to have succumbed to his own conscience, or to the quirks of his own psychology. During this period the simple mirror-writing code which he had used in his notebooks retreated into a more cryptic script, while even some of his more open remarks remained ambiguous. One particularly puzzling entry from this time reads: ‘i medici me crearono edesstrussono’, which translates as ‘the Medici created and destroyed me’. It would be very revealing if this was what Leonardo actually thought of the Medici, and one wonders how they could have destroyed him. Was this perhaps a temporary irritation, connected with Leo X’s ban on dissection, or was it a considered assessment? The trouble is that the word medici is also the plural of medico, the Italian for doctor, and the latter meaning seems more likely. Leonardo’s well-known distrust of doctors could easily have led him to imagine they were destroying him; and if his birth had been difficult, he might also have regarded doctors as ‘creating’ him – even so, this interpretation too remains problematical.
Yet this period of Leonardo’s life was not all clouded with negative thoughts. It was now that he saw the work of Raphael for the first time, which deeply impressed him and would have a marked effect upon his art. Another happy occasion came in 1515, when Leonardo accompanied Leo X on his triumphant entry into Florence, and to his subsequent difficult meeting at Bologna with Francis I, the new young king of France. Leonardo was brought along to amuse, delight and astonish Francis I, and he certainly succeeded. At Leo X’s suggestion, Leonardo had constructed a mechanical lion that walked forwards a few steps and then opened its chest to reveal the French fleur-de-lis in the place of its heart, which was intended to symbolise the heartfelt friendship between Leo (the lion) and Francis. The delight caused by this toy may well have smoothed their edgy encounter and contributed to Giuliano de’ Medici being created Duke of Nemours. This would have proved a fitting recompense of fortune, for Giuliano had long been close to Leonardo and may well have been his most auspicious patron: there is a possibility that he commissioned the Mona Lisa – who may well not have been the wife of the Florentine dignitary Francesco del Giocondo, but instead Giuliano de’ Medici’s mistress.
Leonardo was certainly commissioned by Leo X, and produced a madonna for the future Clement VII, two of only a few dozen paintings that can be firmly attributed to him. The Medici would be a considerable influence on Leonardo’s life, and Leo X’s introduction of Leonardo to Francis I at Bologna would prove particularly fateful.
The twenty-one-year-old French king, besides seeing himself as an embodiment of knightly virtues, was also a scholar; as a result, he and Leonardo would establish a deep and lasting rapport. When Francis I returned to his homeland he established a Renaissance court, to which he invited Leonardo. Disgruntled with his life in Rome, the ageing Leonardo accepted and travelled to France, where after less than three years he would die at the age of sixty-seven – according to the sometimes unreliable Vasari, he even died in Francis I’s arms.
Another very different artist who was patronised by Clement VII was the goldsmith and sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, who also left a colourful but unreliable account of his times. Cellini was born in Florence in 1500, and early in life made a name for himself as a superb craftsman in gold. As a result of a brawl, he was condemned to death, but fled the city, the first of a series of violent and bloody incidents which punctuated his life.
Cellini arrived in Rome at the age of twenty-three, in the very year that Clement VII ascended to the papacy. The new pope was quick to recognise Cellini’s exceptional abilities and gave him a number of commissions, which brought Cellini great renown in Rome. In his Autobiography he would later recall how he worked industriously, producing a cornucopia of objets d’art – including coins, altarpieces and a clasp with a papal heraldic device, all of which were brilliantly executed, in his own modest estimation. He also describes how he would often retire to the countryside with his fowling piece and favourite hunting dog Barucco, where he was apparently capable of bringing down two geese with a single shot at a distance of one hundred yards. Cellini’s wide-ranging but immovably centred Autobiography reveals its author as a braggart, a liar, a thief and even a murderer, but it also contains much illuminating detail concerning the many important figures with whom he came into contact, including Clement VII. Although the series of intimate conversations which he claimed to have had with Clement VII are palpably untrue, there is no doubt that he was close to the pope, and as we shall see he was also present at some of the most crucial events in his life.
Unfortunately, owing to the material in which Cellini so often worked, a large number of his artefacts were later melted down by avaricious vandals, ranging from kings to common thieves. The only fully accredited extant example of his work in gold is a large salt cellar, with reclining male and female nudes, executed for Francis I, which demonstrates beyond question that a promiscuous bisexual braggart and murderer can also be possessed of genius.
Even the quiet and patient Clement VII could become exasperated beyond measure by Cellini. On hearing of yet another escapade, in which he had fatally cracked open a notary’s skull, Cellini recalls: ‘Livid with rage, the Pope ordered the Governor, who happened to be in the room, to seize me and hang me on the spot where the murder was committed.’ Fortunately, before the governor could apprehend Cellini his victim made a miraculous recovery, whereupon the pope pardoned Cellini, allegedly remarking that ‘he would not like to lose me for all the world’.
If this incident is to believed, it recounts one of the few occasions when Clement VII acted passionately, swiftly and decisively. Under most circumstances he appears to have been a man of almost icy self-control, but in him the Medici trait of self-contained caution had deepened into a flaw. When the Venetian ambassador reported on the new pope, he remarked: ‘He speaks well and sees into everything, but is very timid.’ This is perhaps too harsh a judgement; if anything, Clement VII had too much understanding – he could always see both sides of any particular argument. This had made him an excellent close adviser to his cousin Leo X, but hampered his ability to take matters into his own hands. When he had been running Florence, this had not mattered so much, for the party machine took care of most decisions, and his rule had been for the most part competent and astute. But as pope he would have to make decisions that reached far beyond city politics, decisions that required leadership, informed by self-certainty and self-confidence – qualities which may have been undermined by his illegitimacy. Clement VII’s psychology seems to have been severely affected by his lack of a true father; Lorenzo the Magnificent may have cared deeply for him, even noted and encouraged his talents, but for Lorenzo his own children always came first. Indicatively, it was not Lorenzo but his son Leo X who brought about the first major advances in the future Clement VII’s career.
This flaw of indecisiveness in Clement VII would be noticeable from the very outset of his rule as pope; whether it had fatal consequences for his papacy, or whether these consequences were in fact inevitable, is another matter. The difficulties facing Clement VII on his accession were formidable, and were not helped by his lack of a coherent vision; his moderate way of life may have reformed the behaviour of the papacy at home, but it was the papacy as a whole that stood in desperate need of reform.
Clement VII appeared hampered whichever way he turned. Whilst his enemy Cardinal Colonna continued to plot his downfall, the pope found it all but impossible to buy friends, owing to the emptiness of the papal exchequer. Things looked even more ominous beyond Rome, where Christendom faced the external threat of the formidable Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, the ruler of the Ottoman Empire, which now occupied the Balkans as far as the Adriatic and was beginning to extend north into Hungary, threatening the whole of central Europe. As if this was not bad enough, Christendom also faced the internal threat of the Protestant movement unleashed by Luther, which was now beginning to spread alarmingly, whilst closer to home, the conflict between the powerful French and the Holy Roman Emperor threatened to tear Italy apart.
Francis I was soon back on Italian soil, leading his army once more towards Milan. Ten years earlier, Leo X had just managed to survive an identical situation at the start of his papacy, and Clement VII’s handling of the situation would attempt to be much the same, although fortune and character would work against him. Clement VII joined forces with the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, together with his Spanish army, and in February 1525 these forces met the French at Pavia, just twenty miles south of Milan. The Spanish army inflicted a crushing defeat and many of the French noblemen-commanders were killed, while Francis I himself was captured and carried off to Spain. He would only be released a year later, having been forced to cede to Charles V the whole of Burgundy, as well as having to renounce his claims to Naples and Milan.
Clement VII quickly understood that the Emperor Charles V now posed a direct threat to the whole of Italy, to say nothing of the rest of Europe, and immediately opened secret negotiations with the newly released Francis I. In 1526 this resulted in the League of Cognac, which joined France, Venice, Milan, and the Papal States, as well as Florence, all in an alliance against the Holy Roman Emperor.
The Emperor Charles V was incensed; but news now reached Rome of a great battle between the Hungarians and the Ottoman army of Suleiman the Magnificent at Buda, on the banks of the Danube, The historian Guicciardini, who was in Rome as the pope’s councillor, relates how they heard that ‘the army, gathered of all the nobility and brave men in Hungary, was shattered, a great many killed, and the King himself was slain, together with many of the leading prelates and barons of the realm’. Clement VII at once appealed for ‘a universal peace amongst Christians’ and for the formation of an armed alliance against the invading infidels, whereupon he summoned his college of cardinals and told them to gather their forces in preparation for a march against the Turks.
Heedless of the greater threat, Cardinal Colonna saw this as his opportunity to strike at Clement VII, and immediately set off for his fortified estates in the foothills of the mountains forty miles south-east of Rome, where he succeeded in raising an army of 800 horsemen and 5,000 foot soldiers. He then marched them to Rome, where according to Guicciardini: ‘the Pope had neither his own forces to defend himself; nor did the people of Rome, partly happy at his misfortune and partly judging that public disturbances would not affect them, make any sign of moving in his support’. As a result, Cardinal Colonna quickly overran the city. ‘Ready to die’, Clement VII took ‘his place on the pontifical throne, vested in his pontifical garb and ornaments, following the example of Boniface VIII’ (who had been similarly attacked by a Colonna in 1303). However, Clement VII’s cardinals eventually managed to persuade him to take refuge in the Castel Sant’Angelo, which certainly saved his life; though in the event Cardinal Colonna was able to extract a humiliating agreement from the pope ‘because there were no victuals in the Castello to maintain him’. Clement VII was forced to repudiate the League of Cognac against the Holy Roman Emperor; at the same time Cardinal Colonna and his fellow conspirators were to be granted a special papal pardon granting them immunity from reprisal.
Clement VII’s position was now virtually untenable; with his authority undermined and his political strategy in ruins, he appeared to lapse into his habitual state of indecision. Yet on this occasion the appearance belied the reality: acting with some stealth and uncharacteristic speed, the pope arrived at a hasty decision, one that would later be seen as amongst the worst of his life, though its initial effect certainly caught Cardinal Colonna by surprise. Clement VII despatched a large contingent of papal troops to Cardinal Colonna’s estates, with orders to lay waste his domains and its fortifications, scatter to the hills those who lived on his estates, and burn his castles to the ground. To add insult to injury, the pope also decreed that Cardinal Colonna himself be stripped of all his Church offices and titles, and be branded as an outlaw, even going so far as to put a price on his head (which added further insult by being disrespectfully low, owing to the lack of funds in the papal exchequer). It was reported that when Cardinal Colonna heard of this, he was plunged into such a fury that the very mention of the pope’s name made him shake with rage. Without further ado he marched the remainder of his men south towards Naples, where the Holy Roman Emperor’s viceroy was already following the orders of Charles V and assembling an army to ‘teach the Pope a lesson he would never forget’.
Meanwhile north of the Alps, Charles V had ordered another of his generals to assemble a vast army to march on Rome. This consisted of Landsknechte (mercenaries) recruited from Bavaria and Franconia, mostly Protestants of peasant stock all filled with religious zeal for the march on Rome and further inspired by tales of rich booty. These were led by the formidable but ageing German commander Georg von Frundsberg.
Clement VII’s desperate situation was only slightly relieved when papal forces south of Rome managed to check Cardinal Colonna and the Neapolitan troops at Frosinone, the gateway to Colonna’s ravaged estates. But by now von Frundsberg’s army of Landsknechte had begun to make its way south through the Alps. Undeterred by torrential rains, and then the first snowstorms of winter, they forced their way through the ravines of the upper passes, heaving and manhandling the portly von Frundsberg over rocks and snowfields, until finally they made it to the plains of Lombardy. Ragged and hungry after their ordeal, the Landsknechte joined forces with the troops of the other imperial commanders, the dashing Philibert, Prince of Orange, and the Duke of Bourbon, who led more Spanish forces. In all, the imperial army in the north now numbered 30,000 men.
By this stage Clement VII was in an agony of indecision, unable to make up his mind whether to defend Rome or sue for a humiliating peace, to brazen out his position by asserting his right as the spiritual leader of Christendom or throw himself on the mercy of Charles V – or simply flee and hope that the Church hierarchy would come to his rescue. Eventually the pope was persuaded to despatch emissaries, who managed to negotiate a temporary peace with the Duke of Bourbon and his advancing army. Yet when the motley German Landsknechte were informed of this they were literally up in arms; their payment was dependent on them fighting, and having survived their alpine crossing they were in no mood to attempt another one empty-handed. Even the continuing rain failed to douse their ardour, and they shouted down any attempt to address them by Georg von Frundsberg, who became so outraged at this insubordination that he had a fit of apoplexy and had to be carried off in a cart to recover in Ferrara.
Fig 13 Three Landsknechte
The Duke of Bourbon now took charge of the Landsknechte, but found himself unable to control the increasingly mutinous and bedraggled elements of his army. Still it continued to rain, supplies were running short and the heavy artillery was becoming bogged down; soon even the disciplined Spanish troops were against the peace, and the Duke of Bourbon caved in, giving the order to march south across the Apennines towards Rome. With a cheer, the Germans surged forward, followed by the more orderly ranks of grim Spaniards.
The torrential rains continued as the army moved rapidly south through the mountains. Contemporary reports speak of the ragged and starving Landsknechte accompanied by fanatical Spanish troops storming over the passes and the ravines. In gangs of thirty men with clasped hands, they made their way through the cascading torrents of the swollen mountain streams, driven on by dreams of the gold and plunder that lay ahead.
In Rome, Clement VII was so terrified by the turn of events that he is said to have lapsed into a state of near-deranged apathy from which he could not be roused, his dark hollow-eyed face fixed in an immobile stare. Some of his cardinals were now fleeing the city, while others were barricading themselves in their fortified palaces and burying their valuables. Finally the pope stirred himself into action, only to find that the papal exchequer was empty – there was no money to pay for the defence of the city. In a desperate move to remedy this, Clement VII quickly appointed six of the richest remaining citizens as cardinals, thus raising just over 15,000 florins; but this only plunged him into a state of further indecision. According to Guicciardini: ‘The Pope’s conscience was more deeply upset over this flagrant bribery than he was at the prospect of the end of the Papacy and Christendom in ruins.’ By now 3,000 people had taken refuge in the all but impregnable Castel Sant’Angelo, which this time had been properly provisioned for a siege. Yet still Clement VII dithered in the papal palace, refusing all entreaties to save himself, as the imperial army swarmed down the approaches to the Eternal City.
On the morning of 6 May 1527 the imperial army arrived at the walls of Rome, where overnight a thick mist had risen from the Tiber. Inside the papal palace, Clement VII had been on his knees since the early hours, praying frantically for divine intervention. As the enemy emerged through the mist and began to scale the walls, the defenders rushed to the ramparts. Cellini, who was present, describes the scene: ‘When we got up onto the city walls we could see below the formidable massed ranks of the Duke of Bourbon’s army, which were battling their utmost to break into the city. The fighting was particularly bitter where we were, and already many young men had been killed by the attackers. The whole place was covered in the thickest fog and the fighting was desperate.’ Cellini described how his companion-in-arms panicked and desperately begged him to flee, but the brave goldsmith managed to rally his friend. By now the imperial troops had a number of ladders secure against the walls; Cellini and the defenders fired down at them with their arquebuses, and amidst the mist and shouts and gunfire there was chaos. Several sources report how at the beginning of the assault the Duke of Bourbon stood at the forefront of his troops bravely rallying them and urging them on. At one stage a pocket of swirling mist cleared, and Cellini described how, up on the ramparts: ‘I pointed my arquebus at the thickest and most packed group of the enemy, aiming directly at a man I could see standing out from the rest. It was so foggy I could not even see whether he was on foot or on horseback.’ If Cellini is to be believed, this was how he shot dead the leader of the imperial troops; and indeed, other historical sources confirm that the Duke of Bourbon was shot by an arquebus as he stood below the walls, though none specify who did this deed.
The assault troops were now joined by the forces of Cardinal Colonna, and the defenders found themselves outnumbered; as the walls were scaled, the inhabitants of the city panicked, fleeing for the pope’s fortress at Castel Sant’Angelo. The tumult was so great that many were trampled to death on the approaching bridge over the Tiber; under such conditions it was impossible to blow up the bridge to prevent a river crossing by the imperial troops into the heart of Rome. As the populace besieged Castel Sant’Angelo, a last cardinal was to be seen being hauled up the wall in a basket. Cellini and his companions fled the city walls and made their way as best they could through the fleeing throng towards the Castel. ‘It was difficult for us to flee for the Castel, because our officers were wounding or killing anyone who fled from the fighting at the city walls. The enemy had already broken into the city and were chasing after us by the time we managed to reach the gate of the Castel. Luckily the castellan had cleared the crowd as he wanted to drop the portcullis, so the four of us were able to rush in at the last moment and push our way inside.’
Fig 14 Castel Sant’Angelo
Amazingly, at this stage Clement VII was still on his knees in the oratory of the papal palace; in between imploring him to leave, his weeping attendants informed him of the latest news of the fighting. When the pope heard that the Duke of Bourbon had been killed, he was momentarily emboldened. Assuming an air of majesty he ascended to the papal throne, drawing his episcopal robes about him; once again, he declared that he would confront his enemies like Boniface VIII. From outside, there was a sudden tumult of roars and cries as the enemy troops arrived and began hacking their way through the streets of terrified citizens huddled around the papal palace. Clement VII became distraught, weeping; at the last moment he was persuaded to rush for the safety of the Castel, making his way along the raised stone passage that linked it to his palace (a feature prudently installed by the Borgia pope Alexander VI). With Clement VII’s attendants holding up his long pontifical robes behind him so that he could run faster, he hurried along the passageway over the street, while through the apertures in the passage wall the Landsknechte could be seen below butchering the priests and the citizens with their halberds. At this point, in the words of the papal historian Paolo Giovo, who was running alongside the pope: I flung my own purple cloak about his head and shoulders, lest some Barbarian rascal in the crowd below might recognise the Pope by his white rochet, as he was passing a window, and take a chance shot at his fleeting form.’ Thus Clement VII finally made it to the safety of the Castel Sant’Angelo.
By the end of the day the city was overrun and 8,000 people had been killed. But this was only the beginning; on the morning of the next day the Sack of Rome began with a vengeance. Inflamed after a night’s carousing, the Landsknechte began ransacking the churches and breaking into the convents to attack the nuns. Spanish troops were seen conducting vicious tortures and mutilations on their hapless victims, while the impoverished southern Italian troops were said to have pillaged even the hovels of the watermen, carrying off everything down to the pots and nails. Other reports tell of holy relics employed for target practice, piles of ancient manuscripts used as litter for horses, Martin Luther’s name scratched by a pike in large letters across a Raphael fresco. The palaces of the cardinals and dignitaries were broken into and pillaged, the women raped, the masters stripped, subjected to gross indignities and then ransomed for huge sums. Those not worth a ransom were lucky to die. According to a contemporary eyewitness: ‘Hell hath nothing to compare with the present state of Rome.’
Cellini tells of a man standing beside him on the ramparts of the Castel Sant’Angelo, crazed with grief ‘tearing at his face and sobbing bitterly’, as he watched the soldiers below dragging his family from his house. It comes almost as light relief to hear Cellini bragging how he became such a brilliant shot with his cannon on the walls that on one occasion he ‘sliced a Spanish officer in two with a single cannon ball’. On another occasion: ‘I fired the arquebus, dealing out death and destruction. The man I hit was the Duke of Orange, who was carried away . . .’ Miraculously, the prince seems to have survived this episode, for as we shall see he continued to play an energetic role as an imperial commander.
Cellini’s Autobiography also records Clement VII’s profuse and frequent admiration for his brave exploits: ‘The Pope was highly delighted [with me] . . . The Pope sent for me; we shut ourselves in a room together and he asked me what to do about the Papal treasures . . . hotly defended my action . . . thanked me warmly . . .’ and so on. In fact, the pope was a broken man; as the siege continued, he would daily rise at dawn and trudge to the ramparts, searching the northern horizon for the French troops he imagined were being sent to rescue him.
The Sack of Rome brought about a transformation in the character of Clement VII. His previous honesty was replaced by an incurable deviousness, and he trusted no one; his hesitancy remained, but now it masked a scheming mind rather than an understanding one. Never had a pope been so humiliated, and news of the Sack of Rome spread quickly throughout Europe – such a thing had not happened for more than a thousand years, since the Dark Ages and the invasions of the Vandals and the Visigoths. The Emperor Charles V hypocritically ordered his court into mourning; Luther saw it as God’s wrath visited upon the worldliness and corruption of the Eternal City; and Erasmus was caused to remark: ‘Truly, this is not the ruin of one city, but of the world.’
The siege of Pope Clement VII in the Castel Sant’Angelo would last for five weeks, during which the thousands of inmates endured the growing heat and were soon reduced to near-starvation. Not until 7 June would the Emperor Charles V allow the siege to be lifted, but first Clement VII was made to sign a treaty surrendering vast swathes of papal territory – from Civitavecchia and Ostia on the coast, to Parma, Modena and Piacenza in the north. At a stroke, the papal territories were reduced to a fraction of their former size; they no longer had access to the sea, or much land beyond the Apennines.
Even after this, Clement VII himself was not permitted to leave the Castel Sant’Angelo, where he lived as a virtual prisoner, whilst around him the remnant citizens of Rome lived in misery amongst their desecrated dwellings, suffering from hunger and plague. Carrion crows circled in the sky above the ruins, and even the few imperial troops left encamped outside the Castel Sant’Angelo became disheartened as the long hot summer months gave way to autumn. With the advent of winter, hordes of German Landsknechte and Spanish mercenaries who had spent the summer pillaging the countryside of the Romagna returned to Rome. They had yet to receive any money and issued an ultimatum: if they were not paid, they would break into the Castel Sant’Angelo and slaughter the pope.
In the early hours of 7 December, the pope and his retinue were permitted to escape. Disguised as a servant, Clement VII made his way north with his attendants; sewn into the linings of their clothes were strips of gold that Cellini had made from melted-down papal treasures. After travelling for several days the ragged papal entourage finally stumbled up a solitary mule track into the Umbrian mountains, the only approach to the isolated and deserted Episcopal Palace at Orvieto. Here at least Clement VII was safe – from his enemies, if not from the elements, for according to eyewitness reports the palace was ‘ruinous and decayed’, and to reach the pope’s privy chamber one had to pass through three large rooms ‘all naked and unhanged, the roofs fallen down’. Partly for warmth, but probably more as a reflection of his dejection and transformation of character, the pope now grew a moustache and beard: the man who on his accession to the papacy had widely been acclaimed as the most handsome man ever to hold this office was now reduced to a haunted figure with a black saturnine beard. By this stage he had developed the Medici heavy-lidded eyes, which had passed through Cosimo Pater Patriae to his grandson Lorenzo the Magnificent; but in Clement VII’s case he looked half-asleep, or scheming.
In Orvieto, the pope attempted to continue with the business of administering the papacy, and was soon beset with further political problems. A delegation arrived from Henry VIII of England, seeking papal dispensation for a divorce from his wife Catherine of Aragon. This placed Clement VII in a particularly difficult situation: he had no wish to alienate his ally Henry, but on the other hand Catherine of Aragon was the aunt of the Emperor Charles V, on whom the very future of the papacy now depended. Clement VII prevaricated – for the moment he appeared incapable of making any decision. The English delegation returned home, bringing dire news of the pope’s circumstances: ‘all things are in such scarcity and dearth as we think has not been seen in any place’, and they spoke of ‘hunger, scarcity, ill-favoured lodging, ill air’, and of how the roofless chambers of the pope’s palace were filled with ‘rif-raf and others, standing in the chambers for a garnishment. And as for the Pope’s bedchamber, all the apparel in it was not worth twenty nobles [less than seven pounds], bed and all.’ This description of the pope’s humiliation and powerlessness would have crucial repercussions: the first seeds of doubt were sown, and Henry VIII would begin to have his suspicions about the power of the man he was dealing with.
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Clement VII had not only lost vast swathes of papal territory, but he had also lost the Medici power base Florence. On being elected to the papacy, he had appointed as his successor to rule Florence a papal emissary, Cardinal Passerini, who had been instructed to coach the two teenage Medici heirs Ippolito and Alessandro in the business of government. The main branch of the Medici family now had precious few heirs, and both of these youths were in fact illegitimate; Ippolito was the bastard son of the deceased Giuliano, Duke of Nemours, whilst Alessandro was officially the bastard of the deceased Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino. In reality, the swarthy and uncouth Alessandro was almost certainly the illegitimate son of Clement VII himself, the result of a liaison with a Moorish slave girl whilst he had been living at the Palazzo Medici in Florence. The only legitimate offspring was Caterina de’ Medici, daughter of the Duke of Urbino and Francis I’s cousin Princess Madeleine de la Tour d’Auvergne, the first Medici with royal blood. From the start of his papacy, Clement VII had nursed plans for Caterina that went far beyond Florence. As we shall see, even in his extremity he continued to harbour this secret and highly ambitious plan – which he almost certainly inherited from his uncle Lorenzo the Magnificent, by way of Leo X.
Clement VII’s choice of Cardinal Passerini as his representative in Florence had been ill-judged; the historian Francesco Guicciardini, acting as a papal councillor at the time, reported back to Clement VII during a visit to Florence expressing his forthright views on Passerini. According to Guicciardini, Cardinal Passerini was a ‘eunuch who spent the whole day in idle chatter and neglects important things’. The presence of an outsider in the Palazzo Medici was deeply resented in the city, and Passerini’s two illegitimate charges were regarded with contempt. There were outbreaks of civil unrest, and during one of these the Palazzo della Signoria was seized by anti-Medici demonstrators. In the course of the ensuing siege, the demonstrators hurled from an upper window a heavy wooden bench, which hit Michelangelo’s David in the piazza below. The statue’s raised left arm was snapped off and fell to the ground, shattering into three pieces. These were rescued by the sixteen-year-old Vasari, who placed them in a nearby church for safekeeping; the arm would later be restored, though the joins can still be seen to this day.
When news of the fall of Rome reached Florence, the people once again took to the streets, causing Cardinal Passerini and his two charges to flee in fear of their lives, A new administration took over, and appointed as gonfaloniere for a period of twelve months the anti-Medici Niccolò Capponi, the son of Piero Capponi, the gonfaloniere who had stood up to the French king Charles VIII during his occupation of the city.
For the third time, the Medici had been ousted from Florence. The first time Cosimo de’ Medici had made a triumphant return after just a year; the second time the Medici exile had lasted for eighteen years; but now, with Medici money, power and popularity all but dissipated, it appeared doubtful whether they would ever return. Citizens who had been friends of the Medici were persecuted, all Medici insignia on buildings were destroyed and other evidence of Medici rule was defaced; at the same time the eight-year-old Caterina de’ Medici was seized and held in the convent of Santa Lucia as a hostage.
Reflecting the unstable situation in the rest of the country, the situation within Florence remained unsettled. To begin with, an oligarchy manipulated by the old families remained nominally in control, but this was soon opposed by more popular republican forces. Instability brought about a resurrection of the ideas of Savonarola, who had now been dead almost thirty years. People flocked to the churches in religious fervour, Jesus Christ was proclaimed King of Florence, and moves were made to establish once more a City of God – this time known anomalously as the ‘Republic of Christ’. Laws were passed against gambling, carnivals and pageants, as well as immodest or extravagant dress and behaviour, whilst wealthier citizens took the precaution of hiding their books, paintings and other finery. As before, the aim was to expunge the Medici past and all it stood for; the blend of social envy and justifiable resentment, which never lay far beneath the surface of the city, again possessed its citizens. However, the worst excesses of the Savonarola era were avoided, largely owing to the actions of Francesco Carducci, a man of principle and a confirmed democrat, who took over as gonfaloniere. While others succumbed to piety, he ensured that autocratic measures introduced by the Medici were repealed and more republican laws enacted in their place.
By the summer of 1528, Clement VII felt it safe to return to Rome and take up residence once more in the papal palace. His main concern was now Florence, for he knew that without that city the Medici were homeless and all but powerless: what little influence they had would disappear with the end of his papacy. For the Medici to return to their power base in Florence, Clement VII realised that he would need a strong ally. It quickly became clear that he could not rely on the French, who in 1529 once again seized the opportunity to launch an offensive in Italy, sweeping all before them until they reached Naples. Here they were ravaged by plague, suffered from over-extended supply lines and were forced to retreat.
Fig 15 The siege of Florence
Clement VII now made overtures to the Emperor Charles V, who decided that it was in his interests to make friends with the pope, and early in 1529 they signed the Treaty of Barcelona. For his part, Pope Clement VII agreed to crown Charles V as Holy Roman Emperor at Bologna. This ancient ceremony originated with the first Holy Roman Emperor, Charlemagne, who had been crowned by the pope in 800; the ceremony had not lapsed until Charles Vs predecessor Maximilian I, whose territorial ambitions had led to him being prevented from entering Italy by the Venetians. Charles V was anxious to revive this tradition, and in return promised to aid Clement VII in returning Medici rule to Florence.
Yet still the French king Francis I remained a threat; ever since his release from humiliating captivity by Charles V, Francis I had been determined to avenge himself. Unfortunately, this required some delicacy – for Charles V still held the French king’s sons as hostages, which ruled out a direct attack on Charles V in Spain. The offensive on imperial Naples had proved a fiasco, as had the issue of a personal challenge to Charles V to meet Francis I in knightly combat, which had simply been dismissed with scorn – such things were for knights and princes, not kings and emperors. Finally it became clear that there was only one recourse; in August 1529 Francis I of France and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V signed the Treaty of Cambrai, whereby Francis I was handed back his heirs in return for a ransom equivalent to one million florins.
By now Charles V had sent orders to his commander in Italy, the Prince of Orange, to offer his services to the pope. In order for Clement VII to fulfil his plans to reinstate the Medici in Florence, the pope would now have to endure the further humiliation of employing the Prince of Orange, who two years previously had imprisoned him in the Castel Sant’Angelo. The Prince of Orange marched into Tuscany with an army of 40,000 mainly Spanish troops, who began laying waste the towns under Florentine control; and on 24 October his vast army appeared on the hill sides overlooking Florence itself.
The city had long since prepared itself for such an eventuality. When Cardinal Passerini and his youthful Medici charges had fled Florence, Michelangelo had been working on the Medici Chapel in the church of San Lorenzo, and the authorities had immediately appointed him to Machiavelli’s old post: Supervisor of the City Walls. The paths of art and science may by now have begun to diverge somewhat, but artists were still regarded as technicians; just as Leonardo had been employed by Cesare Borgia, so Michelangelo was now employed by the city of Florence – as a military engineer.
Reluctantly, Michelangelo abandoned his creative endeavours and set to work on the fortification of Florence. He ordered that the city walls be extended south to include the hill of San Miniato, which overlooked the city centre, making it a key site for a besieging army to position its cannons. He also ordered that the tower of the church at San Miniato should be strapped with mattresses of tightly packed straw to protect it from cannonballs. All this was long since completed by the time the Prince of Orange arrived and his army pitched their thousands of tents across the surrounding hillsides to begin the siege of Florence.
All roads in and out of the city were blocked, the countryside and villages around were laid waste, and the besieging cannons began sporadically firing into the city. Yet it soon became clear that the citizens of Florence were in no mood to surrender. They were also considerably aided, and heartened, by the exploits of one of their military officers, Francesco Ferrucci. At night, Ferrucci would sally forth from one of the city gates with a band of armed men, attacking whichever point he had noticed was the weakest in the besieging army; before reinforcements could arrive, a convoy of fresh supplies would be rushed into the city under cover of darkness. In this way autumn passed into winter, and still Florence held out.
In February 1530 Clement VII travelled to Bologna to crown Charles V as Holy Roman Emperor of the German nations. The coronation had been fixed for 24 February, Charles Vs birthday: amidst suitable pomp the two great leaders of Christendom, both dressed in their magnificent ceremonial robes, approached one another. The pope then crowned the emperor with the iron imperial crown, in a ceremony dating back more than 700 years (though this was in fact the last time that the ceremony would take place). In the course of these proceedings a personal rapprochement of sorts was established between Pope Clement VII and Emperor Charles V; the spiritual and political powers of Europe were now united, and the peace of the continent seemed assured.
Yet still the siege of Florence continued; winter passed into spring, then summer. Despite Ferrucci’s efforts, the populace was now all but starving, and cases of plague were being reported. Ferrucci decided upon a desperate but brave measure: under cover of darkness he led a troop of armed men out beyond the besieging forces into the Tuscan countryside; he then began riding from town to town, gathering up an army of volunteers. When he returned to Pistoia, twenty miles north-west of Florence, his volunteer army numbered 3,000 foot soldiers and 500 cavalry.
By now the Prince of Orange had received intelligence of what was happening, and together with a large detachment of Spanish soldiers he went in pursuit of Ferrucci, finally managing to surprise him resting in the mountains above Pistoia at the village of Gavinana. Ferrucci and his men were quickly surrounded, hunted from house to house, and more than 2,000 of them were slaughtered. In the midst of this bloody mayhem, the Prince of Orange was felled with two shots from an arquebus, but Ferrucci himself fought to the last, and was captured only when he was mortally wounded. He was then carried on a litter before the new commander, a Neapolitan called Maramaldo, who was so outraged that he set upon the dying man in a frenzy with his dagger.
When news of Ferrucci’s brutal death reached Florence, the population was in despair; bands of starving popolo minuto took to the streets, crying out pitifully: ‘Give us the Medici, who can give us bread.’ Six days later the gonfaloniere despatched a delegation to surrender to the enemy, while the population barricaded themselves in their cellars or took sanctuary in the churches, in fear of the imperial soldiers. After ten long months the siege was over; but there was no massacre, as Clement VII had insisted to Charles V that the population be spared. The Swiss and Spanish soldiers of the imperial army moved in, and the Medici faction quickly took control of the city. The gonfalotiiere was merely imprisoned, though the previous incumbent Francesco Carducci was executed; the Medici recognised the democrat as their true enemy. At the same time, a number of the leading families who had supported the republican regime, such as the Strozzi, were banished to exile.
When Medici rule had once again been firmly established, and the imperial army had withdrawn, Clement VII sent his twenty-year-old illegitimate son Alessandro to take over the reins of power. (The other illegitimate claimant, Ippolito, was consoled by being made a cardinal.) The day after Alessandro entered the city, he was declared Head (Capo) of the Florentine Republic. This title was suitably significant, but also suitably vague; the main ruling councils were retained, but the head had a seat on all of them, and the head was also gonfaloniere for life.
The godfathers of the Renaissance now provided the officially recognised godfather (the aptly named Capo) of Florence, and the gauche and fractious Alessandro de’ Medici soon lived up to his title. Within two years the Signoria was abolished; and in an act whose symbolism resonated throughout the city, the bell in the tower of the Palazzo della Signoria, the famous vacca that summoned the people to a Balia, was thrown from its tower. It crashed to the ground in the piazza, smashing to pieces; Alessandro then ordered the pieces to be melted down and cast as medals celebrating the Medici family.
But the Emperor Charles V was still concerned about Florence; he insisted to Clement VII that what he now required of his new Florentine ally was a consistency of foreign policy, which could only be achieved by consistency of rule. There must be no further uprisings, no more changes of government, no more switching of allegiances: what was required above all else was stability. With some reluctance Clement VII took the necessary steps: acting in his power as pope, he bestowed a title on Alessandro de’ Medici, sending word to Florence that Alessandro ‘is henceforth to be called the Duke of the Florentine Republic’. This was a crucial step: the Medici had now become the noble rulers of the city – the title of duke was hereditary, and whoever inherited it inherited the city. The last semblance of democracy, or even the pretence of it, had disappeared.
Clement VII was only fifty-five years old, but he had become ill and was ageing rapidly; even so, he was still determined to pursue the fulfilment of his ambitions for the Medici family. Florence was now allied to both the Emperor Charles V and Francis I of France, and Clement VII made it known that he wished to seal these alliances by marriage. Despite his illness, in 1533 he travelled in some discomfort to Bologna for another meeting with Charles V, at which he suggested that there should be a marriage between Alessandro de’ Medici, the new Duke of Florence, and the emperor’s natural daughter Margaret. Charles V agreed, whereupon Clement VII carefully introduced the subject that was his main concern, asking the emperor if he had any objection to him arranging a marriage between the young Caterina de’ Medici and one of Francis I’s sons. The emperor reluctantly gave his permission, convinced that Francis I would never permit one of his royal sons to marry ‘one who was little more than a private gentlewoman’.
But Clement VII had already taken the precaution of approaching Francis I on this matter, and had received his assent; by the time Charles V realised that he had been tricked, it was too late. In October 1533, the petite pale-faced fourteen-year-old Caterina disembarked from Tuscany for the south of France. Clement VII himself travelled to Marseilles to conduct the marriage ceremony, and Caterina de’ Medici, Countess of Urbino, was duly married to Francis I’s second son Henri de Valois, Duke of Orleans. The ceremony was suitably magnificent, with the bride attended by no fewer than twelve maids of honour, and it was to be followed by nine days of lavish banquets, pageants and festivities. As tradition demanded, the expense of all this was met by the bride’s family; in preparation, Clement VII had imposed punitive taxes on Florence, and special new taxes had been introduced in Rome. The father-in-law Francis I was particularly impressed by his present of a casket containing twenty-four panels of rock crystal framed in silver, each carved with a biblical subject, while the casket itself was engraved with Clement VII’s papal insignia. For this ultimate occasion – the entry of a Medici into the very heart of the leading royal family of Europe – the Medici once again displayed their legendary generosity; Lorenzo the Magnificent, who had taken the first steps towards this day, would have been proud of his favoured nephew.
But 1533 was also marked by the final disgrace of Clement VII’s reign. Henry VIII of England, created Defender of the Faith by Leo X, at last lost patience with the pope over his prevarication concerning the divorce from Catherine of Aragon, and in an unprecedented move the Church of England severed its links with the Roman Catholic Church. Previously a number of German states had broken from the Church, as well as remote Sweden and some Baltic states, but now for the first time a major European power had declared itself Protestant. After this there could be no disguising the fact that Europe was tearing itself apart as never before; with Leo X and Clement VII, the Medici unwittingly became very different godfathers – this time to the Protestant Reformation.
It soon became clear that Clement VII was dying. His liver was failing and his skin turned yellow; he also lost the sight of one eye and became partially blind in the other. The irrepressible Cellini describes a visit to the pope. ‘I found him in bed, at a very low ebb. Still, he welcomed me affectionately.’ Cellini had brought some medals he had designed for the pope, but the pontiff’s eyesight was now so bad that he was no longer able to see them. ‘He began feeling my work with the tips of his fingers for some time, and then he gave a deep sigh.’ Three days later, on 25 September 1534, Clement VII died after having been pope for ten years. A few days later Cellini put on his sword and went to pay his last respects to Clement VII, who was lying in state: ‘I kissed his feet, and could not restrain my tears.’
However, Cellini appears to have been the only person in Rome who mourned Clement VII’s passing, for by this stage the pope was reviled throughout the city. After he was buried, St Peter’s was broken into on several nights; his tomb was desecrated with graffiti and smeared with excrement. His conduct during his papacy has been likened to that of a dedicated but clumsy disciple of Machiavelli: he was ruthless, but at the wrong time; he felt strong enough to scorn popularity, but did so when he most needed it; and though not afraid to betray his friends, he succeeded in alienating them all at once. In Clement VII’s defence, it must be said that no pope ever presided over the Church at a more unfortunate time, though it must also be said that he did little or nothing to avoid the greatest calamities of his reign: the Sack of Rome, and Christendom dividing against itself.
Yet there remains one sphere in which Clement VII’s life can be seen as an unalloyed success: his actions marked perhaps the most significant turning point in the history of the Medici family – the ascent into nobility in Florence, and the joining of the French royal family. Without the guiding hand of Clement VII, the Medici would never have been able to achieve the pinnacles of greatness that were yet to come.
