R. A. Scotti (17 page)

C
lement VII's pontificate began with high expectations.

Guicciardini, the most notable and opinionated contemporary historian, recalled, “The Marquis of Pescara said to me that this was perhaps the only occasion on which he had seen what all men desired come to pass.”

Guicciardini was a fellow Florentine and Medici stalwart, grateful for their patronage and prejudiced in their favor. He had little positive to say about Julius II except by way of comparison with the new pope. “No two men could have been more unlike in character than the Popes Julius and Clement,” he wrote. “For while the former was of great and even excessive courage, ardent, impulsive, frank and open, the latter was of a temper inclining rather to timidity, most patient, moderate, and withal dissembling.”

Born Giulio de' Medici, Clement was the illegitimate son of Lorenzo's brother, murdered in the Pazzi conspiracy. Although he had been Leo's close adviser, the cousins were very different. Clement was a canon lawyer, by every account a man of intelligence and high personal morals, and he took a number of steps to bring coherence to the chaos that Leo had left. He established an international council of bishops to study and respond to Luther's complaints, and he named a commission, the Collegium LX Virorum, to look into the finances of the Basilica. Its stated mission was “the crusade of the Great Pardon of the Marvelous Fabbrica of St. Peter's”—in other words, to correct the faults that had crept in and bring some accountability to the project.

The Collegium recommended the establishment of an international oversight committee with authority to organize, administer, and finance the entire enterprise and float bonds to pay for it. On December 12, 1523, by the papal bull
Admonet nos suscepti,
Pope Clement instituted the Fabbrica di San Pietro nel Vaticano, composed of sixty experts drawn from all parts of Europe. He placed it under the direct jurisdiction of the Holy See.

From this promising beginning, Clement's pontificate descended into hell. With the possible exception of Hamlet, no figure real or invented has been a more infamous vacillator than this second Medici pope. Aretino derided him as “a sheep instead of a shepherd,” and the Venetian ambassador said, “He talks well but decides badly.” It could have been Pope Clement's epitaph.

Two complementary portraits show a handsome patrician with a long face, gentle eyes, and a concerned expression. The paintings are almost identical in size, palette, and composition, except that in one Clement is pictured with the French king Francis I, and in the other he is conferring with the emperor Charles V. That very neatly points up the fault that did much more than clip the wings of the “vile tyranny of the priests.” It brought ruin to Rome, division to the Church, and shame to the papacy.

The grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella, Charles V ruled an empire that made the Caesars look land-poor. At the peak of his power, it was twenty times larger than Rome's and comprised the Hapsburg kingdom of Austria, Germany, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands; Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia in Italy; Burgundy and Artois in France; and Spain, Mexico, and Peru.

Since the death of Julius, Italy had been the battlefield where the dueling armies of Charles and Francis vied to tip the balance of power in Europe. Scarcely a year passed without one or the other alternately threatening the Papal States and allying with or attacking the various city-states. Florence, Venice, and Milan were prime targets.

In 1525, Charles captured Francis at Pavia, south of Milan, and tossed him in prison. Eventually, the two signed the Treaty of Madrid, which lasted just long enough to spring Francis from his jail cell. Then the battle was on again.

During his cousin's pontificate, Clement had two power bases. He was Leo's proxy in Florence and his vice chancellor in the Vatican. As pope, his loyalties remained divided. Like Leo, he was a Medici first, last, and always, and his preoccupation with Florence kept him vacillating between emperor and king. Concerned that Charles wanted to add Tuscany to his seemingly boundless kingdom, Clement wavered: Should he ally with the French or appease the emperor?

Guicciardini encouraged him to act decisively.

When Clement finally took decisive action, he provoked worse than alarm. Ever since his election, there had been friction between the pope and the powerful Roman families. To win the papacy, he had cut a deal with the Orsini cardinal, angering the rival Colon-nas. In a series of terrible miscalculations, the Florentine pope alienated Cardinal Pompeo Colonna, the patriarch of the clan, and then, even more disastrously, alienated the emperor. When he finally chose sides, Clement joined the French, Venetians, and Milanese against Charles in the League of Cognac. It was a virtual invitation to invasion.

 

When the monk from Saxony posted his gripes against Rome, he wanted to instigate debate, not incite a holy war. But ten years later, forty thousand angry men trudged over the Alps. Many of them were mercenaries owed their pay, Protestants but not necessarily protestors on a mission to reform or reshape the Church. They may never have heard of Martin Luther, but the Protestant princes who led them knew him well. Luther preached what they wanted to hear. The Church, the intercessor between God and man, was redundant, which in practical political terms meant that civil rulers did not have to bow to the higher authority of Rome.

 

Under the imperial banner of Charles V, German and Austrian troops marched south and joined the Colonna forces. Wiping out the papal army, they ravaged the city. A horrified Cardinal Colonna witnessed what he had wrought through arrogance and spite and tried to turn back the invaders. His remorse came too late to save his city.

Rome may hold the record for the “most sacked city in history.” In the fifth century, waves of invaders charged over the Alps with pillage and rape on their minds and ravaged the peninsula. Visigoths, Huns, and Vandals were followed in
a.d
. 846 by the Saracens, who, seeking vengeance against the infidels, desecrated the grave of Peter, the most sacred site in Europe. The Normans continued the conquest in 1084, mounting the papal altar in Constantine's basilica with swords drawn. All things being relative, though, the barbarian hordes were compassionate invaders compared with the troops of the Roman Catholic emperor Charles V, a pious Christian, champion of the faith, and an avowed foe of Luther.

With a nod and a wink from the princes, the soldiers were loosed on Rome like a biblical plague. Mercenaries took their back pay in gold chalices, in the rape of convents of nuns, in the humiliation and murder of priests, in the desecration of consecrated Communion hosts, and in the destruction of iconic art.

When his imperial army swarmed over Rome in 1527, everything sacred was profaned. According to one witness, “All were cut to pieces even if unarmed, even in those places that Attila, the most cruel of men, had in former times treated with religious respect.”

Soldiers broke into the reliquaries in the Basilica of St. John Lateran and, according to contemporary reports, played ball with the heads of Peter and Paul. A priest who refused orders to give Communion to a donkey was butchered. Roman countesses and baronesses were raped, forced into brothels, and labeled “the relics of the Sack of Rome.” Men were tortured for money and ransom. Guicciardini's brother Luigi described the brutality:

The streets were fetid with the stench of corpses. Anywhere from six thousand to twenty thousand Romans were killed. Many had tried to escape across the bridges. Those who weren't crushed in the stampede were slaughtered. Two thirds of the buildings were destroyed, and fires raged unchecked. The siege continued for four months. In the orgy of violence, an epidemic of plague broke out. A Spaniard gave this picture of the spoiled city:

Since the barbarian invasions, Castel Sant'Angelo had been the papacy's last defense against a hostile and violent world. Direct access from the Vatican palace to the fortress on the bank of the Tiber River gave the popes a citadel against capture and imprisonment. Clement, thirteen cardinals, and his entire household escaped along the
passetto
to the fortress. A bishop described their escape: “I flung my own purple cloak about the pope's head and shoulders lest some Barbarian rascal in the crowd below might recognize the pope by his white rochet as he was passing a window and take a chance shot at his fleeing form.”

Terrified Romans took refuge with the pope. In all, about three thousand barricaded themselves in Castel Sant'Angelo. Rome was an inferno. To the east, the city was in flames. In the north, halfway up Monte Mario, Villa Madama, the pope's summer palace,
*
was burning. From the parapet of the fortress, Clement watched and wept.

The German troops commandeered the Vatican. They set up headquarters in the Vatican library, converted the papal palace into barracks, caroused in Raphael's Stanze, and turned the Sistine Chapel into a mortuary. Horses steamed and stomped under Bramante's arches in the new Basilica.

 

Some pious Christians saw the Sack of Rome as divine retribution against the pervasive corruption in the Church. They recalled the words of Psalm 78:

The righteous, wielding their swords in holy war, became butchers. “In trying to make themselves angels,” Montaigne wrote, “men transform themselves into beasts.” Even those who saw the lesson of Sodom and Gomorrah in the punishment inflicted on the city deplored the ravaging.

Even the ever-critical Erasmus mourned. Calling Rome “the mother of nations,” he lamented: “This is not the ruin of one city but of the whole world.” In England, Henry VIII put aside his marital woes and joined forces with the French king Francis to rescue the pope.

With Rome lying in ruins again, the Catholic emperor, who earlier had vowed “to stake his dominion, life, blood, soul and friends” on stopping the heretic Luther, protested that he had been too preoccupied in saving the Church from Moslem infidels to halt the advance of his German princes. Ignoring the fact that the pope had gone over to the enemy, Charles first denied unleashing terror as a political tool. But finding himself isolated and abjured throughout the Christian world, he finally compromised.

Clement ordered his goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini, who had been manning a cannon on the ramparts of Castel Sant'Angelo, to melt down the papal jewelry. With the gold, the pope paid the emperor's ransom and promised him absolution. In exchange, Charles called off his troops, returned the Papal States, and made his peace with Rome.

 

In the fifth century, Pope Leo the Great famously rode out to meet Attila the Hun and turned away “the Scourge of God” by the power of his words. Pope Clement by his ill-conceived policies had invited the invaders in. Broken in spirit and shamed before the world, he returned to the scorched earth of the imperial city. “Rome is finished,” a member of his household cried. “Four-fifths of it is quite uninhabited.”

But Renaissance politics were so volatile that three years after the Sack, Pope Clement not only bestowed public absolution on the invader, he rode to Bologna and crowned Charles V Holy Roman Emperor. It was the last imperial consecration performed by a pope.

In no time, Francis and Charles were once again making the Italian boot their battleground. After the horror inflicted on Rome, even their royal families said enough. The bloody bickering had to end. The king's mother, Louise of Savoy, and the emperor's aunt Margaret of Austria, who had raised him since he was a baby, forced the two to sign a truce in 1529—officially the Treaty of Cambrai, but always known as the Ladies' Peace.