It was not a promising start to the campaign. To Pope Clement, though, the simple fact that a large imperial army had crossed into papal territory had a demoralizing effect. In mid-March, without consulting his League allies, and despite the fact that his forces were making good progress in the south, Clement made a unilateral peace with Charles V’s ruler in Naples, the imperial viceroy Charles de Lannoy. Clement’s allies were furious. Yet one can see why Clement was tempted as it was an excellent deal. Lannoy agreed that all imperial troops would leave papal territory at once, while Clement’s ally, the duke of Sforza of Milan – who was at the heart of the whole conflict – would regain his lost dukedom. The war was over and Rome and Florence were safe. As his part of the truce, Clement agreed to end his attacks on Naples and also to hand over 60,000 ducats, which would be given to the Landsknechte to persuade them to go home to Germany. Happy in the knowledge that he had nothing further to worry about, Clement, for a second time in less than a year, saved money by standing down his troops.
But he had been gulled again. In Charles V’s rickety empire it was often unclear who had authority over whom, an ambiguity which Charles and his commanders found very useful. That Clement had made peace with Charles’ man in Naples, Lannoy, did not mean he had made peace with the commander of Charles’ army in northern Italy, Bourbon. Lannoy, who was known for his double-dealing, probably intended to trick Clement all along, though he made a pretence of acting in good faith. He sent an envoy to Bourbon’s army, which was still sheltering from the weather outside Bologna, who handed over Clement’s 60,000 ducats and ordered Bourbon to leave papal territory. To Bourbon, though, retreat was not an option. Charles V had secretly instructed him to take Rome if he could, while even the pope’s ducats were not enough to cover his troops’ back pay. Bourbon knew they would be satisfied only if they plundered a large city: either Florence or Rome would do. Accordingly he had his soldiers fake a second mutiny and then told Lannoy’s envoy that he was unable to leave papal territory as his army was now out of control.
Finally, at the beginning of April, having slimmed down his forces, reducing the camp followers to a meagre three prostitutes per company, Bourbon and his army resumed their march south, sacking and burning small towns along the way. The weather was as bad as before, with heavy snow and driving rain that left rivers so swollen that Bourbon had to leave behind his three heaviest guns. On 15 April he was met by the perfidious viceroy of Naples, Lannoy, who brought another stash of money. This had been extracted from the Florentines, who had melted down treasures from their churches in the belief that this would convince Bourbon to leave. The invasion was being financed by its victims. Bourbon pocketed the money and marched on, his army larger than ever, as it had now been joined by several thousand Italian adventurers, eager to gain some plunder.
On 25 April, Clement, who had finally seen the worthlessness of his truce with Lannoy, changed his mind yet again and rejoined the League of Cognac. Though he had stood down most of his troops he was not entirely at the mercy of Bourbon’s forces. The Venetians, in spite of Clement’s treacherous unilateral peace, had ordered the League’s army, which was commanded by the duke of Urbino, to march south, shadowing Bourbon’s forces. If this was good news for Clement, it was not that good. The duke of Urbino, who was violently short-tempered, and had personally murdered two people by the age of 21, one of them a cardinal, was the very same duke of Urbino who Clement’s spendthrift cousin, Leo X, had tried and failed to rob of his dukedom. The League army’s commander-in-chief was no friend of the Medici.
Urbino soon showed his priorities. In late April, Bourbon’s army neared Florence, where a large anti-Medici faction was ready to welcome them into the city. Urbino saved the day, reaching Florence before the Imperialists, cowing the anti-Medici rebels and keeping Bourbon’s army at bay. His actions, though, were intended as a favour not to Clement but to himself. In exchange for Urbino’s help, the pro-Medici Florentines handed back a small area of territory that Urbino had failed to regain since Leo X tried to steal his dukedom. Urbino might be commander of the League army but he was working strictly for himself.
Worse, the saving of Florence put Rome in greater danger. Bourbon, fearful that the League army would foil him again, began a rapid, forced march. At Siena, which was an imperial ally, he slimmed down his forces again, dismissing more camp followers and abandoning all his remaining artillery. His army, its load lightened, then began a dash southwards. The weather was still terrible and the river Paglia was so swollen that to avoid being swept away, his cavalry clutched the manes of their horses and his soldiers clung to one another’s shoulders. Despite this the army made rapid progress, covering 30 to 50 kilometres each day.
As they drew closer to Rome, Bourbon received word from Clement’s other enemy, Cardinal Pompeo Colonna, who proposed that he and Bourbon should attack Rome together. On the night of 9 May Colonna would have his supporters in the city rouse the populace in revolt against Clement, and at dawn the next morning they would open the Porta del Popolo to Bourbon’s troops. The plan made a good deal of sense. Bourbon’s tactics, as far as he had any, were strangely out of time. During the battles that had been going on for the previous thirty years in Italy, European warfare had become transformed. Medieval tactics involving knights and pikemen had given way to methods that looked ahead to those of the Napoleonic era, in which artillery and soldiers armed with arquebus guns were the key to winning battles. Campaigns were frequently decided by sieges, around which a new science was evolving, of elaborate bastions, of trenches and counter-trenches, and of underground mines and counter-mines, and in which defenders had a strong advantage over their attackers. It was unheard of for a city to be attacked by storm.
Yet, without artillery, Bourbon had no other options. His army raced on to Viterbo, past Lake Bracciano and to Isola Farnese, carried forward by its hunger, its momentum and its fear of the League army that its soldiers knew was close behind them. On the afternoon of 5 May, four days before Colonna’s proposed uprising, the army reached Rome. Though his soldiers were exhausted, cold and starving, Bourbon did not wait but immediately sent out a force to cross the Tiber, and another to skirmish at the walls of the Leonine City. Neither achieved anything but high casualties. Reluctantly, Bourbon had his soldiers set up camp on nearby Monte Mario while he himself rode out to make a careful inspection of the Leonine Wall looking for weak spots. He soon found one.
II
What kind of Rome lay waiting for him? Compared to our earlier glimpses of the city, some of which have been a little hazy, Rome in 1527 can be seen in sharp detail as we are almost spoiled for information. Where before we have relied on archaeological discoveries, legal documents or perhaps a telling line in a letter or a satirical poem, there are now paintings of the city, sketches, maps and city guides for visitors in different languages. There are numerous buildings that have survived comparatively unscathed across the ages. There is also a new form of writing that was unheard of in the unegotistical Middle Ages, and was rare even in classical times: the personal account. With the rise of printing a century earlier and with more people able to read and write than ever before, the literary selfie had arrived. At times it seems as if everyone who was anyone produced their version of great events, to exaggerate their own roles and smear their enemies.
If a Roman from 1081 had found himself transported forwards four and a half centuries, his greatest surprise would have been the discovery that their city had moved. By 1527 Rome had completed a process that had been going on for more than a millennium, as it shifted slowly westwards, pulled by the river and the magnet of Saint Peter’s tomb. By the sixteenth century, Romans had abandoned their ancient heartland – the seven hills – for the malarial lowlands beside the Tiber. This change had brought another. The suburban, garden city of the eleventh century had been replaced by two sharply distinct landscapes. Most of the area within the old city walls was now countryside. The disabitato – which meant the uninhabited part �
�� was made up of fields and vineyards, along with occasional churches, farmhouses and country retreats for wealthy Romans. The Forum, which had been the Frangipani’s power base, was now called the Campo Vaccino (the cow field), and the southern part of the Capitoline, the Tarpeian Rock, was Monte Caprino, or Goat Hill.
As to the smaller, inhabited, abitato, a visitor from 1081 would have found it oppressively crowded. Packed into its streets were more Romans than the city had contained for a thousand years. Since the popes had returned to Rome from Avignon in the 1420s Rome had boomed. In May 1527, as chance would have it, we know precisely how many Romans there were, as the city’s first ever census had been taken only a few weeks earlier. In early 1527 Rome had a total of 54,000 inhabitants, excluding infants. Six years earlier, prior to a series of troubles – which we will come to – the population had been considerably larger, and may have been as high as 85,000. And of course there were also pilgrims who, as in medieval times, were a constant presence. In jubilee years Rome had more visitors than inhabitants, thronging the Borgo, staying in the city’s hundreds of lodging houses and, as ever, buying straw for their bedding in St Peter’s Square. St Peter’s itself was something of a disappointment – it was a building site – but pilgrims who came at Easter, Ascension or Christmas could watch the pope appear on the portico above the church’s entrance to bless the Veronica cloth. And there were the other great churches to visit, with their famous relics. San Giovanni, despite having burned down twice, still displayed Peter’s and Paul’s heads.
Yet if Rome was larger than it had been for many centuries, it had slipped behind other cities. To visitors from northern Italy, or northern Europe, whose towns had mechanical clocks and a new sense of time and precision, Rome was old-fashioned. It was also falling behind economically. Unlike other great cities in Europe and the Middle East, Rome had comparatively few artisans. Most Romans worked as shopkeepers or innkeepers in the pilgrim trade, or as bankers, jewellers, painters, medal makers or silversmiths. Directly or indirectly, almost everyone in Rome now worked for the Church.
The Church could pay well and its gold had had a striking effect on the city’s population. In the early sixteenth century few Romans were really Romans. Less than a quarter of them had been born in the city or even in the Papal States. Rome in 1527 was the most cosmopolitan city in Europe, and its people were more diverse than they had been since imperial times, a thousand years earlier. More than half came from other Italian states and almost a fifth from outside the peninsula. Rome had Lombard builders, architects, artisans and labourers. Rome’s river port was worked by Genovese sailors. There were Tuscan bankers, jewellers, shopkeepers, printmakers, painters and sculptors, German bakers and cooks, and German and French innkeepers. To warm the nights of the city’s numerous Spanish churchmen there was a thriving colony of Spanish prostitutes, one of whom inspired a play that was a huge hit in Spain. One of the few European countries that was hardly represented, curiously enough, was England, though there had been a sizeable English colony only a century earlier. It was as if the English were already preparing themselves for their break with the Catholic Church.
As well as economic migrants, the city was home to refugees escaping violence. Lombards fled the endless wars fought over Milan by Europe’s great powers. Albanians and Balkan Slavs fled Turkish occupation. Jews fled a new wave of persecution in Portugal, Spain, and Spanish-conquered Sicily and southern Italy. For the most part they found Rome a welcoming sanctuary. The two Medici popes, Leo X and Clement VII, were known for their tolerance and in 1527 Rome had a thriving Jewish community of almost 2,000, which included every profession from doctors, bankers, musicians and rabbis to the poorest artisans and traders. When Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel he sought out Jewish Roman models for Old Testament figures. Though life for Rome’s Jews could be precarious at certain seasons. Easter passion plays in the Colosseum could work Christians into violence and Carnival, in the last days before Lent, also had its dangers. Races were held on the long Via del Corso, in which Jews old and young were made to run semi-naked, as crowds, many of whom had placed bets on the runners, jeered and threw filth. Jews were not alone in having to run the gauntlet on the Corso. There were also races for young Christians, old Christians, for donkeys and for water buffalo. Pope Alexander VI, formerly Rodrigo Borgia, introduced a new race for Rome’s prostitutes.
Most of the city’s immigrants lived in areas that a visitor from the eleventh century would have found dimly familiar. They were medieval and, thanks to medieval city planning, their inhabitants lived cheek by jowl in permanent chaos. Compared to those of classical times, homes in 1527 were still small – a few had four floors but most had only two – yet they were festooned with balconies, outside stairways, overhangs and porticoes that encroached on every free inch of space. Below them lay a labyrinth of courtyards, archways and dark, winding alleys that were congested with obstacles and, most of all, congested with Romans: Romans doing their laundry or cutting up animal carcasses; Romans selling their wares or cooking their dinner. Rome in 1527 stank as it had not done since the glory days of Empire: of rubbish, offal and fish bones, of filthy water from tanneries and dyers, and of dung, both animal and human.
Rome was also a city of that most medieval of constructions, fortress towers. A visitor from the eleventh century, if he or she climbed one of the city’s hills, would have been astonished by the city’s appearance. Rome now had a pincushion or porcupine look. In 1081 it had possessed a dozen fortress towers. Now there were hundreds. Offering both status and security from one’s neighbours, during the high Middle Ages towers had become a must for every Roman who was anyone, and even shopkeepers built them. Some sprouted from ancient triumphal arches. The Church soon joined in and spindly bell towers, or campanili, sprang up beside churches across the city. One even appeared on the portico of the Pantheon. Rome also had a new skyline. Where it had once been overlooked by the temple to Jupiter Best and Greatest on the Capitoline Hill – now a quarry for stone – from the 1250s it was dominated by a large new church that stood on the other, northern end of the Capitoline: Santa Maria in Aracoeli.
Fortress towers did not stand alone but rose up from medieval palaces that were built around courtyards, and had outside stairways, often covered to keep their inhabitants dry. To Romans of the High Middle Ages these homes were a vast improvement on the ad hoc homes of their eleventh-century ancestors, which had been built out of the city’s crumbling ruins. These had long ago fallen out of fashion and in 1527, aside from the pope’s fortress, the Castel Sant’Angelo, the only classical building that was still inhabited was the old Pierleoni fortress, the Theatre of Marcellus, which had lately been converted into a palace and was now the home of the Portuguese ambassador.
By the 1520s fashions had changed once again, and if many rich Romans remained in their families’ medieval palaces, with small windows and dark, poky rooms, few wanted to do so. They wanted to live in a new Renaissance palace – still relatively rare, though steadily growing in number – whose rooms were spacious and filled with light. Rome’s new housing was designed with a new sense of the rational, with each level assigned a clear role, from the storerooms and stables on the flood-prone ground floor, to the halls, dining rooms and owners’ bedrooms on the temperate first floor – the piano nobile – to the servants’ quarters that, just as in ancient Roman mansions, baked beneath the roof.
One of Rome’s first new palaces was the Palazzo San Marco, which was begun in 1455, and is better known by its later name of Palazzo Venezia (it was here that, almost five centuries later, Mussolini would appear on the balcony to address huge crowds of supporters). Two decades later, Rome’s palace boom really took off, when Pope Sixtus IV introduced a new law that allowed high clergy, who until then had been required to bequeath any palace they built to the Church, to leave palaces to their relatives. It would not be the last time that Rome’s architectural beauty would be nourished by dubious financial arrangements. Palaces and gra
nd new houses sprang up across the city. One of the largest was built by Sixtus’ nephew, Cardinal Raffaele Riario, who had money to spend, having won a huge sum gambling with the son of Sixtus’ successor, Pope Innocent VIII, and who demolished a fourth-century church to build his grand new home, the Palazzo della Cancelleria. In 1523 it would be given to Pompeo Colonna by Giulio de’ Medici, as part of the deal he made for Colonna’s support in the conclave.
The greatest Roman home, naturally, was in the Vatican. In the 1520s the Vatican Palace was in the midst of becoming Europe’s largest palace. It had accomplished this feat in a complex series of stages. At the beginning of the thirteenth century a palace was built here which gradually supplanted the Lateran as the main papal dwelling. In the 1480s Pope Innocent VIII built a modest second palace on the Vatican hill, which overlooked its medieval predecessor several hundred yards below and was named the Belvedere for its fine views. Two decades later the syphilitic warrior Pope Julius II had his architect, Bramante, draw up a plan to link the palaces by two immensely long wings. By 1527 one wing was already complete and overlooked what would become a gargantuan courtyard that occupied three levels as it climbed the hill.
Beneath its Renaissance palaces Rome had new Renaissance streets. An eleventh-century visitor would have found these puzzlingly alien: straight, wide and uncluttered, with high, clean-lined buildings. It was almost as if Rome’s ancient ruins had come back to life. And, in a way, that was exactly what had happened. In 1527 the Italian Renaissance was at its height and classical design was much admired. The architecture of Rome’s new buildings emulated that of Rome a millennium and a half earlier.
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