In the depths of autumn Clement was approached with an unexpected request. William Knight, envoy to King Henry VIII of England, had completed a long and unhappy journey through terrible weather, at the end of which he had almost been killed by hungry locals outside Rome. He had brought Henry’s appeal to declare invalid his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Henry’s timing could hardly have been worse. Catherine of Aragon was yet another of Charles V’s relations; in this case his aunt. Henry had set in motion the annulment just eleven days after imperial troops first burst into Rome. If he had asked for a divorce a year or two earlier, Clement – then an ally of England at war with Charles V – would have agreed without a murmur. With great difficulty William Knight managed to smuggle his request into the Castel Sant’Angelo via the chamberlain of a Venetian cardinal. Knight offered Clement two possible papal bulls. One gave permission for Henry to marry Anne Boleyn. The second, rather surprisingly, offered a compromise, under which Henry would take Anne as his second wife while keeping Catherine as his first. At this moment, when Lutheranism was a rising force and Christianity was in flux, polygamy – which had a strong presence in the Bible – had a number of enthusiasts. Clement, a master at prevarication, told Knight that it would take a little time to complete the paperwork.
Knight soon enjoyed easier access to the pope. In early December the deadlock in the Castel Sant’Angelo was finally ended. It was broken when imperial commanders, who by now lived in terror of their own soldiers, conspired with Clement to sneak him out of the city. A new deal, the latest of many, was struck. Of the seven hostages Clement had handed over in June, and who had nearly been lynched by the Landsknechte, two had recently managed to escape by getting their guards drunk. Clement said he would replace them with his two illegitimate nephews, the Medici heirs, Ippolito and Alessandro. As neither nephew was anywhere near Rome, Clement offered in the meantime three of his remaining associates in the castello, including two cardinals. It was a disingenuous offer, as Clement had no intention of handing over his nephews, yet it was enough to break the impasse. On 6 December 1527 the guards in the Castel Sant’Angelo were withdrawn and in the small hours of the night the imperial commanders, who had kept their soldiers in the dark about the whole business, had the pope, disguised in the clothes of his own chamberlain, smuggled out of the city.
Yet even with Clement gone Rome’s misery was not over. For a further two months what was left of the imperial army continued to mutiny, to raid nearby towns and to use the city’s buildings as a source of firewood. Finally, in February 1528 the prince of Orange and another imperial commander, del Guasto, managed to extract 100,000 ducats from the viceroy of Naples, which was enough to give the soldiers two months’ back pay. They had wanted far more but they were in no mood to argue as for once they needed their commanders. A French force had linked up with the army of the League and was making rapid inroads into imperial Naples. If they were not careful the Spanish and Landsknechte would have no friendly territory to flee to.
Finally, on 15 February, the Italian and Spanish troops marched out of Rome. The Landsknechte left the next morning. The exodus was surprisingly orderly. Within hours of their departure, members of the Colonna’s old enemies, the Orsini family, burst into the city and avenged themselves on any Imperialists who had been unwise enough to linger. A few Romans managed to get something back from their tormentors: among legal documents of the time, one is a contract between a certain Bernardino del Bufalo and several Spanish officers in the Santo Spirito hospital, whom del Bufalo agreed to sneak out of the city unharmed in exchange for the officers’ looted valuables. After eight months of occupation, destruction, plague and innumerable deaths – one Spanish soldier claimed he threw 2,000 bodies into the river and oversaw burial of another 10,000 – Rome was finally free.
• • •
Clement VII, cautious as ever, did not come back to his capital till the following October, returning in the midst of a violent thunderstorm. The lowest point of his papacy came three months later, in January 1529, when it seemed he had lost almost everything he held dear. A series of cities had been stolen from the papal state, Rome lay in ruins and the papacy was threatened with a new schism as the French and English urged cardinals to meet in Avignon, presumably to choose a new antipope. The Medici had lost Florence. And on top of everything else, Clement, as everybody knew, was dying. Rumours claimed he had been poisoned, though it is more likely he had either malaria or a malingering cold that had got out of hand. In his desperation he finally did what he had been so determined to avoid, and made both his illegitimate nephews Alessandro and Ippolito cardinals.
But Clement did not die. Instead, over the next five years he achieved a remarkable turnaround in his fortunes. He did this by swallowing his pride and doing what he would have been wiser to do years earlier: he formed an alliance with Charles V. Charles added the Medici to his many relations by marrying his illegitimate daughter, Margaret, to Clement’s illegitimate nephew, Alessandro. The new alliance soon proved highly beneficial to both parties. Charles squeezed some funds from Clement in the form of church taxes from the kingdom of Naples, and he also improved his reputation, which had taken quite a battering as news of Rome’s sack spread across Europe. The new entente reached a high point in Bologna on 24 February 1530, when Clement crowned Charles Holy Roman Emperor. By then peace had been agreed between the Empire and France. Charles had won the struggle and his empire was accepted as the controlling power in Italy.
In return, Charles gave Clement almost everything he had lost. Both through force of arms and diplomatic pressure he rebuilt the papal state, retrieving the cities that had been snatched away by its neighbours. Best of all, in Clement’s eyes, in September 1529 imperial troops under the prince of Orange marched on Florence. Despite ingenious fortifications designed by Michelangelo the city fell after a terrible siege lasting eleven months. The next summer Clement’s nephew Alessandro rode into the city to be installed as its first openly acknowledged hereditary ruler. The Medici had regained their heartland.
Alessandro, like Clement’s other nephew, Ippolito, proved a poor ruler and Florence soon passed to another branch of the family, under Cosimo, but it remained in the hands of the de’ Medici, while Clement scored a big success for another of his close relatives. In September 1533, he journeyed to Marseilles. Along with his barrels of Tiber water, which saved him from the risk of drinking the local supply, he also brought his young niece, Catherine, who we last saw being held hostage by Florentine republican rebels. The next month Clement himself married Catherine to King Francis I’s second son, Henri, and so restored his relations with France. Clement, who knew only too well how monarchs could oil their way out of a properly constituted marriage, is said to have intended to witness the consummation personally. Fourteen years later, after the fortuitous death of her brother-in-law, Catherine became queen of France.
Within a year of his niece’s marriage, Clement was dead. He died still wearing a beard in mourning for Rome. His papacy would be remembered as a disaster, yet it could have been far worse. He had managed to salvage all that he most cared about. The papal state, Florence and the Medici were restored in their fortunes. Rome had been wrecked, it was true, Luther’s doctrines continued to spread unchecked and Henry VIII’s England had broken from the Church of Rome, but faraway England was low on Clement’s list of priorities.
And Rome? Francesco Gonzaga, who visited the city soon after the sack, described it as a city of abandoned houses without doors, windows, attics or roofs. Of the many people he had known there before the sack, he recognized hardly one and when he asked about old friends he heard that most of them were dead, a great many from the plague. For two years the city suffered famine and the starving inhabitants in the surrounding countryside resorted to banditry. It was hard to imagine that things might get any worse but then, in October 1530, they did. The city was struck by the worst flood ever recorded: it inundated most of the city centre to above head height, destroying
hundreds of houses, drowning several thousand Romans and bringing a new famine. Commentators wondered whether Rome had finally reached the end of its days.
But of course the city went on. Houses and churches were repaired. The city had a scare in the spring of 1536. Emperor Charles V had finally reached the third part of his to-do list – making war on Islam – and, in an effort to crush North African pirates, he had seized Tunis. He was now with his army in Naples and his next destination was Rome. Romans prepared to flee the city but, fortunately, Charles’ visit was to be a friendly one. Clement VII’s successor, Paul III, decided to make a grand show of the city to impress the emperor. He demolished a number of churches and hundreds of houses to create new vistas and make Rome’s antiquities more visible.
Paul’s efforts succeeded. Though some Romans were horrified to recognize the faces of soldiers who had tortured them nine years earlier, no destruction was done and Charles, as he rode along a new Via Sacra, passing beneath triumphal arches both ancient and newly built for the occasion, was greatly impressed. He would not have realized it but he had helped preserve some of the antiquities he saw, as his sacking of the city had halted their being quarried for stone. That his troops had wrecked Rome and raped and tortured its inhabitants was discreetly passed over by Pope Paul, and Charles was hosted in grand style. The vast Renaissance banquet in Trastevere that included 200 dishes cooked by the great Bartolomeo Scappi was held in his honour. Charles had such a good time that he decided to extend his stay. Enjoying fine food and a grand tour of the city’s antiquities, he was one of Rome’s first true tourists.
Slowly the city recovered. Money seeped back through the rickety system of papal finances, and Rome was rebuilt. The destruction of wooden houses in the sack, and Pope Paul III’s clearances, accelerated its transformation from a medieval to a Renaissance city. Though most artists, and humanists too, had fled or died in 1527, some returned. One of Clement VII’s last acts as pope was to commission Michelangelo to decorate a wall of the Sistine Chapel. The result, his Last Judgement, showed how times had changed. By comparison with the confidence and optimism in his ceiling paintings, the Last Judgement was a disturbing, gloomy masterpiece that reflected some of the horrors of Rome’s sack. In 1542 work was finally resumed in earnest on the new St Peter’s. Paul III hoped to have it completed in time for the 1550 Holy Year. He was over-optimistic and St Peter’s would not be finished for more than a century.
If Rome was growing again, it was growing in a direction that took it ever further away from the easy-going, tolerant city it had been under the Medici popes. As the schism between the Church of Rome and Protestants in northern Europe grew more bitter and permanent, the Catholic Church came under the spell of a new purism that was far more invidious than that of the eleventh-century reformists. Its greatest enthusiast was Cardinal Gian Pietro Carafa, a Renaissance Senator McCarthy who became determined to cleanse the papal court of, as he saw them, subversives. In 1542 he supported the creation of a new Inquisition in Rome, and he was so impatient for it to begin work that he bought chains and locks for its new jail with his own money. Thirteen years later, in 1555, Carafa was elected pope as Paul IV and used his position to embark on a witch-hunting campaign against suspected heretics, gays and sellers of Church offices. Romans, many of whom would have been included in at least one of these categories, learned to live in fear of being informed upon, arrested, secretly interrogated and tortured. It was Paul who brought to the Church a new Index of prohibited books, which included those of the Renaissance’s greatest humanist scholar, Erasmus.
If these terrors were not enough, under Paul IV Rome seemed destined to relive the disaster it had endured a generation before. Paul, who was a passionate Italian patriot and who had never forgiven the sack of 1527, formed an alliance with France against the Empire, which went wrong almost as rapidly as Clement’s had done. In 1557 a Spanish army under the duke of Alba advanced on the helpless city. Fortunately, Alba was reluctant to repeat the public relations disaster of three decades earlier and Paul IV realized his error just in time. On 14 September, in a rare display of good judgement, he signed a treaty of complete surrender and the duke of Alba let the city be. But Rome had no luck that month. The very next day, on the night of the 15th, the Tiber burst its banks in the worst flood since 1530.
As Romans looked about them that September, their city ruined once again, with disease breaking out, an enemy threatening outside the walls and a witch-hunter pope inspiring fear on every street, one would forgive them for thinking that Rome was cursed. They would never have imagined that they were just two years away from a new pope, a new and lasting peace and the start of one of Rome’s greatest eras, when their city would grow and thrive as it had not done since classical times.
CHAPTER SIX
FRENCH
I
THESE DAYS THE Quirinal Palace in the heart of Rome is a busy place. Tall uniformed Corazziere – the personal guards of the president of Italy – shepherd tourists and school groups through security checks and into the state rooms, to the gardens and the stables, to see the palace’s paintings, its grand chandeliers, and its collection of antique plates and clocks. If they are lucky, visitors may catch a whiff of haute cuisine prepared for foreign dignitaries, or even glimpse the president as he passes through the courtyard in his official car.
It was a very different place on the evening of 24 November 1848, when the French ambassador, the duc d’Harcourt, approached in his carriage. Then it was not a presidential but a papal palace. It was also a place where something bad had happened recently. One of the main doors was scorched black and a good number of windows had been shattered. There would have been a discernible tension in the air as Harcourt’s carriage was stopped and he presented himself, not to members of the pope’s Swiss Guards, as would have been the case only a few days earlier, but to soldiers of the National Guard. These were Rome’s citizens in uniform and they were less concerned with protecting the pope than with making sure he did not leave. They were his jailers. Harcourt, as a friend of the pope, would have been viewed with suspicion.
But they let him into the palace. He was escorted up the grand stairway to the papal apartments where Pope Pius IX was waiting. Considerately – and unwisely – the National Guards allowed the door to be closed so Harcourt and the pope could talk in private. It was a strange sort of discussion. For a short time the National Guardsmen outside would have heard the voices of both men, but then only Harcourt’s, speaking loudly enough for them both. By now Pope Pius had slipped into an adjoining room, where he hurriedly changed from his papal robes into the vestments of an ordinary priest. Putting on a pair of dark glasses he, together with a papal servant, Benedetto Filippani, left Harcourt talking to himself and as Filippani lit the way with a small, flickering candle they hurried through the shadow-filled halls of the palace. John Francis Maguire, who wrote an account of events a few years later, describes what happened next:
As they passed through one of the apartments, the taper was suddenly extinguished, and both the pope and his attendant were left in total darkness. To proceed further without light was impossible; so Filippani was obliged, in order to re-light the taper, to return to the same cabinet in which the French Ambassador had been purposely left waiting. On seeing Filippani return, the Duke was seized with astonishment and terror, believing that some untoward occurrence had occasioned the extinction of the taper, and deranged the entire plan of escape.1
But the duc d’Harcourt need not have worried. Filippani relit his candle, hurried back to Pius and led him to the oval stairway on the far side of the palace. In the courtyard below, where a horse-drawn city cab was waiting, the pope had another scare, when a servant recognized him and went down on his knees to be blessed. Fortunately, the National Guards, who kept up a poor sort of watch that night, did not notice. Pius climbed into the cab, which rattled out of the palace. After taking a roundabout route through Rome’s streets to avert suspicion, Pius exchanged his cab
for the carriage of the Bavarian ambassador, who was another conspirator and who gave Pius his doctor’s passport. In the middle of that same night Pope Pius IX crossed the frontier to the kingdom of the Two Sicilies. He had successfully escaped from his kingdom. Only five months later a large, modern and professional French army of between eight and ten thousand soldiers advanced towards the walls of Rome, determined to put him back.
The mid-nineteenth century was an age of revolutions, when Europeans longed for or dreaded the sudden overthrow of their established orders. These dreams and fears had their origins half a century earlier, in France’s revolution, which, with the help of French armies, was then exported across Europe. France’s radical new vision of a forward-looking, rational, meritocratic world reached Italy in 1796, brought by France’s new star general, Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon did his best to free Romans of their antiquated aristocratic ways. A liberty tree was planted in the Forum and the pope, Pius VI, was kidnapped and dethroned to die in exile. A decade later, now as Emperor of the French, Napoleon proclaimed Rome the second city of his empire and capital of a kingdom of Italy. The country, though occupied, was more united than it had been for a thousand years.
Most Romans had little liking for the French during these years and remained strongly loyal to their pope. In 1798 the poor of Trastevere rebelled and were subdued only with violence. Yet after the French left Italy in 1814 many Italians found they were nostalgic, not for French occupation but for some of the changes the French had brought. Educated, bourgeois Italians were blocked from advance by exactly the entrenched aristocratic elite that French revolutionaries had so reviled. Politics, too, went into reverse. Italians, like other Europeans, found themselves ruled by absolute monarchs who imposed strict censorship and suppressed any sign of dissent. No Italian government was more reactionary than that of the Papal States, whose jails became crowded with political prisoners. In the 1830s and ’40s Pope Gregory XVI even rejected technological change, banning the telegraph, gas lighting and also railways. The latter, whose French name was chemins de fer, he denounced as chemins d’enfer, or ‘the ways of hell’. Italians also felt national humiliation. The French had been replaced by new occupiers: Habsburg Austrians. After 1815 several Italian states were ruled by members of the Habsburg family, and Venice, which had been an independent republic for more than a thousand years, was now a province of the Austrian Empire, as was Milan. The desire of Italians to unite and end foreign occupation of their country, which we saw flare briefly in 1525, burned again.
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