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Vandals
The conflagration that Erasmus predicted in his letter to Thomas More was more imminent than he could have imagined. On the same day that he wrote it, the imperial army—a ragged, raving, half-starved force of more than twenty thousand men—broke camp in San Giovanni, Italy, not far from Bologna, and began marching south. They included some fourteen thousand Landsknechts, German mercenaries who had passed through the Alps the previous November; five thousand Spaniards in the service of Charles V; and three thousand Italians, French, and assorted hangers-on. For months they had bivouacked in northern Italy, enduring rain and snow, mud and cold, hunger and vermin, while the emperor, a thousand miles away in Granada, Spain, mulled his next move. Charles’s decisive victory over the French at Pavia two years earlier had left him in a position to gain control of the entire Italian peninsula, but rather than exploit his advantage, he had devoted his time to finding a wife—eventually settling on Isabella of Portugal—and planning the wedding.
Isabella brought a dowry of a million ducats—money Charles desperately needed. Despite the stores of gold and silver being shipped from the New World, he was deeply indebted to the Fuggers and other bankers, and his troops in Italy had gone eight months without pay. Promises that the money was on its way had been repeatedly broken, and the troops—hungry, shivering in the constant downpours, sleeping in swamp-like conditions—had turned mutinous. The only thing restraining them was the prospect of plunder. Seventy-five miles away was Florence, with its Medician riches, and 170 miles farther south was Rome, with its lavish palaces and bejeweled churches. For the Landsknechts, many of whom were Lutheran, the prospect of pillaging the Eternal City offered the added allure of paying the pope back for all the crimes and abuses that had been charged to him. “To Rome! To Rome!” the cry went up throughout the camp, and on March 30, 1527, the horde set off.
Two things stood in their way. One was the Apennines, still covered with snow at that time of year. The other was the army of the Holy League of Cognac. This inaptly named anti-imperial alliance had been formed in May 1526 by Pope Clement VII. While Clement was far more solemn than his cousin Leo X, forgoing frivolous pastimes for sober management, he, too, suffered from that grave defect of the Renaissance papacy—a passion for geopolitical meddling. Both indecisive and unscrupulous, he kept switching his allegiance between Charles and Francis, alienating both in the process. With Charles now the main threat, Clement joined with France, together with Venice and the duchy of Milan, to form the new league. Through it, the pope hoped not only to regain lost papal lands but also to restore Italy to the position it had held prior to the French invasion of 1494. In thus provoking the emperor, Clement seemed oblivious to the weakness of the league, the depleted state of his treasury, and the physical vulnerability of Rome.
With the imperial army expected to attack Florence, the Holy League sent troops to protect it, but the imperial commander—Charles, the duke of Bourbon, who was a cousin of Francis I and a charismatic veteran of many campaigns—decided to bypass the city and instead head southeast along the ancient Via Emilia into the upper Arno valley. Braving torrential rains, the ravenous infantrymen crossed the mountains well south of Florence, pillaging and burning as they went. On April 20, they were in the upper Tiber valley. Six days later, they struck the road to Rome, and by early May they were in Viterbo, just fifty miles from the city.
As word of the advancing army reached Rome, its residents braced for yet another calamity. In the previous year they had had to endure flooding, an outbreak of the plague, and a brutal spree of looting and rapine carried out by a band of adventurers under the command of Cardinal Pompeo Colonna, still fuming over having been bypassed for pope. Fanatical preachers were foretelling a catastrophe that would strike the city as punishment for its sinful ways. The citizenry, meanwhile, was irate over a new war tax the pope had levied. Now that war loomed.
To this point, Rome had been largely untouched by the religious storm north of the Alps. Despite Luther’s outbursts against Rome and the multiplying grievances against the Vatican, the Holy See had continued its extravagant and dissipated ways. Now bearing down on it, however, was a raging mass of German Lutherans, Spanish adventurers, and French and Italian freebooters intent on grabbing the spoils they had dreamed of through the long months of sodden encampment.
With typical equivocation, Clement had not prepared for the onslaught. Not until May 4, 1527, when the imperial army had reached Monte Mario, a hill in the northwestern suburbs that overlooked the city, did he finally summon the great council of Rome. Even then, he assumed that the crisis would quickly pass, and he managed to raise no more than eight thousand armed men, including two thousand Swiss Guards. The city did not even take the obvious precaution of raising its bridges; residents insisted that they remain open so as not to interfere with business. When it became clear that the imperial force was approaching the city’s walls, panic broke out. Nobles, cardinals, and merchants retreated into the dozens of palaces clustered in the heart of the city, desperately seeking hiding places for their valuables; foreigners frantically boarded boats to carry them down the Tiber to Ostia and the sea.
The imperial army took up positions along the city’s western perimeter from the Vatican south to the Janiculum Hill and Trastevere. The main body was encamped in the vineyards behind St. Peter’s. The duke of Bourbon set up his headquarters in a Hieronymite cloister in Trastevere, and at a war council held there on May 5, it was decided to storm the Vatican the following morning. The duke rode among his troops, rallying them with the cry “Victory or death.” Throughout the night of May 5 and the early hours of May 6, the bell on the Capitoline tolled, summoning Rome’s defenders to their posts along the walls. At four in the morning the attack began, with Germans and Spaniards storming the city from the north and west. Meeting strong resistance, they were forced to withdraw with heavy losses.
But then a thick mist rose from the Tiber, and under its cover the attackers were able to advance to the foot of the walls. There they propped up ladders fashioned from trellises they had uprooted in the vineyards. The defenders—their guns virtually useless in the fog—could do little more than throw rocks and direct shouts of “Jews,” “infidels,” and “Lutherans” at the unseen enemy while getting off an occasional volley. One shot found the duke of Bourbon, who was carried off to a nearby chapel, where he died. The news of his death caused despair in the imperial ranks, but the soldiers quickly regrouped and were soon clambering over and slipping through breaches in the wall. By six in the morning, both the Spaniards and the Landsknechts were laying siege to the Vatican. All around St. Peter’s there was fierce fighting, with the Swiss Guard putting up strong resistance, but it was nearly wiped out. In a blind fury, soldiers invaded the hospital of Santo Spirito and killed almost all inside; the residents of the neighboring orphanage were similarly slaughtered.
Praying in his private chapel in the Vatican, Clement could hear the cries of battle. With mournful sobs he was led along the covered stone corridor linking the Vatican to the Castel Sant’Angelo. Over the years, successive popes had turned this hulking brown mausoleum of Hadrian’s into a fortified retreat that, provisioned with enormous jars of grain, oil, and wine, could hold out for up to three years. Thirteen cardinals along with several thousand men, women, and children were able to push their way in; when the portcullis suddenly dropped, some of those trying to enter were crushed to death.
With the castle’s powerful guns lobbing shells, the imperial troops were forced to withdraw from the Vatican, and the attackers decided to deploy their forces farther to the south. At about seven in the evening, the first columns arrived at the Ponte Sisto, one of three bridges leading from Trastevere into the city proper. About two hundred Roman horsemen appeared at the bridge to try to turn back the invaders, but they were quickly overwhelmed. The imperial troops raced into the heart of the city, slashing and stabbing to death all they encountered, including old women and young ch
ildren, priests and monks. Everywhere the cry rang out, “Empire! Spain! Victory!” By nightfall, the Germans had occupied the Campo de’ Fiori and the Spaniards the Piazza Navona.
When the soldiers saw that all resistance had ended and that no force was on its way to fight them, their leaders could no longer restrain them. Thousands of tattered, unwashed, and lustful soldiers surged through the streets of Rome, determined at last to get their due. Carrying lighted wax candles, they passed in bands from house to house in the darkness, seizing gold, silver, jewels, and finery and killing all who resisted. The Sack of Rome had begun.
On the morning of May 7, 1527, there were everywhere scenes of appalling destruction. The air echoed with the wails of women, the shrieks of children, the report of weapons, the crash of burning roofs. Using battering rams, soldiers broke into the great palaces in search of spoils. Noblemen who refused to divulge the hiding places of their treasures were subjected to savage torture. One merchant was tied to a tree and had a fingernail pulled out for each day that he could not pay the required ransom. Some were forced to eat their own ears or noses; others had their teeth pulled out or were branded with red-hot irons.
Once done with the palaces, the troops headed for the convents. Thousands of women who had taken refuge in them found themselves cruelly trapped. Delicately raised girls were stripped and brutalized by filthy, fantastically attired mercenaries. Hospitals were invaded and their patients murdered. The streets filled with corpses, severed limbs, and heads that had been lopped off.
Special fury was aimed at the clergy, particularly by Lutheran Landsknechts. Some priests were eviscerated; others were stripped naked and forced on pain of death to utter blasphemies or to take part in profane travesties of the Mass. Nuns were savagely violated. Some soldiers draped an ass in bishop’s vestments, led it into a church, and demanded that a priest incense the beast and offer it the sacred host; when the priest refused, he was slashed to pieces. A Bavarian captain who dressed up as the pope bade his comrades, gotten up as cardinals, to kiss his hands and feet. The whole gang made their way to the Vatican, where, to the sound of trumpets and fifes, they shouted, “Luther for pope!”
Cardinal Cajetan, who in 1518 had interrogated Luther in Augsburg and who now at fifty-eight was an adviser to Clement, was dragged through the streets in chains, insulted, and tortured. Every church was plundered. Costly vestments, vessels, and works of art were carried off by the rampaging troops, flung away on dice or wine, or sold to Jews. The precious settings of relics were torn off and destroyed. Supplies of the host were spat on, trampled, and desecrated in every way imaginable.
Not even St. Peter’s was spared. For the German soldiers, the half-built basilica was the supreme symbol of Roman oppression, and they surged in, seeking blood and retribution. “Even on the high altar of St. Peter’s,” went one report, “five hundred men were massacred, as holy relics were burned or destroyed.” Emperor Constantine’s golden cross, which for more than twelve hundred years had rested in St. Peter’s, was stolen and never recovered. The tombs of Julius II and other popes were opened and pillaged for valuables, and the leaden seals of papal bulls were melted down and made into bullets.
In the stanze of the Vatican, a German soldier scrawled the name of Martin Luther on one of Raphael’s frescoes—a symbolic act of desecration. Generally, though, neither the stanze nor Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling suffered much damage. Frescoes had no value for the rampaging troops; it was precious metals and jewels they were after. Like the rebellious peasants in Germany, the soldiers became enraged at the sight of artifacts of learning. Many monastic libraries were gutted and the manuscript collections of scholars scattered or burned.
For at least eight days this initial wave of looting and killing continued unchecked. Throughout, the pope and his court remained sequestered in the Sant’Angelo castle, living in the maschio, the central tower that sat on the structure’s massive circular drum, protected by a papal garrison of about five hundred. Clement kept awaiting the arrival of the troops of the Holy League, but they remained encamped ten miles to the north. With no prospect of relief, the pope on June 5, 1527, signed a treaty with the imperial force, agreeing to pay the fantastic sum of 400,000 ducats and to cede huge swaths of papal territory.
For Rome itself, the agreement provided no respite. Days after it was signed, a Spaniard described the scene: “In Rome, the chief city of Christendom, no bells ring, no churches are open, no Masses are said, Sundays and feast-days have ceased. Many houses are burned to the ground; in others the doors and windows are broken and carried away; the streets are changed into dunghills. The stench of dead bodies is terrible; men and beasts have a common grave, and in the churches I have seen corpses that dogs have gnawed.” In the piazzas “tables are set close together at which piles of ducats are gambled for. The air rings with blasphemies fit to make good men—if such there be—wish that they were deaf. I know nothing wherewith I can compare it, except it be the destruction of Jerusalem.”
By May 17, the first signs of plague had appeared, and over the next two months several thousand Germans would be carried off. Yet even the pestilence could not stop the marauding. Having picked Rome bare, the mercenaries moved out into the countryside, preying on towns like Narni. “We took the town and castle without firing a shot, by God’s grace,” a German soldier wrote, “and then put to death about 1,000 men and women.”
In all, il Sacco di Roma left as many as thirty thousand houses destroyed and reduced the city’s population by half. It also delivered a crushing blow to Rome’s literary and artistic communities. The painters, poets, scholars, and philosophers who had come to the city over the decades fled. Sapienza, the university, was ruined. Paolo Bombace, the great Italian humanist and friend of Erasmus, was murdered in the first days of the sack. Johann Küritz, a major patron of arts and letters, fled at the earliest opportunity and never returned. The grammarian Julianus Camers committed suicide, and the poet Marcantonio Casanova, forced to beg for bread in the streets, died of hunger and disease. The humanist scholar Angelo Colocci was twice captured and twice tortured; he managed to escape further abuse only by paying an immense bribe, and even then he was forced to watch dolefully as his manuscript collection was burned.
For humanists, the sack marked the end of the golden era ushered in by the crowning of Petrarch as poet laureate in 1341. His vision of restoring Rome’s position as caput mundi, head of the world, which had seemed so fanciful at the time, had to a remarkable degree been realized as aspiring men of letters from around Europe came seeking inspiration, patrons, and fame. Now that world had been brutally shattered, and the city’s cultural life would take decades to recover.
“We have seen Rome sacked more cruelly than it was in ancient times by the Gauls or by the Goths,” Erasmus lamented. Not even the Vandals or the Huns had in their fury burned books, “a sacred possession.” The catastrophe befalling Rome, he wrote, was one affecting all nations, since the city was not only the citadel of Christianity and the domicile of the Muses but also “the common mother of all peoples.” Assuredly, the sack “was more truly the destruction of the world than of a city.”
Nine years later, when Michelangelo resumed work on the Sistine Chapel, he covered the wall behind the altar with The Last Judgment, its wrathful Christ and huddled figures begging for mercy offering a grim contrast to the classically inspired images of grace and power he had earlier applied to the ceiling.
For Luther, the irony of the sack was unmistakable. The emperor Charles, who had persecuted Luther on the pope’s behalf, was now destroying the pope on Luther’s behalf. Like many others, Luther believed that Rome was receiving divine punishment for its iniquitous ways. Yet the event gave him little satisfaction, for it seemed another sign of the final days. In addition to various natural oddities and fires appearing in the skies, the Ottomans were again threatening Christian Europe. On August 29, 1526, at the town of Mohács on the Danube, the 100,000-man force of Sultan Suleiman had wiped o
ut virtually the entire 20,000-man Hungarian army. Among the fallen was King Louis II, who drowned in a marsh while trying to retreat. The Turks marched triumphantly into Buda, putting to the torch every major building except the royal palace. They occupied half of Hungary, pillaging and leveling as they went. Vienna—two hundred miles to the northwest—seemed next. The Turks, Luther felt sure, were agents of Satan working to overthrow Christ.
During this period, Satan was paying visits to Luther himself. He usually slipped into his room at night, planting disturbing thoughts in his head. Lying in bed next to Katharina, Luther thought of all the chaos he had caused, all the hatred he had stirred. Tens of thousands of peasants invoking his name had been butchered, and pastors preaching his doctrines were being tortured and beheaded. Luther was especially troubled by the case of Leonhard Kaiser, a middle-aged vicar who had returned to his hometown of Schärding, in Bavaria (today Austria), to tend to his ailing father. Kaiser had recently studied in Wittenberg and gotten to know Luther well. While in Schärding, he had continued to preach, infuriating the Catholic authorities. After an investigation found his views to be Lutheran, he was condemned to death. Luther sent him a letter of comfort while he awaited execution. He was tormented by the spectacle of such pious men shedding their blood for the gospel while he slept safely in his bed. And what if his teachings were false? “How many people must you have led astray!” the Devil frequently challenged him. A doctor must be sure that he is “called by God,” Luther said; otherwise he “is lost.”
In short, the Anfechtungen—the spells of spiritual anguish that had so darkened Luther’s early years in the monastery—were again striking. An especially serious attack occurred on the evening of July 6, 1527. Luther had invited Justus Jonas and his wife for supper, but when they arrived they found Luther complaining of a troublesome roaring in his left ear, and he retired to his bedroom to rest. Jonas followed, and Luther, feeling faint, said that if he did not get some water at once, he would die. Jonas poured cold water on his face and his back. “O Lord,” Luther wailed, “if it be Thy will, if this is the hour Thou hast set for me, Thy will be done.” Katharina came in and, seeing her husband lying on his bed almost lifeless, called for the servants. As Luther prayed, a professor of medicine at the university arrived and applied some hot bags; Bugenhagen, to whom he had confessed that morning, also showed up. Imagining the great joy his enemies would feel at his death, Luther began sobbing uncontrollably. He asked after his son, Hans, who was brought in, and Luther praised him. He then regained some strength and was left to rest. The doctor told Jonas that Luther’s spiritual distress was “twice as great” as any bodily illness he was suffering.
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