ABSTRACT
After four hours of intense fighting that had begun before dawn on 6 May 1527, the polyglot mob of mercenaries that made up the army of the Emperor Charles v finally managed, under the cover of a thick morning fog, to break through a weak point in the walls of Rome just east of the Vatican. Those of the hastily assembled defenders who noticed them in time raced in disorder across the Tiber, in the vain hope of finding protection among the winding, cluttered streets of the medieval city. Those who failed to notice them in time were butchered on the spot. The pope, with the resident cardinals and their retinue, fled through the covered causeway recently constructed for just such emergencies to Castel Sant’Angelo, which had fortunately been rendered impregnable by the construction of a bastion and a moat around the rebuilt ruins of the second-century a d tomb of the Emperor Hadrian. By the end of the day, all Rome had been occupied except the Castello, which no longer served any offensive purpose other than that of firing off an occasional cannon ball. The victorious army, now leaderless after the unexpected death of its commander and reinforced three days later by the private army of the Colonna family, set forth systematically to plunder churches, despoil monasteries and burn palaces, to torture or hold in chains whoever was suspected of knowing the location of a hidden treasure, to violate the bodies as well as the possessions of whoever might become the object of long-frustrated passions, distinguishing neither between the sacred and the profane, men and women, nuns and matrons, young and old, prelates and plebeians, former enemies and professed allies. In the words of one eye-witness,
The army — or, rather, the soldiers, since every attempt to restore some measure of discipline proved to be equally ineffective — then settled down to
consume what it seized or extorted; and for ten long months, according to another witness,
The Sack of Rome did not take the Romans wholly by surprise. Just seven months earlier they had suffered another such invasion, albeit led by one of their own baronial families and directed not against them, but against their ruler, Pope Clement v i i . They were well aware that papal finances had been disastrously compromised by the efforts of Clement’s uncle and predecessor, Leo x, who attempted to carve out a permanent temporal state for the lay head of his family, the Medici, and by the precipitous drop in revenues provoked by the preaching of Martin Luther in Germany and by the collapse of the tourist business, their chief source of income as the innkeepers to pilgrims from all over Christendom. They were constantly called upon to refill the constantly empty papal treasury by paying even more taxes on the necessities of life and by buying shares in the Monte della Fede, the funded state debt that Pope Clement had reluctantly inaugurated in imitation of similar institutions set up on much sounder economic bases in most northern Italian states.
