Even more alarming threats had already come from Germany where the old warrior, Georg von Frundsberg, had assembled an immense army of Landsknechte, mostly Lutherans from Bavaria and Franconia, fired with a missionary zeal to have their revenge upon the Roman Anti-Christ and with a more practical but no less intense desire to relieve him of his valuable possessions. This intimidating force, undeterred by torrential rains and Alpine snowstorms, descended into Lombardy. And although the Pope’s other enemies, Colonna and Lannoy, were checked in their advance on Rome at Frosinone, nothing seemed capable of halting the further progress of von Frundsberg’s tough Germans.
The courageous warrior, Giovanni delle Bande Nere, who had married Lorenzo il Magnifico’s granddaughter, made a brief attempt to halt their relentless advance; but he was hit in the right leg by a ball from a falconet as he was trying unsuccessfully to prevent them crossing the Po. He held up a torch so that a surgeon could amputate the smashed limb. The surgeon wielded his saw so incompetently, however, that the wound proved fatal, and Giovanni delle Bande Nere died on 30 November. Francesco Guicciardini, who had been appointed the Pope’s Lieutenant-General, had repeatedly warned Giovanni not to take so many risks and had urged the Pope to give the same advice. ‘His person is of too great value,’ Guicciardini had written to Clement, ‘and it is clear the enemy seek his life with great determination. If we lose him we shall be losing too much.’ Now Guicciardini bitterly regretted that the warnings had gone unheeded. ‘It has pleased God,’ he lamented, ‘to extinguish so much courage at the time when we needed it most.’
Soon after the death of Giovanni delle Bande Nere, von Frundsberg – who had already accepted the help of a young adventurer in the Emperor’s service, Philibert, Prince of Orange – was joined by a large army of Spanish soldiers from Milan. The combined forces which now marched south towards Bologna numbered over 30,000 men.
Recognizing at last the true measure of his dreadful plight, the Pope endeavoured to secure a truce to which the commanders of the advancing host seemed disposed to agree. But the Landsknechte had not come so far to be turned away empty-handed now. Shouting their determination to pillage Rome or to be well paid for not doing so, they rounded upon von Frundsberg, whose fat and ancient frame had not well withstood the rigours of the campaign, and reduced him to apoplexy. As he was carried away rigid to Ferrara, the march continued under the uncertain leadership of Charles, Duke of Bourbon, the Germans having made it clear that they were prepared to obey the orders of the new commander no longer than it pleased them.
A far more forthright leader than the Duke of Bourbon would have found it difficult to control the motley force that now hurried on to Rome. Almost starving, their clothes ragged, their filthy bodies washed by the pouring rain and the roaring mountain streams through which they stumbled, holding hands to keep their balance, they reached Isola Farnese, seven miles from Rome, on 4 May. From here, Bourbon sent messengers into Rome offering to spare it for a ransom sufficiently generous to satisfy his men.
The Pope declined to treat with him, turning his attention to long-postponed measures for the city’s defence. Many prelates and nobles, with a keener awareness of their danger, had long since fled. Others had hidden their treasures, stoutly fortified their palaces, and employed men to defend them. Yet Clement himself had appeared to be ‘struck by a kind of paralysis’. It was not until 26 April that he had asked the Commune for a gift towards the cost of Rome’s defence; it was not until 3 May that, after repeated urgings, he himself raised 200,000 ducats by agreeing to create six rich men cardinals – ‘suffering’, so Guicciardini said, more scruples over this ‘than over ruining the Papacy and the whole world’. And it was not until 4 May that he at last summoned the Great Council of Rome and urged the people to defend the city under the leadership of Renzo da Ceri.
The people, however, were not much inclined to do so. They preferred to believe that if the approaching army did make themselves masters of Rome, they ‘would prosper and have the same advantages as they had had under the dominion of priests’. They prevented Renzo da Ceri from blowing up the bridges over the Tiber; and had Renzo not stopped them, they would have sent out their own envoys to make a separate peace with the Duke of Bourbon. Few of them turned out of their homes at the sound of the great bell of the Capitol ringing the tocsin. In all Renzo had scarcely more than eight thousand men, including two thousand Swiss Guards and two thousand former members of Giovanni de’ Medici’s Black Bands, with which to defend the long expanse of the city wall.
XIX
SIEGE AND MURDER
‘Mild measures are useless’
THE FIRST attack, launched at dawn on 6 May 1527, was repulsed by the papal gunners; but soon afterwards a thick mist rose from the Tiber and, unobserved beneath its cover, the Duke of Bourbon’s men were able to mount scaling ladders made from vine-poles against the city walls. Bourbon himself was hit by a stray shot from an arquebus and carried away to a nearby chapel by the Prince of Orange. By the time of his death, the assaulting troops, followed by vengeful men from the Colonna estates and other pillagers, had forced their way through breaches in the wall and were threatening to break into the centre of the city. The defenders fought bravely but were no match for the far greater numbers of the imperial army. Soon a vast mass of people were rushing headlong for the drawbridge of Castel Sant’ Angelo until the bridges spanning the river were so blocked by those struggling to get across that scores of bodies were trampled underfoot.
The Pope was also running for the Castle. The Bishop of Nocera had found him in an agony of indecision in his oratory and had induced him to make use of the stone corridor that linked the apostolic palace to the Castle. The Bishop held up the Pope’s skirts to enable him to run the faster, and flung his purple cloak over his head and shoulders ‘lest some barbarian villain in the crowds below might recognize [him] by his white rochet, as he was passing a window, and take a shot at his flying form’.
Some Spanish troops did fire at him; but he reached the Castle in safety. So did some three thousand other fugitives, including thirteen cardinals, one of whom was dragged aloft in a basket. But when the drawbridge was pulled up all the remaining inhabitants of Rome, except those in well-fortified palaces, were left to the mercy of the invaders. Scant mercy was shown to anyone. The army spent most of the rest of that day in securing food and a comfortable place to spend the night, but the next morning, 7 May, the town was sacked and its inhabitants murdered and mutilated with appalling ferocity. The doors of churches and convents were smashed, their contents hurled out into the streets, their bells and clocks, chalices and candlesticks beaten into fragments, their sacred treasures defaced, their holy relics used as targets by arquebusiers, and their ancient manuscripts as litter for horses. Priceless vestments were tossed over the shoulders of drunken whores, and nuns changed hands on the throw of a dice. The name of Martin Luther was carved with a pike on one of Raphael’s frescoes in the Stanze. Shops and houses were so thoroughly plundered that even the hinges were wrenched from the shutters and the handles from the gates. The rich were held as hostages for ransom, the poor being tortured or slaughtered out of hand. Priests were stripped naked and obliged to take part in profane travesties of the Mass and to utter blasphemies on pain of death; orgies and gambling games were held round altars splashed with blood and wine; crucifixes were hurled about the streets. Fingers were cut off for the sake of rings; arms were lopped off for bracelets, ears for pendants. A merchant who could not pay the ransom demanded of him was tied to a tree and each day one of his finger nails was pulled off; eventually he died. It has been estimated that on the first day alone 8,000 people were killed.