Renaissance Woman_The Life of Vittoria Colonna

by Ramie Targoff

  Vittoria left Marino before the castle was attacked, and traveled to Aquino, some sixty miles to the southeast of Marino. Aquino had recently been restored to the d’Avalos family after a tumultuous period in which control over the town changed hands multiple times. There, in the birthplace and namesake of the great thirteenth-century philosopher Tommaso d’Aquino, or Thomas Aquinas (a distant relative of Ferrante’s grandmother Antonella d’Aquino), Vittoria spent several months far removed from the destruction sweeping the Colonna lands. Whether she saw much of Aquino’s beautiful medieval quarter with its imposing rectangular tower, the remains of its Roman aqueduct and the stunning first-century arch, or ever prayed in the town’s splendid Romanesque church, the Chiesa della Madonna della Libera, graced with mosaics from the twelfth century, cannot be said. Her letters from this period were entirely consumed with the events taking place in Rome.

  Soon after her arrival in Aquino, Vittoria received a long letter from Charles V. Perhaps he was finally registering how inadequately he had recognized Ferrante’s service to him, or perhaps he was making sure of her continued support in the escalating conflict with the pope. The letter, dated November 9, 1526, and written from Granada, rehearsed once again both Charles’s grief in the loss of Ferrante—nearly equal, he imagined, to Vittoria’s—and the joy he felt, and urged her to feel, in celebrating Ferrante’s posthumous glory. He concluded by suggesting that the rewards owed to Ferrante might now be passed along to his heir and cousin, Alfonso d’Avalos, Marquis of Vasto: “We certainly will always honor [Ferrante] with the most pleasant memories of his outstanding service, both from the more remote past as in more recent days, and the heartfelt gratitude that we have shown for him, we now feel for the illustrious Marquis of Vasto, who has succeeded him not only in his skills but also in his virtues.” We do not know what Vittoria made of this letter—no response of hers has survived—but it is striking that Charles was thinking about her, and concerned about her state of mind.

  At roughly the same time that she received the emperor’s letter, Vittoria wrote to her friend (and Charles’s adversary) Gian Matteo Giberti, the papal secretary and bishop of Verona. This was not the first or last time that Vittoria managed to maintain relations with both sides during an active conflict, and Giberti himself recognized the sacrifice she was making in writing to a member of the pope’s inner circle. Vittoria’s letter to Giberti is lost, but we can reconstruct at least some of its contents from his response, which was dated December 9, 1526. He began by expressing his deep regret about the devastation of the Colonna lands, and the expulsion of Vittoria’s cousin Pompeo from the Sacred College of Cardinals. “Your excellence may rest assured,” he wrote, “that it was most bitter to me to see our Lord [Clement] forced by the serious offense to turn and destroy that house which I have always desired to see most great.”

  Vittoria had no doubt shared her deep dismay over the razing of the Marino castle, but she must have done so without calling into question her continued affection for Giberti. He thanked her, in any case, for not subjecting him to the “hatred of the others, which has been the reward of my service [to the pope],” and indicated his willingness to do absolutely anything that she might ask of him. “Nor can you do me a more singular favor than to command me,” he wrote, “for you will find me always most ready to obey you.”

  The year 1526 came to an end with a truce between the warring parties, which lasted several months. During that time, Vittoria moved from Aquino to Ischia, where she stayed for most of the next five years. From this safe distance, she learned about the gruesome siege on the part of the imperial troops and Colonna armies, known to history as the Sack of Rome. News of the sack took two to three days to reach Florence; it must have taken twice that time to arrive at the remote island castle in the Bay of Naples. Thus sometime in the middle of May 1527, Vittoria got word of what had befallen her beloved city.

  On the evening of May 5, the emperor’s commander Charles III, Duke of Bourbon, reached Rome with an army of roughly eight thousand men. Having begun his career as one of the finest soldiers in the French army, which led to his appointment as constable of France in 1515, Bourbon fell out of Francis I’s favor in the early 1520s, and in 1524 joined Charles V’s service as commander of an army of German mercenaries. He was the last of the French lords to fight against his own king. After his heroic service leading the cavalry at the Battle of Pavia (Ferrante was in charge of the infantry), Bourbon was appointed governor of Milan. It was from this northern city that he made his way to Rome, accompanied by his underpaid and already pillaging troops. The men were mostly German and Spanish, with a smaller number of Italians and Frenchmen.

  The pope’s army in Rome, led by an Italian mercenary from the Orsini family, Renzo da Ceri, was once again inadequate in both numbers and skill. However talented a commander Renzo was, his chances of success against Charles’s soldiers were very low: he was given only three thousand infantry to defend the entire city, some of whom were men who had been dragged out from the households of the papal curia. We might recall Falstaff’s piercing description of his soldiers in Shakespeare’s Henry IV: “Tut, tut, good enough to toss; food for powder, food for powder. They’ll fill a pit as well as better.”

  Bourbon arrived beneath the walls of the Borgo—the area of Rome bordered by the Vatican to the west and the Tiber to the east—and demanded that his troops be admitted to the city. Not surprisingly, the pope refused them entry. At this point, early in the morning of May 6, the soldiers began to scale the Borgo’s stone walls, aided by a dense fog, which made it difficult for the artillerymen inside Castel Sant’Angelo, where Clement was once again sequestered, to fire their cannon—they simply could not see their targets. The fog was later interpreted by Charles V’s followers as a sign of divine support for their cause.

  Bourbon himself was positioned with a group of Spanish troops outside one of the lowest points in the wall, not far from Saint Peter’s Basilica. After making a rousing speech in which he compared the Spaniards’ imminent attack on Rome to their recent conquests in the New World—“When I begin to imagine this,” he reportedly said, “I seem to see all of you shining in golden armor, all lords and princes of conquered lands”—he was killed scaling the wall, shot by a ball fired from an arquebus (a type of rifle invented in the fifteenth century). Bourbon’s death did not, however, deter his soldiers: it only increased their rage. Once they had successfully knocked down part of the wall, they poured into the city. In the three days that followed, Rome was subjected to the worst violence it had seen in more than a thousand years. As the Florentine statesman Luigi Guicciardini—brother of the famous historian Francesco—recounted in his book The Sack of Rome: “If anyone had been walking through the streets of Rome by day or night, he would have heard not sighs and tearful laments, but the pitiful cries and screams of hapless prisoners coming from every house and building.” If we think of the fantasy captured by Raphael in his painting Incendio di Borgo, or Fire in the Borgo, which depicts the ninth-century pope Leo IV miraculously extinguishing a fire that was raging in front of Saint Peter’s, we see how far the image of the pope had fallen. Raphael’s painting, commissioned by Leo X in 1511 for his private dining room in the Vatican, shows the medieval pontiff standing proudly in Saint Peter’s Loggia delle Benedizioni, saving both the church and the people of Rome with a simple sign of the cross. Clement, hiding away in Castel Sant’Angelo while the imperial army burned and looted his city, cut a very poor figure indeed.

  Rome turned out to be so easy to conquer, in fact, due to a series of miscalculations that Clement had made in the months immediately preceding the sack. In March, he had signed a truce with one of the emperor’s chief generals, Charles de Lannoy, viceroy of Naples from 1522 to 1524. Mistakenly imagining that this agreement carried with it the consent of all of Charles V’s commanders—the army was made up of many different factions, each with its own ax to grind—Clement had prematurely dismissed the so-called Bande Nere, or Black Band
s, the hugely effective group of Italian mercenaries formed originally in 1516 to protect Leo X. (The Black Bands were constituted by Pope Leo’s cousin, Ludovico di Giovanni de’ Medici, known as Giovanni delle Bande Nere.) Clement made this decision for purely economic reasons: he was already in bad financial straits and desperately needed to reduce his expenditures. What he had not anticipated, of course, was that Lannoy had failed to convince Bourbon to accept the peace treaty.

  Apart from the local militia, there were very few soldiers left in Rome to defend the city, and among them were several cowards, including, as it turned out, the papal commander Renzo da Ceri. Seeing that the battle was lost, Renzo was said to have screamed out, “The enemy are within! Save yourselves, retreat to the strongest and safest places!” and then run to Castel Sant’Angelo to escape from the fighting. According to Guicciardini, who claimed to have recorded the events as they unfolded, Renzo “was immediately followed by everyone who was around him in a state of confusion and terror … He reached the bridge at the same time as many other soldiers and Roman civilians who had abandoned the ramparts when they heard he had fled.”

  Having managed to kill or scare off nearly all the papal troops within a day’s time, the attackers began the robbing and pillaging of Rome. One palace after another was seized from its owners, and churches were systematically plundered. The destruction visited upon the churches was generally blamed on the German mercenaries known as the Landsknechts, who were Lutherans and despised the Catholic sanctuaries. In truth, the Italian and Spanish Catholics did not behave much better than their Protestant counterparts. There were men from the Colonna estates who flooded into the city on May 10 to profit from the looting; Pompeo tried to stop them, but to little avail.

  Charles’s soldiers not only plundered riches from Roman palaces and churches, but also committed countless acts of violence against Roman citizens, who were kidnapped, raped, and murdered. One of the pope’s followers, Pietro Corsi, described seeing fathers forced to buy back, “at the cost of robes, gold, houses, [and] estates,” the corpses of their children, who had died from tortures “of the kind that all antiquity did not see.” He also reported with horror the soldiers’ cruel persecution of victims of the plague, which was already raging and only intensified as the living conditions in the city continued to worsen: “Men dragging with difficulty their infected limbs were summoned into foul torments and hung from a beam either by the feet or by that one part of the body which public decency covers (but always with the miserable one’s hands bound behind his back), compelled by fire or by the sword, amidst a hastened death, to [produce] gems and precious vases and gold that they had never possessed.”

  Guicciardini similarly recounted perverse and inhuman acts of violence meant to reveal the soldiers’ depravity. A priest was “shamelessly and cruelly killed because he refused to administer the most holy sacrament to a mule.” The mule, he added, had been dressed in clerical vestments. Young girls were torn away from their mothers’ breasts, and violated inside churches. “I will not describe what happened to the noble and beautiful young matrons, to virgins and nuns,” he exclaimed, “in order not to shame anyone. The majority were ransomed, and anyone can easily imagine for himself what must have happened when these women found themselves in the hands of such lustful people as the Spaniards.”

  Because it was nearly impossible to flee the city—the gates had all been barred—the only hope for the desperate Roman populace was to take refuge inside the city walls. The pope remained in Castel Sant’Angelo, where he was joined by several thousand churchmen and friends. Others retreated to the homes of the emperor’s allies, which they mistakenly thought would be spared. Nearly four hundred people, for example, including Pietro Corsi, moved into Cardinal Andrea della Valle’s palace, and a group of comparable size crowded into the home of Cardinal Giovanni Piccolomini. Within a week or two, however, and after exorbitant sums had been extorted from the inhabitants to keep themselves safe—an Italian captain in the imperial army managed to collect more than thirty-five thousand ducats to protect those hiding away in della Valle’s home—the palaces were attacked by the Landsknechts. The only residence in Rome that seems to have escaped harm was the Palazzo Colonna in Piazza Santi Apostoli, which Pompeo Colonna had personally secured, with more than two thousand Roman citizens lodged within.

  Although Vittoria was on Ischia, far away from these events, she kept herself well informed. She also worked hard to intervene on behalf of her friends implicated in the conflict, especially Giberti, who was one of seven hostages whom the pope had handed over to the imperial troops. After Vittoria sent a letter to Pompeo begging for Giberti’s release, Pompeo moved him to the Palazzo Colonna. The letter Vittoria sent to Pompeo is lost, but a letter from Giberti to Vittoria, written on November 26, 1527, reveals how instrumental she had been in securing his safety. His language was almost absurdly mannered, although such exquisiteness, bordering on aggression, was not unusual for formal letters of the period. “I would wish,” Giberti declared, “not to have been as certain as I have already been of ‘your love and goodness for me,’ so that these demonstrations of it that you have made and make more effectively every day, were they new and unexpected, would fill me with so much pleasure that they would make every travail I experience delightful.” Vittoria must have included a copy of her letter to Pompeo inside the letter she sent to Giberti, since he mentioned that he had seen what she had written, and was more grateful to her than ever: “I would thank you for the collateral you offered from your estate, on my behalf, but how can I thank you, or what do I have that I can promise to you again, being as I am completely obliged and indebted to you now more than ever.”

  Pompeo turned out to be one of the only imperial commanders who helped to rescue some of the papal supporters, and to restore order in Rome. When the German and Spanish troops who had left the city over the summer of 1527 due to the onset of plague tried to resume their looting and plundering that fall, it was Pompeo who kept them at bay. According to the humanist Pietro Alcionio, who had taken refuge with the pope in Castel Sant’Angelo but successfully defected to the Colonna side in the siege’s immediate aftermath, Pompeo was almost single-handedly responsible for rescuing the city from ruin. Alcionio died sometime in early 1528, but he wrote four Latin orations on the events in the months preceding his death. The last of these, addressed to Pompeo and entitled “On the Deliverance of the City,” praised his new patron for having “dashed to pieces the audacity and ruthlessness of those who returned by force of arms into Rome, from which they had gone out by force of law.” Alcionio described the Machiavellian tactics Pompeo used to persuade the invading soldiers to put an end to their destruction—he bribed, threatened, and did whatever was necessary. In one instance, Alcionio reported that Pompeo helped the hostages inside Palazzo Colonna get the guards sufficiently drunk so that they could escape; the liberated citizens then rode through Rome dressed as German soldiers. For all of Pompeo’s service to the city, Alcionio declared, the citizens planned to erect a statue in honor of him (no trace of such a monument has survived).

  None of Pompeo’s heroic gestures, however, were of use to the pope. Bankrupted by the combination of military costs and ransom money that he was forced to pay the emperor, Clement was held as a prisoner in his very own fortress. After long negotiations with the emperor’s agents, on December 6, 1527, he was finally given permission to leave Rome. He slipped out at dawn in disguise, out of fear for his safety at the hands of the Landsknechts, and traveled to Orvieto. Perched high on top of a volcanic rock, this town of Etruscan origins had served as a refuge for no fewer than six popes in the thirteenth century, and was particularly favored by Clement, who referred to it as “our city” in 1525.

  Despite his physical safety in Orvieto, Clement was hardly a free man: nearly all his territories were occupied by imperial troops, five of his cardinals were being held hostage in Rome and Naples, and those members of his curia who had moved with him to Orvieto were
under close surveillance by Charles V’s agents. When the English king Henry VIII sent ambassadors to meet with Clement in Orvieto in hopes of obtaining support for his divorce from Catherine of Aragon, Charles made clear that Clement would face serious consequences should he abandon the cause of his beloved aunt (Catherine was the sister of Charles’s mother, Joanna of Castille). In addition to his lack of freedom, Clement was also stripped of his usual splendor. According to the cleric Luigi Lippomano, the court in Orvieto was “more or less in ruins, and penniless.” “The bishops go about on foot,” he remarked, “with skullcaps and threadbare cloaks, and the courtiers blaspheme against God, as though they have lost all hope. The cardinals go about with four menservants and riding mules, the way they did in the primitive church, but with their accustomed dishonorable attitudes, and they would sell Christ for a farthing.” Orvieto’s papal palace was itself in a state of neglect, and its furnishings regarded as inadequate. In the words of the English ambassador, Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester, the pope’s chambers were “all naked and unhanged, the roofs fallen down, and as we can guess, 30 persons, riff raff and other, standing in the chamber for a garnishment.”

  Clement was finally able to return to Rome in October 1528, but the city he found was severely broken. To observers both in Italy and abroad, Rome’s second Golden Age seemed to have come to an end—and with it, the end of an era more broadly. As the great Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus put it in a letter to the Italian reformer Iacopo Sadoleto, bishop of Carpentras: “Assuredly this was more truly the destruction of the world than of a city.” Many of the most talented artists and poets who had enjoyed the extravagant patronage of the Medici popes, Leo X and Clement VII, fled from Rome, seeking refuge in courts and palaces elsewhere. One of the most sought-after destinations was the d’Avalos castle in Ischia. There, Costanza d’Avalos opened her doors to an extraordinary group of individuals who came together on the beautiful island in the middle of the sea to form a civilized world of their own. Once again, Vittoria was thwarted in her desire for a quiet retreat. And yet, what looked at first like the very last thing she wanted turned out to have its rewards.