The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean

by John Julius Norwich

  At about five o’clock that same afternoon, after hours of heavy fighting, Clement fled along the covered passage that led from the Vatican to the Castel Sant’ Angelo. Meanwhile the looting and plundering had begun. As one of the secretaries of the curia reported:

  The papal palace was almost completely stripped, even to the bedroom and wardrobe of the Pope. The great and private sacristy of St Peter’s, that of the palace, the apartments of prelates and members of the household, even the horse-stalls were emptied, their doors and windows shattered; chalices, crosses, pastoral staffs, ornaments of great value, all that fell into their hands was carried off as plunder by this rabble.

  The mob even broke into the Sistine Chapel, where the Raphael tapestries were torn from the walls. Golden and jewelled chalices, patens and all manner of ecclesiastical treasures were seized, to a value estimated at 300,000 ducats.

  With proper preparations made, a Pope could hold out in the Castel Sant’ Angelo for months; on this occasion, however, thanks to the incompetence of the castellan, Giulio de’ Medici, the fortress was completely unprovisioned. Clement had no choice but to make what terms he could. The ensuing negotiations were hard, but their results were less than satisfactory to Pompeio Colonna, who now realised that his attempted coup had been a failure. Not only had Pope Clement remained on his throne, but public opinion had swung dramatically against his own family. Rome had been plundered and the Colonna had–rightly–been blamed. In November Pompeio was deprived–for the second time–of all his dignities and benefices, and the leading members of his family suffered similar fates. The family of Colonna lost all its property in the Papal States except for three small fortresses.

  Clement had indeed survived, but only just.

  The Pope sees nothing ahead but ruin: not just his own, for which he cares little, but that of the Apostolic See, of Rome, of his own country and of the whole of Italy. Moreover, he sees no way of preventing it. He has expended all his own money, all that of his friends, all that of his servants. Our reputation, too, is gone.

  So wrote another official of the curia, Gian Matteo Giberti, towards the end of November 1526. The Pope had good reason to be depressed. Strategically he was vulnerable on every side, and the Emperor was exploiting his vulnerability to the full. And now there came the news of the defection of Ferrara, whose Duke, Alfonso d’Este, had joined the imperialist forces. ‘The Pope,’ wrote the Milanese envoy Landriano, ‘seems struck dead. All the attempts of the ambassadors of France, England and Venice to restore him have been in vain…He looks like a sick man whom the doctors have given up.’ And still his tribulations were not over. On 12 December a Spanish envoy delivered a personal letter from the Emperor repeating his demand for a General Council of the Church, in defiance of Pope Clement’s wishes to the contrary. Early in the following year, there came the news that an imperial army under the Duke of Bourbon was advancing upon the Papal States.

  Despite his treachery to his king, Bourbon was a charismatic figure, admired by all his men for his courage. He never shirked an engagement, and could always be found where the fighting was thickest, easily distinguishable by the silver and white surcoat that he always wore and by his black, white and yellow standard on which was emblazoned the word ‘Espérance’. Now, as he advanced southwards from Milan at the head of an army of some 20,000 German and Spanish troops, the citizens of all the towns along his route–Piacenza and Parma, Reggio, Modena and Bologna–worked frantically on their cities’ defences. They could have saved themselves the trouble. The Duke had no intention of wasting time on them. He led his army directly to Rome, drawing it up on the Janiculum hill, immediately north of the city wall; and at four o’clock in the morning of 6 May 1527 the attack began.

  In the absence of heavy artillery, Bourbon had decided that the walls would have to be scaled–a technique far more difficult and dangerous than that of simply pounding them until they crumbled. He himself was one of the first of the casualties. He had just led a troop of German landsknechts136 to the foot of the wall, and was actually positioning a scaling-ladder when he was shot through the chest by an enemy arquebus. The fall of this unmistakable white-clad figure was seen by besiegers and besieged alike, and for an hour or so the fate of the siege hung in the balance; then the thought of revenge spurred the Germans and Spaniards on to ever greater efforts, and between six and seven in the morning the imperial army burst into the city. From that moment on there was little resistance. The Romans rushed from the wall to barricade their own homes, and many of the papal troops joined the enemy to save their own skin. Only the Swiss Guard and some of the papal militia fought heroically on until they were annihilated.137

  As the invaders approached the Vatican the Pope was hustled out of St Peter’s and led for the second time along the covered way to the Castel Sant’ Angelo, already thronged with panic-stricken families seeking refuge. Such were the crowds that it was only with the greatest difficulty that the drawbridge could be raised. Outside in the Borgo and Trastevere, despite specific orders by their commanders, the soldiers embarked on an orgy of killing, cutting down every man, woman or child they encountered. Almost all the inmates of the Hospital of Santo Spirito were massacred; of the orphans of the Pietà, not one was left alive.

  The imperial army crossed the Tiber just before midnight, the German landsknechts settling in the Campo dei Fiori, the Spaniards in Piazza Navona. The sack that followed has been described as ‘one of the most horrible in recorded history’.138 The bloodbath that had begun across the Tiber continued unabated: to venture out into the street was to invite almost certain death, and to remain indoors was very little safer; scarcely a single church, palace or house of any size escaped pillage and devastation. Monasteries were plundered and convents violated, the more attractive nuns being sold in the streets for a giulio each. Nor was any respect shown, even by the Spaniards, to the highest dignitaries of the papal curia. At least two cardinals were dragged through the streets and tortured; one of them, who was well over eighty, subsequently died of his injuries.

  It was four days and four nights before Rome had any respite. Only with the arrival on 10 May of Pompeio Colonna and his two brothers, with 8,000 of their men, was a semblance of order restored. By this time virtually every street in Rome had been gutted and was strewn with corpses. One captured Spanish sapper later reported that on the north bank of the Tiber alone he and his colleagues had buried nearly 10,000, and had thrown another 2,000 into the river. Six months later, thanks to widespread starvation and a long epidemic of plague, the population of Rome was less than half what it had been before the siege; much of the city had been left a smouldering shell, littered with bodies lying unburied during the hottest season of the year. Culturally, too, the loss was incalculable. Paintings, sculptures, whole libraries–including that of the Vatican itself–were ravaged and destroyed, the pontifical archives ransacked. The school of Raphael was broken up; the painter Parmigianino was imprisoned, saving his life only by making drawings of his jailers before escaping to Bologna.

  The imperial army, meanwhile, had suffered almost as much as the Romans. It too was virtually without food; its soldiers–unpaid for months–were totally demoralised, interested only in loot and pillage. Discipline had broken down: the landsknechts and the Spaniards were at each other’s throats. The only hope seemed to lie in the army of the League, under the mildly ridiculous Duke of Urbino. Given the present state of the imperialists he might well have broken into the city, rescued the Pope and saved the day; pusillanimous as ever, he did nothing. Eventually Clement was forced once again to capitulate. The official price he paid was the cities of Ostia, Civitavecchia, Piacenza and Modena, together with 400,000 ducats; the actual price was higher still, since the Venetians–in spite of their alliance–seized Ravenna and Cervia while the Duke of Ferrara made a grab for Modena. The Papal States, in which an efficient government had been developing for the first time in history, had crumbled away.

  Even then, the fighting–n
ow largely polarised between France and the Empire–continued. Peace, when it came, was the result of negotiations begun during the winter of 1528–29 between Charles’s aunt Margaret of Savoy and her sister-in-law Louise, mother of King Francis. The two met at Cambrai on 5 July 1529, and the resulting treaty was signed in the first week of August. The Ladies’ Peace, as it came to be called, confirmed Spanish rule in Italy. Francis renounced all his claims there, receiving in return a promise from Charles not to press the imperial claims to Burgundy; but France’s allies in the League of Cognac were left entirely out of the reckoning and were thus subsequently forced to accept the terms that Charles was to impose at the end of the year–terms which included, for Venice, the surrender of all her possessions in south Italy to the Spanish Kingdom of Naples. Francesco Maria Sforza was restored to Milan (though Charles reserved the right to garrison its citadel); the Medici, who had been expelled from Florence in 1527, were also restored (though it took a ten-month siege to effect the restoration); and the island of Malta was given in 1530 to the Knights of St John.

  It was a sad and–to those who felt that the King of France had betrayed them–a shameful settlement. But at least it restored peace to Italy and put an end to a long and unedifying chapter in her history, a chapter which had begun with Charles VIII’s invasion of 1494 and had brought the Italians nothing but devastation and destruction. To seal it all, Charles V crossed the Alps for the first time for his imperial coronation. This was not an indispensable ceremony; his grandfather Maximilian had done without it altogether, and Charles himself, since his coronation at Aachen, had been nearly ten years on the throne without this final confirmation of his authority. The fact remained, nonetheless, that until the Pope had laid the crown on his head his title of Holy Roman Emperor was technically unjustified; to one possessing so strong a sense of divine mission, both the title and the sacrament were important.

  Imperial coronations were traditionally performed in Rome. On landing at Genoa in mid-August 1529, however, Charles received reports of Süleyman’s steady advance on Vienna and at once decided that a journey so far down the peninsula at such a time would be folly; it would take too long, besides leaving him dangerously cut off in the event of a crisis. Messengers sped to Pope Clement, and it was agreed that in the circumstances the ceremony might be held in Bologna, a considerably more accessible city which still remained firmly under papal control. Even then the uncertainty was not over: while on his way to Bologna in September Charles received an urgent appeal from his brother Ferdinand in Vienna, and almost cancelled his coronation plans there and then. Only after long consideration did he decide not to do so. By the time he reached Vienna either the city would have fallen or the Sultan would have retired for the winter; in either case, the small force that he had with him in Italy would have been insufficient to tip the scales.

  And so, on 5 November 1529, Charles V made his formal entry into Bologna where, in front of the Basilica of S. Petronio, Pope Clement waited to receive him. After a brief ceremony of welcome, the two retired to the Palazzo del Podestà across the square, where neighbouring apartments had been prepared for them. There was much to be done, many outstanding problems to be discussed and resolved, before the coronation could take place. It was, after all, only two years since papal Rome had been sacked by imperial troops, with Clement himself a virtual prisoner of Charles in the Castel Sant’ Angelo; somehow, friendly relations had to be re-established. Next there were the individual peace treaties to be drawn up with all the Italian ex-enemies of the Empire, chief among which–apart from the Pope himself–were Venice, Florence and Milan. Only then, when peace had been finally consolidated throughout the peninsula, would Charles feel justified in kneeling before Clement to receive the imperial crown. Coronation Day was fixed for 24 February 1530, and invitations were despatched to all the rulers of Christendom. Charles and Clement had given themselves a little under four months to settle the future of Italy.

  Surprisingly, it proved enough. Well before the day appointed, Charles had laid the foundations of a pan-Italian league–a league which testified to the spread of imperial power across the length and breadth of Italy unparalleled for centuries past. And so the peace was signed; Clement’s League of Cognac and Charles’s sack of Rome were alike forgotten, or at least dismissed from minds; and on 24 February 1530, in S. Petronio, Charles was first anointed and then received from the papal hands the sword, orb, sceptre and finally the crown of the Holy Roman Empire. Something of a cloud was cast over the proceedings when a makeshift wooden bridge linking the church with the palace collapsed just as the Emperor’s suite was passing across it, but when it was established that the many casualties included no one of serious importance spirits quickly revived, and celebrations continued long into the night.

  It was the last time in history that a Pope was to crown an Emperor; on that day the 700-year-old tradition, which had begun in 800 AD when Pope Leo III had laid the imperial crown on the head of Charlemagne, was brought to an end. The Empire was by no means finished, but never again would it be received, even symbolically, from the hands of the Vicar of Christ on Earth.

  CHAPTER XV

  Barbary and the Barbarossas

  Since the beginning of time men have preyed upon their fellows; and since the building of the first navigable ships, piracy had existed in the Mediterranean. Since the Dark Ages it had been practised by Christians and Muslims alike, with or without the excuse of war and often with the clearest of consciences. To the Turks, the activities of the Knights of St John during their years in Rhodes would have merited no other name; while Ferdinand and Isabella, after their defeat of the Kingdom of Granada, would hardly have seen the constant harassment of Spanish shipping by Muslim raiders from North Africa as an honourable continuation of the war on the part of the vanquished. Yet such, in the eyes of those raiders, it was, and as the sixteenth century got under way, so this harassment took on a new dimension: the Barbary–or Berber–Coast became synonymous with piracy.

  After the first appearance of the Arabs nearly nine hundred years before, the North African coast–with the exception of Melilla, which had been occupied by the Spaniards in 1497 and remains to this day Spanish territory139–had been controlled by the Umayyad, Abassid and Fatimid Caliphates, the Almoravids and the Almohads, and various other smaller dynasties such as the Beni Hafs in Tunis, the Beni Ziyan in the central Maghreb and the Beni Merin in Morocco. Their rule, for the most part, was not unenlightened. They allowed freedom of worship to such modest Christian communities as existed within their borders; in the thirteenth century there was even a Bishop of Fez, where Leo Africanus–whose writings remained, for some four centuries, one of Europe’s principal sources of information about Islam–had served as a registrar in the ‘strangers’ hospital’. He testified in about 1526 to the ‘civilitie, humanitie and upright dealing of the Barbarians…a civill people [who] prescribe lawes and constitutions unto themselves’ and were learned in the arts and sciences. It seems, moreover, that they normally enjoyed fairly close commercial relations with Sicily and the Italian mercantile republics, and were well known even to the English merchants of the fifteenth century, for whom Algiers was a good deal more easily accessible than Constantinople or even Venice. But although their rulers could prohibit piracy, they could never prevent private freebooters from setting sail, and the Christian victims–especially the Sardinians, Maltese, Genoese and Greeks–gave as good as they got. Until the end of the fourteenth century, indeed, they gave rather better; they, rather than the Muslims, were the chief terrorists of the Mediterranean. Only with the coming of the large commercial fleets did their occupation lose something of its savour; thenceforth it is the Moorish corsairs who assume centre stage.

  The fifteenth century, as we have seen, witnessed two cataclysmic events, one at each end of the Middle Sea: in the east, the fall of Constantinople in 1453–with the consequent closure of the Black Sea to Christian navigation–and in the west the gradual expulsion of the Mo
ors from Spain in the years following 1492. Both led to a proliferation of rootless vagabonds–in the east Christians, in the west Muslims–all of them ruined, disaffected and longing for revenge; and many of them adopted the buccaneering life. The Christians would normally establish their bases in the central Mediterranean: in Sicily, or Malta, or among the countless islands off the Dalmatian coast. The Muslims, on the other hand, could only join their co-religionists in North Africa. Between Tangier and Tunis there were some 1,200 miles and, in what was for the most part a fertile and well-watered coastal strip, innumerable tideless natural harbours ideal for their purposes. And so the legend of the Barbary Coast was born.

  Of all the pirates of that coast, the two greatest were brothers: Aruj and Khizr–better known as Kheir-ed-Din–Barbarossa. Born on the island of Mytilene (the modern Lesbos), they were the sons of a retired Greek-born janissary, then working as a potter, and his wife who was formerly the widow of a Greek priest. (Since all janissaries had originally been Christians before their forcible conversion, the Barbarossa brothers possessed not a drop of Turkish, Arab or Berber blood–a fact to which their famous red beards were further testimony.) In his early youth Aruj–the elder of the two–had taken part in an unsuccessful expedition against the Knights of St John, during which he had been captured and forced to serve in their galleys. Ransomed–we have no idea by whom–he was soon afterwards entrusted with a privateer by merchants of Constantinople, and served under the Mameluke ruler of Egypt.

  Some time during the very first years of the century, he and his brother appeared in Tunis with two galleots–basically open boats with about seventeen oars a side, each oar manned by two or perhaps three rowers; and in 1504, in the channel that runs between the island of Elba and the Italian mainland, Aruj won his first major prizes: two papal galleys, loaded to the gunwales with precious goods from Genoa. They were bound for Civitavecchia, but they never reached it; boarded and captured, they were brought proudly back to Tunis.