The good times reached a climax in the year 1300. In February of that year another power-player pope, Boniface VIII, announced that any pilgrim who reached Rome before the end of the year, who confessed, who was penitent and who stayed in the city for at least fifteen days would receive plenary indulgence, or forgiveness of all sins. Rome was now offering what had, until then, been a monopoly of Jerusalem. So began Rome’s first Holy Year. It was a triumphant success and one chronicler reported that it was as if the whole world was rushing to Rome, whether rich or poor, old or young, male or female. By Christmas, the crowds were so great that a number of unfortunate pilgrims were crushed to death.
Nobody could have imagined what lay just around the corner. Within a few short years all building projects in the city had been abandoned, artists had left to find better prospects elsewhere and the pilgrim trade was a shadow of its old self. Rome became a depressed city of street battles between rival families, whose population fell by half, to some 17,000. This was the century when Europe was ravaged by the Black Death, yet the plague, though it added to Rome’s decline, was not its real cause. Rome had been struck by something much more familiar. In 1309, encouraged by the king of France, the French Pope Clement V moved the papacy to Avignon. The popes had left.
CHAPTER FIVE
SPANISH AND LUTHERANS
I
THESE DAYS, unless it is in the depths of the off season or you don’t mind spending a few hours in a queue, it is best to book a visit to the Vatican Museums online. Even then it can be a trying business that may feel less like a cultural feast than a trip to the sales. Artworks are lost behind huge tour groups, selfie sticks and guides’ batons brandished above them. Doors create bottlenecks where guards endlessly murmur, ‘Don’t stop, keep moving.’ The worst spot, unsurprisingly, is the most popular: the Sistine Chapel. As you enter, guards call out, ‘Silence’, ‘No photographs’, and direct you to join the crush that fills the room, of people staring upwards, holding audio guides to their heads, or listening to their tour leaders through earphones. And yet, as you try to hold your space against the people shoving past, it is still a dazzling, overwhelming sight.
It was a very different scene in the middle of November 1523. At that time Michelangelo’s ceiling paintings were new, having been completed only a few years earlier, while his vast portrait of Judgement Day remained a thing of the future. Several dozen hutch-like wooden cells lined the walls of the chapel, some painted red, others green, and each placed a little apart from its neighbours, to prevent those inside being overheard. There was no need to call for silence, as conversations would have been hushed and careful. This was a conclave of cardinals, meeting to choose a new pope.
It was deadlocked. For six weeks compromise candidates had been proposed and dropped (one of the first to go was England’s Cardinal Wolsey) without success. Progress was blocked by the obstinacy of two rival factions, each of which had the backing of one of Europe’s two great powers, who were in the midst of a grand struggle to dominate Italy. The group whose cells were painted red, whose candidate was Giulio de’ Medici, was supported by Emperor Charles V. The other group, with green cells, was backed by the French king Francis I. De’ Medici had fewer supporters among the cardinals – only 15 out of 39 – but, with some cardinals remaining neutral, he had enough to block the other side from winning. His cardinals were also dependable. Many were his relatives and had been appointed by his cousin, who until his death two years earlier had ruled as Pope Leo X.
By contrast all that held the other faction together was a shared desire to stop Giulio de’ Medici. Its members included French cardinals, supporters of the popular Roman papal candidate Alessandro di Farnese, and also a group led by Cardinal Pompeo Colonna. Colonna had been a supporter of Charles V but had joined the French to thwart de’ Medici, for whom he felt a strong dislike. The Medici were allies of the Colonnas’ ancient enemies in Rome, the Orsini, while Pompeo had a personal grudge against them. Giulio’s cousin, Pope Leo X, had imprisoned his relative, Cardinal Soderini, for several years on a false charge of plotting to kill him, and Soderini had only just been freed.
Six weeks was a long time for a conclave and impatience was rising, especially outside the Sistine Chapel. Until the cardinals made a decision the Papal States were in a state of paralysis and all public business was halted. The country was also vulnerable. The duke of Ferrara had already attacked its northern borderlands, seizing two towns. As was traditional when a conclave dragged on, Romans had rioted, shouting that the cardinals should hurry up and choose somebody, anybody, it didn’t matter if he was a block of wood. The conclave guardians had been driven to making their worst threat, warning that if the cardinals did not reach a decision they would be put on a diet of bread and water. Still, the Mantuan envoy wrote despairingly that the cardinals seemed determined to spend the whole winter in conclave.
A resolution was nearer than he knew. On 16 November one of the anti-Imperialists finally cracked and switched his support to Giulio de’ Medici. Rather surprisingly it was the one who most disliked him: Pompeo Colonna. That he had given way was largely the result of de’ Medici’s ingenious tactics. The French cardinals, growing weary of the deadlock, had thrown their support behind a new compromise candidate, Cardinal Orsini, and Giulio de’ Medici, seeing his chance, said that he might also support him. Much though Pompeo Colonna loathed the thought of another Medici pope, the prospect of an Orsini pope was far worse. He and Giulio were publicly reconciled and eight days later Giulio was elected pope, taking the name Pope Clement VII.
The Romans were delighted. They had a pope; and a promising one, too. Leo X had been hugely popular, largely because of his lavish spending – which had contrasted strongly with the reign of his short-lived, stingy and much-loathed successor, the Dutch Pope Adrian VI – and everyone assumed Clement VII would be a big spender like his cousin. He was also expected to be an efficient pope, as it was well known that he had been the real statesman behind Leo’s rule. Charles V’s ambassador in Rome, the duke of Sessa, who had been working tirelessly in support of the de’ Medici, was equally pleased. Triumphantly, he wrote to his master in Madrid, ‘The pope is entirely your majesty’s creature. So great is your majesty’s power that you can change stones into obedient children.’1 Yet, only three and a half years later, something that would have seemed unimaginable would occur. A huge, starving army would advance on Rome, sent by Charles V to exact revenge on Clement VII, his former protégé.
How had things gone so wrong? The answer lay largely with Clement himself. Clement has had a poor press over the centuries and his papacy is considered one of the most disastrous of any pope – which is quite a record to hold – yet it is hard not to feel a liking for the man. He was a private person, an unfortunate quality in a religious and state leader, and where his cousin had held lavish banquets with court jesters, Clement preferred quiet occasions with scholars. He was widely regarded as one of the finest musicians in all of Italy. He was a devoted admirer of Michelangelo, from whom he commissioned a number of projects, and with whom he kept up a regular correspondence, loudly reading out Michelangelo’s jokes to the delight of the papal court.
He was also an unlikely pope. He was a love child. His mother was a Florentine woman of low birth while his father was the brother of Florence’s ruler, Lorenzo the Magnificent. Being a Medici could be dangerous as well as advantageous as the family had many enemies, and baby Giulio’s father was murdered shortly after he was born, causing him to be brought up in his uncle Lorenzo’s home. Disaster then struck the whole family. When Giulio was fourteen the Medici were flung from power and exiled from Florence and it was almost twenty years before they were able to return as rulers, with the help of Emperor Charles V’s grandfather, Emperor Maximilian. Throughout his life Giulio’s first concern was to further his family’s interests and those of their city, Florence.
After November 1523 he had two further interests to worry about: Catholicism and the city of Rome.
His career in the Church owed everything to his cousin, who first promoted him into it, yet Clement had no wish to follow Leo’s style, which had been closer to that of a Roman emperor than a pope. Leo held extravagant banquets and pageants, and he used papal troops to depose the duke of Urbino, in an unsuccessful attempt to create a new state for another of his cousins, Giuliano. In 1517 Leo falsely accused five cardinals, all of whom were old enemies of the Medici, of plotting against him. By doing so he both settled some old family scores – one of the cardinals was strangled in his cell – and, by selling their five vacant cardinal posts, he gained some spending money (one of the five was Pompeo Colonna’s relative, Soderini). As has been seen, Leo also had no difficulty with nepotism and he made four of his relatives cardinals, one of them Giulio. Leo overcame the awkward matter of Giulio’s illegitimacy by arranging for proof to be miraculously found that his parents had married in secret.
Clement, by contrast, was determined to be a good pope. He piously observed fasts and ate only bread and water during Lent. He tried to clean up the Church, at least in a modest way, and, despite the fact that, thanks to his cousin’s extravagance, his papacy had inherited a huge financial black hole, he refused to sell cardinals’ positions, or even to appoint new cardinals. That he tried to rein in spending won him few friends in Rome. Yet the disasters that struck his papacy sprang from elsewhere: when he tried to do the right thing in his foreign policy.
Foreign policy was never going to be easy. The previous three decades before Clement’s election had been a violent and destructive time in Italy, when the peninsula was used as a battleground by Europe’s great powers to settle their rivalries. That Italy was fought over was no accident. During this era Europe’s rulers had grown accustomed to fighting with armies that were larger and more costly than their states could afford, and which could only be paid for with plunder. Italy was Europe’s wealthiest region and so offered rich pickings. Until now Rome had not been a victim but an aggressor, as a series of powerful popes – including Clement’s cousin Leo X – took advantage of the fighting to extend papal territory and to try and carve out new Italian states for their relatives. While other Italian cities had been wrecked, Rome remained unscathed.
At least till now. The papal conclave of 1523 had been contested so keenly because a new crisis was approaching between King Francis I and Emperor Charles V. Their personalities could hardly have been more different. Francis was something of a romantic, who viewed war in an almost medieval light, as an opportunity to show courage and gain honour. Charles V had much loftier ambitions. He was a one-man superpower, largely thanks to the poor health of his relatives. In this time Europe’s ruling families frequently arranged marriages between their children, creating a complex web of royal cousins, and if enough of them died young or childless the result could be a kind of dynastic chain reaction. So it was with Charles. Born in the Netherlands, by the time he was nineteen the deaths of his uncle and aunt, a cousin, his father, a usurping uncle by marriage and Charles’ highly placed grandparents, had left him ruler of most of modern Holland, Belgium and Austria, large parts of Germany, all of Aragon and its possessions – including Sicily and southern Italy – and finally Castile, which at that moment was in the process of conquering the Americas. He had also been elected Holy Roman Emperor.
One might think Charles would have been happy with his inheritance, but no. His mother was a depressive – possibly schizophrenic – who spent most of her life cloistered in a Spanish castle and Charles seems to have acquired her gloomy outlook. He was renowned for his chin, which was so large as to be almost deformed, and for his seriousness. Then again, he had much to be serious about. Ruling so many straggling territories meant there was more to go wrong. There was also the worry of the Turks, whose steady conquests in the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean were causing alarm across Europe. Surveying his vast territories, which made him Europe’s most powerful leader since Charlemagne, he decided that these had not come to him by chance, but that God had given them to him for a purpose. Accordingly, he set himself a short to-do list. First, he needed to unite all Europe (by defeating the French king, Francis, who was yet another of Charles’ relatives). Second, he needed to unite Christianity (by crushing or winning round the supporters of a heretic challenging the Church, Martin Luther). Finally, he needed to save Christianity by defeating the Turks. His first task, of defeating the French, would begin in Italy.
To find his way through this minefield Clement VII needed luck and, above all, shrewd judgement. Both began to desert him even before he became pope. During the 1523 conclave a Venetian envoy reported that, in his eagerness to be elected, the future Clement had made an offer to the French to betray his supporter, Charles V, and remain neutral in any war, and possibly to support the French outright. Such a deal would explain a lot about his actions on becoming pope. At first neutral, within a year he had made a secret alliance with France.
He was far from alone. By 1524 Charles’ vast empire and his sense of God-given destiny were causing unease across Italy, provoking Venice and Milan – which had also been imperial allies – to join the papacy in its secret alliance. Unfortunately, after only a few weeks, in January 1525, the alliance ceased to be secret. Charles was furious at this betrayal, especially by Clement, whom he had helped to win the papacy. He determined to gain revenge on ‘that poltroon of a pope’, adding ominously, ‘Some day perhaps Martin Luther will become a man of substance.’ The new anti-Empire alliance went awry almost at once. Within weeks Francis I was crushingly defeated at the battle of Pavia and he himself was captured. For a short time the disaster had an invigorating effect on Italians and, filled with patriotic fervour and determined to free their land of foreign invaders, most, but not all, Italian states joined a new alliance with France, the League of Cognac, but optimism quickly faded. The League’s army became bogged down fighting Charles V’s armies in northern Italy and opportunities were lost.
In the summer of 1526 Charles strengthened his forces. His commander in northern Italy, Constable Bourbon – a French renegade who had turned against his country after his king, Francis, tried to take his lands – was sent 5,000 Spanish, who at this time were considered the finest soldiers in Europe. Across the Alps, Charles’ loyal underling in southern Germany, Georg von Frundsberg, was so keen to see Pope Clement hanged for his betrayal that he paid soldiers with his own money, pawning towns he possessed, his castle and even his wife’s jewels. His efforts paid off and he managed to raise a force of 10,000 Landsknechte. Though mercenaries, the Landsknechte had an intense sense of collective loyalty, electing officers and court-martialling any soldier who dishonoured his comrades – each company had its own executioner – so their units have been described as military republics. They also held strong religious views. Many had been won over by Martin Luther’s recent attacks on the papacy and were eager to kill some churchmen, the higher the better.
If he did not already have trouble enough, Clement also faced enemies from the south. Pompeo Colonna, who had extensive estates and castles south of Rome, was eager to avenge himself for, as he saw it, Clement’s theft of the papacy, that had been rightfully his. Colonna allied himself with the kingdom of Naples – which was yet another of Charles V’s territories – and it was he who struck the first blow against Clement. That he managed to do so was wholly Clement’s fault as, though highly intelligent, Clement could be very gullible. In the summer of 1526 Pompeo had his cousin Vespasiano, whom Clement liked and – unwisely – trusted, convince him that the Colonna wanted only peace. Clement, struggling to deal with the financial black hole left by his cousin, decided to save money by standing down the troops he had guarding Rome from the south.
That it was a poor saving became painfully clear at dawn on 20 September 1526 when Colonna’s troops seized Rome’s San Giovanni and San Paolo gates and poured into the city. Compared to the other attacks on Rome that we have seen, this was more like a military parade than a sack. The Romans, who felt res
entful towards Clement for having raised their taxes, refused to fight and instead went out to watch as Pompeo’s troops marched across the town and then fought their way through the Santo Spirito Gate and into the Borgo, as the old Leonine City was now known. Pompeo failed in his main objective of capturing Clement, who saved himself at the last minute by fleeing along the raised escape passage to the Castel Sant’Angelo. The raid was still a humiliation for the pope. Worse, it showed his vulnerability. Clement was helpless against the raiders who pillaged the papal palace and stole every horse in the papal stables.
During the following months Clement gained his revenge. He raised armies, which, together with those of his League allies, destroyed Colonna fortresses south of Rome and captured a string of towns from imperial Naples. Unfortunately, Naples and the Colonna were no longer his real threat. In February 1527 Bourbon’s 5,000 Spanish linked up with Frundsberg’s 10,000 Landsknechte and, with Bourbon in command, the huge combined army, whose camp followers and prostitutes outnumbered its soldiers, began moving slowly southwards. Emperor Charles V made his intentions clear. He wanted to hold a general council of the Church, which could mean only one thing: he intended to see Clement replaced as pope. If Frundsberg’s Landsknechte had not already hanged him.
First, though, they had to reach Rome, which was no easy matter. Though it contained the most formidable soldiers in Europe, Bourbon’s army was, like any army of this era, highly unstable, being less an arm of the state than a kind of rogue state in its own right, loyal only to itself. Having entered papal territory in early March it then had to stop outside Bologna to shelter from atrocious late winter weather. Idleness soon led to trouble. The Spanish troops, who were owed more back pay than the Landsknechte, mutinied, and Bourbon saved his own life only by fleeing to the Landsknechte and hiding in a horse stall. The Landsknechte then rebelled too, and when their commander Georg von Frundsberg tried to control them he became so worked up that he had a stroke and was forced to abandon his soldiers and return to Germany.
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