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.
Inside the Castel Sant’ Angelo, according to his own lurid and vainglorious account, Benvenuto Cellini was a tireless, brilliant and inspiring gunner. ‘So there I was in the castle,’ he recalled.
I went up to some guns that were in charge of a bombardier [who] was staring out over the battlements to where his poor house was being sacked and his wife and children outraged. He dared not fire in case he harmed his own family, and flinging his fuse on the ground he started tearing at his face and sobbing bitterly. Other bombardiers were doing the same. When I saw this I seized one of the fuses, got help from some of the men who were not in such a sorry state, and lined up some heavy pieces of artillery and falconets, firing them where I saw the need. In this way I slaughtered a great number of the enemy…I continued firing, with an accompaniment of blessings and cheers from a number of cardinals and noblemen. Inspired by this I forced myself to try to do the impossible. Anyway, all I need say is that it was
through me that the castle was saved…I carried on with the work all day until evening approached.
Throughout the ensuing days Cellini applied himself ‘with unimaginable energy and zeal’, to helping ‘a great Roman nobleman called Antonio Santa Croce, whom Pope Clement had put in charge of all the bombardiers’. Not everyone appreciated Cellini. He ‘made bitter enemies’ of two particular cardinals whom he ordered off the high platform where the guns were ranged as their ‘nasty red birettas could be seen a long way off’; and he nearly killed two other cardinals when the blast from one of his cannonades dislodged a barrel of stones which crashed on to the terrace at their feet. But the Pope himself, so Cellini said, had nothing but praise for him. ‘Not a day passed without [his] achieving some outstanding success’; and as a result, his ‘stock with the Pope went up and up’. When Cellini asked the Pope to absolve him of all the killing he had done
while serving the Church in the castle, the Pope raised his hand, carefully made a great sign of the cross above [his] head, and said that he gave [him] his blessing, that he forgave [him] all the homicides [he] had ever committed and all those [he] ever would commit in the service of the Apostolic Church.
Cellini continued,
After I left him, I climbed back to the tower and spent all my time firing away at the enemy, hardly ever wasting a shot…If I told in detail all the great things I did in that cruel inferno I should astonish the world…I shall skip a good deal and come to the time when Pope Clement, in his anxiety to save the tiaras and mass of wonderful jewels belonging to the Apostolic Camera, sent for me…and ordered me to remove them from their gold settings. I did as I was told; and then, after I had wrapped them up in pieces of paper, we sewed them into the linings of the Pope’s clothes [and into those of his faithful servant, Cavalierino]. When this was done they gave me all the gold – which came to about two hundred pounds – and told me to melt it down as secretly as I could.
Every morning when it was light the Pope looked north hoping to catch sight of the army which was supposed to be advancing to Rome’s relief. But he looked in vain. At the beginning of June, after more than a month’s incarceration in the Castle, he was forced to surrender to the Emperor’s envoy. His fellow refugees were dying of hunger and disease around him; and the army, which he had hoped would come to rescue him, was retreating towards Viterbo. He was obliged to deliver up Civitavecchia, Ostia and Modena as well as Parma and Piacenza to the imperial forces. He was also required to find a huge ransom, to restore the Colonna to their possessions and to hand over seven important men as hostages, including Jacopo Salviati and Lorenzo Ridolfi.
Yet although he had surrendered he was not permitted to leave Castel Sant’ Angelo, which had now become his prison, until the ransom demanded from him had been paid. The summer passed and the autumn, and still he was detained there. The imperial army was driven from Rome by plague and hunger, but two thousand troops were left behind to guard the city and to make sure that the prisoner remained where he was. Then, at the beginning of December, after German and Spanish troops, having plundered the surrounding countryside, had returned to Rome threatening to hang their captains and cut the Pope to pieces if they did not receive the arrears of pay that were due to them, the captive was told that his guards would look the other way if he made his escape. Early on the morning of 7 December he did so, wearing the clothes of his major-domo. With a few companions, he got away to Orvieto where, in the remote fastness of the episcopal palace which could be reached only by a mule track from the valley of the Paglia, he endeavoured to rebuild his shattered power and reputation.
It was at Orvieto, in this ‘ruinous and decayed old palace’ with the ‘roofs fallen down and thirty persons, riff-raff and others, standing in the chambers for a garnishment’, that an embassy from England sought him out in order to obtain his authority for Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon. Clement would have welcomed the opportunity of obtaining Henry’s friendship, but Catherine was Charles V’s aunt and the now penniless Pope could do no more than make vague promises that he would grant the King’s request once he was free to move back to Rome again. In fact, the Pope’s mind was occupied by other matters that seemed to him more important. None of these appears to have concerned him more than the problem of Florence, where the sack of Rome and his own subsequent imprisonment had had the most unfortunate repercussions.
The Florentines had deeply resented the presence in the Medici Palace of the Pope’s representative, the ill-mannered and avaricious foreigner, Cardinal Silvio Passerini, who had been followed to Florence by two other papal representatives, Cardinals Innocenzo Cibò and Niccolò Ridolfi. Nor had the Florentines taken kindly to Passerini’s charges, the two young Medici bastards, in particular to the unprepossessing Alessandro. Both these boys had been upbraided in public by Piero di Lorenzo’s daughter, Clarice Strozzi, who had indignantly attacked them for being utterly unworthy of their great name, adding that Clement himself no more deserved to be Pope than Passerini deserved to be his representative.
‘I have seen in the short time I have been here a thousand things like it,’ wrote Francesco Guicciardini to the Pope, reporting on a riot in the Piazza della Signoria,
and all derive from the ignorance of this eunuch [Passerini] who spends the whole day in idle chatter and neglects important things…He does his best to fill himself and everyone else with suspicion; he makes everyone despair; and has no idea himself what he is doing.
His two charges, Guicciardini considered, were equally reprehensible.
There was no doubt that the Florentines agreed with Guicciardini. When the news from Rome reached the city, they marched through the streets shouting slogans and singing songs of thanksgiving. And as soon as Passerini and his two pupils had scurried away, they threw the Pope’s effigy out of the church of the Annunziata, tore it to pieces in the square, and loudly declared their approval of a new republican constitution, the re-establishment of the Grand Council as well as the militia, and the election of anti-Medicean Gonfaloniere, Niccolò Capponi, to hold office for a year. On the façade of the Medici Palace – which was, however, protected by a strong guard from mobs of would-be looters – a descendant of Ghiberti painted a picture of the Pope climbing up a ladder to the gallows.
The Pope determined to tolerate the situation no longer than his present powerlessness and bankruptcy obliged him to do. He could hope for no more help from the French whose forces, having yet again invaded Italy and advanced as far as Naples, were ravaged by the plague and obliged to surrender once more to the Spaniards. So he came to terms at last with the Emperor. On the understanding that the Pope would recognize his position in Italy and would crown him on his proposed arrival there, Charles undertook, by a treaty signed at Barcelona on 29 June 1529, to return the Medici to Florence – if necessary by force.
Thinking that they in turn would be well advised to come to an agreement with the Pope, whose conduct of the city’s government in the past had not been exceptionable, a few of the older and more cautious citizens of Florence now proposed the formulation of some sort of compromise. The younger citizens, however, refused to listen to such pusillanimous proposals and in their patriotic enthusiasm they carried the majority of the people with them. They called out the militia, voted money for mercenaries, pulled down villas beyond the walls which might have afforded cover to the Imperialists, built new strong-points, and improved the city’s fortifications. The military command they gave to a Perugian condottiere, Malatesta Baglioni, whose father had fought against the Medici and whose services to Florence would, he hoped, be rewarded by his returning to power in his native city. At the same time the ingenious Michelangelo, whose colossal and inspiring statue of David now stood in the Piazza della Signoria, was appointed to supervise the works of defence.1
Having proposed that the defences should be extended to circumvallate the hill of San Miniato and that the belfry of its church should be protected from artillery fire by mattresses, Michelangelo w
aited to see the works almost completed, then lost his nerve and fled from the city. A few days later he returned, and though not reinstated in his former responsible position, his behaviour was attributed to his artistic temperament and he was forgiven.
By then the Pope had enlisted the help of the Prince of Orange, the adventurer who had commanded the imperial troops during the Sack of Rome and who now agreed to lead an almost equally unruly, mostly Spanish force against Florence. In the early autumn of 1529 this force appeared on the hills above the city, calling out, so it was said, ‘Get out your brocades, Florence, for we are coming to measure them with our pikestaffs’. But although the army was nearly 40,000 strong, the Prince did not consider it either large or manageable enough for a direct assault and decided to starve the city into surrender.
Owing largely to the heroic activities of the gifted and ruthless Florentine commander, Francesco Ferrucci,2 who repeatedly led out fighting patrols to keep the supply routes open, the city held out for no less than ten months. On 3 August 1530, however, Ferrucci was surrounded in the village of Gavinana in the mountains above Pistoia by a troop of Spanish soldiers who hacked him to pieces; and with his death Florentine resistance collapsed. For weeks past, indeed, surrender had seemed inevitable. Malatesta Baglioni, though he marched about the streets with the word ‘Libertas’ emblazoned on his hat, had already entered into secret negotiations with the enemy. The population was starving and plague-ridden; mobs marched forlornly through the streets shouting for bread and for the return of the Medici as the only means of getting it. ‘Everyone was beside himself with fright and bewilderment,’ Benedetto Varchi recorded.
The House Of Medici Page 26