Although hunting was his passion, Leo’s method was bizarre. Because he was too myopic and corpulent to ride to the hunt, he would watch from a stand through his monocle. Waving a white flag, he would signal the start of the chase to his cardinals, who had exchanged their cassocks and skullcaps for gray jackets and sombreros. Occasionally, a boar was lured into a penned area so that the pope could deliver the coup de grâce.
On the afternoon of June 15, 1520, while hunting in the hills of the campagna north of Rome, Leo paused in his curious entertainment just long enough to sign a papal bull, Exsurge domine, condemning the tiresome monk as a heretic.
Rome’s troubles were just beginning.
Intent on immediate gratification and with little apparent concern for the future, Leo X presided over what would be both the apogee and the final act of the Renaissance. The history of Rome was repeating itself. Renaissance Rome had not only rediscovered classical culture, it had embraced the licentiousness that precipitated the fall of the imperial city.
When Leo was consecrated pope, Romans anticipated a second Golden Age of Augustus to crown the imperium of the second Julius. The Medici prince had seemed the ideal choice. He was a young man of noble intentions, refined taste, and the best education, excessively generous to friends and artists. By his death in 1521, his reign had been shown to be fool’s gold.
“As of his pontificate, everything began going bad, and from bad to worse,” Girolamo Seripando, who would become one of the strongest voices in the Council of Trent, wrote, “whether we’re dealing with the war against the Turks, or the empire [the Papal States], of which we lost a large part: Modena, Reggio Emilia, Parma, Piacenza. Or morals, of which every light had gone out, or of reputation, which has never been worse in the minds of men. Or authority, which has never been less, to the point where it has almost evaporated in a joke.”
By the end of Leo’s disastrous, eight-year pontificate, all the main players in the first building phase of St. Peter’s were dead: Giuliano della Rovere, Donato Bramante, Giuliano da Sangallo, Fra Giovanni Giocondo, Raphael Sanzio, and Agostino Chigi. The Church was impoverished, spiritually and fiscally, and the future of the Basilica was very much in doubt.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
A BRIEF MOMENT OF TRUTH
If the Renaissance had been a heady, hedonistic time for the humanists and hierarchy in Rome, it had been a less happy time for the faithful who expected their priests to be pastors. Many pilgrims, especially travelers from Britain and Germany, had been shocked by the dissoluteness of the clergy. One wag quipped that the northern countries “were too poor to rival Italy in immorality.”
A participant in the Lateran Council that Julius convened in 1512 deplored the abasement of the Church: “How many of the clergy,” he asked rhetorically, “do not wear clothes laid down by the sacred canons, how many keep concubines, are simoniacal and ambitious? How many carry weapons like soldiers?…How many go to the altar with their own children around them? How many hunt and shoot with crossbows and guns?”
Catholics in the north countries were losing respect for the papacy and growing resentful of the constant demands for more and more generous contributions. All their money was flowing to Rome with no return. Whether blind to its own shortcomings, scornful of its critics, or bored by the prospect of cleaning house, the Medici papacy had underestimated the divide that was looming.
When the cardinals met in papal conclave in the final days of 1521, the writing was on the wall. They realized that stringent measures were necessary to appease the restive Christians in the north and avert the looming “agony of Catholicism.” Turning away from the dissolute Roman prelates, they elected Adrian of Utrecht, a strict monk who had been tutor to the emperor Charles V. He kept his given name.
Adrian VI was an aberration in the Roman Renaissance, like John Ashcroft on a Stones road trip or Grandma Moses at a Mapplethorpe opening. A northerner and a man of rigid strictures, he had no tolerance for moral lapses. Taking his mandate seriously, he addressed the German protestors:
God has permitted this persecution of the Church because of the sins of mankind, especially of priests and prelates…. We are conscious that much that is vile has befallen this Holy See over the past years…. We have all strayed from the right path and so must all honor God and humble ourselves before him…. For our part, we pledge ourselves, that the Curia, perhaps the source of all the evil, shall be wholly renovated.
Adrian was preaching to closed minds. The dissidents didn’t trust his sincerity, and Rome wasn’t ready for such drastic self-improvement. After a few months of the no-nonsense Dutchman, Romans began looking back nostalgically to the pampered Medici prince. Humanists deplored the day that the Church had chosen a non-Italian to sit on the throne of Peter.
Adrian “took no delight in pictures, sculptures, or in any other good thing,” Vasari reports. He did not see beauty as a reflection of truth, or art as an instrument of religion, and he stopped work on all the painting and architecture that Julius and Leo had ordered. Raphael’s assistants, who were finishing his frescoes in the Great Hall of the papal palace, were dismissed, and construction of the Basilica halted.
Conceived as the glorious monument to God and his Vicar, the Basilica of St. Peter came to look increasingly like Julius’s Folly. It had become a financial nightmare, an administrative quagmire, and a burr abrading the faithful. Adrian closed down operations. The teeming work yard was silent. The lime furnaces were cold. Oxcarts and mule wagons no longer crowded the Ponte Sant’Angelo with loads of timber and travertine. Without the lush papal patronage that had made many of them wealthy, artists began to look for contracts outside the city.
“Driven to despair” and “almost like to die of hunger,” they were beginning to leave Rome, when “by the will of God,” Vasari writes, the foreign pope died.
The pontificate of the dour Dutchman lasted twenty-one months, interrupting, but not breaking, the Medici grip on Rome. When the cardinals met to elect his successor, they chose Leo’s bastard cousin and confidant Giulio de’ Medici. He took the name Clement VII, “and with him all the arts…were restored to life in one day.”
Elected in the moral backlash against Leo’s dissolute style, Adrian served as an ellipsis between the two Medici papacies. Although his pontificate was so joyless that 450 years would elapse before the throne of Peter was given to another foreigner,* the Renaissance Church was in dire need of an Adrian—or some equally unpleasant medicine.
License has a limited life span. Rome was cavorting on the edge of a precipice. Whether brought down by outside forces—the unholy alliance of politics and religion forming in the north—or by self-destruction, the end of the Church appeared inevitable.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
MEDICI REDUX
Clement VII’s pontificate began with high expectations.
Guicciardini, the most notable and opinionated contemporary historian, recalled, “The Marquis of Pescara said to me that this was perhaps the only occasion on which he had seen what all men desired come to pass.”
Guicciardini was a fellow Florentine and Medici stalwart, grateful for their patronage and prejudiced in their favor. He had little positive to say about Julius II except by way of comparison with the new pope. “No two men could have been more unlike in character than the Popes Julius and Clement,” he wrote. “For while the former was of great and even excessive courage, ardent, impulsive, frank and open, the latter was of a temper inclining rather to timidity, most patient, moderate, and withal dissembling.”
Born Giulio de’ Medici, Clement was the illegitimate son of Lorenzo’s brother, murdered in the Pazzi conspiracy. Although he had been Leo’s close adviser, the cousins were very different. Clement was a canon lawyer, by every account a man of intelligence and high personal morals, and he took a number of steps to bring coherence to the chaos that Leo had left. He established an international council of bishops to study and respond to Luther’s complaints, and he named a commission, the C
ollegium LX Virorum, to look into the finances of the Basilica. Its stated mission was “the crusade of the Great Pardon of the Marvelous Fabbrica of St. Peter’s”—in other words, to correct the faults that had crept in and bring some accountability to the project.
The Collegium recommended the establishment of an international oversight committee with authority to organize, administer, and finance the entire enterprise and float bonds to pay for it. On December 12, 1523, by the papal bull Admonet nos suscepti, Pope Clement instituted the Fabbrica di San Pietro nel Vaticano, composed of sixty experts drawn from all parts of Europe. He placed it under the direct jurisdiction of the Holy See.
From this promising beginning, Clement’s pontificate descended into hell. With the possible exception of Hamlet, no figure real or invented has been a more infamous vacillator than this second Medici pope. Aretino derided him as “a sheep instead of a shepherd,” and the Venetian ambassador said, “He talks well but decides badly.” It could have been Pope Clement’s epitaph.
Two complementary portraits show a handsome patrician with a long face, gentle eyes, and a concerned expression. The paintings are almost identical in size, palette, and composition, except that in one Clement is pictured with the French king Francis I, and in the other he is conferring with the emperor Charles V. That very neatly points up the fault that did much more than clip the wings of the “vile tyranny of the priests.” It brought ruin to Rome, division to the Church, and shame to the papacy.
The grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella, Charles V ruled an empire that made the Caesars look land-poor. At the peak of his power, it was twenty times larger than Rome’s and comprised the Hapsburg kingdom of Austria, Germany, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands; Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia in Italy; Burgundy and Artois in France; and Spain, Mexico, and Peru.
Since the death of Julius, Italy had been the battlefield where the dueling armies of Charles and Francis vied to tip the balance of power in Europe. Scarcely a year passed without one or the other alternately threatening the Papal States and allying with or attacking the various city-states. Florence, Venice, and Milan were prime targets.
In 1525, Charles captured Francis at Pavia, south of Milan, and tossed him in prison. Eventually, the two signed the Treaty of Madrid, which lasted just long enough to spring Francis from his jail cell. Then the battle was on again.
During his cousin’s pontificate, Clement had two power bases. He was Leo’s proxy in Florence and his vice chancellor in the Vatican. As pope, his loyalties remained divided. Like Leo, he was a Medici first, last, and always, and his preoccupation with Florence kept him vacillating between emperor and king. Concerned that Charles wanted to add Tuscany to his seemingly boundless kingdom, Clement wavered: Should he ally with the French or appease the emperor?
Guicciardini encouraged him to act decisively.
I once told Pope Clement, who was wont to be disquieted by every trifling danger, that a good cure for these empty panics was to recall the number of like occasions on which his fears had proved idle. By this I would not be understood as urging men never to feel fear, but as dissuading them from living in perpetual alarm.
When Clement finally took decisive action, he provoked worse than alarm. Ever since his election, there had been friction between the pope and the powerful Roman families. To win the papacy, he had cut a deal with the Orsini cardinal, angering the rival Colon-nas. In a series of terrible miscalculations, the Florentine pope alienated Cardinal Pompeo Colonna, the patriarch of the clan, and then, even more disastrously, alienated the emperor. When he finally chose sides, Clement joined the French, Venetians, and Milanese against Charles in the League of Cognac. It was a virtual invitation to invasion.
When the monk from Saxony posted his gripes against Rome, he wanted to instigate debate, not incite a holy war. But ten years later, forty thousand angry men trudged over the Alps. Many of them were mercenaries owed their pay, Protestants but not necessarily protestors on a mission to reform or reshape the Church. They may never have heard of Martin Luther, but the Protestant princes who led them knew him well. Luther preached what they wanted to hear. The Church, the intercessor between God and man, was redundant, which in practical political terms meant that civil rulers did not have to bow to the higher authority of Rome.
Under the imperial banner of Charles V, German and Austrian troops marched south and joined the Colonna forces. Wiping out the papal army, they ravaged the city. A horrified Cardinal Colonna witnessed what he had wrought through arrogance and spite and tried to turn back the invaders. His remorse came too late to save his city.
Rome may hold the record for the “most sacked city in history.” In the fifth century, waves of invaders charged over the Alps with pillage and rape on their minds and ravaged the peninsula. Visigoths, Huns, and Vandals were followed in a.d. 846 by the Saracens, who, seeking vengeance against the infidels, desecrated the grave of Peter, the most sacred site in Europe. The Normans continued the conquest in 1084, mounting the papal altar in Constantine’s basilica with swords drawn. All things being relative, though, the barbarian hordes were compassionate invaders compared with the troops of the Roman Catholic emperor Charles V, a pious Christian, champion of the faith, and an avowed foe of Luther.
With a nod and a wink from the princes, the soldiers were loosed on Rome like a biblical plague. Mercenaries took their back pay in gold chalices, in the rape of convents of nuns, in the humiliation and murder of priests, in the desecration of consecrated Communion hosts, and in the destruction of iconic art.
When his imperial army swarmed over Rome in 1527, everything sacred was profaned. According to one witness, “All were cut to pieces even if unarmed, even in those places that Attila, the most cruel of men, had in former times treated with religious respect.”
Soldiers broke into the reliquaries in the Basilica of St. John Lateran and, according to contemporary reports, played ball with the heads of Peter and Paul. A priest who refused orders to give Communion to a donkey was butchered. Roman countesses and baronesses were raped, forced into brothels, and labeled “the relics of the Sack of Rome.” Men were tortured for money and ransom. Guicciardini’s brother Luigi described the brutality:
Many were suspended for hours by the arms; many were cruelly bound by the genitals; many were suspended by their feet high above the road or over the river, while their tormentors threatened to cut the cord. Some were half buried in the cellars, others were nailed up in casks or villainously beaten and wounded; not a few were branded all over their persons with red-hot irons. Some were tortured by extreme thirst; others by insupportable noise and many were cruelly tortured by having their teeth brutally drawn. Others again were forced to eat their own ears, or nose, or their roasted testicles, and yet more were subjected to strange, unheard of martyrdoms that move me too much even to think of, much less describe.
The streets were fetid with the stench of corpses. Anywhere from six thousand to twenty thousand Romans were killed. Many had tried to escape across the bridges. Those who weren’t crushed in the stampede were slaughtered. Two thirds of the buildings were destroyed, and fires raged unchecked. The siege continued for four months. In the orgy of violence, an epidemic of plague broke out. A Spaniard gave this picture of the spoiled city:
In Rome, the chief city of Christendom, no bells ring, no churches are open, no masses are said. Sundays and feast days have ceased. Many houses are burned to the ground; in others the doors and windows are broken and carried away; the streets are changed into dunghills. The stench of dead bodies is terrible; men and beasts have a common grave and in the churches I have seen corpses that dogs have gnawed. In the public places, tables are set close together at which thousands of ducats are gambled for. The air rings with blasphemies fit to make good men—if such there be—wish that they were deaf. I know nothing wherewith I can compare it, except it be the destruction of Jerusalem. I do not believe that if I lived for two thousand years I should see the like again.
Since the ba
rbarian invasions, Castel Sant’Angelo had been the papacy’s last defense against a hostile and violent world. Direct access from the Vatican palace to the fortress on the bank of the Tiber River gave the popes a citadel against capture and imprisonment. Clement, thirteen cardinals, and his entire household escaped along the passetto to the fortress. A bishop described their escape: “I flung my own purple cloak about the pope’s head and shoulders lest some Barbarian rascal in the crowd below might recognize the pope by his white rochet as he was passing a window and take a chance shot at his fleeing form.”
Terrified Romans took refuge with the pope. In all, about three thousand barricaded themselves in Castel Sant’Angelo. Rome was an inferno. To the east, the city was in flames. In the north, halfway up Monte Mario, Villa Madama, the pope’s summer palace,* was burning. From the parapet of the fortress, Clement watched and wept.
The German troops commandeered the Vatican. They set up headquarters in the Vatican library, converted the papal palace into barracks, caroused in Raphael’s Stanze, and turned the Sistine Chapel into a mortuary. Horses steamed and stomped under Bramante’s arches in the new Basilica.
Some pious Christians saw the Sack of Rome as divine retribution against the pervasive corruption in the Church. They recalled the words of Psalm 78:
Oh God, the heathens have defiled thy holy temple…. They have given the dead bodies of thy servants to be meat for the fowls of the air, the flesh of thy saints for the beasts of the earth. We are become a reproach to our neighbors, a scorn and derision….
The righteous, wielding their swords in holy war, became butchers. “In trying to make themselves angels,” Montaigne wrote, “men transform themselves into beasts.” Even those who saw the lesson of Sodom and Gomorrah in the punishment inflicted on the city deplored the ravaging.
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