The Sack of Rome 1527

Summary

Summary of "The Sack of Rome 1527" Episode from In Our Time

In Our Time's episode titled "The Sack of Rome 1527," hosted by Melvyn Bragg and featuring experts Stephen Baud, Jessica Gethals, and Catherine Fletcher, delves deep into one of the most tumultuous events of the Renaissance. This comprehensive discussion explores the political, religious, and cultural ramifications of the sack, providing listeners with a detailed understanding of its impact on Rome and Europe at large.

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1. Introduction to the Sack of Rome 1527

The episode opens with a vivid description of the events of May 1527, when an army led by Holy Roman Emperor Charles V breached Rome's walls, unleashing unprecedented chaos. Melvyn Bragg sets the stage by highlighting the scale of destruction and the subsequent comparisons to historical events like the fall of Carthage and Jerusalem.

“In 1527, an army of the Holy Roman Emperor broke through the walls of the holy city of Rome, bringing death and destruction on a holy epic scale.” [01:28]

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2. Political and Religious Context

Jessica Gethals explains the protracted conflict leading up to the sack, primarily a struggle for hegemony between France and Spain over the wealthy and fragmented Italian states. Charles V, ruling over Spain and significant territories in Europe, aimed to establish friendly regimes in Italy to secure trade and financial interests.

“Italy is one of the two richest parts of Europe at this time. It's a really, really wealthy place.” [04:37]

Catherine Fletcher further contextualizes Charles V's role, emphasizing his religious motivations intertwined with political ambitions. As a staunch Catholic, Charles was also influenced by apocalyptic prophecies, positioning himself as a unifier of Christendom akin to Charlemagne.

“Any ruler who comes up and happens to have named Charles is going to get pinged for these expectations.” [06:12]

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3. The Invading Armies and Their Motivations

The Imperial army, estimated at around 20,000 troops [12:13], comprised mainly Spanish soldiers who were particularly notorious for their brutality. The lack of payment and provisions led these soldiers to resort to looting and violence to sustain themselves.

Jessica Gethals notes the dire conditions faced by the troops, mentioning their starvation and the promises of wealth from the New World as motivating factors.

“The troops are starving. That's one way of justifying the sack.” [15:07]

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4. The Sacking of Rome

The sack commenced on May 5th, with Imperial troops infiltrating Rome through unguarded areas like Sant' Andrea. The city's defenses were inadequate, partly due to Pope Clement VII’s reluctance to invest in fortifications, viewing taxes as a burden rather than a necessity for protection.

Melvyn Bragg describes the chaotic entry of the army, leading to widespread atrocities:

“You seize what you can, resell it or melt it or melt it down. You take people ransom and you hold, torture them or hold them captive until their families cough up with the ransom.” [11:56]

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5. Atrocities and Notable Anecdotes

The episode doesn't shy away from detailing the gruesome acts committed during the sack. From mass murder and sexual violence to the desecration of churches, the events were marked by sheer brutality. Catherine Fletcher recounts the death of Charles de Bourbon, the Imperial general, killed amid the chaos, often credited to the actions of the artist Benvenuto Cellini.

“He describes himself before that as having been the one to take the fatal shot of Charles de Bourbon…” [16:20]

Jessica Gethals adds that Imperial soldiers violated the sanctity of churches, further intensifying the horror of the sack, especially given Rome's status as the heart of Christendom.

“It's a holy city. In a sack, sometimes you will get a sense that a church should be a place of sanctuary…” [21:49]

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6. Cultural and Artistic Impact

The sack had a profound effect on Rome's cultural landscape. Notable artworks and architectural masterpieces were damaged or lost. Ricordi of Cellini's accounts provide a personal touch to the destruction, though some claims, like graffiti bearing Luther's name, remain subjects of debate among historians.

“There's direct evidence that some of these landslides are going in and graffiti ing in the Raphael rooms…” [27:46]

Catherine Fletcher discusses the long-term cultural dispersal resulting from the sack, with artists and intellectuals fleeing to cities like Venice and France, which consequently became new centers of Renaissance art and learning.

“Other places see themselves as coming into that void. And so France is going to be an important part of that.” [44:10]

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7. Aftermath and Political Consequences

Politically, the sack weakened the Papal States and solidified the Holy Roman Empire's dominance in Italy. The Treaty of Barcelona in 1529 marked the beginning of the end for the Italian Wars, with Charles V emerging victorious, reshaping the political landscape of Italy.

Jessica Gethals elaborates on the treaty's significance and its role in diminishing papal authority:

“In 1529, he makes the Treaty of Barcelona in which he settles with the Pope…” [40:05]

The human cost was staggering, with thousands of deaths reported, though Melvyn Bragg suggests these numbers may be exaggerated.

“Dead bodies thrown into Tiber at Trasteveri around 2000. I always reduce by a factor of 10 with these figures.” [41:39]

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8. Long-term Historical Impact

The sack is often cited as the end of the High Renaissance and the decline of Renaissance papacy. It marked a shift in cultural and intellectual centers away from Rome, leading to the rise of other Italian cities in the arts and scholarship.

Melvyn Bragg touches on the restoration and rebuilding efforts post-sack, noting how iconic structures like St. Mark's Square in Venice were reimagined by artists who fled Rome.

“So the city that we see now is a city that is rebuilt in the aftermath of the sack.” [44:10]

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9. Additional Insights and Reflections

In the bonus material, Catherine Fletcher ponders the psychological impact on Rome's citizens when Charles V returned as a victor less than a decade later, contrasting his triumphal entry with the prior atrocities.

“What must have been like for the everyday citizens of Rome… to see the figure associated with that walking through the streets as a victor.” [45:25]

Melvyn Bragg and Jessica Gethals discuss the legacy and personal traumas associated with the sack, including the distorted accounts of snipers’ accuracy and the anti-Jewish sentiments exacerbated by the violence.

“People always sort of say, can the snipers really do what they claim?” [47:11]

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10. Conclusion

The episode concludes by highlighting the profound and lasting effects of the Sack of Rome 1527. It not only reshaped the political and cultural landscape of Italy but also left an indelible mark on European history, symbolizing the fragility of power and the catastrophic consequences of military and political conflicts.

“The Medici come out, the Medici win.” [44:50]

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Notable Quotes:

• “Italy is one of the two richest parts of Europe at this time. It's a really, really wealthy place.” – Jessica Gethals [04:37]
• “Any ruler who comes up and happens to have named Charles is going to get pinged for these expectations.” – Catherine Fletcher [06:12]
• “You seize what you can, resell it or melt it or melt it down. You take people ransom and you hold, torture them or hold them captive until their families cough up with the ransom.” – Melvyn Bragg [11:56]
• “It's a holy city. In a sack, sometimes you will get a sense that a church should be a place of sanctuary…” – Jessica Gethals [21:49]
• “The Medici come out, the Medici win.” – Melvyn Bragg [44:50]

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This episode of In Our Time offers an intricate exploration of the Sack of Rome 1527, weaving together political intrigue, religious fervor, and cultural devastation. Through expert discussions and compelling narratives, listeners gain a comprehensive understanding of how this event signaled a turning point in Renaissance history.

Transcript

[Melvyn Bragg]

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[Jessica Gethals]

BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts this is in.

[Stephen Baud]

Our time from BBC Radio 4 and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. In 1527, an army of the Holy Roman Emperor broke through the walls of the holy city of Rome, bringing death and destruction on a holy epic scale. Later writers compared this to the fall of Carthage or Jerusalem, and soon the mass murder, torture, rape and looting were followed by disease, worsened by starvation and open graves. It's been called the end of the Renaissance, a conflict between north and south, between Lutherans and Catholics, and a fulfillment of a prophecy of divine vengeance and perhaps more persuasively, a consequence of not feeding or paying your soldiers. With me to discuss the sac of Rome in 1527 are Stephen Baud, to professor of early Modern History at the University of Edinburgh, Jessica Getholes, Associate professor of Italian at the University of Alabama, and Catherine Fletcher, professor of History at Manchester Metropolitan University. Catherine Fletcher this seems like a period of constant warfare. What armies were fighting? Which armies at this time?

[Jessica Gethals]

Well, there's a description of this time which says the Whole world was now at war. And that comes from Benvenuto Cellini, who's a goldsmith, who I'm sure we're going to come back to.

[Stephen Baud]

Cellini.

[Jessica Gethals]

Cellini, yes. Really, this is a conflict that has been going on, on and off for over 30 years. And fundamentally, it's a conflict between France and Spain for hegemony in Italy. Italy at this time is divided into lots of small states, and the wars have actually started off originally because of a conflict between two sides of the ruling family of Milan. Now moving on to where we are, just ahead of the sack in 1527, Spain is now being ruled by the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, who is not only King of Spain, but has also inherited the Habsburg lands, that's most of Germany and Austria, what's now known as the Netherlands, the Low Countries. And his troops are facing off against almost everybody else that would be the Papal States, France, Venice. Because the other side has got very, very nervous about just how well Charles has been doing in. In this conflict for control of north and central Italy. I say control, it's more like hegemony. It's about having friends and influencing people rather than directly ruling over the top of the Italian peninsula. But really, since 1525, when Charles and his troops won a great victory in which they took the King of France hostage, everybody else believed that was a pavia, and people have got very nervous about just how much power the Holy Roman Empire is accumulating. So this is going to be something of a showdown and what is at.

[Stephen Baud]

Stake for them in Northland, because he had the overseas holdings as well, didn't they? Spain was conquering the world at that time. I mean, that's a naive question, but you'll give me a brilliant answer.

[Jessica Gethals]

Italy is one of the two richest parts of Europe at this time. It's a really, really wealthy place. And it's not so much that Charles V wants to conquer north or central Italy directly. What he wants is to have friendly regimes in place who are not going to block trade with tariffs, who are going to lend him money, who are going to be generally friendly. For example, a lot of his financing in the new world comes from Genoa, comes from Italian bankers. So you want to be on side with some of these people. It's not so much a literal conquest of territory, although that idea of princely honour and winning wars is still very important. Pavia Francis I, to his great misfortune, came personally onto the battlefield. So we do still have that element of kings wanting to fight for themselves, wanting to win and that being a matter of princely honour, but at the end of the day, it's really about spheres of influence.

[Stephen Baud]

Did the word holy mean much to him?

[Jessica Gethals]

Yes, he's quite serious, he's quite religious, he's a pious man. He has been really very critical of Martin Luther. He is not a fan of the Protestants. What's going on in the Holy Roman Empire at this time? There's quite a lot of conflict between the princes of this empire over how the new religion is going to work out. And there's a lot of discussion about Catholic reform, the proprieties of religion at this time. Charles V is a pious man.

[Stephen Baud]

Thank you very much, Jessica. What more ought we to know? We've had a very good introduction. Is there anything you would like to add to this?

[Catherine Fletcher]

On the one side, as Catherine was just indicating, we have the figure of Charles V, who is coming from the most important families in Europe. So on his paternal side, he is the grandson of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I. On his maternal side, he is the grandson of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella from Spain. And with that, part of his interest in Italy is not only financial or power hegemonic ideas, but also these religious expectations that are tied into his role as arguably, at this point, the most powerful man in the West. But he's also a Charles. And part and parcel of the kind of religious tenor of the 14 and 1500s is the expectation that there will be a universal monarch, somebody who's going to really bring Christianity all together and unite it in a way that hasn't been possible. And so this will be a second Charlemagne. And so really, any ruler who comes up and happens to have named Charles is going to get pinged for these expectations. So the Italian wars begin in 1494 with the figure of Charles VIII from France, and he's circled by these apocalyptic expectations. Charles V is no exception. And part of the second Charlemagne prophecy is that the reunification of the Christian world will come in part through the destruction of cities like Florence and Rome, progressing on to Jerusalem. So it's not only a question of power and money and influence that is driving him, but he also is, again, circled by these prophecies. And he has figures in his government, like an Italian, Mercurio Gattinara, who is pushing these discussions about the kind of apocalyptic or Christian unification agenda that could. Could be beneficial to them. On the other hand, we have a figure like Clement vii, who is coming from the powerful Medici family from Florence, and so he's arriving into his position of power with completely different expectations. Ones of patronage, influence and the like. And in cases of both men, those expectations will be thwarted to some degree.

[Stephen Baud]

Pope Clement VII was a Medici, and it's arguable that he was a Medici first and a Pope second, really. But what do we know about him that's going to be relevant to the sack of Rome?

[Catherine Fletcher]

He's coming up in the family of the Medici, who is important for putting Florence on the map as a center for Renaissance learning, art discussions, intellectual life and the like. His father is killed in the Pazzi conspiracy, one that was anti Medici conspiracy, and he's brought into the inner fold of the rest of the family. His cousin will become Pope leo X in 1513 and he will rise to a cardinalship in that period. And so between the papacy of his cousin Leo X and his own, there is, for the perspective of Roman artists and intellectuals, a somewhat disappointing year and a half where we have the papacy of Adrian vi, who is Dutchman, who doesn't share the same enthusiasm for largesse in terms of patronage. And so Clement VII's arrival as the Pope is embraced by the inhabitants of Rome, who are interested in things like cultural exchange, art patronage and the like, as a moment of possibility, that is in 1523 and it's going to be just a few short years later, where the city sees quite a different reality descend upon its walls.

[Stephen Baud]

Thank you very much, Stephen. Stephen Bout. So there's Rome. Charles is on his way. How well prepared was Rome for this attack?

[Melvyn Bragg]

I think he was slightly taken by surprise. I think there seems to be some divided views about how well prepared Rome was. Clement does call up the sort of local civic guards and so on.

[Stephen Baud]

Are they any good?

[Melvyn Bragg]

They mixed reports, some saying these are sort of people who've getting drunk most of the time, who aren't particularly useful or well trained. Similarly, I think the walls and fortifications of Rome are at this time usually described as being pretty poor state.

[Stephen Baud]

Why is that?

[Melvyn Bragg]

No money had been spent. Clement.

[Stephen Baud]

Why no money being spent?

[Melvyn Bragg]

Well, Clement has a reputation of being quite avaricious. This may be because he comes from a banking family, he's Medici. So there's all these sort of Roman prejudices against the Florentines and against bankers. He likes to raise taxes in Rome, but he doesn't like to spend them on vital things like defences. So he has to spend some of it, of course, on his extended household and providing opportunities for Florentines in Rome.

[Stephen Baud]

Well, that's more Medicius.

[Melvyn Bragg]

Yes, there's a lot of them in Rome at this time, of course. And they all want a slice of the action.

[Stephen Baud]

So he wasn't very well prepared for an attack by a hungry army. Literally hungry. Yeah, because he wouldn't pay them, Charles wouldn't pay them and he wouldn't, wouldn't feed them. So they wanted somewhere where they could loot and feed. Yeah.

[Melvyn Bragg]

Clement and, and his supporters expected it to be the imperialist to be deflected on the way or bought off or to come to. And he does try to come sort of some, some sort of agreement with Charles and buy them off. They arrive and they, they break into the city early on. It's the 5th of May, correct me.

[Jessica Gethals]

The knight of the 5th going out of the 5th.

[Melvyn Bragg]

And they break into one of the. I think it's at Santia Postoli. It's one of the places where there are these rather grand cardinals villas and relatively unprotected area. So they break into a vineyard that's a back garden, basically a cardinal's back garden. And they're, they're clambering over ladders and they find, yeah, they find a city which there is shrouded in, missed, I think, early on. So there's a lot of confusion at first. Probably a lot of shots going off. And they find, you know, these very wealthy palaces which they can then obviously very well stocked churches full of ecclesiastical apparatus.

[Stephen Baud]

And they found loot. They found loot which is their way of paying themselves.

[Melvyn Bragg]

You seize what you can, resell it or melt it or melt it down. You take people ransom and you hold, torture them or hold them captive until their families cough up with the ransom.

[Stephen Baud]

Have you any idea of the numbers involved? I mean, this imperial army was pretty tough.

[Melvyn Bragg]

I think the estimate's about 20,000. The Imperial army, obviously these estimates of how many vary, but that's one estimate I've heard, Catherine.

[Jessica Gethals]

And I think one of the difficulties is that the civic militia inside the city are a bit of a mess. I mean, the civic militia in any case is probably only drilling and practicing once a month, whereas you've got battle hardened soldiers outside. And a lot of the civic militia have been bought off to be private bodyguards. So cardinals have said, look, you know, come and guard my personal palace. The rich families have asked people to sort of just drop out of the civic militia for money. So the troops on the inside are a bit of a mess. They're trying to fire down from these walls, which are the ancient Roman walls that have been patched up over the centuries, often. Well, and so we've got a real asymmetric Battle going on here of a bunch of citizens who are doing their best to defend, but are in a pretty chaotic situation and some really quite motivated troops who are hungry and after money coming in from outside.

[Stephen Baud]

Can we just go back to these troops for one last time? Because what they did was spectacular, devastating and awful. So was there any one thing driving them? Luther 15:17 had changed the map religious. And in the emotional map of Europe, Charles was determined to develop his empire. Did those two things coalesce? Did something else turn up? What was happening?

[Melvyn Bragg]

It's interesting. I mean, the report, contemporary reports suggest that the Spanish, the Spaniards are the worst, that they're the ones.

[Stephen Baud]

They were part of their.

[Melvyn Bragg]

They were part of the Imperial. Yeah, part of the Imperial army, part of this, you know, global imperial army, as it were. So the Spanish were worse than the Germans. So I hesitate to say it's that they're not being driven by the. The religious, heretical, Reformation ideas in the same way. Although, of course, many Catholics were very looked upon the Pope as corrupt. Pope in Rome as corrupt, out for his own benefit.

[Stephen Baud]

So that had been going on for a long time.

[Melvyn Bragg]

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

[Stephen Baud]

But they hadn't assembled enough force to prove that corruption could be something they could dislodge, had they?

[Melvyn Bragg]

No, there hadn't been. Not since 1084.

[Stephen Baud]

Come back to you, Catherine. How did they justify their result? Did they pray that they were doing the right thing? Did they think God was on their side? What was going on?

[Jessica Gethals]

Well, after the fact, there's a great account given of Charles de Bourbon's speech to the troops the night before, and this is written up by Luigi Guicciardini. And I don't think we can take it as a literal eyewitness account of the speech, but it's interesting just to reflect on the ideas that are going around at the time. So one of the factors that's mentioned there is the question of money survival. These people, the troops are starving. That's one way of justifying the sack. Guicciardidi's version of Charles de Bourbon also has him promising them wealth from the New World. You know, you're all going to be dressed in golden armor. This is money. You know, it's just after the conquest of Mexico.

[Stephen Baud]

Just a second. Did you say that and did they believe it?

[Jessica Gethals]

Well, the words you use, we don't quite know what. We don't know exactly what they. What they believed, but certainly this is. This is something that's. That's written up in these accounts. And he does mention Luther again in the Guicciardini version, he's saying that, you know, the infallible prophet Luther has, you know, promised that we're going to take on the papacy. So there are all these different elements, and who knows in the mind of any individual soldier which of them is at the forefront of his mind? I don't think we can tell that from the sources that we have.

[Stephen Baud]

And Guichedin is a fairly reliable scholar of the times, isn't he?

[Jessica Gethals]

He's a. He's a historian, he's a diplomat, he's a statesman in Florence. He's fairly close to the Medici party in Florence, although he's perfectly prepared to criticize him in private correspondence. But part of the point of this account of the sack is, I think, to provide moral lessons after the fact. So we need to be a little bit careful about exactly how we treat it.

[Stephen Baud]

So they're in the city, Jessica, and they're on the rampage, really. They're looking for food and wealth, and they're prepared to dig up graves in looking for wealth and raid palaces or challenge people in the streets. I've done in the beginning of it. Can you tell us the rest of it, this bloodbath?

[Jessica Gethals]

Yes.

[Catherine Fletcher]

Well, there's very little that they won't do at this point, or at least by reputation. And part of why it is so disastrous is that the General Charles de Bourbon is killed at the moment of invasion, famously depicted as falling from the ladders that were put up against the city's walls. And the artist that we mentioned briefly before was Benvenuto Cellini, a goldsmith who had been pressed into the service of one of these prominent men in Rome, but ultimately finds himself on the top of the Castel sant', Angelo, this fortress where Pope Clement VII had taken refuge, along with a couple thousand other people promised.

[Stephen Baud]

There was actually a secret tunnel from the. From the Vatican to the Castel, isn't there?

[Catherine Fletcher]

Well, there is a connection, but there's also a passageway that is above ground. And at least by contemporary Roman legend, urban legend, if you look at the corner of the Vatican, where this above ground passageway is, you can still see shots in the walls that haven't been covered up by the city. So by reputation, by urban legend, those are still the shots of the soldiers that are trying to kill the Pope as he's running from the Vatican to this fortress, the Castel sant'. Angelo. And one of the cardinals, in his companionship, throws his cloak over the head of the Pope to help disguise which of the figures racing for safety. It was Cellini, this artist describes himself as on the ramparts of the fortress, the Casa sant', Angelo, and says that he himself is having an important role in the defense of the city. He describes himself before that as having been the one to take the fatal shot of Charles de Bourbon, but in his later, as a sniper of sort. Yes, he's, you know, if. But Cellini is. He writes later an autobiography, and he presents himself in very swashbuckling, derring do terms generally across his life. And so he has all sorts of wonderful descriptions, or at least shocking descriptions of himself as a sniper, hitting one soldier, for example, in the middle of his chest so directly that it splits the man in two. But he also describes this as a kind of spectacle of sorts, to get. To get back to that question, something that had never been seen before, that he presents as almost something that's for his enjoyment. And contemporaries often circled back to this language of it as a horrible spectacle, this display of violence. And part of what made that so horrific and the atrocities so widespread is that the defenders made a couple of tragic mistakes. Well, the first is that even before the soldiers, the imperial soldiers, had arrived at the gates of the city, Clementine had signed a truce that was maybe done in bad, bad faith on the. On the imperial side, and so just had dismissed a number of his mercenaries. And so the city was, for all intents and purposes, as something of a sitting duck. The other mistake they made within the city was that when the imperial armies breached the walls, they're coming from Santo Spirito, from Trastevere, from the area of the Vatican. They did not cut the bridges that connect that part of the city with the rest of the city that we know with Piazza Navona, the Colosseum, the Pantheon, the like. And that gave these invaders free access to the rest of the city. And there's virtually no spot that they didn't arrive down to the smallest convent. And so there were between the absence of a general who was stopping or making any attempt to stop the atrocities, and this free passage to the city. Descriptions of the time describe this not only as a horrible spectacle, but one in which the imperial soldiers are running rampage through the city, creating whatever chaos, taking whatever they could, finding whatever bodies they could, not only for purposes of ransom and torture, although that's certainly a part of it. And one document that exists is a list of the prices paid per head in the household of a cardinal. And that's separated into groups of Catholic men, Jewish men and women. How much did each one of their safeties cost? But we also have descriptions of things like cardinals being forced to give the Eucharist to donkeys, or these kind of performative humiliations as well as tortures.

[Stephen Baud]

Can I come to Stephen? Thank you very much. See, coming. I'm afraid I'm gonna ask you to do the gory stuff. Can you tell listeners it was. What happened was spectacularly gruesome, terrible. Can you just. Can you hold your nose and do it?

[Catherine Fletcher]

Yes.

[Melvyn Bragg]

I mean, just to set the context. I mean, a lot of these soldiers would have had some experience of sacking. This is not their first gig, as it were, sacking and massacring. And there is a. They know exactly what kind of injuries to inflict in order to. In order not to kill someone, but to create enough pain to make them cough up their wealth, often literally. So sometimes they will cut them open, cut their stomachs open because people might have swallowed gold to. Looking for gold and jewels. They will sometimes cut their genitals off and stuff them in their mouths or roast them in front of some. Their genitals in front of them, and then make them eat them roasted, whilst their family might be watching, as a way of trying to encourage them to reveal the location of their. Of their wealth and so on. But this is. We hear reports of this in other accounts and indeed in modern atrocities as well, similar accounts.

[Stephen Baud]

But what do you think is specific to this from then on? Known as a spectacular. Can you give us a few more specific examples? We've had the raiding of convents, the raping of nuns. And that's just the start of it. Just give us some more texture, because this is the thing that marks a sack of Rome, isn't it?

[Melvyn Bragg]

Yes. So, for example, you know, cardinals or bishops humiliated in the street or forced to put on ridiculous costumes, or stripped naked and attacked and tortured in the street in front of people.

[Jessica Gethals]

I think. I mean, part of the issue here is that this is Rome. It's a holy city. That in itself makes this feel all the more horrific. In a sack, sometimes you will get a sense that a church should be a place of sanctuary, and people will flee to the churches and try and take refuge in the churches. In the sack of Rome, the soldiers are going into the churches and helping themselves to the gold and silver. I mean, they do that in other circumstances. But I think there's a particular significance that this is peculiarly awful because it is Rome, and Rome is special, and Rome is the center of Christendom. And that's why it feels so much worse to everybody involved than sacking any other city.

[Stephen Baud]

Jessica, do you want to come in?

[Catherine Fletcher]

Rome is a repeatedly sacked city, so it has its own prehistory as a city that is repeatedly invaded over time, but from the 410 sack of Rome. So quite a bit before this, one of the lessons that was taken from that sack, and that figures like St. Augustine discussed, was the remarkability of Rome in that moment was that the churches, as Catherine was indicating, were not violated, that those were safe spaces. And so that made this a sack. That was horrific in 410 for a lot of reasons, but that Christianity had some important part to play in saving people. And that did not happen this time. And so not only were cardinals humiliated, priests tortured, nuns raped, but even the emblems of Catholicism, or belief itself, were destroyed. So it's not just about stealing from one own self, a relic, but also grounding it into dust. Right. So the destruction of emblems of the sacred.

[Melvyn Bragg]

Yeah. And I think on this occasion, it may have been the autumn sort of precursor to the sack of Rome, where there's an autumnal sack of Rome, which is sort of the Colonna family within the city are egged on or work with imperialists to put pressure on the Pope, who they hate, and they wish to be assassinated. They really do want the Pope killed. But I think the head of St. Andrew, for example, is taken out of its holy place and kicked around or tossed around. So there's these kind of sacrilegious things.

[Stephen Baud]

How long did this go on for? Weeks, months, days? What was it?

[Melvyn Bragg]

So you've got a week of intense sacking, and then the army digests its sack, as they used to say in the 16th century, over the following several months. I mean, we've got. So we have documentary evidence of people being ransomed and organizing through notaries, the payment of ransoms all through that summer. But we'd also. I just want to say. I just wanted to. I feel like I've been unfair to the Spanish. But we should also say that obviously the German Landsknechts, the German soldiers, weren't involved. But we also have these incredible documents where Spanish soldiers who obviously, in some sort of fit of guilt or feeling of endangering their soul through this actions, actually they provide these testaments and documents which provide dowries for orphaned children in the city during the summer as well. And some of them give back some of the loot they take. So I just wanted to. Not BBC balance, but just to just try and speak on behalf of.

[Stephen Baud]

Balance is a word that doesn't play in this conversation. Jessica, do you want to come in on this.

[Catherine Fletcher]

Well, I wanted to add that one thing that I think makes this a particularly shocking event and distinguishes it from other sacks of other epic cities, including Rome itself, is that the armies of the emperor are not only Spanish and German, but also a fair number of Italians, too. And so the degree to which Italians themselves participated in perhaps not all of the atrocities per se, but participated in the invasion and certainly the looting. And so there's famous cases of materials being taken out of the Vatican. So Isabella d', Este, for example, who's a powerful woman to the north, is there present in the city. Her one of her sons is on the imperial side. He helps secure her safety. And then the family, for safekeeping, or so they said, removed Raphael's tapestries from the Vatican and put them on a boat and that boat eventually sank. So there's a degree to which there is an Italian presence in the sack of Rome that distinguishes it from, from other kind of quote unquote, foreign invasions.

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[Stephen Baud]

Was there a sense that the great art that was in. In Rome suffered from this? Did it get destroyed?

[Jessica Gethals]

I just wanted to mention briefly that there is direct. I mean, there's direct evidence that some of these landslides are going in and graffiti ing in the Raphael rooms in the. Stephen, you're looking skeptical.

[Melvyn Bragg]

I've always wondered about this. I know it's very famous. Even an image of Martin Luther's name scratched and graffiti on. Is this actually true or is this just Catholic propaganda?

[Stephen Baud]

Well, you're the ones who told me. I don't know.

[Melvyn Bragg]

I'm asking Jessica.

[Jessica Gethals]

I mean, see, the thing is that, you know, at this point, there's a huge numbers of pamphlets going around in which Luther is calling the Pope the Antichrist. We know that there is a Lutheran element among these German landsknechts. We know that, you know, they break into the Vatican. It seems to be entirely plausible that some of them scribble Luther or some of them scribble, you know, victory to Charles V and such like. Now the. And. And, you know, we have the. These examples. One example of the. The word Luther scratched into the Sala della Segnatura today now is that somebody is later imagining. I think it's really. But I think it's really plausible that it happened, you see. And I think it's, you know, whether or not we can prove that that graffiti was made precisely at that time. So it's practical, perhaps. Another question.

[Stephen Baud]

Is it true that the horses were stable in the Sistine Chapel?

[Melvyn Bragg]

Yes, that's why. Yes, that's my understanding. But the library is saved. The imperial head, the commander who replaces bourbon, shot down, supposedly by Cellini or by who? Lots of people probably claiming they did it. He's headquartered in the Vatican near the library. So it's saved.

[Stephen Baud]

And this event, this sacrament, actually, Michelangelo's working before it. And quite soon after the first few weeks, he's back at work again. Is that right?

[Catherine Fletcher]

Well, Michelangelo at this point is in Florence, not in. In Rome, but he will be coming back shortly thereafter to work on the Last Judgment. But if I can. If I can, to circle back to Catherine's discussion of the graffiti, you know, we do have other examples. In, for example, Villa Farnesina, there's essentially scratched into the wall something like, you know, Luther was here, or something to that effect, but also a description of laughing while watching the Pope run for safety. But in the Vatican itself, in the same rooms by Raphael, we could debate whether or not the Luther was here is original to that event, but there were all sorts of gouges made and shots taken into the paintings themselves. And a figure was later brought back to Rome. He had been. His name is Sebastiana del Piombo. He had been present during the sack. He's a disciple of sorts of Michelangelo and one of the favorites of the pope, Clement vii. And he has a famous. A rather famous letter that he sends to Michelangelo after the fact, where he says, I'm not the same Bastiano that I was. So something that we might call today something like trauma. He describes himself as no longer the same person he was before experiencing this horrific event. He's called in back to the Vatican to help repair some of these gouge marks and shot marks that are put into Raphael's work. He kind of botches the job. And so in the 1950s, one of the restoration works is to redo his sorry attempts to patch over these gouges, these swords, and again, shot marks and that kind of thing. So real damage was done, and certainly real damage was done in other parts of the city. And if you walk around Rome today, you can still find things like commemorative plaques that mark in various churches. This is a place where destruction happened. There's also a college, a Colleggio, that's just right above the Pantheon, where there's a plaque today commemorating all of the young men who lived in that college, all of whom died trying to save the city.

[Stephen Baud]

Now, almost in the context of what we've been talking about, and actually, you've been very light about the horrors that were going on, you've been very tactful about it. But there's this almost a comic side of it where Henry VIII's delegation is flapping around Rome trying to get the papers in his hands so he can have a divorce.

[Jessica Gethals]

Well, it takes quite a long time for the news to get to England. In fact, it takes several weeks further, the news to get to England. So, unbeknownst to Henry VIII and Cardinal Woolsey, who are back in London, all this is going on. Meanwhile, Henry has had his eye on Anne Boleyn, and he has developed these doubts about the validity of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. And he's. He's got Woolsey to hold some hearings into the validity of this marriage. And these go on through the middle of May to the end of the month. And they're trying to work out, can we find a way of effectively getting Henry a divorce? And then the news arrives and the whole thing is thrown into chaos because anything The English court sides is going to be subject to appeal to Rome. And if the Pope is a hostage, as he is, if he's being held hostage by the nephew of Catherine of Aragon, then as Wolsey writes at the time, this is not a little going to hinder your grace's affairs. This is very bad news for Henry viii. So the butterfly effect of this sack goes all over Europe.

[Stephen Baud]

Thank you, Jessica. What was being written about the sack? Just after the time, what was the. I mean, I know it seems to take weeks to get to England, but other places as well, what was, what was happening? Did people say, terrible things happening in Rome, go and help, or terrible things is happening in Rome, let's make our walls stronger. What happened?

[Catherine Fletcher]

Tremendous amounts of material is being written about this event. It's helpful to remember that we're before the era of the newspaper. And so to learn about what was happening in Rome, we of course rely on things like eyewitness accounts, reports, ambassadorial missives and the like. And so almost immediately there's. And who knows how these pieces of paper managed to escape out of a city that was undergoing the ordeal that it was. But writings about the sack, descriptions of the horrors and accounts of what was happening to figures like the Pope, find them ways very quickly all across Italy, the Italian peninsula and across Europe.

[Stephen Baud]

And what are they saying about it?

[Catherine Fletcher]

A lot of them are factual descriptions of what happened. But a good number of these are focusing on catalogues of horrors, focusing especially on things that seem particularly shocking within a Christian audience. So the widespread rape of nuns, the destruction of relics and the like. But a lot of them are echoing the things that we've talked about, Stephen mentioned before, the testicular torture of residents. And certainly a number of these are describing those same kind of events. While we have these factual information, letters, missives, the like, and some of them are finding their way into print very quickly within. Within weeks, which in today's social media world within weeks doesn't seem particularly fast, but it is remarkable in the period. We also have almost immediately more literary approaches about this particular event. One of the one case that I find particularly striking is by the so called scourge of princes. This is a writer named Pietro Aretino, who himself escaped Rome two years prior in 1525, when he had managed to survive an assassination attempt, supposedly because he wrote some scandalous sonnets for pornographic images. Within a week or so of the sack, he writes two poems about the event that come at it from completely different perspectives. And he sends it to the Gonzaga family. One of them is a lament. And so it describes really horrific and touching scenes, poignant scenes. So newlywed couple slain in their bed, babies who were drinking more blood than milk from their mother's breasts, women who were assaulted and in order to prove their purity, were throwing themselves into the Tiber as a demonstration of their chastity and innocence. The other poem which he writes and sends at the exact same time, a satirical poem. And so that's a poem that is delighting in the facts of the sack as a kind of just punishment for a city that was corrupt and vainglorious and desirous of wealth and those kind of things. And so he takes. Aretino has plenty of enemies in Rome, and so he imagines them men and women, but especially some of those men as being sexually assaulted, describes cardinals being tied together by their genitals, places women, including nuns, in pornographic positions in his poetry, and describes this as something for laughter. There'll be a tremendous amount of writing on the subject, even 100 years after the fact. We have everything from kind of history writing, like Luigi Guicciardini's history that Catherine mentioned before, and his more famous brother. Francesco Guicciardini writes quite a lot, especially because he was one of the generals but in charge with defending the papacy and in a more private set of writings that weren't published during his lifetime, essentially puts himself on trial for his culpability in the event. But we have everything from those kind of writings to theater and especially comedy. And these events of the Italian wars and the upheaval that they caused, the dispersion of families and the like, become plot points for comedies. And one of the most famous cases staged in 1532 in Siena, called the Deceived Linganati, written collectively by Academy, and it describes the fate of a family. The father has lost all his wealth, the son has gone missing and is presumed dead, and the daughter, she has us to understand as audience members, has likely been sexually assaulted. And the comedy is where do we go from here? That comedy will be published 17 times over 100 years and have numerous adaptations, the most famous of which is Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.

[Stephen Baud]

Can I come back to you, Steve? What effect did this, what we've been hearing? Did it spread around Europe? How terrible things have happened? This must never happen again. God is wreaking vengeance on the city of too much wealth and too much lost.

[Melvyn Bragg]

I'd say yes, there's a certain amount of propaganda war that cranks up and that each side, you know, those are hostile to Rome, particularly on the imperial side are quite gleeful, certainly. I think the reformers, Luther and his followers see this as a just punishment on a. Yeah. On a corrupt city.

[Stephen Baud]

It's been thought of. It's been called the end of the High Renaissance. Do you go along with that?

[Melvyn Bragg]

I'm not sure. It's seen as the end of a Clementine, sometimes seen as the end of a particular Clementine Renaissance. I think it's also seen as end of Renaissance papacy. The idea of the Renaissance, Renaissance popes, as these important political players on the European stage, with their armies and alliances and so on, they lose steam after this period, after this sack. And it's, as Catherine said at the beginning, this is really the moment of imperial hegemony in Italy.

[Stephen Baud]

Did anybody except Isabella d' Este come out of this with an enhanced reputation?

[Melvyn Bragg]

Well, she came out with a poor reputation, actually.

[Stephen Baud]

I mean, she. She. She protected people. Yes, she. She.

[Melvyn Bragg]

She certainly protected people.

[Stephen Baud]

That's quite a big thing to do.

[Melvyn Bragg]

But then she was also accused, as Catherine said, of spiriting off the Raphael's tapestries. And she says she was going to. She said she was looking after, and she was going to offer it for resale back to the very worse. A lot of eyebrows raised about this about this claim.

[Stephen Baud]

Let's be serious about. I think she's. She played. Given what was going on. Yeah, she played a very good part.

[Melvyn Bragg]

Yeah, no, absolutely. She played a good part. And there is a number of accounts of women in the sack of Rome playing important roles. For example, there's an abbess, so we've heard all about the nuns being raped and violated in the sacrilege zone. There's a wonderful abbess, Ursula Formicini, who leads her entire convent to safety. And we have the account of that from the sort of convent's histories in which she says something like, oh, we lost everything, but then we did not lose honor, so nothing is lost.

[Stephen Baud]

And that's as far as you can reach in your examples, is it, in terms of people who came well out of it?

[Melvyn Bragg]

Well, yeah, Quite hard for people who came out of this well.

[Stephen Baud]

Okay, Catherine, can you talk about the political consequences of this act in the following decades?

[Jessica Gethals]

I think. I mean, immediately, there's a whole long period when Clement VII is a hostage in Rome. And this is quite politically. It's politically at first quite awkward for Charles V, but at the end of the day, this ends up being the beginning of the end of the land wars in Italy, which Charles is effectively going on to win. In 1529, he makes the Treaty of Barcelona in which he settles with the Pope, the respective child and nephew are going to have a marriage alliance. And so he. Through that and through a kind of conquest of Florence, which is seized for a few years by the opponents of the Medici, he ends up with a lot of what he wanted. He also ends up making peace with the King of France and again doing very well out of that peace. That's what's known as the ladies peace, negotiated respectively by his aunt and the mother of the King of France. So the political consequences really are that the empire wins these land wars in Italy. In fact, they manage to get friendly princes in power across quite a large chunk of the north. The Papal state is very badly weakened. It takes a Paul iii, who's the successor to Clement vii, starts to rebuild. But it's a very, very tough process. The consequences for the ordinary people of Italy who've had these decades of war, countryside absolutely destroyed, multiple bad harvests, you know, they're really horrific. And I think, you know, part of this, a huge human cost to this, both inside Rome and outside in the countryside.

[Melvyn Bragg]

Yeah, I was going to say, let's not forget the Romans. So the numbers reported. So bodies. Numbers of bodies thrown into the Tiber. Dead bodies thrown into Tiber at Trasteveri around 2000, 2000. Suggestions that. I mean, these figures, I always reduce by a factor of 10 with these figures. That's my hunch.

[Stephen Baud]

You mean 10 or 10%?

[Melvyn Bragg]

By a factor of. By 10th. Yeah, well. Or 10%. And nine or 10,000 buried in the aftermath. And then as you mentioned at the beginning, of course, this disturbing of sewers, people digging up graves and digging up sewers to try and find hidden wealth. Helps to spread, it said, helps us spread the. Never mention, not to mention all the other bodies lying everywhere. Helps to spread disease. And that causes a lot of deaths among, obviously amongst the Imperial army as well as amongst the Romans. But there's, you know, so there's that huge cost as well. We don't know how, whether Rome was swollen with refugees at this time. It may have had a. People may have fled from the countryside into Rome. So the figures may be even higher.

[Stephen Baud]

Yes, we're coming to the end now, but I'd like to know, Jessica, from you, you're really talking about diaspora, aren't you, Stephen? Would you like to take that up, Jessica?

[Catherine Fletcher]

If we go back to that question of who benefits or who comes out well from the sack of Rome, surely. I agree with Stephen that it's very few people who are based in Rome itself. I Think the winners of the Sack of Rome are other cities that see themselves as new Romes. And so certainly Rome is about to enter into a crisis. And so the Rome that was of great Latin learning and writing and Raphael style art, that's going to show shift. But other places see themselves as coming into that void. And so France is going to be an important part of that. And the king of France is going to try to lure various writers and artists to his court. Venice is another one. And if we go to St. Mark's the St. Mark's that we see today was largely reworked by Jacopo Sansovino, who was an artist who was present during the sack and like very many, escaped. And many of these figures connected to writing, art, the print industry, the printing presses in Rome largely were destroyed. And so there is a great movement of figures to the city of Venice. And so Sansovino redid St. Mark's Square. And so the city that we see now is a city that is rebuilt in the aftermath of the sack. So Rome lies in ruins and Venice is surging.

[Melvyn Bragg]

Finally, Stephen, it's also worth pointing out that France and the empire are once again at war within seven years of the Lady's Peace. So it's not the final stop on that, on that rivalry, but nevertheless, it does establish imperial hegemony, you know, over Italy, over large parts of Italy. It allows Clement vii, the Medici Pope, to make sure to establish his family in Florence after a bit of a revolution there during this period when he's weak. And it allows the Medici to be set up as dukes and then grand dukes of Tuscany for the next several hundred years. So the Medici come out, the Medici win.

[Stephen Baud]

Well, thank you all very much. That was very enjoyed that an awful lot. Thanks to Jesse Gethals, Catherine Fletcher and Stephen Bode, and our studio engineer, Phil Lander. Next week, it's the foundational Years of Quantum Mechanics with Werner Heisenberg and his Uncertainty Principle. Thank you for listening.

[Jessica Gethals]

And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

[Stephen Baud]

Start this off by saying if each of you could say what you wish you'd said but didn't have time to say in the programs. Let's start with you, Jessica.

[Catherine Fletcher]

I think one thing that's remarkable is that we talk about the Sack of Rome so much in terms of the big players, the prominent families. It's hard to know what happened to the individuals, the citizens of Rome. But one thing that really I find quite curious is that in 1536. So less than a decade later, Charles V will be in Rome. He's just had a successful military campaign in Tunisia and comes to Rome treated as a victor with a grandiose triumphal entry like we'd associate with a Julius Caesar. And I wonder to myself what it must have been like for the everyday citizens of Rome who less than a decade before had experienced this horrific violence, to see the figure associated with that walking through the streets as a victor.

[Melvyn Bragg]

Stephen I, I think, like Jessica, I'm fascinated by the individual experiences, people in Rome on the ground that that kind of lived experience or experience of death. And, and one of the groups I'm interested in are the Jews in Rome. And I, I think we mentioned in discussion that in one of the palaces we have, I think Jessica mentioned that we have the list of ransoms paid by those who were allowed in to shelter there by the imperialists, and that includes Jewish people as well. And we know that at this time, during sacks of cities and including the sack of Rome, Jews become targets, particular targets for violence and for sacking, partly because they often have pledges, pawns, items, valuable items in their stores as part of their business, which are targets for the mob. Equally, there are accusations circle at this time that there are Jews in the army of the imperialists and that they are in the forefront of the sacking or they take a key part in the sacking. That's obviously very much related to the strong anti Jewish prejudices of the time.

[Jessica Gethals]

That's also an anti Spanish prejudice because there's this sort of the history of Spain as having large Jewish and Muslim populations. They feeds into this idea that Spanish soldiers aren't kind of really quite properly Christian. And the thing that I wanted to add was just when we were talking about the snipers, people always sort of say, can the snipers really do what they claim? And I think, you know, the thing about this is one, the guns are not that accurate. You've got about a 50% chance of hitting a torso size, you know, piece of paper at 100 meters. And that's under perfect test conditions. No fog, no actual war, no distractions going on. So really all these tales of sort of snipers shooting down from the ramparts can't have happened except by accident. But of course you are going to remember the moment that your shot hit as opposed to all the moments when it didn't, because that's, you know, kind of the way that memory works is going to be to, you know, when it happens, when you, when it works out, I think Those are going to be the things, the things that stick in the mind. So we're talking more about lucky shots than accurate shooting here.

[Melvyn Bragg]

And Cellini is someone who really loves from you mentioned his memoirs, but he really talks about. He describes loving the music of gunpowder or the music of artillery. He talks a lot about gunpowder and he's drawn to it. This is the cutting edge.

[Jessica Gethals]

He is quite a serious shooter. So he also goes out and he shoots wildfowl. So if you a practiced shooter of moving targets out in the countryside, then you're probably going to be as good as it gets. As a practiced shooter of enemy soldiers in the street, that still doesn't make your gun work perfectly. I'm sorry.

[Stephen Baud]

Well, thank you all very much indeed. I enjoyed that very much indeed.

[Melvyn Bragg]

So, does anyone want tea or coffee?

[Stephen Baud]

I'll have a little coffee, please.

[Jessica Gethals]

Coffee? I'll have coffee as well.

[Melvyn Bragg]

Two coffees, yeah.

[Jessica Gethals]

In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Hi, I'm Mariana Spring, the BBC's disinformation and social media correspondent. And I've learned firsthand that the online world can be a breeding ground for hate. But why do some people behave the way they do on social media? For BBC Radio 4, I'm meeting the people at the heart of some extraordinary online conflicts to see if I'm disappointed even forgiveness is ever possible. Listen to why do you hate me? On BBC Sounds. This is history's heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the first World War.

[Catherine Fletcher]

You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you.

[Jessica Gethals]

Join me, Alex von Tunzelman for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.