favor of the King led to the threatened loss of the
Constable's dignities and lands, and provoked him to
renounce the French service. After making a secret treaty
with Charles V and with his ally, Henry VIII of England,
Bourbon led a force of German mercenaries into Lombardy,
where in 1523 he joined Charles' Spanish army, and next year
aided in driving the French from Italy. Invading France, he
marched under the Emperor's orders to Marseilles and laid
siege to the city, but failed to take it.
Bourbon contributed materially to the Emperor's great
victory at Pavia, and was rewarded by being made Duke of
Milan and commander in Northern Italy. But although Charles
thus honored Bourbon he did not trust him, and was not
really desirous of advancing a person of such great resource
and consequence. In the peace between Spain and France in
1526 Bourbon's great interests were neglected.
Notwithstanding these things, when Charles V wished to
punish Pope Clement VII, who had joined a league against
him, Bourbon, with George of Frundsberg, led an army of
Spanish and German mercenaries to Rome.
The description of the sack which followed, written by
Benvenuto Cellini, the celebrated Italian artist, shows him
as an effective participant in the defence. This account of
a combatant is of course only fragmentary, and is
supplemented by Trollope's critical narrative.
BENVENUTO CELLINI
The whole world was now in warfare. Pope Clement had sent to get some
troops from Giovanni de' Medici, and when they came they made such
disturbances in Rome that it was ill living in open shops.[36] On this
account I retired to a good snug house behind the Banchi, where I
worked for all the friends I had acquired. Since I produced few things
of much importance at that period, I need not waste time in talking
about them. I took much pleasure in music and amusements of the kind.
On the death of Giovanni de' Medici in Lombardy, the Pope, at the advice
of Messer Jacopo Salviati, dismissed the five bands he had engaged; and
when the Constable of Bourbon knew there were no troops in Rome, he
pushed his army with the utmost energy up to the city. The whole of Rome
upon this flew to arms. I happened to be intimate with Alessandro, the
son of Piero del Bene, who, at the time when the Colonnesi entered Rome,
had requested me to guard his palace.[37] On this more serious occasion,
therefore, he prayed me to enlist fifty comrades for the protection of
the said house, appointing me their captain, as I had been when the
Colonnesi came. So I selected fifty young men of the highest courage,
and we took up quarters in his palace, with good pay and excellent
appointments.
Bourbon's army had now arrived before the walls of Rome, and Alessandro
begged me to go with him to reconnoitre. So we went with one of the
stoutest fellows in our company; and on the way a youth called Cecchino
della Casa joined himself to us. On reaching the walls by the Campo
Santo, we could see that famous army, which was making every effort to
enter the town. Upon the ramparts where we took our station, several
young men were lying, killed by the besiegers; the battle raged there
desperately, and there was the densest fog imaginable. I turned to
Alessandro and said: "Let us go home as soon as we can, for there is
nothing to be done here; you see the enemies are mounting, and our men
are in flight." Alessandro, in a panic, cried, "Would God that we had
never come here!" and turned in maddest haste to fly. I took him up
somewhat sharply with these words: "Since you have brought me here, I
must perform some action worthy of a man"; and, directing my arquebuse
where I saw the thickest and most serried troop of fighting men, I aimed
exactly at one whom I remarked to be higher than the rest: the fog
prevented me from being certain whether he was on horseback or on foot.
Then I turned to Alessandro and Cecchino, and bade them discharge their
arquebuses, showing them how to avoid being hit by the besiegers. When
we had fired two rounds apiece I crept cautiously up to the wall, and,
observing among the enemy a most extraordinary confusion, I discovered
afterward that one of our shots had killed the Constable of Bourbon;
and, from what I subsequently learned, he was the man whom I had first
noticed above the heads of the rest.[38]
Quitting our position on the ramparts, we crossed the Campo Santo, and
entered the city by St. Peter's; then, coming out exactly at the Church
of Santo Agnolo, we got with the greatest difficulty to the great gate
of the castle; for the generals, Renzo di Ceri and Orazio Baglioni, were
wounding and slaughtering everybody who abandoned the defence of the
walls.[39]
By the time we had reached the great gate, part of the foemen had
already entered Rome, and we had them in our rear. The castellan had
ordered the portcullis to be lowered, in order to do which they cleared
a little space, and this enabled us four to get inside. On the instant
that I entered, the captain Palone de' Medici claimed me as being of the
papal household and forced me to abandon Alessandro, which I had to do
much against my will. I ascended to the keep, and at the same instant
Pope Clement came in through the corridors into the castle; he had
refused to leave the palace of St. Peter earlier, being unable to
believe that his enemies would effect their entrance into Rome.[40]
Having got into the castle in this way, I attached myself to certain
pieces of artillery, which were under the command of a bombardier called
Giuliano Fiorentino. Leaning there against the battlements, the unhappy
man could see his poor house being sacked, and his wife and children
outraged; fearing to strike his own folk, he dared not discharge the
cannon, and, flinging the burning fuse upon the ground, he wept as
though his heart would break, and tore his cheeks with both his
hands.[41]
Some of the other bombardiers were behaving in like manner; seeing
which, I took one of the matches, and got the assistance of a few men
who were not overcome by their emotions. I aimed some swivels and
falconets at points where I saw it would be useful, and killed with them
a good number of the enemy. Had it not been for this, the troops who
poured into Rome that morning and were marching straight upon the castle
might possibly have entered it with ease, because the artillery was
doing them no damage. I went on firing under the eyes of several
cardinals and lords, who kept blessing me and giving me the heartiest
encouragement. In my enthusiasm I strove to achieve the impossible; let
it suffice that it was I who saved the castle that morning, and brought
the other bombardiers back to their duty.[42] I worked hard the whole of
that day, and when the evening came--while the army was marching into
Rome through Trastevere--Pope Clement appointed a great Roman nobleman
named Antonio Santacroce to be a captain of all the gunners. The first
thing this man did was to come to me, and, having greeted me with the
utmost kindness, he stationed me with five fine pieces of artillery on
the highest point of the castle, to which the name of the "Angel"
specially belongs.
This circular eminence goes round the castle and surveys both Prati and
the town of Rome. The captain put under my orders enough men to help in
managing my guns, and, having seen me paid in advance, he gave me
rations of bread and a little wine, and begged me to go forward as I had
begun. I was perhaps more inclined by nature to the profession of arms
than to the one I had adopted, and I took such pleasure in its duties
that I discharged them better than those of my own art.
Night came, the enemy had entered Rome, and we who were in the
castle--especially myself, who have always taken pleasure in
extraordinary sights--stayed gazing on the indescribable scene of tumult
and conflagration in the streets below. People who were anywhere else
but where we were could not have formed the least imagination of what it
was.
T. ADOLPHUS TROLLOPE
The combined force of Bourbon and Frundsberg was in all respects more
like a rabble-rout of brigands and bandits than an army, and was
assuredly such as must, even in those days, have been felt to be a
disgrace to any sovereign permitting them to call themselves his
soldiers. Their pay was, as was often the case with the troops of
Charles V, hopelessly in arrear, and discipline was of course
proportionably weak among them. Indeed, it seemed every now and then on
the point of coming to an end altogether. The two generals had the
greatest difficulty in preventing their army from becoming an entirely
anarchical and disorganized mob of freebooters as dangerous to its
masters as to everybody else. Of course food, raiment, and shelter were
the first absolute essentials for keeping this dangerous mass of armed
men in any degree of order and organization, and in fact the present
march of Frundsberg and Bourbon had the obtaining of these necessaries
for its principal and true object.
The progress southward of this bandit army unchecked by any opposing
force--for Giovanni delle Bande Nere had lost his life in the attempt to
prevent them from passing the Po; and after the death of that great
captain, the army of the league did not muster courage to attack or
impede the invaders in any way--filled the cities exposed to their
inroad with terror and dismay. They had passed like a destroying locust
swarm over Bologna and Imola, and crossing the Apennines, which separate
Umbria from Tuscany, had descended into the valley of the Arno not far
from Arezzo. Florence and Rome both trembled. On which would the storm
burst? That was the all-absorbing question.
Pope Clement, with his usual avarice-blinded imbecility, had,
immediately on concluding a treaty with the Neapolitan viceroy,
discharged all his troops except a bodyguard of about six hundred men.
Florence was nearly in as defenceless a position. She had, says Varchi,
"two great armies on her territory; one that under Bourbon, which came
as an enemy to sack and plunder her; and the other, that of a league,
which came as a friend to protect her, but sacked and plundered her none
the less." It was, however, probably the presence of this army, little
as it had hitherto done to impede the progress of the enemy, which
decided Bourbon eventually to determine on marching toward Rome.
It seems doubtful how far they were, in so doing, executing the orders
or carrying out the wishes of the Emperor. Clement, though he had played
the traitor to Charles, as he did to everyone else, and had been at war
with him recently, had now entered into a treaty with the Emperor's
viceroy. And apart from this there was a degree of odium and scandal
attaching to the sight of the "most Catholic" Emperor sending a Lutheran
army in his pay to attack the head of the Church, and ravage the
venerated capital of Christendom, which so decorous a sovereign as
Charles would hardly have liked to incur. Still, it may be assumed that
if the Emperor wished his army kept together, and provided no sums for
the purpose, he was not unwilling that they should live by plunder. And
perhaps his real intention was to extort from Rome the means of paying
his troops by the mere exhibition of the danger arising from their
propinquity while they remained unpaid. Upon the whole we are warranted
in supposing that Bourbon and Frundsberg would hardly have ventured on
the course they took if they had not had reason to believe that it would
not much displease their master. And Charles was exactly the sort of
man who would like to have the profit of an evil deed without the loss
of reputation arising from the commission of it, and who would consider
himself best served by agents who could commit a profitable atrocity
without being guilty of the annoying want of tact of waiting for his
direct orders to commit it.
For the especial business in hand, it was impossible, moreover, to have
had two more fitting agents than Bourbon and Frundsberg. It was not
every knightly general in those days who would have accepted the task,
even with direct orders, of marching to the sack of Rome, and the open
defiance of its sacred ruler. A Florentine or a Neapolitan soldier might
have had small scruple in doing so; and a Roman baron--a Colonna or an
Orsini--none at all. But there would have been found few men of such
mark as Bourbon, in either France or Spain, willing to undertake the
enterprise he was now engaged in. The unfortunate Constable, however,
was a disgraced and desperate man. He was disgraced in the face of
Europe by unknightly breach of fealty to his sovereign, despite the
intensity of the provocation which had driven him to that step. For all
the sanctions which held European society together, in the universal
bondage which alone then constituted social order, were involved in
maintaining the superstition that so branded him. And he was a desperate
man in his fortunes; for though no name in all Europe was at that day as
great a military power at the head of a host as that of Bourbon, and
though the miserable bearer of it had so shortly before been one of the
wealthiest and largest territorial nobles of France, yet the Constable
had now his sword for his fortune as barely as the rawest lad in the
rabble-rout that followed him, sent out from some landless tower of an
impoverished knight, in half-starved Galicia or poverty-stricken
Navarre, to carve his way in the world.
Even among those whose ranks he had joined, Bourbon was a disgraced and
ruined man beyond redemption. Although his well-known military capacity
had easily induced Charles to welcome and make use of him, he must have
felt that the step he had taken in breaking his allegiance and
abandoning his country had rendered him an outcast and almost a pariah
in the estimation of the chivalry of Europe. The feeling he had awakened
against himself throughout Christendom is strikingly illustrated by an
anecdote recorded of his reception at Madrid. When, shortly after
winning the battle of Pavia, Bourbon went thither to meet Charles, and
the Marquis of Villane was requested to lodge the victorious general in
his palace, the haughty Spaniard told the Emperor that his house and all
that he possessed were at his sovereign's disposition, but that he
should assuredly burn it down as soon as Bourbon was out of it; since,
having been sullied by the presence of a renegade, it could no longer be
a fitting residence for a man of honor.
So low had Bourbon fallen! Every man's hand was raised against him, and
his hand was against every man. And it is easy to conceive what must
have been his tone of mind and feeling, as he led on his mutinous
robber-rout to Rome, while men of all parties looked on in
panic-stricken horror. Thus Bourbon led his unpaid and mutinous hordes
to a deed which, none knew better than he, would shock and scandalize
all Europe, as a man who, having fallen already so low as to have lost
all self-respect, cares not in his reckless despair to what depth he
plunges.
As for Frundsberg, he was a mere soldier of fortune, whose world was his
camp, whose opinions and feelings had been formed in quite another
school from those of his fellow-general; whose code of honor and of
morals was an entirely different one, and whose conscience was not only
perfectly at rest respecting the business he was bound on, but approved
of it as a good and meritorious work for the advancement of true
religion. He carried round his neck a halter of golden tissue, we are
told, with which he loudly boasted that he would hang the Pope as soon
as he got to Rome; and had others of crimson silk at his saddle-bow,
which he said were destined for the cardinals!
Too late Clement became aware of the imminence and magnitude of the
danger that threatened him and the capital of Christendom. He besought
the Neapolitan viceroy, who had already signed a treaty with him, as has
been seen, to exert himself and use his authority to arrest the
southward march of Bourbon's army. And it is remarkable that this
representative of the Emperor in the government of Naples did, as it
would seem, endeavor earnestly to avert the coming avalanche from the
Eternal City. But, while the Emperor's viceroy used all his authority
and endeavors to arrest the advance of the Emperor's army, the Emperor's
generals advanced and sacked Rome in spite of him. Which of them most
really acted according to the secret wishes of that profound dissembler,
and most false and crafty monarch, it is impossible to know. It may have
been that Bourbon himself had no power to stay the plundering,
bandit-like march of his hungry and unpaid troops. And the facts
recorded of the state of discipline of the army are perfectly consistent
with such a supposition.
The Viceroy sent a messenger to Bourbon, while he was yet in Bologna,
informing him of the treaty signed with Clement, and desiring him
therefore to come no farther southward. Bourbon, bent, as Varchi says,
on deceiving both the Pope and the Viceroy, replied that, if the Pope
would send him two hundred thousand florins for distribution to the
army, he would stay his march. But, while this answer was carried back
to Rome, the tumultuous host continued its fearfully menacing advance;
and the alarm in Rome was rapidly growing to desperate terror. At the
Pope's earnest request, the Viceroy, "who knew well," says Varchi, "that
his holiness had not a farthing," himself took post and rode hard for
Florence with letters from Clement, hoping to obtain the money there.
The departure of the Viceroy in person, and the breathless haste of his
ride to Florence, speak vividly of this Spanish officer's personal
anxiety respecting the dreadful fate which threatened Rome. But the
Florentines do not seem to have been equally impressed with the
necessity of losing no time in making an effort to avert the calamity
from a rival city. It was after "much talking," we are told, that they
at last consented to advance a hundred fifty thousand florins, eighty
thousand in cash down, and the remainder by the end of October. It was
now April; and Bourbon had by this time crossed the Apennines, and was
with his army on the western slopes of the mountains, not far from the
celebrated monastery of Lavernia. Thither the Viceroy hurried with all
speed, accompanied by only two servants and a trumpeter; and having
"with much difficulty," says Varchi, come to speech with the general,
proffered him the eighty thousand florins. Upon which he was set upon by
the tumultuous troops, and "narrowly escaped being torn in pieces by
them." In endeavoring to get away from them and make his way back to
Florence, he fell into the hands of certain peasants near Camaldoli, and
was here again in danger of his life, and was wounded in the head. He
was, however, rescued by a monk of Vallombrosa, and by him conducted to
the neighboring little town of Poppi in the Casentino, or upper valley
of the Arno, whence he made his way to Siena, and so back to Rome, with
no pleasant tidings of what might be expected from Bourbon and his
brigand army.
The Vallombrosan monk, who thus bestead the Viceroy at his need, was, as
Varchi records, rewarded by the bishopric of Muro, in the kingdom of
Naples, which, adds the historian, "he still holds."
The fate of Rome was no longer doubtful. Clement, who by his pennywise
parsimony had left himself defenceless, made a feeble and wholly vain
attempt to put the city in a state of defence. The corrupt and cowardly
citizens could not have opposed any valid resistance to the ruffian
hordes who were slowly but surely, like an advancing conflagration,
coming upon them, even if they had been willing to do their best. But
the trembling Pope's appeal to them to defend the walls fell on the ears
of as sorely trembling men, each thinking only of the possible chances
of saving his own individual person. Yet it seems clear that means of
defence might have been found had not the Pope been thus paralyzed by
terror.
Clement, however, was as one fascinated. Martin du Bellay tells us that
he himself, then in Italy as ambassador from Francis I, hurried to Rome,
and warned the Pope of his danger in abundant time for him to have
prepared for the protection of the city by the troops he had at his
disposal. But no persuasion availed to induce Clement to take any step
for that purpose. Neither would he seek safety by flight, nor permit his
unfortunate subjects to do so. John da Casale, ambassador of Henry VIII
at Venice, writes thence to Wolsey on May 16th--the fatal tidings of the
sack of the city having just reached Venice--as follows:
"He"--Clement--"refused to quit the city for some safer place. He even
forbade by edict that anyone should carry anything out of the gates on
pain of death, though many were anxious to depart and carry their
fortunes elsewhere." Meantime Florence, for her own protection, had
hastily induced Francesco Maria, Duke of Urbino, to place himself at the
head of the remaining forces of the Italian league, and to take up a
position at Incisa, a small town in the Upper Valdarno, about twenty
miles from the city, on the road to Arezzo. Thus the torrent was turned
off from the capital of the commonwealth. Probably as soon as the
invading army once found itself to the south of Florence, that wealthy
city was in no immediate danger. Rome was metal more attractive to the
invaders, even had there not been an army between them and Florence.
And now it became frightfully clear that the doom of the Eternal City
was at hand. On came the strangely heterogeneous rout of lawless
soldiery, leaving behind them a trail of burned and ruined cities,
devastated fields, and populations plague-stricken from the
contamination engendered by the multitude of their unburied dead.
On May 5th Bourbon arrived beneath the walls of Rome. During the last
few days the unhappy Pope had endeavored to arm what men he could get
together under Renzo di Ceri and one Horatius--not Cocles,
unhappily--but Baglioni. "Rome contained within her walls," says Ranke,
"some thirty thousand inhabitants capable of bearing arms. Many of these
men had seen service. They wore swords by their sides, which they had
used freely in their broils among each other, and then boasted of their
exploits. But to oppose the enemy, who brought with him certain
destruction, five hundred men were the utmost that could be mustered
within the city. At the first onset the Pope and his forces were
overthrown." On the evening of May 6th the city was stormed and given
over to the unbridled cupidity and brutality of the soldiers, who during
many a long day of want and hardship had been looking forward to the
hour that was to repay them amply for all past sufferings by the
boundless gratification of every sense, and every caprice of lawless
passion. Bourbon himself had fallen in the first moments of the attack,
as he was leading his men to scale the walls, and any small influence
that he might have exerted in moderating the excesses of the conquerors
was thus at an end.
It does not fall within the scope of the present narrative to attempt
any detailed account of the days and scenes that followed. They have
been described by many writers; and the reader who bears in mind what
Rome was--her vileness, her cowardice, her imbecility, her wealth, her
arts, her monuments, her memories, her helpless population of religious
communities of both sexes, and the sacred character of her high places
and splendors, which served to give an additional zest to the violence
of triumphant heretics--he that bears in mind all these things may
safely give the reign to his imagination without any fear of
overcharging the picture. Frundsberg had been wont to boast that if ever
he reached Rome he would hang the Pope. He never did reach it, having
been carried off by a fit of apoplexy while striving to quell a mutiny
among his troops shortly after leaving Bologna on his southward march.
But the threat is sufficiently indicative of the spirit that animated
his army, to show that Clement owed his personal safety only to the
strength of the castle of St. Angelo, in which he sought refuge.