$Unique_ID{how04375}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Sack Of Rome By The Imperial Troops
By T. Adolphus Trollope}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Trollope, T. Adolphus}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{rome
bourbon
army
city
himself
clement
pope
viceroy
florence
charles}
$Date{}
$Log{}
Title:       Sack Of Rome By The Imperial Troops
Book:        By T. Adolphus Trollope
Author:      Trollope, T. Adolphus

By 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 Frunsdberg.  It was not every
knightly general in those days who would have accepted the task, even with
direct orders, or 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
saddlebow, 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 permits 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, he 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.

     The sensation produced throughout Europe by the dreadful misfortune which
had fallen on the Eternal City was immense.  John da Casale, in the letter
cited above, says that it would have been better for Rome to have been taken
by the Turks, when they were in Hungary, as the infidels would have
perpetrated less odious outrages and less horrible sacrilege.  Clerk, Bishop
of Bath, writes to Wolsey from Paris on May 28th following: "Please it, your
Grace, after my most humble recommendation, to understand that about the
fifteenth of this moneth, by letters sent from Venyce, it was spoken, that the
Duke of Burbon with the armye imperyall by vyolence shold enter Rome as the
6th of this moneth; and that in the same entree the said Duke should be
slayne; and that the Pope had savyd Himself with the Cardynalls in Castell
Angell; whiche tydinges bycause they ware not written unto Venyce, but upon
relation of a souldier, that came from Rome to Viterbe, and bycause ther cam
hither no maner of confirmation thereof unto this day, thay war not belevyd.
This day ther is come letters from Venyce confyrming the same tydinges to be
true.  They write also that they have sackyd and spoylyd the town, and slayne
to the nombre of 45,000, non parcentes nec etati nec sexui nec ordini; amongst
other that they have murdyrd a marveillous sorte of fryars, and agaynst
pristes and churchis they have behavyd thymselfes as it doth become Murranys
and Lutherans to do."

     How deeply Wolsey himself was moved by the news is seen by a letter from
him to Henry VIII, written on June 2d following.  He forwards to the King the
letters "nowe arryved, as wel out of Fraunce as out of Italy, confirming the
piteous and lamentable spoiles, pilages, with most cruel murdres, committed by
the Emperialls in the citie of Rome, non parcentes sacris, etati, sexui, aut
relioni; and the extreme daungier that the Poopes Holines and Cardinalles, who
fled into the Castel Angel, wer in, if by meane of the armye of the liege,
they should not be shortly socoured and releved.  Which, sire, is matier that
must nedes commove and stire the hartes of al good christen princes and people
to helpe and put their handes with effecte to reformacion thereof, and the
repressing of such tirannous demenour."

     Even Charles himself affected at least to mourn the success of his own
army.  Nowhere did this terrible Italian misfortune fail to awaken sympathy
and compassion save in a rival Italian city.  Florence heard the tidings, says
Varchi, with the utmost delight.  The same historian expresses his own
opinion, that the sack of Rome was at once the most cruel and the most merited
chastisement ever inflicted by heaven.  And another Florentine writer piously
accounts for the failure of all means adopted to avert the calamity, by
supposing that it was God's eternal purpose then and thus to chastise the
crimes of the Roman prelates - a theory, it may occur to some minds, somewhat
damaged by the unfortunate fact that the greater part of the miseries suffered
in those awful days were inflicted on the unhappy flocks of those purple
shepherds.