Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D
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die (December 1, 1521) in the unction of victory.
V. ADRIAN VI: 1522-3
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His successor was an anomaly in Renaissance Rome: a Pope who was
resolved at all costs to be a Christian. Born of lowly folk in Utrecht
(1459), Adrian Dedel imbibed piety and scholarship from the Brothers
of the Common Life at Deventer, Scholastic philosophy and theology
at Louvain. At thirty-four he was chancellor of that University; at
forty-seven he was appointed tutor of the future Charles V. In 1515 he
was sent on a mission to Spain, and so impressed Ferdinand with his
administrative ability and moral integrity that he was made bishop
of Tortosa. After Ferdinand's death Adrian helped Cardinal Ximenes
to govern Spain in the absence of Charles; in 1520 he became regent of
Castile. Through all this progress he remained modest in everything
but certainty, lived simply, and pursued heretics with a zeal that
endeared him to the people. The repute of his virtues reached Rome,
and Leo made him a cardinal. In the conclave that met after Leo's
death his name was put forward as a candidate for the papacy,
apparently without his knowledge, and probably through the influence
of Charles V. On January 2, 1522, for the first time since 1378 a
non-Italian- for the first time since 1161 a Teuton- was chosen pope.
How could the Romans, who had hardly heard of Adrian, forgive such
an affront? The populace denounced the cardinals as madmen, as
"betrayers of Christ's blood"; pamphleteers demanded to know why the
Vatican had been "surrendered to German fury." `052116 Aretino
composed a masterpiece of vituperation, termed the cardinals "filthy
rabble," and prayed that they might be buried alive. `052117
Pasquino's statue was covered with lampoons. The cardinals feared to
show themselves in public; they ascribed the election to the Holy
Ghost, who, they said, had so inspired them. `052118 Many cardinals
left Rome, fearing both the contumely of the people and the ax of
ecclesiastical reform. For his part Adrian calmly completed his
unfinished business in Spain, and notified the Curia that he could not
reach Rome before August. Unaware of the splendor of the Vatican, he
wrote to a Roman friend asking that a modest house and garden be
rented for his residence. When at last he reached the city (which he
had never seen before), his pale ascetic face and lean frame awed
observers into some reverence; but when he spoke, and it appeared that
he knew no Italian, and talked Latin with a guttural accent all the
world away from Italian melody and grace, Rome fumed and despaired.
Adrian felt himself a prisoner in the Vatican, and pronounced it fit
for the successors of Constantine rather than of Peter. He
discontinued all further decoration of the Vatican chambers; the
followers of Raphael, who had been working there, were dismissed. He
sent away all but four of the hundred grooms that Leo had kept for his
stable; he reduced his personal servants to two- both Dutch- and
bade them bring his household expenses down to one ducat ($12.50) a
day. He was horrified by the looseness of sex and tongue and pen in
Rome, and agreed with Lorenzo and Luther that the capital of
Christianity was a sink of iniquity. He cared nothing for the
ancient art that the cardinals showed him; he denounced the statuary
as relics of idolatry, and walled up the Belvedere Palace, which
contained Europe's first collection of classical sculpture. `052119 He
had a mind to wall up the humanists too, and the poets, who seemed
to him to live and write like pagans who had banished Christ. When
Francesco Berni, in one of his bitterest capitoli, satirized him
as a Dutch barbarian incapable of understanding the refinements of
Italian art, literature, and life, Adrian threatened to have the whole
tribe of satirists doused in the Tiber. `052120
To lead the Church back from Leo to Christ became the devout passion
of Adrian's pontificate. He set himself with blunt directness to
reform such ecclesiastical abuses as he could reach. He suppressed
superfluous offices with sometimes inconsiderate and indiscriminate
vigor. He canceled the contracts that Leo had signed to pay
annuities to those who had bought church offices; 2550 persons who had
purchased these as an investment lost, so to speak, both principal and
interest; Rome resounded with their cries that they had been
defrauded; and one of the victims tried to kill the Pope. Relatives
who came to Adrian for sinecures were told to go back and earn an
honest living. He put an end to simony and nepotism, scored the
venality of the Curia, enacted severe penalties for bribery or
embezzlement, and punished guilty cardinals with the same treatment as
the humblest clerk. He bade bishops and cardinals go back to their
sees, and read them lessons on the morality that he expected of
them. The ill repute of Rome, he told them, was the talk of Europe. He
would not accuse the cardinals themselves of vice, but he charged them
with allowing vice to go unpunished in their palaces. He asked them to
put an end to their luxuries, and to content themselves with a maximum
income of 6000 ducats ($75,000) a year. All ecclesiastical Rome, wrote
the Venetian ambassador, "is beside itself with terror, seeing what
the Pope has done in the space of eight days." `052121
But the eight days were not enough, nor the brief thirteen months of
Adrian's active pontificate. Vice hid its face for a while, but
survived; reforms irked a thousand officials, and met with a sullen
resistance and the hope for Adrian's early death. The Pope mourned
to see how little one man could do to better men; "how much does a
man's efficiency," he often said, "depend upon the age in which his
work is cast!"- and he remarked wistfully to his old friend Heeze:
"Dietrich, how much better it went with us when we were living quietly
in Louvain!" `052122
Amid these domestic tribulations he faced as honorably as he could
the critical problems of foreign policy. He restored Urbino to
Francesco Maria della Rovere, and left Alfonso undisturbed in Ferrara.
Ousted dictators took advantage of the pacific Pope and again seized
power in Perugia, Rimini, and other Papal States. Adrian appealed to
Charles and Francis to make peace, or at least accept a truce, and
to join in repelling the Turks, who were preparing to attack Rhodes.
Instead, Charles signed with Henry VIII of England the Treaty of
Windsor (June 19, 1522), which pledged them to make a concerted
assault upon France. On December 21 the Turks took Rhodes, the last
Christian stronghold in the Eastern Mediterranean, and it was
rumored that they were planning to land in Apulia and conquer
disorganized Italy. When Turkish spies were captured in Rome the
trepidation mounted to a point that recalled the city's fear of
invasion after Hannibal's victory at Cannae in 216 B.C. To quite
fill Adrian's cup of gall, Cardinal Francesco Soderini, his chief
minister and confidante, and a principal agent in his negotiations for
a European peace, plotted with Francis a French attack upon Sicily.
When Adrian discovered the plot, and learned that Francis was
massing troops on the border of Italy, he abandoned neutrality and
leagued the papacy with Charles V. Then, broken in body and spirit, he
fell sick and died (September 14, 1523). His will left his property to
the poor, and his last instructions were that he should be given a
quiet and inexpensive funeral.
Rome greeted his death with more joy than if the city had been saved
from capture by the Turks. Some believed that he had been poisoned for
art's sake, and a wag attached to the door of the Pope's physician
an inscription Liberatori patriae SPQR - expressing the gratitude
of the "Senate and People of Rome to the Liberator of the Fatherland."
The dead pontiff was blackened by a hundred satires; he was accused of
greed, drunkenness, and the grossest immorality, and every act of
his career was transformed into wickedness by malice and ridicule; now
the surviving freedom of the "press" in Rome prepared by its
excesses its own unmourned demise. It was a pity that Adrian could not
understand the Renaissance; but it was a greater crime and folly
that the Renaissance could not tolerate a Christian pope.
VI. CLEMENT VII: THE FIRST PHASE
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The conclave that met on October 1, 1523, fought for seven weeks
over the selection of Adrian's successor, and finally named a man
who by universal opinion was the happiest possible choice. Giulio
de' Medici was the illegitimate son of that amiable Giuliano who had
fallen a victim to the Pazzi conspiracy, and of a mistress,
Fioretta, who soon disappeared from history. Lorenzo took the boy into
his family and had him brought up with his sons. These included Leo,
who, as pope, dispensed Giulio from the canonical impediment of
bastardy, made him archbishop of Florence, then a cardinal, then the
able administrator of Rome and the chief minister of his
pontificate. Now forty-five, Clement was tall and handsome, rich and
learned, well mannered and of moral life, an admirer and patron of
literature, learning, music, and art. Rome greeted his elevation
with joy as the return of Leo's gulden age. Bembo prophesied that
Clement VII would be the best and wisest ruler that the Church had
ever known. `052123
He began most graciously. He distributed among the cardinals all the
benefices that he had enjoyed, entailing a yearly revenue of 60,000
ducats. He won the hearts and dedications of scholars and scribes by
drawing them into his service or supporting them with gifts. He
dealt out justice justly, gave audience freely, bestowed charity
with less than Leonine, but with wiser, generosity, and charmed all by
his courtesy to every person and class. No pope ever began so well, or
ended so miserably.
The task of steering a safe course between Francis and Charles in
a war almost to the death, while the Turks were overrunning Hungary,
and one third of Europe was in full revolt against the Church,
proved too much for Clement's abilities, as for Leo's too. The
magnificent portrait of Clement in his early pontificate, by
Sebastiano del Piombo, is deceptive: he did not show in his actions
the hard resolution that there seems limned in his face; and even in
that picture a certain weak weariness shows in the tired eyelids
drooping upon sullen eyes. Clement made irresolution a policy. He
carried thought to excess, and mistook it as a substitute for action
instead of its guide. He could find a hundred reasons for a
decision, and a hundred against it; it was as if Buridan's ass sat
on the papal throne. Berni satirized him in bitter lines prophetic
of posterity's judgment:
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A papacy composed of compliment,
Debate, consideration, complaisance,
Of furthermore, then, but, yes, well, perchance,
Haply, and such like terms inconsequent....
Of feet of lead, of tame neutrality....
To speak plain truth, you shall live to see
Pope Adrian sainted through this papacy. `052124
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He took as his chief counselors Gianmatteo Giberti who favored
France, and Nikolaus von Schonberg who favored the Empire; he
allowed his mind to be torn in two between them; and when he decided
for France- only a few weeks before the French disaster at Pavia- he
brought down upon his head and his city all the wiles and forces of
Charles, and all the fury of a half-Protestant army unleashed upon
Rome.
It was Clement's excuse that he feared the power of an Emperor
holding both Lombardy and Naples; and he hoped, by siding with
Francis, to secure a French veto on Charles's troublesome idea of a
general council to adjudicate the affairs of the Church. When
Francis came down over the Alps with a new army of 26,000 French,
Italians, Swiss, and Germans, seized Milan, and besieged Pavia,
Clement, while giving Charles assurances of loyalty and friendship,
secretly signed an alliance with Francis (December 12, 1524),
brought Florence and Venice into it, and reluctantly gave triumphant
Francis permission to levy troops in the Papal States and to send an
army through papal territory against Naples. Charles never forgave the
deception. "I shall go into Italy," he vowed, "and revenge myself on
those who have injured me, especially on that poltroon the Pope.
Some day, perhaps, Martin Luther will become a man of weight." `052125
At that moment some men thought that Luther would be made pope; and
several of the Emperor's entourage advised him to contest the election
of Clement on the ground of illegitimate birth. `052126
Charles sent a German army under Georg von Frundsberg and the
Marquis of Pescara to attack the French outside Pavia. Poor tactics
nullified the French artillery, while the hand firearms of the Spanish
made a mockery of Swiss pikes; the French army was almost
annihilated in one of the most decisive battles of history (February
24-5, 1525). Francis behaved gallantly: while his troops retreated
he plunged forward into the enemy's ranks, making royal slaughter; his
horse was killed under him, but he kept on fighting; at last,
thoroughly exhausted, he could resist no more, and was taken
prisoner along with several of his captains. From a tent among the
victors he wrote to his mother the message so often half-quoted:
"All is lost save honor- and my skin, which is safe." Charles, who was
at this time in Spain, ordered him sent as a prisoner to a castle near
Madrid.
Milan reverted to the Emperor. All Italy felt itself at his mercy,
and one Italian state after another presented him with diverse
bribes for permission to remain in existence. Clement, fearful of
invasion by the imperial army, and of revolution against the Medici in
Florence, abandoned his French alliance, and signed a treaty (April 1,
1525) with Charles de Lannoy, Viceroy of Naples for Charles,
pledging Pope and Emperor to mutual aid; the Emperor would protect the
Medici in Florence and accept Francesco Maria Sforza as imperial vicar
in Milan; the Pope would pay Charles, for past affronts and future
services, 100,000 ducats ($1,250,000?), `052127 which were badly
needed for the imperial troops. Shortly afterward Clement connived
at a plot by Girolamo Morone to free Milan from the Emperor. The
Marquis of Pescara revealed it to Charles, and Morone was jailed.
Charles treated captive Francis with feline procrastination. After
softening him with almost eleven months of courteous imprisonment,
he agreed to free him on the impossible conditions that the King
should surrender all French rights, actual or alleged, to Genoa,
Milan, Naples, Flanders, Artois, Tournai, Burgundy, and Navarre;
that Francis should supply Charles with ships and troops for an
expedition against Rome or the Turks; that Francis should marry
Charles's sister Eleonora; and that the King should surrender his
eldest sons- Francis, ten, and Henry, nine years old- to Charles as
hostages for the fulfillment of these terms. By the treaty of Madrid
(January 14, 1526) Francis agreed to all these conditions with
solemn oaths and mental reservations. On March 17 he was allowed to
return to France, leaving his sons in his place as prisoners.
Arrived in France, he announced that he had no intention of honoring
promises made under duress; Clement, with the support of canonical
law, absolved him from his oaths; and on May 22 Francis, Clement,
Venice, Florence, and Francesco Maria Sforza signed the League of
Cognac, pledging them to restore Asti and Genoa to France, to give
Milan to Sforza as a French fief, to return to each Italian state
all its prewar possessions, to ransom French prisoners for 2,000,000
crowns, and to bestow Naples upon an Italian prince who would pay a
yearly tribute of 75,000 ducats to the king of France. The Emperor was
cordially invited to sign this agreement; if he refused, the new
League proposed to war upon him until he and all his forces were
driven from Italy. `052128
Charles denounced the League as violating Francis' sacred oaths as
well as the treaty that Clement had signed with Lannoy. Unable to go
to Italy himself at this time, he commissioned Hugo de Moncada to
win back Clement by diplomacy, and, that failing, to stir up against
the Pope a revolution of the Colonna and the Roman populace. Moncada
performed his mission nicely: he brought Clement into an amicable
agreement with the Colonna, persuaded the Pope to disband the troops
that were guarding him, and allowed the Colonna to continue organizing
a conspiracy to capture Rome. While Christendom so exercised itself in
treachery and war, the Turks under Suleiman the Magnificent
overwhelmed the Hungarians at Mohacs (August 29, 1526), and captured
Budapest (September 10). Clement, alarmed less Europe should become
not merely Protestant but Mohammedan, announced to the cardinals
that he was thinking of going to Barcelona in person to plead with
Charles to make peace with Francis and join forces against the
Turks. Charles at that time was equipping a fleet whose purpose, it
was said in Rome, was to invade Italy and depose the Pope. `052129
On September 20 the Colonna entered Rome with five thousand men,
and, overriding feeble resistance, plundered the Vatican, St. Peter's,
and the neighboring Borgo Vecchio, while Clement fled to Castel
Sant' Angelo. The papal palace was completely stripped, including
Raphael's tapestries and the Pope's tiara; sacred vessels, treasured
relics, and costly papal vestments were stolen; an hilarious soldier
went about in the white robe and red cap of the Pope, distributing
papal benedictions with mock solemnity. `052130 On the following day
Moncada restored to Clement the papal tiara, assured him that the
Emperor had only the best intentions toward the papacy, and
compelled the frightened Pope to sign an armistice with the Empire for
four months, and to pardon the Colonna.
Moncada had hardly retired to Naples when Clement raised a new papal
force of seven thousand troops. At the end of October he ordered it to
march against the Colonna strongholds. At the same time he appealed to
Francis I and Henry VIII for aid; Francis sent dilatory excuses;
Henry, absorbed in the difficult task of begetting a son, sent
nothing. Another papal army, in the north, was kept inactive by the
apparently treacherous Fabianism of Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke
of Urbino, who could not forget that Leo X had ousted him from his
duchy, and was not especially grateful that Adrian and Clement had let
him return and stay. A braver leader was with that army- young
Giovanni de' Medici, handsome son of Caterina Sforza, heir of her
dauntless spirit, and called Giovanni delle Bande Nere because he
and his troops had worn black bands of mourning when Leo died. `052131
Giovanni was all for action against Milan, but Francesco Maria
overruled him.
VII. THE SACK OF ROME: 1527
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Charles, still remaining in Spain, and moving his pawns with magic
remote control, commissioned his agents to raise a new army. They
approached the Tirolese condottiere, Georg von Frundsberg, already
famous for the exploits of the Landsknechte - German mercenaries- who
fought under his lead. Charles could offer little money, but his
agents promised rich plunder in Italy. Frundsberg was still
nominally a Catholic, but he strongly sympathized with Luther, and
hated Clement as a traitor to the Empire. He pawned his castle, his
other possessions, even the adornments of his wife; with the 38,000
gulden so obtained he collected some 10,000 men eager for adventure
and pillage and not averse to breaking a lance over a papal head; some
of them, it was said, carried a noose to hang the Pope. `052132 In
November, 1526, this impromptu army crossed the mountains and
descended toward Brescia. Alfonso of Ferrara repaid the papacy for its
many efforts to depose him, by sending Frundsberg four of his
mightiest cannon. Near Brescia Giovanni delle Bande Nere was shot in a
skirmish with the invaders; he died at Mantua on November 30, aged
twenty-eight. No one remained to hinder the Duke of Urbino from
doing nothing.
Frundsberg's rabble crossed the Po as Giovanni died, and ravaged the
fertile fields of Lombardy so effectively that three years later
English ambassadors described that terrain as "the most pitiable
country that ever was in Christendom." `052133 In Milan the imperial
commander was now Charles, Duke of Bourbon; created constable of
France for bravery at Marignano, he had turned against Francis when
the King's mother, as he felt, had cheated him of his proper lands; he
went over to the Emperor, shared in defeating Francis at Pavia, and
was made Duke of Milan. Now, to raise and pay another army for
Charles, he taxed the Milanese literally to death. He wrote to the
Emperor that he had drained the city of its blood. His soldiers,
quartered upon the inhabitants, so abused them with theft,
brutality, and rape that many Milanese hanged themselves, or threw
themselves from high places into the streets. `052134 Early in
February, 1527, Bourbon led his army out of Milan, and united it
with Frundsberg's near Piacenza. The conglomerate horde, now numbering
nearly 22,000 men, moved east along the Via Emilia, avoiding the
fortified cities, but pillaging as it went, and leaving the
countryside empty behind it.
When it became clear to Clement that he had no sufficient forces
with which to stop these invaders, he appealed to Lannoy to arrange
a truce. The Viceroy came up from Naples, and drew up terms for a
truce of eight months: Clement and the Colonna ceased their war and
exchanged their conquests, and the Pope provided 60,000 ducats with
which to bribe Frundsberg's army to stay out of the Papal States.
Then, nearing the end of his funds, and supposing that Frundsberg
and Bourbon would honor an agreement signed by the imperial Viceroy,
Clement reduced his Roman army to three hundred men. But Bourbon's
brigands shrieked with fury when they heard the terms of the truce.
For four months they had endured a thousand hardships only in the hope
of plundering Rome; most of them were now in rags, many were shoeless,
all were hungry, none was paid; they refused to be bought off with a
miserable 60,000 ducats, of which they knew only a small part would
trickle down to them. Fearing that Bourbon would sign the truce,
they besieged his tent, crying, "Pay! pay!" He hid himself
elsewhere, and they plundered his tent. Frundsberg tried to calm them,
but was stricken with apoplexy in the course of his appeal; he
played no further part in the campaign, and died a year later. Bourbon
took command, but only by agreeing to march on Rome. On March 29 he
sent messages to Lannoy and Clement that he could not hold back his
men, and that the truce was perforce at an end.
Now at last Rome realized that it was the intended and helpless
prey. On Holy Thursday (April 8), when Clement was giving his blessing
to a crowd of 10,000 persons before St. Peter's, a fanatic clad only
in a leather apron mounted the statue of St. Paul and shouted to the
Pope: "Thou bastard of Sodom! For thy sins Rome shall be destroyed.
Repent and turn thee! If thou wilt not believe me, in fourteen days
thou shalt see." On Easter Eve this wild eremite- Bartolommeo
Carosi, called Brandano- went through the streets crying, "Rome, do
penance! They shall deal with thee as God dealt with Sodom and
Gomorrah." `052135