In Our Time - The Sack of Rome 1527

Episode Date: March 21, 2024

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the infamous assault of an army of the Holy Roman Emperor on the city of Rome in 1527. The troops soon broke through the walls of this holy city and, with their leader shot dead early on, they brought death and destruction to the city on an epic scale. Later writers compared it to the fall of Carthage or Jerusalem and soon the mass murder, torture, rape and looting were followed by disease which was worsened by starvation and opened graves. It has been called the end of the High Renaissance, a conflict between north and south, between Lutherans and Catholics, and a fulfilment of prophecy of divine vengeance and, perhaps more persuasively, a consequence of military leaders not feeding or paying their soldiers other than by looting. WithStephen Bowd Professor of Early Modern History at the University of EdinburghJessica Goethals Associate Professor of Italian at the University of AlabamaAnd Catherine Fletcher Professor of History at Manchester Metropolitan UniversityProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list:Stephen Bowd, Renaissance Mass Murder: Civilians and Soldiers during the Italian Wars (Oxford University Press, 2018)Benvenuto Cellini, Autobiography (Penguin Classics, 1999)Benvenuto Cellini (trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella), My Life (Oxford University Press, 2009)André Chastel (trans. Beth Archer), The Sack of Rome 1527 (Princeton University Press, 1983Catherine Fletcher, The Beauty and the Terror: An Alternative History of the Italian Renaissance (Bodley Head, 2020)Kenneth Gouwens and Sheryl E. Reiss (eds), The Pontificate of Clement VII: History, Politics, Culture (Routledge, 2005)Francesco Guicciardini (trans. Sidney Alexander), The History of Italy (first published 1561; Princeton University Press, 2020)Luigi Guicciardini (trans. James H. McGregor), The Sack of Rome (first published 1537; Italica Press, 2008)Judith Hook, The Sack of Rome (2nd edition, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)Geoffrey Parker, Emperor: A New Life of Charles V (Yale University Press, 2019)

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. This is in 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 can find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoyed the programme. Hello, in 1527, an army of the Holy Roman Emperor

broke through the wars 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 opened 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, Stephen Bauer, Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Edinburgh. Jessica Gathels, 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? Well, there's a description of this time which says the whole world was now at war, and that comes from Benvenu to Chilini, who's a goldsmith, who I'm sure we're going going to come back to. Chilini. Chilini, yes. And 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, 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. So that's most of Germany in Austria, what's now known as the Netherlands, the low countries. And his troops are facing off against almost everybody else. So that would be the Papal States, France, Venice, because the other side has got very, very nervous about just how well, Charles. Charles has been doing in this conflict for control of north and central Italy. It's a 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. That was a Pavia, yeah. 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 does it take for them? He had enough land because they had the overseas holdings as well, didn't it? The Spain was conquering the world at that time. I mean, that's a naive question, but you'll give me a brilliant answer. 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.

not going to block trade with tariffs who are going to lend him money, who are going to be generally friendly. I mean, 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 Prince Leonor and winning wars is still very important. I mean, at Pevere, Francis I first, 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. Did the word holy mean much to him? 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 is quite a lot of conflict between the princes of this empire over how the new religion is going to work out. There's a lot of discussion about Catholic reform, the proprieties of religion at this time. Charles Fitt is a pious man. 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? 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, 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 Fernand 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 altogether and united 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 having Charles is going to get pinged for these expectations. So the Italian wars begin in 1494 with a figure of Charles VIII from France and he's circled by these apocalyptic expectations. Charles V is no exception. And part of the second Charlene prophecy is that the reunification of the Christian world will come in part through the destruction of cities like Florence and Rome before 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 Gatinaara, who is pushing these discussions about the kind of apocalyptic or Christian unification agenda that could be beneficial to them. On the other hand, we have a figure like Clement the 7th, 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. Pope Clement the 7th 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? 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 is anti-Medici conspiracy, and he's brought into the inner fold of the rest of the family. His cousin will become Pope Leo the 10th in 1513, and he will rise to a cardinalship in that period. And so between the papacy of his cousin, Leo, the 10th and his own, there is, for the perspective of Roman artists and intellectuals, somewhat disappointing a year and a half, where we have the papacy of Adrian VI, who is a Dutchman, who doesn't share the same enthusiasm for largesse in terms of patronage. And so Clement the 7th rival 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. Thank you very much.

Stephen Bowdo. So there's Rome. Charles is on his way. How well prepared was Rome for this attack? I think he was slightly taken by surprise. I think there seems to be, there's some divided views about how well prepared Rome was. Clement does call up the sort of civic, local civic guards. and so on.

Are they any good? The mixed report, some saying these are sort of people who are 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. Why is that?

No money had been spent. Why no money had been spent? 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 and Rome. Well, that's more Medici's. Yes, there's a lot of them in Rome at this time, of course, and they all want a slice of the action. So he wasn't very well prepared for an attack by a hungry army, literally hungry.

because he wouldn't pay them, Charles wouldn't pay them and he wouldn't feed them. So they wanted some of whether they could loot and feed. Clement and his supporters expected to be the imperialist to be deflected on the way or bought off. And he does try to come sort of some sort of agreement with Charles and buy them off. They arrive and they break into the city early on. It's the 5th of May. It's the 5th. The night of the 5th going on to the 6th.

and they break in to one of the, I think it's at Santa Apostoli, 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 backguard, basically a Cardinal's back garden, and they're clambering over and ladders. And they find a city which is shrouded in mist, 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. And they found loot, which is their way of paying themselves. You seize what you can resell it or melt it or melt it down. You take people ransom, and you torture them or hold them captive until their families cough up with the ransom. Have the only idea of the numbers involved?

I mean, this, this, Imperial Army was pretty tough. I think the estimates about 20,000 at the Imperial Army. Obviously, these estimates of how many vary, but that's one estimate I've heard. Catherine. 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 brought off to be private bodyguards. So Cardinals, that's

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 not very 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. 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 1517 had changed

the map, religious and an emotional map of Europe. Charles was determined to develop his empire. Did those two things coalesce? Did something else turn up? What was happening? It's interesting. I mean, the report, Contemporary reports suggest that the Spanish, the Spaniards are the worst. They were part of their empire. They were part of the Imperial Army, part of this global imperial army, as it were. So the Spanish were the worst than the Germans. So I hesitate to say that they're not being driven by the religious, heretical reformation ideas in the same way.

Although, of course, many Catholics were very looked upon the Pope as corrupt. The Pope in Rome is corrupt. for his own benefit. That had been going on for a long time. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But they hadn't assembled enough force to prove the corruption could be something they could dislodge, had they? No.

There hadn't been, not since 1084. 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? After the fact, there's a great account given of Charles de Bourbon's speech to the troops the night before.

This is written up by Luigi Guichardini, 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, is people, the troops are starving. That's one way of justifying the sack. Gwit Hadidi's version of Chardabot, Bobin, also has him promising them wealth from the new world. You know, you're all going to be dressed in golden armour.

This is money, you know, just after the conquest of Mexico. Just a second, did he say that and did they believe it? Well, the words you used. We don't quite know what. It's interesting, isn't it? We don't know exactly what they believed. But certainly this is something that's written up in these accounts. And he does mention Luther.

Again, in the Gwitjardini 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 mum. mind, I don't think we can tell that from the sources that we have. And Grichidine is a fairly reliable scholar of the Times, isn't he? 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 criticise 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. So they're in the city, Jessica, and they're on the ramping. really. They're looking for food and wealth and they're prepared to dig up graze

and 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? Yes, 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 Benvenu to Chenlini 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 the 7th had taken refuge along with a couple thousand other people, prominent cardinals. There was actually a secret tunnel from the Vatican to the Castelladaiso, isn't that? Well, there is a connection but there's also a

passageway that is above ground and at least by contemporary Roman 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 Castas Sant'Angelo, and one of the cardinals in his companionship throws this cloak over the head of the Pope to help disguise which of the figure is

racing for safety it was. Chilini, this artist, describes himself as on the ramparts, of the fortress, the Casa Zandangelo, 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. As a sniper, as a sniper sort, yes. He's, you know, but Chalini is,

he writes later an autobiography, and he presents himself in very swashbuckling, daring to 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 into. But he also describes this as a kind of spectacle of sorts to get back to that question, something that had never been seen before, that he presents is almost something that supports 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 different, 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, Clement had signed a truce that was maybe done in bad faith on the imperial side. And so it 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 Tastever, from the area of the Vatican, They did not cut the bridges. They connect that port 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, the descriptions of the time described 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 the 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 to 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.

Can I come to Stephen now? Thank you very much. See, I'm afraid I'm going to ask you to do the gory stuff. Can you tell listeners, what happened was spectacularly gruesome, terrible? Can you just hold your nose and do this? Yes, I mean, just to set the context, I mean, a lot of these soldiers would have had some experience of science, This is not their first gig, as it were, sacking and massacring. And 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. eat them roasted whilst their family might be watching as a way of trying to encourage them to reveal the location of their wealth and so on. But this is, we hear reports of this and other accounts and indeed in modern atrocities as well, similar accounts. 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? Yes, so for example, you know, cardinals or bishops humiliated in the street are forced to put on ridiculous costumes or stripped naked and attacked and tortured in the street in front of people. I think 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 golden 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 centre of Christendom. And that's why it feels so much worse to everybody. involved in sacking any other city. Jessica, do you want to come in? 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 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. Yeah, and I think it's 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 Andrews, St Andrew, for example, is taken out of its holy place and kicked around or tossed around. So there's these kind of sacrilegic... How long were this going for weeks, months, days? What was it?

So you've got a week of intense sacking and then the army digests at 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 organising 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... been unfair to the Spanish, but we should also say that, obviously, the German lands connects, the German soldiers were involved, but we also have these incredible documents where Spanish soldiers who are obviously in some sort of fit of guilt or a feeling of, you know, endangering their souls through those 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

sell, give back some of the loot they take. So I just wanted to not BBC balance, but just to try and speak on behalf of them and something that way. Balance is some word that doesn't play in this conversation. Jessica, do you want to come in on this?

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 to. 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 Desti, for example, who's a powerful woman to the north, is their president in the city. 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 other kind of quote-unquote foreign invasions. Was there a sense that the great art that was in Rome suffered from this?

Did it get destroyed? I just wanted to mention briefly that there is direct, I mean, there's direct evidence that some of these landsnakes going in and graffiti in the Raphael rooms in the... I see when you're looking skeptical. I've always fonded about this. 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? Well, you're the ones to tell me, I don't know.

I'm asking Jessica and Catholic. I mean, I 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 Lansnecks. 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. And, you know, we have these examples, one example of the word Luther scratched into the Saladella Senatura 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 perhaps another question. Is it true that the horses were stable in the Sistine Chapel? Yes, that's my, yes, that's my understanding. Yeah. But the library is saved. The head, the commander who replaces Bourbon shot down supposedly by Chalini or lots of people probably claiming they did it. He's headquartered in the Vatican by the near the library. It's saved.

And this event is saccharam. Actually, Michelangelo's working before it and quite soon after the first few weeks he's back at work again. Is that right? Well, Michelangelo at this point is in Florence, not in Rome, but he will be coming back shortly thereafter to work on the last judgment. But 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 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 that 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. His name is Sebastian Adel Pionbo.

He had been present during the sack. He's a disciple of sorts of Michael Angelo and one of the favorites of the Pope Clement, the seventh. And he has a rather famous letter that he sends to Michael Landre 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 work, marks is to redo his sorry attempts to patch over these gouges, these from, you know, 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 to them 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 collegio, 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. 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 the 8th delegation is flapping around room trying to get the papers in his hand so you can have a divorce. Well, it takes quite a long time for the news to get to England. In fact, it takes several weeks further than use to get to England. So unbeknownst to Henry VIII and Cardinal Wulsey 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 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 decides 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 Woolsey 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. Thank you. Jessica, what was being written about the sack just after the time? I mean, it seems like weeks that got to England, but in other places as well. What was happened when did people say terrible things happening in Rome, go and help,

or terrible things that's happening in Rome, let's make our walls stronger. What happened? Tremendous amounts of material is being written about this event. It's helpful to remember that we're before the air 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 away very quickly all across Italy, the Italian Peninsula, and across Europe. And what are they saying about it? A lot of them are factual descriptions of what happened, but a good number of these are focusing on catalogs of horrors, focusing especially on things that seem particularly shocking within a Christian audience. So the widespread rape of nuns, the destruction of relatives. 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 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, one case that I find particularly striking is by the so-called scourge of princes. This is a writer named Pietro Aratino 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 a newlywed couple slain in their bed,

babies who were drinking more blood than milk from their mother's breasts, women who were assaulted 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, is 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 kinds of things. And so he takes, Aratino 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 in including nuns in pornographic positions in his poetry, and describes this as something for laughter. There'll be a tremendous amount of writing on this subject, even 100 years after the fact. We have everything from kind of history writing like Luigi Gricardini's history that Catherine mentioned before, and his more famous brother, Francesco Gwichardini, writes quite a lot, especially because he was one of the generals in charge with defending the papacy and in a more private set of writings that we, 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 cause, 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 Lingenati, 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 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 12th night.

Can I come back to you, Steve? What effected this, what we've been hearing? Did he spread around Europe? How terrible things have happened? This must never happen again. God is reeking mentions on this city of too much wealth and too much lost? 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, the Luther and his followers, are, see this as a just punishment on a, yeah, on a corrupt city. It's been thought it, it's been called the end of the High Renaissance. Do you go along with that?

I'm not sure. seen as the end of a Clementine, sometimes seen as the end of a particular Clementine Renaissance, or I think it's also seen as end of Renaissance papacy. The idea of the 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. Did anybody except Isabel Adesda

come out of this with an enhanced reputation. Well, she came out with a poor reputation actually. I mean, she protected people. Yeah, she certainly protected people. Well, that's quite a big thing to do. But then she was also accused, as Catherine said, of spiriting off the Raphael's

tapestries. And she says that she was going to... She said she was looking after it and she was going to offer it for resale back to the Pope. I'm very much but there was a lot of eyebrows raised about this claim. Let's be serious about it. I think she's She played, given what was going on, she played a very good part.

Yeah, no, absolutely. She played a good part. And there was 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 sacrilege and so. There is a wonderful abyss, 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, we lost everything, but then we did not lose honour, so nothing is lost?

And that's as far as you can reach in your examples, is it? In terms of people who came well out of it. Well, yes, you have to look quite hard for people who didn't came out of this well. Okay. Catherine, can you talk about the political consequences of this act in the following decades? I think, I mean, immediately there's a whole long period when Clement the 7th 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 sort of the beginning of the end of the land wars in Italy,

which Charles is effectively going on to win. So 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 piece. That's what's known as the Ladies' Peace negotiated respectively by his aunt and the mother of the King of France. And so the political consequences really are that the empire wins.

these land wars in Italy. In effect, they managed to get friendly princes in power across quite a large chunk of the north. The papal state is very badly weakened. It takes, Sir Paul III, who's the successor to Clement the 7th, 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 there's a huge human cost to this, both inside Rome and outside in the countryside. 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 Trasdavory around 2000. 2000. Suggestions that, I mean, these figures, I always reduced by a factor of 10 with these figures. That's my hunch. You mean 10 or 10%? by factor by 10th, yeah, well, or 10%, yeah, 10%

and 9,000 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 to spread the disease, never mention, not to mention all the other bodies lying everywhere, helps to spread disease, and that causes a lot of deaths obviously amongst the Imperial Army

as well as amongst the Romans. So there's that huge cost. We don't know 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. 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? If we go back to that question of who benefits or who comes out well from the sac 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 Saccharof Rome are other cities that see themselves as new Rome.

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 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. Marks, the St. Marks that we see today was largely reworked by Jacobus Santovino, 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's a great movement of figures to the city of Venice.

And so Sanzovina redid St. Mark's Square. And so the city that we see now is a city that is rebuilt in the aftermath of the SAC. So Rome lies in ruins and Venice is surging. Finally, Stephen. It's also worth pointing out that France and the Empire are once again at war within seven years of the ladies' peace. So it's not the final stop on that rivalry and that. But nevertheless, it does establish imperial hegemony, you know, over Italy, over large parts of Italy. It allows Clement 7th, the Medici Pope to establish his family in Florence after a bit of a revolution there during this period when he's weak.

And it allows the Mediterranean to be set up as dukes and then grandjuks of Tuscany for the next several hundred years. So the Medici come out, the Medici win. Well, thank you all very much. That was very, I enjoyed that in an awful lot. Thanks to Jesse Gethels, Catherine Fletcher and Stephen Bowdo 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. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

I start this off by saying if each of you could say what you wish you had said but didn't. enough time to say in the programs. Let's start with you, Jessica. I think one thing that's remarkable is that we talk about the Saga 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 we're 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 the we'd associate with a Julius Caesar. And I wonder 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. Stephen. I think like Jessica, I'm fascinated by the individual experiences, people in Rome on the ground, that kind of lived experience or experience of death. And one of the groups I'm interested are the Jews in Rome. And 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. That's also an anti-Spanish prejudice because there's this sort of the history of Spain as having large Jewish and Muslim populations feed. 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, a piece of paper at 100 metres, 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 kind of the way that memory works is going to be to, you know, when it happens when it works out, I think those are going to be the things that stick in the mind. So we're talking more about lucky shots than accurate shooting here. And Chalini is someone who really loves, from it, 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. He is quite a serious shooter. So he also goes out and he shoots wildfowl. So if you're 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. Well, thank you all very much indeed. I enjoyed that very much indeed. Does anyone want to your coffee? Melvin? I'll have a little coffee, please. Coffee? I'll have coffee as well. Two coffees. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Hi, I'm Marianna 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. 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 of understanding even forgiveness is ever possible. Listen to Why Do You Hate Me on BBC Sounds.