Part 15
Bourbon's army had now arrived before the walls of Rome, and Alessandro begged me to go with him to reconnoitre. So we went with one of the stoutest fellows in our company; and on the way a youth called Cecchino della Casa joined himself to us. On reaching the walls by the Campo Santo, we could see that famous army, which was making every effort to enter the town. Upon the ramparts where we took our station, several young men were lying, killed by the besiegers; the battle raged there desperately, and there was the densest fog imaginable. I turned to Alessandro and said: "Let us go home as soon as we can, for there is nothing to be done here; you see the enemies are mounting, and our men are in flight." Alessandro, in a panic, cried, "Would God that we had never come here!" and turned in maddest haste to fly. I took him up somewhat sharply with these words: "Since you have brought me here, I must perform some action worthy of a man"; and, directing my arquebuse where I saw the thickest and most serried troop of fighting men, I aimed exactly at one whom I remarked to be higher than the rest: the fog prevented me from being certain whether he was on horseback or on foot. Then I turned to Alessandro and Cecchino, and bade them discharge their arquebuses, showing them how to avoid being hit by the besiegers. When we had fired two rounds apiece I crept cautiously up to the wall, and, observing among the enemy a most extraordinary confusion, I discovered afterward that one of our shots had killed the Constable of Bourbon; and, from what I subsequently learned, he was the man whom I had first noticed above the heads of the rest.[38]
Quitting our position on the ramparts, we crossed the Campo Santo, and entered the city by St. Peter's; then, coming out exactly at the Church of Santo Agnolo, we got with the greatest difficulty to the great gate of the castle; for the generals, Renzo di Ceri and Orazio Baglioni, were wounding and slaughtering everybody who abandoned the defence of the walls.[39]
By the time we had reached the great gate, part of the foemen had already entered Rome, and we had them in our rear. The castellan had ordered the portcullis to be lowered, in order to do which they cleared a little space, and this enabled us four to get inside. On the instant that I entered, the captain Palone de' Medici claimed me as being of the papal household and forced me to abandon Alessandro, which I had to do much against my will. I ascended to the keep, and at the same instant Pope Clement came in through the corridors into the castle; he had refused to leave the palace of St. Peter earlier, being unable to believe that his enemies would effect their entrance into Rome.[40]
Having got into the castle in this way, I attached myself to certain pieces of artillery, which were under the command of a bombardier called Giuliano Fiorentino. Leaning there against the battlements, the unhappy man could see his poor house being sacked, and his wife and children outraged; fearing to strike his own folk, he dared not discharge the cannon, and, flinging the burning fuse upon the ground, he wept as though his heart would break, and tore his cheeks with both his hands.[41]
Some of the other bombardiers were behaving in like manner; seeing which, I took one of the matches, and got the assistance of a few men who were not overcome by their emotions. I aimed some swivels and falconets at points where I saw it would be useful, and killed with them a good number of the enemy. Had it not been for this, the troops who poured into Rome that morning and were marching straight upon the castle might possibly have entered it with ease, because the artillery was doing them no damage. I went on firing under the eyes of several cardinals and lords, who kept blessing me and giving me the heartiest encouragement. In my enthusiasm I strove to achieve the impossible; let it suffice that it was I who saved the castle that morning, and brought the other bombardiers back to their duty.[42] I worked hard the whole of that day, and when the evening came--while the army was marching into Rome through Trastevere--Pope Clement appointed a great Roman nobleman named Antonio Santacroce to be a captain of all the gunners. The first thing this man did was to come to me, and, having greeted me with the utmost kindness, he stationed me with five fine pieces of artillery on the highest point of the castle, to which the name of the "Angel" specially belongs.
This circular eminence goes round the castle and surveys both Prati and the town of Rome. The captain put under my orders enough men to help in managing my guns, and, having seen me paid in advance, he gave me rations of bread and a little wine, and begged me to go forward as I had begun. I was perhaps more inclined by nature to the profession of arms than to the one I had adopted, and I took such pleasure in its duties that I discharged them better than those of my own art.
Night came, the enemy had entered Rome, and we who were in the castle--especially myself, who have always taken pleasure in extraordinary sights--stayed gazing on the indescribable scene of tumult and conflagration in the streets below. People who were anywhere else but where we were could not have formed the least imagination of what it was.
T. ADOLPHUS TROLLOPE
The combined force of Bourbon and Frundsberg was in all respects more like a rabble-rout of brigands and bandits than an army, and was assuredly such as must, even in those days, have been felt to be a disgrace to any sovereign permitting them to call themselves his soldiers. Their pay was, as was often the case with the troops of Charles V, hopelessly in arrear, and discipline was of course proportionably weak among them. Indeed, it seemed every now and then on the point of coming to an end altogether. The two generals had the greatest difficulty in preventing their army from becoming an entirely anarchical and disorganized mob of freebooters as dangerous to its masters as to everybody else. Of course food, raiment, and shelter were the first absolute essentials for keeping this dangerous mass of armed men in any degree of order and organization, and in fact the present march of Frundsberg and Bourbon had the obtaining of these necessaries for its principal and true object.
The progress southward of this bandit army unchecked by any opposing force--for Giovanni delle Bande Nere had lost his life in the attempt to prevent them from passing the Po; and after the death of that great captain, the army of the league did not muster courage to attack or impede the invaders in any way--filled the cities exposed to their inroad with terror and dismay. They had passed like a destroying locust swarm over Bologna and Imola, and crossing the Apennines, which separate Umbria from Tuscany, had descended into the valley of the Arno not far from Arezzo. Florence and Rome both trembled. On which would the storm burst? That was the all-absorbing question.
Pope Clement, with his usual avarice-blinded imbecility, had, immediately on concluding a treaty with the Neapolitan viceroy, discharged all his troops except a bodyguard of about six hundred men. Florence was nearly in as defenceless a position. She had, says Varchi, "two great armies on her territory; one that under Bourbon, which came as an enemy to sack and plunder her; and the other, that of a league, which came as a friend to protect her, but sacked and plundered her none the less." It was, however, probably the presence of this army, little as it had hitherto done to impede the progress of the enemy, which decided Bourbon eventually to determine on marching toward Rome.
It seems doubtful how far they were, in so doing, executing the orders or carrying out the wishes of the Emperor. Clement, though he had played the traitor to Charles, as he did to everyone else, and had been at war with him recently, had now entered into a treaty with the Emperor's viceroy. And apart from this there was a degree of odium and scandal attaching to the sight of the "most Catholic" Emperor sending a Lutheran army in his pay to attack the head of the Church, and ravage the venerated capital of Christendom, which so decorous a sovereign as Charles would hardly have liked to incur. Still, it may be assumed that if the Emperor wished his army kept together, and provided no sums for the purpose, he was not unwilling that they should live by plunder. And perhaps his real intention was to extort from Rome the means of paying his troops by the mere exhibition of the danger arising from their propinquity while they remained unpaid. Upon the whole we are warranted in supposing that Bourbon and Frundsberg would hardly have ventured on the course they took if they had not had reason to believe that it would not much displease their master. And Charles was exactly the sort of man who would like to have the profit of an evil deed without the loss of reputation arising from the commission of it, and who would consider himself best served by agents who could commit a profitable atrocity without being guilty of the annoying want of tact of waiting for his direct orders to commit it.
For the especial business in hand, it was impossible, moreover, to have had two more fitting agents than Bourbon and Frundsberg. It was not every knightly general in those days who would have accepted the task, even with direct orders, of marching to the sack of Rome, and the open defiance of its sacred ruler. A Florentine or a Neapolitan soldier might have had small scruple in doing so; and a Roman baron--a Colonna or an Orsini--none at all. But there would have been found few men of such mark as Bourbon, in either France or Spain, willing to undertake the enterprise he was now engaged in. The unfortunate Constable, however, was a disgraced and desperate man. He was disgraced in the face of Europe by unknightly breach of fealty to his sovereign, despite the intensity of the provocation which had driven him to that step. For all the sanctions which held European society together, in the universal bondage which alone then constituted social order, were involved in maintaining the superstition that so branded him. And he was a desperate man in his fortunes; for though no name in all Europe was at that day as great a military power at the head of a host as that of Bourbon, and though the miserable bearer of it had so shortly before been one of the wealthiest and largest territorial nobles of France, yet the Constable had now his sword for his fortune as barely as the rawest lad in the rabble-rout that followed him, sent out from some landless tower of an impoverished knight, in half-starved Galicia or poverty-stricken Navarre, to carve his way in the world.
Even among those whose ranks he had joined, Bourbon was a disgraced and ruined man beyond redemption. Although his well-known military capacity had easily induced Charles to welcome and make use of him, he must have felt that the step he had taken in breaking his allegiance and abandoning his country had rendered him an outcast and almost a pariah in the estimation of the chivalry of Europe. The feeling he had awakened against himself throughout Christendom is strikingly illustrated by an anecdote recorded of his reception at Madrid. When, shortly after winning the battle of Pavia, Bourbon went thither to meet Charles, and the Marquis of Villane was requested to lodge the victorious general in his palace, the haughty Spaniard told the Emperor that his house and all that he possessed were at his sovereign's disposition, but that he should assuredly burn it down as soon as Bourbon was out of it; since, having been sullied by the presence of a renegade, it could no longer be a fitting residence for a man of honor.
So low had Bourbon fallen! Every man's hand was raised against him, and his hand was against every man. And it is easy to conceive what must have been his tone of mind and feeling, as he led on his mutinous robber-rout to Rome, while men of all parties looked on in panic-stricken horror. Thus Bourbon led his unpaid and mutinous hordes to a deed which, none knew better than he, would shock and scandalize all Europe, as a man who, having fallen already so low as to have lost all self-respect, cares not in his reckless despair to what depth he plunges.
As for Frundsberg, he was a mere soldier of fortune, whose world was his camp, whose opinions and feelings had been formed in quite another school from those of his fellow-general; whose code of honor and of morals was an entirely different one, and whose conscience was not only perfectly at rest respecting the business he was bound on, but approved of it as a good and meritorious work for the advancement of true religion. He carried round his neck a halter of golden tissue, we are told, with which he loudly boasted that he would hang the Pope as soon as he got to Rome; and had others of crimson silk at his saddle-bow, which he said were destined for the cardinals!
Too late Clement became aware of the imminence and magnitude of the danger that threatened him and the capital of Christendom. He besought the Neapolitan viceroy, who had already signed a treaty with him, as has been seen, to exert himself and use his authority to arrest the southward march of Bourbon's army. And it is remarkable that this representative of the Emperor in the government of Naples did, as it would seem, endeavor earnestly to avert the coming avalanche from the Eternal City. But, while the Emperor's viceroy used all his authority and endeavors to arrest the advance of the Emperor's army, the Emperor's generals advanced and sacked Rome in spite of him. Which of them most really acted according to the secret wishes of that profound dissembler, and most false and crafty monarch, it is impossible to know. It may have been that Bourbon himself had no power to stay the plundering, bandit-like march of his hungry and unpaid troops. And the facts recorded of the state of discipline of the army are perfectly consistent with such a supposition.
The Viceroy sent a messenger to Bourbon, while he was yet in Bologna, informing him of the treaty signed with Clement, and desiring him therefore to come no farther southward. Bourbon, bent, as Varchi says, on deceiving both the Pope and the Viceroy, replied that, if the Pope would send him two hundred thousand florins for distribution to the army, he would stay his march. But, while this answer was carried back to Rome, the tumultuous host continued its fearfully menacing advance; and the alarm in Rome was rapidly growing to desperate terror. At the Pope's earnest request, the Viceroy, "who knew well," says Varchi, "that his holiness had not a farthing," himself took post and rode hard for Florence with letters from Clement, hoping to obtain the money there.
The departure of the Viceroy in person, and the breathless haste of his ride to Florence, speak vividly of this Spanish officer's personal anxiety respecting the dreadful fate which threatened Rome. But the Florentines do not seem to have been equally impressed with the necessity of losing no time in making an effort to avert the calamity from a rival city. It was after "much talking," we are told, that they at last consented to advance a hundred fifty thousand florins, eighty thousand in cash down, and the remainder by the end of October. It was now April; and Bourbon had by this time crossed the Apennines, and was with his army on the western slopes of the mountains, not far from the celebrated monastery of Lavernia. Thither the Viceroy hurried with all speed, accompanied by only two servants and a trumpeter; and having "with much difficulty," says Varchi, come to speech with the general, proffered him the eighty thousand florins. Upon which he was set upon by the tumultuous troops, and "narrowly escaped being torn in pieces by them." In endeavoring to get away from them and make his way back to Florence, he fell into the hands of certain peasants near Camaldoli, and was here again in danger of his life, and was wounded in the head. He was, however, rescued by a monk of Vallombrosa, and by him conducted to the neighboring little town of Poppi in the Casentino, or upper valley of the Arno, whence he made his way to Siena, and so back to Rome, with no pleasant tidings of what might be expected from Bourbon and his brigand army.
The Vallombrosan monk, who thus bestead the Viceroy at his need, was, as Varchi records, rewarded by the bishopric of Muro, in the kingdom of Naples, which, adds the historian, "he still holds."
The fate of Rome was no longer doubtful. Clement, who by his pennywise parsimony had left himself defenceless, made a feeble and wholly vain attempt to put the city in a state of defence. The corrupt and cowardly citizens could not have opposed any valid resistance to the ruffian hordes who were slowly but surely, like an advancing conflagration, coming upon them, even if they had been willing to do their best. But the trembling Pope's appeal to them to defend the walls fell on the ears of as sorely trembling men, each thinking only of the possible chances of saving his own individual person. Yet it seems clear that means of defence might have been found had not the Pope been thus paralyzed by terror.
Clement, however, was as one fascinated. Martin du Bellay tells us that he himself, then in Italy as ambassador from Francis I, hurried to Rome, and warned the Pope of his danger in abundant time for him to have prepared for the protection of the city by the troops he had at his disposal. But no persuasion availed to induce Clement to take any step for that purpose. Neither would he seek safety by flight, nor permit his unfortunate subjects to do so. John da Casale, ambassador of Henry VIII at Venice, writes thence to Wolsey on May 16th--the fatal tidings of the sack of the city having just reached Venice--as follows: "He"--Clement--"refused to quit the city for some safer place. He even forbade by edict that anyone should carry anything out of the gates on pain of death, though many were anxious to depart and carry their fortunes elsewhere." Meantime Florence, for her own protection, had hastily induced Francesco Maria, Duke of Urbino, to place himself at the head of the remaining forces of the Italian league, and to take up a position at Incisa, a small town in the Upper Valdarno, about twenty miles from the city, on the road to Arezzo. Thus the torrent was turned off from the capital of the commonwealth. Probably as soon as the invading army once found itself to the south of Florence, that wealthy city was in no immediate danger. Rome was metal more attractive to the invaders, even had there not been an army between them and Florence.
And now it became frightfully clear that the doom of the Eternal City was at hand. On came the strangely heterogeneous rout of lawless soldiery, leaving behind them a trail of burned and ruined cities, devastated fields, and populations plague-stricken from the contamination engendered by the multitude of their unburied dead.
On May 5th Bourbon arrived beneath the walls of Rome. During the last few days the unhappy Pope had endeavored to arm what men he could get together under Renzo di Ceri and one Horatius--not Cocles, unhappily--but Baglioni. "Rome contained within her walls," says Ranke, "some thirty thousand inhabitants capable of bearing arms. Many of these men had seen service. They wore swords by their sides, which they had used freely in their broils among each other, and then boasted of their exploits. But to oppose the enemy, who brought with him certain destruction, five hundred men were the utmost that could be mustered within the city. At the first onset the Pope and his forces were overthrown." On the evening of May 6th the city was stormed and given over to the unbridled cupidity and brutality of the soldiers, who during many a long day of want and hardship had been looking forward to the hour that was to repay them amply for all past sufferings by the boundless gratification of every sense, and every caprice of lawless passion. Bourbon himself had fallen in the first moments of the attack, as he was leading his men to scale the walls, and any small influence that he might have exerted in moderating the excesses of the conquerors was thus at an end.
It does not fall within the scope of the present narrative to attempt any detailed account of the days and scenes that followed. They have been described by many writers; and the reader who bears in mind what Rome was--her vileness, her cowardice, her imbecility, her wealth, her arts, her monuments, her memories, her helpless population of religious communities of both sexes, and the sacred character of her high places and splendors, which served to give an additional zest to the violence of triumphant heretics--he that bears in mind all these things may safely give the reign to his imagination without any fear of overcharging the picture. Frundsberg had been wont to boast that if ever he reached Rome he would hang the Pope. He never did reach it, having been carried off by a fit of apoplexy while striving to quell a mutiny among his troops shortly after leaving Bologna on his southward march. But the threat is sufficiently indicative of the spirit that animated his army, to show that Clement owed his personal safety only to the strength of the castle of St. Angelo, in which he sought refuge.