Sack of Rome (1527): Charles V's Mutinous Army Pillages the City

The Sack of Rome began on 6 May 1527, when the army of Emperor Charles V broke through the walls of Rome and pillaged the city for weeks. The troops, unpaid for months and leaderless after their commander was killed in the first assault, besieged Pope Clement VII in the fortress of Castel Sant’Angelo. The sack shocked Europe, crippled papal independence and is often seen as the end of the High Renaissance in Rome.

Background

The Italian Wars set France and the Habsburgs against each other for control of Italy. After imperial forces captured King Francis I at the Battle of Pavia in 1525, many Italian rulers feared that Charles V, who already ruled Spain, Naples and much of Germany, would dominate the whole peninsula.

Pope Clement VII, born Giulio de’ Medici, therefore joined France, Venice, Florence and Milan in the League of Cognac on 22 May 1526. The alliance proved weak and badly coordinated. In September 1526 the pro-imperial Colonna family raided Rome and plundered parts of the Vatican, a warning the pope did not take seriously enough.

The march on Rome

In northern Italy the imperial army included around 12,000–14,000 German landsknechts recruited by Georg von Frundsberg, many of them Lutheran sympathisers, together with Spanish and Italian troops. The emperor could not pay them. In March 1527, when the soldiers mutinied near Bologna, Frundsberg suffered a stroke while trying to restore order and had to leave the army.

Command passed to Charles III, Duke of Bourbon, the former Constable of France who had joined the emperor. Bourbon could only keep the army together by leading it towards the riches of Florence and Rome. A truce the pope agreed with the imperial viceroy in March was ignored by the troops. In late April the army, estimated at roughly 20,000–34,000 men, marched rapidly south and reached the walls of Rome on 5 May.

The assault of 6 May

Rome had few soldiers to defend it. In thick morning fog on 6 May the imperial troops attacked the walls near the Vatican and the Borgo district. Bourbon, leading the assault and easy to recognise in a white cloak, was struck by an arquebus shot and died shortly afterwards. His death removed the last commander who might have restrained the army.

The papal Swiss Guard made a stand near St Peter’s Basilica. According to the guard’s own tradition, 147 of its 189 men were killed, buying time for Clement VII to escape along the Passetto di Borgo, a raised covered passage, to Castel Sant’Angelo. Several cardinals and hundreds of others took refuge there with him.

The sack

By the evening of 6 May the troops had crossed the Tiber into the main city. For more than a week Rome was subjected to looting, killing, torture for ransom and sexual violence. Churches, palaces and monasteries were stripped, and wealthy citizens and clergy were forced to pay repeatedly for their lives.

Some soldiers mocked the papacy with religious parodies, and Lutheran landsknechts scratched graffiti into the Vatican palace. The name “Luther” can still be seen scratched into Raphael’s fresco the Disputation of the Holy Sacrament in the Stanza della Segnatura. Many works of art and manuscripts were damaged or lost, though the core of the Vatican Library survived.

Plague broke out among both the inhabitants and the occupiers in the summer of 1527. Estimates of the dead in the first days run to several thousand, and later deaths from disease and hunger were much higher. Rome’s population, perhaps about 55,000 before the sack, is commonly said to have fallen to roughly half or less, although figures from the period are uncertain.

Why the army was out of control

The imperial army was typical of the mercenary forces of the period. Soldiers were hired on contract and expected regular wages; when pay failed, they felt entitled to take what they could from the land and towns around them. By the spring of 1527 many had received little or nothing for months, and the emperor’s treasury, stretched by wars on several fronts, could not send enough money.

Religious hostility added to the violence. Many of the German landsknechts had been influenced by Luther’s attacks on the papacy and regarded Rome as a corrupt city. Spanish and Italian troops took part in the looting just as fully, however, and contemporaries recorded abuses by all groups in the army. Some imperial officers tried to protect particular palaces, often in return for payment, but no one could restore discipline over the army as a whole.

Surrender of the pope

Clement VII surrendered on 6 June 1527. He agreed to pay a ransom of 400,000 ducats and to give up several fortresses and cities of the Papal States. He remained a virtual prisoner in Castel Sant’Angelo until December 1527, when he escaped in disguise to Orvieto. The imperial army, reduced by plague and desertion, finally left Rome in February 1528.

Key people

• Clement VII (1478–1534): Medici pope whose alliance against Charles V ended in disaster.
• Charles V (1500–1558): Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain, whose army carried out the sack although he had not ordered it.
• Charles III, Duke of Bourbon (1490–1527): commander killed in the first assault.
• Georg von Frundsberg (1473–1528): landsknecht leader who raised the German troops but left the army after his stroke.
• Philibert of Chalon, Prince of Orange (1502–1530): took nominal command after Bourbon’s death.

Timeline

• 1526, 22 May: Clement VII joins the League of Cognac against Charles V.
• 1526, 20 September: The Colonna raid on Rome and the Vatican.
• 1527, March: The imperial army mutinies; Frundsberg suffers a stroke.
• 1527, 6 May: The army storms Rome; Bourbon is killed and the pope flees to Castel Sant’Angelo.
• 1527, 6 June: Clement VII surrenders.
• 1527, December: Clement escapes to Orvieto.
• 1528, February: The imperial troops leave Rome.
• 1530, 24 February: Clement VII crowns Charles V emperor in Bologna.

Consequences

The sack ended Clement VII’s attempt to resist Charles V. In the Treaty of Barcelona of 1529 pope and emperor were reconciled, and in 1530 Clement crowned Charles at Bologna. In return, imperial troops helped restore the Medici in Florence, which had expelled them in 1527, after a long siege ending in 1530.

The pope’s dependence on the emperor had consequences far beyond Italy. Henry VIII of England was seeking an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, Charles’s aunt. Clement could not afford to offend the emperor, and the failure to grant the annulment contributed to the fall of Cardinal Wolsey and to the English Reformation under Henry VIII.

Legacy

Rome’s artistic world was badly disrupted. Many painters and scholars fled, among them Parmigianino and Rosso Fiorentino, the latter later working for Francis I in France, and the confident culture of the Rome of Julius II and Leo X never fully returned. Some contemporaries interpreted the sack as divine punishment for the corruption of the Church, an idea that fed calls for reform that later influenced the Catholic Reformation.

The Swiss Guard still commemorates its stand of 6 May 1527 by swearing in new recruits on that date each year in the Vatican.

Why it matters

The Sack of Rome showed how a powerful army without pay could escape political control, with devastating results. It left the papacy dependent on the emperor at a critical moment of the Reformation, indirectly helping to set England on the path to its break with Rome.