Sack of Rome

Sack of Rome, an attack on the city of Rome on May 6, 1527, by the forces of the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain, Charles V. Charles’s victory over the French at Pavia in 1525 had left his armies dominant in Italy. After ravaging the countryside, Charles’s forces stormed the city of Rome and embarked on an orgy of destruction and massacre, terrorizing the population and humiliating Pope Clement VII.

Pope Clement had unwisely formed an alliance, the League of Cognac, to challenge Charles’s supremacy in Italy. Rome was not, however, attacked on the emperor’s orders, but on the initiative of imperial troops angry at not being paid. These ragged and hungry soldiers, including German Landsknecht mercenaries and Spanish infantry, mutinied and marched on Rome, under the command of renegade French aristocrat the Duke of Bourbon.

The walls of Rome were poorly defended, the city’s garrison numbering only 8,000 men, including the 2,000-strong Swiss Guard. Among other defenders was the artist and goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini, whose Autobiography recounts his shooting two noblemen among the invaders. On May 6, the rebellious imperial army launched an assault in the face of cannon and arquebus fire. The Duke of Bourbon was shot dead, but the men he had led swept into the city, killing everyone in sight, armed or not. The Swiss Guards fought bravely to defend St. Peter’s Basilica and created enough delay to allow Pope Clement to escape down a tunnel into the fortress of Castel Sant’Angelo. There he was besieged while the city was laid waste. The Protestant Landsknecht, recently converted to Lutheranism, felt particular hatred for Catholic Rome and its idolatrous Renaissance treasures—they stabled horses in St. Peter’s—but the Catholic Spanish equaled them in cruelty and destructiveness. In the end, it is estimated that half of Rome’s population died, either as a direct result of violence or in the famine and epidemics that followed, or fled from the city.

Clement surrendered in June, agreeing to pay a huge ransom and cede substantial territory to Charles V, who, although embarrassed by the brutal conduct of his troops, was happy to accept the advantage he had gained.

The sack of Rome shocked Europe and for decades afterward was a byword for wanton brutality, just as it took Rome decades to rebuild. The event can be understood as an episode in the then growing war between the Catholic Church and the forces of the Protestant Reformation, one that raged for nearly two centuries. It is also considered to mark the end of the Renaissance in Italy.

Losses: Roman, 1,000 Swiss Guards and 25,000 civilian casualties; Holy Roman Empire, unknown.