1523-6

Clement VII and his counsellors

23

himself; he lost courage at once and let go the rudder." Guicciardini too complains of Giulio's faintheartedness, vacillation, and indecision as the chief source of his misfortune. This indecision kept him wavering between the counsels of the two men, in whom from the beginning of his reign he placed his confidence; one belonging to the French faction, the other to that of the Emperor. One was like himself a bastard, Giammatteo Giberti, rightly valued by all his contemporaries for his piety, honesty, and insight. He took an active part in the foundation. of the Order of the Theatines (1524) by the pious Gaetano da Thiene, afterwards canonised, in company with Caraffa. He was appointed Datary by Clement, and afterwards Bishop of Verona. Gaspare Contarini, writing in 1530, says that he was on more intimate terms with the Pope than were any of his other counsellors, and that in politics he worked in the French interest. He left the Court in 1527 to retire to his bishopric, which he made a model of good government. In Verona he founded. a learned society and a Greek printing-press, which published good editions of the Fathers of the Church. Paul III summoned him to Rome several times; it was on his way back that he died in 1543. The Emperor's interests were represented by Clement's other counsellor, Nikolaus von Schomberg, of Meissen, in Saxony. On the occasion of a journey to Italy in 1497, carried away by the preaching of Savonarola in Pisa, he had joined the same monastery. Later, scorned by the populace as a Judas, he had gone over to the party of the Medici, was summoned to Rome as Professor of Theology by Leo X, created Archbishop of Capua in 1520, and often entrusted with diplomatic missions, in which capacity Giulio came to know and value him. Contarini speaks well of him, but evidently only half trusted him. Schomberg received the Cardinal's hat from Paul III in 1534, and died in 1537.

Clement's accession had at once brought about a political change in favour of France. The Pope's policy wavered long between the King and the Emperor; weak towards both of them, undecided, and on occasion faithless enough. On January 5, 1525, he himself announced to the Emperor the conclusion of his treaty with Francis I. The Battle of Pavia, the greatest military event of the sixteenth century (February 24, 1525), made Charles V master of Italy and Francis I his prisoner. By April I Clement had made his peace with the Emperor, but soon began to intrigue and tried to form a league against him with Venice, Savoy, Ferrara, Scotland, Hungary, Portugal, and other States; this was mainly the work of Giberti. At this time the bold plan of a League of Freedom, which was to claim the independence of Italy from foreign Powers, was formed by Girolamo Morone; Pescara, the husband of Vittoria Colonna, the real victor at Pavia, was to stand at its head. The conspiracy in which Clement on his own confession (see his letter to Charles V of June 23, 1526) had taken part, was betrayed by Pescara himself; at his instigation Morone named the Pope as the

이

24

Clement VII and Italian politics

[1525-9 originator of the offers made to Pescara. The veil of secrecy still covers both Pescara's action- Guicciardini characterised it as eterna infamiaand his early death, which occurred on March 30, 1525. The Emperor freely expressed his opinion of the Pope's faithlessness (September 17, 1526). On May 22, 1526, Clement concluded the Holy League of Cognac with Francis, who had returned to France at the beginning of March, his captivity over. This brought on open war with the Emperor, the attack on Rome by the Colonna (September 20), the plundering of the Borgo, the march of the Imperial troops against Rome under the command of Bourbon, the storming of the part of the city named after Leo in which Bourbon fell (May 6, 1527), the flight of the Pope to the Castle of St Angelo, and finally the storming of Rome and the sack which followed it ; cruel and revolting to all Christian feeling, it remains to this day a memory of terror for all Italians. No Guiscard appeared this time, as in the days of Gregory VII, to save the beleaguered Pope. On June 5, 1527, he was forced to capitulate, yield the fortress and give himself up to the mercy of the Emperor. When a prisoner and deprived of all his means, Clement bade Cellini melt down his tiara, a symbol of his own position; for the whole temporal power of the Papacy lay at the feet of the Emperor, who could abolish it if he chose. We know that this policy was suggested to him: we know also that Charles had serious thoughts of utilising the position of the Pope for an ecclesiastical reformation, and forcing him to summon the General Council, which all sides demanded. But France and England declared they would recognise no Council until the Pope was set free again, and the Spanish clergy also petitioned for the release of the Head of the Church. Once more the Imperial troops returned to Rome from their summer quarters, and in September, 1527, the city was once more sacked. Veyre arrived as the Emperor's agent to offer Clement freedom on condition of neutrality, a general peace, and the promotion of reform by means of a Council. The agreement was signed on November 26; but on December 8 the Pope escaped to Orvieto, whence on June 1, 1528, he removed to Viterbo. The war proved disastrous for France; Lautrec's defeats, his death by plague (August 15), the terrible state of Italy, which was now but one vast battlefield strewn with corpses, induced Clement at last to side with the Emperor. On October 8, 1528, he returned horror-stricken to halfburnt, starving Rome. Harried by the plague, her population diminished by one-half; her importance for the literary and artistic life of humanity had been for ever marred by the awful events of the year 1527. Those of her artists and learned men who had not fled were maltreated and robbed during the Sack: those that were left were beggars and had to seek their bread elsewhere. Erasmus wrote to Sadoleto (October 1, 1528) that not the city, but the world had perished, and that the present sufferings of Rome were more cruel than those brought on her by the Goths and the Gauls. From Carpentras in 1529 Sadoleto wrote

1529-32]

Clement VII and the Emperor Charles V

25

a mournful letter to Colocci, in which he speaks of past glories a letter aptly called by Gregorovius the swan's song, the farewell to the cheerful world of humanist times.

Clement's participation in the league against Charles and the Empire had favoured the spread of the Lutheran Reformation in Germany. Unwittingly the Pope had become Luther's best ally at the very moment when for Catholicism everything depended on strengthening the Emperor's opposition to the Reformation, which had the hour in its favour. Even after the Sack the Pope was not chiefly concerned for the preservation and improvement of the Church, or for the reparation of the evil done to Rome. What absorbed his attention were the dynastic interests of his own House, which had once more been expelled from Florence, and the restoration of the Papal State. The Emperor could have ended the Temporal Power with a stroke of the pen had he not feared the immense influence of the clergy and the threatening voice of the Inquisition, which did not hesitate to cross the threshold even of the most mighty. Charles needed the Pope, since a lasting enmity with him would have cut the ground from under his feet both in Spain and Germany. He needed him in order to keep his hold on Italy, and by his influence to divide the League. And so the Treaty of Barcelona was brought about (June 29, 1529), whereby the Emperor acknowledged the power of Sforza in Milan, gave the Papal State back to the Pope, undertook to restore Florence to the Medici by force of arms, and as a pledge of friendship to give his illegitimate daughter Margaret to Alessandro de' Medici. The Imperial coronation was moreover to take place in Italy. The "Ladies' Peace" of Cambray (August 5, 1529) confirmed Spanish rule in Italy. Clement crowned Charles Emperor on February 24, 1530, in Bologna, having come thither with sixteen Cardinals. The Emperor left for the diet at Augsburg on June 15. The Pope returned to Rome on April 9; and on August 12 Florence fell after a heroic death-struggle, burying the honour of the Pope in its fall, since he had not hesitated to hand over the freedom of his native town to his family. The republican constitution of the town was formally annulled on April 27, 1532, and Alessandro de' Medici was proclaimed Duke of Florence.

Clement VII is said to have sighed during the siege: "Oh that Florence had never existed!" The Papacy itself, as well as its representative in that time, had good reason to utter this cry; for the fall of the Republic brought about by the Pope and accomplished by the Emperor and his bands of foreign mercenaries, joined the Papacy henceforth to all movements inimical to the freedom and unity of Italy. It delivered over Italy and the Church to the idea of an ecclesiastico-political despotism native to Spain; it severed the bond which in the Middle Ages had kept Rome in touch with the national aims of the Italian people. In December, 1532, Emperor and Pope met once more in Bologna in order to conclude an Italian league. At the same moment

26

Marriage of Catharine de' Medici

[1532-3 Clement was negotiating with France, who did her utmost to draw the Papacy from the embrace of Spain. Francis I proposed the marriage of his second son Henry with Catharine, daughter of Lorenzo de' Medici the younger, and did his very best to help Clement to prevent an assemblage of the Council, as we now know from the disclosures of Antonio Soriano. The marriage of Catharine de' Medici, through whom her House attained to royal honour, was celebrated with great solemnity at Marseilles in October, 1533. Clement himself had come to witness the triumph of his family in the person of his great-niece. The young girl, scarcely more than a child, whom he handed over to the royal House of France, proved a terrible gift to the land; for some thirty-eight years later she contrived the Massacre of St Bartholomew. The jewels which Filippo Strozzi counted over to the French as forming part of the dowry of the little princess, Genoa, Milan, Naples, - never came into the possession of France, and Henry was forced in the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis to yield all the gains of the French policy of annexation in Italy.

Clement was back in Rome by December 10, 1533, and in the following March annulled Thomas Cranmer's declaration that the marriage of Henry VIII with his cousin Catharine of Aragon was void. The Pope threatened the King with excommunication if he did not re-establish the marriage. The King's answer was the separation of England from the obedience of Rome. Shortly before this the articles of the League of Schmalkalden had recorded the desertion of a considerable part of South Germany to the Reformation. The Council which was to have restored unity to the Church had not come into being. Clement certainly raised hopes of it in the near future at Bologna (January 10, 1533), but only for the sake of appearances. had every reason to prevent all discussion by a Council of his personal and dynastic policy, and he attained his end by excuses and means which led the Emperor's confessor, Cardinal Garcia de Loaysa (May, 1530), to write to Charles V that this Pope was the most mysterious of beings, that he knew more ciphers than anyone else on earth, and that he would not hear of a Council at any price.

In reality he

Even the last act of the dying Pope leaves a painful impression. On September 23, 1534, he wrote a long letter to the Emperor, to recommend to his care, not the welfare of the Church or of Italy, but the preservation of the rule of the Medici in Florence, and the protection of his two beloved nephews, the Cardinal Ippolito and Alessandro, whom Clement had appointed to be his heirs.

After a painful illness Clement VII died on September 25, 1534. His friend Francesco Vettori gives testimony that for a century no better man had occupied Peter's Chair than Clement, who was neither cruel nor proud, neither venal, nor avaricious, nor luxurious. And despite of this, he continues, the catastrophe came in his time, while

Decadence of Italy

others stained with crime lived and died happily.

27

And indeed many

an excellent quality seemed to promise this Medici a happier reign; but he had to atone for his dynastic egotism and for the sins of his predecessors. A fatal confusion of politics and religion bore its bitterest. fruits in his pontificate. Rome was ruined, Italy from Milan to Naples was turned into a field of slaughter bathed in blood and tears; the unity of the Church was destroyed, and half Europe fell away from the centre of Christianity. All this was a painful commentary on the theories of political Catholicism and the esteem of that temporal sway over the world which some still affirm to be useful or even necessary to the cause of Christ.

The harmonious union of medieval with modern thought, the organic arrangement of the ideas brought by the Renaissance in the system of Christian Ethics, the inner development of Catholicism on the basis of this harmony as planned in the scheme of the Camera della Segnatura; all this miscarried, and was bound to do so, since the acting powers, on whom devolved the accomplishment of this great scheme, conceived in the true spirit of the Apostle Paul, lacked the ability and enthusiasm necessary for the execution of so enormous a task. The preceding paragraphs have shown to what extent these acting powers were incapable of fulfilling the mission set before them.

The powers at work were two in chief, the Papacy and the Italian nation. We have seen the Papacy of Medicean Rome swayed by political, by worldly considerations, guided in all its actions and decisions by the dynastic interests of its rulers. The religious and moral point of view was ignored in this domain of worldly aims and ideas. The pontificate of Adrian VI, that came as an interlude between those of Leo X and Clement VII, certainly was representative of religious Catholicism, honourable, wise, sincere. But on the one hand it was of too short a duration to ripen any of its fruits, and on the other it failed, not only because of Italian corruption, and the general dislike to foreigners, but also because the last Teutonic Pope could not comprehend the development of Italian culture, the right of the Latin world to its own characteristics, and the aesthetic interests swaying all minds south of the Alps. The predominance of the worldly and sensuous elements in life, in science, and even in art came into play; they did their part in preventing the victory of idealistic views.

Although the Curia was not equal to its task, had Italy been still in a healthy state the nation and public opinion could have forced the Papacy into right courses. But here also corruption had long since set in. Strong moral force, such as proclaims itself in Dante, in Caterina of Siena, was gone from the people; they had but lately given its last prophet to the flames in the Piazza della Signoria at Florence. No nation can sin thus against its best men without punishment. The