Defenders of the Faith: Christianity and Islam Battle for the Soul of Europe, 1520-1536 by James Reston Jr

Author:James Reston Jr. [Reston Jr., James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2009-04-15T22:00:00+00:00

25.

SETTING THE STAGE

On the morning of September 19, 1526, an army of nearly four thousand Spanish troops, under the command of Ugo di Moncada and the Colonna, appeared before the gates of Rome. To maintain the element of surprise, the soldiers had marched at a furious pace from Naples; oxen pulled their artillery. After they crashed into the city through the Gate of St. John the Lateran, they moved quickly to the Tiber River, stormed across the Ponte Sisto into Trastevere, then raced along the Lungara to the high ground of the Janiculum, where they looked over to the Borgo and St. Peter’s. The Romans offered no resistance to the invaders. They were fed up with papal war taxes and especially the tax on wine, and they regarded this as a family spat, Medici versus Colonna. “This is not our affair, but the pope’s,” one resident was heard to say. Others were more vocal. With their great palace in the Quirinale, the Colonna were viewed as Romans rather than Neapolitans, and now their name was shouted in celebration. “Empire, Colonna, freedom!” The Spanish dispatched the few guards at the Porta San Spirito and poured into the Old Borgo.

Then the plundering began. The marauders raced through the corridors of the Vatican, into the papal apartments, even into the pope’s very bedroom, stripping whatever could be removed: relics, crosses, chalices, pastoral vestments, even the pope’s tiara. A soldier was seen dancing drunkenly through the streets wearing the pope’s white vestments, the tiara half-cocked on his head, dispensing mock papal blessings. Raphael’s tapestries were taken, and the cross of St. Peter itself was stripped of its ornament. Only a bribe for drink money saved the Vatican Library. “There was no greater respect for religion nor horror of sacrilege than if they had been Turks despoiling the churches of Hungary,” Guicciardini wrote later. The price tag for the plunder was put at three hundred thousand ducats.

At the first sign of the threat, Clement had proclaimed that he would clothe himself in his full pontifical garb and meet the rebels as a martyr of Christ at the altar of St. Peter’s, just as his predecessor Boniface VIII had greeted another Colonna renegade heroically two hundred years earlier. Clement’s cardinals quickly talked him out of this insane posturing and hustled him through the covered passage to the bastion of Castel Sant’Angelo. From there, he could hear the rabble wreaking their havoc in the distance, beyond the range of the papal cannons. Unfortunately for the pope, the papal bastion had not been provisioned with food and water, and this sapped the pope’s appetite for resistance. He called for Ugo di Moncada.

The Spanish exaltado presented himself as an obedient and contrite (if totally hypocritical) supplicant, throwing himself mawkishly at the feet of the pope, offering his apologies, and returning the despoiled tiara and the vicar’s dented silver staff. Once he brushed away his crocodile tears and was on his feet, Moncada’s demands were stiff. There was to be

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