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Summary
As French forces began to prey on the Italian states in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, Rome became the focus of Italy’s collective defense, and the pope the architect of that defense. Milan had fallen, and the northern states were under pressure, but they could survive as long as Rome remained strong. Pope Leo X did an admirable job in this role; however, his successor, Pope Clement VII, while a decent and moral pope, was a failure as a politician. To make things worse, when Clement VII ascended to the Papal throne in 1523 there was, for the first time in centuries, a great emperor in Europe. Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, was heir to Spain, Burgundy, the Netherlands, Austria, and Naples, as well as a claimant to Milan by imperial right. Meanwhile, France's Francois I insisted on ruling Milan and Naples himself.
Spanish and French armies fought on Italian soil, debating claims to pieces of Italian territory. The Imperial army of some 22,000 Spaniards, Italians, and Germans was not truly controlled by any single leader, but after defeating the French in a major battle, they demanded payment, a little of which they received from Spain, and some of which they took from the broken Milanese, who had been subjugated to Imperial-Spanish rule. Much of the demanded payment went unmet. The army, angry and hungry, moved south. Spain, meanwhile, was negotiating with the Pope over payment of a ransom the Imperial army had demanded from Rome. Clement VII, a disastrous negotiator and decision-maker, refused to pay the ransom, and the talks went nowhere.
On May 5, 1527, the army arrived at the walls of Rome, starving and still unpaid. The Pope denied a final request for the ransom, since he believed that the small Roman professional force of 5,000, aided by volunteers, could fend off the starving army due to the Romans' advantage in artillery. At midnight, the Roman citizens were summoned to arms and the army of mercenaries began its attack. By 1 p.m., 13 hours later, the mercenaries held the city in what would come to be known as the sack of Rome.
The treaty of Barcelona in 1529 placed most of Italy in Spanish hands. Venice, Florence, and the Papal States retained their independence, but were compelled to cooperate with the Spanish in order to survive. Under high taxes and tight restrictions, the Italian economy crumbled, and intellectual and artistic production declined. The power of the Church declined under the pressure of the Protestant Reformation, which had begun in 1517.
That power suffered still further when Henry VIII of England broke with Rome in 1532 over his denied request for a divorce from Catherine of Aragon. The Church reacted drastically in Italy, censoring writing and art and reaffirming the doctrines of Catholicism more rigidly than they had during the Renaissance period. Gradually, the spirit of the Renaissance was sapped and replaced with a more somber outlook. Though much of the change wrought by the Italian Renaissance proved irreversible and spread to other parts of Europe (the Northern Renaissance), by 1550, the rate of change had slowed to a stop in Italy.
Analysis
Pope Clement VII followed a line of pontiffs who had brought the papacy to moral degradation with corruption and manipulation. He epitomized what the leader of the Church should be—conscientious, loyal, discreet, devout, and morally upstanding. However, these qualities did little to help him in his role as politician. Such a ruler would have been dangerous at the center of Italian affairs in any time, but the particular situation in which Clement VII found himself upon ascending to the throne accentuated his flaws as a negotiator and decision-maker.
For years, the papacy had been the seat not only of the leader of the Church, but also of shrewd, if not always ethical, politicians. Though Pope Sixtus IV and Pope Alexander VI had lived lives of corruption and excess unbefitting a leader of the moral responsibility they held, they, and Rome along with them, had prospered. Leo X had similarly been a talented bargainer and administrator, proving that such skills could exist without the moral transgressions of his predecessors. The Renaissance Papacy was characterized by popes who had devoted themselves more to their role as political leader than that of spiritual figure. This is the real irony of the 1527 fall of Rome, and in truth, all of Italy: at a time that, above all else, demanded a pope who could be an international statesman, it had Clement VII, whose qualities were more suited to the neglected role of spiritual leader, and his political power and knowledge limited to Italy alone.
The sack of Rome was, in effect, an accident, ordered by no political leader or general. Rather, the army acted independently, roaming the Italian countryside and, starving and unpaid, setting their sights on the conquest of Rome solely for reasons of revenge and anger. Nevertheless, the sack of the city took the wind from the sails of the Italian city-states, who were soon resigned to imperial subjugation. The new situation crushed the city-states’ economy and spirit. In addition, Italy's prime geographical location within the Mediterranean lost some of its importance. After the discovery of America in 1492, the importance of trade routes through Italy steadily declined, leaving the Italian city-states weak and especially vulnerable to the economic restrictions placed upon them by the Spanish. By 1550, the once great trading cities of Florence, Venice, and others, were on the decline, sapped of their wealth by the lack of trade and the taxes and restrictions of the Spaniards.
Perhaps the greatest finishing blow dealt to the Renaissance was the Counter-Reformation, an initiative pursued by the Church in response to the Protestant movement begun by a German monk, Martin Luther, in 1517. The Counter-Reformation involved a conservative Church backlash in which the Church extended censorship to protect itself against further criticism, thereby stifling any literary and artistic ambitions that still prevailed after the middle of the 15th century. Resistance to these measures was weak and sporadic. Authoritarianism triumphed, and a somber pessimism descended upon the once joyous Italian states. Even the style of dress changed to reflect Spanish dominance. The black cap, doublet, hose, and shoes that became the fashion in Italy of the mid-16th century, seemed in their contrast to the bright colors of the Renaissance, the vestments of mourning for the glory and liberty of the Italian Renaissance, now dead.
