This is the second part of a series of articles by Vinicius on the Italian Wars. You can read the first part here.
After the Battle of Pavia in 1525, Charles Habsburg (Holy Roman Emperor and ruler of Spain, new lands in the Americas, Naples and the Netherlands) dominated Europe as no monarch had since the time of Charlemagne. In reaction to this, a somewhat unholy common cause emerged among his opponents.
In June 1526, Pope Clement VII celebrated a high Mass in honour of the League of Cognac he had just signed with Francis I of France against Emperor Charles. Henry VIII of England was this alliance’s “protector”; the Ottoman Turks were its “silent” partners, devastating and occupying Hungary later that year.
This low point in European affairs fully revealed the Renaissance as an existential threat to the Christian West. This worldview allowed the betrayal of the Hungarians, who had successfully resisted the Turks for a century and a half. Under Islamic domination, Protestantism was encouraged in Hungary, being adopted by a majority; only the restoration of Catholic rule in the late seventeenth century allowed the Tridentine counterreformation to win back the majority in Hungary, which has remained religiously divided, however.
The Renaissance almost drags the Papacy down
The Renaissance period in Rome as elsewhere, is famously associated with immorality, and prestige for neo-pagan attitudes. Profoundly influenced by this context, the papacy risked reducing the Church to a mere player among civil societies. In 1526, the Renaissance ideologue Francesco Guicciardini, commanding Pope Clement VII’s army, persuaded him to join Francis I’s League of Cognac against Emperor Charles V. It’s worth glancing at the political theories that were influencing the behaviour of statesmen in this period.
Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) in The Prince (1513) urged rulers to put society’s interests before any principle beyond itself. He defined society as absolutely self-referring and historically determined, and claimed his theory was based on reality rather than “abstract” rules and morality. Francesco Guicciardini became known as “the first of the Machiavellians” because of a shared view of Italian nationalism and “objective politics”: “Political power cannot be wielded according to the dictates of good conscience. If you consider its origin, you will always find it in violence”.
This directly contradicts the Church’s teaching that civil society is inherent in nature which is good per se, and should reflect natural law rather than originating in “violence”; political power should only be wielded according to a conscience informed by natural law and religion, whose “dictates” apply universally.
Machiavelli made civil society supreme, but “sacralised” this secularism with religious utilitarianism. He advised rulers to uphold religion “even though they be convinced that it [religion] is quite fallacious.”
This scepticism was reflected by Guicciardini: “To have faith means simply to believe firmly… things that are not reasonable”, something arising merely from an often-useful “stubbornness”. This denied the traditional Christian view that the doctrines of the faith, which might not be known through reason alone, are nevertheless not “irrational”.
Guicciardini foreshadows a modern, secularist view (in its conservative, not liberal form) of religious utility. This scepticism might support or subvert religion depending on whether it was considered useful to civil society. Henry VIII and Francis I embodied this Renaissance attitude, with disastrous consequences. Emperor Charles V began his career much in the Renaissance mould but changed his ways (as did Pope Clement VII), helping to bring triumph out of near ruin for Europe (in old age, he abdicated and retired to a monastery in Spain).
The Sack of Rome
The League of Cognac was defeated by Imperial armies in the north of Italy. At the same time, Clement VII’s army invaded the Kingdom of Naples, but was soon discouraged by the resistance. Lulled into a false sense of security by an armistice, he disbanded his entire army to save money. But the Imperial armies were now at large, unpaid and furious at Pope Clement’s duplicity.
Led by Charles de Bourbon, a mass of over 30,000 disaffected soldiers (consisting of 12,000 Germans – many of them Lutherans, 6,000 Spanish, several thousand French and Italians, deserters from the League of Cognac, adventurers and bandits) gradually descended from Lombardy. It was not until they had passed Florence that the design of plundering Rome’s practically unguarded and legendary wealth, clearly took shape.
In May 1527, the troops began their assault on the city, but Charles de Bourbon was almost immediately killed. Lacking any respected commander, the soldiers quickly broke through the Aurelian walls and began several months of pillage. Pope Clement took refuge in the Castel Sant’Angelo, his escape being covered by the Swiss Guards, who were massacred.
Several thousand were packed within the walls of the fortress along with Pope Clement (who was given safe passage out in June after paying an enormous ransom). They witnessed the savage destruction of the city. Most of Rome’s inhabitants died or fled, and perhaps 75% of housing was destroyed. The clergy were cruelly singled out and Churches targeted for sacrilegious abuse by the Protestants. It was only after several months that the outbreak of the plague succeeded in expelling the plunderers.
Pope Clement, the last of the Renaissance warlord Popes, believed he could play Christian monarchs off against each other, and thereby expand his own temporal glory. Failing as a warlord as well as in principled conduct, he exposed Rome and the Church’s prestige to an unprecedented devastation that shocked the entire West.
Some saw in the plunder of the Holy City the hand of God, a punishment of the Church for its infidelities during the Renaissance. Lutherans rejoiced, but Catholics were mortified; this event marked the end of Catholic “anti-papalism”. Charles V expressed his consternation at what his mutinous troops had done.
Whatever the case, Clement VII mended his ways, came to terms with the Habsburg hegemons of the Italian peninsula (who guaranteed it two centuries of stability and orthodoxy after the chaos of the Renaissance) and began the reform of the Church, which would be successfully completed by Popes like Paul III, Pius IV and Saint Pius V.
The Church rises out the ashes, renewed and better than before
The sack of Rome deeply marked Clement VII (even physically; he grew a beard as a sign of penance, and this custom became papal fashion for two centuries). He and Charles Habsburg were eventually reconciled. In 1530, Pope Clement crowned Charles as Holy Roman Emperor in Bologna. This was the last papal coronation of an Emperor.
The reform of Church discipline and organisation and, above all, a better expression of its faith and liturgical practice soon gathered pace. This would be the work of the great Council of Trent (1545-1563). This accompanied and confirmed the enormously successful renewal of scholastic philosophy exemplified by the Dominicans of the School of Salamanca, and the Jesuits.
Scholasticism became hegemonic, intellectually staring down the false and facile pretensions of Renaissance Neo-Platonism (which was inseparable from false mysticism, neo-paganism and esotericism). When Enlightenment philosophies eventually emerged (backed by the political and military violence that eventually made them hegemonic) in the late seventeenth century, they still regarded scholasticism as the main intellectual opponent (Thomas Hobbes obsessively attacking the Jesuit Francisco Suarez from the previous century).
The Council of Trent entrusted the papacy with the codification of liturgical books. The result was Pope Saint Pius V’s Bull, Quo Primum, which ended the liturgical chaos that had festered for some time, declaring:
“It is most becoming that there be in the Church only one appropriate manner of reciting the Psalms and only one rite for the celebration of Mass”.
The renewed Church expanded far beyond Europe, finding tens of millions of new members in the Americas, Asia and Africa. This “Tridentine” Church was the first truly global religion, and its key features still characterise our Church today (having been confirmed and strengthened by the First Vatican Council).
The Tridentine reforms introduced systematic seminary formation for the regular clergy. Clarity concerning doctrine, the sacraments and the Mass, along with a long-term growth of true mysticism and the appearance of marvellous new religious orders, gave the Church and its members the purpose and strength to win back many areas of the old Continent that had fallen away.
Indeed, “Tridentine” Catholicism was never diminished or threatened except through military violence, or the oppression of Enlightenment monarchies during the eighteenth century. Its worldview was perfectly adapted to deal with “modernity”. Indeed, the Christian West inspired by Tridentine Catholicism can truly be said to have pioneered the modern world. Its attitude of resisting and transforming the Renaissance world of 1527 is a good model for today; so many of the issues are surprisingly similar.
by Vinicius. Vinicius is a Melbourne-based historian-researcher focussing on early modernity as the Christian Western alternative to ideological, Enlightenment modernity.
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