California Italian Studies

Although the 1527 Sack of Rome by the German, Spanish, and Italian troops of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V shocked Europe, a violent invasion of the Eternal City had long been anticipated in prophetic, historical, and literary texts alike. These works envisioned a dramatic contest at the city’s gates and subsequent carnage within its walls. While the brutality of the historical event matched—or even surpassed—these expectations, contemporaries were dismayed by the weakness of the city’s defense and by the speed with which Rome was taken. This article traces the relationship between earlier compositions, which cast the Sack as catastrophic but inevitable, and the production of historical and poetical texts in the Sack’s aftermath detailing the progression of Charles’s armies across the Italian peninsula and into the streets of Rome. The invasion opened the floodgates to murder, kidnapping, torture, sexual assault (of men and women alike), theft, sacrilege, and destruction for much of the populace during months of occupation, while the curial elite instead largely fled to safety. Comparisons of Rome’s fate to those of biblical sites like Babylon and Jerusalem as well as to “epically” destroyed cities like Troy and Carthage circulated widely, once again making Rome’s fall literary in nature. Figures such as Francesco Guicciardini, Luigi Guicciardini, Pietro Aretino, and Benvenuto Cellini, among others, developed a common language to interpret the imperial march toward Rome and its dire consequences as the product of both providence and poor leadership. Notably, their works also presented the event as a tragic visual spectacle from which their readers could varyingly draw important historical-military lessons, experience awe, and even be pleasurably entertained. This essay explores the tensions in their works representing the gravest threat in centuries to the very eternality of Rome.