Volume 30, Number 5 · March 31, 1983
The Roman Spring of Clement VII
By Peter Partner
The Sack of Rome, 1527
by André Chastel, translated by Beth Archer
Bollingen Series XXXV:26, Princeton University Press, 321 pp., $40.00
From the fall of Babylon onward, the catastrophes of great cities—Rome of the Caesars, Jerusalem, Constantinople, Hiroshima—have been signs and wonders. The Sack of Rome in 1527 by the undisciplined troops of the emperor Charles V symbolized, like the other wondrous disasters, the defeat of one way of life and the victory, or threatened victory, of another. Before 1527 the Rome of the Renaissance had been glorious for its great works of art and splendid buildings, but tawdry and vulnerable as the seat of worldly bishops whose doctrinal orthodoxy did not excuse their indifferent conduct. The Sack occurred in the midst of the long power struggle in Italy between the French and the Hapsburg monarchies. Charles's army, raised to dominate the north of the peninsula, failed in its task there and poured over the Apennines in the direction of Rome, so demoralized and ill-paid as to be hardly more than an armed mob.
Review, 3290 words
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