[Sidenote: December 1521]
The death of Leo X was followed by an unusually long conclave, on account of the even balance of parties. At last, despairing of agreement, and feeling also that extraordinary measures were needed to meet the exigencies of the situation, the cardinals, in January, offered the tiara to Adrian, who, alone among modern popes, kept his baptismal name while in office. The failure of Adrian VI to accomplish much was due largely to the shortness of his pontificate of only twenty months, and still more to the invincible corruption he found at Rome. His really high sense of duty awakened no response save fear and hatred among the courtiers of the Medicis. When he tried to restore the ruined finances of the church he was accused of niggardliness; when he made war on abuses he was called a barbarian; when he frankly confessed, in his appeal to the German Diets, that perchance the whole evil infecting the church came from the rottenness of the Curia, he was assailed as putting arms into the arsenal of the enemy. His greatest crime in the eyes of his court was that he was a foreigner, an austere, phlegmatic man, who could understand neither their tongue nor their ways.
{379} Exhausted by the fruitless struggle, Adrian sank into his grave, a good pope unwept and unhonored as few bad popes have ever been. On his tomb the cardinals wrote: "Here lies Adrian VI whose supreme misfortune in life was that he was called upon to rule." A like judgment was expressed more wittily by the people, who erected a monument to Adrian's physician and labeled it, "Liberatori Patriae."
[Sidenote: Clement VII, 1523-34]
The swing of the pendulum so often noticed in politics was particularly marked in the elections to the papacy of the sixteenth century. In almost every instance the new pope was an opponent, and in some sort a contrast, to his predecessor. In no case was this more true than in the election of 1523. Deciding that if Adrian's methods were necessary to save the church the medicine was worse than the disease, the cardinals lost no time in raising another Medici to the throne. Like all of his race, Clement VII was a patron of art and literature, and tolerant of abuses. Personally moral and temperate, he cared little save for an easy life and the advancement of the Three Balls. He began that policy, which nearly proved fatal to the church, of treating the Protestants with alternate indulgence and severity. But for himself the more immediate trouble came not from the enemy of the church but from its protector. Though Adrian was an old officer of Charles V, it was really in the reign of Clement that the process began by which first Italy, then the papacy, then the whole church was put under the Spanish yoke.
[Sidenote: Spanish influence, 1525-6]
After Pavia and the treaty of Madrid had eliminated French influence, Charles naturally felt his power and naturally intended to have it respected even by the pope. Irritated by Clement's perpetual deceit and intrigue with France, Charles addressed to him, in 1526, a document which Ranke calls the most {380} formidable ever used by any Catholic prince to a pope during the century, containing passages "of which no follower of Luther need be ashamed."
[Sidenote: Sack of Rome, May and September 1527]
Rather to threaten the pope than to make war on him, Charles gathered a formidable army of German and Spanish soldiers in the north under the command of his general Frundsberg. All the soldiers were restless and mutinous for want of pay, and in addition to this a powerful motive worked among the German landsknechts. Many of them were Lutheran and looked to the conquest of Rome as the triumph of their cause. As they loudly demanded to be lead against Antichrist, Frundsberg found that his authority was powerless to stop them. [Sidenote: March 16, 1527] When he died of rage and mortification the French traitor Charles, Constable of Bourbon, was appointed by the emperor in his place, and, finding there was nothing else to do, led the army against Rome and promised the soldiers as much booty as they could take. Twice, in May and September, the city was put to the horrors of a sack, with all the atrocities of murder, theft and rapine almost inseparable from war. In addition to plundering, the Lutherans took particular pleasure in desecrating the objects of veneration to the Catholics. Many an image and shrine was destroyed, while Luther was acclaimed pope by his boisterous champions. But far away on the Elbe he heard of the sack and expressed his sorrow for it.
The importance of the sack of Rome, like that of other dramatic events, is apt to be exaggerated. It has been called the end of the Renaissance and the beginning of the Catholic reaction. It was neither the one nor the other, but only one incident in the long, stubborn process of the Hispanization of Italy and the church. For centuries no emperor had had so much power in Italy as had Charles. With Naples and {381} Milan were now linked Siena and Genoa under his rule; the states of the church were virtually at his disposal, and even Florence, under its hereditary duke, Alexander de' Medici, was for a while under the control of the pope and through him, of Charles.