It lies outside the scope of this work to describe the series of events which led up to the sack of Rome in 1527.  Clement, by his tortuous policy, and by the avarice of his administration, had alienated every friend and exasperated all his foes.  The Eternal City was in a state of chronic discontent and anarchy.  The Colonna princes drove the Pope to take refuge in the Castle of S. Angelo; and when the Lutheran rabble raised by Frundsberg poured into Lombardy, the Duke of Ferrara assisted them to cross the Po, and the Duke of Urbino made no effort to bar the passes of the Apennines.  Losing one leader after the other, these ruffians, calling themselves an Imperial army, but being in reality the scum and offscourings of all nations, without any aim but plunder and ignorant of policy, reached Rome upon the 6th of May.  They took the city by assault, and for nine months Clement, leaning from the battlements of Hadrian’s Mausoleum, watched smoke ascend from desolated palaces and desecrated temples, heard the wailing of women and the groans of tortured men, mingling with the ribald jests of German drunkards and the curses of Castilian bandits.  Roaming those galleries and gazing from those windows, he is said to have exclaimed in the words of Job:  “Why died I not from the womb? why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly?”

The immediate effect of this disaster was that the Medici lost their hold on Florence.  The Cardinal of Cortona, with the young princes Ippolito and Alessandro de’ Medici, fled from the city on the 17th of May, and a popular government was set up under the presidency of Niccolo Capponi.

During this year and the next, Michelangelo was at Florence; but we know very little respecting the incidents of his life.  A Ricordo bearing the date April 29 shows the disturbed state of the town.  “I record how, some days ago, Piero di Filippo Gondi asked for permission to enter the new sacristy at S. Lorenzo, in order to hide there certain goods belonging to his family, by reason of the perils in which we are now.  To-day, upon the 29th of April 1527, he has begun to carry in some bundles, which he says are linen of his sisters; and I, not wishing to witness what he does or to know where he hides the gear away, have given him the key of the sacristy this evening.”

There are only two letters belonging to the year 1527.  Both refer to a small office which had been awarded to Michelangelo with the right to dispose of the patronage.  He offered it to his favourite brother, Buonarroto, who does not seem to have thought it worth accepting.