as when God
  Will o’er some high-viced city hang his poison
  In the sick air.[2]

At last the crash came.  Clement by a series of treaties, treacheries, and tergiversations had deprived himself of every friend and exasperated every foe.  Italy was so worn out with warfare, so accustomed to the anarchy of aimless revolutions and to the trampling to and fro of stranger squadrons on her shores, that the news of a Lutheran troop, levied with the express object of pillaging Rome, and reinforced with Spanish ruffians and the scum of every nation, scarcely roused her apathy.  The so-called army of Frundsberg—­a horde of robbers held together by the hope of plunder—­marched without difficulty to the gates of Rome.  So low had the honor of Italian princes fallen that the Duke of Ferrara, by direct aid given, and the Duke of Urbino, by counter-force withheld, opened the passes of the Po and of the Apennines to these marauders.  They lost their general in Lombardy.  The Constable Bourbon, who succeeded him, died in the assault of the city.  Then Rome for nine months was abandoned to the lust, rapacity, and cruelty of some 30,000 brigands without a leader.  It was then discovered to what lengths of insult, violence, and bestiality the brutal barbarism of Germans and the avarice of Spaniards could be carried.  Clement, beleaguered in the Castle of S. Angelo, saw day and night the smoke ascend from desolated palaces and desecrated temples, heard the wailing of women and the groans of tortured men mingle with the jests of Lutheran drunkards and the curses of Castilian bandits.  Roaming its galleries and leaning from its windows he exclaimed with Job:[3] ’Quare de vulva eduxisti me? qui utinam consumptus essem, ne oculus me videret.’  What the Romans, emasculated by luxury and priest rule, what the Cardinals and prelates, lapped in sensuality and sloth, were made to suffer during this long agony, can scarcely be described.  It is too horrible.  When at last the barbarians, sated with blood, surfeited with lechery, glutted with gold, and decimated by pestilence, withdrew, Rome raised her head a widow.  From the shame and torment of that sack she never recovered, never became again the gay licentious lovely capital of arts and letters, the glittering gilded Rome of Leo.  But the kings of the earth took pity on her desolation.  The treaty of Amiens (August 18, 1527), concluded between Francis I. and Henry VIII. against Charles V., in whose name this insult had been offered to the Holy City of Christendom, together with Charles’s own tardy willingness to make amends, restored the Papacy to the respect of Europe.

    [1] See, for instance, Berni’s sonnets.  In one of these, Berni
    very powerfully describes the vacillation and irresolution of
    Clement’s state-policy.

    [2] See Varchi’s picture of the state of Rome, St. Fior. ii.

    [3] So Luigi Guicciardini in his account of the sack of Rome
    relates.