The Ransacking of Rome in 1527: once so powerful now shattered

The Ransacking of Rome: in 1527 there were 12000 Landsknechs in Italy (they were mercenary infantry soldiers, famous for their cruelty to the peoples fought as well as for the violence they showed against the enemy) that were supposed to annihilate the League of Cognac, an alliance between the French king Francis I and Pope Clement VII against the emperor Charles V of Habsburg.

Left without wages and without food, the Landsknechts first devastated the countryside, then marched on Rome which, in those years for the Germans of Lutheran faith, was considered: the “city of Satan” and the den of all vices.
Looting it was not a sacrilege but an act of divine justice. 

On May 6, the Landsknechts defeated the 3000 Swiss mercenaries who defended Rome and set the entire city on fire: the Roman citizens were massacred, princes, cardinals, merchants were tortured by the Landsknechts to reveal where they had hidden their wealth; the priests were put into the pillory; the nuns were raped as well as the women in their homes; churches were devastated and many works of art destroyed. 

The Landsknechts remained in Rome for nine months, while the Pope saved himself by barricading in the fortress of Castel Sant’Angelo with his court. The Landsknechts retired only because the Church paid a very high ransom in gold and precious stones and because remaining had become impossible: the city was left without food, the streets were full of buried corpses, the water was missing because all the fountains had been destroyed and the plague mowed both the victims and the executioners. 

The Ransacking of Rome in 1527 had, in the imagination of the time, the value of a shock, it was experienced as rape: it marked the end of an era, that of the Renaissance.