Foundations of the Anglican Church XXXVIX

Castel Sant'Angelo where Clement VII sought

refuge from the troops of Charles V during the

Sack of Rome in 1527

Luther’s preaching swept Germany as his complaints about the torpid state of the Church spread to other preachers who took up his cry against the superficial and vapid religiosity that was being pedaled to the faithful as authentic Christianity.  Luther’s simple message that salvation is not something that we earn but which is given us freely by a loving and generous God ignited the minds and hearts of countless souls.  Luther had no intention of starting a new Church—indeed he never saw his work as anything more than reforming the One Church—but his excommunication put a divide between him and Papal Christianity.  Many Germans quickly rallied to his side of the divide.  Luther and other German preachers who agreed with him no longer looked to the bishops for leadership but prepared to take the Church out into the deep waters of reform on their own.  The bishops, for the greater part, were a sorry lot.  They held their offices in gift from the Emperor or various German princes.  Their benefices made them princes in their own right and gave them a most comfortable life in their palaces with hordes of servants and every luxury.  They were not loyal to Rome, much less to the Gospel, but only anxious to preserve their own position and saw the evangelical fervor of Luther as a threat that they too might be expected to take the Gospel seriously and give themselves to the work of God’s Kingdom rather than to hunting and whoring and drinking and gluttony and luxury.  Left without leadership from the bishops Luther and other evangelicals bravely struck out to translate their theological principals into reformed pastoral practice.  One of Luther’s first acts was to provide a German translation of the scriptures so that every German who knew how to read, could read the Bible.  He wrote dozens of hymns in German so that they could sing their faith with the same enthusiasm they sang in the beerhalls—and he used many beer-hall tunes that have become to subsequent generations and to us “religious” music.  He translated the Mass into German and while keeping its basic structure of Introit, Confession of Sin, Kyrie, Gloria, Collect etc. he did eliminate any idea that the Mass was a sacrifice independent of Christ’s Sacrifice on Calvary.  (In this regard the poor exegetical methodology referred to in the last posting did him and the liturgy harm as he stripped the Anaphora—the Great Prayer of Thanksgiving over the bread and wine—down to the simple words of consecration.)   While he did translate the Mass to German, he did not object to those congregations who preferred the Latin and Latin persisted in many places for several centuries.  Bach, as you may note, wrote Latin settings for the Evangelical Mass.  He also retained the use of altars, candles, crucifixes and was indifferent about retaining vestments.  Luther had a personal devotion to the Mother of God and while by the mid 1520’s he no longer spoke of her as an intercessor, he did preach and speak about her.  Indeed he had no objection to statues of Mary or the saints but he was anxious for his followers to put their faith in Christ alone as our intercessor before God.  This, of course, is harmonious with the scriptures which emphasize, especially the Letter to the Hebrews, that we have but one intercessor and that is Jesus Christ.  (We Catholics see Mary and the saints as sort of secondary intercessors who join their prayers to those of Christ the High Priest on our behalf but who are not intercessors in their own right.) 
Luther’s zeal, combined with German temper, led him to excoriate the unreformed Catholicism of the Bishops and especially of the Pope.  The Papal insistence on pomp and the money to maintain the papal pomp led Luther to see the Pope(s) as the prophesied Anti-Christ who would set themselves up as false deities.  Luther had anything but an irenic personality and his quick temper enflamed the minds and hearts of many who followed his reformed evangelicalism and they came to see the pope and papal Catholicism as a demonic cult.
Ok, here is where this story begins to affect Henry and his request for an annulment of his marriage to Katherine of Aragon. 
The most powerful monarch of the day was Katherine’s nephew, Charles V.  Charles was the son of Katherine’s sister—Juana the Mad.  (Why she was called “mad” or crazy is a great story in itself but we aren’t going there.)  Charles inherited from her the throne of Spain and the Spanish empire in the New World as well as Naples, southern Italy, Sicily, and Sardinia.  Not a bad inheritance.  But that was only part of it.  Charles’ father—and Juana’s husband—was Philip the Handsome of Burgundy.   Philip’s father died before he could inherit from his father, the Emperor Maximilian, the Holy Roman Empire—a vast empire consisting of today’s Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Poland, Czech Republic, and much of Northern Italy.  This inheritance then passed to Charles.  Charles was a devout Catholic and anxious to preserve the Church from Luther but many of his German subjects had embraced Luther’s reforms.  In 1527 Charles led an army down into Italy to quell rebellions brewing there and solidify his power.  In the process he found himself in conflict with a French backed anti-Imperial league consisting of Florence, Milan, Venice and the papacy.  This put Charles at military odds with Pope Clement VII and Charles’ troops ended up sacking Rome.  Clement fled the papal palace and took refuge in the Castle Sant’Angelo.  But Charles’ troops were mostly Germans—and mostly Lutherans.    For them their attack on Rome was an attack on the anti-Christ and the subsequent sack of the city was horrendous.  Priests were murdered at their altars, nuns raped in their convents, and thousands of Romans—believers and non-believers alike—were put to the sword.  The Pope’s Swiss guards were all but wiped out defending the Vatican.  Tons of gold and silver were carried off as the Roman churches and basilicas were stripped of their treasures—and as the houses of Cardinals and bishops were pillaged alongside the monasteries and convents. 
Charles himself was not in command of the army at the time of the siege.  In fact the problem is that no one was in command.  The designated leader, the Duke of Bourbon, had been killed in the opening skirmish; moreover the army was in mutiny because the emperor had been slow in paying them for their Italian campaign.  The Lutheran troops particularly were in a blood frenzy as they saw themselves as God’s avengers.  The 1527 sack of Rome effectively put an end to the Roman Renaissance and there was a tremendous slowdown in the vast programs of building and art that had characterized Rome for the previous three decades. 
It was at this particularly poor time to ask a favor from the Pope that England’s King Henry wanted an annulment from his wife, Katherine of Aragon, aunt to the Emperor Charles.  Clement was in no position to alienate the Emperor by sanctioning his aunt being dumped for a Trophy Wife and Queen.  But there is more to the story—far more—and the real reason may have more to do with Medici politics than Clement’s fear of pissing off Charles. 

The Sack of Rome--which sack???

The passagetto (“secret” passage from

the Vatican to the Castle Sant’ Angelo)

is contained along the wall to the right

of the picture. You can see the Vatican

in the distance at the end. 

Let’s take a look at the Sack of Rome as it affects the progress of the building of Saint Peter’s.  Rome was sacked a number of times in its history.  It was sacked by the Gauls in 387  B.C.E., by the Visigoths in 410 C.E. (aka A.D.), Vandals in 455, Ostrogoths in 546, The Arabs in 846 (Well, just the Vatican, not the city itself), and the Normans in 1084.  To be honest, for much of its history Rome wasn’t worth sacking.  For most of the Middle Ages Rome was only an overgrown cow pasture with ruins of where the mighty Empire had once been, but by 1527 it was the flourishing center of the Renaissance with a booming economy and a rapidly growing economy.

     What triggered the 1527 attack was that in order to check the awesome power of the Emperor Charles V (who ruled what is today Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, and much of northern Italy) France, Venice, Milan, Florence and the Papacy teamed up in the League of Cognac.  Great name, but not a great idea.  It was the mice out to kill the cat and it was a disaster.  The Imperial army handily defeated the French—the only ones in the coalition who had a real army (and in those days the French were considered the best fighters in the world—who knows what happened to them)  but the Emperor didn’t have any money to pay the troops for their service.  Their commander, Charles de Bourbon was French—yes, a French commander for the German Army fighting France!  It seems that when Charles’s wife, Suzanne died—she had been the Bourbon heir—the Queen Mother of France, Louise of Savoy, seized the Bourbon lands and wouldn’t give them back to the widowed husband to whom they had been left by Suzanne’s will.  The King refused to intervene against his mother and so Charles, pissed, sided with the enemy despite his position of Marshal of France. (The Marshal was the head of the army.)  Pity because Charles de Bourbon was a good soldier, a great soldier.  Anyway now he had a German army who hasn’t been paid and no money to pay them. The army was restless.  Pope Clement VII knew this was a dangerous situation and that he was in trouble and sued for a truce, but the army was in no mood to pay attention—the loot from Rome would suffice for the money due them from the Emperor.  Charles de Bourbon had excellent command of his army and could have negotiated a settlement with Clement, but the artist Benvenuto Cellini shot and killed Charles in the initial attack.  That was the mistake.  The army was enraged and went wild, storming the city.  With Charles dead there was no one who could bring the army under control.  Rome had only about 12,000 troops to defend it.  The Imperial attack was a massacre—all but 42 of the Pope’s Swiss guard were killed defending the Pope, but because of their bravery Pope Clement was able to flee  through the “secret” passage way linking the Vatican with the Castel Sant’Angelo where he would be safe.  As Clement fled through the passagetto, Imperial soldiers took pot shots at the papal figure as he passed the occasional break in the wall.  The worst of the sack lasted three days but for a month the Imperial troops dominated the city without discipline.  Churches were pillaged of their ornaments and relics.  The palaces of the Cardinals were ransacked, art destroyed, precious objects carried off.  Monasteries and convents were destroyed, monks and nuns killed, the nuns often raped.  Ordinary Romans were not safe—those who took refuge in Churches were often slain as the clung to the altars begging for mercy.  The Emperor had the upper hand.  Clement feared him and was anxious to win his alliance.  The Pope had some dynastic concerns for which he needed the Emperor. (We will talk more about that when we get to Henry VIII and his failure to get an annulment.)   The Emperor Charles V was Catholic—devoutly so—but he wasn’t on the scene and many of the Imperial troops, being German, were recent converts to Lutheranism.  That certainly didn’t help restore unity to Christendom.  Some historians claim that it brought the renaissance to a crashing end, but in fact Rome recovered quickly and went on to bigger and better triumphs of art, architecture, music, literature, and certainly to a papacy that would become imperial in its own right.  As for Saint Peter’s it brought the construction to a temporary halt but by 1534 Clement had commissioned Michelangelo to fresco the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel (it would be frescoed between 1537 and 1541.)  Michelangelo would be named the chief architect of Saint Peter’s in 1546.  And so the work continued.  But don’t let me forget to tell you about Antonio da Sangallo and his stealing from the basilica in the interim before Michelangelo.    

Saint Peter's Proceeds in Fits and Starts

Raphael's Plan for Saint Peter's

Well, Raphael was by all means a great artist, but he wasn’t half the architect Bramante was.  In the first place, he just wasn’t focused enough for architecture.  Saint Peter’s was only one of the many commissions he was working on.  He was busy frescoing the villas of various cardinals and princes and his workshop was turning out Madonna’s at an remarkable rate.  He was surrounded with an army of assistants to prepare canvases for paints and apply the plaster for frescos, to mix the pigments and produce the paints.  He was making money hand over fist and spending it even faster.  Raphael was a bon vivant and a ladies’ man.  And in between the business, the pleasure, the paintings, the frescoes, he was supposed to produce a plan for Saint Peter’s.  Good Luck!  Moreover, the help he had inherited from the triumvirate of architects when he took Bramante’s place vanished.   His Dominican friar teammate, Fra. Giovanni Giocondo died within the year and the old priest had been the engineer—and a very good one—to figure out the technical aspects of the design.  Giulano da Sangallo, the business manager was feeling his age and retired to Florence.  Pope Leo—who was more interested in jewelry and Hanno, his pet elephant—than architecture replaced the team to work with Raphael.  He named Baldassare Peruzzi to replace the old friar, and Giuliano da Sangallo’s nephew—Antonio the Younger Sangallo—to take his uncle’s place. It wasn’t a happy arrangement. 

Bramante's Plan for Saint Peter's

     Raphael for some reason decided to make a fundamental change in Bramante’s perfectly symmetrical plan.  Instead of the Greek Cross plan in which all four arms of the cross would be equal and lead to the central dome over the tomb of the Apostle and its altar, Raphael designed a Latin Cross plan where the “stem” of the Cross would be twice as long as the other “arms” of the cross.  In addition to destroying the symmetry of the building, it threatened to make the building look much more heavy as well as cut down the amount of natural light, or rather reduce the effect of the natural light, entering the basilica through the dome.  The Raphael plan just lacked the elegance of the original design.  It did make for a larger church, but it failed to inspire. 
      In the event, Raphael did not live long enough to see his designs bear fruit.  He died in 1520 at only thirty-seven years of age.  Peruzzi succeeded as main architect and reverted to the Bramante plan of a Greek Cross though he did retain some features—mostly the worst ones—of Rafael’s plan.  Peruzzi didn’t get to see his plans put into action either.  Thank heavens.   Leo died the year after Raphael and was succeded by the pedantic Dutchman (yes, I know that is redundant) Cardinal Adriaan Florenszoon Boeyens who reigned as Adrian VI.  Fortunately he reigned briefly.  One year, eight months, and five days later he was dead; the Roman crowds, delighted to be rid of the dour Dutchman, hung a laurel wreath on the door of the papal physician to thank the doctor for not having prolonged the boredom of this tediously scholarly pope who was far more interested in Reform (which the Romans have always abhorred) than art, beauty, and the Renaissance.  Non  fiducia mai un papa che ha letto solo (never trust a pope who sleeps alone) as the Romans are wont to say.   
      In November 1523 Adrian was succeeded by Leo’s cousin, Clement VII.  The Medici never slept alone, though Clements preference, unlike Leo’s, was for women.  Rampant heterosexuality in a pope brings problems of its own as we will see when we hear the story of why Henry VIII didn’t get his annulment, but that is another story.  Suffice it to say that Clement, like Leo, was a papal disaster.  Leo triggered Luther’s break with the Church; Clement would trigger Henry VIII’s.  Maybe the Romans are wrong about that sleeping alone thing, celibacy is a good idea at least for popes.  But on May 6^th 1527 the troops of Emperor Charles V sacked Rome.  It was a debacle from which it would take Rome decades to recover.  We will go into detail in a future entry, but the half-demolished old basilica, half-built new basilica was looted, graves emptied, treasures stolen, clergy, soldiers, and laity alike massacred.  When Peruzzi died nine years later, construction on the basilica had not advanced. The walls stood incomplete where they stood at all, the four great piers waited for a dome that no one could engineer, and the revenues were drying up as country after country fell to a series of Reformations that snapped their ties with Rome.     

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

Julius II

Well Popes may  be infallible at times but they are never immortal.  (The “t” is crucial in that word, they are often, as we have seen, immoral.)  Julius died in 1513.  It was only at the very end of his life, in those last few days, that he thought to ask the members of his household for their prayers for his soul.  Better late than never.  And Julius, though not a good man, was a good pope—in fact a great pope.  That is how it often is.  Saints almost invariably make bad kings, presidents, rulers-for-life, and popes.  And they are, of course, absolute failures at being despots.   Nevertheless, Julius went off to his reward, whatever it may have been (and would, of course, still be).  Personally, I am inclined to trust in the mercy of God even for someone like Julius, but the Dutch humanist Erasmus wasn’t.  He wrote a scathing essay: Julius Exclusus de Caelis (Julius kicked out of heaven) a biting satirical dialogue between an adamant Peter and a Julius bewildered that with all his power and wealth Peter won’t admit him to paradise.  After all what is a little pederasty (and a lot of simony) compared to all the art he sponsored, the battles won, the wealth accumulated for the Church.  (Boy it sounds like Bernie Cardinal Law, doesn’t it???   Of course Bernie’s battles were with people like Cardinal Bernadin and Joan Chittister and I don’t recall any art. Well, moving on--)    
     Julius died and he left Michelangelo 10,000 ducats (approximately 450,000.00 in toda’s money).  The tomb was never built.  But the Basilica would continue.  Julius was interred in the vault of his uncle, Sixtus IV.  The arrangement was meant to be temporary and in a certain way it was.  About fifteen years later, during the sack of Rome, the tomb was violated and the graves desecrated.  The elegant bronze tomb of Sixtus IV was  displaced (it is now in the museum of the Treasury in Saint Peter’s Basilica) and replaced--a cenutry anhd a half later--by stone slab marking the vault as the grave of Clement X who died in 1676.  The three popes are jammed in the vault like the poor three to a bed.  Sic transit gloria mundi. 
      Julius died leaving the Church quite secure financially—with the equivalent of about  18,000,000 USD in the treasury—half in gold the other in jewels and ornaments.  It wouldn’t go far in the Vatican today but was a lot in those days.  Nevertheless, Julius was anxious to provide a steady flow of income for his basilica and so only a few months before he died he approved his banker, Agostino Chigi’s, scheme of selling indulgences.  Julius didn’t know it, but it was an unfortunate note to go out on.    On the brighter side he also called a Council—Lateran V—for the reform of the Church.  It was not totally a noble gesture; it was meant to ward off the threat from calls for Reform coming from papal enemies such as Louis XII of France, but better to do the right thing for the wrong reason than not to do the right thing.  We’ll talk more about Lateran V when our blog entries on Reformations catches up to this point.  In the meantime stay tuned.