and military events on the continent did not help Henry. In 1527, the Holy Roman Emperor’s mutinous army did the unthinkable: it sacked Rome. This was an extraordinary debacle which further damaged the papacy’s standing in Europe. The attack on Rome was not explicitly authorised by Charles V, whose troops had been fighting the French and a coalition of Italian states associated with the papacy. He was genuinely distressed by what happened. On the other hand, he had not seemed too concerned when his army of 25,000 men marched on Rome.
Most of the men were unpaid and wanted to damage Rome as a protest, but the protest rapidly deteriorated into a horrific orgy of violence. There were many Germans in the imperial army, and some of them were Lutherans, but the motivation does not appear to have been religious. Indeed, observers felt that Spanish and Italian soldiers committed far worse atrocities than the Germans. It was not Pope Clement VII’s fault that the walls of Rome were inadequately defended; it was not his fault that the emperor could not control his feral troops. If Clement was to be blamed for anything, it was naïveté. He ingenuously thought that Rome would be secure because of its sacred role as the centre of Christianity.
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