Imperial troops sack Rome
A mutinous Habsburg army mercilessly lays waste to the city
On the morning of 6 May 1527 the people of Rome awoke with a sense of dread. The previous day, the Habsburg imperial army, commanded by Charles, Duke of Bourbon, had arrived at the walls of the old city. After years of fighting in the Italian peninsula, his army was short of funds and discipline. His adversary, Pope Clement VII, was the ideal target. And now, at his headquarters at the monastery of St Onofrio, the duke gave the order to attack.
As luck would have it, Charles himself was killed early in the assault – but his death only enraged his men, most of whom were Spanish and German mercenaries. After breaking through the city’s defences, they rampaged through the streets, smashing their way into churches and monasteries, looting and killing without mercy.
The Germans in particular seemed fired with religious fury. In front of Clement’s fortress, they staged a mocking parody of a papal procession. “Long live Luther Pontifex,” they chanted. One observer lamented that “the Germans were bad, the Italians worse, but worst of all were the Spaniards.”
The most infamous confrontation of the day occurred in the Teutonic Cemetery next to St Peter’s where the pope’s elite bodyguards, the renowned Swiss Guard, had assembled to cover his escape into the castle. What followed was a massacre, the guardsmen cut down where they stood by the Habsburg troops. In the final bloody moments of the encounter, the guard’s commander, Kaspar Röist, escaped to his house nearby. The imperial troops burst in and butchered him in front of his wife. Of the 189 Swiss Guards, only 42 survived.