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Note: Siege and Murder
Tag(s): Italy, Medici, Papacy
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THE FIRST attack, launched at dawn on 6 May 1527, was repulsed by the papal gunners; but soon afterwards a thick mist rose from the Tiber and, unobserved beneath its cover, the Duke of Bourbon’s men were able to mount scaling ladders made from vine-poles against the city walls.
LOCATION: 3746

It has been estimated that on the first day alone 8,000 people were killed.
LOCATION: 3770

At the beginning of June, after more than a month’s incarceration in the Castle, he was forced to surrender to the Emperor’s envoy. His fellow refugees were dying of hunger and disease around him; and the army, which he had hoped would come to rescue him, was retreating towards Viterbo. He was obliged to deliver up Civitavecchia, Ostia and Modena as well as Parma and Piacenza to the imperial forces. He was also required to find a huge ransom, to restore the Colonna to their possessions and to hand over seven
LOCATION: 3796

Early on the morning of 7 December he did so, wearing the clothes of his major-domo. With a few companions, he got away to Orvieto where, in the remote fastness of the episcopal palace which could be reached only by a mule track from the valley of the Paglia, he endeavoured to rebuild his shattered power and reputation. It was at Orvieto, in this ‘ruinous and decayed old palace’ with the ‘roofs fallen down and thirty persons, riff-raff and others, standing in the chambers for a garnishment’, that an embassy from England sought him out in order to obtain his authority for Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon.
LOCATION: 3805

Catherine was Charles V’s aunt and the now penniless Pope could do no more than make vague promises that he would grant the King’s request once he was free to move back to Rome again. In fact, the Pope’s mind was occupied by other matters that seemed to him more important. None of these appears to have concerned him more than the problem of Florence, where the sack of Rome and his own subsequent imprisonment had had the most unfortunate repercussions.
LOCATION: 3811

To replace them in the government of the city, the Pope dispatched the dark, frizzy-haired, now nineteen-year-old youth, Alessandro de’ Medici, for whom he had bought the Dukedom of Penne from Charles V and to whom he hoped to marry the Emperor’s natural daughter, Margaret.
LOCATION: 3877

Having thus roughly and decisively settled the future of Florence, to which he himself never again returned – and having created Ippolito a cardinal, an honour to which that cheerful, gregarious, extravagant and sensual young man in no way aspired – the Pope now concentrated his attentions upon the family’s one remaining asset, the little Caterina de’ Medici,
LOCATION: 3879

And so it was that on 28 October 1533, the Pope himself conducting the ceremony in Marseilles, the fourteen-year-old Caterina de’ Medici, Duchess of Urbino, was married to Henri de Valois, Duke of Orleans, second son of Francis
LOCATION: 3889

Cellini confessed that the tears filled his eyes as he kissed the dead Pope’s feet; but there was no one else to mourn for him. On the contrary, Rome rejoiced.
LOCATION: 3902