1  

Mass Murder in Sacks during the Italian Wars, 1494-1559*

The Italian Wars and Mass Murder

In his History of Italy (written 1537-40) Francesco Guicciardini observed that

the calamities of the Italian Wars arose 'sometimes because of the just anger

of God, and sometimes because of the impiety and wickedness of other men'.

In particular, he attributed the murderous cruelty of sacks to ‘other men’ in the

form of the French; he called the French sack of the Florentine stronghold of

Fivizzano in 1494, when the entire foreign garrison and many inhabitants

were killed, 'a thing unheard of and very frightening in Italy, which for a long

time had been used to seeing wars staged with beautiful pomp and display,

not unlike spectacles, rather than waged with bloodshed and dangers'. In

1495 the ‘innate fury’ of the French drove them to massacre the inhabitants of

Monte San Giovanni indiscriminately and to burn the place down, prompting

Guicciardini’s indignant comment: ‘This method of making war, not used in

Italy for many centuries, filled all the kingdom with the greatest terror, because

in victory, in whatever way it had been acquired, the farthest point the cruelty

of the victors had ever gone was to plunder and then free the conquered

soldiers, to sack the towns captured by assault and take the inhabitants

prisoners in order that they would have to pay ransom, but always sparing the

lives of those men who had not been killed in the heat of combat.’ Writing of

the period after 1508 and the League of Cambrai, Guicciardini expanded on

this point, noting how murder was no longer confined among the ‘barbarians

  2  

themselves’ but now spread among the peoples (‘i popoli’) of Italy. As he put

it: ‘But now the door opening to new discords in the future, there followed

throughout Italy, and against the Italians themselves, the cruelest accidents,

endless murders, sackings and destruction of many cities and towns …'. A

terrible climax was reached with the sack of Rome in 1527, a year ‘full of

atrocities and events unheard of for many centuries … everything full of death,

flight and rapine.’1

The Italian Wars were certainly notable for their large pitched battles

and heavy military casualties. They were also marked by episodes of mass

murder of civilians, often consequent to the fall of a besieged town. The sacks

of Fivizzano and Monte San Giovanni, mentioned by Guicciardini, were

followed by the sacks of Forlì (in 1500), Capua (1501), Arezzo (1502), Padua,

Monselice, Fiume, Feltre (all in 1509), Vicenza (1510), Udine (1509 and

1511), Ravenna, Brescia, Lonigo, and Prato (1512), Genoa (1522), Pavia,

Rome (1527), and Molfetta (1529), to name just some of the best recorded

incidents. Contemporary evidence for the numbers killed in these sacks is

probably as unreliable as it is for fatalities in battle, ranging from the

suspiciously precise 2,125 deaths at Capua to the almost certainly inflated

number of 20,000 deaths at Brescia and ‘more than 40,000’ at Rome.2 These

statistics may include the number of those killed in events indirectly related to

the sack: the murderous sack of Capua was preceded by four days of

bombardment, while the sack of Rome was followed by a plague that may

have killed around 5,000 imperial troops alone within two months.3 Finally,

reaching a conclusion about the proportion of the total population killed in

  3  

these episodes of mass murder is hampered by the difficulty of estimating

urban populations during such unsettled times. Rome’s population of about

55,000 was swollen by refugees, while Brescia’s normal population of around

50,000 was probably depleted as many citizens fled to the surrounding

countryside, or were expelled by the French during the first years of

occupation after 1509.4

Violence against non-combatants, including women and children, is at

least as old as the Bible (eg. Deuteronomy 20: 13-20). However, recent

experience of genocidal events and the formulation of ‘crimes against

humanity’ have encouraged intense historical investigation of the roots of

such violence, which can illuminate the nature of mass murder during the

Italian Wars.5 Commentators on the mass murders of Nanjing (1937) and My

Lai (1968), as well as on the genocide of the Holocaust (1933-45), have

suggested that while each event had particular causes it is nevertheless

possible to identify a common ‘web of factors’ in which authorised violence,

routinised actions, and dehumanisation of victims play a role.6 The

demonisation of the enemy and the prolongation of the siege of Shanghai may

have fuelled the Japanese troops’ desire for retribution at Nanjing as hopes

for a swift victory were frustrated. The experience of warfare exacerbated the

situation: frontline troops marching to Nanjing exploited locals to survive and

excused increasing brutality in the name of a greater good, culminating in the

capture of the city. In the case of both My Lai and the Holocaust, perpetrators

felt able to inflict violence since their victims were imbued with an ‘abstract’

quality rather than with any individual identity.7 The victims at My Lai, mainly

  4  

old people and small children, were collapsed into the category of ‘Vietcong’;

as an idiom in use among soldiers went: ‘Anything you see is all Vietcong’.8

Early modern sacks might be viewed as modern ‘war crimes’ in the

sense of a violation of the rules of war, or even acts of genocide, since they

could be driven by the desire to exterminate a national group in part or

inadvertently.9 Acts of mass murder might be justified by the precepts of just

war theory, which sanctioned actions on the principle of military necessity. On

the other hand, excessive violence, attacks on innocent persons, and acts of

perfidy such as breaking the terms of a peace could be condemned as unjust

and punished.10 Furthermore, mass murder might exceed accepted Christian

moral limits and fall into the category of nefas (a wicked act), thereby drawing

on ancient associations with unspeakable sexual crimes and diabolic acts.11

As I will demonstrate in the rest of this chapter, the violence of early

modern sacks depended on the authorisation and routinisation of actions with

the sanction of laws and military customs. These acts, like their modern

analogues, also owed much to the dehumanisation of the enemy and the

frustration of unpaid soldiers, especially as the desire for revenge grew in

soldiers bombarded during a siege, or grieving for comrades lost at the large

and indiscriminate slaughters of battles like that of Ravenna. Finally, it seems

that the recollection and presentation of these traumatic events posed a

particular challenge for diarists, chroniclers, and artists, as well as for the

victims themselves, which they met with a variety of techniques including the

adoption of narratives of chivalry or martyrdom, and by silence or self-

censorship.

  5  

Motives for Mass Murder

As Francesco Guicciardini and other chroniclers knew well, mass murder

during sacks of cities had a venerable history from Troy and Carthage to

Rome and Constantinople.12 More recently, violence had also fallen upon

civilians at Cesena (1377), Piacenza (1447), and Volterra (1472).13 Although

mass murder was far from the ideal of military behaviour promoted by either

ancient or modern authorities the laws, customs and etiquette of war could

justify the massacre of civilians in the storming of a city after a siege,

regardless of what more optimistic advice suggested or what generals might

have preferred in the way of military order. In the first century Onosander

argued that an army’s good behaviour in a captured city would encourage

other cities to yield, and he recommended that the general proclaim that

anyone who laid down arms would be treated well since killing those who had

been overcome – as was the commander’s legal right – was an example of

cruelty and foolishness rather than martial virtue. The Italian humanists

Francesco Filelfo and Jacopo Porcia made similar points, while Niccolò

Machiavelli, following the ancient Roman authority Vegetius, suggested that

when soldiers entered a city they could overcome the opposition of

inhabitants by opening the city gates to allow them to flee and (this time in

contrast to ancient sources favouring a complete slaughter until the order for

sack was given) by proclaiming that only those who were armed would be

offended and that whoever threw his arms to the ground would be pardoned.14

  6  

In practice the besieged were usually given an opportunity to surrender

when a herald appeared before the town walls. The besieged then faced a

dilemma: their ruler might punish them for surrendering to a besieging force

prematurely, or they could hold out against the enemy and suffer the wrath of

frustrated troops.15 One example of this latter course occurred at Prato in

1512 when a trombetta was sent by the Spanish to the walls of the city to

announce that it would be sacked within three days if Spanish demands were

not met. This herald was treated to a round of artillery fire, the inhabitants of

the city built bastions and ditches behind the walls and they fought in futile

expectation of Florentine relief. The Pratese were soon overcome by artillery

and faced the ‘grandissima furia’ of the Spanish who leapt the walls, it was

said, like rabid dogs.16

Even a town that had been lawfully besieged and then offered

unconditional surrender might still be thoroughly sacked and its inhabitants –

their lives rendered forfeit and spoils of war – given no quarter but murdered

on the word of the commander enacting justice. The author of one advice

book for generals suggested that with the first signs of the defection of a city it

must be vanquished.17 Moreover, as Pierino Belli, a participant in the war in

Piedmont, noted in 1558: ‘[T]he soldiers of our day, careless of salvation

(being persons who either do not believe in God or do not fear Him), make a

business of plundering and all sorts of outrage … [and] whether they retake

these places by force of arms or even by surrender, they plunder as heartily,

and abstain not a whit more from murder, debauchery, and pillage, than if

they had taken a city of the Turks at the cost of much labour and bloodshed.’18

  7  

The ‘grandissima furia’ or vengeful mood of troops, evident at Prato

and elsewhere, helped to increase the scale of the slaughter, for once within a

town men would fight for survival conscious of the fact that all inhabitants had

resisted their siege and constituted mortal enemies until they laid down their

arms or died.19 From the point of view of the soldier, behaviour that might be

condemned as a ‘war crime’ today was therefore sanctioned by the

exigencies and customs of war, and even considered honourable, for some

believed that the civilian was incapable of honourable or memorable deeds,

and consequently need not be treated with the same chivalric care that

military men might apply to their fellows. Thus, while the Gascon soldier

Blaise de Monluc enjoyed good relations with his opposite number during and

after the siege of Siena in 1554-5 both soldiers acted with offhand cruelty

towards those civilians they considered ‘useless mouths’.20

It was only when victory by force seemed assured that mass murder

might ease off and a city sacked safely with only sporadic applications of fatal

cruelty.21 The desire to extract ransom and information about hidden

treasures, and the drive for revenge, caused these latter murderous

assaults.22 One chronicler of the sack of Prato described a frenzy of killing

that lasted day and night with some unfortunates having their throats cut,

others ejected from windows or severely beaten, their genitals (natura) burnt

and left for dead. In order to extract payments of ransom people were tortured

with cords or roasted like pigs or thrushes on a spit and reduced to sexless

corpses.23

  8  

Civilian affronts to military honour also played a part in the violence of

mass murder. In a speech reportedly given to stiffen the resolve of troops cut

off from supplies while assaulting Prato, the viceroy of Naples declared that

the ‘Terra’ of Prato ought to be sacked and everyone over the age of fifteen

run though with a sword on account of the dishonour (sdegno) endured by the

soldiers who had drunk poisoned wine and died when they first arrived on the

plain of Prato.24 Chroniclers and letter-writers also recorded examples of

murder accompanied by public humiliation during the sack of Rome such as

the young and beautiful Roman nobleman forced by Germans to wear a

‘camisia subtilissima’ before they murdered him.25

The sack of Ravenna provides an interesting example of the way in

which the desire for booty or supplies combined with a thirst for revenge and

escalated into mass murder. In this instance Luigi da Porto’s reflection on the

state of mind of sacking troops is rare and instructive.26 He wrote: ‘Following

this most bitter and unhappy victory [at the Battle of Ravenna] in which died,

besides [Gaston de] Foix, almost the entire flower of their captains of every

kind, they found themselves near Ravenna, standing with much unease

between happiness and sadness, lamentation and pleasure.’ Having

demanded supplies and being met with some resistance a few Gascons broke

into the city and a sack soon spread. Da Porto concluded in more concrete

terms: ‘Neither the Duke [of Ferrara] nor any other captain had the power to

forbid such cruelty and wickedness, since the camp had so many different

people with such dissimilar languages, and the majority being without their

leaders who had died in the recent battle …’.27

  9  

Marcello Alberini provides a similar impression of greedy, desperate,

and ill-disciplined troops, noting that the sack of Rome arose in the context of

a disorder of nations and tongues without obedience to superiors and lacking

the leadership of Constable Bourbon, who had been cut down scaling the

walls.28 As the persona of Rome in La presa et lamento di Roma put it: ‘Ah

fatal fortune, Bourbon was dead! / In dying he landed a severe blow / And a

cause of greater devastation and evil for me / Since that mob, bereft of piety /

Proceeded down such a deadly road / That I fall into a cold sweat to think of

it.’29 Luigi Guicciardini noted how during the sack of Rome some Germans

‘were cutting to pieces anyone who they ran into, as is highly necessary at the

beginning of a victory’ but that Spanish soldiers assured the Germans that the

city was now taken and stood defenceless, and since many treasures had

been hidden it was better to keep people alive.30

Contemporary explanations for mass murder might include nationalist

prejudice and demonisation of the enemy, which have a modern genocidal

ring. Francesco Guicciardini described the 'natural hatred' for Italians of

northerners who in violent sacks, such as that of Ravenna noted above,

expressed their 'fury' at their battlefield losses.31 Guicciardini’s thesis about

foreign corruption of native practices was shared by the Florentine diarist

Luca Landucci,32 and also by Venetian patrician Girolamo Priuli, who not only

berated the corruption of his fellow nobles, especially the young, but attributed

this decline in martial spirit to foreign elements. Recording reports of French

cruelty in Lombardy (and comparing these with the relatively secure

conditions that had existed under Venetian rule there) he grumbled in his diary

  10  

about the ways in which the barbarity of the northerners was imitated and

even exceeded by the Italian troops.33

Religious motives for murder and looting were also ascribed by

contemporaries to Jews and, especially at the sack of Rome, to Lutheran

‘heretics’. Priuli reported that at the sack of Monselice in 1509 Jews in the

armies of the French and Germans killed babies in their cradles in a desire to

drink their innocent blood. He suggested that this was a form of revenge for

the losses at the sack of Padua of jewels and other goods pledged to the

Jews in return for loans.34 When Priuli described Jews murdering children in a

literal thirst for their blood and entering churches during the sack of Monselice

to burn or ruin images of Christ, Mary and the saints he was merely

confirming Christian suspicions of Jewish hostility to the followers of Jesus

Christ and the medieval 'blood libel'.35 Such libels died hard and fifty years

after he witnessed the sack of Brescia as a small child Giovanni Pianero was

accusing Jews of burying men and boys alive and in the same breath dilating

on the infamous case of blood libel involving Simon of Trent.36 The presence

of Jews and ‘marrani’ among the Spanish troops at the sack of Rome was

later noted by a number of contemporary versifiers and by Luigi Guicciardini,

who described them as ‘viziosissima’ and without equal among the sackers in

their hunger for riches.37 Some of the violence of the sack of Rome was also

blamed on Lutherans among imperial troops, although their role was probably

exaggerated in the war of words that marked the early Counter Reformation.38

History and Memory

  11  

The trauma of mass murder posed a challenge for those who wished to

record or represent such events.39 As the author of a lament about the sack of

Rome complained, chronicles and pictures were inadequate to express such

dark cruelties.40 However, it seems clear that witnesses of destruction and

mass murder were not always inarticulate with grief or shock, even if the

language they used was less emotionally charged and more communal and

providential than its modern counterpart. The invocation of the Jewish ‘blood

libel’, noted above, and the descriptions of a latter-day massacre of innocents

involving babies torn from breasts and murdered, or foundlings thrown from

windows, are perhaps the most obvious examples of this selective

representation.41 Some painted images of the Massacre of the Innocents were

set in the contemporary world and doubtless served as moralising

allegories.42 For example, Altobello Melone's Massacre of the Innocents

(c.1518) in contemporary setting and dress may be compared with

Alessandro Bonvicino Moretto's canvas on the same subject, which was

recognizably set in the piazza della loggia of Brescia. The latter was probably

intended as an imaginative recollection of the frenzied murder of innocent

civilians witnessed in the city two decades earlier by the commissioners of the

canvas (Figure 1).43 In accordance with contemporary ideals of the painted

istoria, the mêlée gained some heroic decorum through the depiction of the

ancient dress and musculature of the soldiers while the pathos and horror of

mass murder were evoked by means of the expressions on the faces of

women, including one gazing out of the canvas.

  12  

Chroniclers rarely identified the victims of sacks unless they were well-

known figures such as the outstanding soldiers or nobles at the sack of

Brescia mentioned by Luigi da Porto, or, perhaps most famously, the

Constable Bourbon who fell at the sack of Rome.44 The goldsmith Benvenuto

Cellini, who thought his shot brought down the Constable, revelled in the

‘music of the guns’ during the sack in 1527 but preferred to pass over the

deaths of civilians in silence: ‘[T]he conflagration and the unbelievable

spectacle before our eyes … was such that it could only be seen or imagined

by those in the castle [of Sant’Angelo]. But I shall not begin describing it; I

shall just carry on with the story of my own life and the events that really

belong to it’. Significantly, the only account of civilian injury he provides is that

seen through the eyes of Giuliano the bombardier who ‘was staring out over

the battlements to where his poor house was being sacked and his wife and

children outraged’.45 In a similar way, Francesco Guicciardini’s account of the

sack of Brescia, like that of Luigi da Porto, passed over the details of civilian

experiences and focused on military manoeuvres and success, asserting that

the name of the French commander Gaston de Foix was glorious throughout

Christendom for his deeds, including the recuperation of Brescia ‘con tanta

strage de’ soldati e dal popolo’ in such a manner that the ‘universal

judgement’ was that Italy had not seen anything like him in military affairs for

centuries.46 Military honour rather than civilian murder is also dominant in the

surviving elements of the tomb monument for Foix (Figure 2). The

representation of the capture of Brescia or Ravenna conforms to the tradition

of the depiction of painted istoria, noted above, in its variety of figures – both

  13  

animal and human – as well as in its prominent display of heroic nudity, while

the pathos of the figure in flight who seems to stare out at the viewer provides

the only hint of civilian casualties.

Like the Foix tomb monument, the illustrations, or news-related prints,

which accompanied popular published verses about the sack of Rome, clearly

show battles between soldiers in contemporary or classical armour and

contain no suggestion of the bloody mass murder of civilians (Figure 3).47 In

an even more oblique fashion potters broke the ‘visual silence’ about the

event with istoriato maiolica dishes decorated with allegorical images of the

sack of Rome, in one case with a figure borrowed from a print of the

Massacre of the Innocents (Figure 4).48 In this subtle fashion they

acknowledged the political prejudices of their noble patrons and alluded to the

theme of divine punishment for clerical immorality also found in texts such as

that of Francesco Guicciardini. As André Chastel remarked of representations

of the sack of Rome: ‘… it is as though there had been a refusal in Italy to

portray the event, a kind of instinctive censorship.’49 The paucity of images of

battles and soldiers in contemporary dress in Italian art also led John Hale to

wonder: ‘so much war, so much art: why did the two meet so rarely?’50 The

base nature of soldiering, as Hale supposed, and the horrific nature of the

mass butchery at odds with the Italian heroic tradition in paintings of battles

may have discouraged a realist depiction of sacks. However, during the last

decade of the fifteenth century Leonardo da Vinci could write of the way in

which an artist should depict the corpses, blood, and death agonies of battle,

concluding: ‘And see to it that you paint no level spot of ground that is not

  14  

trampled with blood.’51 In 1527 the humanist-cleric Marco Girolamo Vida, who

elsewhere deplored the sack of Rome, evoked the pathos of suffering in

Vergil’s description of the sack of Troy (Aeneid 2: 298-558), asking: ‘And who,

then, would hold back his tears as poets tell of cities captured by enemy

hands?’52 Therefore, the horrors of violence could be evoked in a monitory

way,53 and presented as edifying and pathetic narratives through the

articulation of classical, sacred, or chivalric motifs, but the contemporary

reality of civilian death was less important than the moral or political message

it could convey.54

The authors of accounts of sacks and their aftermath could take the

dehumanisation of the victim to an extreme level and simply provide a bare

list of acts and objects.55 The most perfunctory references to mass murder

were accompanied by lengthy lists of damaged or stolen property, especially

when appeals to the state for compensation might be involved. The

community of Feltre, sacked in 1509, fell at the feet of the Venetian doge, as

they put it, as a ‘lacrimabile cita’ subjected to the ‘crudellisime barbarice

depradatione’ and called for an exemption from tax. As evidence of their

incapacity they invoked the ruined churches and other public places in the

womb (matrice) of the city including the rectors’ houses ‘arse, & ruinate nel

universal incendio, di quella infoelicissima cita’ and in need of expensive

repairs.56 Marin Sanudo listed some of the houses sacked at the recapture of

Padua by the Venetians in 1509 but he did not mention any civilian victims by

name.57 When Girolamo Priuli surveyed the ruins of Padua tears came into

his eyes but in his account he concentrated on the physical ruins of the city

  15  

and its surrounding area which stood in stark contrast to its previous

flourishing and beautiful state rather than on any injuries or deaths, which he

accounted ‘pochissimi’.58 In his description of the sack of a corrupt and vice-

ridden Rome, Francesco Vettori briefly listed the array of actions undertaken

by the imperial troops but passed over the killing to dwell on the wealth

seized.59

Finally, it is worth noting that memories of sacks could be shaped by

the Christian tradition of martyrdom which replaced silence with a

stereotypical narrative of torment and death. Lauro Martines has explored the

religious framework of violence and observed that official judicial violence was

closely linked to the bloody martyrdoms and suffering at the heart of

Christianity.60 Similarly, the violence of the religious wars in France during the

sixteenth century could be presented as a ‘sacral act’ avenging evil and

offering martyrs for the cause.61 It is therefore surely no coincidence that

images of Massacres of the Innocents might relate to events of contemporary

mass murder, as we have seen. It is no less surprising that the theme of

martyrdom was strongly evoked in several recollections of the sack of Rome,

the head of the Catholic world. For example, at the opening of the second

book of his history of the sack, Luigi Guicciardini reflected on northern

success in the Italian wars and contrasted it with Italian idleness (ozio),

discord, pusillanimity and other vices.62 Guicciardini then noted the plunder of

relics of martyred saints such as Peter, Paul, and Andrew during the sack,

and later in his narrative he outlined the tortures inflicted on Romans by the

sackers in a bid to extract information about the location of their treasures.

  16  

The victims were branded, deprived of water and sleep, suspended for hours

by their arms, had their genitals bound, their teeth extracted, or forced to

consume their own ears, nose, or roasted testicles ‘and others [were afflicted]

with strange and unheard of martyrdoms, that move me so much to think of

that I cannot write about each one, because one continually saw and heard of

many cruel and pitiable examples …’.63 The pathetic spectacle of martyrdom

at the hands of an army of sackers containing Lutherans was made public by

the living presence in the city of men with disfigured faces and missing private

parts, perhaps the best sign of Italian penitence, which Guicciardini believed

was urgently needed in his own age.64 In a similar way Baldassare

Castiglione, attacking the pro-imperial dialogue on the sack written by Alfonso

de Valdés, rejected the view that the prelates were justly allowed by God to be

killed for their unchristian lives and asserted that they were more like martyrs

suffering persecution in imitation of Christ whose bones the sackers had

desecrated.65

The allusion to martyrdom was most pronounced in Marcello Alberini’s

recollections of the sack of Rome composed for domestic consumption some

twenty years after the event. Alberini described the inhuman and

indiscriminate killing and cruelty of the sack, which was a martyrdom both for

the victims and for himself in telling the story.66 He recalled that his family had

mourned the death of his father for several days after they misidentified a

naked corpse lying in the street in front of their home. Alberini, who was a

teenager at the time, asked rhetorically whether it was not ‘un marthirio

intenso’ that circumstances impeded filial piety and he was unable to leave his

  17  

house and check the body to find out if it was that of his father.67 He also

reflected that no martyrdom could equal the experience of homes being

robbed and bread stolen from the mattresses of plague victims during the

famine that followed the sack.68 Whether he witnessed this for himself or not,

Alberini’s emotions seem most obviously raw here as he goes on to note that

he was not allowed to view the actual body of his father (who was captured

during the sack and died of a combination of fever, age and shock) or the

body of his brother who, like all of his siblings, died of the plague.69 It may be

no coincidence that at this point in the narrative four lines were cancelled –

perhaps some thoughts could not be recorded for posterity, even in the

relative privacy of family papers, just as episodes of mass murder could only

be represented in an obliquely allusive or aesthetically distanced way.70

Conclusion

As we have seen, the sack took its place in early modern moral rhetoric as a

sign of divine anger, a reflection of native weakness or noble corruption, as

well as an episode of barbarian destruction or military greed. More prosaically,

the sack could also offer an opportunity for soldiers to gain booty and for

civilians to settle scores.71 Guicciardini’s judgment that war became more

bloody in Italy during 1494 to 1525 has been confirmed by modern historians

who note that the introduction of artillery during this period rendered the

medieval tactic of a defensive retreat to castles and a prolonged siege

ineffective. As a consequence, until new fortifications became widespread,

  18  

commanders preferred to resort to pitched battles between armies swollen

with vulnerable infantrymen resulting in high and indiscriminate loss of life.72

However, the violence of sacks was a very old phenomenon and it was

governed by the same rules and laws that supported the honour of the

chivalric knight.73 If anything had changed, it was simply the scale of the

slaughter as larger armies stormed larger and more prosperous urban

centres. Sacks were simply another form of war in a period when war was the

normal state of affairs and they form a bleak episode in the social history of

warfare.74

Finally, the records and recollections of sacks, even at their most terse,

reveal the intensity of violence during many sacks. Chroniclers, often victims

of sacks themselves, could be appalled or driven into silence in the face of

such events and representing the virtually unrepresentable forced them to

produce narratives appealing to religious preconceptions about non-

Christians, as well as to the examples of martyrdom and chivalric heroism. It

is these constraints that give almost all the accounts of sacks their hyperbolic

and stereotypical qualities, but this should not lead modern readers to

conclude that mass murder in the Renaissance was simply accepted as an

inevitable fact of life, or viewed without a considerable range of emotions from

the tearful and indignant to the outraged and fearful. Like the tears which

sprang to the eyes of Girolamo Priuli surveying the ruins of Padua and the

almost palpable shudder which came over Marcello Alberini recalling the

events of his childhood, mass murder during the Italian Wars was not a

natural product of any medieval lack of restraint but a response to the

  19  

pressures and conditions of war guided by a set of rules and customs laid

down by military manuals, law, and the requirements of military success.75 If

sacks died away in Italy after the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis (1559) ended

the Italian Wars, it was therefore not as a consequence of the birth of

‘modern’ civilised men or women but as the result of military and political

calculations that had made sacks possible in the first place.

                                                                                                               * I would like to thank the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland for

their financial support.

1 Francesco Guicciardini, The History of Italy, trans. and ed. Sidney Alexander

(Princeton University Press, 1969), 3, 56, 72, 191, 376; idem, Storia d’Italia,

ed. Constantino Panigada (Bari: G. Laterza, 1929), 1: 1, 81, 105-6; 2: 245; 5:

101.

2 Silvestro Guarino, ‘Diario’ in Pelliccia (ed.), Raccolta di varie croniche, diarj

ed altri opuscoli, così Italiani, come Latini, appartenenti alla storia del Regno

di Napoli (Naples: Bernardo Perger, 1780-2), 1. 209-47 (at 239); Marin

Sanudo, I diarii di Marino Sanuto, eds. Rinaldo Fulin, Federico Stefani, Nicolò

Barozzi, Guglielmo Berchet, and Marco Allegri, facsimile reprint, 58 vols.

(Bologna: Forni, 1969-70), 13: col. 517 (Brescia), 45: col. 122 (Rome); Andrea

Mocenigo, La Guerra di Cambrai fatta a’ tempi nostri in Italia, trans. Andrea

Arrivabene (Venice: Andrea Arrivabene, 1562), fol. 77r (15,000 dead at

Brescia). On the instrumental and rhetorical functions of counting the dead

see John Gagné, ‘Counting the Dead: Traditions of Enumeration and the

Italian Wars’, Renaissance Quarterly, 67.3 (2014), 791-840.

  20  

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             3 An imperial commander quoted in André Chastel, The Sack of Rome, 1527,

trans. Beth Archer (Princeton University Press, 1983), 91. For the suggestion

that no more than 4,000 died see Alfonso de Valdés and the Sack of Rome:

Dialogue of Lactancio and an Archdeacon, trans. John E. Longhurst, with

Raymond R. MacCurdy (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,

1952), 59 (and see ibid., nn. 6, 7 for other estimates).

4 For the populations of Rome and Brescia see Egmont Lee (ed.), Descriptio

Urbis: The Roman Census of 1527 (Rome: Bulzoni, 1985), and Stephen D.

Bowd,Venice’s Most Loyal City: Civic Identity in Renaissance Brescia

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 18. On refugees in Rome

see Marcello Alberini, Il sacco di Roma del MDXXVII: studi e documenti. 1. I

ricordi, ed. Domenico Orano (Rome: Forzani, 1901), 279.

5 Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and

Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven: Yale University Press,

2007). For the suggestion that genocide is a uniquely modern phenomenon

see Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing

(Cambridge University Press, 2005). See also Alan S. Rosenbaum (ed.), Is

the Holocaust Unique?: Perspectives on Comparative Genocide (Boulder,

CO: Westview Press, 1996).

6 Joshua Fogel, ‘Introduction’ in idem (ed.), The Nanjing Massacre in History

and Historiography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Mark

Eykholt, ‘Aggression, Victimization, and Chinese Historiography of the Nanjing

Massacre’, in ibid., ch. 2 (quotation at 14).

  21  

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             7 Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University

Press, 1989), 226-7, 246-7; Myra MacPherson, Long Time Passing: Vietnam

and the Haunted Generation (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1985), 581.

8 Quoted in Heonik Kwon, After the Massacre: Commemoration and

Consolation in Ha My and My Lai (Berkeley: University of California Press,

2006), 29.

9 Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan (ed.), The Specter of Genocide: Mass

Murder in Historical Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2003); Kiernan,

Blood and Soil, esp. 13-18. Compare Len Scales, ‘Bread, Cheese and

Genocide: Imagining the Destruction of Peoples in Medieval Western Europe’,

History, 92.307 (July 2007), 284-300.

10 For example, Giovanni da Legnano, The Tractatus de Bello, trans. James

Leslie Brierly (Washington, D.C.: Printed for the Carnegie Institution of

Washington at the Oxford University Press, 1917), 269, 282-4 (chs. LIX, LX,

LXXXIII, LXXXIV). In the middle of the sixteenth century Francisco de Vitoria

argued that anyone who had borne arms against the invaders of a city might

be killed on capture, while the sack might be lawful if necessary for the

conduct of war, a deterrent to the enemy, or spur to the courage of troops:

Francisco de Vitoria, On the Indians and on the Law of War, trans. John

Pawley Bate (Washington, D.C.: Printed for the Carnegie Institution of

Washington at the Oxford University Press, 1917), 184-5.

11 Jacques Chiffoleau, 'Avouer l'inavouable: l'aveu et la procédure inquisitoire

à la fin du Moyen Age', in Renaud Dulong (ed.), L'aveu: histoire, sociologie,

philosophie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994), 57-97. Note the

  22  

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             application of the term to mass murder in Diana Robin, Filelfo in Milan:

Writings, 1451-1477 (Princeton University Press, 1991), 75, 187 line 432.

12 Guicciardini, Storia d’Italia, 5: 140; Alberini, Sacco di Roma, 199. See also

Innocenzo Casari, ‘De exterminio Brixianae civitatis libellus’, in Vasco Frati,

Ida Gianfranceschi, Françoise Bonali Fiquet, Irene Perini Bianchi, Franco

Robecchi, and Rosa Zilioli Faden (eds.), Il sacco di Brescia: Testimonianze,

cronache, diari, atti del processo e memorie storiche della ‘presa memoranda

et crudele’ della città nel 1512 (Brescia: Grafo, 1989), 1/1: 48. The

comparison with Troy was also made in Sanudo, Diarii, 13: col. 511, and note

anon., Copia de una littera del successo et gran crudeltade fatta drento di

Roma che non fu in Hierusalem ò in Troia cosi grande (n.p., n.d; Rome?:

1527?).

13 On Cesena see Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., Lust for Liberty: The Politics of Social

Revolt in Medieval Europe, 1200-1425; Italy, France, and Flanders

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 103-4, 148. On Piacenza

see Robin, Filelfo in Milan, ch. 2 (discussion), Appendix B (text). On Volterra

see Antonio Ivani da Sarzana, Historia de Volaterrana Calamitate in idem,

Opere Storiche, ed. Paolo Pontari and Silvia Marcucci (Florence: Sismel.

Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2006), esp. 327-9.

14 Onosander, Onosandro Platonico Dell'ottimo capitano generale, et del suo

vfficio, tradotto di greco in lingua volgare italiana per messer Fabio Cotta nobil

romano (Venice: Gabriel Giolito de Ferrari, 1546), fols. 20r-v, 39r-v, 41v-42r,

47r-v, 47r-48r; Jacopo Porcia, De re militari liber (Venice: Giovanni Tacuini de

Tridino, 26 Feb. 1530 [m. v. = 1531]), fols. XVIIIr, XXXIIr, XXXIIIr-v, XXXIXr-v;

  23  

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             Robin, Filelfo in Milan, 45-7, 172-4; Niccolò Machiavelli, Arte della Guerra,

scritti politici minori, ed. Jean-Jacques Marchand, Denis Fachard, and Giorgio

Masi (Rome: Salerno, 2001), 265. See also idem, The Art of War, ed. and

trans. Christopher Lynch (University of Chicago Press, 2003), 149-51 (VII. 65-

90), 151 n. 43 (on the views of Vegetius, Frontinus, Livy, and Polybius). For

examples of the punishment of military misbehaviour see Robin, Filelfo in

Milan, 78-9. On the desire of commanders to prevent or control the outbreak

of sacks see Guicciardini, Storia d’Italia, 5: 25, and Mocenigo, Guerra di

Cambrai, fols. 21v-22r.

15 Compare Geoff Mortimer, Eyewitness Accounts of the Thirty Years War

1618-48 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 40-4, 62, 65.

16 Iacopo Modesti, ‘Il miserando sacco dato alla terra di Prato dagli Spagnoli

l’anno 1512’, Archivio Storico Italiano, 1 (1842), 236-7.

17 Porcia, De re militari, fol. XXXVIIIr.

18 Pierino Belli, De re militari et bello tractatus; A Treatise on Military Matters

and Warfare in Eleven Parts, trans. Herbert C. Nutting, 2 vols. (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1936), 2: part 8, 232 (emphasis mine). This edition contains

a photographic reproduction of the 1563 edition (Venice: Francesco Portonari),

where this passage appears in 1: fol. 103r.

19 On legal and military attitudes towards non-combatants, including vengeful

anger, see John R. Hale, War and Society in Renaissance Europe, 1450-

1620 (London: Fontana, 1985), 186-96.

  24  

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             20 Yuval Noah Harari, Renaissance Military Memoirs: War, History, and

Identity, 1450-1600 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2004), 180. See also Monluc

quoted in Hale, War and Society, 192-3.

21 ‘I nemici, certi della vittoria, et avendo già i due terzi de’ lor nemici,

cominciarono a saccheggiare tutte le case …’. Simone di Goro Brami da

Colle, ‘Narrazione del sacco di Prato’, Archivio Storico Italiano, 1 (1842), 257.

The vulnerability to robbery of looting soldiers is noted by Alberini, Sacco di

Roma, 272-3.

22 Lauro Martines, Furies: War in Europe, 1450-1700 (London: Bloomsbury

Press, 2013), ch. 3; Fritz Redlich, De praeda militari: Looting and Booty,

1500-1815 (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1956).

23 Modesti, ‘Il miserando sacco’, 242-3, 244. See also Stefano Guizzalotti, ‘Il

miserando sacco di Prato’, Archivio Storico Italiano, 1 (1842), 267-8.

24 Brami da Colle, ‘Narrazione del sacco’, 257.

25 Sanudo, Diarii, 45: col. 262.

26 Luigi da Porto, Lettere storiche, ed. Bartolommeo Bressan (Florence: F. Le

Monnier, 1857), 312-13.

27 Ibid., 312, 313.

28 Alberini, Sacco di Roma, 269-70.

29 Antonio Medin and Ludovico Frati (eds.), Lamenti storici dei secoli XIV, XV

e XVI, facsimile reproduction (Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua,

1969), dispensa 236, vol. 3, ch. 21, 363.

30 Luigi Guicciardini, ‘Il sacco di Roma’, in Carlo Milanesi (ed.), Il sacco di

Roma del MDXXVII (Florence: G. Barbèra, 1867), 202. Confusion between

  25  

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             those who were fighting and killing and those intent on sacking who spared

lives is also noted in a letter from Florence to the marquis of Mantua on 13

May 1527: Sanudo, Diarii, 45: col. 122.

31 Guicciardini, History of Italy, 251.

32 Luca Landucci, Diario fiorentino dal 1450 al 1516 di Luca Landucci,

continuato da un anonimo fino al 1542, ed. Jodoco del Badia (Florence: G. C.

Sansoni, 1883), 113.

33 Girolamo Priuli, I diarii di Girolamo Priuli [AA. 1499-1512], ed. Arturo Segrè

(vol. 1) and Roberto Cessi (vols. 2 and 4), Rerum Italicarum Scriptores

(Bologna: Nicola Zanichelli, 1933-41), vol. 24, pt. 3, 243 (24 August 1509).

34 Ibid., 253. On sack of Jews at Padua see ibid., 157.

35 Ibid., 253-4. See also Brami da Colle, ‘Narrazione del sacco’, 257, 259 and

Modesti, ‘Miserando sacco’, 241-2.

36 Giovanni Pianero, Varia opuscula (Venice: Apud Franciscum Zilettum,

1584), fols. 4r, 11r. On Simon of Trent see Stephen Bowd (ed.) and J. Donald

Cullington (trans.), ‘On everyone’s lips’: Humanists, Jews, and the Tale of

Simon of Trent (Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies

Series, 2012).

37 Eustachio Celebrino, Il Successo de tutti che fece il Duca di Borbon con la

presa di Roma novamente stampato (Venice: G. A. de’ Nicolini, 1528?), sig.

Diir; anon., ‘Lamento d’Italia per la presa di Roma’, in Medin and Frati (eds.),

Lamenti storici, dispensa 236, vol. 4, appendix, ch. 5, 183; anon., ‘La presa et

lamento di Roma et le gran crudeltade fatte drento: con el credo che ha fatto li

Romani: con un sonetto: et un successo di Pasquino’, in ibid., vol. 3, ch. 21,

  26  

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             355, 364; anon., ‘Romae lamentatio’, in ibid., ch. 24, 409; Guicciardini, ‘Sacco

di Roma’, 229.

38 On Lutherans in the army of the league see Alfonso de Valdés, 47. On the

Lutheranism of some of the sackers see Celebrino, Successo de tutti li fatti,

sig. Diir; Guicciardini, ‘Sacco di Roma’, 170, 182, 230-1; Iacopo Buonaparte

(attr.), ‘Il sacco di Roma’, in Milanesi (ed.), Sacco di Roma, 334, 364; Sanudo,

Diarii, 45: cols. 186-7; Francesco Guicciardini (attr.), ‘Lamento d’Italia’, in

Medin and Frati (eds.), Lamenti storici, dispensa 236, vol. 3, ch. 24, 409; and

Andrea Navagero to Venice, 27 July 1527, Valladolid, in Rawdon Brown (ed.),

Calendar of State Papers Relating to English Affairs existing in the Archives

and Collections of Venice, and in other Libraries of Northern Italy, vol. 4.

1527-1533 (London: Longman, 1871), 76.

39 For a modern view see Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

40 ‘Et altre lacrimando desolate / Piangeran le innocente creature, / Che da

l’altre fenestre eran gittate. / Tacian ormai le croniche e pitture, / Taccia le

crudeltade preterite, / Ché queste son assai più delle altre oscure …’. Anon.,

‘La presa et lamento di Roma et le gran crudeltade fatte drento: con el credo

che ha fatto li Romani: con un sonetto: et un successo di Pasquino’, in Medin

and Frati (eds.), Lamenti storici, vol. 3, ch. 21, 364.

41 Priuli, Diarii, vol. 24, pt. 3, 253 (Monselice, 1509), 393 (Fiume, 1509);

Sanudo, Diarii, 45: col. 167 (Rome, 1527).

42 J. R. Hale, Artists and Warfare in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1990), 27, 236-7.

  27  

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             43 Ibid., 238, fig. 300; Pier Virgilio Begni Redona, Alessandro Bonvicino Il

Moretto da Brescia (Brescia: La scuola, 1988), 252-6; Gabriele Neher,

'Moretto and Romanino: Religious Painting in Brescia 1510-1550; Identity in

the Shadow of la Serenissima.' Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation (University of

Warwick, 2000), 74-7.

44 Da Porto, Lettere storiche, 279, 286-96; Giovanni Marco Burigozzo,

‘Cronaca di Milano’, Archivio Storico Italiano, 3 (1842), 468.

45 Benvenuto Cellini, The Autobiography, trans. George Bull (Harmondsworth:

Penguin, 1956), 76, 72, 71; idem, Opere: vita, trattati, rime, lettere, ed. Bruno

Maier (Milan: Rizzoli, 1968), 142, 135, 134.

46 Guicciardini, Storia d’Italia, 3: 168-71 (quotation at 170-1). He does note, in

passing, that Gaston de Foix ordered the nunneries to remain unviolated.

47 Note the soldiers in classical armour dignifying the scene for a philo-

imperial readership in Vasco Díaz de Fregenal, Triumpho pugnico lamentable

sobre la profana entrada y saco de la ciudad de Roma (n.p., n.d., 1535?),

title-page.

48 Dora Thornton, ‘An Allegory of the Sack of Rome by Giulio da Urbino’,

Apollo, 119 (June 1999), 11-18 (quotation at 13).

49 Chastel, Sack of Rome, 44.

50 Hale, Artists and Warfare, 145.

51 Selections from the Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, ed. Irma A. Richter

(Oxford University Press, 1952), 182-5 (quotation at 185); Institut de France,

Paris, MS A (2172; 2185), fol. 110v, Ashb. 30v; transcription of text (in mirror

  28  

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             hand) in Leonardo da Vinci, I manoscritti dell’Institut de France: il manoscritto

A, ed. Augusto Marinoni (Florence: Giunti Barbèra, 1990), 228-9.

52 Marco Girolamo Vida, ‘De arte poetica’ of Marco Girolamo Vida, ed. and

trans. Ralph G. Williams (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), xxiii,

69 (quotation).

53 Around 1400 the Dominican Giovanni Dominici thought that children should

view images of the Massacre of Innocents to teach them a fear of weapons

and armed men. See Creighton Gilbert, ‘On Subject and Not-subject in Italian

Renaissance Pictures’, The Art Bulletin, 34 (1952), 207.

54 Krystina Stermole, ‘Venetian Art and the War of the League of Cambrai

(1509-17)’ (Unpublished PhD dissertation, Queen’s University, 2007); eadem,

‘Chivalric Combat in a Modern Landscape: Depicting Battle in Venetian Prints

during the War of the League of Cambrai (1509-1516)’ in Marco Mondini and

Massimo Rospocher (eds.), Narrating War: Early Modern and Contemporary

Perspectives (Bologna and Berlin: il Mulino and Duncker & Humblot, 2013),

113-30.

55 Erika Kuijpers, Judith Pollmann, Johannes Müller, and Jasper van der

Steen (eds.), Memory before Modernity: Practices of Memory in Early Modern

Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2013).

56 Archivio di Stato, Venice, Consiglio dei Dieci, Deliberazioni, parti miste, filza

40, no. 122 (23 Sept. 1517).

57 Sanudo, Diarii, 8: 520-5, 543-4 (owners of sacked property).

58 Priuli, Diarii, vol. 24, pt. 3, 388 (entry for 5 October 1509); ibid., 412-13 (13

October 1509).

  29  

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             59 ‘La occisione non fu molta, perché rari uccidono quelli che non si vogliono

difendere, ma la preda fu inestimabile, di danari contanti, di gioie, d’oro et

argento lavorato, di vestiti, d’arazzi, paramenti di case, mercantile d’ogni

sorte; et oltre a tutte queste cose, le taglie, che montorono tanti danari …’.

Francesco Vettori, ‘Sommario della istoria d’Italia (1511-1527)’, in Scritti

storici e politici, ed. Enrico Niccolini (Bari: G. Laterza, 1972), 244.

60 Lauro Martines, April Blood: Florence and the Plot Against the Medici

(London: Pimlico, 2003), ch. 8. The narration of the Italian wars is considered

by Jean-Louis Fournel, ‘Narrating the Italian Wars (1494-1540):

Contamination, Models, and Knowledge’ in Mondini and Rospocher (eds.),

Narrating War, 45-61, and by Massimo Rospocher, ‘Songs of War: Historical

and Literary Narratives of the ‘Horrendous Italian Wars’ (1494-1559)’, in ibid.,

79-97.

61 Mark Greengrass, ‘Hidden Transcripts: Secret Histories and Personal

Testimonies of Religious Violence in the French Wars of Religion’ in Mark

Levene and Penny Roberts (eds.), The Massacre in History (New York:

Bergahn, 1999), ch. 3 (quotation at 72).

62 Guicciardini, ‘Sacco di Roma’, 129-32. The Constable of Bourbon remarks

that the Roman clergy were corrupt and demonstrated ‘ozio’ at ibid., 168.

63 Ibid., 225-6. See ibid., 204 (on relics of martyred saints), and 223-5

(tortures).

64 Ibid., 239. In the 1536 verses ‘El clamor de Italia’, Italy pronounces: ‘Odi

Roma tutta franta, / che ancora ha gli occhi bagnati, / che dal capo infin la

pianta / tutti i membri i fu fiaccati: / soi figlioli martorizati, / queste acade per la

  30  

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             Guerra.’ Medin and Frati (eds.), Lamenti storici, dispensa 236, vol. 4,

appendix, ch. 6, 191.

65 Alfonso de Valdés, 110 (Castiglione to Valdés, [Madrid], after September

1527).

66 Alberini, Sacco di Roma, 270, 278.

67 Ibid., 282-3, 283 (quotation).

68 Ibid., 298.

69 Ibid., 294-5 (death of siblings), 305 (death of father), 306 (Alberini

prevented from viewing body of father or brother for reasons of health and

morale).

70 Ibid., 306.

71 Giuseppe Marinello da Molfetta, ‘Presa, e sacco della città di Molfetta

successo l’anno del signore MDXXIX’, in Pelliccia (ed.), Raccolta di varie

croniche, 4: 369; Uberto Foglietta, Dell’Istorie di Genova, trans. Francesco

Serdonati (Genoa: Heredi di Girolamo Bartoli, 1597), 654 (on the Genoese

masking themselves and taking part in the Spanish sack of Genoa in 1522).

Marcello Alberini recalled that people who left the city during the sack of

Rome were assaulted by the peasants (villani) who held an ancient hatred of

the Romans: Alberini, Sacco di Roma, 279-80.

72 Bert S. Hall, Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe: Gunpowder,

Technology, and Tactics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997),

ch. 6.

73 Maurice Keen, The Laws of War in the Late Middle Ages (London:

Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), 120-1, 121 n.3.

  31  

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             74 On the need for a social history of war, including ‘pillage’, see Lauro

Martines, ‘Notes on War and Social History’ in Mondini and Rospocher (eds.),

Narrating War, 31-43.

75 See also Barbara H. Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about Emotions in History’,

American Historical Review, 107.3 (June 2007), 821-45.