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.
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