Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud

by Peter Watson

The sack itself, which began on 6 May 1527, was truly terrible. Anyone who resisted the Teutons was murdered. Mansions and palaces that weren’t put to the torch were pillaged. The pope, the bulk of the cardinals in residence, and the Vatican bureaucracy, sought safety in the fortress of Sant’ Angelo, though one cardinal, with the gate already closed, had to be chair-lifted to safety in a basket. As for the rest of the population…‘Women of all ages were raped in the streets, nuns rounded up and herded into bordellos, priests sodomised, civilians massacred. After the first, week-long orgy of destruction, more than two thousand bodies were floating in the Tiber, nearly ten thousand others awaited burial and thousands more lay eviscerated in the streets, their remains half-eaten by rats and hungry dogs.’44 Some 4 million ducats changed hands in ransoms alone–those who had the wherewithal to pay were freed, the rest killed. Tombs were broken, the bones of saints tossed to the dogs, relics denuded of their jewels, archives and libraries torched, save for enough paper to provide bedding for horses, which were stabled in the Vatican.