History - Rome - page 675

The Sack of Rome & Protestant Protest
But outside Rome an ill wind was blowing. The main source of trouble was the longstand-
ing conflict between the Holy Roman Empire, led by the Spanish Charles V, and the Itali-
an city states. This simmering tension came to a head in 1527 when Rome was invaded by
Charles' marauding army and ransacked as Pope Clement VII (r 1523−34) hid in Castel
Sant'Angelo. The sack of Rome, regarded by most historians as the nail in the coffin of
the Roman Renaissance, was a hugely traumatic event. It left the papacy reeling and gave
rise to the view that the Church had been greatly weakened by its own moral shortcom-
ings. That the Church was corrupt was well known, and it was with considerable public
support that Martin Luther pinned his famous 95 Theses to a church door in Wittenberg in
1517, thus sparking off the Protestant Reformation.
The Counter-Reformation
The Catholic reaction to the Reformation was all-out. The Counter-Reformation was
marked by a second wave of artistic and architectural activity, as the Church once again
turned to bricks and mortar to restore its authority. But in contrast to the Renaissance, the
Counter-Reformation was a period of persecution and official intolerance. With the full
blessing of Pope Paul III, Ignatius Loyola founded the Jesuits in 1540, and two years later
the Holy Office was set up as the Church's final appeals court for trials prosecuted by the
Inquisition. In 1559 the Church published the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Index of
Prohibited Books) and began to persecute intellectuals and freethinkers. Galileo Galilei
(1564−1642) was forced to renounce his assertion of the Copernican astronomical system,
which held that the earth moved around the sun. He was summoned by the Inquisition to
Rome in 1632 and exiled to Florence for the rest of his life. Giordano Bruno (1548−1600),
a freethinking Dominican monk, fared worse. Arrested in Venice in 1592, he was burned
at the stake eight years later in Campo de' Fiori. The spot is today marked by a sinister
statue.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the Church's policy of zero tolerance, the Counter-Re-
formation was largely successful in re-establishing papal prestige. And in this sense it can
be seen as the natural finale to the Renaissance that Nicholas V had kicked off in 1450.
From being a rural backwater with a population of around 20,000 in the mid-15th century,
Rome had grown to become one of Europe's great 17th-century cities, home to Christen-
dom's most spectacular churches and a population of some 100,000 people.