The blackest day in the history of the Swiss Guard

The 43 men stormed breathlessly through the barrel vault of the “Passetto di Borgo” in Rome, dimly lit by torches, that 800-meter-long corridor, camouflaged from the outside as an ordinary wall, that leads from the Vatican to Castel Sant’Angelo. 42 of the fugitives were Swiss Guards led by their lieutenant Herkules Göldli from Zurich, one was Pope Clement VII himself. The escape was successful and the guards and the pope reached Castel Sant’Angelo unharmed.

The “Sacco di Roma” (from the obsolete Italian word for “to plunder”) on May 6, 1527, was to be a black day. The rampant looting by the largely reformed mercenaries of Charles V, the elected but uncrowned Holy Roman Emperor, had a long history. For six years, Spain, ruled by Charles, and France under King Francis I had fought for supremacy in northern Italy.

After the crushing defeat of the French army at the Battle of Bicocca in 1522, Pope Clement, who had previously stood at the side of the Spanish Imperial troops, saw his time come. He claimed Milan for himself and resigned from the alliance with Charles V. According to the Vatican, the Duchy of Milan, the Republic of Venice and other northern Italian states, the Holy Roman Emperor had become too powerful and so in 1526 they united in the Pro -French League of Cognac.

When the English king Henry VIII also left Charles’s alliance and the emperor could no longer afford his armies without making lucrative conquests, a mercenary revolt broke out in March 1527. The German commander-in-chief, Georg von Frundsberg, suffered a stroke and the leaderless German landsknechts, Spanish mercenaries and Italian condottieri began besieging the League of Cognac-held city of Florence to claim their wealth.

The siege dragged on and when there was nothing left to gain in the area, the hungry soldiers decided to take revenge on Pope Clement, blaming them for their hopeless situation. They left behind all the heavy equipment of war and marched on Rome.

In view of the impending catastrophe, the pope tried to convince the Imperial commander, Captain General Charles III. to bribe the Bourbon with a large sum of money, but nothing helped: the Bourbon refused, and in any case the Landsknechts stopped taking orders. When they began storming Rome on the morning of May 6, the few troops that remained there could no longer withstand the rampant onslaught.

Favored by the thick fog, the attackers stormed the Borgo district, stretching from Castel Sant’Angelo to the Vatican, killing their leader de Bourbon with a gunshot (which the papal sculptor Benvenuto Cellini later boasted fired).

42 members of the Swiss Guard took the Pope to safety, the remaining 147 men took up positions in St. Peter’s Square to protect St. Peter’s Basilica and the Vatican grounds. Only, against the more than 20,000 attackers, the guards could do nothing and were wiped out to the last man. The next day, the rest of the city fell to the mercenaries and the months-long looting spiraled out of control.

Leaderless and out of control, the Landsknechts roamed the streets, pillaging, raping and murdering. The Vatican, churches and palaces were robbed, huge ransoms were extorted from nobles and anything of value was taken from civilians under torture. Even the tombs of the popes buried in St. Peter’s Basilica were broken open.

Quickly reinterpreted as an act of religious warfare in the aftermath of the Reformation, the “Sacco di Roma” went down in history as an unprecedented war crime. The number of victims ran into the tens of thousands; more than 90 percent of Rome’s art treasures were stolen or destroyed. The pope was besieged in the Castel Sant’Angelo for six months and was only released after the transfer of extensive possessions, including the cities of Modena, Parma and Piacenza, and the payment of 400,000 ducats.

The Swiss Guard was wiped out all but 42 men in Engelsburg and was not wiped out until 1548 by Clement’s successor Pope Paul III. regrouped. To this day, the Swiss Guard commemorates this day’s atrocities with the swearing-in ceremony for new recruits in Rome, which takes place on May 6.

A last trace of Charles V’s murderous soldiers did not come to light until centuries later. The “Disputa del Sacramento” fresco in the “Stanza della Segnatura” on the second floor of the Vatican, one of the most famous paintings by the Italian Renaissance painter Raphael, uses dozens of angels and putti, biblical figures, evangelists and Church Fathers to represent current Catholic theology as “divinarum rerum cognitio”, as “knowledge of divine things”.

When restorers examined the 7.7 by 5 meter mural in 1999, they discovered the letters “V[ivat] K[arolus] Imp[erator]» and below that, probably the biggest conceivable insult to the Catholic Church, the name «Luther».