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A soldier in a looted cope raises a chalice to the room. The army had marched all winter without pay; this was the payroll.

The army that came over the walls of Rome at dawn on 6 May 1527 belonged, on paper, to the Holy Roman Emperor; in practice it belonged to nobody, which was the whole problem. Some 30,000 men, Spanish veterans, Italian mercenaries, and German landsknechts of mostly Lutheran conviction, had marched south all winter without pay, and their commanders had promised them the one currency left. In the first assault, in fog, their general the Duke of Bourbon took an arquebus ball and died at the foot of the wall; the goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini spent the rest of his life claiming the shot, which tells you what kind of century it was. After that there was no one left with the authority to say stop. The Swiss Guard said it anyway, once, on the steps of St Peter's: of 189, 147 died where they stood, buying the pope the minutes he needed to run the raised stone corridor to Castel Sant'Angelo with the enemy shooting at his white robe. Then the city was opened like a strongbox. Churches were stripped to the reliquaries; ransoms were priced door by door and collected with fire; nuns and citizens learned what an army does when the sermon it has heard for years is that Rome is the whore of Babylon. Landsknechts held a mock conclave and proclaimed Luther pope; someone scratched LUTHER into a fresco by Raphael with a pike point. The Stanze became stables. Plague arrived within the month to finish the arithmetic, and a city of 55,000 was, by winter, a city of perhaps ten. Clement VII watched it from his castle, then paid 400,000 ducats he raised partly by melting his own tiaras, and grew a beard of mourning that every pope for a century imitated. Historians who like clean edges close the High Renaissance on that May morning: the artists scattered to Venice and Mantua and Fontainebleau and took the style with them. And one hostage clause reached further than any of it. With the pope captive to the emperor, an English king's petition to annul his marriage to the emperor's aunt was never going to be granted, and the refusal cost Rome the allegiance of England entire. Amérigo painted the sack in 1884 as a single church interior: the chalice raised in a toast by a soldier wearing a bishop's cope, a nun hauled backward over the choir rail, the defenders dead on the altar steps, and a boy playing dress-up in vestments in the middle of it, because armies bring their children everywhere.