**During the Sack of Rome of 1527, Pope Clement VII was protected by Swiss Guards as he fled the Vatican. Illustration by Marco Heer**

The darkest day in the history of the Swiss Guard

The Sack of Rome, or ‘Sacco di Roma’, by the leaderless troops of Charles V on 6 May 1527 ended in a bloodbath that also cost the lives of 147 Swiss guards. Traces of that dark day are still being discovered.

Thomas Weibel

Thomas Weibel is a journalist and Professor of Media Engineering at the Fachhochschule Graubünden and the Hochschule der Künste in Berne.

Forty-three men hurried breathlessly through the torch-lit barrel vault, of Rome’s ‘Passetto di Borgo’ – an 800-metre-long secret passage connecting the Vatican and Castel Sant’Angelo, which from the outside looks like an ordinary wall. Forty-two of the escapees were Swiss guards, under the command of Lieutenant Herkules Göldli from Zurich, and one was Pope Clement VII himself. The escape was successful: the guards and the pope reached Castel Sant’Angelo unscathed.

**Pope Clement VII in a painting by Sebastiano del Piombo, circa 1531.**The Getty Center

The Sack of Rome that took place on 6 May 1527 was to be a dark day. The unrestrained looting and pillaging by the mainly Lutheran mercenaries of Charles V – the elected but still uncrowned Holy Roman Emperor – was a long time in the making. For six years, Spain, which was under Charles V’s rule, and France under François I, had been battling for control of northern Italy.

After the devastating defeat of the French army at the Battle of Bicocca in 1522, Pope Clement, who had previously sided with the Spanish-Imperial troops, saw an opportunity. He laid claim to Milan and withdrew from the alliance with Charles V. The Vatican, the Duchy of Milan, the Republic of Venice and other northern Italian city states believed the Holy Roman Emperor had become too powerful and so joined the pro-French League of Cognac in 1526.

Emperor Charles V, painting (sketch) by Titian and his workshop assistant Lambert Sustris, 1548.Alte Pinakothek, Munich

When the English king Henry VIII also left Charles’ alliance, and the Emperor could no longer pay his armies without any lucrative conquests, there followed a mercenary revolt in March 1527. The German military commander Georg von Frundsberg suffered a stroke, and the leaderless Landsknechte (German troops), Spanish mercenaries and Italian Condottieri embarked on a siege of the city of Florence (which was held by the League of Cognac) to get their hands on its wealth.

The siege dragged on and since there was nothing left to take in the surrounding area, the hungry soldiers decided to wreak revenge on Pope Clement, whom they blamed for their desperate predicament. They abandoned their heavy artillery and marched on Rome.

**The ‘Sacco di Roma’ in a painting by Johannes Lingelbach from the 17th century.**Wikimedia

In view of the looming disaster, the Pope tried to bribe the imperial commander, Charles III, Duke of Bourbon, with a large sum of money, but it didn’t help: Bourbon refused and anyway the mercenaries were completely mutinous by that point. When they descended on Rome on the morning of 6 May, the few remaining troops in the city could no longer resist the rampant attack.

Helped by a thick fog that had fallen over the city, the attackers stormed the district of Borgo, stretching from the Castel’Sant Angelo to the Vatican. In the process, their leader Bourbon was killed, allegedly by the sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, who later worked for the Pope and boasted of having fired the lethal shot.

Forty-two Swiss Guards brought the Pope to safety, while the remaining 147 men took up position on St. Peter’s Square to protect St. Peter’s Basilica and the Vatican. Alone against the 20,000 attackers, the guards were completely overwhelmed and every single one was massacred.

The next day, the rest of the city fell into the hands of the mercenaries and the months-long sack spiralled completely out of control. Without a leader and on the rampage, the mercenaries roamed the streets, pillaging, raping and murdering.

The Vatican, churches and palaces were looted, noblemen were forced to pay huge ransoms, and citizens were tortured into handing over their valuables. Even the papal tombs in St. Peter’s Basilica were forced open.

**Swiss Guard from the Papal Guard in a print, circa 1850.**Swiss National Museum

The Sack of Rome, which was soon reframed as an act of religious war in the wake of the Reformation, went down in history as an unprecedented war crime. The victims numbered in the tens of thousands and 90 per cent of Rome’s art treasures were stolen or destroyed.

The Pope was held prisoner in Castel Sant’Angelo for six months and was only released in exchange for the surrender of extensive territories, including the cities of Modena, Parma and Piacenza, and payment of 400,000 ducats.

All 42 Swiss Guards in the Castel Sant’Angelo were killed, and the Swiss Guard was only reformed by Clement’s successor, Pope Paul III, in 1548. To this day, the Swiss Guard commemorates the horrors of that day with the swearing-in ceremony for new recruits, which takes place every year on 6 May in Rome.

Swearing-in ceremony of the Swiss Guard at the Vatican on 6 May 2021.Alessia Giuliani / DUKAS/ABACA

A final trace of Charles V’s murderous band of soldiers only emerged centuries later. The fresco ‘Disputa del Sacramento’, which adorns the walls of the Room of the Segnatura on the second floor of the Vatican, is one of the most famous paintings by Italian Renaissance artist Raphael, and presents Catholic theology as ‘divinarum rerum cognitio’ (knowledge of divine things) through dozens of angels and cherubs, biblical figures, evangelists and church fathers.

When in 1999 restorers took a closer look at the fresco, which measures 7.7 by 5 metres, they discovered that during the Sack of Rome, hate-filled mercenaries had scratched the painting with the words ‘V[ivat] K[arolus] IMP[erator]’ and underneath, probably the worst possible insult for the Catholic Church – the name ‘Luther’.