Augusta Theodosia Drane

THE RENAISSANCE IN ROME.

A.D. 1513 TO 1528.

On the morning of the 11th of April 1513 the streets of Rome were thronged with a joyous and expectant crowd, assembled to witness the public procession of the newly-elected Pontiff, Leo X., on occasion of his taking possession of the Basilica of St. John Lateran. Many circumstances combined to render the accession of Leo welcome to his new subjects: they had already felt the charm of his courteous manners, springing partly from careful culture, and partly from an innate kindness of heart; and whilst the Roman citizens, who were heartily tired of the wars and war-taxes of Julius II., rejoiced at the prospect of peace and plenty, the artists and professors, who made up a population by themselves, regarded the election of a Medici as a sufficient guarantee for the protection of their personal interests. The son of Lorenzo, and the pupil of Politian, of Chalcondylus, and of Bernard Dovizi, he had imbibed a love of art and poetry in the gardens of Florence and the villas of Fiesole. Created a Cardinal at the age of fourteen, he was but thirty-seven at the period of his election to the Papal chair, and during his residence at Rome under the two preceding Pontificates had acquired a character which his friends condensed into a motto, and exhibited in golden letters on the canopy under which he was enthroned, Litteratorum prÆsidium ac bonitatis fautor. If an ancient statue had been disinterred in the baths of Titus, the Cardinal de’ Medici had been the first to celebrate the auspicious event in graceful iambics improvised to the music of his lyre; his house had been the rendezvous of artists, poets, and, above all, of musicians; and whilst men of this stamp loudly proclaimed the taste and munificence of the new Pontiff, the unblemished name which he had preserved in the midst of a society the corruptions of which were matter of public notoriety, put to silence the busy tongue of scandal.

It was truly, therefore, a festa-day which his subjects were now celebrating; and as he rode on his white charger through the brilliant streets, men contrasted his mild and dÉbonnaire countenance, his gay smile, and affable address; with the imperious bearing of his predecessor, the warlike Julius; and the contrast was all to his advantage. What a scene it was through which he was now passing! Rome had been all but rebuilt under the four last Pontiffs, and from the Vatican to the Coliseum the way was marked with monuments of their munificence and of the genius of their artists. Domes, amphitheatres, arcades, and fountains had risen during the last seventy years with magnificent profusion; the old Basilica of the Apostles had disappeared, and was in process of being replaced by a pile worthy of the vast conceptions of its founders and its architects. And now the splendid city had decked herself in gala costume, and amid velvet tapestries and flowery wreaths, triumphal arches, and private houses, with their facades improvised into heathen temples, appeared a strange medley of saints and mythological characters, in which the statues of Mars, Apollo, Minerva, and Venus, were exhibited in close proximity to those of SS. Peter and Paul. On the whole, however, the classic element predominated, and the characters chosen at each resting-place to harangue the new Pontiff were the Muses, the Seasons, and their attendant nymphs.

The hopes and expectations of the Roman populace on that day were abundantly fulfilled. Leo did his best to restore peace to Italy, and raised Rome to the dignity of a great capital. Few princes have ever been more richly endowed than he with the qualities which make princedom popular; a liberality which bordered on profuseness, a generous readiness to reward merit, and a charming urbanity of manners, which made every one who approached his person believe himself the object of the Pope’s particular regard. Erasmus felt the magical influence of his presence, and wrote to his friends, saying, that Leo was as far superior to the rest of men, as men are superior, to beasts. “He has the genius and the virtues of all the Leos who have preceded him, and to perfect goodness of heart,” he continues, “he unites an incredible strength of soul.” In the church all beholders admired the majesty with which he officiated at the sacred ceremonies; and his temperate habits in private have been praised by all his biographers. He was not only a passionate lover of literature and science, but was firmly persuaded that the cultivation of letters, rightly regarded, is ever friendly to the faith. “I have always loved learned men and good letters,” he wrote to Henry VIII. “This attraction was born with me, and it has only increased with years; for I always see that those who cultivate literature are most firmly attached to the dogmas of the faith, and form the glory of the Christian Church.” His patronage of arts and letters, therefore, was hearty and munificent enough to satisfy even the requirements of the learned world around him. He restored the Roman University, and appointed a brilliant staff of professors, men not only of the first ability, but of exemplary life. In his Bull addressed to the students, he failed not to warn them against substituting Plato and the poets for more serious studies, and reminded the preceptors that they were called on to defend the faith as well as to teach good letters. His own tastes, however, had the character which might have been anticipated from his education: they inclined almost exclusively to the belles-lettres. In many cases the classic acquirements of those who were now promoted to canonries and Cardinals’ hats were more regarded than their personal merits. Bernard Dovizi, who, as tutor to the young Medici, had studiously and successfully laboured to confer on his manners that exquisite polish which was his greatest charm, was now raised to the purple, and, as Cardinal Bibiena, endeavoured to surround the Pontifical palace with every attraction of a secular Court. The literary public of those days was not easily scandalised, but it was at least taken by surprise by the first production which came from the new Cardinal’s pen, his comedy of “Calandra,” written as a carnival piece for the amusement of a noble lady, and acted in the private apartments of the Vatican.[325] Ariosto was also welcomed at Court, and even the infamous Aretino received marks of favour, whilst Bembo and Sadolet, the two first Latinists of their day, were appointed the Pope’s secretaries.

The patronage of Leo was not limited to any one kind of literary excellence. He was as ready to reward a scientific treatise as an imitation of Horace, and whilst encouraging the study of the Eastern tongues, and publishing at his own expense a magnificent edition of Tacitus from the unique manuscript obtained from the abbey of Old Corby, he was accepting the dedication of Italian tragedies and causing the “Rosamunda” of Ruccellai to be acted in his presence. Almost his first act after his accession to the Papal dignity was to summon Lascaris to Rome, and establish him in a palace on the Esquiline, where, in concert with Musurus, he superintended a Greek academy and printing press. Zenobius Acciajoli, the most learned Orientalist of his day, who had shone among the stars of Lorenzo’s Court, and had afterwards assumed the Dominican habit and dedicated his genius to sacred studies, now became Prefect of the Vatican Library; whilst another Oriental scholar of the same order, the celebrated Sanctes Pagninus, found generous encouragement to undertake his Latin translation of the Scriptures from the original tongues.

But whilst extending his splendid patronage to every department of literature, the personal predilections of Leo were undoubtedly for poetry and the arts. Like a true Medici he loved the sunny side of life, and delighted in surrounding himself with poets, wits, and musicians, he himself being the gayest wit and best musician of the party. The Court was crowded with professional improvisatori who enlivened the suppers at the Vatican with their jests and pastimes. In the mornings there were literary assemblies in which the great men of the day recited their poems or epigrams, or more learned works. Now it was Vida, whom Leo had engaged to undertake the composition of his “Christiad,” and who beguiled his lighter hours by setting forth the mysteries of the game of chess in Latin hexameters; or Paulus Jovius,[326] the Italian Livy, who came to read a chapter of his history; or “the divine Accolti,” as he was called, who recited his poems surrounded by a guard of honour, and who in return for his lyric productions was raised to the dukedom of Nepi and a bishopric.

Under such a rÉgime the arts flourished, and men of letters were promoted to wealth and dignities; Rome grew daily more luxurious and more splendid, but, alas! it must be said, her moral atmosphere was a pestilence. The historian Mariana declares that at the opening of the sixteenth century greater disorders existed there than were to be witnessed in any other European capital. Even Bembo, whose own life at this time was a disgrace to the ecclesiastical habit, admits the charge, and owns that he who desired to lead a holy life would do well to fly from Rome.[327] What else could be anticipated of a society made up of artists and professors, paganised to the very core in its literature, its language, and its every maxim? And when we say paganised, let it not be supposed that the simple restoration of classical studies is here intended, or that the abuses complained of consisted only of the extravagances of a few learned pedants. In Italian literary circles, if we may credit historians of the time, the Christian ideas were slowly becoming obliterated. It had grown fashionable in certain coteries to scoff at all the Christian dogmas as obsolete and barbarous; and Antonio Bandino complains that you were no longer regarded as a man of education unless you could jest at the Scriptures and indulge in some witty piece of scepticism. Many of the Italian schools were deeply infected with infidelity, particularly the University of Padua, which for more than a century had been notorious as the focus of atheism. Pomponatus,[328] one of the Paduan professors, published a treatise on the immortality of the soul, during the reign of Leo X., in which he endeavoured to show that the doctrine was not held by Aristotle, that it rested only on the authority of Scripture and the Church, and was plainly opposed to reason. A great number of professors taught similar errors, and pretended that though contrary to revelation they might yet be taught as philosophically true. These were condemned in 1513 by the Fifth Council of Lateran, which formally declared that “truth could not contradict truth;” and to counteract the dangerous spirit prevalent in the universities it was at the same time decreed that students aspiring to sacred orders should not follow the course of philosophy and poetry for more than five years, unless at the same time they studied theology and canon law.[329] But little or no fruit was produced by this decree, and as we shall see, at a somewhat later period the “great and pernicious abuses” which were admitted as loudly demanding reform, were formally declared by a commission of Cardinals to have arisen mainly from the impious teaching tolerated in the public schools.

In fact, Italy was at this time professor-ridden. Of all odious dogmatisms surely that of pedagogues is the most intolerable form of social tyranny, and under this the Transalpine world was then groaning. Armed with their pens and their tinsel eloquence the men of letters wrote down and talked down all opposition, and made so much noise in the world that they seemed for a time to occupy a much larger and more influential position than was really the case. They dictated their laws to the literary world, and every one who would not be pasquinaded as a barbarian was content to follow the fashion. So in the pulpit preachers called on their audience to contemplate the examples of Epaminondas or Socrates; parallels were drawn between the sacred events of the Passion, and the self-devotion of a Curtius or a Decius: our Divine Lord was commonly spoken of as a hero who had deserved well of his country, and not unfrequently allusions would be introduced to the thunders of Jupiter and the stories of heathen mythology.

The grand object of Italian scholars at this time was to attain a pure Ciceronian style, and in this none were more successful than the two papal secretaries, Sadolet and Bembo. The pains taken by the latter on his compositions at least deserved success. He is said to have kept forty portfolios, into each of which his sheets were successively entered, and only passed on to the one next in order after undergoing careful revision. The rejection of every phrase not absolutely Ciceronian led to very strange affectation when speaking of events of ordinary life, as well as to the more offensive fault of adopting heathen phraseology on matters relating to the Christian faith. Thus the accession of Leo was announced to foreign Courts as having taken place “through the favour of the Immortal Gods;” Divine grace was the magnificentia divinitatis; Our Lady was the Dea Lauretana, or the Alma Parens; and the Christian mysteries were described in terms taken from the sacrificial terminology of the Greeks. Erasmus had good sense enough to despise these extravagances, and he did his utmost to render them ridiculous.[330] He describes the Ciceronian spending a whole winter’s night on the composition of a single sentence, compiling lexicons of Ciceronian words, tropes, locutions, and pleasantries, more bulky than the great orator’s entire works, and struggling with the insuperable difficulties of rendering the wants and habits of a modern age into the colloquial phraseology of the ancients.

The poets and artists followed the example set them by the professors. They still occasionally condescended to choose Christian subjects, but in most cases it was to debase them by a pagan method of treatment. When Sannazar thought fit to employ his muse on so old-fashioned a theme as the birth of Our Lord, he converted it into a pagan fable, placed the prophecies of the Sibyls in the hands of the Blessed Virgin, and the words of Isaias in the mouth of Proteus, omitted the name of Jesus Christ throughout his entire poem, and surrounded the holy crib with nymphs, satyrs, and hamadryads. The very liturgy of the Church had a narrow escape of undergoing a classical reform, and a new Hymnarium appeared, drawn up by Zachario Ferreri, “according to the true rules of Latinity and metre,” in which, says Dom GuÉranger, “occur every image and allusion to pagan belief and customs which are to be met with in Horace.” This work was undertaken by command of Leo X., but its use, though permitted by Clement VII., was happily never enjoined on the clergy.

Hand in hand with the paganism of literature advanced the paganism of morals. We are not here engaged in studying the history of the Church, and may therefore be spared the pain of contemplating her scandals—those scandals the existence of which, far from weakening our faith, may rather confirm it, when we remember that they were distinctly prophesied by her Divine Head as evils which “must needs be” accomplished. Our business is with schools and scholars, and, sooth to say, after wandering amid the dim religious light of the mediÆval cloisters, the blaze of the Roman literary circles, after first dazzling our eyes, reveals such bewildering spectacles, that we look about for some retreat into which the Christian scholar may creep and hide himself.

Such, perhaps, was the feeling of many a student who, coming fresh from the schools of Louvain, or the cloisters of Winchester or Oxford, found himself suddenly dropped down upon a world which seemed to have broken loose from all time-honoured traditions of scholastic life. Perhaps he had been used to set before him the musty maxim of Philip the Almoner,[331] that “that is no true science which is not the companion of justice;” or he had learned from Hugh of St. Victor to regard humility as the foundation of wisdom; or he was familiar with the saying of the Angel of the schools, that the best way to make progress in philosophy was to keep the commandments of God. But if he had the gift of prudence, he would think twice before citing such authorities in the polite circles of the Roman literati. He would have been hooted at as a barbarian. The monks and schoolmen were never spoken of by the professors of the new learning save in terms of execration and contempt. They were, to use the language of Erasmus, wretched creatures, whose language was as uncouth as their apprehension was dull. In those days there was no greater reproach than to call a man a Scotist—it meant precisely a dunce[332]—and those who held communion with the Muses and the Graces would have judged it an affront to be required to treat with respect the memory of St. Thomas or St. Bonaventure. And truly their venerable names, and the maxims they had laid down for the guidance of Christian scholars, would have been sadly out of place in the sumptuous orgies of the Chigi palace, or those luxurious soirÉes where prelates, ambassadors, and men of letters did not refuse to appear as the guests of the most questionable characters. The Roman academy which had been suppressed by Paul II., and had revived under Julius II., was now at the height of its renown. Its members generally met in some delicious suburban garden, and there, under the shade of the thick foliage, in an atmosphere heavy with the perfume of the orange-flower, they recited poems, proposed philosophic questions, and whiled away with song and merriment long hours of the day and night. Amid scenes of such Epicurean enjoyment the stranger might have been forgiven had he imagined himself taking part in the revelries of pagan rather than of Christian Rome. On the walls of the luxurious banqueting-rooms, in which he assisted at those suppers of world-wide celebrity, he might see representations from the comedies of Plautus, reminding him how close a parallel was to be drawn between the manners described by the Latin poet and those of the sixteenth century. From the elegant revellers around him he might hear the authority of Pliny quoted to prove that the human soul differed in nothing from that of beasts; or, exchanging the philosophic for a lighter mood, he might perhaps be called on to assist at some macaronic exhibition, such as the crowning of Querno, the drunken buffoon, arch-poet of Rome; or be required to listen to the facetious improvisation of Folengo or Mariano Fetti,—the former a monk, the latter a friar,—both of whom had quitted their cloisters to ply the trade of professional jesters. Thankful enough he would be to escape from these polished circles and return to his own barbarous land and the society of those rude English, who, as Politian contemptuously remarked, “knew nothing of letters, and busied themselves with their sheep,” and who perhaps might, in their turn, have thought with the Psalmist, that it was well with those who knew no literature, and were only mindful of justice.[333]

We are not left merely to conjecture the abuses which throve in such a soil. We have the grave avowal of the commission of Cardinals already referred to, that “in no city was there to be witnessed such corruption of manners as in this city, which should be an example to all.” Vice, in fact, had ceased to wear a veil; it stalked abroad under the noonday sun, and too often found illustrious support. Yet, strange to say, the existing abuses, monstrous as they were, were more superficial than they seemed. The evil scum that rises to the surface of society must not always be taken as a test of what lies beneath; the gaudy charlock may toss its wanton head and blazon itself to the eye, but the good seed is quietly germinating below, and in the day of harvest its sheaves will not be wanting. The Church is happily not governed by professors and scholastics, and at the very time when the literary world of Rome was exhibiting the spectacles described above, the Fifth Council of Lateran was holding its sessions in that very city, and promulgating its decrees for the reform of the Universities, the College of Cardinals, and the Roman Court.[334] The Church, by the mouth of her episcopate, was solemnly exposing and condemning those very evils which thoughtless observers were perhaps laying to her charge. In the decree of the Council on the study of the Scriptures and the liberal arts, the Fathers, after setting forth the vital importance of the education of youth, go on to declare that schoolmasters and professors are bound not merely to teach their scholars grammar and rhetoric, but yet more to instruct them in their religion, and to make them study sacred hymns and psalms, and the lives of the saints; and forbid anything to be taught on Sundays and festival days save what refers in some way to religion or holy living. Decrees of this sort, if they plainly indicate the deplorable practical paganism which at that time prevailed in most public academies, show us also that the rulers of the Church were sensible of the evil, and earnestly desirous to apply a suitable remedy. And, as we shall see hereafter, this very city of Rome that seemed so corrupt, cherished in her bosom a principle of life and power, which eventually cast out the infection which had hung over her so long, and so accomplished her own purification. Long before Luther had uttered the word “Reform,” it had rung through the halls of the Lateran. The Fathers of the Council spared nothing and dissimulated nothing; and at the opening of the ninth session, a remarkable oration was delivered by Antonio Pucci, clerk to the Apostolic Chamber, in which he called on the Pope to set about the work in earnest. “Holy Father!” he exclaimed, “you desire to restore peace to Christendom, and you do well in so desiring. But see first that you extinguish the intestine wars of our vices, and exterior peace will soon reappear. Behold the world! Behold the cloister! Behold the sanctuary! Everywhere there are abuses to reform, and it is with the house of God that we must begin.”

Yet it can be no great matter of surprise that passing strangers did not always penetrate the distinction between the Church and the City of Rome, and that the undeniable corruption of the Roman literary circles brought ecclesiastical rulers into disrepute, and sapped in many minds the sentiment of loyalty to the Apostolic See. That both Erasmus and Luther carried with them from Rome fatal impressions, which, each in his own way, turned to the detriment of religion, is not to be doubted. Erasmus, indeed, had no cause to be scandalised by a state of society which was exactly to his taste. He was fÊted and flattered by prelates and philosophers, and in his letters from Rome he wants words to express his raptures at those delicious hours which he spent among libraries and academies, in the reunions at the palace of the divine Cardinal San Giorgio, or the yet more charming assemblies in the Pope’s private chambers. Yet, while enjoying the cup of pleasure to the full, his keen sarcastic eye was taking the measure of all he saw, and it was on his journey back to the north, that he beguiled his travelling fatigues with composing his “Praise of Folly,” in which Cardinals, Popes, and Prelates are made the subject of his most caustic gibes and pleasantries. And this, after all, is the way of the world; it is a lynx-eyed critic, and has ever a rigorous standard for those who ought to be saints, and a ready condemnation for those who fall short of it. Erasmus, who was himself worldly to the heart’s core, had yet sense enough to feel that worldliness, however delightful, was out of place on the threshold of the apostles, and he made other men feel it too, with all that biting irony of which he was the master.

Luther, a man of different mould, visited Rome in a widely different spirit. He was in the first fervour of what he considered his religious conversion, when in 1510 he came thither full of enthusiasm, and fell on his knees as he entered the city, to kiss the soil watered by the blood of martyrs; though he afterwards mocked at his own devotion and at the simplicity with which he ran about from church to church prepared to believe and venerate everything that he saw. He too carried away impressions that were never effaced. His coarse, strong Saxon nature had little taste for the arts and the belles-lettres, and was only repelled by the magnificence around him. The Olympic deities that met his eye at every street corner, the heathenish adornments of the very churches, where pictures and images of Christian mysteries were presented in the garb of paganism, and the yet worse heathenism which met his ears from the elegant literary crowds among whom he passed in his coarse friar’s frock, all this sank into his soul to be reproduced on the day when he launched his imprecations against the seven-hilled city, and held her up to the scorn of his countrymen, as “the dwelling-place of dragons, the nest of bats and vultures, the resort of hobgoblins, weasels, gnomes, and demons.”[335] Nor did it matter anything to his audience that the enormities he exposed were far surpassed by those which he committed, and that the apostle of reform had himself let loose on the world the reign of frenzied license; the scandals he propagated did the work which he intended, and indelibly fixed in the Saxon mind the tradition which identified Rome with Babylon.

We need not here concern ourselves with the history of that great revolution which history miscalls the Reformation. Before the death of Leo X., that which had been deemed in its beginning to be but “a squabble of friars,” was ending in the apostasy of nations. The Roman academicians, however, were less moved at the tidings which reached them in 1520, that the Pope’s Bull, the Decretals, and the Summa of St. Thomas, had all been burnt together by Luther in the public square of Wittemberg, and that the Pope himself had been declared by the same authority to be Antichrist, than at another piece of intelligence, which was communicated to them on February 9, 1522, and which startled them like a clap of thunder. Leo was dead, and the choice of the Cardinals had fallen on the Cardinal Adrian of Utrecht. The burning of St. Thomas in person would have been a light matter to them, in comparison with the election to the Papal dignity of a plain austere Louvain professor; already known to fame as the advocate of ecclesiastical discipline, the friend and colleague of Ximenes, and it was more than whispered, the supporter of scholasticism. He was a Fleming, a “Scotist,” a Goth, and the enemy of letters. He had come into the city without pomp of any kind, and had ordered one of the half-finished triumphal arches, that was to have cost a thousand ducats, to be destroyed. He had discharged ninety out of the one hundred equerries kept by his predecessor. He had brought his old Louvain housekeeper with him to the Vatican, and was dismissing the improvisatori and whole troops of other Court idlers. They had taken him over the Museum attached to his palace, and he had been heard to mutter the words Idola antiquorum, when standing before the group of the Laocoon. Some of Sadolet’s most elegant Latin epistles had been placed in his hands, and he had briefly commented on them as “the letters of a poet.” “I verily believe,” writes Jerome Negri, in terrible alarm, “that he will do as Pope Gregory did before him, make a clean sweep of our libraries, and perhaps grind up our statues to furnish mortar for building St. Peter’s.” The artists cried out that now they should all be starved; the professors bewailed the certain return of Gothic barbarism: Bembo set out at once for Venice, and Sadolet retired to his bishopric of Carpentras, where he displayed those noble qualities which had as yet found no room to expand in the artificial atmosphere of the Court.

Never was there a more undeserved reproach than that which stigmatised Pope Adrian as the enemy of learning. Erasmus, who had been defended by him from the attacks of some over-zealous scholastics, judged far otherwise, but the Romans could not forgive his indifference to ancient art, and his condemnation of those paganising scholars, whom he termed “Terentians.” Still less could they forgive his plain speaking on the subject of reform. “Many abominations,” he said, “have existed near this Holy Chair, abuses in spiritual matters, and evil everywhere. We pledge ourselves, on our part, to use our utmost endeavour to reform that Court which has, perhaps, been the source of the evils we deplore.”

In his brief pontificate of twenty-two months he was unable to accomplish the work which lay so close to his heart. His death was regarded by the Roman literati as a kind of providence, a special grace from heaven which had averted the return of mediÆval barbarism; and some of them went so far as to adorn with garlands the house of his physician, to whose want of skill the fatal termination of Adrian’s illness was ascribed, hanging over his door the inscription—“To the Saviour of his country.”

Yet those two-and-twenty months, which seemed so fruitless, witnessed the turning of the tide. The election of another Medici as successor to Adrian was the signal for extraordinary rejoicings, and for the return to Rome of many who had abandoned it after the accession of Adrian. Clement VII. had all the personal grace and refined intellect of his family; he had less taste for pleasure, and more aptitude for business than Leo, and was a true lover of learned men. He induced Sadolet to resume his functions as secretary, and did his best to engage Erasmus to devote his genius to the earnest defence of the Church.

The spirits of the Romans revived when they witnessed the splendid patronage of letters exercised by the new Pope and his kinsman, Cardinal Hyppolitus de’ Medici, who entertained in his household no fewer than three hundred learned men. The artists and academicians confidently reckoned on a return of their golden age; and yet all were more or less conscious of a certain indefinable change which had stolen over the public mind, betokening that a reaction was setting in, and that a new era was at hand. The German revolt from the Church had by this time assumed proportions which it was impossible to ignore. The question of the English divorce was causing grave inquietudes, and whilst the shadow of new and unprecedented calamities hung heavy over the world, even the most indifferent minds felt perhaps that something more earnest was called for at that moment than the cultivation of the Muses. It cannot, indeed, be said that the tide of social corruption was checked; yet another and a better element was silently at work; and, hidden in the glittering crowd,

Clement had summoned to his Court several illustrious ecclesiastics who, whilst inferior to none of their contemporaries in literary merit, were desirous above all things to provide a remedy for those grave domestic abuses which, they rightly felt, afflicted the Church more heavily than any attacks from her exterior foes. Among these were the Venetian, Gaspar Contarini, a profound scholar, and a man of fervent piety; Sadolet, who, now greatly weaned from the pursuits which had formerly absorbed him, desired to devote his remaining years to his pastoral duties; Matthew Ghiberti, the worthiest prelate of his time, whom Clement had admitted to his closest confidence, and raised to the dignity of Chancellor and the see of Verona; the Prothonotary, Cajetan of Thienna, and the Cardinal Caraffa, Archbishop of Theate, who afterwards became Pope under the title of Paul IV. The jubilee year 1525 also brought to Rome a number of devout and earnest pilgrims, among whom was our own great countryman Reginald Pole, then a student at Padua, whom Bembo called the most virtuous young man in Italy, and whose happiness it was to enter on his list of friends the name of almost every one of his contemporaries most illustrious for scholarship or piety. Men of this stamp felt the need, in the midst of that luxurious and enervating atmosphere, of some tie of Christian fellowship which might support and invigorate their spiritual life; and the result was the formation of a humble confraternity which met in the church of SS. Silvestro and Dorotea, and took the name of “the Oratory of Divine Love.”

Similar associations were springing up in other cities of Italy, but that at Rome is remarkable as being the germ whence afterwards developed the order of the Theatines. A plan was concerted among the members of the confraternity for instituting an order of regular clerks, in which the ancient canonical mode of life should be revived; this being suggested as offering the surest means for effecting that reformation of manners among the clergy which all good men so earnestly desired to forward. This design was carried out with the approbation of the Pope; Caraffa and St. Cajetan being chosen the two first superiors. Of the latter it was commonly said that he desired to reform the world without letting the world know he was in it, and in the northern cities of Italy, where he had hitherto chiefly resided, he had the character of uniting in one person the seraphic gifts of a contemplative to the heroic virtues of an apostle. The rule adopted by the regular clerks was nearly the same as that of the ancient Canons Regular. It appears certain that their original design included the formation of ecclesiastical seminaries, and in all essential particulars the new foundation bore a striking resemblance to that set on foot in the eighth century, with a very similar purpose, by St. Chrodegang of Metz. And thus we see how saintly men, when they took in hand the work of ecclesiastical reform, found no better means for carrying out their views, than turning back into the old paths, and following the traditions bequeathed them by a golden antiquity.

The order of Theatines, however, whilst yet in its infancy, was threatened with extinction when that terrible calamity fell upon Rome, to describe which one needs to use the language of the inspired writers, when they detail the woes that were to chastise the guilty city, which was yet the chosen city of God. The political combinations which had closely allied the Roman Pontiff with the Court of France, exposed him to the hostility of the Emperor Charles V., whose armies entered Italy in the early part of the year 1527, and threatened to lay siege to Rome. On the 5th of May, the city was stormed by the ferocious bands of the Constable de Bourbon, consisting chiefly of German Lutherans, animated to frenzy by the thirst for plunder and a wild religious fanaticism. The Pope took refuge in the castle of St. Angelo, and from thence had the anguish of witnessing his capital given up to scenes of sacrilege and violence which find no equal in history. The sack of Rome by the barbarian Goths lasted but six days, but the Germans held possession of their prey for nine months, every hour of which witnessed some fresh abomination. The citizens were subjected to horrible tortures, to compel them to give up their hidden treasures; the churches were desecrated, and sacred relics tossed about the streets; troop-horses were stabled in the Pontifical chapel, and littered with Bulls and decretals; mock celebrations of holy rites were performed by drunken troopers, who, decked out with cardinals’ dresses, pretended to hold a conclave, and proclaimed the election of Luther as Pope. Out of a population of 85,000, 50,000 citizens are calculated to have perished by torture and the sword, and the excesses of the soldiers at last brought a pestilence in their train, which all but annihilated, the conquerors themselves; so that the city, awhile before so brilliant and luxurious, became little better than a desolate and fetid tomb.

Amid the nameless horrors of that time it is needless to say that neither piety nor learning procured any mercy for their owners. St. Cajetan was scourged and tortured, and then compelled with his brethren to abandon the Roman territory and take refuge in Venice; where their modest house a few years later afforded hospitality to St. Ignatius and his first companions. As to the academicians, we are assured by Jerome Negri that the very few who escaped from the sword were dispersed into foreign lands, and that all subsequent efforts to restore their Society on its former footing proved an utter failure. In fact, when the city was at last delivered from the apostate hordes that possessed her, it was only to be exposed to the new scourges of famine, pestilence, and inundation, and during these calamities there reappeared in her streets, not the gay bands of artists and literati, but reformed Camaldolese and Capuchin friars, whose existence in the city, says one writer, was first made known to the Romans during the plague of 1528. Rome, indeed, recovered from her overwhelming disasters with astonishing rapidity, and it was not long before the Court of Clement VII. reassumed much of the brilliant character which it had borne under Leo X. But Roman society no longer groaned under the dictatorship of professors. The grave troubles of the Church drew to her capital men of earnest and exalted piety, who responded to the cry that came from every Catholic land for a General Council that should not only vindicate the doctrine of the Church against heretical innovators, but courageously enter on the reform of practical abuses. Delivered by her terrible chastisement from the meretricious splendour of a false prosperity, Rome prepared to put on her beautiful garments as of old, and to purify herself from the contagion which worldly men had brought into the very presence of the sanctuary. Even whilst her enemies were counting her among the dead, and rejoicing over her humiliation, she arose to a more beautiful and vigorous life than ever, so that many of those whose hearts had become estranged turned to her once more, and beholding her invested with the majesty of ancient discipline, recognised the seven-hilled city to be indeed “the city of truth, the mountain of the Lord of Hosts, the sanctified mountain.”[336]