The Experience of the Sack
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chapter 4 The Experience of the Sack The sack of Como by Spanish troops in 1521 was agonizingly described by Giovio, a native of the town and an eyewitness to its devastation: All the city was miserably put to sack, and of the many noblemen of ancient families, though they provided a larger bounty to free them- selves, several were injured and others killed; Madonna Lucia Capella, a noble and very beautiful matron, was very cruelly slain by an arque- bus shot; and the Spanish soldiers had no respect to the vestry of the church [of Santa Maria Maggiore], snatching the vases consecrated for the altars and defiling everything in the monasteries of friars. And thus with such voracity [of the Spaniards], never was another city sacked with such impudence or cruelty.1 Joseph ha-Kohen, who was already a resident of Genoa during its sack by the imperial army in 1522, described the same images of destruction and cruelty.2 One of the most intense experiences of early modern military life was the participation in a sack. In most cases the soldiers witnessed their comrades either dying of disease and combat or killing enemy soldiers. Everyday encoun- ters with the local population could lead to violence and death but infrequently and on a relatively small scale. The experience of the sack was entirely diffe- rent; the soldiers rampaged through cities and towns, being allowed to steal and destroy, but also to harm, torture, and kill civilians and enemy soldiers alike. Like a swarm of locusts, the Spaniards swept through populated areas, sparing no one and nothing. The phenomena of sacking and plundering, with the violence that accom- panied them, are mostly discussed briefly and from the vantage point of the physical damage inflicted on the property and populations involved, and studies are usually satisfied, often understandably, with the most elementary explanations for the soldiers’ extreme brutality. In contrast, this chapter will concentrate on the motivations that drove the Spanish soldiers to use extreme 1 Paolo Giovio, La vita del signor don Fernando d’Avalo marchese di Pescara (Venice: Giovanni de Rossi, 1557), 40r. 2 Joseph ha-Kohen, Dibre ha-Yamim le-Malke Zarfat we-Beit Otoman ha-Tugar (Amsterdam, 1732), pt.2, 4. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/97890043377�5_006 The Experience of the Sack 145 violence toward civilians and will attempt to describe the experience, effects, and consequences of the sack from the soldiers’ vantage point. The two most infamous and relatively well-documented ordeals—the sack of Prato in 1512 and that of Rome in 1527—will be used as case studies.3 Preparing for the Sack The extreme violence embedded in the act of sacking was not unique to early modern warfare or to any specific nationality of soldiers. Some of the most shocking events of what are now termed “war crimes” were committed during the last century. Soviet and German troops showed little mercy to civilians when passing through enemy territories during the campaigns in Eastern Europe and Germany. The Vietnam War, the Russian involvement in Chechnya, and the violent conflicts in Yugoslavia, to name only a few examples, are all infa- mous for the brutal actions of soldiers against supposedly uninvolved civilians. What separates modern atrocities from early modern forms of large-scale violence toward seemingly harmless civilians is that the latter was considered an innate part of warfare. While in modern warfare at least some perpetrators of atrocities could expect to be hunted down by local or international justice systems, and obvious cases of atrocity are always considered war crimes by 3 The political, social and cultural background and implications of the sack of Rome garnered much research attention, and especially in Italy. See for example: Silvio Maurano, Il sacco di Roma (Milan: Ceschina, 1967); Vicente de Cadenas y Vicent, El saco de Roma de 1527 por el ejército de Carlos V (Madrid: Hidalguía, 1974); Maria Ludovica Lenzi, Il sacco di Roma del 1527 (Florence: La nuova Italia, 1978); E.R. Chamberlin, The Sack of Rome (London: B.T. Batsford, 1979); Giovanna Solari, Il sacco di Roma (Milan: Mondadori, 1980); André Chastel, The Sack of Rome, 1527 (Princeton, N.J. Princeton University Press, 1983); Francesco Mazzei, Il sacco di Roma (Milan: Rusconi, 1986); Augustin Redondo, ed., Les discoures sur le sac de Rome de 1527: pouvoir et littérature (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne nouvelle, 1999); Antonio di Pierro, Il sacco di Roma: 6 maggio 1527: l’assalto dei lanzichenecchi (Milan: O. Mondadori, 2003); Judith Hook, The Sack of Rome (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Pier Paolo Piergentili, Gianni Venditti and Lelio della Valle, Scorribande, lanzichenecchi e soldati ai tempi del sacco di Roma: Papato e Colonna in un inedito epistolario dall’archivio della valle-del Bufalo (1526–1527) (Rome: Gangemi, 2009); Giulia Ponsiglione, La ruina di Roma: il sacco del 1527 e la memoria letteraria (Rome: Carocci: Sapienza Università di Roma, 2010). For the sack of Prato see: Cesare Guasti, Il sacco di Prato e il ritorno de’Medici in Firenze nel MDXII (Bologna: Commissione per I testi di lingua, 1968); Vittorio Gori, Il sacco di Prato (Prato: Studio pubblicitario editoriale, 1972); Vicente de Cadenas y Vicent, El saco de Prato: la primera reposición de los Mecidis en Florencia y la pres- encia de España en el Milanesado (Madrid: Hidalguía, 1982); Valeria Tozzini Cellai, Storia del sacco di Prato (Prato: Pentalinea, 1991)..