Jacopo Sadoleto's Letters to Curial Friends, 1527-1529

CHAPTER FOUR RENEGOTIATION AND REMEMBRANCE: JACOPO SADOLETO'S LETTERS TO CURIAL FRIENDS, 1527-1529 When Jacopo Sadoleto took leave of his duties in mid-April of 1527 to travel to his diocese of Carpentras in France, his timing could not have been more auspicious. On 31 March, the Constable of Bourbon had renewed his march southward, ignoring the truce that Pope Cle ment had made with the Imperial viceroy, Charles de Lannoy, just two weeks before.1 The papacy had slipped into desperate financial straits. Although the Roman citizenry would not turn into a panicky mob until the Sack itself, the mood within the city grew increasingly uneasy as a military crisis loomed. Those in positions of power could scarcely have doubted the gravity of the situation, especially as ap peals to Italian allies failed to elicit military support.2 Shortly before Sadoleto's departure, Girolamo Negri wrote to his friend Marcan tonio Michiel in Venice, "This court has now become a chicken yard. Every day makes us more aware of the iniquity of the times and of a desperate situation."3 But even as Rome's predicament worsened, Sadoleto's own fortunes improved: after a harrowing voy age over both sea and land, he arrived safely in Carpentras on 3 May—a mere three days before the Imperial army sacked Rome. En route, Sadoleto heard rumors of renewed fighting in Italy, but not until weeks after his arrival in his diocese did certain news of Rome's destruction reach him. Like other humanists who had been active in Pope Clement's court, Sadoleto grappled with the implica- 1 On the complications surrounding this truce, see Judith Hook, The Sack of Rome, 1527 (London, 1972), esp. chap. 9. 2 Already in January, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese had suggested to Pope Clem ent that he leave Rome. Although the pope asserted publicly that the city would not be taken, his decision to post sentries at city gates to keep citizens from fleeing suggests that others were less convinced. See Hook, Sack of Rome, 158. 3 LP 2 (Venice, 1581), fols. 72v-73r (Negri to Michiel, 15 April 1527), at 72v: "Questa Corte hormai è divenuta un cortile da galline. Ogni di siamo piu chiari della iniquità de' tempi, & della pessima stagione." I reproduce the translation in Richard M. Douglas, Jacopo Sadoleto, 1477-1547: Humanist and Reformer (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), 52 (citation hereafter abbreviated as "Douglas"). 104 CHAPTER FOUR tions of the catastrophe. Like Alcionio and Corsi, he needed to re work the shared narrative that Roman humanists had constructed on behalf of the papacy. How could any of them now envisage a trium phant papal Rome about to assert its inherited prerogatives by lead ing Christendom into a new age? Unlike most of his former col leagues, however, Sadoleto also had to justify—both to them and to himself—his own opportune departure. How came it that he, in par ticular, had been spared? In his correspondence during the months following his precipitous departure from Rome, Sadoleto grappled with its implications. In private letters to Roman humanist friends and patrons, he began to renegotiate his relationships with them, to redefine his image of pa pal Rome, and to rewrite the narrative of his own life. Through a series of labored explanations and self-justifications, he sought to maintain his bonds with the friends he had left behind, despite hav ing escaped their trauma and no longer being able to draw upon shared present experience as a basis of friendship. Beyond justifying his choices and sustaining friendships, Sadoleto now came to view papal Rome from the vantage point of an outsider. Although when he wrote these letters he did not intend to return to Rome, they mark the first steps in his progression toward 1536, when he would in fact do so—but as an "outside" reformer of the institutionally entrenched abuses that had helped to sustain the bureaucracy and the lavishness of the Roman curia, rather than as an "insider" heavily invested in the system that needed reform.4 These letters do more, however, than serve as an extension of Sadoleto's dialogues with friends and as a medium for revaluing Renaissance Rome: for they also constitute a form of life-writing, in which he created a coherent narrative that invested with meaning the recent dramatic changes in his own ca reer. Just as he came to a deeper understanding of the workings of divine providence in the world, so too he developed a strong (if time ly) sense of God's providential designs for him. The insider status that Jacopo Sadoleto chose to relinquish in 1527 had been long in the making. Born in 1477, he studied Latin and Greek letters at the University of Ferrara, where his father was a 4 On the extent to which curialists' investment in the status quo militated against such institutional reform, see Barbara McGlung Hallman, Italian CardinaL·, Reform, and the Church as Property (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1985). .

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