Pope Clement VII

• 1. Introduction

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  Pope Clement VII was born Giulio di Giuliano de' Medici on the 26th of May 1478, exactly one month after his father was stabbed to death on the altar steps of Florence Cathedral. That father, Giuliano de' Medici, was cut down in the Pazzi conspiracy, a plot by enemies of his powerful family. The son who never knew him would grow up to become the man historians call "the most unfortunate of the popes". He would preside over the Sack of Rome, flee his own city in disguise, watch England break away from the Catholic Church, and spend six months imprisoned in a fortress he had run to for safety. Yet he would also approve Copernicus's theory that the Earth moves around the Sun, commission The Last Judgment, and arrange the marriage that would carry the Medici name into the royal houses of Europe. How did a man so widely praised for his intelligence end up governing through such catastrophe? And what does his story reveal about what it meant to lead the Church at the precise moment the medieval world was cracking apart?

• 2. A Medici Education

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  Giulio's first seven years were spent in the household of his godfather, the architect Antonio da Sangallo the Elder. After that, his great-uncle Lorenzo the Magnificent took him in and raised him at the Palazzo Medici in Florence alongside his own children, including Giovanni, who would one day become Pope Leo X. The tutors at the Palazzo were humanists of the first rank; Angelo Poliziano was among them, and one of Giulio's schoolmates was the young Michelangelo. In this world, Giulio became an accomplished musician, cultivated a reputation for shyness, and was regarded by those around him as handsome.

  The Church would have been a natural home for him, but Giulio had a problem: he was illegitimate. His father had died before his birth, and his mother's identity was never firmly established, though several scholars name Fioretta Gorini, daughter of the professor Antonio Gorini. Illegitimacy barred him from the Church's highest offices, so Lorenzo steered him instead toward a military career. Giulio was enrolled in the Knights of Rhodes and became Grand Prior of Capua.

  When Lorenzo the Magnificent died in 1492, Giulio began to reorient himself toward Church affairs. He studied canon law at the University of Pisa and traveled with his cousin Giovanni to the conclave of 1492, where Rodrigo Borgia became Pope Alexander VI. When the Medici were expelled from Florence in 1494, Giulio and Giovanni wandered Europe together for six years, twice landing in jail, first in Ulm and then in Rouen, with Piero the Unfortunate bailing them out each time. By 1512, both were present at the Battle of Ravenna, where Giovanni was captured by the French and Giulio escaped to serve as an emissary to Pope Julius II. That same year, with Spanish troops and Julius's backing, the Medici retook Florence.

• 3. The Cardinal's Rise

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  In March 1513, when Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici was elected Pope Leo X, Giulio stepped onto the world stage at the age of 35. Within three months of Leo's election, Giulio was named Archbishop of Florence. That autumn, a papal dispensation declared his birth legitimate, ruling that his parents had been betrothed per sponsalia de presenti. The dispensation cleared the way for Leo to make Giulio a cardinal at the first papal consistory, on the 23rd of September 1513. Six days later he was appointed Cardinal Deacon of Santa Maria in Domnica.

  Venetian ambassador Marco Minio wrote to the Senate in 1519 that Cardinal de' Medici "has great power with the Pope; he is a man of great competence and great authority; he resides with the Pope, and does nothing of importance without first consulting him." Leo formally named him Vice-Chancellor of the Church on the 9th of March 1517, but in practice the two cousins had governed in partnership from the beginning.

  His statesmanship was unusually independent-minded. In January 1514, Henry VIII of England appointed him Cardinal protector of England. The following year, Francis I of France nominated him to become Archbishop of Narbonne, and in 1516 named him cardinal protector of France. Both kings then pressured him to resign one role, since they saw a conflict of interest in his protecting both countries. He refused.

  The idea that shaped his foreign policy was la libertà d'Italia, the goal of freeing both Italy and the Church from French and Imperial control. In 1521, when rivalry between Francis I and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V erupted into war, Cardinal Giulio sided with Charles, calculating that keeping France out of Lombardy mattered more than honoring his role as France's protector. He helped lead a victorious Imperial-Papal army against the French in Milan. The strategy worked, for a time. Contemporary Francesco Guicciardini wrote that Giulio was better suited to arms than to the priesthood.

  Between 1519 and 1523 he governed Florence with what U.S. President John Adams later called "very successful and frugal" administration. Adams described how Giulio reduced the business of the magistrates and the mode of public expenditure in a way that produced widespread joy among the citizens. When Leo X died in 1521, Adams wrote that all the principal citizens of Florence wanted the cardinal to continue governing the city.

• 4. The Papal Throne

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  When Pope Adrian VI died on the 14th of September 1523, Cardinal Giulio managed to win the election that had eluded him before. He was chosen Pope on the 19th of November 1523, taking the name Clement VII. His contemporaries saw him as a wily diplomat but also as someone indifferent to the real dangers the Protestant Reformation posed to the Church.

  His opening moves were diplomatic. He sent the Archbishop of Capua, Nikolaus von Schönberg, to the kings of France, Spain, and England in an attempt to end the Italian War. A report from Marino Caracciolo to the Emperor quoted the new Pope's view that, with the Turks threatening Christian states, bringing about a general peace of all Christian princes was his first duty. The attempt failed.

  When Francis I conquered Milan in 1524, Clement switched sides, forming a treaty in January 1525 with France, Venice, and other Italian princes. That treaty secured Parma and Piacenza for the Papal States and confirmed Medici rule over Florence. One month later, Francis I was crushed and captured at the Battle of Pavia, and Clement reversed course again, signing an alliance with the viceroy of Naples.

  When Francis I was freed after the Treaty of Madrid in 1526, Clement reversed again, entering the League of Cognac with France, Venice, and Francesco II Sforza of Milan. He issued a public attack on Charles V, who replied by calling him a "wolf" rather than a "shepherd" and threatening to summon a council on the Lutheran question. Clement's wavering had made enemies of everyone.

  In 1529, Clement issued the bull Intra Arcana, granting Charles V and the Spanish Empire powers of patronage over their colonies in the Americas. In 1532 he took possession of Ancona, ending hundreds of years during which the Republic of Ancona had operated as an independent maritime power and folding it permanently into the Papal States.

• 5. The Sack of Rome

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  Cardinal Pompeo Colonna, the Roman nobleman who had tried to block Giulio's candidacy before, now turned to open aggression. His soldiers pillaged Vatican Hill and seized control of Rome in his name. Clement, humiliated, promised to bring the Papal States back to the Imperial side. Colonna then abandoned the siege and left for Naples, breaking his promises and losing his position.

  From that point on, Clement was swept along by events. Alfonso I d'Este, duke of Ferrara, had supplied artillery to the Imperial army, which kept the League forces at a distance while a horde of Landsknecht mercenaries, led by Charles III, Duke of Bourbon and Georg von Frundsberg, advanced on Rome unchallenged. Charles of Bourbon died while scaling a ladder during the short siege. His troops, unpaid and without a commander, felt free to ransack the city starting on the 6th of May 1527. The murders, rapes, and vandalism that followed destroyed what remained of Renaissance Rome.

  Clement took refuge in Castel Sant'Angelo. On the 6th of June he was forced to surrender. He agreed to pay a ransom of 400,000 ducats and to cede Parma, Piacenza, Civitavecchia, and Modena to the Holy Roman Empire, though only Modena could actually be occupied. While he was imprisoned, Venice seized Cervia and Ravenna, and Sigismondo Malatesta returned to Rimini. In Florence, Republican enemies of the Medici expelled his family from the city once again.

  After buying off some Imperial officers, Clement escaped disguised as a peddler. He sheltered first in Orvieto and then in Viterbo. He did not return to Rome until October 1528, finding it depopulated and devastated. During his six months of imprisonment, he had grown a full beard as a sign of mourning, in contradiction to canon law requiring priests to be clean-shaven. He kept the beard until his death in 1534. His successor Paul III followed his example, and the fashion persisted through 24 subsequent popes, down to Innocent XII, who died in 1700.

• 6. Henry VIII and the English Break

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  By the late 1520s, Henry VIII wanted his marriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled. Catherine was the aunt of Charles V, the emperor who had just sacked Rome. Henry argued that because Catherine had been his brother's widow, the marriage was blighted in God's eyes, even though Pope Julius II had granted a dispensation for the union, and even though Catherine's first marriage had been childless. Catholic teaching held that a validly contracted marriage could not be dissolved, and Julius had already ruled the union valid.

  In 1527 Henry asked Clement to annul the marriage. The Pope, effectively a prisoner of Charles V and unwilling to insult the emperor's family, refused. Clement did, however, quietly advise Henry to divorce Catherine without seeking a formal annulment, trying to resolve the situation without open confrontation. Henry refused that path, insisting on proper ecclesiastical procedure.

  In October 1530, a gathering of clergy and lawyers in England concluded that Parliament could not empower the Archbishop of Canterbury to act against the Pope's prohibition. Bishop John Fisher argued the Pope's case in Parliament. Henry nonetheless went ahead: he arranged a marriage ceremony with Anne Boleyn in either late 1532 or early 1533.

  The death of Archbishop William Warham, a firm ally of Rome, gave Henry the opening he needed. He persuaded Clement to approve Thomas Cranmer, a friend of the Boleyn family, as Warham's successor. Clement issued the necessary papal bulls while also requiring Cranmer to swear the customary oath of loyalty to the Pope before consecration. Cranmer was consecrated after declaring beforehand that he did not intend to honor that oath. He promptly granted the annulment Henry wanted. Clement responded by excommunicating both Henry and Cranmer.

  In England that same year, the Act of Conditional Restraint of Annates redirected taxes on Church income from the Pope to the Crown. The Peter's Pence Act barred the annual payment to Rome. Parliament declared that England had "no superior under God, but only your Grace." In 1534, the Act of Supremacy established the independent Church of England, completing the break Clement had tried for years to prevent.

• 7. Patronage and Ideas

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  Benvenuto Cellini credited Giulio de' Medici's artistic patronage with "excellent taste", and the range of what he commissioned bears that out. As a cardinal, he arranged the contest that produced Sebastiano del Piombo's The Raising of Lazarus, pitting Sebastiano directly against Raphael to see who could create the finer altarpiece for Narbonne Cathedral. He commissioned Raphael's Transfiguration and Michelangelo's Medici Chapel. He financed Raphael's architectural Villa Madama in Rome and Michelangelo's Laurentian Library in Florence.

  As Pope, Clement appointed Cellini head of the Papal Mint and painter Sebastiano del Piombo as keeper of the Papal Seal. Just two days before his death, he confirmed that Michelangelo should paint The Last Judgment above the altar in the Sistine Chapel. Historian André Chastel gave the name "Clementine style" to the artistic movement that flourished in Rome from 1523 to 1527. Among its practitioners were Parmigianino, Rosso Fiorentino, Marcantonio Raimondi, Giulio Romano, Giovanni da Udine, Perino del Vaga, and Polidoro da Caravaggio. The Sack of Rome ended it: several of those artists were killed, captured, or drawn into the fighting.

  His intellectual patronage reached into literature and science. He encouraged Erasmus's On Free Will as a response to Martin Luther. He commissioned Machiavelli's Florentine Histories. He appointed Baldassare Castiglione as papal diplomat to Charles V and Francesco Guicciardini as governor of the Romagna. In 1531 he issued rules for the oversight of human cadaver dissection and medical trials, a rudimentary code of medical ethics. His personal physician was the humanist and author Paolo Giovio.

  In science, his most lasting act was approving Nicolaus Copernicus's heliocentric theory in 1533, when scholar Johann Widmanstetter explained the system to him. Clement was so pleased that he gave Widmanstetter a valuable gift in thanks. The approval came 99 years before Galileo's heresy trial. Before his papacy, Clement had also been close to Leonardo da Vinci; Leonardo had given him a painting, the Madonna of the Carnation.

• 8. Legacy

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  Clement's contemporary Francesco Vettori put the paradox plainly: Clement had "endured a great labor to become, from a great and respected cardinal, a small and little-esteemed pope," and yet "for more than a hundred years, no better man than Clement VII sat upon the Throne." Disasters had found a good man, not the other way around.

  Historian E.R. Chamberlin described him as a protagonist in a Greek tragedy, "the victim called upon to endure the results of actions committed long before." Each territorial claim by his predecessors had pulled the papacy deeper into European power politics, and each moral compromise had weakened its hold on ordinary Christians. Kenneth Gouwens argued that the costs of defending Italy with standing armies forced Clement to abandon ecclesiastical reform entirely; the money simply was not there.

  His own character shaped his fate as much as circumstance did. Historian Francesco Guicciardini, who served under him, wrote that Clement had "a most capable intelligence and marvelous knowledge of world affairs" but lacked "the corresponding resolution and execution." Paul Strathern wrote that the Medici trait of caution had deepened in Clement into a flaw. He could always see both sides of any argument, which had made him an exceptional adviser to Leo X and a paralyzed decision-maker as Pope.

  Ecclesiastically, Clement issued orders protecting Jews from the Inquisition and approved the Theatine, Barnabite, and Capuchin orders. He died on the 25th of September 1534, aged 56, having reigned for 10 years, 10 months, and 7 days. His body was first interred in Saint Peter's Basilica, then moved to a tomb in Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome, designed by Baccio Bandinelli. In 1533 he had already arranged the marriage that, according to Medici historian Paul Strathern, marked the most significant turning point in Medici history: the wedding of Catherine de' Medici to the future King Henry II of France.