r courage to attack or
impede the invaders in any way--filled the cities exposed to their
inroad with terror and dismay. They had passed like a destroying locust
swarm over Bologna and Imola, and crossing the Apennines, which separate
Umbria from Tuscany, had descended into the valley of the Arno not far
from Arezzo. Florence and Rome both trembled. On which would the storm
burst? That was the all-absorbing question.

Pope Clement, with his usual avarice-blinded imbecility, had,
immediately on concluding a treaty with the Neapolitan viceroy,
discharged all his troops except a bodyguard of about six hundred men.
Florence was nearly in as defenceless a position. She had, says Varchi,
"two great armies on her territory; one that under Bourbon, which came
as an enemy to sack and plunder her; and the other, that of a league,
which came as a friend to protect her, but sacked and plundered her none
the less." It was, however, probably the presence of this army, little
as it had hitherto done to impede the progress of the enemy, which
decided Bourbon eventually to determine on marching toward Rome.

It seems doubtful how far they were, in so doing, executing the orders
or carrying out the wishes of the Emperor. Clement, though he had played
the traitor to Charles, as he did to everyone else, and had been at war
with him recently, had now entered into a treaty with the Emperor's
viceroy. And apart from this there was a degree of odium and scandal
attaching to the sight of the "most Catholic" Emperor sending a Lutheran
army in his pay to attack the head of the Church, and ravage the
venerated capital of Christendom, which so decorous a sovereign as
Charles would hardly have liked to incur. Still, it may be assumed that
if the Emperor wished his army kept together, and provided no sums for
the purpose, he was not unwilling that they should live by plunder. And
perhaps his real intention was to extort from Rome the means of paying
his troops by the mere exhibition of the danger arising from their
propinquity while they remained unpaid. Upon the whole we are warranted
in supposing that Bourbon and Frundsberg would hardly have ventured on
the course they took if they had not had reason to believe that it would
not much displease their master. And Charles was exactly the sort of
man who would like to have the profit of an evil deed without the loss
of reputation arising from the commission of it, and who would consider
himself best s