least to mourn the success of his own
army. Nowhere did this terrible Italian misfortune fail to awaken
sympathy and compassion save in a rival Italian city. Florence heard the
tidings, says Varchi, with the utmost delight. The same historian
expresses his own opinion, that the sack of Rome was at once the most
cruel and the most merited chastisement ever inflicted by heaven. And
another Florentine writer piously accounts for the failure of all means
adopted to avert the calamity, by supposing that it was God's eternal
purpose then and thus to chastise the crimes of the Roman prelates--a
theory, it may occur to some minds, somewhat damaged by the unfortunate
fact that the greater part of the miseries suffered in those awful days
were inflicted on the unhappy flocks of those purple shepherds.

FOOTNOTES:

[36] These troops entered Rome in October, 1526. They were disbanded in
March, 1527.

[37] Cellini here refers to the attack made upon Rome by the great
Ghibelline house of Colonna, led by their chief captain, Pompeo, in
September, 1526. They took possession of the city and drove Clement into
the castle of St. Angelo, where they forced him to agree to terms
favoring the Imperial cause. It was customary for Roman gentlemen to
hire bravoes for the defence of their palaces when any extraordinary
disturbance was expected, as, for example, upon the vacation of the
papal chair.

[38] All historians of the sack of Rome agree in saying that Bourbon was
shot dead while placing ladders against the outworks near the shop
Cellini mentions. But the honor of firing the arquebuse which brought
him down cannot be assigned to anyone in particular. Very different
stories were current on the subject.

[39] Renzo di Ceri was a captain of adventurers, who had conquered
Urbino for the Pope in 1515, and afterward fought for the French in the
Italian wars. Orazio Baglioni, of the semiprincely Perugian family, was
a distinguished _condottiere_. He subsequently obtained the captaincy of
the Bande Nere, and died fighting near Naples in 1528. Orazio murdered
several of his cousins in order to acquire the lordship of Perugia. His
brother Malatesta undertook to defend Florence in the siege of 1530, and
sold the city by treason to Clement.

[40] Giovio, in his _Life of the Cardinal Prospero Colonna_, relates how
he accompanied Clement in his flight from the Vatican to the castle.
While passing some open portions of the gallery, he threw his vi