Rome, May 1527
The army of Charles V has been sacking this city for three weeks. The word sacking does not describe what I have been witnessing. The word implies a military operation with defined objectives. This is something older: the permission given to men who have not been paid and have been promised that what they find inside those walls is theirs.
I was in the Trastevere during the first three days and I am not going to write in detail about what I saw. I will write this: the soldiers who participated most enthusiastically in what was done to the civilians of Rome were German Lutheran troops who had been told they were attacking the Whore of Babylon. The soldiers who participated most enthusiastically in what was done to the art and manuscripts were Spanish Catholic troops who simply wanted what they could carry.
Both categories wrapped their appetite in the language of righteousness. This is not unusual. The appetite is always there before the language. The language is the costume the appetite puts on when it needs to walk in public.
I am in a house near the Aventine with twelve people whose names I will not write here and a box of manuscripts I rescued from a library that was beginning to smoke. The manuscripts include three texts I have never seen copies of elsewhere. This is what matters most to me, which tells you what forty-nine years of witnessing has done to my sense of proportion. The city will survive. It always survives. The cost of the surviving is the part that never fully reconciles.