The incompetent Pope was totally at a loss what policy to follow, not knowing whether it was better to incline towards the Empire or to France. He shifted at the wrong time, joined a league against the Empire, then wriggled and shuffled, and so drew upon himself and the devoted city the punishment due to a long course of wickedness. The Imperial army, a ruffian host of Germans (many of them Lutherans), Spaniards, and Italians, under the command of the traitor Bourbon, was encamped in the north; the unpaid soldiers clamoured for plunder, and Bourbon led them to Rome, carried the neglected walls by assault, and put the city to sack. Rome was a little city, with perhaps 90,000 inhabitants, but rich in the oblations and tribute money of Christendom; the churches were decked with gold and silver, the palaces stuffed with precious paintings, tapestries, and ornaments of every kind. Popes, cardinals, and princes had rivalled one another in accumulations of works of art and articles of luxury. Though license, profligacy, and crime had then shut out Rome from the sympathy of the world, it is impossible to read to-day of the horrors of the sack--men murdered, mothers, daughters, nuns outraged, old men and priests brutally insulted, churches and sacred relics defiled--without the sharpest pity. For eight days the devilish work went on, and but 30,000 inhabitants were left, so many had fled, or been killed, or made prisoners (1527). Terrible was the punishment that Clement witnessed,--Rome sacked, the liberty of Italy taken away, the Roman Catholic Church rent in two. FOOTNOTES: [19] The Roman Curia is not looking for a sheep without wool. [20] _The Papacy during the Reformation_, vol. v, Appendix (translated). M. Creighton. CHAPTER XXVIII THE HIGH RENAISSANCE (1499-1521) We are now at liberty to return to the great intellectual and artistic movement that lifted Italy to the primacy in Europe, and reached its zenith in the period of time to which the last two chapters have been devoted. This is the culminating period, in which the greatest masters did their work, and separates the earlier and more experimental stage that preceded it from the later stage of exaggeration and decadence which followed. The movement swept all the arts along with it. It produced the greatest men in literature since Petrarch, the greatest architects since the Gothic masters of the Ile de France, the greatest sculptors since Praxiteles, the greatest painters that ever were.