Note 5 — Chapter X · THE SAVONAROLA FALLACY

But there was nothing new about a Catholic sack of Rome. The city had been hideously sacked and in large part destroyed under Gregory VII (1084) by Robert Guiscard, the Pope’s ally, after having been captured without sacking by the German Emperor. It just missed being sacked by Frederick II in 1239. In 1413 it was captured by Ladislaus of Naples, who gave all Florentine property in the city to pillage. No question of heresy arose in these episodes; nor did the forces of the Church itself blench at either sack or sacrilege. Faenza was foully sacked in 1376 by Hawkwood, called in for its defence by the bishop of Ostia; and in 1377 the same condottiere massacred the population of Cesena under the express and continuous orders of Robert, Cardinal of Geneva, the papal legate, afterwards the “anti-pope” Clement VII. No more bestial massacre took place in the pandemonium of the fourteenth century; and the sacking of the churches and the violation of the nuns was on the scale of the bloodshed.5 In view of the endless atrocities of the wars of the Church and of Christendom there is a certain ripe absurdity about the exegetical comments on the subject of the sack of Rome in 1527. Says Blass:—