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Updated: April 30, 2025
What he began was carried on amid crime, anarchy, and bloodshed by successive Popes of the Renaissance, until at last the troops of Frundsberg paved the way, in 1527, for the Jesuits of Loyola, and Rome, still the Eternal City, cloaked her splendor and her scandals beneath the black pall of Spanish inquisitors.
Hus humbly but firmly refused to do anything against his conscience; he asked for proof from God's word, then he would submit. "I stand before the judgment of God; He will judge me and you in righteousness, as we deserve it." As Hus was led back to prison, John of Chlum, a Bohemian nobleman, shook hands with him, just as Frundsberg comforted Luther at Worms.
The Colonna princes drove the Pope to take refuge in the Castle of S. Angelo; and when the Lutheran rabble raised by Frundsberg poured into Lombardy, the Duke of Ferrara assisted them to cross the Po, and the Duke of Urbino made no effort to bar the passes of the Apennines.
In 1527 a German army, largely composed of Lutherans, led by Constable Bourbon and George Frundsberg, stormed and captured Rome. The Pope made an alliance with Henry VIII. A French army under Lautrec appeared at Naples, but it was so weakened by a fearful pestilence that it was easily destroyed. The Pope concluded peace with Charles in 1529. The emperor promised to exterminate heresy.
A favourite book of his grandfather had been the life of old George Frundsberg of Mindelheim, a colonel of foot-folk in the Imperial service at Pavia fight, and during the wars of the Constable Bourbon: and one of Frundsberg's military companions was a certain Carpzow, or Carpezan, whom our friend selected as his tragedy hero.
The capture and occupation of Rome by troops mainly Spanish in the same year, despite the Emperor's repudiation, was another alarming symptom; which received a terrifying confirmation in 1527, when the Imperial troops, Spanish and German, headed by the "Lutheran" Frundsberg and the Constable of Bourbon, turned their arms upon the Holy City, stormed it, sacked it with a savage thoroughness unparalleled since the days of Alaric, and held the Pope himself a prisoner.
By a series of those falsehoods which only the powerful can venture on, but which bring ruin upon the weak, Clement brought about the advance of the Germano-Spanish army under Bourbon and Frundsberg . It is certain that the Cabinet of Charles V intended to inflict on him a severe castigation, and that it could not calculate beforehand how far the zeal of its unpaid hordes would carry them.
When entering the hall, he was clapped on the shoulder by a famous knight and general of the empire, Georg von Frundsberg, who said, "Monk, monk, thou art in a strait the like of which myself and many leaders, in the most desperate battles, have never known. But if thy thoughts are just, and thou art sure of thy cause, go on, in God's name; and be of good cheer; He will not forsake thee."
On his way into the hall where the Diet was assembled, tradition tells us how the famous warrior, George von Frundsberg, clapped him on the shoulder, and said: 'My poor monk! my poor monk! thou art on thy way to make such a stand as I and many of my knights have never done in our toughest battles.
In the same month the world learnt with amazement that the troops of Bourbon and the Lutheran Frundsberg had stormed and sacked Rome; and that the Imperial troops held Clement himself a prisoner in the castle of St. Angelo. The Pope was thus completely in the Emperor's power: the Emperor was Katharine's nephew and would most certainly veto the divorce.
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