Clement VII

Giulio di Giuliano de' Medici · 1523 – 1534

A Medici pope whose indecisiveness led to the catastrophic Sack of Rome and the English Reformation when he refused to annul Henry VIII's marriage.

Giulio de' Medici was a cousin of Leo X and inherited the same love of art and culture but none of the political luck. He became pope in 1523, just as Europe was tearing itself apart. He wavered between alliances with France and the Holy Roman Empire, and in 1527, Emperor Charles V's unpaid troops sacked Rome in an orgy of destruction that lasted months. Churches were looted, nuns were assaulted, and the pope hid in Castel Sant'Angelo. It was the worst attack on Rome since the Vandals in 455. Clement's other defining crisis was Henry VIII's request for an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Catherine was Charles V's aunt, and Clement couldn't afford to offend the emperor who had just sacked his city. He stalled for years. Henry eventually broke with Rome entirely, taking England out of the Catholic Church. Clement also commissioned Michelangelo's Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, though he died before it was finished. His pontificate is a study in how indecision and bad timing can have catastrophic consequences.

The Sack of Rome

The 1527 sack was a turning point. Imperial soldiers, many of them Lutheran, destroyed churches, desecrated relics, and terrorized the city for months. Clement's diplomatic miscalculations made it possible. The event shattered the confidence of Renaissance Rome and convinced many that the Church needed the kind of deep reform that would eventually come at Trent.

Losing England

Clement's refusal to annul Henry VIII's marriage was doctrinally defensible but politically disastrous. He was caught between two powerful rulers and chose paralysis. By the time he might have found a diplomatic solution, Henry had already made his move. England's break with Rome lasted permanently, and the Catholic martyrs who died resisting it, Thomas More and John Fisher among them, paid the price for Clement's inability to act.