Campagna the Colonna entered the city in arms,
orderly, silent and sober, and from their well-guarded fortresses they
contemplated the ruin they had brought upon Rome. Cardinal Pompeo
installed himself in his palace of the Cancelleria in the Region of
Parione, and gave shelter to such of his friends as might be useful to
him thereafter. In revenge upon John de' Medici, the Captain of the
Black Bands, whose assistance the Pope had invoked, the Cardinal caused
the Villa Medici on Monte Mario to be burned to the ground, and Clement
the Seventh watched the flames from the ramparts of Sant' Angelo. One
good action is recorded of the savage churchman. He ransomed and
protected in his house the wife and the daughter of that Giorgio
Santacroce who had murdered the Cardinal's father by night, when the
Cardinal himself was an infant in arms, more than forty years earlier;
and he helped some of his friends to escape by a chimney from the room
in which they had been confined and tortured into promising a ransom
they could not pay. But beyond those few acts he did little to mitigate
the horrors of the month-long sack, and nothing to relieve the city from
the yoke of its terrible captors. The Holy League sent a small force to
the Pope's assistance and it reached the gates of Rome; but the
Spaniards were in possession of immense stores of ammunition and
provisions, they had more horses than they needed and more arms than
they could bear; the forces of the League had traversed a country in
which not a blade of grass had been left undevoured nor a measure of
corn uneaten; and the avengers of the dead Constable, securely fortified
within the walls, looked down with contempt upon an army already
decimated by sickness and starvation.

At this juncture, Clement the Seventh resolved to abandon further
resistance and sue for peace. The guns of Sant' Angelo had all but fired
their last shot, and the supply of food was nearly exhausted, when the
Pope sent for Cardinal Colonna; the churchman consented to a parley, and
the man who had suffered confiscation and disgrace entered the castle as
the arbiter of destiny. He was received as the mediator of peace and a
benefactor of humanity, and when he stated his terms they were not
refused. The Pope and the thirteen Cardinals who were with him were to
remain prisoners until the payment of four hundred thousand ducats of
gold, after which they were to be conducted to Naples to await the
further pleasure