of the Emperor; the Colonna were to be absolutely and
freely pardoned for all they had done; in the hope of some subsequent
assistance the Pope promised to make Cardinal Colonna the Legate of the
Marches. As a hostage for the performance of these and other conditions,
Cardinal Orsini was delivered over to his enemy, who conducted him as
his prisoner to the Castle of Grottaferrata, and the Colonna secretly
agreed to allow the Pope to go free from Sant' Angelo. On the night of
December the ninth, seven months after the storming of the city, the
head of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church fled from the
castle in the humble garb of a market gardener, and made good his escape
to Orvieto and to the protection of the Holy League.

Meanwhile a pestilence had broken out in Rome, and the spectre of a
mysterious and mortal sickness distracted those who had survived the
terrors of sword and flame. The Spanish and German soldiery either fell
victims to the plague or deserted in haste and fear; and though Cardinal
Pompeo's peace contained no promise that the city should be evacuated,
it was afterwards stated upon credible authority that, within two years
from their coming, not one of the barbarous horde was left alive within
the walls. When all was over the city was little more than a heap of
ruins, but the Colonna had been victorious, and were sated with revenge.
This, in brief, is the history of the storming and sacking of Rome which
took place in the year 1527, at the highest development of the
Renascence, in the youth of Benvenuto Cellini, when Michelangelo had not
yet painted the Last Judgment, when Titian was just fifty years old, and
when Raphael and Lionardo da Vinci were but lately dead; and the
contrast between the sublimity of art and the barbarity of human nature
in that day is only paralleled in the annals of our own century, at once
the bloodiest and the most civilized in the history of the world.

The Cancelleria, wherein Pompeo Colonna sheltered the wife and daughter
of his father's murderer, is remembered for some modern political
events: for the opening of the first representative parliament under
Pius the Ninth, in 1848, for the assassination of the Pope's minister,
Pellegrino Rossi, on the steps of the entrance in the same year, and as
the place where the so-called Roman Republic was proclaimed in 1849. But
it is most of all interesting for the nobility of its proportions and
the simplicity of its archit