interests were substituted for principles; cross-combinations perplexed
the real issues of dispute; while one sole fact emerged into
distinctness--that, whatever happened, Italy must be the spoil of the
victorious duelist.

The practical termination of this state of things arrived in the battle
of Pavia, when Francis was removed as a prisoner to Madrid, and in the
sack of Rome, when the Pope was imprisoned in the Castle of S. Angelo.
It was then found that the laurels and the profit of the bloody contest
remained with the King of Spain. What the people suffered from the
marching and countermarching of armies, from the military occupations of
towns, from the desolation of rural districts, from ruinous campaigns
and sanguinary battles, from the pillage of cities and the massacres of
their inhabitants, can best be read in Burigozzo's _Chronicle of Milan_,
in the details of the siege of Brescia and the destruction of Pavia, in
the _Chronicle of Prato_, and in the several annals of the sack of Rome.
The exhaustion of the country seemed complete; the spirit of the people
was broken. But what soon afterwards became apparent, and what in 1527
might have been thought incredible, was that the single member of the
Italian union which profited by these apocalyptic sufferings of the
nation, was the Papacy. Clement VII., imprisoned in the Castle of S.
Angelo, forced day and night to gaze upon his capital in flames and hear
the groans of tortured Romans, emerged the only vigorous survivor of the
five great Powers on whose concert Italian independence had been
founded. Instead of being impaired, the position of the Papacy had been
immeasurably improved. Owing to the prostration of Italy, there was now
no resistance to the Pope's secular supremacy within the limits of his
authorized dominion. The defeat of France and the accession of a Spanish
monarch to the Empire guaranteed peace. No foreign force could levy
armies or foment uprisings in the name of independence. Venice had been