‘With Pain/Pen’

The Italian Wars stimulated an enormous poetic response which drew on the literary traditions of the peninsula—including history writing—and fed or shaped a widespread demand for news and for rapid reflections on the political and military situation. The sack of the city and the massacre of civilians formed an important part of this output. Poets on all sides listed massacres and described individual atrocities. They might blame human sin, Italian weakness, or barbarian national character for these events; or they might attribute them to divine providence or justify them according to the laws and customs of just war. More rarely did the civilian receive much attention. The forms in which they wrote ranged from the classical Latin epic to the mock epic in terza rima, sonnet, or lament.