The wrath of Charles V – the Holy Roman Emperor and Europe’s most powerful monarch – showed clearly around Siena during the early spring of 1555. Over the past four centuries, the Tuscan city – the capital of the republic of the same name – had grown to become one of the Continent’s economic and cultural centres, known for the quality of its governance as well as for the beauty of its architectural and artistic treasures.
But now it was entering its second year under siege, with Spanish, German, and Italian soldiers of the emperor’s besieging army occupying a string of camps and small forts that encircled it. The once-beautiful surrounding countryside, which formerly boasted magnificent tracts of mature forest, was denuded of trees, which the Habsburg emperor’s soldiers had used as fuel, or in the making of forts.
In an effort to stave off starvation, the French defenders of the city had previously turned out thousands of noncombatants, so that there might be fewer mouths to feed. The besieging troops, however, had refused to grant them passage through their lines. As a result, corpses were piled up in no-man’s land, and those who had somehow survived clung precariously to life amid the squalor beneath the walls of the city that had once been their home.
Scanning the Elgin Marbles