Portrait of Cardinal Pompeo Colonna

Pompeo Colonna wore a cardinal's red but thought like the soldier his family bred. He came from the Colonna, the great Roman clan forever at war with the popes, and in 1526 he did the almost unthinkable: he led armed men into the Vatican and forced Pope Clement VII to shelter in the Castel Sant'Angelo. It was a warning of worse to come. The next year the emperor's unpaid troops sacked Rome outright, and Colonna, still no friend of Clement, ended up governing Naples for the emperor Charles V, where he died in 1532.