A Swiss Guard from the early 1920s. From The Arador Armour Library.

Sacred Variations on the Theme of L’Homme Armé

L’homme, l’homme, l’homme armé, l’homme armé,
l’homme armé doibt on doubter, doibt on doubter.
On a fait par tout crier,
Que chascun se viegne armer, d’un haubregon de fer.
L’homme, l’homme, l’homme armé, l’homme armé,
l’homme armé doibt on doubter, doibt on doubter.

The fifteenth-century cantus firmus L’Homme Armé inspired numerous Mass settings in the liberal—and libertine—period that characterized the late Renaissance and the run-up to Trent. Desprez, Dufay, and even Palestrina wrote polyphonic settings of it, elaborately inverting and weaving the profane mode into more minor and appropriately ecclesial notes. One more bizarre-minded composer of the late ’60s, Maxwell Davies, re-wrote portions of an anonymous late-medieval Mass on the theme with instrumentation ranging from timpani, crotales, tabors, temple blocks and Swannee whistle and as well as something listed only as a “nightingale.” Another musical group from Britain, called Perfect Houseplants, wrote an equally idiosyncratic Mass for St. Michael’s Day on the same theme, with parts for countertenor and saxophone, among other things.

The original song is rather a surprising choice to serve as an inspiration for religious music. The text runs something like this:

The man, the man, the armed man, the armed man
The armed man must be feared.
Everywhere, all have cried,
That they should armor themselves in a mail shirt.
The man, the man, the armed man, the armed man
The armed man must be feared.

A song for uncertain and disconsolate times, about fear and violence. Yet, sometimes, the armed man can carry the fear of God rather than inspire merely earthly fear, like the mighty warrior St. George, like St. Michael, and like 147 warriors who died over five hundred years ago in an unfair fight, just steps away from where the first Pope was martyred. I met their spiritual descendents the other day. They’re called the Pontifical Swiss Guards.

***

Nightlife in Rome is something I scrupulously avoid, unless it’s partying late at L’Eau Vive. That’s the Pope’s favorite restaurant, just down the street from the studio in Via Monterone. One journalist described it cheekily as an “ecclesiastical Beni-Hana” with branches from Paris to Manila. It’s staffed by a group of Carmelite tertiaries dedicated to evangelization through French cooking. The only downside is sometimes they make you watch their pseudo-liturgical bouts of interpretive dance.

Most of my friends, however, tend to prefer something a bit more exciting than dancing nuns, and so they go to a bar nicknamed Donnie’s, somewhere in the tangle of streets between the Pantheon and the old temple that is now occupied by Rome’s stock exchange. I’m agnostic about the place; I went there twice. The first time, a five-minute wait for pasta turned into forty-five and, regarding the second time, I’m still waiting for them to take my order.

All that notwithstanding, I have to be grateful to Donnie himself. I’ve never met the fellow—I assume the name’s short for Donato—but he’s a legendary figure among the arkies. He tends to give us his surplus produce, and so there are usually large crates of bananas and lettuce lying inexplicably around the school kitchen. Fruit, while necessary for the oftentimes Vitamin-C deprived Roman student, is still fruit. You can wander over to the chaos of Campo dei Fiori and buy some yourself rather than relying on the good graces of an Italian restauranteur. However, there was one thing which Donnie managed to get for us which you can’t buy at Campo dei Fiori.

A chance to see the Swiss Guards up close and personal. In full armor, no less.

(…un haubregon de fer…doibt un doubter…)

In 1527, Charles V, a Holy Roman Emperor that was neither, swept down on the Eternal City with a vast force of disgruntled Lutheran Landsknecte and utterly trashed the place. It was the result of one of the Renaissance’s complicated religio-political power-plays that brought a man who was king of Spain, Europe’s most solidly Catholic nation, as well as the putative successor to the caesars, to lay waste to the spiritual center of all that he should have held dear, with the assistance of a crowd of beer-swilling heretics. It was one of the worst tragedies in western history.

Rome, of course, had been sacked before. Four centuries before Christ, the Gauls started the trend, while in the declining years of the Empire, the Visigoths, Goths, Vandals and even the Byzantines, who should have known better since they owned the place, contributed to progressively destroying the city. Then there were the Lombards, who merely scuffed up the place, and Saracen pirates, and finally the Normans, who, at the close of the eleventh century, had been invited by Pope Gregory VII as the medieval equivalent of rent-a-cops. They didn’t have much company loyalty.

Fast forward to 1523. Pope Clement VII, a Medici of somewhat dubious legitimacy, had been elected to succeed the ascetic Dutchman Adrian VI. As soon as he had ascended the Cathedra Petri he found himself completely out of his league, painted into a diplomatic corner in the middle of a complicated military-dynastic struggle between Charles V and the King of France, the crooked-nosed bon vivant Francis I. When, at Pavia in February of 1525, Francis found himself in captivity, he acceded to all of Charles’s demands and swore solemn oaths to keep them. Nonetheless, he seems to have been lying through his teeth and cast off the dictates of the Emperor’s treaty in short order.

Here Clement, poor Clement, made his mistake. Following the scorecard of history, Clement had been backing the French before Pavia: the Emperor, despite being in some sense the Pope’s other half, was generally no friend to the Holy See. That being said, his decision to continue his support after Francis’s betrayal of a lawful treaty was, at the very least, poor planning and seriously annoyed Charles V in the process. Clement, naturally, had his reasons, considering the one worse thing than having Francis I rummaging around in Italy was having the Emperor as a next-door neighbor.

Clement, meanwhile, had shut himself up in Castel Sant’ Angelo while the bandit Colonna family had, with Imperial backing, proceeded to steal everything in Rome except the kitchen sink, principally because it hadn’t yet been invented. To make matters worse, the German Protestant soldiers of Charles now positioned in northern Italy were starting to get uppity without food or money. A temporary truce with the Emperor, after he had disavowed his association with the Colonna mafia, meant that the Eternal City was defenseless.

L’homme, l’homme, l’homme armé, l’homme armé,
l’homme armé doibt on doubter, doibt on doubter.

So, on May 5, 1527, the Germans, under their weak-minded commander the Constable de Bourbon, showed up on the Pope’s doorstep. What followed was barbaric. The Landsknechte pillaged palaces, desecrated altars, kidnapped cardinals, defiled women both consecrated and lay, drank altar wine in drunken revels held amid the empty, shattered churches. The chaos lasted eight straight days, but the aftershocks didn’t die down for months afterwards. The more predatorial of Rome’s families joined the Protestant looters: though the violence proved too great even for the Colonna, who holed up in the Cancelleria and tried their best to ride out the storm. By the end of the summer, over 45,000 of Rome’s citizens had fled or been murdered. Nobody could say exactly how many had died.

The Sistine Chapel proved to be one of the survivors of the sack, because the dead Constable de Bourbon had been laid there in state after his death. The hoodlum goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini had been using him for target practice from the heights of Castel Sant’ Angelo and nailed him with a crossbow bolt. While history remembers Cellini as a honest rogue—or at the very least, a braggart—Bourbon was a true traitor. He had originally fought under Francis I, but finding the money running low, had switched sides and joined the Emperor, being made Governor of Milan for his trouble. He proved incapable of curbing his own soldiers, and had, on their own urging, led them to Rome after, ironically enough, being unable to pay their wages.

The practical Florentines had, incidentally, bribed him to stay out of their neighborhood en route to the Eternal City.

L’homme armé doibt on doubter, doibt on doubter.

Another survivor, besides the Sistine Chapel, was Clement VII himself. Seven months later, he was still in hiding in Castel Sant’ Angelo. The Emperor may not have been directly responsible for the sack, but he certainly was enjoying watching the Pope roast in the moldering fortress. There, he had fended off the invaders with Cellini’s assistance, dropping a hail of arrows, lead and occasionally marble statues onto the besiegers below.

However, how the Medici pontiff had gotten to Castel Sant’ Angelo, is one of the few moments of heroism in this horror. As May 6 dawned, the Pope was still in the Vatican. The enemy was swiftly advancing, and the only thing between Clement and the Germans were 200 Swiss mercenaries who had been brought in by one of his predecessors, Julius II. As the Landsknecte swarmed over St. Peter’s Square, the Swiss stood their ground, buying valuable minutes for Clement to escape down the narrow pasagetto atop the Leonine wall connecting the Vatican with the papal bolt hole of Castel Sant’ Angelo. 147 were cut down in their defense of the Holy See, slaughtered on the very steps of the greatest church in Christendom.

To this day, in their honor, the Swiss Guards bear the proud title of Defensores Ecclesiae Libertas, the defenders of the Church’s liberty. Today, May 6, four hundred and eighty-seven years later to the day, the Swiss Guards would remember their fallen countrymen and swear in 33 new recruits to pledge their life’s blood to defend the honor and safety of the Papacy.

It would be a day of pomp and martial ceremony. And, as of an hour and forty-five minutes before the celebration, Rome was engulfed in rain. The Swiss Guards were going to melt in their stuffy felt uniforms. Plus, for once they’d be in full armor-plated rig. It wouldn’t do for one of the finest fighting forces on earth to have to get hosed down with rustoleum on their official holiday.

(…d’un haubregon de fer?)

My friend, the Roman Seminarian, had appeared on time in the vestibule of the studio, and I ushered him upstairs as the rest of the group assembled to head down to the Vatican. He was impeccably turned out in a black cassock with a black umbrella in hand—a rather striking contrast against the faux gold and scarlet marble of the studio. He was also feeling somewhat overdressed as he considered the motley crowd of architecture students he would be joining. For my part, I was wishing I’d worn a tie, but the rest of the group was dressed in a ratty assemblage of jeans, tee-shirts, and at least someone had highlighted his hair with fuscia dye.

Neither of us were quite sure what to expect. The Seminarian studied the bright orange tickets with the Papal escutcheon atop them, translating the fustian and courtly Italian invitation on them. “ ‘Your Lordship’! ” he chuckled. “You have to admire the way they phrase things around here!”

“Mmm?”

“La Signoria vostra. Your Lordship in Italian.”

I considered the ticket with a little laugh.

GIURAMENTO GSP 2004
Il Commandante della Guardia Svizzera Pontificia ha l’onore di invitare la Signoria vostra al assistere al Giuramento della Guardia che avrà luogo nel Cortile di San Damaso il 6 Maggio alle ore 17.00, per commemorate l’eroica morte delle guardie in difesa del Sommo Pontefice Clemente VII nel Sacco di Roma, 1527.

Which means, rather grandiloquently:

The Commandant of the Pontifical Swiss Guard has the honor of inviting Your Lordship to assist at the Oath-taking of the Guard that will take place in the San Damaso Courtyard on May 6 at 5 o’clock, to commemorate the heroic death of the guards in defense of the Supreme Pontiff Clement VII in the Sack of Rome, 1527.

That’s a doozie of an invitation. First, cassocked seminarians, and now discovering that Colonel Mader thought I was something out of a Gilbert and Sullivan comedy. The local color was through the roof already.

“Of course,” reminded my Seminarian friend, “they tend to inflate titles over here. Go to university four years and you’re suddenly a Doctor.” All the invitations were written that way, after all. Nonetheless, I decided to enjoy my time being a Lordship.

***

If I thought that Rome’s talent for the unexpected had been satisfied by my brevet title of nobility and my friend turning up looking like one of the scale figures in a Letarouilly print of Napoleonic Rome, I thought wrongly. I’d already noticed a surprising number of cassocked priests in Largo Argentina, taking the opportunity to console the Seminarian by pointing out he wasn’t the only one overdressed. However, as we piled off the bus-stop and hurried over to the Paul VI Audience Hall, where the ceremony was scheduled to take place in case of rain, I saw the one thing which I never expected to see anywhere, much less Rome.

Marching up the curving south colonnade of Piazza San Pietro was a regiment of 18th century Franco-Swiss mercenaries. I was sure about it, I recognized the flame-patterned scarlet and blue colors they carried at their head, recognized the Viribus Unitis embroidered in gold on the white cross, recognized their splendid cocked hats with bobbing scarlet pompons, their powder-blue coatees. They passed by in an ear-splitting thunder of drums, bayonets fixed, chins uplifted. Jowly chins uplifted. As I looked closer, I saw florid arteries splitting their faces, disordered tangles of wig, growing veteran paunches. Definitely too old for active service. The Giuramento had been invaded by a bunch of re-enactors.

The Seminarian, my classmate friends, and myself soon found ourselves in the Paul VI Audience Hall, a vast, well-lit seventies-style cavern with a Charles de Gaulle Airport roof and two gigantic though mediocre imitation rose-windows piercing the clerestory. It’s on the whole, fairly unobtrusive stylistically, if unremarkable.

The crowd around us, however, was far from dull. Indeed, as the Seminarian pointed out, jokingly, it was swiftly turning into a military history pageant. Another historical enthusiast was heading to his seat resplendent in a beautifully-cut bright blue habit-veste that would have done an Old Guardsman proud. A couple of real-life Columbian generals sauntered up the aisle in extravagantly braided olive-green uniforms, trying to outshine the silver-laureled Carabineri pooh-bahs taking their privileged seats in the front row. A few of the over-the-hill re-enactors exchanged salutes with alarmingly tall and Germanic Swiss soldiers in green berets and grey jackets, while men with patrol windbreakers marked POLIZEI and POLIZIA mingled freely. The Seminarian almost thought he’d seen some Mounties out of the corner of his eye when he turned around to see it was just a tour-group in red tee-shirts piling into the seats on the south side of the hall.

Like most Vatican events, there was a certain amount of waiting involved, and plenty of false starts. A woman realized she was on the big TV screen showing images of the crowd, and started frantically waving. We tried to guess the orders of nuns around us and played “who’s that Cardinal?” a few times as we watched one Prince of the Church with tufted eyebrows play ostentatiously with his pectoral cross. Occasionally, a pilgrim group would get up to chat with some local personage, bishop, priest, monsignor, taking his seat and everyone would mistake it for the main event. Meanwhile, the Seminarian and I debated the possibility of starting the Wave while I wrote down further local color in my note-book.

And then there was the Pace Maria guy. He’d gotten a seat across the center aisle from us. He has a peculiar habit of appearing out of nowhere at these events; he’d sat across me at the St. Cyril’s Day festivities at San Clemente and scolded me on my casual posture. He’s a small, rather insect-like fellow, with a rainbow Pace peace-activist flag (l’homme armé doibt on doubter) worn scarf-fashion around his neck and hauling around a broken tape-recorder. Today he looked stern and rather distressed under a flapped sheepskin cap with sun-glasses and his usual fringe of beard.

Another false start, this one unusually loud. The forty re-enactors suddenly marched down the aisle. More rolling of drums. Everyone scrambled to their feet for an excited view as the scarlet and blue banner bobbed down the center. They thumped towards the stage in perfect formation and took their places along the wall towards the front, leaning on their muskets as they awaited the moment we were all waiting for.

Then it was time. Three buglers in the full uniform of the Swiss Guards appeared on the left side of the empty platform at the far end of the hall. A solemn fanfare echoed sonorously across the hall. Then came a long, slow beating of drums somewhere far behind us. Several thousand heads turned to the rear of the hall at once, a great wave of people rising to their feet. People climbed atop chairs and crowded the aisle barricade.

First came the drummers in gleaming morions and piebald yellow-black plumes, followed by the great damask banner of the regiment in vivid—startlingly vivid—yellow and aquamarine blue and scarlet, the livery of the Medici and della Rovere pontiffs who founded the guard. The colors were flanked by fully-armored sergeants shouldering long two-handed flame-bladed swords, and then a vast expanse of polished steel. Forty guardsmen followed, their gleaming helmets marked with the della Rovere oak tree and crested with scarlet plumes like bloodied flamingos.

(L’homme, l’homme, l’homme armé, l’homme armé.)

It was a jaw-dropping sight. It wasn’t just the pageantry. We’re so familiar with mediaeval melodrama and historical pomp from overblown box-office smashes, we forget the sheer, shocking visual power of a forest of spiked halberds on the march, of light on polished steel armor. The mind fumbles with ridiculous comparisons to kitchenware, to clanks and clinks and clunks, to stage-plays and imagination. But the full weight of such a splendid sight defies the mind of modern man, and yet fills him, deep within him, with a subconscious call to arms. These were real soldiers here, not actors on parade: most could probably break bone with their karate skills and some might carry very real and very modern pistols tucked beneath the slashed folds of their Renaissance finery.

Their piebald Harlequin appearance was a crystallization and stylization of sixteenth-century tough-guy fashion, tunics ripped to shreds by blades and pikes. And they looked like they meant business.

Their weapons were raised high over their heads as they moved with slow, deliberate steps, not quite automatons and yet fearfully human. You could feel coiled concentration in their steps rather than coiled springs. Man the killer angel. They strode up to the front of the hall, stopped, and turned to face the crowd in one sweeping united gesture as quick as a piece of ballet. They dropped their halberds to their sides with one single deafening clank, steel paudrons and besagews snapping together in unison. Their drill, their dance, had a mesmerizing splendor to it, and it was easy to see how, on the battlefield, the dance could become a dance of death. Meanwhile, a subaltern gave a gracious salute with his slim cup-hilted rapier to the cardinals seated in the front row, another mingling of honor and ferocity.

Everyone was still standing, and some in the back rows began to squall. Cries of “Seduti!” as the front rows slumped into their seats. We may have been robbed of the Renaissance beauty of the San Damaso Courtyard, but the sloped seating of the Paul VI Audience Hall actually guaranteed us a better view than we would have gotten standing in the traditional venue for the Giuramento. Another lucky break for being a lordship.

And his Lordship continued to watch the guards as they went through their magnificent drill. It was sheer martial pleasure to study this strange composite organism, this body of bodies, watching them as they stood there, stock-still, as a quadrilingual speech in Italian, French, German and dialectal Romansch were read by the Commandant. He was resplendent in slashed violet velvet, a white plume bobbing on his morion. He was armored from neck to waist, from shoulder to wrist in elaborately etched plate, a scalloped chain mail fringe hanging beneath his sword-belt. He gave his fealty to a cassocked cardinal seated in the front row, and then the Prince of the Church took the lectern from him and gave another lengthy multi-language oration.

Amelia, Vera and S., who had come along with the group, passed the time debating which one they wanted to take home with them, but decided that the potential for excommunication and possible bodily harm with a halberd precluded any attempts to ask one out on a date. At least one person, overwhelmed by work, fell asleep. Meanwhile, I chatted quietly with the Seminarian about liturgical minutiae and reconsidered his offer about trying to start the Wave.

And then I heard the word Giuramento, oath, and my ears pricked up again.

The Commandant had returned to the podium, loudly declaiming the official text of the age-old Oath. The moment had come when they would pledge their life, their blood, their fortunes, their sacred honor, when they would bind their fate to Providence and Pontiff. Most of them couldn’t have been much older than I was. Probably most of them would have been mere freshmen back at Notre Dame. But there they stood, paladins of the Church, the Pope’s divisions, armored like centurions and trained like Green Berets. The entire regiment took one thunderous, precisely shifting step sideways, and the color guard moved forward. The sergeants swung their heavy swords around with the skill of a drum-major, bringing them to their shoulders again. Then, the ensign lowered the banner, attended by that gallant velvet subaltern with the drawn rapier.

Then a loud, startling clank and thud. The first Swiss guard to take the oath had handed—slammed is a better word for it—his halberd to the guard next to him with perfect precision and stepped out to take the oath. He moved towards the flag with a strutting, military walk, the unfamiliar strutting walk of the armored, armed man, that would have seemed splendidly swaggering if it had not been so clearly and deliberately been rehearsed. He strode up, placed his left hand on the banner and thrust his right hand sharply into the air, two fingers and a thumb crooked up in a traditional invocation of the Holy Trinity. He barked out the Oath with vigor, his face magnified a thousandfold on the enormous TV screens, turned and marched back to his post. 33 times we saw them come and 33 times we saw them return to their ranks, accompanied by the staccato click of halberds and the sharp shouts of the Oath in four different languages.

I swear to observe faithfully, legitimately and honorably all that has been read to me. May God and His Saints assist me!

“They’re not using inside voices,” I heard one of my friends joke. They weren’t, for sure. L’homme armé doesn’t have to.

I sat there and watched, racking my brain to put into words what I was seeing, what I was hearing. The sound—the harsh music—of armored men moving in unison simply defies description. My notebook is filled with complex scrawls trying to grasp those fleeting sensations. It was like rainfall, like the jingle of rings, like quiet thunder, like change clinking in your pockets. It was like all of these and none of these, a poetic, warlike sound.

The Giuramento finished, the Commandant inspected his troops, threading his way through the three ranks of armored soldiers. I was somehow reminded of the columns in St. Peter’s Square I’d seen earlier, staggered and shifting in perspective. Then there was a loud blast of drums and trumpets, of screeching police-whistles, a flourish of excitement and celebration. The color guard moved to the center with a swinging martial step, and the bandsmen moved down in cadenced silence. There was a polite fumbling with their sheet-music, and they played a long series of cheerful marches, each growing more and more exuberant.

So exuberant that the Seminarian and I exchanged incredulous glances as the band slid straight-faced into a trumpets-and-drums number that sounded more salsa than solemn. I’d go as far as to call it jazzy. Or spicy. Or Latin, and not in the usual liturgical sense. The big TV screens panned the scene, and I caught a glimpse of one meticulously martial Swiss bandsman shaking a lone maraca at one side. Neither the Seminarian nor I succeeded in keeping a straight face. “This would work so much better out in the sun,” he said. I smiled and agreed, and sat and listened. It may have been incongruously in a cavernous bland hall, but the splendid colors and eccentric martial jollity certainly put a carnival spirit in the air. The serious business of blood and oaths and history was over with. It was time to party with the best-dressed army on earth in their moment of glory.

Considering all the variations that L’Homme Armé had gone through in the last five hundred years, from polyphony to Perfect Houseplants, and from pikes and halberds to karate blackbelts and concealed machine-guns, somehow a maraca didn’t seem amiss. It just goes to show you that sometimes God’s warriors, les hommes armés, are still good at surprise attacks.