Holy Shit. From La Wik:
The Sack had major repercussions for Italian society and culture, and in particular, for Rome. Clement's War of the League of Cognac would be the last fight for Italian independence and unity until the nineteenth century. Rome, which had been a center of Italian High Renaissance culture and patronage before the Sack, suffered depopulation and economic collapse, causing artists and thinkers to scatter. The city's population dropped from over 55,000 before the attack to 10,000 afterward. An estimated 6,000 to 12,000 people were murdered. Many Imperial soldiers also died in the aftermath, largely from diseases caused by masses of unburied corpses in the streets. Pillaging finally ended in February 1528, eight months after the initial attack, when the city's food supply ran out, there was no one left to ransom, and plague appeared.Clement would continue artistic patronage and building projects in Rome, but a perceived Medicean golden age had passed.
A power shift – away from the Pope, toward the Emperor – also produced lasting consequences for Catholicism. The Emperor, for his part, professed great embarrassment that his troops imprisoned the Pope despite having sent armies to Italy with the goal of bringing the latter under his control. This done, Charles reformed the Church in his own image. Clement, now making decisions under duress, rubber-stamped Charles’ demands – among them naming cardinals nominated by the latter; crowning Charles Holy Roman Emperor at Bologna in 1530; and refusing to annul the marriage of Charles' beloved aunt, Catherine of Aragon, to King Henry VIII of England, prompting the English Reformation. Cumulatively, these actions changed the complexion of the Church, steering it away from Renaissance freethought personified by the Medici Popes, toward the religious orthodoxy exemplified by the Counterreformation. After Clement's death in 1534, under the influence of Charles and later his son King Phillip II of Spain (1556-1598), the Inquisition became pervasive, and the humanism encouraged by Renaissance culture came to be viewed as contrary to the teachings of the Church.
