Crisis in the Respublica Christiana: Jacopo Sadoleto’s View of Christian Society Before and After the Sack of Rome

According to many narratives, the respublica Christiana was a medieval conception of European union and community that, by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, had outlived its usefulness. Yet this phrase continued to be employed by the papal court in the early sixteenth century, sometimes replacing Apostolica sedes in papal letters as the preferred term for ecclesiastical authority. During his tenure as secretary to Leo X (1513-1521), Jacopo Sadoleto led this shift in terminology. This paper examines Sadoleto’s language in the letters he wrote for Clement VII leading up to the Sack; it traces how Sadoleto employed a particular vision of Christian unity as he urged Charles V to keep his troops away from Rome and respect the authority of the pontiff. Sensing the impending disaster, Sadoleto left Rome for his see early in the spring of 1527. The second part of the paper switches to his private correspondence, examining how Sadoleto made sense of the Sack as a rupture in the Christian republic and defended his own absence from Rome. It also examines how, by the 1530s, Sadoleto began to take a more activist stance (albeit still from the safety of Carpentras), seeking ways to heal or recreate a unified Christian republic amidst the growing divisions of the Reformation. In short, the paper uses the Sack and one particular and pregnant term to chart changing conceptions of the church in the early years of the Reformation.