THE FALLS OF ROME
The Sack of Rome in the Early Modern Europe
Winter 2027

Few historical events proved as powerful and adaptable a motif in early modern Europe and the Mediterranean as the sack of Rome. Rome was conquered and plundered by the Visigoths under Alaric in 410 CE, and by Charles V’s imperial army in 1527. Constantinople, known in the Christian West as the “second Rome,” was conquered by the Ottomans in 1453, thus adding another moment of catastrophe to this historical repertoire. In the early modern period, these events became points of reference for reflecting on political changes, cultural transformations, and religious crisis.

This reading group examines how the sack of Rome was remembered, interpreted, and redeployed between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries. Through an interdisciplinary approach that brings together Classical Studies, modern history, religious and cultural studies, we will discuss how classical narratives about the ancient sack of Rome were transmitted, adapted, and transformed, and how contemporary experiences of conquest and crisis of the ‘Eternal City’ could reshape interpretations of the ancient past. We will consider how writers’ positions shaped their accounts and how the memory of the sack of Rome informed debates about empire, Christianity, civilization, and historical change.

The reading group will ask what ‘Rome’ (as a geographical and cultural place) represented to early modern writers and why its conquest remained such an evocative historical motif. How did accounts of the sack shape ideas of decline, decadence, continuity, and historical transformation? How did the fall of Constantinople alter reflections on Rome and the fate of empire? How did ancient narratives of Rome’s destruction provide models through which early modern writers understood their own experiences of political, cultural, and religious crisis? More broadly, what can comparisons between ancient and contemporary catastrophes reveal about early modern historical consciousness and the uses of the Roman past?

The reading group will meet four times in Winter 2027 in Pratt 304 with a Zoom option for those who would like to participate remotely.

For further information about the group, please contact Dr Giulio Leghissa at giulio.leghissa@mail.utoronto.ca.

Schedule of Readings

Session 1: Friday, January 22, 2–4pm, Pratt 304
Italian Humanists and the Gothic Invasion of Italy
Primary Sources

• Francesco Petrarca, Against a Detractor of Italy (1373)
• Leonardo Bruni, History of the Florentine People (1415-1444) 1.37-41, 52-54
• Flavio Biondo, De litteris romanae locutionis (1435) and Decades, Prologue to Book 1 (1453)

• T. Mommsen. 1942. “Petrarch’s Conception of the ‘Dark Ages’,” Speculum 17(2): 226–242
• J. G. A. Pocock. 2003. “Flavio Biondo and the decades of decline,” in Barbarism and Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 179–202.
• Lee. 2018. “The Twilight of Empire: (c. 1369–1402),” in Humanism and Empire: The Imperial Ideal in Fourteenth-Century Italy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 141–182.

Session 2: Friday, February 19, 2–4pm, Pratt 304
The Sack of Rome seen by the ‘Barbarians’
Primary Sources

• Joannes Leonclavius, Apology of Zosimus (1576) (link)
• Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, Discours sur l’histoire universelle, pp. 124–5 and 415–26 (1681) (link)
• Montesquieu, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline (1734), pp. 375–411 (link)

• L. Špoljarić (2019), “Nicholas of Modruš and his De Bellis Gothorum: Politics and National History in the Fifteenth-Century Adriatic,” Renaissance Quarterly 72(2): 457–491 (Download)
• S. Mazzarino (1966), The End of the Ancient World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 92–106.
• S. Malik. 2019 ‘Decadence and Roman Historiography,’ in J. Desmarais and D. Weir (eds.), Decadence and Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 30–46

Session 3: Friday, March 19, 2–4pm, Pratt 304
The Sack of the ‘Second Rome’ and the End of the Byzantine Empire
Primary Sources

• Laonikos Chalkokondyles, The Histories VIII.11-19 (1544)
  Secondary Sources
  • M. Nikolić. “The Greatest Misfortune in the Oikoumene: Byzantine Historiography on the Fall of Constantinople in 1453,” Balcanica 47 (2016), 119–133
  • Kaldellis. 2026. “Conquerors and Slaves” and “Aftermath and Legacy,” in 1453: The Conquest and Tragedy of Constantinople. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 194–254.
  • E. J. Watts. 2021. “Roman renewal after the fall,” in The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome: The History of a Dangerous Idea. New York: Oxford University Press, 203–221.

Session 4: Friday, April 16, 2–4pm, Pratt 304
The 1527 Sack of Rome and the End of an Era
Primary Sources

• Guicciardini, History of Italy XVIII.8
• Benvenuto Cellini, Life 1.24-29
• Melanchton, De capta Roma

• J. E. Longhurst (ed.), 1952. Alfonso de Valdés and the Sack of Rome: Dialogue of Lactancio and an Archdeacon. New Mexico: University of Albuquerque.
• K. Gouwens. 1998. “The Sack of Rome and the Theme of Cultural Discontinuity,” in Remembering the Renaissance: Humanist Narratives of the Sack of Rome. Leiden: Brill, 1–30.