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These People All Met a Tragic and Slightly Comedic End

Khalid Elhassan February 15, 2021 35 min

Gen. George Armstrong Custer - Warner Bros. Pictures — Still from 'They Died With Their Boots On'. Clio Muse

18. “The Scourge of Princess” and the Author of “The Lewd Sonnets“

In his youth, Pietro Aretino went to Perugia to take up painting for a while. He eventually ended up in Rome, where a rich banker, the patron of the painter Raphael, took him under his wing. Painting was not really Aretino’s thing, however, and he eventually gave up on that. His real talent lay in words, and in 1516, he penned a satiric will of Pope Leo X’s recently deceased pet elephant. In it, he mocked Rome’s leading figures, including the Holy Father.

The pope was a good sport about it, and the satire was well-received. It launched Aretino’s career as a satirist, and he eventually ended up with the nickname “Scourge of Princes”. After the death of Leo X, Aretino penned vicious satirical pamphlets supporting the candidature of Cardinal Giulio de Medici for the papacy, which helped get him elected as Pope Clement VII in 1523. However, despite the patronage of the new pope, Aretino was forced to leave Rome in 1524 because he had grown too notorious. Especially after he composed a dirty poetry collection known as the Lewd Sonnets.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.