Today’s word of the day, thanks to On This Day, is sack. Sack can be either a noun or a verb, and it has several meanings. As a noun, it can refer to a kind of large bag or the contents of such a bag. It can refer to a woman’s loose fitting dress. It can refer to the result of one’s being fired from a job (“He got the sack”). It can refer to a hammock or bunk or bed (“I’m going to hit the sack”). It can refer to a base in baseball (“Ricky Henderson stole 130 sacks in 1982”). Or it can refer to tackling a quarterback who has gone back to pass (“Michael Strahan set the record for most sacks in a season in 1982”). And in centuries past, sack referred to a a dry wine.

As a verb, sack can be used in a variety of ways related to the use of the word as a noun. For example, one can sack one’s groceries, or sack the quarterback, But the verb form can also refer to conquering a city and pillaging, the city then being robbed and the buildings destroyed and the people injured or killed.

One reason for the variety of meanings is etymology. Sack appears in the language before Early Modern English: “’large oblong bag,’ Middle English sak, from Old English sacc (West Saxon), sec (Mercian), sæc (Old Kentish) ‘large cloth bag,’ also ‘sackcloth,’ from Proto-Germanic *sakkiz (source also of Middle Dutch sak, Old High German sac, Old Norse sekkr, but Gothic sakkus probably is directly from Greek), an early borrowing from Latin saccus (also source of Old French sac, Spanish saco, Italian sacco), from Greek sakkos ‘bag (made of goat hair); sieve; burlap, large burlap cloak,’ which is from Semitic (compare Hebrew, Phoenician saq ‘sack, cloth of hair, bag, mourning-dress’).

The wide spread of this word for ‘a bag’ probably is due to the incident in the Biblical story of Joseph in which a sack of corn figures (Genesis xliv). In English, the meaning ‘a sack or sack material used as an article of clothing’ as a token of penitence or mourning is from c. 1200 (https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=sack). The reference to wine relates to the importation of a French word (of course): “’sherry,’ 1530s, an alteration of French (vin) sec ‘dry (wine),’ from Latin siccus ‘dry’ (see siccative). Originally of strong, light-colored wine from Spain and the Canaries. OED notes that the vowel is ‘not a normal development from the original “seck.”’”

Some of the other meanings may be derived metaphorically: sack as a bed war originally nautical, when sailors slept in hammocks that may have seemed like a big bag. Sack was firing someone may have related to a time when tradesmen carried their own tools to work with them in a large bag. Etymonline suggests that this explains using sack to refer to pillaging, that people would put things into a sack. But it may also be that sack is a shortening of the word ransack, which appears in the language in the “mid-13c., ransaken, ‘to plunder; to make a search, search thoroughly,’ from a Scandinavian source akin to Old Norse rannsaka ‘to pillage,’ literally ‘search the house’ (especially legally, for stolen goods), from rann ‘house,’ from Proto-Germanic *raznan (c.f. Gothic razn, Old English ærn ‘house;’ Old English rægn ‘a plank, ceiling;’ see barn) + saka ‘to search,’ related to Old Norse soekja ‘seek’ (see seek). Properly it would have evolved as *ransake; the present form perhaps was influenced by sack (v.1)” (https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=sack). So maybe the verb sack ultimately derives from both sack and ransack.

On this date in 1527, the city of Rome, the capital of the Roman Catholic Church, was sacked by the army of Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. That’s what the historians say. But what exactly does that mean? Sacking a city is something that happens after the city’s defensive forces have been defeated. The city leaders may even have surrendered, laid down their arms, and opened the city gates. That is when the sacking begins.

So the first part of sacking a city is pillaging: that is the violent taking of goods and treasures from the citizens and buildings. Pillaging in the modern era is against international law and is considered a war crime, but there was no such thing in the 16^th century. Famously King Henry V of England had forbade pillaging by his army when he conquered France in the early 15^th century, even going so far as to execute any soldiers who engaged in pillaging. So why would the army of Charles V pillage Rome? It probably had to do with payment.

Charles V had recruited an army of Germans and Spaniards. Germany and Spain were both part of the Holy Roman Empire at the time, but the German troops were mercenaries. Well, they were theoretically mercenaries because a mercenary is paid for his fighting, and Charles’s troops hadn’t been paid. So despite the command of Charles to not pillage Rome, the soldiers did it anyway. Many of the German soldiers were Landsknecht, pikemen who were very effective on behalf of the Holy Roman Empire for a century and a half, including the resistance against the Ottoman Empire’s attempts to conquer Europe. Some of the were Roman Catholics, but some of them were Lutherans, so the pillaging had a bit of a religious element. However, the major problem was that they were compensating themselves for fighting.

Sack also included things worse than pillaging. Charles’s army kidnapped people and held them for ransom, which was another way of compensating themselves. They took money from some of the cardinals living in Rome to not pillage their houses. But they also murdered and raped people. In our time, these practices are condemned as war crimes, at least in most cases, but they were fairly common practices in previous eras (one reason I am glad that I live in the 21^st century).

The army held the city for over a month, at which time Pope Clement VII agreed to pay a massive amount of money to save his life. And the sack of Rome finally ended.

Rome had been sacked before. But in the past it had been barbarians. This sacking was accomplished by Christians against the capital of the Catholic Church. Then again, Clement VII had created an alliance with Francis I of France and some other smaller countries to try to hem in the power of the Holy Roman Emperor. That alliance would have included Henry VIII of England except that Henry had pitched a little fit because they wouldn’t come to England to sign the treaty (it was signed in a French town named Cognac, so the result war was the War of the League of Cognac.

And of course most of the people who died in the War of the League of Cognac, and all of the women and children who were raped, had nothing to gain by this conquest of Rome. In fact, for just the pillaging part of the sack of Rome, we might even sympathize with the soldiers who had risked their lives for the ungrateful emperor who hadn’t paid them. Maybe some of them took enough wealth that they were able to quit the mercenary business entirely.

Today’s image is a painting by Johannes Lingelbach (1622-1674), a Dutch painter.