The Sack of Rome in May 1527 by the troops of Emperor Charles V—king of Germany, Spain, Naples, and Sicily, and ruler of the Netherlands—was an event of rare violence that left a deep impression during the sixteenth century. An accident of a war opposing a considerable portion of European princes, it partially served as an outlet for religious tensions that had been growing since the late Middle Ages. Protestant but also Catholic soldiers united in a sacred intoxication that announced the religious conflicts to come. The soldiers nevertheless conserved a genuine rationality that lent its full support to a logic of predation. Quickly known throughout Europe, these exactions were interpreted by the vast majority as a religious event: well-deserved punishment for the papal Antichrist or the corruption of the Church, a divine scourge, sacrilege, or an occasion to reconcile Christians within the universal reformation.