THE period from 1520 to 1560 was one of profound change in the Italian peninsula. An informed observer in the year 1520 could have hardly foreseen some of the political developments that were to take place by 1560. Certainly it would have been difficult to guess in 1520 that a bothersome, but somewhat limited, reform movement in Germany would lead by 1560 to a divided Europe and to one of the great internal efforts at reform by the Catholic Church, arguably the greatest to occur between the Renaissance and the twentieth century ; or that Rome would sacked by the Imperial forces in such a savage manner that emotions were aroused almost everywhere in Europe—even the Emperor Charles v had to distance himself from the behavior of his troops. Perhaps our observer, living in war-torn IItaly, would have thought it even less likely that a lasting peace—sanctioned by the 1559 treaty of Câteau-Cambrésis—could put an end to several decades of fighting between the Emperor and the king of France and therefore to the almost constant clash of foreign armies on Italian soil. In 1520, when the French controlled the duchy of Milan, it might have also been difficult to foresee that the peace of 1559 would sanction an almost total Imperial and Spanish dominance in Italian affairs for some time to come, a turn of events that has culturally influenced Italy (especially its Southern regions) up to the present day.

The political events of these four decades had profound repercussions on the arts in general, and on music in particular. As the balance of power shifted, courts were created and destroyed, political influence and wealth were absorbed by the struggle for survival (or for expansion), and the cultivated and tolerant ideals of Castiglione's Cortegiano were sacrificed to the harsh realities of political and religious strife, becoming increasingly detached from reality. The later boundaries of our period also mark the true beginning of the Catholic Reformation, a time when the edicts of the Council of Trent had to be put into practice, and the role of polyphonic music within the Catholic liturgy was debated and clarified.