Mistress of the Vatican (12 page)

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would be destroyed. And whenever Vesuvius rumbled, many Neapoli-tans remembered the egg and crossed themselves.

When traveling in the city, even going to church, the Pamphilis would have been accompanied by an armed guard. Kidnappers could capture them and hold them for ransom or simply rob and murder them in broad daylight. Going out at night was a form of suicide. Once dusk fell, everyone but the criminals stayed inside and bolted their doors. A dinner party or ball naturally included an invitation to spend the night and return home in the morning.

Bristling with thousands of Spanish soldiers, its harbor stuffed with Spanish warships, Naples posed a constant low-level threat to the sovereignty of the Papal States to the north. The pope had only the tiniest standing army, relying on a sudden rush of volunteers or the hiring of mercenaries if invasion threatened. The papal navy consisted of a few ships manned by slaves and convicts. His Holiness relied on the goodwill of Spain, with its unlimited firepower, to protect him from invasion. However, if Spain decided to invade the Papal States, it could have easily rolled across the entire country with very little opposition.

But it was unlikely that Spain would do such a thing. For eight hundred years the Spaniards had waged a nonstop crusade against Muslims on Spanish soil, resulting in a militant Catholicism. Spaniards considered themselves to be more devoutly Catholic than any other nation in Europe, certainly more Catholic than the self-absorbed French or the rollicking Italians. In the late sixteenth century King Philip II said that religion was too important to be left in the hands of the pope.

His Excellency Gianbattista Pamphili and his staff would be working on a variety of issues with the Spanish viceroy, the personal representative of the king of Spain. Grain and other foodstuffs were shipped from Na-ples to the Papal States, and vice versa, depending on the harvests, and were taxed. The Vatican owned property in the kingdom of Naples— churches, monasteries, and farms—from which it received revenues. As a Catholic nation, Naples owed the Papal States a sum of money every year—which was negotiable, depending on war, famine, and plague.

Financial matters aside, there were numerous church issues that required attention. Requests for marriage annulments and dispensations

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would be presented to the Roman nuncio, who would look them over, write an opinion, and forward them to the Vatican. There was always the pesky problem of criminal clerics—a priest who robbed someone in Naples, for instance. Civil authorities were not permitted to pass judgment on ordained priests, who would be handed over to the nuncio’s men and taken to Rome for trial.

Heresy was to be trampled, and literature on the Index of Forbidden Books was to be rooted out and publicly burned. Then there were issues related to greed and ambition. Neapolitans pushed for honors and pensions from the Holy See, and Roman nobles pushed for honors and pensions from the kingdom of Naples. Often, trades were made to keep everyone happy.

The papal courier service between Rome and Naples was efficient, the trip taking only three days on a fast horse. Gianbattista would have been required to write a weekly diplomatic dispatch that ran some fifteen or twenty pages. His reports would have been coded to prevent spies from understanding them. The easiest way to encode letters was to use numbers to represent the names of people and places, so that Gian-battista’s Italian prose would have had numbers interspersed throughout. However, in highly sensitive cases every letter of every word was represented by a number. Back in Rome, the papal office of ciphers would decode them and deliver them to the pope. Similarly, the pope’s instructions would arrive in Naples encoded, and Gianbattista’s secretary would decode them.

As nuncio, Gianbattista would have been expected to set up his own espionage network, bribing servants in the viceroy’s house or employees in his office. Information could always be bought for the right price, and the corruption of Naples made the corruption of Rome seem downright saintly in comparison.

In addition to the under-the-table bags of gold that stank of corruption, the papal nuncio was expected to give over-the-table gifts that smelled of ambergris—fragrant petrified whale vomit—and musk, the aromatic glandular secretion of the musk deer. The most popular gifts for government officials, local noblemen, and their female relatives were perfumed gloves. Seventeenth-century gloves were of supple leather,

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heavily embroidered with scarlet and gold thread, with huge tabbed cuffs extending halfway up the forearm, and adorned with tassels woven of real gold. Perfuming the gloves often cost twice as much as the gloves themselves, so rare were the fragrances. In fact, on May 29, 1621, less than two months after his arrival in Naples, Gianbattista wrote to Rome asking for a shipment of gloves.

The position of papal nuncio to Naples was a heavy financial burden and only awarded to the richest candidates willing to spend their own money. The salary was low and very few expenses were reimbursed by the pope. But it was a path to the riches of a cardinal’s hat, and many churchmen were eager for the opportunity.

Without Olimpia’s money, Gianbattista would never have been considered for the post. Olimpia paid for the servants, the food, the festivities, the secret bag-of-gold bribes, and all of those perfumed gloves. As careful as she was with money, all of her Naples expenses were well worth it. For one thing, she would do anything, give anything, to help Gianbattista, the one person who truly appreciated her, the one person she truly trusted. For another, her expenses were actually an investment. If he should be made cardinal, she would be paid back with interest. And most important of all, she exercised real power, which had always been her dearest dream.

We can assume that Olimpia was up to her elbows in intrigue and loving every moment of it—plotting, planning, bribing, manipulating, dictating coded letters, and decoding letters from the Vatican as soon as they arrived. Although they were not aware of it, the viceroy of Naples, the king of Spain, and the pope himself were all dealing with
her
political suggestions. It was worth all the money she spent to play such a major role in high-level international politics.

The Venetian ambassador to Rome, Alvise Contarini, reported that “to the same signora Donna Olimpia, [Gianbattista] declared himself to be very much obliged for the rich dowry carried into the Pamphili family and for having provided for his needs.”
²

Cardinal Sforza Pallavicino, who knew Olimpia well later in life, wrote that she “carried into the Pamphili family much patrimony that was used most instrumentally to honorably sustain the house, and from

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this came all the greatness which successively followed [Gianbattista]. Let me add that she possessed an intellect of great value in economic government, and she had always administered with care the possessions of the family, with great advantage to the purse, to relieve the cares of her brother-in-law.”
³

To Olimpia’s joy, her brother, Andrea, moved just outside Naples and the two saw each other frequently. On September 23, 1621, Olimpia wrote her mother that Andrea was four days into his governorship of Aversa, a town five miles north of the city. Andrea was approximately forty years old and well on his way to siring the ten sons and numerous daughters he would have with two wives. Oddly, Olimpia never resented her brother for being Sforza’s favorite or receiving all of the family wealth; she would remain very close to him until his death.

While close to her brother, Olimpia seems to have distanced herself from her husband. An anonymous document in the Vatican Archives does not beat about the bush when it comes to stating that Olimpia wore the breeches in the marriage. Olimpia, “married to Panfilio Pan-filij in the second marriage, showed such a stubborn mind that many times . . . he was forced to tolerate her many importunities and many insolent rebukes.”
⁴

Despite the marital tensions or, as some said,
because
of them, a blessed event occurred. On February 21, 1622, some ten months after arriving in Naples, Olimpia gave birth to a healthy son she called Ca-millo. The Pamphili family, which had been grinding its way inexorably toward extinction for decades, now had an heir. The proud papa was nearly sixty and the mother thirty. With an uncle rising quickly in the church hierarchy and a rich ambitious mother like Olimpia, the boy, if he lived, was destined for a brilliant career. But many in Naples, aware of the strained state of Olimpia’s marriage and her unusual closeness to her brother-in-law, wondered if the papal nuncio himself might be the father of the bouncing baby boy.

Shortly after the birth, Olimpia and Pamphilio returned to Viterbo for a few months to show her mother, Vittoria, her grandson and manage their business interests there. It is revealing that during her sojourn in Naples, Olimpia had placed her mother, not her father, in charge of

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her extensive Viterban properties. Family archives contain several letters to Vittoria from both Olimpia and Pamphilio regarding the rents, crops, and improvements. There are no extant letters from Olimpia or Pam-philio to Sforza, with whom relations were, apparently, strained.

In a letter to her mother dated October 11, 1622, Olimpia wrote, “I saw what Your Excellency said in your letter of September 27, and I did not fail to immediately write a letter to my father, which you will see here enclosed. If it seems appropriate to you then pass it on to him. I have tried to write lovingly so that he no longer has any doubts.” At Christmastime, Olimpia sent warm seasonal greetings to her mother, adding, “and to signor father, too.”
⁵

Sforza died in the late spring of 1623 at about the age of sixty-three, suffering agonizing stomach pains. According to a letter Pamphilio wrote to Vittoria Gualtieri on July 22, 1623, Sforza had never finished paying the dowry he had promised Olimpia in 1612. Now Pamphilio wanted the money out of Sforza’s estate. It is not known if he ever obtained it. Certainly, coming on top of the convent story, the dowry issue must have been an additional source of the father-daughter rupture.

It is uncertain when Olimpia’s mother died. The last letter written to her in the family archives is dated 1629. But in their Viterban convent, Olimpia’s sisters would live to old age in excellent health. From Naples, Olimpia often sent her sisters little comforts—macaroni, sweets, and linen undergarments. She frequently mentioned Ortensia and Vittoria in her letters to her mother, and probably wrote them letters that are now lost.

q

Pope Gregory XV was never entirely healthy during his pontificate and let his nephew, whom he promoted to cardinal, rule for him. “Just give me something to eat and you can take care of the rest,” the pope said.
⁶
On July 8, 1623, Gregory died. “After the death of Gregory the treasury was empty and aggravated by huge debts, without anyone knowing how this occurred,” the Roman diarist Giacinto Gigli wrote. The pope had given everything to his relatives, “who in twenty-nine months accumulated the greatest riches.”
⁷

The city of Rome tumbled into anarchy, which was usual when the

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See was vacant. Gigli noted, “There was not a single day when there were not many fights, murders, betrayals, finding many men and women killed in various places, and many were found without a head. Many headless bodies were found that had been thrown in the Tiber. Many houses were broken into and robbed at night. Doors were smashed, women were raped, others killed, and many young girls disgraced, raped, and taken away.”
⁸
For once it was actually safer to be in Naples than in Rome.

On July 19, fifty-five cardinals processed with great dignity into their tomblike accommodations in the Sistine Chapel to elect a new pontiff. It was a summer conclave, the dread of every cardinal. In the stifling heat, chamber pots grew rank and fetid. The smell of unwashed bodies oozed through red robes. And malaria struck, “the atmosphere being laden with putrid miasmas and sickening smells of decaying victuals that the potent perfumes of the young cardinals could not manage to disguise,” one chronicler reported.
⁹
Then fleas invaded the premises, eating the cardinals alive.

The decision hastened by the spreading malaria, on August 6 the candidate favored by France, the Florentine cardinal Maffeo Barberini, was elected pope and took the name Urban VIII. Barberini had been papal nuncio to France from 1604 to 1607, and his continued good relations with the French government disgruntled Spain. At fifty-five he was younger than most newly elected popes and promised a long reign, which disgruntled the other cardinals, many of whom would never have another chance to become pope. But to get out of that stinking malarial hellhole of a conclave, the majority of cardinals would have elected the devil himself.