Mistress of the Vatican (14 page)

The Most Affectionate Sister-in-Law and servant of your Illustrious Holiness, Olimpia
¹

q

In 1627, the one hundredth anniversary of the Sack, Rome was undergoing a government-sponsored building program the likes of which it had not seen since the time of the Caesars. Though several popes since the Sack had widened roads, built fountains, and repaired churches, Urban VIII was the pope most responsible for creating the baroque city we see today.

As soon as he recovered from the malaria that almost killed him in conclave, Urban called together architects, engineers, artists, and sculptors to beautify the city. He affixed the Barberini bee emblem on every new building, fountain, and church, and even on old walls that had only been spackled. One visitor to Rome near the end of Urban’s long reign actually went around counting concrete papal bees and found some ten thousand of them. Certain Romans, reflecting on the pope’s numerous greedy relatives, commented that a swarm had invaded the Papal States and sucked the last drop of honey out of them.

For under the Barberini pope, nepotism flourished as never before. The word
nepotism
has its roots in
nipote
, the Italian word for “nephew.” Though the word didn’t come into use until the early seventeenth century, nepotism had started in the eighth century when Pepin the Short, king of the Franks, granted the papacy the central third of Italy as his realm. Suddenly the pope was also a king with lands, castles, and vast incomes to bestow on his relatives.

The fourteenth-century chronicler Lambert di Huy supported nepotism when writing of the then-current pope. It would “without doubt be inhumane if John XXII conferred on strangers, neglecting his own rela-

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tives of equal or superior virtue, those offices that the Church gives to lay people, and the associated stipends. . . . It is wise and praiseworthy that he continues to care for, as he has in the past, his relatives and friends. In fact, as the old proverb says, ‘It is not good to bind strangers to your own navel.’ ”
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Papal nepotism was exacerbated by the fact that the throne was not hereditary, as in most secular monarchies. A cousin of Louis XIII would still be a cousin of Louis XIV, with the same position and income. But when a pope died, his relatives were immediately ousted from power and replaced by a new family. Because popes were usually elected when elderly and died after only a few years, their relatives had a limited amount of time to squeeze the Vatican treasury dry, conclude prestigious marriages, and obtain noble titles, castles, and lands. As soon as a cardinal was elected pope, his family descended on Rome in hordes, hoping to grab as much as possible before their elderly relative kicked the bucket.

While popes gave their lay nephews dukedoms, they made their religious nephews cardinals. There was a good reason for having a nephew in close proximity. In an environment rife with violence—and numerous popes into the Middle Ages were strangled, stabbed, or poisoned—a close relative was thought to be the best bodyguard possible.

In 1538 Pope Paul III instituted the official position of cardinal nephew. Living in the suite of apartments next to the pope’s, the younger man would help his uncle in politics and diplomacy and truly look out for his best interests. The cardinal nephew would have every reason to keep the pontiff alive, unlike many other cardinals who might be tempted to slip something into his wine to hasten the next conclave.

The people of the Papal States were not, in principal, against cardinal nephews or the enriching of the pope’s family. Sharing good fortune with relatives was, after all, a Christian virtue, and all levels of society did it. It was not the premise of papal nepotism but its execution that was disliked. Excessive sums were given to the pope’s relatives, often from taxes imposed on the daily bread ration of the poor. Nepotism confined within the bounds of good taste would have been

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quite acceptable. But the seventeenth century was not exactly a time of

restraint.

“Christ gave the keyes of his church to Saint Peter . . . and not to his nephews,” Leti reminded his readers, but they wouldn’t have known it by looking at the Barberini family.
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Urban VIII would become the most nepotistic pope ever, routinely imposing new taxes on a beleaguered population suffering at different times from plague, flood, and famine. The pope taxed the staples of life—bread, flour, salt, and fruit—so heavily that in some years people starved on the street while his relatives received streams of gold from Vatican coffers.

Urban’s deceased brother Carlo had sired three sons, and all were amply rewarded under their uncle’s pontificate. Taddeo, who possessed very little when Urban ascended the throne in 1623, owned landed property worth four million scudi in 1632, a figure that did not include piles of cash and his art collection of Raphaels, Titians, Michelangelos, and Leonardo da Vincis. In 1630 he acquired the principality of Pal-estrina, becoming Prince Taddeo.

In 1627 Urban arranged Taddeo’s marriage to the scion of one of Rome’s most noble families. Anna Colonna had desperately wanted to become a nun and had successfully held out against marriage until the advanced age of twenty-six. But she suddenly found herself forced by the loss of her family’s fortunes to marry the pope’s
nouveau arrivé
nephew, whom she couldn’t stand. Perhaps Anna Colonna was consoled by her husband’s immeasurable wealth. The family jewels rivaled those of the royal dynasties of Europe. And no one ate from anything that was not of pure gold, silver, or rock crystal, studded with gems.

Anna Colonna must have enjoyed living in the most glorious palace in Rome. Prince Taddeo hired the greatest sculptor since Michelangelo, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, to design the Barberini family residence on the northwestern slope of Quirinal Hill. This monumental structure had an audience chamber with forty-foot ceilings painted with Greek gods. The niches all the way up the triumphal staircase held ancient Roman statues. Behind the palace were extensive gardens of rare flowers and lemon trees, adorned with ancient statues and fountains. The Barberini Palace was also known as the Palace of the Four Fountains.

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Olimpia, the sister-in-law of an important nuncio and cardinal
in pectore,
would have called frequently on Anna Colonna, the first lady of Rome, to render her respects, attend social events, and loudly praise Gianbattista’s work in Madrid. It is tempting to imagine Olimpia’s feelings as she entered the lofty marble halls and strode through the fragrant gardens cooled by a wholesome breeze.

Olimpia’s Casa Pamphili could never be as impressive as the Palazzo Barberini. Her home was hot, for one thing, in a low-lying, flood-prone area of the city where there were no cool breezes. There was no room for a garden in her tiny courtyard, and certainly not behind the house, hemmed in on all sides by busy streets, vegetable sellers, the post office, and drunken pasquinade writers. Though Olimpia oozed with charm at Anna Colonna’s events, it is possible she was also lime green with envy. If Olimpia ever got Gianbattista elected pope, then
she
would be first lady of Rome and could own such a palace. Maybe even
this
palace.

Urban named Prince Taddeo the prefect of Rome, a title of great honor and income but only ceremonial duties. Yet with this empty title he created a diplomatic furor by claiming that he, as prefect, had precedence over all the ambassadors.
He
would march first in the parades;
he
would have the more honorable seat at dinner parties. The ambassadors of France and Spain, who were the personal representatives of their monarchs, were so insulted that they boycotted any function where the pope’s obnoxious nephew would push them out of the way. They were finally recalled in protest by their kings, a huge snub to Urban.

The pope was more fortunate in Taddeo’s brother Cardinal Fran-cesco, who had accompanied Gianbattista to Paris and Madrid. The cardinal was a great scholar who translated ancient Greek, experimented in botany, and with his collection of rare books and manuscripts founded the Barberini Library, the most extensive library in Rome after that of the Vatican. With regards to his personality, however, he was not exactly a barrel of laughs. In 1630 the Venetian ambassador Alvise Con-tarini described Cardinal Francesco as “choleric, melancholy, greedy, and pretentious,” though he was respected for his chaste way of life.
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Not so the third brother, Antonio, who became cardinal in 1627 at the tender age of twenty. “The great inclination he has had to women

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hath been no small blemish to his reputation,” Leti wrote, and for once in his life Leti was being kind.
⁵
Cardinal Antonio was known for his astonishing agility in swinging both ways and caused scandal with both male and female lovers.

A sinister affair concerned Gualterio Gualtieri—Olimpia’s cousin and Gianbattista’s nephew—probably the same youth whose gambling debts she had mentioned in her letter to Gianbattista. Still in his teens, Gualterio entered the service of Cardinal Antonio as a page to learn cultured manners and the courtly way of life. Evidently, he learned other things as well. One day the cardinal called him away from the gaming table to attend him. “I have him in the ass all night,” the young man cried, slapping down his cards. “He should at least leave me alone during the day!”
⁶

The impudent remark flew around Rome like wildfire. Cardinal Antonio was so furious that he sent Gualterio to the battlefield in Ger-many to fight Protestants. No sooner had the boy arrived than he was killed on the field, many said shot in the back by an assassin paid by the cardinal. Whether he was murdered or not, his death had certainly resulted from his master sending him to war in a fit of rage. Gianbattista and Olimpia had been extremely fond of the boy and were devastated by his untimely death.

It was unfortunate that the prudish, studious Francesco was the handsomer of the brothers, while the swashbuckling, lecherous Antonio had eyes set ridiculously close to each other over an enormous nose. The two heartily disliked each other and jealously complained to their uncle if one received more money or honors than the other. The pope forced Francesco and Antonio to have breakfast with each other every morning, but usually the two ate in glum silence, never lifting their eyes from their plates. Once the two cardinal brothers got into a shrieking fight over the possession of a diamond-studded cross sent by Louis XIII; the pope yanked it from them and gave it to Taddeo.

Not all of Urban’s relatives were lost to the deadly sins of greed, pride, and lust. The one member of the family—including the pope— who seemed truly called to a religious life was Urban’s brother Anto-nio. Antonio had been a Capuchin monk for decades when his brother,

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newly elected pontiff, called him to Rome to be made a cardinal against his loud protests. He was a humble monk and wanted to remain so.

Leti found the new cardinal entirely unsuited to his glorious station. “Cardinal Onofrio, brother to Urban the Eighth, who was taken from a cloister of
Capucines
, and introduc’d into the Affairs of the Court, could never accustom himself to live in any other manner, but in that slovenly way of the
Capucines
,” he wrote, “so that when he was to receive any Embassadours, he committed the most ridiculous pieces of clownishness imaginable.” When the imperial ambassador asked him to convince the pope to assist Christian nations against the advancing Turks, the good cardinal began talking about “the excellence of Turneps, and the manner how the
Capucines
boil them in good fat broth; seeming to lick his fingers almost at every syllable and to swallow a Turnep at every word.”
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q

On November 19, 1629, the papal nuncio to Madrid, Monsignor Gian-battista Pamphili, was proclaimed a cardinal by Pope Urban VIII, along with eight others. Gianbattista was not technically a cardinal until the pope placed a red cap on his head in a special ceremony, but he would now receive the remunerative revenues of a cardinal. These would enable him to pay the exorbitant expenses associated with the creation ceremonies when he returned to Rome.

The word
cardinal
was first used at the end of the fifth century and comes from the Latin
cardo
, which means “hinge.” Scholars believe that the hinge referred to the flexibility cardinals were expected to show in leaving their local churches and swinging over to Rome to serve the pope. Early cardinals were a kind of super-priest, with greater dignity than regular priests, and over the centuries they steadily acquired more honors, income, and power. A cardinal was “created,” and those cardinals created by a particular pope were known as his “creatures,” a term that sounds extremely odd to us today.