Mistress of the Vatican (20 page)

The papal funeral was held in Saint Peter’s Basilica, the church richly festooned inside and out with black cloth and brightly colored canvases depicting the papal coat of arms. It was customary for the deceased pontiff to be laid out on a bier directly above Saint Peter’s grave, dressed in pontifical vestments, surrounded by an iron grill through which only his feet protruded. This was to allow the faithful to kiss the holy feet but not steal the richly embroidered vestments. Sometimes, though, the shoes went missing.

Along with thousands of Romans, Giacinto Gigli went to pay his respects to the deceased pontiff. “On Sunday, July 31, the body of Urban VIII was exposed in Saint Peter’s for three days to a huge crowd of people,” he wrote, “and there was a great tumult, and two men were killed and there was a great stink coming from the cadaver, very bad on the first day, and on the others there were many homicides.”
¹⁹

It is doubtful that Olimpia wasted time joining the throngs to see the stinky corpse. The moment she had been working toward for more than thirty years had finally come. Now was the time to get Gianbattista— and herself, of course—elected pope.

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8

Conclave

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No one takes this honor upon himself; he must be called by God.

—Hebrews 5:4 n the fourth day after his death, Urban VIII was laid in a casket of cypress, which was placed in a lead coffin engraved with his name, his coat of arms, and the years of his reign. According to custom, before the coffin was sealed, a scroll listing the dead pope’s pious deeds was placed at his feet. It is not known when or why this tradition began. Perhaps it was for the dead pontiff to read to Saint Peter to convince him to open the pearly gates.

Interestingly, a sack of gold was also placed beside the pope’s corpse, probably a vestige of the ancient Greco-Roman tradition of putting a coin on the mouth of the deceased to pay the ferryman to take his soul over the River Styx. Urban, however, as a Catholic, would have used it to pay the heavenly gatekeeper if he had remained unconvinced by the list of pious deeds. Armed with the scroll and the gold to help him on his journey, Urban was laid to rest in Saint Peter’s Basilica beneath a magnificent marble effigy of himself in pontifical robes, with his right arm outstretched in blessing, a black winged skeleton crouched at his

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feet. Only half finished at the pope’s death, it was being sculpted by the incomparable Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

While the funeral solemnities, rich with music and incense, took place inside the church, in the streets of Rome violence broke out against the dead pope and his greedy family.
Papa Gabella,
they called Urban; Pope Tax. He had placed sixty-three new taxes on the Roman populace to support his nephews, and despite the increased taxation, at his death the Vatican treasury was nineteen million scudi in the red. Angry mobs raced around Rome with hammers, disfiguring as many Barberini bees as they could reach on fountains, walls, and bridges. Crowds waving hammers tried to hack to pieces the statue of Urban in front of the civic government building of the Campidoglio, but soldiers with guns and cannon successfully defended it.

Ferocious pasquinades were placed all over the city. Giacinto Gigli noted sadly, “The people vented against the dead pope and the Bar-berinis with injurious words, their pens writing every evil, and there were an infinite number of compositions published, some in Latin, some in Italian, some in prose and some in verse, so that I believe there was never anything like it. . . . If Christians treat the head of their own church this way, what will the Turks and Heretics do? . . . Many other verses were against the Cardinals, making fun of the customs, vices, inclinations, and defects of each one, especially those who aspired to be pope.”
¹

For centuries, the vacant See had been a time of anarchy in Rome. Those wanting to settle an old score would wait for years if necessary to carry out the deed after the pope died, when the police were hopelessly overwhelmed with crime. Every morning bodies, many headless, appeared on the streets or floating down the Tiber.

Vacant See violence was exacerbated by the fact that upon a pope’s death, prisoners were let out of jail in imitation of Pontius Pilate’s freeing Barabas at the time of Jesus’ crucifixion. Sometimes debtors didn’t want to be released, knowing that their creditors were waiting just outside the prison door ready to beat them. The jailers would try to smoke the reluctant debtors out, accidentally suffocating some of them.

On the day of the pope’s death, Giacinto Gigli, serving a stint as one of Rome’s fourteen
caporioni
—a kind of city councilman—went into

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one prison himself carrying a ring of large keys to unlock the cell doors. A huge crowd had gathered on the square in front of the prison to watch Gigli, followed by soldiers, drummers, and prisoners, march pompously outside.

After their release, many of the more violent prisoners immediately formed gangs, which roamed the streets, broke into houses, plundered, raped, and murdered. The princely households barricaded themselves inside and hired armed guards to stand watch with loaded pistols and drawn swords. Servants patrolled the roof, ready to throw rocks at any would-be attackers below.

Merchants hid their merchandise, schools ceased instruction, and courts were suspended. The entire city pulsated with suspense, hoping that a new pontiff, and the order he would bring with him, would come soon. The liveliest places in Rome were the gambling parlors where people wagered on which cardinal would become pope, the odds changing daily as news leaked out of the conclave.

According to tradition, a conclave was to be held in the Vatican commencing on the tenth day after the pope’s death. But the low-lying Vati-can was ghastly in August and September, roasting hot, shirt-soakingly humid, and without a breath of fresh air. Worse, it was subject to malaria, as the area had been a swamp for thousands of years. When the Roman emperor Vitellius stationed his army on Vatican Hill in a.d. 69, most of his men died of malaria. Sixteen centuries later, the mosquitoes seemed to retain an ancient memory, buzzing happily about their ancestral abode and diving down with bloodlust at the sight of red robes.

The threat of infection was compounded by the utter ignorance about malaria’s cause, which was thought to be
mal aria
—bad air. In his
Book on Particular Matters,
the thirteenth-century scholar Michael Scot described malaria as “a corruption of the air that is not evident everywhere, but which moves about hidden from region to region, then settles down and maintains itself.”
²
In Olimpia’s time, Scot’s definition was still believed; it was not until 1880 that the parasite
Plasmodium
was found to be transmitted by mosquitoes.

Given the heat and risk of illness, many cardinals petitioned to move the conclave to the other Roman papal palace, the Quirinal, situated on

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a breezy hill. The conclave doctor agreed that the Vatican was a lethal choice due to “the miasmas and the danger of infection.”
³
But Cardinal Antonio, who as camerlengo had the final decision, held his ground for a Vatican conclave out of respect for papal traditions. Realizing the health risks, most cardinals made their wills before reporting for duty.

A papal conclave was thought to be guided by the Holy Spirit, who would inspire the cardinals to select the man chosen by God. But Olim-pia was leaving nothing up to the Holy Spirit. She had, in fact, been preparing for this moment for more than thirty years. She had buttered up the Spanish, courted the French, venerated the Barberinis, discreetly bribed the cardinals and flattered all of their female relatives. Having positioned her kings, queens, and bishops on her chessboard, she now placed her pawns—spies in the conclave and in the houses of the French and Spanish ambassadors.

Leti wrote, “Due to the vacant See at the death of Urban, Donna Olimpia threw herself into keeping watch over all things carefully, and into making the most extreme effort to discover the intrigues, the plotting, and the intentions of the cardinals and ambassadors with regards to the election of a new pope. And even though she had a natural stinginess, she didn’t fail to spend a great deal on spies to be well aware of all things. She staged a campaign to inform herself of the least intrigue from here or there and made every effort possible to learn what was happening.”
⁴

With an eye to a checkmate, right before the conclave Olimpia gave precise instructions to Gianbattista. Leti continued: “The evening they entered the conclave, Cardinal Pamfili spoke a long time with his sister-in-law, but I have never been able to discover exactly what passed between them.”
⁵

The conclave was preceded by the sound of hammering echoing from the Vatican halls as carpenters boarded up all windows in the cardinals’ area. They left a couple of inches open at the top to let in a little humid air, swarms of mosquitoes, and a faint beam of light; candles would be used throughout the day. The boarding up of windows was supposed to prevent cardinals from making gestures or signs or giving messages of any kind to the outside world.

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Though supposedly sealed off from communication with those outside, the conclave leaked like a sieve and would continue to do so until Pope Pius X enforced absolute secrecy in 1904. Until then journalists and diplomats wrote daily newsletters with conclave updates, reporting with uncanny accuracy on who had voted for whom. Cardinal Antonio Barberini routinely corresponded with the French ambassador, the marquis de Saint-Chamond, who sent back replies. And Olimpia received frequent reports from Gianbattista, friendly cardinals, and their servants, and responded with new instructions.

Messages were often smuggled in and out of conclave in food platters. Meals were brought in twice daily by the cardinal’s household servants, who marched in stately procession carrying large silver bowls swinging from wooden poles. Having arrived at the door assigned for food deliveries, they handed over the bowls to the guards, who were supposed to examine all platters and wine bottles for secret messages going in and out. But the guards often cast a careless glance at the victuals, even more careless than usual if a handsome tip was offered. Instructions to the cardinals were hidden among the roasted gizzards in a duck’s body cavity, or tucked under the crust of a chicken pie. Cardinals replied by concealing messages in the secret compartment of a silver salad bowl returned for washing, or in a hollowed-out wine cork.

Cardinals lived in “cells,” hastily constructed rooms ranging from about fifteen feet to twenty-two feet square. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, when there were fewer than twenty-five conclave cardinals, the cells had been built in the Sistine Chapel itself, where votes were cast in front of the main altar. But now that the Sacred College had been expanded to a maximum of seventy cardinals, the cells were built in the hall next door. Placed over each cell was a letter of the alphabet or two; after the letter
Z
came
AA, AB,
and so on. Before the conclave opened, cardinals had to draw letters out of a chalice to determine which cell would be theirs. This was to prevent squabbling over the bigger cells.

As soon as Gianbattista learned the location of his cell, his servants would have hung all the walls with beautiful cloth—purple for cardinals who had been created by the just-deceased pope, as Gianbattista

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had been, and green for the others. The cells were built without roofs but were covered with a canopy, which could be opened for air circulation or closed for greater privacy. The servants would then have set up his bed, tables, chamber-pot chair, writing desk, stools, a chest with his clothing, books, washbasins, a little stove to reheat cold food, and eating utensils.

Each cardinal was allowed to have two servants, or
conclavistas,
who slept with him in his cell. Old, sick cardinals were permitted three. These servants were invaluable to their masters. They tidied their cells, served their food, cleaned their clothes, and emptied their chamber pots. But far more important than these mundane matters,
conclavistas
were their masters’ eyes and ears. They performed tasks undignified for a prince of the church yet absolutely necessary all the same, such as peering through keyholes or placing an ear firmly against a thin wooden cell wall to listen to the conversation inside. Hidden in the shadows, they watched which cardinals visited one another. They often wore disguises at night—false beards, mustaches, or bulbous noses—and ghosted around from cell to cell negotiating with other cardinals on behalf of their masters.

Conclavistas
spread false rumors, lied, flattered, and offered bribes to other servants for information. They smuggled letters in and out and sent news to the bookies to set odds on which cardinal would be elected pope. Armed with their inside knowledge, most
conclavistas
placed high wagers of their own, reaping a fortune when their favorite was elected. A cardinal chose his
conclavistas
from among his household servants, who eagerly sought the exciting, remunerative position. Among the emoluments was the right to sack the new pope’s cell as soon as he was elected.