Mistress of the Vatican (24 page)

Leti confidently declared that Innocent, who was not planning on having a cardinal nephew, initially seemed willing to give Olimpia the official suite of rooms. But Cardinal Panciroli was almost apoplectic at the idea. He “had a hard time diverting the pope and Donna Olimpia from this resolution, representing this design as scandalous, not only for the city of Rome but for all the earth and which would confirm all the rumors that ran throughout the world.”
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The pope finally concurred with Cardinal Panciroli that Olimpia should continue to reside in the Piazza Navona palace. Olimpia acquiesced, but she would hold an eternal grudge against Cardinal Panciroli. The pope, however, gave her carte blanche to visit him at any time, day or night. Her visits usually lasted from sunset to midnight, as Innocent was a night owl and did his best work after dinner.

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Innocent and Olimpia made preparations for his coronation as the 243rd pope going back in unbroken succession to Peter. Indeed, the power of the Catholic Church rests on Jesus’ statement in Matthew 16:18–19, in which he called his friend Simon bar Jonah by a new name. “And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven,

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and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” Papal coronations were held in Saint Peter’s Basilica, where, it was thought, the power of the saint himself would be transferred directly to his new earthly representative.

The grand basilica of Innocent’s time had risen from the humblest beginnings. In 500 b.c., Etruscan professional soothsayers called
vati-cinia
lived in the swamps there at the foot of a modest hill. For a price, they would slaughter an animal and read fortunes in the shape and color of the liver. Vatican clay was used in pots, bricks, and roof tiles.

Around a.d. 40, Emperor Caligula built a stadium, called a circus, for chariot races on the site. Inside he placed an immense twelve-hundred-year-old red-granite obelisk he had swiped from Egypt. Since no one wanted to live in a mosquito-ridden sinkhole outside the walls of Rome, a pagan graveyard sprouted outside the sports arena. Emperor Nero even buried his favorite chariot horses there.

In a.d. 64 when the great fire of Rome was blamed on Nero, the emperor, in turn, blamed that strange new sect, the Christians. Since the Colosseum would not be built for another fifteen years, Nero held his executions in the Vatican Circus. Christians were made to don animal skins and run from ravenous dogs, who tore them to pieces. Others, smeared with tar, were nailed to crosses and set alight, human torches for nighttime entertainment. Two particularly troublesome Christians, Paul and Peter, were dispatched. According to Catholic tradition, as a Roman citizen Paul was beheaded and his body buried outside Rome. But the poor fisherman from Judea was crucified. Peter reportedly refused the honor of dying in exactly the same way Jesus did. Crucify me upside down, he said, and they did. It is possible the last sight Peter saw on earth was the great Egyptian obelisk, which now stands in front of Saint Peter’s Basilica.

Executed criminals were often denied burial, their bodies tossed into the Cloaca Maxima, Rome’s great sewer. It is likely that Peter’s friends came that night to the circus to cut down his body and, unable pull out the nails in his feet, cut off the feet at the ankles. They placed his body in a hole dug on the side of Vatican Hill—about 150 feet up from the road—and covered it with roof tiles, the poorest kind of Roman burial.

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The guards who entered the circus for cleanup the following morning would have found only the old man’s feet, still nailed to the cross.

The location of Peter’s illegal grave must have been a closely guarded secret among the early Christian community. But the growing flock wanted a place to pray close to the body of Jesus’ best friend. Within eighty years or so of Peter’s death, when rich pagan Romans were building elaborate garage-sized mausoleums nearby, the Christians erected a pagan-looking altar above Peter’s humble grave. They could visit the shrine, pray, eat, and drink in commemoration of the departed, just as they would have at a pagan grave. No one would have known it was a forbidden Christian tomb.

During the persecution of the 250s, Emperor Valerian dug up the body of a Christian saint and threw it into the Tiber. Evidence indicates that leaders of Rome’s Christian community, fearing he would do the same to Peter’s bones if he discovered their location, scooped them up from beneath the altar, wrapped them in a purple shroud, and placed them in a cavity of the altar wall; other bones were scattered in the tomb to fool any desecrators.

In the 320s when Constantine decided to erect a huge new church to honor the saint, Pope Sylvester I told him the secret location of Peter’s grave but not that the bones were hidden in a wall of the old altar. This secret, it seems, had died out, or perhaps the pope feared Constantine might jump back to paganism and dig up the holy bones.

The emperor designed the church so that the high altar would be located directly over the saint’s grave. Unfortunately for Constantine, Peter’s tomb was not on the flat area near the circus but on the side of Vatican Hill, and it would have been a desecration to move the bones from their initial resting place. Using slave labor, imperial engineers had to remove a million cubic feet of earth from the top of the hill and dump it at the bottom to create a flat surface. Around the saint’s tomb they constructed enormous brick foundation walls seven feet thick and up to thirty-five feet high.

The church was built in the form of the Roman court of justice, the basilica, a rectangular building separated into three sections by two rows of large columns. Indeed, much of early church architecture and

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customs was based on the Roman imperial judicial system. This was because Constantine, realizing that Catholic bishops were among his most educated subjects, granted them judicial responsibilities to settle a variety of legal disputes. A bishop assumed the robes, rings, and special insignia of a judge of the Roman Empire. Bishops were also accorded the ceremonial rites of Roman judges—in their basilicas they sat on thrones, took center stage in processions accompanied by incense and torches, and expected those speaking to them to kneel. The altar of Minerva, goddess of wisdom, present in all pagan basilicas, became the altar of God in a Christian one.

As Christianity spread throughout the empire, Rome loudly claimed primacy over all other bishoprics because the holy bodies of Saints Peter and Paul were buried there. Constantinople, the glistening new capital of the empire, had such a dearth of apostolic bodies that starting in a.d. 356 Saints Timothy, Andrew, and Luke were imported. And Jerusa-lem, the location of Christ’s crucifixion, could hardly claim to have his body. Gradually, other bishoprics accepted Rome’s primacy and looked to Rome for direction, acknowledging the pope as universal father and Vicar of Christ, appointed by God himself to nurture his bride, the church.

Although barbarians periodically poured into Rome and pillaged, the Goths, Lombards, and Huns were semi-Christian and spared Saint Peter’s Basilica out of respect or, perhaps, superstition. But when the Muslim Saracens marched on Rome in 846, church officials knew the undefended basilica—outside the city walls—would make a tempting target for plunder. Pious officials opened Peter’s tomb below the altar and took the skull they found to safety, not knowing, of course, that the real bones were hidden in the tomb wall. Retreating behind the stout walls of Rome with the skull, church officials placed it in the Church of Saint John Lateran, where for centuries it was the object of intense veneration, though it might have been the skull of a pagan or even a woman.

While the power of the church waxed over the centuries, the structure of its holiest basilica was sliding into dereliction. By the time the popes returned to Rome for good in 1443, the eleven-hundred-year-old

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building was leaning dangerously off-kilter—one wall was six feet out of plumb and slowly pulling the perpendicular walls with it. Given the shifting sand beneath the basilica, it was a testament to the skill of Con-stantine’s engineers that the structure had lasted as long as it did.

Late-fifteenth-century popes pondered what to do with the tottering basilica, hesitating to destroy something so sacred. But the irascible warrior pope Julius II (reigned 1503–1513) had no such scruples. The ancient basilica was torn down, its ancient papal tombs relocated and some of the art incorporated into the new church. Throughout the sixteenth century the new basilica was raised by fits and starts. Italy’s greatest architects—Bramante, Raphael, Sangallo, and Michelangelo—argued over the design, particularly over the trailblazing dome they wished to build as a beacon to all Christendom.

Shoddy construction required the tearing down of years of work. Some popes, facing war, plague, famine, the Sack of Rome, or a bankrupt treasury, ignored the project entirely. There are several contemporary etchings of the partially built basilica with large trees growing out of the piers. But late-sixteenth-century popes raced to finish construction, and the new basilica was dedicated in 1615.

Saint Peter’s is not the orderly work of one architectural genius who labored to create a harmonious design. It is a collage of centuries of conflicting personalities and historical upheavals, organized haphazardly in an immense space. In Olimpia’s time the basilica was not much different from the Saint Peter’s of today, only lacking certain later embellishments. Then as now, the visitor is immediately overwhelmed by the sheer size of the structure. The eye tries to find a focal point but cannot, distracted by the multicolored marbles, gilding, bronzes, statues, tombs, reliefs, lamps, pilasters, columns, and ornate vaulted ceilings. In 1638 a visiting John Milton found Saint Peter’s so dizzying that years later, when he wrote
Paradise Lost,
he located Pandemonium there.

The chief purpose of Saint Peter’s Basilica was public relations, perhaps best summed up in the 1455 deathbed speech of Pope Nicholas V. “To create solid and stable convictions in the minds of the uncultured masses,” he said, “there must be something which appeals to the eye; a popular faith, sustained only on doctrines, will never be anything but

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feeble and vacillating. But if the authority of the Holy See were visibly displayed in majestic buildings, imperishable memorials and witnesses seemingly planted by the hand of God himself, belief would grow and strengthen. . . . Noble edifices combining taste and beauty with imposing proportions would immensely conduce to the exaltation of the chair of Saint Peter.”
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The new basilica was, and still is, the largest church in the world. It is 693 feet long, 404 feet high under the dome, and 232 feet wide, holding some 20,000 people. It is much larger than the footprint of the old church, which was 395 feet long and 212 feet wide. The altar is in the center of the church, visible on all sides, and not flush against the far wall as it had been in the old basilica.

In 1626, Urban VIII commissioned the twenty-seven-year-old Gian Lorenzo Bernini to construct the baldachino, the 100-foot tall, 186,000-pound bronze canopy supported by twisted columns, directly over the high altar and Saint Peter’s tomb. When digging the four ten-foot-square foundations to support the columns, workmen realized that below the basilica there were mausoleums and streets, an entire underground city of the dead. The laborers who cautiously walked through the brightly colored rooms, holding their torches high, were surprised to find that the cemetery was both pagan and Christian.

Upon opening the coffins, they found some bodies wrapped in ancient Christian clerical garb. Other tombs bore frescoes of dancing naked goddesses. Urban considered the inscription on the tomb of a certain Flavius Agricola so revolting that he had the sarcophagus thrown into the Tiber.

If the pope was afraid of desecrating the holy grave that he hoped was down there, he was absolutely terrified that the grave wasn’t there at all—many Protestants insisted that Peter had never even set foot in Rome and the Catholics had made up the story to solidify Roman power. Urban instructed Bernini to disrupt as little as possible beneath the altar.

Unbeknownst to Innocent and Olimpia, beneath the baldachino, beneath Michelangelo’s giant dome, slumbered the bones of Saint Peter, tucked away in the cavity of the second-century altar wall. They would

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be discovered in the 1940s and identified in 1968 as the remains of a robust man, some sixty to seventy years old at death. The bones were dyed purple—a rare and expensive dye reserved for royalty—from an ancient, disintegrated cloth. Pieces of every bone in the body (including the skull) were found except the feet, which had evidently been severed. The lack of foot bones almost certainly confirms the identification as Saint Peter, who, according to the most ancient tradition had been crucified upside down, unworthy to die like his Lord.

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