Mistress of the Vatican (25 page)

Celebrations

q

God has given us the papacy! Let us enjoy it!

—Pope Leo X n the morning of October 4, 1644, Pope Innocent X was dressed for his coronation in ceremonial vestments—an
alba,
a floor-length white linen robe; a cincture, or linen belt; and a
stola,
the long band of silk worn around the neck and crossed on the breast. Around his shoulders hung the cope, a heavy, stiff cape with glorious gold and silver embroidery of biblical scenes, studded with pearls and precious gems. A dazzling bejeweled miter was placed on his head.

After Mass in the Sistine Chapel, Innocent climbed onto his pontifical chair to be carried into Saint Peter’s Basilica. The chair was a golden throne affixed to a platform with gilded wooden rods on each end. Servants picked up the rods and carried the chair on their shoulders so that the people could see their pontiff lifted high above the crowds. If the pope needed to travel through Rome, the chair could be affixed to an elaborate wagon and pulled by horses. Then, when the wagon reached its destination, the servants would lift the chair and carry the pope up the stairs and into the building. Above the chair was a baldachino, a covering on four gilded columns to protect the pope from the wind,

O

Eleanor Herman

rain, and sun. The sides of the chair were adorned with enormous ostrich-feather fans.

During the coronation ceremony, Camillo, as the pope’s nephew, sat next to him on a lower chair. As part of the ancient coronation rites, the pope ritually washed his hands several times, a gesture oddly reminiscent of Pontius Pilate. First Rome’s city magistrates—the conservators—poured the water over the pope’s hands. Then Camillo did the honors, followed by the French ambassador and the envoy of the Holy Roman Emperor. As the Sistine Chapel choir sang, Innocent was given the fisherman’s ring, which the Vatican jeweler had crafted for him, and took his place on the throne. Two by two, the cardinals came forward to kneel in adoration, followed by the ambassadors, prelates, and nobility.

Then Signor Domenico Belli, the papal master of ceremonies, stood before the new pontiff with a bunch of flax on the head of a cane and set it on fire. It burst into flame and turned to ash immediately as Signor Belli solemnly intoned, “
Pater sancte, sic transit gloria mundi
.”
¹
Holy Father, thus passes the glory of the world. It was the reminder that the pope, no matter how exalted at that moment, was mortal, and his power transient. He, too, would return to ashes and dust.

Throughout the ceremony, there were two centers of attention. Most spectators, as if watching a tennis match, glanced from the pope to Olimpia and back. According to the author of the
Relatione della Corte di Roma,
who witnessed the coronation, “The Most Excellent Signora Donna Olimpia Maidalchini” sat in the place of honor near the main altar on a platform adorned with rich crimson damask and embroidered heavily with gold. “Next to her sat the Marquesa Giustiniani, her daughter, niece of His Holiness; Donna Anna Colonna . . . and a great number of titled ladies.”
²

Olimpia was beaming with joy because for the first time ever her chair was more honorably positioned than that of Anna Colonna, who sat next to her. Anna Colonna had insisted on equal honors for her chair, given that she was of blue blood by birth, a niece of the recently deceased pontiff, and wife of the prefect of Rome. But Olimpia would have none of it, and it must have felt good to tell the haughty Anna

[ 150 ]

M i s t r e s s o f t h e Vat i c a n

Colonna that Urban VIII was
dead,
thank you very much. Her chair would be several inches behind Olimpia’s.

The ambassadors and princes who attended the coronation were impressed by Olimpia’s appearance. The new power behind the papal throne was a stately widow renowned for her intelligence and financial acumen. Diplomatic dispatches posted that day described the “prudence and valor” of Donna Olimpia. She would certainly be a tremendous asset to the pope, playing his hostess as first lady of Rome.
³

After the ceremony, the pope was carried to the loggia of benediction to be crowned in front of the crowd in Saint Peter’s Square, most of whom had camped out overnight to get a good spot. Cardinal Fran-cesco Barberini removed Innocent’s jeweled miter, and Cardinal Carlo de’ Medici, whose gouty toe was healing, placed the shining triple crown on the pope’s head.

The papal tiara was unique among the crowns of European monarchs. Until the late eleventh century the pope wore a simple white cap. But as the papacy increased in power and majesty, so did popes’ hats, which rose like overyeasted loaves. Originally the high hat had two be-jeweled circles—the tiaras of the temporal and spiritual realms. But by 1300 the power-hungry Boniface VIII had enlarged his crown to resemble an enormous pointed dunce cap with
three
jeweled tiaras—the triple crown. It was said that the three crowns stood for the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, though no one really knew. By Innocent’s time the triple tiara was lower, and wider, shaped something like a potato.

At his coronation each pope was expected to choose a motto for his reign. Innocent selected an invocation to God: “Give to your servant a docile heart to judge your people.”
⁴
Many snickered that the pope’s heart was already docile enough, at least where his sister-in-law was concerned.

As the sun set, Innocent prepared a new delight for the people of Rome. Vatican servants with mountain-climbing experience tied ropes around their waists and knotted them on iron hooks along the observation point at the top of Saint Peter’s dome. Easing down the dome, they affixed torches in the iron spikes projecting out every few feet, all the way down the dome, and then down the façade itself. When darkness

[ 151 ]

Eleanor Herman

descended, the entire basilica glowed and shimmered and seemed to be aflame.

According to one eyewitness, Girolamo Lunadoro, “There was not a street that was not full of lights, not a palace without illumination. . . . It is sufficient to say that for many, many years Rome has not been as jubilant as it is now for the happy exaltation of its prince, to whom Divine Majesty concede the years of Nestor and the strength to execute his holy thoughts.”
⁵

q

In seventeenth-century Rome, any individual who found himself suddenly possessed of a fortune was expected to share it with his family. After all, that was what a good Christian of any social standing was supposed to do. Sitting on the zenith of the social pyramid, the pope was no exception.

Moreover, as monarch of the Papal States, the pope was a sovereign and his family members were, therefore, temporary royalty, holding their vaunted positions until their elderly uncle breathed his last. But unlike the Bourbons of France and Habsburgs of Spain, many of the popes had worked their way up from the humblest backgrounds, and the citizens of the Papal States did not want their monarch’s relatives mending nets in fishing hovels or feeding pigs on pork farms. Most of the pope’s subjects wanted to point to their ruling family with pride— the princes and princesses setting out from their sumptuous palaces in elegant coaches and six, just as the royal families of France or Spain did. Over the period of twenty-one years the rapacity of the Barberini family had, of course, exceeded the bounds of good taste. It was hoped that the Pamphili pope would practice a more dignified nepotism.

On September 24, nine days after his election, Innocent made a new will in which he left all his worldly goods to Olimpia, whom he designated as his heir, expressly stating that she could do whatever she wanted with his money. It was highly unusual for a pontiff—or any Italian nobleman, for that matter—to choose a woman as his heir, especially when he had a healthy young nephew. But Camillo, Innocent knew, was a thoughtless ditherer. Olimpia was the only one capable of man-

[ 152 ]

M i s t r e s s o f t h e Vat i c a n

aging the increasing family wealth. And Innocent’s decision must have made Camillo hate his mother even more.

But Innocent did not reward Olimpia to the exclusion of her three children. Her eldest daughter, Maria, now twenty-five, had married the marquess Andrea Giustiniani in 1640. During the conclave Giustini-ani’s uncle had had the good grace to die and leave him his immense wealth. The pope gave Giustiniani the title of prince of Bassano, and Maria became a princess. Innocent also made him the castellan of Cas-tel Sant’Angelo, an honorific post that brought a good income.

At seventeen, Olimpia’s younger daughter, Costanza, was unmarried. Two promising candidates immediately made offers for her hand. The handsome prince of Caserta, twenty-three, seemed a perfect match, but the thirty-one-year-old Niccolò Ludovisi, who had placed two wives in the grave and was casting about for a third, was the most titled man in Italy. He was the prince of Piombino and Venosa, the duke of Sora and Arce, the marquess of Populonia and Vignola, the count of Conza, the signor of Elba and Montecristo, and a grandee of Spain. Some of his titles descended from his great-uncle Pope Gregory XV and others from his dead wives.

Though he dragged such impressive titles in his wake, Prince Lu-dovisi offered the decided disadvantage of being obscenely fat, so fat that Roman gossip speculated as to whether he was in any position to have children. Looking at his slender, handsome bachelor opponent in the race to marry the pope’s niece, Ludovisi was “debased and humiliated and oppressed,” said one diplomat.
⁶
But in the end, titles won out over looks as they usually did.

The dowry documents were signed in October. The pope gave Ca-millo 20,000 scudi to give Costanza as her dowry, a pitiful sum for a pope’s niece, who usually fetched 100,000 scudi. But Prince Ludoviso accepted eagerly; the position of pope’s nephew, even a nephew by marriage, almost always guaranteed immense political power. On Decem-ber 21, Costanza married the fat prince in a grand ceremony in the Sistine Chapel presided over by the pope himself.

The choice of the ardently pro-Spanish, anti-French groom had dangerous international implications. The Venetian ambassador to Rome,

[ 153 ]

Eleanor Herman

Contarini, reported to his senate, “Prince Ludovisi is bursting with private hatreds and is too inclined towards the Spanish faction.”
⁷
Spain rejoiced and France was outraged, demanding that the papal nuncio explain if this was a sign that the new pope despised their kingdom. Innocent sent a calming missive to Paris, explaining that most eligible bachelors in Rome were of the Spanish persuasion, and he was merely trying to find his niece a suitable husband.

With the girls’ futures arranged, that left Camillo. By the end of the conclave, Olimpia had already made plans for him to marry Lucrezia Barberini, sealing the deal she had made to win the Barberini cardinals’ crucial votes for her brother-in-law. But Camillo proved unexpectedly intransigent. It was his life’s greatest misfortune that he had been born not to a woman but to a force of nature. Camillo was fed up with his mother’s domination. Here he was, the pope’s nephew, the number two man in the country, being treated as if he were a mindless child.

Camillo told his friends that he would not marry Lucrezia Barberini because that was precisely what his mother wanted him to do. Moreover, as an art connoisseur he could not have been pleased that the potential bride’s eyebrows were blacker, thicker, and bristlier than most men’s mustaches, or that her nose took up an inordinate amount of her face. Camillo would not marry her. He would become cardinal nephew and wield more official power than his bossy mother ever could.

Camillo’s stubborn refusal to wed Lucrezia put Olimpia in a terrible bind, and he must have relished it. The furious Barberini cardinals would suffer a double loss—Francesco and Antonio would not keep their powerful positions, which would be taken over by Camillo, nor would they be immune from prosecution for corruption as members of the new pope’s extended family.

Olimpia, for her part, wanted to bring the powerful Barberinis into the family for her own protection. Innocent had reached the age of seventy in a century when most men died in their fifties. Whenever Innocent died, the Barberinis would bounce back from ignominy and, using all their wealth and connections, be in a position to harm Olimpia. In Roman politics, one hand always washed the other, and because of Ca-millo’s stubbornness both of Olimpia’s hands remained hopelessly filthy.

[ 154 ]

M i s t r e s s o f t h e Vat i c a n

Many Romans expressed surprise that the only son born to the Pam-phili family in seventy years would join the church, ensuring the extinction of the line. There was a way around this, however. If the male heirs died out, as happened frequently in the best families, many noble Ital-ians gave the family name to a daughter’s second son to extend it into the future.

In his
avvisi
of October 15, 1644, Teodoro Amayden informed his readers, “The news of the antechamber is that Signor Camillo will be made a cardinal. . . . And in the meantime there could be born sons to the Marquesa Giustiniani which would be enough for both families, as a son has already been born and she is pregnant again.”
⁸