Mistress of the Vatican (29 page)

For three centuries after Jesus, Christianity was not an official Roman imperial religion and as such had no public churches for worship. Church services were held in homes, the accepted domain of women. And here women played a major role—teaching, disciplining, and managing material resources. According to tombstones found in France, Turkey, Greece, Italy, and Yugoslavia, some of these women were priests.

Women lost ground when Constantine legalized Christianity and built grand basilicas—the public sphere of men—for the church. A new generation of male leaders marched in, casting the women aside. The flexible hierarchy of the house churches yielded to a more rigid structure of parishes and dioceses, all run by men.

To excise traces of women’s role in the early church, the apostle Junia, whom Paul hailed in Romans 16:7 as “foremost among the apostles,” was transformed into Junias, a male name that incorrectly persists in Bibles today. In the ancient Roman Church of Saint Prassede, the mosaic of Bishop Theodora has had the feminine ending of her name scratched off, leaving Bishop Theodo wearing a woman’s headdress.

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Yet in southern Italy the tradition of women priests was not easily uprooted. Pope Gelasius I (reigned 492–496) expressed his outrage to Christian communities there. “We have heard,” he thundered, “that divine affairs have come to such a low state that women are encouraged to officiate at sacred altars and all matters reserved for the male sex.”
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Not only were women prevented from becoming priests, there was a growing movement afoot to prevent them from marrying priests. Pope Siricius (reigned 384–399) issued the first decretal denying marriage to the clergy. Yet the Bible makes clear that Saint Peter was married, and for 350 years after him the church had no policy against clerical marriage. Paul wrote in 1 Timothy, “A bishop must then be blameless, the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behavior, given to hospitality, apt to teach . . . one that ruleth well his own house, having his children in subjection in all gravity. For if a man know not how to rule his own house, how shall he care for the church of God?”

Later popes realized that a bachelor priest would not have family issues distracting him from his work and could devote himself fully to the prosperity of the church. But there was a more pressing problem. For more than a thousand years after Constantine, married priests bequeathed their churches, the lands around them, the silver sacrament chalices, and their priestly incomes to their sons. If a priest had no sons, he would give the church buildings to his daughters as dowries. Church property became something owned not by the Vatican but by individual families, passed from generation to generation. Priests’ wives, with a position to maintain, paraded about town decked out in finery paid for by alms intended for the poor.

Some forty popes up until the seventh century were the sons of priests. Several popes were the sons of popes. The major attack on priestly marriage did not occur until the late eleventh century, and even then, most priests ignored it. Some married priests of the time were much like Catholics today who practice birth control—otherwise good Catholics ignoring a papal decree that proves so inconvenient to their personal lives.

Married priests were unfazed by threats of fines or loss of income. They might have to send their wives and children away if a visiting

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bishop came to town, but they would bring them back the moment he left. Many town leaders refused to accept bachelor priests, fearing they would seduce their wives and daughters. Churchmen sent from Rome with decrees outlawing priestly marriage were often beaten up and kicked out of town, as townsfolk threw the papal documents into a bonfire.

The church had more control over what occurred in Rome. In 1051 Pope Leo IX enslaved priestly wives, making them cook food for the bishops and scrub the church floors. After that, few Roman women wanted to marry priests. But overall, the path to priestly celibacy was long, drawn-out, and hard-fought.

The church believed sexual continence was good for the soul. Finding no decree of abstinence in the Bible, Martin Luther believed it to be a pitiful waste. Sex within marriage, he reasoned, was good. Virginity was displeasing to God, who gave people reproductive organs with the express purpose of bringing children into the world. Priestly celibacy was the real sin. God said in the book of Genesis, “Be ye fruitful and multiply.” By wrongfully insisting on celibate priests, the Catholic Church had prevented the fruitful multiplication of millions of people.

Luther believed there was another problem with prohibiting priestly marriage. Sex, he reasoned, was a valid bodily need just like urination. God created the body to get certain things out of the system. To deny the body sex—or, for that matter, urination—was sure to generate a terrible explosion sooner or later. And scandalous sexual explosions occurred across the board, from the lowliest parish priest up to the popes themselves.

According to accusations made after his death, Boniface VIII (reigned 1294–1303) often said, “To lie with women or with boys is no more sin than to rub one hand against the other.”
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Many popes in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had children. Innocent VIII (reigned 1484–1492) was credited with sixteen, though this was probably an exaggeration. The Borgia pope had at least eight that we know about, by three of his mistresses. Julius II (reigned 1503–1513) had at least one daughter, whom he handsomely maintained, and possibly two more. Paul III (reigned 1534–1549) sired four children, whom he amply re-

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warded when he became pope, making his grandsons cardinals. Pius IV (reigned 1559–1565) had three bastards, and Gregory XIII (reigned 1572–1585) had one.

As the droves of papal children proved, it wasn’t sex that bothered the church; it was marriage, with its rights of inheritance of ecclesiastical property. Mistresses, male lovers, and bastards posed no threat to the prosperity of the church, as they had no inheritance rights. And so the word
celibacy
came to denote lack of marriage, rather than lack of sex. Morality became a bit twisted when sex without marriage was deemed a lesser sin than sex within the bonds of holy matrimony, as the Luther-ans were quick to point out.

While most papal mistresses stayed quietly in the background, there were a few exceptions. The charming Cecile, countess of Turenne, believed to be the mistress of Pope Clement VI (reigned 1342–1352), evidently did the same things that Olimpia would do three hundred years later and received the same criticism. The scintillating countess sold offices, received bribes for her influence, and paraded around with great haughtiness.

Clement’s contemporary, the Florentine merchant Giovanni Vil-lani, wrote of the pope, “When he was an archbishop he did not keep away from women but lived in the manner of young nobles, nor did he as pope try to control himself. Noble ladies had the same access to his chambers as did prelates and, among others, the Countess of Turenne was so intimate with him that, in large part, he distributed his favors through her.”
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When the pope’s confessor warned him that he must give up women for the good of his eternal soul, Clement reportedly shrugged and said he had gotten used to women during his youth and only continued sexual relations now on the advice of his doctors.

Some 150 years after the countess of Turenne, Cardinal Rodrigo Bor-gia, who became Pope Alexander VI in 1492, took as his mistress the voluptuous brunette Giulia Farnese. When the affair began in 1489, Giulia was a bride of fifteen and Borgia was a fat cardinal of fifty-eight. Giulia wanted no power or riches for herself but accepted Borgia into

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her bed as the price she had to pay for getting her brother Alessandro made a cardinal.

Unambitious though she was, Giulia was a target for Vatican favor seekers. Anyone who wanted something from the pope stopped off at Giulia’s house to give her presents and heavily larded compliments. “The majority of those who want to receive favors from the pope pass through that door,” said one writer, referring to the large doorway of her palazzo.
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Her brother Alessandro, an able and diligent churchman, would forever feel uneasy about the manner in which he had obtained his red hat. Pasquino called him “the Petticoat Cardinal,” an infuriating name that caught on with the Roman people. Giulia, who had advanced his career, was now a stumbling block to it long after Alexander VI’s reign. She showed her brother great consideration by dying in 1524, a full decade before the Petticoat Cardinal become Pope Paul III.

The other Vatican woman of Borgia’s reign was his daughter Lucre-zia, who in 1501 at the age of twenty-one was given official power to run the church and the Papal States when her father toured lands conquered by her brother. Reports spread by Borgia enemies had Lucrezia sleeping with both her father and her brother, and slipping poison from her ring into the wine of enemies, none of which is likely.

Lucrezia was a pawn moved about on the bloodstained chessboard of her male relatives to advance their own selfish objectives. Highly intelligent, she survived in a brutal, male-dominated world by playing the fragile female. Twittering apologies for her headaches and fatigue, Lu-crezia was permitted to remain in her rooms for days at a time, temporarily removing herself from the sinister machinations of her male family members.

Washing her ankle-length blond hair was an all-day affair, as it took hours for her ladies to comb and dry it, in front of the fire in cold weather, out on the balcony in warm. Periodically the simpering Lucr-ezia begged for a retreat to a convent, to get closer to God, she said, though it was more likely she wanted to escape from Vatican men. Lu-crezia presented herself as weak, meek, and not terribly bright. Yet she

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was smart enough to get her way. Not even the most savage warlord, looking at Lucrezia’s golden tresses and trembling smile, would refuse her a hair wash.

Men were less impressed by a woman like Olimpia, stomping into the Vatican with no headaches, no blond curls, and no apologies for being a weak, stupid female. She knew she was smarter than the men and didn’t bother to hide it. And their resentment grew.

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12

Vengeance on the Barberinis

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Even on the highest throne in the world, we are still sitting on our ass.

—Michel de Montaigne limpia and Innocent started off their papacy with an extremely dangerous enemy—Cardinal Mazarin, prime minister of France. Due to Olimpia’s conclave machinations, the good cardinal found himself in the unfortunate position of having to congratulate a pope who had been the only candidate he had expressly excluded from the papacy.

In a fury, Mazarin fired Ambassador Saint-Chamond, believing incorrectly that he had taken a bribe to allow Pamphili’s election. He then punished Cardinal Antonio Barberini’s betrayal by taking away his lucrative French protectorship and stripping him of all French honors, incomes, and titles.

Gazing from afar at the new pope and his family, Mazarin realized that he could not bare his fangs openly and covered them with an oily professional smile. In November 1644, Mazarin instructed the French ambassador to Venice, Nicolas de Gremonville, to travel to Rome to

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present Innocent X with the homage of six-year-old King Louis XIV. Mistakenly believing that the cardinal nephew would hold the greatest influence over the new pontiff, Mazarin instructed Gremonville to bestow on Camillo the abbey of Corbie, the second richest in France, with an annual income of twelve thousand scudi.

To win over Olimpia—whom Mazarin reckoned would always have some influence over Innocent—Gremonville was instructed to lose money at her card parties. The ambassador of Lucca observed that on certain evenings the Pamphili palazzo on the Piazza Navona became a gambling den, “where run princes, high prelates and other sorts of nobility, each believing himself greatly fortunate to have rotten luck in this gaming, as losing could acquire the protection of this signora in their interests and cause her to affectionately and efficaciously advance their causes to His Holiness.”
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Losing money to Olimpia was, of course, a form of bribery, but more fun for her than simply receiving a bag of money or a diamond necklace. At the card table she could truly
win.
It is amusing to picture the grandees of Rome and ambassadors of foreign powers racing to Olim-pia’s house intent upon losing vast sums to her at the seventeenth-century equivalent of poker. Given the whims of Lady Luck, there must have been a few courtiers who won, despite their best efforts to lose, and walked away humiliated by the gold coins stuffing their pockets, knowing that now they would never get anywhere with the pope.

The courtly Gremonville managed to lose such great sums that Olimpia demonstrated “with words and a great expression of affection the desire to earn his approval, declaring herself his special servant, exaggerating that there would never be an occasion where she would not do her best to serve him.”
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