Mistress of the Vatican (3 page)

As the shrieks ceased and he heard the midwife’s footsteps coming toward him, Sforza prayed fervently to all the saints. Was it a boy?

The saints, evidently, had not listened to his prayers. Sforza’s child was a girl.

Children were baptized soon after birth, lest they die and their un-baptized souls be barred from entering heaven. And so, according to her recently discovered baptismal record, later that day Sforza’s daughter was baptized by Carlo Montilio, the bishop of Viterbo, in the twelfth-century Cathedral of Saint Lorenzo. Sforza’s standing in the community was shown by the fact that the child’s godmother was Fiordalisa Nini, the sister of Nino Nini, the richest man in town.

The baby was christened Olimpia.

As Father Montilio sprinkled her with baptismal water, he spoke the sacred words that would mark the child’s soul with an indelible stamp, signifying that as a Christian she belonged to God. “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” he said. Performing this baptism as he had hundreds of others, Father Montilio

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had no idea that kings and prime ministers would bow down to this unwanted girl, sending her lavish gifts and begging for her influence.

As he watched the ceremony, little did the dejected Sforza Maidal-chini know that it would be his nuisance of a daughter, not his beloved son, who would make the Maidalchini family name great. No one had the vaguest idea that day, in the cool, gray church that smelled of age and mildew, that this mewling infant would become a pivotal personality in the history of the Catholic Church.

q

At the moment of her birth, Olimpia Maidalchini was encumbered by her father’s disappointment in her gender and the question of the dowry that would loom ever larger as she grew up. But she was also burdened by a culture that blithely accepted women’s inferiority to men. Pope Innocent III (reigned 1198–1216) confidently declared that menstrual blood was “so detestable and impure that, from contact therewith, fruits and grains are blighted, bushes dry up, grasses die, trees lose their fruits, and if dogs chance to eat of it, they go mad.”
¹

Even the miracle of giving birth—the sole domain of women—was not considered an achievement of any particular value. The fourth-century b.c. Greek philosopher Aristotle and the Renaissance culture that quoted him believed that a uterus was a kind of soil—dirt, actually—in which the man planted his seed. A woman merely provided a nine-month lease for a warm rented room. In the
Oresteia,
the classical Greek trilogy by Aeschylus, the god Apollo argued that it was impossible for a man to kill his mother, since no one actually
had
a mother.

All pregnancies, it was thought, started off as male, nature attempting to replicate its own perfection. But at some point in about half of pregnancies, something went terribly wrong, an irremediable birth defect, and the fetus became female. A female’s reproductive organs proved her defectiveness; they were small and misshapen, most of them tucked away in an evil-smelling cavity inside the body, unlike the robust, fully formed private parts of men, which enjoyed the fresh air and dangled proudly.

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According to popular medieval literature, which was still widely read in sixteenth-century Italy, if a woman spread her legs very far, her female organs would fall out and she would become a man. If this were true, many ambitious women, including Olimpia, would have spread their legs wide, pushed their organs onto the floor, and luxuriated in the advantages of being a man in a man’s world.

The church, too, looked on females as defective creatures. Jesus and his disciples had all been male. The church fathers, who in the second through fifth centuries grappled with Scripture to hammer out Catholic theology, were notorious misogynists. In the third century, Tertul-lian wrote a scathing commentary on women in the early church who preached, healed, and baptized. “The very women of these heretics, how wanton they are! For they are bold enough to teach, to dispute, to enact exorcism, to undertake cures—it may be even to baptize.”
²

In the thirteenth century, Saint Thomas Aquinas, arguably the most influential theologian in the history of the Catholic Church, declared women to be “misbegotten men,” inferior by nature and therefore incapable of leadership. Defective women, it was believed, had no place in business, politics, or finance. They certainly had no place in Christ’s church. The Latin word for woman—
femina
—was said to have come from
fe
for “faith” and
minus
for “less,” since women were thought to be too weak to hold and preserve the faith. Moreover, it was believed that women’s handling the holy Eucharist or stepping foot inside the Vatican would contaminate the holiness with their impurity.

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The girl who would one day contaminate the holiness of the most holy Catholic Church was a born leader, a most unfortunate personality for a female. The only description of Olimpia as a child came from her first biographer, Gregorio Leti, who claimed to have spoken to people who knew her growing up.

“As soon as she attained the age of reason she was ambitious of commanding,” he wrote. “Even at the most tender age, and as small as she was, she showed this inclination in childhood games. She always gave orders to the other children, and nothing was done without her com-

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mands. As a child she was reported to be dominating by nature. She decided which games to play and always wanted to win.”
³

Unfortunately, Olimpia had little education to back up her bossiness. She went to school in the medieval Convent of Saint Dominic in Vit-erbo, where her aunt was a nun. It was a rudimentary education at best. Times had changed since the early sixteenth century when women like the Roman poetess Vittoria Colonna (1490–1547) held salons, encouraged the arts, and spoke several languages.

Olimpia’s world was shaped by the 1563 Council of Trent—the belated Vatican response to accusations of Church abuse lobbed by Martin Luther and his followers forty years earlier—and reforming bishops decided that wifely virtues were threatened by female education. An educated female would be less satisfied managing her household and raising her children; she would want to go gadding about town, meddling in government and business. Up north, the heretics would laugh at Catholics who couldn’t even control their women. And so Olimpia would have learned to read and write Italian, do a bit of math, memo-rize the precepts of the Catholic religion, and sew.

Though she knew little or nothing of art, literature, philosophy, and foreign languages, Olimpia had two skills uncommon in girls. With regards to financial matters, her mind worked as if it were an abacus, adding, multiplying, subtracting, and calculating percentages. Within seconds of examining an economic issue, she could figure out the best financial advantage, a trait she must have inherited from Sforza. Moreover, Olimpia had a fantastic memory. She had only to read or hear something once to remember it forever.

Given her lifelong love of mathematical calculations and business, it is likely that Olimpia spent some time in her father’s tax office. Perhaps she sat inconspicuously in the corner, watching Sforza chatting pleasantly with the landowners about their tax bills. As he added up the value of land, livestock, and crops, perhaps she did the figures in her head, coming up with the answers before he did. We can imagine Olimpia studying her father with her dark eyes, proud of him, wanting to grow up and be just like him.

While everyone acknowledged Olimpia’s intelligence, there is some

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confusion as to her appearance during her girlhood. One source asserted that in her teens Olimpia was a “conspicuous beauty.”
⁴
Another disagreed, calling her “not beautiful, but blond [light-skinned] and thin, pleasing, vivacious and always smiling.”
⁵

If she was not exactly beautiful, she was attractive and energetic, with an earthy sense of humor. From later likenesses we can extrapolate what Olimpia looked like as a girl. She was petite, with dark hair and chiseled features. She had a wide, high forehead, sparkling dark eyes under black, arched brows, and a beautiful, perfectly straight nose. Her cheekbones were wide, her lips thin, her jaw square, and her chin, though not overly large, prominent. It was a face of ambitious angles and resolute determination. It was a face that was intriguing on a slender blooming girl but that would become ferocious on a plump, hard-bitten older woman.

Olimpia grew up in a jewellike medieval town whose heyday had passed some three hundred years earlier. Viterbo sat snugly inside massive eleventh-century walls studded with turrets, towers, and gates. It was a town of thick strong stone the color of pearl gray and soft sand. Narrow streets wound between sturdy medieval houses and opened up onto charming piazzas with sparkling fountains. Adorning fountains, buildings, pillars, and palaces were stone lions—the heraldic symbol of Viterbo and the emblem of strength.

Rich volcanic soil and healing sulfuric baths had first drawn the Etruscans to the site, and then the Romans. In the eleventh century, Viterbo became a papal city, which the popes visited to escape Rome’s malarial summers and perennial violence. The thirteenth century was a time of splendor, when new churches, towers, and palaces rose from the ancient citadel.

Viterbo’s climactic moment in history came in 1268 after the death of Pope Clement IV in Viterbo’s papal palace. Eighteen cardinals met to elect his successor but couldn’t make up their minds. When the voting extended into 1269, and then 1270, Viterbans became frustrated at the lack of law and order in the popeless Papal States, and decided to make the electors’ lives as uncomfortable as possible to hasten a result. Instead of allowing the dithering cardinals to return to their sumptuous palaces

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every night, they locked them in the building
cum clave,
the Latin for “with a key” and the origin of the term
conclave.

When that didn’t work, one cardinal jokingly remarked that the palace roof should be removed to give greater access to the Holy Spirit, who was believed to direct cardinals to elect the right man. Taking him at his word, the exasperated Viterban authorities removed the palace roof, exposing the cardinals to the wind, rain, and sun. They lowered down baskets of bread and water, all the food the sluggard cardinals could expect. The cardinals responded by threatening the entire city with excommunication, but this left the Viterbans unfazed. Finally, after two years and nine months, the longest election in church history, on September 1, 1271, the cardinals elected not one of themselves but a deacon named Teobaldo Visconti of Piacenza, who took the name Gregory X.

Some thirty years after the election, the popes became fed up with Rome, where noble families fought one another in daily street battles and sometimes held the pontiff himself hostage. The papal court moved to the peace and quiet of Avignon, in southern France, and the importance of Viterbo dwindled. When the popes returned to Rome for good in the fifteenth century, they had for the most part forgotten their once beloved haven, returning now and then only to soak in the salutary baths. By the time of Olimpia’s birth, the town had no great political or church importance, though it was the seat of a bishopric.

Viterbo’s bustling prosperity was due to its location; it was the last town of any size for visitors traveling to Rome from the north. Here countless pilgrims and diplomats ate, shopped for supplies, shod their horses, and rested before the last march to the holy city.

Pilgrims also prayed at the shrine of Saint Rosa. In 1250 fifteen-year-old Rosa led an uprising of Viterbans against their conqueror, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, who had invaded Italy to seize territory from his enemy, the pope. Two years later Rosa died in a cell in her father’s house, worn out by penance and bodily mortification, and, it was said, performed many miracles after her death. Each year on the eve of her feast day, September 4, her statue was carried through Viterbo in an elaborate procession that visited seven churches and ended at her tomb.

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It was a festival that lasted for several days, involving the entire town and numerous visitors, and as a child Olimpia must have observed or participated in it. Perhaps Olimpia, realizing her own battle was looming, contemplated the audacious courage of a fifteen-year-old girl standing up to a warrior emperor.

When Olimpia was eight, Viterbo buzzed with scandalous news from Rome, fifty miles to the south. On September 11, 1599, the twenty-two-year-old noblewoman Beatrice Cenci was beheaded for playing a role in the murder of her violent father, who, it was whispered, had sexually abused her. Also executed were her mother and two brothers. A year earlier, the body of Francesco Cenci had been found at the foot of a castle cliff, his head smashed in. Aware of Francesco’s brutal nature and the hatred his family bore him, authorities immediately suspected this was no accidental fall, but rather murder. And indeed, under torture the brothers admitted that the family had clobbered him and thrown him off the cliff.