Mistress of the Vatican (30 page)

Having cleverly lost a fortune to Olimpia at cards, the ambassador then informed the pope of Cardinal Mazarin’s dearest wish, the one tiny favor that would cement the friendship of France and the Papal States forever—a cardinal’s cap for Mazarin’s brother, the Dominican priest Father Michel. This request was not out of Mazarin’s love for Michel, whom he considered an idiot, but out of his dynastic ambitions.

By making some of his relatives high-level churchmen and marrying

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others into powerful European families, Mazarin could strengthen his tenuous hold on power. He was prime minister neither by election, nor by parliamentary approval, nor by the king’s personal appointment because the king was still a small child. Jules Mazarin held power because he was the queen mother’s lover.

While the French might have shrugged and winked when it came to taking the queen to bed, what they could not forgive was that the prime minister of France wasn’t even French. Though he dripped in opulent French lace and clipped his silky beard in the sharply pointed French fashion, beneath his overpowering French cologne there remained the annoying whiff of spaghetti sauce. The powerful nobles grumbled, and Mazarin lived uneasily, knowing that he could be toppled at any moment.

Unfortunately for the prime minister’s dearest wish, Innocent knew Michel Mazarin and despised him. In fact, many people wondered if Michel was all right in the head. He seemed to be a child, giggling one moment, stomping his foot in rage the next, apologizing after that. In addition to his impetuosity, Michel was known for his “indiscretions,” which we can presume to be sexual in nature.

Innocent had too great a respect for the church to make such a man a cardinal. When the pope’s list of cardinals was announced on March 6, 1645, it included Orazio Giustiniani, the brother of Andrea Giustini-ani, who had married Olimpia’s older daughter, Maria. It also listed Niccolò Albergati, a cousin of Niccolò Ludovisi, who had married Olim-pia’s younger daughter, Costanza. These creations were all well and good as etiquette demanded that the pope select a cardinal from each of the families that had married into his own. But of the five other cardinals, not one of them was named Michel Mazarin. Worse, all seven were known to be pro-Spanish.

Ambassador Gremonville marched into the Vatican protesting loudly, and Innocent declared that he would
never
consider Michel Mazarin worthy of the honor of being a cardinal. When Jules Mazarin heard the news, he was so insulted that he loudly threatened to follow the ways of Henry VIII, creating an autonomous church of France and never paying another penny to Rome. He ordered his ambassador to leave Rome

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immediately. Nursing his wounded pride, Mazarin considered the best way to humiliate the stubborn pope.

Meanwhile, Cardinal Antonio Barberini found himself in a terrible situation. Having lost his French income, he called on his old enemies the Spaniards, who, in order to obtain his support in conclave for Cardinal Pamphili, had promised they would restore any loss of French funds. Now Spain apologetically backtracked, saying they could not offend their ally, the duke of Tuscany, who hated Antonio Barberini. Besides, they really couldn’t afford it. And so he was left with no money and no honors. In the streets of Rome, people hissed and hooted and threw dung at his carriage. Many cardinals avoided him, and Cardinal de’ Medici pretended not to see him at all, looking straight through him so he would not have to render his respects according to protocol.

Worse was to come. While Innocent was initially kind to the Bar-berinis, letting them know how much he appreciated their votes in conclave, he found himself increasingly besieged on all sides to investigate them for corruption. The Vatican treasury was nineteen million scudi in the red, and the useless Castro war alone had cost twelve million. There were, all in all, tens of millions of scudi missing. And much of it could be found in Barberini palaces and art collections.

Olimpia, too, was pressuring the pope to punish the Barberinis, who were furious at her. She had betrayed them, they complained, promising to marry her son to their niece, when all along she must have known Camillo was planning on becoming cardinal nephew. Fantastically rich, still powerful in their connections, the Barberinis could wreak the most excruciating revenge on Olimpia as soon as Innocent breathed his last. Better to have them poor, powerless, and exiled. The warm feeling of safety that Olimpia had enjoyed when Innocent was elected hadn’t lasted very long. The highest position in the land was not so much a sanctuary as a target. Now Olimpia had more enemies, who could do her more harm, than ever before.

Innocent was tortured by indecision. He was keenly aware that without the Barberini votes he would never have been elected pope, and he was always ready to show gratitude to those—like Olimpia—who had helped him. On the other hand, with his strict sense of justice and

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strong streak of parsimony, Innocent knew the Barberinis had had their hands in the till. Pressured by Olimpia, numerous cardinals, advisors, Pasquino, and the people of Rome, the pope named a commission to investigate the Barberini family for corruption. He wanted a detailed accounting of all monies the family had received from the Vatican and how they had been spent.

But the Barberinis had kept lousy account books and in many cases hadn’t kept any records at all. For the twenty-one years their uncle was pope, they had used the Vatican treasury as a personal bank account for building palaces, buying art, and helping the poor. Awash in money, they had seen no reason to keep a record of it. Waving away the Bar-berini excuses, the commission insisted loudly on getting the accounting records, and the family grew desperate.

Mazarin realized that he could become a thorn in the side of the pope by taking the Barberini family back under his protection as the persecuted victims of a cruel pontiff. Forgetting his fury and vengeance against them only months earlier, he secretly extended his welcome and promise of financial assistance if things got too hot in Rome.

As usual, Pasquino, with his psychic abilities, made an accurate prediction, crowing: “From what people are saying, I think that we will see Innocent chasing away from Rome the family of the bee.”
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Cardinal Antonio immediately took Mazarin up on his offer. Though all Barberinis had been guilty of corruption above and beyond the accepted level, Cardinal Antonio had possibly been guilty of murder as well. There had been that little matter in the early 1630s when he sent Olimpia’s young nephew to war and he died soon after, shot in the back, it was said, by a henchman of the good cardinal. Now Antonio felt he was in grave danger. In September, without obtaining the mandatory papal permission to travel, he fled Rome for France. Upon hearing the news, Innocent was shocked.

In December Prince Taddeo and Cardinal Francesco Barberini unearthed some records for the war of Castro, which they delivered to the commission. But the commissioners found the records highly irregular; the war had cost some twelve million scudi, but the entries had gaping holes, with large sums unaccounted for. As a result, all Barberini bank

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accounts were frozen and all Barberini family members were put under surveillance. Servants were taken away for questioning—a polite word for torture. Word on the street was that the Barberinis would be put in prison, perhaps a dank, dark cell in the dungeons of Castel Sant’Angelo, a place from which few people ever emerged.

Dressed as huntsmen, Cardinal Francesco, Prince Taddeo, and his children sailed away from Rome in January 1646, leaving the imperious Anna Colonna to defend what was left of the family property. Just when Olimpia thought she could take over the Palazzo Barberini, Anna Colonna defiantly raised the French flag over the entrance, declaring that she had given the house to Louis XIV, and brought in French soldiers to defend the property. It was a clever move, because now if Olim-pia made any attempt to take it, France would have cause to wage war on the pope.

Though Anna Colonna kept her palace, it was cold and empty. All the exquisite furnishings had been hidden from the pope. The princess, who had used only utensils of pure gold and silver, was seen waving a rusty tin fork in the air as lamentable proof of how far the family fortunes had fallen due to the vengeance of the Pamphilis. Many who knew her, however, said she still had the gold and silver utensils safely hidden in a palace wall and used the rusty tin forks to make herself look pitiful.

Mazarin welcomed the fugitive Barberinis in triumph, greeting them outside Paris with a cavalcade of more than a hundred carriages. He held lavish banquets for them and restored their French incomes. The French government decried the unjust persecution of the poor innocent cardinals.

Documents indicated that when Innocent heard of Mazarin’s exuberant welcome of the Barberinis to Paris, he threw a temper tantrum, screaming and jumping up and down in his white robes. “The heretics are laughing,” he said, “and the Catholics are scandalized to see a pope so scorned as I am.”
⁴

While the pope was fretting about his loss of dignity, Olimpia was not above having a good laugh at the situation. For the Carnival of 1646 she gave a play in her palazzo, attended by Rome’s elite, in which

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a staggering drunk (Francesco Barberini) was held up by a man dressed half-French, half-Italian (Mazarin), who picked him off the ground each time he fell. Those with more delicate sensibilities thought the play in very poor taste given the dangerous international situation. But Olimpia’s cackles rang out loudly at this earthy scene. Word of the Carnival comedy winged its way swiftly to Paris, where her humor didn’t translate very well into French.

Mazarin considered his next step. Though he couldn’t very well attack the Vicar of Christ, he could wage war on the pope’s ally, Spain, in territories uncomfortably close to the Papal States. In the spring of 1646, a French fleet left port in Provence, captured the Spanish isle of Elba, and raided principalities along the Italian coast. To show the pope that the war was, indeed, a personal vendetta, France captured the Spanish territory of Piombino, owned by Olimpia’s son-in-law Prince Ludovisi.

But French successes were short-lived. Plagued by military setbacks, Mazarin suddenly looked ridiculous, waging a stupid war against Spain just because his idiot brother was not given a cardinal’s cap. Some called it a tyrannical abuse of power.

In addition to his reverses in the war, Mazarin soon discovered that he did not like the Barberini brothers, who had become a thorn in his side. They seemed ungrateful for the income he had given them, whining that it was not nearly as much as they had enjoyed in Rome. They were reduced to such a disgraceful state, they lamented, that they couldn’t even throw decent dinner parties. They wanted to go home. They wanted their Roman titles, honors, commissions, positions, and properties restored. Surely the all-powerful Mazarin could make this happen.

Given the lost battles, huge costs, political unrest, and the Barberini complaints, the beleaguered prime minister couldn’t stand it anymore. What had seemed like a political stroke of genius was quickly turning into a disaster. Mazarin sent a new ambassador to Rome, the abbot Saint-Nicolas, to negotiate the Barberinis’ return in a manner that would allow both France and the Holy See to keep face. On June 20, Saint-Nicolas was received by the pope, who insisted that the Barberinis write him a letter of apology and pay a hefty fine of 600,000 scudi. When Saint-Nicolas spoke of reducing the amount, the pope inveighed

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against “the consummate dissimulation” of the family that cried poverty “while from the dust of their palace you could get a fortune, and that Donna Anna used the same lies when eating on earthen plates.”
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As negotiations proceeded, Olimpia was also having second thoughts about the Barberini exile. If she brought them back, they would be extremely grateful to her. Perhaps it was not too late to arrange a marriage between the families, and all would be forgotten. She told Innocent it was time to let bygones be bygones and sweep the whole untidy affair under the rug. On September 12, Innocent acquitted the Barberinis of criminal intent and did not impose his threatened fine, but he stubbornly insisted on receiving letters of apology before he permitted their return. And the matter of their confiscated property would have to be attended to later.

On December 16, Cardinal Antonio wrote three letters asking pardon, one to Innocent, one to Olimpia, and one to Camillo. On the same day, not by coincidence, Saint-Nicolas called on Olimpia, who welcomed him with a great show of friendship. Saint-Nicolas, knowing exactly what to say to win her over, thanked her obsequiously for using her immense influence with the pope on behalf of the Barberinis. When Olim-pia demurred, saying she hadn’t really done anything, he assured her of her great power. Later that day the ambassador wrote to Mazarin, “She would have been plenty mad if we believed she didn’t have any.”
⁶

Mazarin, having finally put away his warships, felt increasingly well disposed toward the pope. First of all, he was going to get the troublesome Barberinis off his hands. Second, Mazarin felt that Innocent was not in a position to refuse a cardinal’s hat to his idiot brother, Michel. And now he truly understood who had the power to obtain it for him—Olimpia. Saint-Nicolas had informed Mazarin that all efforts should be concentrated on Olimpia, and that it was perfectly useless to speak with the cardinal nephew. “It is better not to go there at all,” he advised, “because he only responds with compliments.”
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