Mistress of the Vatican (36 page)

above: Pope Alexander VII by Giovanni-Battista Gaulli, known as Il Baciccio.

The successor of Innocent X charged Olimpia with stealing from Vatican coffers.

(© Civici Musei, Castello,

Udine.)
right: The dashing but useless Cardinal Camillo Astalli-Pamphili, Innocent X’s “fake” nephew.
(Courtesy of The His-panic Society of America, New

York.)

San Martino, the town Olimpia built for dowerless girls
as she had once been. Her palace is on the left, next to the church where she is buried.
(© Maurizio Vecchi.)

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

Unable to take the position herself, Olimpia already had a replacement picked out. She needed someone who was young enough and obedient enough to permit her to run the Vatican by serving as a front for her and doing every little thing she said. She found the perfect candidate in Francesco Maidalchini, the seventeen-year-old son of her half-brother, Andrea. Olimpia had originally planned for him to marry her granddaughter, Olimpiuccia, thereby keeping all the money in the family, but now she saw a better opportunity. Soon after Camillo’s resignation, she had Francesco named abbot of her church at San Martino and a canon of Saint Peter’s. She told the pope that this boy would be his next cardinal nephew.

The minimum age requirement for a cardinal was twenty-two. But the pope could grant a dispensation to make a newborn a cardinal, if he wanted. For political reasons Paul V gave the red hat to a ten-year-old Spanish prince in 1619, knowing that youth was the one handicap guaranteed to pass away with time. And manhood came earlier in past centuries. Seventeen-year-olds married, fathered children, slashed their way across battlefields, and toiled in their professions.

But Francesco Maidalchini had very little in the way of intelligence and an unattractive appearance to boot. Gregorio Leti described him as having “a stupid expression, neither the air nor the appearance of a man, with no experience of the world, ignorant of letters and even incapable of learning them, brutal and disagreeable in his actions and his words, badly made in body and mind, and carried away entirely with exercises and diversions low and unworthy to people of quality.”
⁴

The pope was fond not only of attractive women but of handsome men as well. He could barely stand to look at ugly people—it seemed to truly pain him—and he believed a person’s appearance reflected the virtues and intelligence radiating from within. It is not known what Innocent thought when looking in the mirror, but he was clearly displeased when looking at little snub-nosed Francesco Maidalchini.

Seeing the pope’s hesitation, Olimpia offered to put the boy under the instruction of top cardinals to bring him up to speed quickly. “But this was no more than to sow Corn upon a Rock,” Leti wrote. “Maid-alchini had no capacity to receive any thing at all, having brought an

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incredible stupidity along with him, even from his Mothers belly.”
⁵
And alas, Francesco’s ignorance would prove invincible.

Whether he was stupid or not, Olimpia insisted on the boy’s appointment, and the pope finally relented. Leti reported that “the rest of their Eminences were all astonish’d at the Election of such a person, and I know above forty of them were displeas’d, and would willingly have gone out of Rome to have avoided the sight of him, but in spight of their indignation, they were forc’d to be content to visit him as the rest, and to swallow that bitter Pill in the Cup of Patience, without speaking one word to the Pope against it.”
⁶

Making Francesco Maidalchini a cardinal trailed another problem in its wake. For three years Innocent had refused to give the nitwit Michel Mazarin a cap, explaining that a man of such low intelligence was not worthy of the honor. By caving in to Olimpia’s pleas to give her nephew a hat, the pope found he could no longer use this excuse.

It was no coincidence that on October 7, 1647, Francesco Maidalchini was created a cardinal along with Michel Mazarin. When the former ambassador Saint-Nicolas asked the pope what had changed his mind, Innocent was very frank, explaining that if he gave a cap to one imbecile, he might as well give a cap to the other imbecile, too. “Here is the entire secret of this affair,” Saint-Nicolas informed his prime minister.
⁷
But Mazarin didn’t care what the pope thought of his brother. Michel had received the red hat, thereby increasing the prime minister’s power and dignity, and that was all that mattered.

The creations were done to the deep regret of a pope who wanted to make only the brightest men cardinals and, political and family considerations aside, usually managed to do so. Innocent must have been consoled by the fact that he had, at least, made peace with France and kept Olimpia happy. Immediately after the consistory where the pope announced Maidalchini’s creation, Innocent had himself carried to the Piazza Navona, where he gave Olimpia the good news. On the same day, he instructed Cardinal Panciroli to start teaching the youth politics and diplomacy.

In rendering his courtesy visits to all the other members of the Sacred College and the foreign diplomats in Rome, Cardinal Maidalchini

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tried hard to remember the polite compliments Aunt Olimpia had taught him to say. He ended up stiffly repeating the same words again and again, “like a song that he had learned by heart. Moreover, he was not capable of producing anything more than abrupt changes of subject and ridiculous discourse.”
⁸

The Giustinianis and Ludovisis were furious that the selection had not fallen on a worthier candidate from one of their families. They stormed into the Vatican and let the pope know what a ridiculous choice he had made.

Unfortunately, the uproar over the boy’s promotion was not limited to the pope’s family. The people of Rome, who eagerly fell in love with a good-looking face and an impressive figure, could not pardon Cardinal Maidalchini’s unpalatable appearance. The new cardinal nephew, it was said, bore an uncanny resemblance to Pasquino, that battered statue with no nose. The day of Cardinal Maidalchini’s creation ceremony, someone hung a sign on Pasquino’s friend Marforio that read,

don’t cry pasquino,
as a companion you will have maldachino.
⁹

Leti grumbled, “And in fact this cardinal will forever be the laughingstock of the Sacred College, the scandal of the church, and the disgrace of all the Roman court. The instructions given him by his aunt, who did everything to persuade him to always keep beside him learned men, didn’t help much as he didn’t have the mind to reap any advantage.”
¹⁰

Olimpia knew she could not let this boy loose in the Vatican. Ca-millo, while forced to live with his mother, had still worked in the Vati-can offices. But Cardinal Maidalchini would not only live with Olimpia, he would also hold court there. In his impressive office in the front rooms of the Piazza Navona palace, Cardinal Maidalchini held his meetings with Olimpia sitting next to him, elbowing him to blurt out the answers she had taught him.

Giacinto Gigli wrote, “She didn’t want him to stay in the palace next to the pope, but to live in her house so she would not lose dominion. And she did not want the prelates and the rest of the court, who without doubt would have gone to the antechamber of the cardinal, to

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abandon her own antechamber.”
¹¹
Finally, the beating heart of the Vatican had been transferred to Olimpia’s own house.

But it did not last long. Cardinal Camillo, at least, had been a good-looking man with refined manners, dignified in his crimson robes. When he had managed to climb out of bed, he had politely discussed art, poetry, and gardening, though politics had seemed to escape him. But poor little Cardinal Maidalchini was hopeless. Confronted with experienced diplomats of the most powerful sovereigns in Europe, he sat numb with terror as they spoke of treaties, trade agreements, war, and taxation. His memory was awful, and he had a hard time sputtering out the statements Olimpia had taught him the night before.

Olimpia persuaded her nephew to espouse the cause of Spain. “But finding by degrees the little esteem the Spaniards had for him,” Leti explained, “by their several times neglecting to call him to their Assemblies, in which the intrigues of that Court were transacted, and all because they knew he had not judgement enough to give them any Councel, he turned to the French, who receiv’d him very readily, if for no other reason to secure his voice in the Conclave.”
¹²
One good thing did result from his hobnobbing with the French. Over time, Cardinal Maidalchini picked up a veneer of French elegance, and his conversation began to improve.

The Spaniards weren’t the only diplomats who found they were wasting their time talking to a pimple-faced boy in a cardinal’s costume. Other than the French, they all began sidestepping him and went right to Cardinal Panciroli in the Vatican.

As a reward for Olimpia’s invaluable aid in obtaining the red hat for Michel Mazarin, the queen of France suggested sending her a splendid tapestry and a silver dinner service. But Mazarin, in a rare and egregious miscalculation, instead sent Olimpia a large trunk of the queen’s old clothes. The gowns, of the finest materials edged with the richest lace, were valued at four thousand scudi, a significant sum. Perhaps the prime minister thought Olimpia would be honored to have the clothes of a queen who, a widow like her, always wore black. But he was dead wrong, and Olimpia was highly insulted to be given hand-me-downs from a queen or anyone else.

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When Ambassador Fontenay next called on Olimpia, she threw a royal conniption fit about the gift. The horrified diplomat wrote Mazarin immediately, letting him know he had made an awful mistake. On No-vember 17 the prime minister replied, “I believe that it is most important for the service of the king to correctly cultivate her friendship, and to omit nothing possible to conquer her entirely, knowing full well that her credit will prevail always with the pope over all his other relatives for the duration of this pontificate. . . . I ask you to discover what would please her most in terms of silver plate, precious stones or beautiful tapestries, and if she desires that these gifts come from the queen or from myself, if she prefers that the gifts go to her nephew [Maidalchini] or to her, if the thing should be publicly known or extremely secret, in fine, to conform exactly to the above punctually and in a manner that would be the most agreeable to her.”
¹³
It is probable that the gifts were sent by the queen instead of the cardinal, to Olimpia instead of her nephew, and quite publicly.

While Mazarin was sending splendid gifts to Olimpia, back home the people of France took note. In addition to the old dresses and whatever other presents Olimpia received, she would also have pocketed a cash commission. Speculation ran high as to exactly how much it had been. The president of the French Parlement declared that Michel Mazarin’s red hat had cost France twelve million gold pieces, which Olimpia Maidalchini had stashed in her bottomless pockets. The Venetian ambassador Nani wrote back to his senate that the price had actually been a mere one hundred thousand. Other French politicians said they knew for a fact she had received only thirty thousand, which is probably closer to the mark.