Mistress of the Vatican (39 page)

On November 27, the pope traveled to various vineyards and gardens in Rome for some fresh air. Gigli reported, “Many people went to him crying at the top of their voice, bread bread! Holy Father we cannot find bread, we want bread. The pope replied, You will have some. . . .
Some people retorted that bread would be found in his own house, and that another should govern than a woman.”
⁷

Innocent was so devastated by the scene that he took to his bed again. He had hoped to be a just pope ruling over a prosperous people. But now his people were starving, and they were shouting terrible things about Olimpia. By the end of November, it looked as though Innocent might die. Numb with terror at the thought, Olimpia exposed the Holy Sacrament in the Church of Saint Mary of the Peace. Masses were held across Rome to implore God to spare the pontiff.

Innocent slowly recovered, and Olimpia held the usual Christmas celebrations in her palazzo, though the mood was somber. At one of these events, a lady politely inquired as to how Her Excellency was doing. Shrugging, Olimpia replied with an old Italian saying: “I am like a beaten horse. The beatings just make my coat glossier.”
⁸

Many of Olimpia’s beatings took place right outside the rear of her palace. Pasquino had always had a lot to say about her, and looking out her corner window each morning, she could see the crowds gaping, elbowing one another, and laughing. Ever since Innocent became pope, most of the pasquinades had been about her. One cartoon showed the main entrance of Olimpia’s palazzo. In one frame, her valet was portrayed inviting inside a priest with a full purse, crying, “Come in, blessed father.” In the second frame the valet is shown chasing off a priest with

[ 230 ]

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

an empty purse, crying, “Go away, accursed one, into eternal ignominy.”
⁹
An unflattering caricature of Olimpia was leaning out of the window, crying, “Why do you trouble me? I will have nothing to do with the ungrateful.”
¹⁰

In addition to charges of bribe taking, the exact nature of Olimpia’s relationship with the pope was the object of intense speculation. One particularly popular Latin pasquinade made a pun on her name.
“Olim pia, nunc impia,”
it said: Once pious, now impious.
¹¹

The pasquinades became more vicious when bread ran short in Rome. One poem, which rhymes beautifully in Italian, stated:

Who says “lady” says harm.

Who says “woman” says misfortune. Who says Olimpia Maidalchini
Says lady, harm, ruin.
¹²

On one occasion Pasquino quipped:

“The Roman people are dying of hunger,”

It was said in the Vatican hall
So the pope, to put an end to the loss, Said Maidalchini would eat for us all.
¹³

Pasquino starting referring to Olimpia as the Pimpaccia of the Piazza Navona. Pimpa was a power-hungry, greedy vixen in a popular play, and the Italian ending
accia
means something like “incredibly horrible.”

It was believed that the princess of Rossano was responsible for some of the pasquinades, epigrams, and cartoons against her mother-in-law. After all, she held contests in her palazzo to create such witty masterpieces, and oddly enough, a short time later they appeared on the talking statues of Rome. Olimpia would have liked nothing more than to tie the slanderous pasquinades to her daughter-in-law. Giacinto Gigli wrote that she convinced the pope to station spies near Pasquino “who mixed with the crowds clothed in silk to look like gentlemen.”
¹⁴
Many pasquinade writers were arrested, including three mischievous brothers, but this didn’t put a dent in the heaps of biting verses piled on the statue.

More serious than the pasquinades were the
avvisi
sent to foreign

[ 231 ]

Eleanor Herman

governments. The agent of the duke of Modena was arrested because in his newsletter he wrote that the ministers of the tax department had held a meeting before the
papessa—
the female pope—where it was decided that the
pagnotta
should fall by two ounces. It was a great insult to the Holy See to call a woman the
papessa
and to insinuate that Olimpia was responsible for holding meetings to decide the vital issue of the bread supply. The worst part of it was that this
avvisi
was being sent to a foreign ruler. What messages had been sent out that had not been caught by the censors? What were heads of state thinking about Innocent?

Olimpia knew that the pope cared a great deal for the dignity of his office. All popes had to put up with nasty pasquinades, of course; that came with the office. But most of the pasquinades during Innocent’s reign were about Olimpia, not the pope. She was the cause of scandal, the cause of the waning dignity of the papacy. In front of the pope, she shrugged off the popular hatred, hid a great deal of what was going on, and presented a smiling face. But deep down she was worried. If it really came to a contest between Olimpia and the dignity of the papacy, she was not completely certain which one Innocent would choose.

q

The pope’s bouts with kidney stones led him to seek improved health in ways that would avoid encounters with doctors, whom he despised. In truth, seventeenth-century medical care was often more fatal than the disease it attempted to treat. The human body can often cure itself of many life-threatening ailments if given bed rest and hot soup; but the doctors’ interventions so weakened the body that it simply gave up and died. Blood was drained out in alarming quantities, and the nutrition needed for healing was forced either to explode upward or downward after the doctors’ administration of pukes or purges.

The pope decided that perhaps the only nonviolent way to improve his health was to improve the air he breathed. He moved to the Quirinal Palace on one of the Seven Hills of ancient Rome. The palace was also known as Monte Cavallo, or the Hill of Horses. Two immense sculptural groups of the Dioscuri, or Horse Tamers, had been unearthed from a nearby ancient temple and placed in the piazza in front of the palace.

[ 232 ]

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

The palace had its origins as a papal dwelling in 1587 when Pope Six-tus V bought a luxurious villa with extensive gardens as his summer residence. It offered the advantage of a good location still in the heart of Rome but lacked the mosquitoes and miasmas of the sunken Vatican. Sixtus added long wings around a large internal courtyard, and subsequent popes left their own marks on the palace and gardens. It was more comfortable than the ancient, moldy Vatican, and just as beautiful. It even boasted a replica of the Sistine Chapel with the same dimensions.

When the rest of Rome sweltered, the Quirinal was cooled by refreshing breezes. Upon moving in, Innocent liked the palace so much he decided he would stay there year-round and sleep at the Vatican only if he was required to perform ceremonial functions early the next morning. He must have been elated when his doctors cried out that this was a terrible idea, and he must return to the Vatican every winter for the sake of his health. With a gleam in his eye, he told them he wouldn’t budge.

q

Detested at home because of the famine, Innocent found himself humiliated on the international level by the ignominious end of the Thirty Years’ War. Having started in 1618 as a religious quarrel between Catholic and Protestant states, over time it had become a multinational free-for-all to grab territory from neighbors.

The Thirty Years’ War was the bloodiest, widest-ranging war of the early modern age. Much of Germany was devastated. Hundreds of thousands of civilians had been killed, thousands of villages burned to the ground, millions of acres destroyed, and all in the name of God. The lesson learned by both Catholics and Protestants alike was that war in the name of religion clearly wasn’t worth it. The costs of defending religious beliefs were too high. Better to have people worship as they pleased and wage war only for sensible reasons, like taking a neighbor’s land or stealing his money.

By 1648 Europe was bled white and ready for a peace that settled both religious and territorial questions. The Treaty of Westphalia stipulated that the Lutheran and Calvinist religions were to be officially tolerated by the Catholic princes of Germany, and ecclesiastical

[ 233 ]

Eleanor Herman

lands, whether Protestant or Catholic, were to be returned to whomever owned them in a year arbitrarily chosen, which happened to be 1624.

For the first time since Martin Luther questioned papal authority in 1517, European monarchs accepted that the religious divide was irreparable. There would be no forcing the heretics back to the fold of the Mother Church. Heretics, the treaty acknowledged, were here to stay and were rich and powerful to boot. It was a humiliating acknowledgment for Pope Innocent X.

When Innocent heard the terms of the peace treaty, he was furious. He wanted heretics converted, not tolerated, in Germany. And according to the treaty, the church had to hand over to Protestants numerous territories it had conquered since 1624—three archbishoprics and thirteen bishoprics, a total of sixteen huge territories including thousands of churches, monasteries, and pious foundations.

The papal envoy to the negotiations, Monsignor Fabio Chigi, stated that the Austrian ambassador, Count Maximilian von Trauttmansdorff, would sign over Saint Peter’s Basilica itself to the Protestants if they asked for it. No one at the table seemed to take the church seriously. Chigi wrote, “To pass the time, these gentlemen play with bishoprics and monasteries as boys play with nuts and marbles.”
¹⁵

For centuries, the Vatican had been the great negotiator, the mediator of European wars. Not only was Innocent
not
invited to mediate the treaty, it was signed over his shrieking protests. Times were changing. Nation-states were rising even as the secular importance of the papacy fell. The Treaty of Westphalia was a watershed event for the Vatican, marking the end of its diplomatic hegemony and signaling the rise of the modern state. Sadly, everyone knew that Innocent couldn’t keep his own fractious family members from making war on one another, much less European nations.

Innocent issued a bull dated November 20, 1648, declaring the Treaty of Westphalia “null, void, invalid, iniquitous, unjust, damnable, reprobate, inane, empty of meaning and effect for all time.”
¹⁶
He was politely ignored. The Catholic German nations, eager to clean up the debris and move forward, didn’t want the pope making any trouble about the

[ 234 ]

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

treaty and prohibited his bull from being distributed. Like a bad would-be author, the pope couldn’t even get published.

To his great disappointment, the real victor of the Thirty Years’ War was France, which emerged from the conflict triumphant. Spain and Austria climbed out of the ashes exhausted, though Spain was still too proud to sign a treaty with France and would continue the war, sort of, until 1659. Having trounced its ancient enemies, the path would be open for France to rise to glory under Louis XIV. But that was in the future, and when the Treaty of Westphalia was signed, the brilliant Sun King was yet a slender ray, playing with toy soldiers.

Other parts of the world presented difficulties for the pontiff. Victorious Muslim fleets continued to conquer Venetian trading posts in the Aegean, sweeping ever westward. England was ruled by the Puritans, the most virulent heretics ever seen, who cut off the head of the Catholic sympathizer King Charles I in January 1649. They executed priests, stripped English Catholics of all their possessions, and sent troops into Ireland, where they massacred more than 100,000 Catholics.

Looking further afield, the pope’s missions to South America were fraught with personality conflicts. A nine-month journey from Rome, missions so far from Vatican control were often reduced to brawling among bishops and priests to see who could wield the most power. In North America, missionaries to Canada were being slaughtered by the Iroquois.

But the pope experienced some successes. In terms of spreading the faith in Africa, his missionaries had received a friendly reception in Senegal in 1645 and had converted the king of Benin in 1648. Italian Capuchin monks had entered the kingdom of the Congo in 1646. In India the Jesuits were extremely active. The king of Ceylon became Catholic in 1644. In the Philippines, Innocent built the Dominican College of Manila to teach theology and bestow academic degrees. The Christians in Japan had been destroyed, but in China there were some 150,000 of them.

Missionary efforts were not all in the far-flung corners of the globe. An ongoing program existed in Rome itself. The Jewish community was a source both of pride and embarrassment to the Holy See—pride