Mistress of the Vatican (40 page)

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because unlike other nations, the Papal States had never slaughtered its Jews; embarrassment because just a short walk from the Vatican lived a stubborn population of nonbelievers.

Jews had lived in Rome since at least the time of Jesus. In 1555, Pope Paul IV had crammed all Jews into an eight-acre walled ghetto in Traste-vere on the Tiber. During Innocent’s reign, the population had risen to some four thousand. Jews were not permitted to own property or work in the government or the military. They were only allowed to sell used goods, run small shops, and lend money. They were also expected to pay enormous taxes to the Roman government. The purpose of these punitive measures was to induce the Jews to convert, and each convert was given his choice of career—possibly a high office in the Vatican itself—a generous pension, and the right to move out of the ghetto. Unmarried female converts were given ample dowries and strapping Christian husbands.

But converts from the ancient, closely knit community were few. Frustrated by this, in 1584 Pope Gregory XIII decreed that 155 Jews over the age of twelve had to attend a church service every Saturday— the Jewish holy day—in which a Dominican friar preached to them of their theological errors. If fewer than the required number showed up, the community was forced to pay a heavy fine. And so they attended, but some stuffed their ears with cotton and others used the opportunity to catch up on their sleep. The church hired a bailiff to patrol the sermon stick in hand and whack those who were not listening. This, too, had little effect.

On January 7, 1645, John Evelyn attended such a service and left us a priceless description of it. “A Sermon was preach’d to the Jewes at Ponte Sisto,” he wrote, “who are constrained to sit till the houre is don; but it is with so much malice in their countenances, spitting, hum’ing, coughing, and motion, that it is almost impossible they should heare a word from the preacher.” He added, “A conversion is very rare.”
¹⁷

Wherever the poor pope looked, whether in his family, in his city, across Europe, or around the globe, there was scandal, war, famine, slaughter, and humiliation. It was enough to give anybody kidney stones.

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The Shoulder of Saint Francesca

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For wheresoever the carcass is, there will the vultures be gathered together.

—Matthew 24:28 limpia’s 1646 Carnival play written with Gian Lorenzo Bernini, in which they made fun of the pope and Camillo, had resulted in the sculptor’s disgrace. Another play that year, in which she depicted Francesco Barberini as a staggering drunk and Cardinal Mazarin dressed half-French and half-Italian, had had international repercussions. Nothing is recorded about her 1647 and 1648 plays, but for the Carnival of 1649, Olimpia planned another controversial comedy, the story of a young fool who disobeys his wise mother and marries an obnoxious woman who renders his life miserable.

By this time Innocent knew that to prevent scandal he had to examine Olimpia’s comedies carefully before they were performed at her palazzo. The grandest nobles in Rome had eagerly auditioned for the roles and had already memorized their parts when the pope looked into it and put the kibosh on the performance. Olimpia could put on a play if she wanted, Innocent said, but it had to be something less likely to

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Eleanor Herman

cause further uproar in the family. Whatever she put on, it probably did not please the pope. In his
avvisi
of February 6, 1649, Teodoro Amayden noted, “Signora Donna Olimpia has begun her comedies, which are licentious enough.”
¹

On February 9, the Jews were forced to perform their Carnival race through a torrential downpour, to the delight of spectators. After the skies cleared, the weather became unusually warm, and Olimpia took a carriage ride along the Corso. As she passed the Palazzo Aldobrandini she looked up and saw her son and the princess standing in the front window watching the Carnival revelers below. But when they spotted Olimpia, instead of bowing politely as etiquette demanded, they “removed themselves from the window so she would not see them,” Amayden recounted.
²

Furious at the insult, Olimpia ordered her driver to go around the block. When she returned, she saw Camillo and the princess standing in the window again. And when they saw her, they once more stepped backward into the shadows. Amayden added that the snub “was seen by all.”
³

Olimpia raced to complain to the pope. But having told him of the public insult, she was astonished to find that he was angry at
her.
Certainly Camillo and the princess of Rossano had behaved badly by backing away from the window when they saw her, Innocent agreed, but why did she so pointedly stick her head out of the carriage window and look up? And if that weren’t bad enough, why did she order her coachman to go around the block again, stop her carriage and lean out
again,
squinting and grimacing at the princess’s window?

Olimpia, the pope continued, should have politely pretended not to notice the snub and kept on rolling. It was
her
behavior that had made everybody look up at the window in the first place. She, too, must bear some responsibility for creating scandal, and he was tired of her blaming everything on her daughter-in-law.

The princess of Rossano was racking up victories in the War of the Olimpias. She had given birth to an undisputed Pamphili heir despite her mother-in-law’s purported plans to cast doubt on the child’s heritage. She had received permission to remain in Rome despite Olimpia’s hostile campaign for exile. She had emerged triumphant in the public

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skirmishes of the carriages, the insulting epigram contests, and Olim-pia’s never-performed Carnival comedy. Yet not all was victory; the princess began to see signs of defeat very close to home.

The bloom was off the bud in terms of her marriage. After two years with Camillo, the thrill of the forbidden love affair had gone, and the steamy sexual passions had burned themselves out. Now, looking across the breakfast table, the princess realized that she was married to a dolt. Cardinal Pallavicino put it diplomatically when he described Camillo as “a man very much inferior to the mediocrity of others, while his wife was far above the mediocrity of other women.”
⁴

Using his wife’s money, Camillo designed improvements to her gardens and collected statues. He spent an inordinate amount of time trying to give the Pamphili family an ancient noble lineage, instead of the unimpressive descent from the fifteenth-century Pamphilis of the Umbrian backwater of Gubbio. The legendary king of Rome in the sixth century b.c. was called Numa Pompilio. In writing his history of the family, Ca-millo fudged the name to Numa Pamphilio and claimed direct descent. He was terribly proud of his genealogical accomplishment and didn’t seem to notice that people—including his wife—were laughing.

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Olimpia was an avid collector of relics. Catholics believed that the body parts of saints retain the essence of holiness that can perform miracles or at least bring good luck. Saints’ bones, blood, hair, skin, teeth, and even clothing and household items were treasured as miracle-working totems, encased in gold and crystal and studded with diamonds.

The royal family of Spain was fortunate to possess entire saintly cadavers, which, if a member of the dynasty became gravely ill, would be put into the sickbed. Sometimes the royal four-poster became a charnel house of moldering corpses, with the bright eyes of a feverish prince or princess peering out from beneath them. Oddly, the miraculous corpses sometimes affected a cure. Or perhaps, if that experience didn’t kill the invalid, nothing would.

In the Dark and Middle Ages, merchants in the Byzantine Empire, hearing of the European thirst for relics, were seen in crumbling cem-

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eteries digging up rotten bones—of pagans—calling them the bones of early Christian martyrs, and selling them to pilgrims for high prices. Not only human remains were sold. No one seemed to mind that some saints’ bones had a disturbingly canine appearance.

One of the most daring feats of relic stealing occurred in a.d. 828 when two Venetians smuggled the body of Saint Mark the Evangelist out of Muslim-controlled Egypt, where he had been buried. It was thought that Muslims, who had their own cult of saints, would never allow their enemies the Catholics to cart off such a powerful relic, which could even be used against them in battle. They would sooner hide it or destroy it than let it fall into the hands of Christians.

The two Venetians, having secretly dug up the body, took it to their ship, and stashed it into a barrel of pickled pork, a food abhorred by Is-lam. Then, when Muslim customs officers arrived on board to check the cargo, the smugglers smilingly opened the barrel. “Unclean!” the Muslims cried, running off the ship in terror. And that is why Saint Mark is in Venice to this day, and crowds still throng to see the magnificent church that sprouted around his bones.

One of Martin Luther’s beefs with the Catholic Church was the veneration of false relics and the belief that such veneration would confer a get-out-of-purgatory-free card. Until Luther’s followers tossed them into the trash, one German church boasted a feather from the wing of the angel Gabriel, and the bishop of Mainz had a magically solidified flame from Moses’ burning bush. Even today, the cathedral at Aachen has Jesus’ diaper and the loincloth he wore on the cross. Most of all, Luther was disturbed that eighteen disciples were buried on German soil, when Christ had had only twelve.

The multiplication of relics didn’t disturb Catholics, however. If a Protestant visitor to Italy politely asked a priest how there could be, for instance, two heads or three feet of a particular saint, he would smile, shrug, and say, “It’s a miracle!” One Italian church reportedly possessed the head of John the Baptist as a child.

A sure sign of God’s approval was a corpse that remained fresh long after death. In 1599 the body of Saint Cecilia, an early Christian martyr, was found under the high altar of the Roman church named after her.

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Her corpse was surprisingly well preserved, with skin and hair intact. Over several days before the sacred body was reburied, thousands streamed into the church to see it.

The phrase “odor of sanctity” has its origins in reports that certain saintly bodies, when dug up, were not only intact but also exuded the delicate fragrance of roses. A rank, rapidly deteriorating corpse, on the other hand, was the mark of God’s displeasure. Catholics were delighted to hear that no sooner had Martin Luther died in 1546 than his body turned black and began to stink, a sure sign of a quick trip south to a very hot place.

The body parts of saints were called first-class relics. Some Italian churches boasted magnificent first-class items—drops of the Virgin Mary’s breast milk, the foreskin of Jesus’ penis, and his umbilical cord. Other churches offered second-class relics, articles that had been intimately connected with the holy person during his or her life. One Roman church exposed Jesus’ cradle from the manger, and another the marble pedestal on which Pontius Pilate had had him flogged.

In the Vatican itself was the lance that the Roman centurion Longi-nus used to pierce the Savior’s side on the cross; a portrait of Christ on the handkerchief of Saint Veronica, which she had used to wipe the sweat from his face as he carried the cross; and the papal throne of Saint Peter (though carbon dating recently determined that it was, in fact, from the ninth century).

Across Europe, many churches and lucky individuals had splinters of the true cross on which Jesus had been crucified. The cross had been brought to Rome in about a.d. 327 by Constantine’s mother, the devout empress Helena, who had purchased it on a relic-shopping trip to Jeru-salem. There the empress had been approached by a group of Jews who claimed to know where the cross had been hidden centuries earlier. Considering the cruelty with which the Roman emperors had walloped Middle Eastern Jews—obliterating more than a million, and knocking down their holy Jerusalem temple—we can only hope that as Helena sailed back to Rome, those who sold her the cross were not laughing, imagining Constantine’s mother worshipping a piece of rotten wood they had buried the night before.

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Third-class relics were articles that had touched the saint when alive or his bones after death. Even these were thought to have healing powers, having soaked up the magical properties of the saint’s body through physical contact. It was, however, generally not accepted that a person with whom a saint had shaken hands could set himself up in a church for public veneration as a third-class relic.

The pope’s relatives usually showed their piety by endowing their own churches. But because every church worth its salt had to have a first-class relic, and so few new saints were forthcoming in such a degenerate age, somewhere a saintly corpse had to be dismembered.