Mistress of the Vatican (45 page)

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It was the biggest Holy Year ever, with some 700,000 pilgrims coming from all parts of Europe over the course of twelve months. While many travelers shuffled into Rome anonymous, dusty, and tired, others arrived with ostentatious panache. The emperor of China sent a delegation bursting with silken Oriental splendor, years in the planning and two years on the road. The king of the Congo sent warriors draped in leopard skin, laden with thick ivory and gold bangles, and brandishing ceremonial spears.

The most spectacular entourage, however, was clearly that of the Spanish ambassador, the duke of Infantado, representing King Philip

IV. He arrived escorted by 300 carriages, 100 of them rounded up by Prince Ludovisi from his friends and neighbors. This was a satisfying number because the French ambassador had only managed to scare up an embarrassing 160 carriages for his procession. The duke of Infan-tado had in his train hundreds of grooms holding the reins of gaily caparisoned horses, a squadron of tall Africans in plumed turbans, and a team of hunchbacks riding small white mules with jangling silver bells on their saddles.

Of all jubilee visitors, the great Spanish portrait painter Diego Ve-lázquez left us the most lasting souvenir. During the artist’s papal audience, he studied Innocent intently. Back in his rooms, he painted the

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pope without a single sitting. When he presented the portrait to the pope, Innocent took one look at it and cried, “Too true!”
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It is, indeed, almost a photograph of Innocent in all his pontifical majesty, sitting in a red velvet papal chair with gilded woodwork and finials. He wears a frothy white knee-length rochet edged with lace, a shining red satin mozzetta over his shoulders, and on his head the red satin
camauro
. His small, suspicious eyes look critically at the viewer. His brow is furrowed into a perturbed scowl. His lips are slightly pursed, as if he is about to say something unpleasant. The background, perhaps meant to represent a drape, appears unfinished, almost impressionistic, angry swatches of red and black.

The month of May saw the arrival of another famous pilgrim. Princess Maria of Savoy, great-aunt of the reigning duke, clattered into Rome with impressive pageantry. The princess was a fifty-six-year-old spinster and Capuchin lay nun—she lived the life of a nun but had never taken a nun’s vows. She had, however, founded a convent in Turin where she spent her days in prayer, penance, and good works. She and her ladies wore enormous hoods and billowing coats of many wide folds that made the Romans laugh. She was profoundly deaf and used a silver ear horn to help her hear.

Princess Maria went first to visit the pope, to whom she gave a gorgeous reproduction of the Shroud of Turin encrusted with jewels. Immediately after her papal audience, she should have called on Olimpia as first lady of Rome. But instead of going to the Piazza Navona, the princess’s carriage rumbled straight to the Tor de’ Specchi Convent, where she would be residing. And there she remained.

It was a huge snub to Olimpia because everyone in Rome knew the princess had not visited her. But the devout Princess Maria had no intention of calling on a woman who had been born a nobody and who, it was thought, ruled Rome only because she was the pope’s mistress. At the convent, Princess Maria’s bias against Olimpia was exacerbated by Sister Ag-atha, who yelled into her ear horn the story of poor Camillo’s miserable exile, the noble suffering of the pregnant princess of Rossano, and their continued estrangement from the pope, all at Olimpia’s wicked instigation. The princess stayed put, and Olimpia’s enemies roared with laughter.

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As the days passed and still the princess did not call, Olimpia real-ized she needed to do something or she would be the laughingstock of Rome. She came up with an invitation so tantalizing that the devout princess would not be able to turn it down. Olimpia’s private chapel in the Piazza Navona palace was stuffed with the relics of saints and a splinter of the true cross. Surely the princess would like to pray before such holy objects. Practically salivating at the very thought, Princess Maria agreed to make a brief private visit as long as no one else knew about it. She certainly didn’t want the Roman public to know she had debased herself by visiting such an awful woman.

When Princess Maria arrived at the Piazza Navona palace, Olimpia smilingly guided her upstairs and opened the doors to her
galleria.
The princess entered, thinking it was the chapel with the holy relics. To her dismay, she found a crowd of hundreds bowing and clapping. Cardinals, bishops, ambassadors, noblemen, and their wives were standing on both sides of the gallery to witness Olimpia’s triumph. Giacinto Gigli wrote, “There she found all the prelates of Rome, and a good part of the ladies, and she never saw the chapel, and went home disgusted.”
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One of the goals of the jubilee was to encourage conversions. It was hoped that heretics—Protestants—or apostates—Muslims and Jews— would be so overcome by the pageantry and glory of the church that they would recant their false beliefs and spring into the arms of Ca-tholicism.

There were never many conversions, but in a church under threat every single one was greeted with great fanfare. In 1650 six Jews converted, as well as a Turk and several heretics, including a Huguenot who threw himself at the feet of the pope while he conducted Mass and begged to be admitted into the Roman Catholic Church. Innocent embraced the reformed heretic and welcomed him back into the fold.

Sometimes pilgrims were so overcome with religious zeal that they forgot themselves. One gentleman, seeing the papal procession coming out of Saint Peter’s, became so emotional that he darted into the procession, flung his arms around His Holiness, and kissed him.

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Unfortunately, he had kissed the pope’s bearded, exquisitely robed butler. Innocent was standing farther back, enjoying a good laugh at the comical scene.

Not all pilgrims were so devout. Numerous groups, lining up to march to church to proclaim their Christian devotion, got into bloody fights with other groups who were butting in front of them in the parade line. Some of these fights spilled over into churches, and the high altars were littered with dead bodies.

In June, Giacinto Gigli described a riot involving some two thousand pilgrims marching in two different religious parades, both of whom tried to push in front of the other. “Many were wounded with cudgels, among them the Marchese Santa Croce who was beaten in the head. . . . The marchese’s coachman was taken to the hospital badly wounded in the face by a paving stone. These tumults happen on the street almost every day because these villains come from their own countries to Rome for the jubilee . . . and are so haughty they give room to no one and go processing through the streets and won’t let anyone pass by. . . . If they come upon another group, they fight with their fists, because each wants precedence.”
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The
avvisi
noted that some pilgrims, after begging God to forgive their sins and whipping themselves, ran to an inn and ate meat instead of fish, got wretchedly drunk, and had sex with whores. A French visitor observed, “No one abstained from eating forbidden meat, and despite their libertinage, you could see them praying and crying out for mercy, mercy, and beating their breasts as if they were the greatest saints in the world.”
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Giacinto Gigli lamented, “Devotion is lost, and the Jubilee will create scandal and damage and make us Christians look like fools to the Jews, the Heretics, and the Gentiles who see and hear of these mishaps.”
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But there were more serious concerns than unruly pilgrims. Crowd control had not yet been mastered, and well-attended events presented mortal dangers. On May 16 a huge throng surged toward the Quirinal Palace to see the pope bestow his blessing from a balcony. Many pilgrims were crushed, trampled, and suffocated, and Innocent was devastated to hear of the deaths and injuries.

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Then there was the drought. For the first eight months of 1650 it barely rained at all, which prompted fears of another famine. Every day the pilgrims trudged to the four churches in a thick cloud of dust. An epidemic of some sort began to cull its victims. Gigli wrote, “Many people grew sick and many of the pilgrims and workers and even noble and rich people died suddenly.”
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Pilgrims who came to Rome for the jubilee of 1650 had a long list of things to see—festive celebrations, Roman ruins, medieval churches, the beautiful new Saint Peter’s Basilica, and most fascinating of all, the pope’s sister-in-law, who, everyone knew, ran the Vatican.

Those who lived outside Rome had a hard time picturing this woman who ruled a pope, a church, and a nation. Some thought she had achieved her influence through her beauty. She must be drop-dead gorgeous, a Helen of Troy whose face mesmerized even the most dried-up old churchmen. Others, knowing she was fifty-nine, an age bordering on decrepitude, thought perhaps she was more like Cleopatra, no classic beauty but redolent of charm and seduction. After all, there were many such women at the courts of Europe who were still desirable despite having left the freshness of youth far behind. Yet others, who heard she was neither beautiful nor fascinating, believed her influence was the result of witchcraft. She was in league with the devil, they said, to ruin God’s church. She must be inherently evil, a very monster of iniquity trafficking with Satan himself.

When they saw Olimpia, all three groups of pilgrims must have been grievously disappointed. For what they saw was a short, heavy woman in late middle age whose face once had been handsome but now sported a double chin and sagging jowls, a graying bourgeois matron in plain black widow’s weeds. She was neither radiantly beautiful, nor scintillat-ingly seductive, nor manifestly malevolent.

This mistress of the Vatican was a woman no one would ever look at twice, had they not known who she was. Here was a woman who could pass unnoticed in a crowd of colorful Italian nobles, bold prostitutes, pompous clerics, prosperous merchants, and ragged beggars. Of all the

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miraculous wonders the pilgrims saw in Rome that jubilee year of 1650, Olimpia Maidalchini was the most amazing.

Those curious pilgrims who were not worthy of being invited to her festivities at the Piazza Navona palace camped outside, much as modern-day fans might do outside a hotel where their favorite movie star is staying. They studied the countless windows across the broad façade, hoping for a glimpse of her. Whenever the high doors of her courtyard swung open and a carriage clattered out, Olimpia fans thronged it. We can hear them crying, “There she is!” as they rushed her carriage. Had it been the fashion, they surely would have thrust autograph books into her carriage windows.

Pilgrims stationed in front of Olimpia’s house were often treated to the sight of the pope coming by to have lunch with her. But the pope was, after all, just another old man with a beard and funny hat. Popes were pretty much interchangeable—paper-doll figures who all wore the same paper-doll clothes. Olimpia, by virtue of her unique position, truly fascinated them. In 1650 she was a kind of baroque rock star, ruling over the most important event in the world, in the most important city in the world, as if she were a queen.

As the year went by, the pope became uncomfortably aware of Olim-pia’s popularity with the pilgrims. As Saint Peter’s successor and the Vicar of Christ,
he
should have been the center of attention during the jubilee year, and Olimpia was stealing his thunder. One day Innocent’s secretary showed him a letter from a Neapolitan who wrote that most of the pilgrims who left Naples for Rome had done so not for the indulgence of sins or to see the pope but out of curiosity to see his sister-in-law. The Olimpia fans were almost all women, fascinated that another woman had climbed so high against all social restrictions and church regulations.

One day when the pope walked to the loggia of Saint Peter’s to bless the crowds gathered below, a cardinal wondered aloud that there were so many women; usually women were left at home on long, dangerous journeys. The pope replied bitterly that since the pilgrims came to see Olimpia, there were naturally more women among them than men, as curiosity was a strictly female trait.

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Some devout pilgrims were confused to see tarted-up prostitutes rolling through the streets of Rome with the pope’s family coat of arms on the doors. True, the emblem lacked the triple tiara and crossed keys of Saint Peter, which Innocent had taken as his papal coat of arms. But it still had the Pamphili dove with the olive sprig in its mouth. What were prostitutes doing with that crest? When it was explained that the pope’s sister-in-law was the official lobbyist of that particular profession, some visitors became angry. What kind of behavior was that? How could the pope allow such a thing? These opinions filtered up to the pope.