Mistress of the Vatican (50 page)

Fabio Chigi was, indeed, the perfect man for the job. He had spent twelve years in the highly charged, vitriolic German peace negotiations putting up with all kinds of egotistical foolishness. The Swedish envoy rose, went to bed, and ate to the sounds of blaring trumpets, disturbing

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all the other diplomats. The French envoy refused to speak Latin and insisted everyone speak French. The Austrian envoy was ready to give away the entire Catholic Church if only he could go home. The diplomats outdid one another in throwing lavish drunken banquets and racing their horses instead of focusing on the peace treaty. And through it all, Fabio Chigi’s wisdom, calmness, and integrity had won the respect of his sniping, petty counterparts.

In addition to his extensive diplomatic and legal experience, Fabio Chigi had the rare reputation for strict Catholic virtues. He lived a chaste life, keeping far from women. He slept on a board instead of in a feather bed, drank from a cup with a skull on it, and kept no fire in his cold damp German rooms, which resulted in the saintly suffering of bad health.

Chigi was an anomaly in the church hierarchy—he had no ambition other than to serve God. He lived simply, gave most of his money to the poor, and as bad as the intrigues of Germany were, he was thrilled to be far removed from that snake pit of intrigue, Rome.

Within days of Panciroli’s death, Innocent sent a swift messenger to Germany with instructions for Monsignor Chigi to leave for Rome immediately as Cardinal Astalli-Pamphili wanted to bestow an honor upon him. The pope did not tell him that he would be appointed secretary of state; if Chigi knew in advance, he might very well politely decline and stay in Germany. As it was, even the mysterious message was disturbing. Cardinal Pallavicino stated, “Chigi received this news with a doubtful heart. As much as he wanted to return to the Italian sky, he was terrified to enter the troubles of the court.”
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Chigi left Germany on October 1, 1651, and arrived on November 30 in Rome, where he was told to call on the pope immediately. The moment Innocent saw Chigi he was smitten with his serious demeanor. He had a long, narrow face, a long, bony nose, and a dark mustache and goatee. His heavily hooded dark eyes were large and expressive. After a bit of conversation, the pope dropped the bomb: Chigi would be his new secretary of state, working with Cardinal Astalli-Pamphili. Chigi reluctantly accepted the position.

Noticing Chigi’s frugality, Innocent told Cardinal Astalli-Pamphili,

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“We must think about this man because he does not think about himself.”
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The pope presented Chigi with several bags of gold—the enormous sum of three thousand scudi—for his expenses in establishing an honorable household in Rome. Chigi was shocked to receive such a gift but accepted it to please the pope.

Imitating the pope, when Cardinal Astalli-Pamphili discovered that Chigi’s Roman palace was mostly bereft of furniture, he declared that he would give him one thousand gold pieces to furnish it. Chigi was horrified at the announcement but finally had to accept the gift to avoid offending the cardinal nephew.

The rigorous Fabio Chigi squirmed in discomfort at the gift-giving culture of Rome, which often blurred into bribery and influence buying. “He disliked giving and receiving,” wrote Cardinal Pallavicino, “this trafficking in gifts of the ambitious and the self-interested, and the ostentation of the wasteful. He preferred to give alms to the poor rather than fatten the powerful with gifts.”
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Within days of his arrival in Rome, Chigi learned that etiquette demanded he give presents to Cardinal Astalli-Pamphili and Camillo as an expression of gratitude for his good fortune. Not to do so would be the cause of great offense, and he would acquire the reputation of being either ignorant or cheap. Chigi bowed to the reigning custom, but his gifts were thoughtful rather than sumptuous—hard-to-find spices from the Orient, rare books, exquisite perfumes, and delicious pastries. “But having allowed himself to overcome his repugnance to giving, he remained inflexibly opposed to receiving.”
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Chigi’s incorruptibility was the talk of Rome. He refused bribes and gifts from the French and Spaniards alike, and from family factions in Rome; stranger yet, the pope had to force him to accept incomes and benefices becoming his office. Unlike other courtiers, Chigi was as friendly to those known to be in disgrace at court as he was to the favor-ites, treating all with equal kindness and respect. No one in the Vatican had ever seen anything like it.

Before Chigi had been called to Rome, Innocent had given in to Cardinal Astalli-Pamphili’s pleas to keep him a monsignor. Making the older, wiser man a cardinal would give him more power than that of

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the young and foolish cardinal nephew. But even so, the insightful, efficient Chigi soon took over the office, becoming the cardinal nephew’s boss in fact, if not in title. Suddenly the honorable Fabio Chigi was the pope’s favorite, and the charming Cardinal Astalli-Pamphili was on the outs.

Well informed in her exile, Olimpia knew who held the reins of power that had been so violently wrenched from her hands. She traded courteous letters with Monsignor Chigi, who replied with equal courtesy. Though they had never met, they sent each other gifts of wine, cheese, and game. She had nothing against Chigi, who had never done her any harm and could, perhaps, be won over as an ally to help her return.

But the princess of Rossano was not about to let the powerful secretary of state become an ally of her despised mother-in-law. She set about winning his allegiance and had a great advantage over Olimpia by being in Rome. She could wine him, dine him, and meet with him, which Olimpia could not. But if the princess thought that batting her long black lashes or appearing in a particularly low-cut gown could dazzle the somber Chigi as it had Innocent, she was dead wrong.

Cardinal Pallavicino explained, “Now, with every studied industry, showing herself eager for his success, she tried to win Chigi as an ally for the house of Pamphili. But this effort, which would have vanquished the sternest puritan at court, didn’t work with this man, and he replied that he wanted to be of service to all, but against no one, and that being secretary of state it was his office to negotiate the politics of the nation and not the economics of one particular family.”
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And here she was stuck.

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There was no love lost between Cardinal Astalli-Pamphili and the sub-datary, Francesco Mascambruno, who both competed for power and the pope’s affection. The datary, Cardinal Cecchini, had been in disgrace for two years now and still waited pathetically day after day in his office for the pope to call him. Mascambruno ran the lucrative department, and when the marquess Tiberio Astalli asked him for pensions

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and incomes, as was his due as the cardinal nephew’s brother, Mascam-bruno angrily rebuffed him. The subdatary sold these positions and was certainly not about to give them away.

To get Tiberio Astalli off his back, Mascambruno complained to the pope that the marquess was importuning him almost daily and should perhaps be banished to his estates in the country. Innocent angrily called in Cardinal Astalli-Pamphili and told him to make sure his brother did not bother Mascambruno anymore, or the whole family would be exiled. The cardinal nephew, knowing Mascambruno’s hands were very unclean, conducted a little investigation of his own, found something heinous, and spread the word.

Monsignor Chigi had been in his position as secretary of state for less than three weeks when an angry Jesuit stormed into his office. Father Luigi Brandano, the assistant to the Holy See from Portugal, had heard that the pope had signed a scandalous indulgence for the Portuguese count of Villafranca. The count had been married in a church ceremony by a village priest, which would have been no sin in itself except that the count was already married to a richly dowered lady, and his second bride was a teenaged boy, dressed up like a woman, with whom he fully consummated the marriage that night. When word got out, the Span-ish Inquisition threw the groom, the “bride,” and the priest into a dungeon.

The penalty for sodomy was usually burning at the stake. But the desperate count had paid forty thousand gold pieces for a papal order to get him out of this hot water. Even now, Father Brandano insisted, a bull signed by the pope was winging its way to Portugal ordering the transfer of the trial from the jurisdiction of the unforgiving Inquisition to that of the local bishop, a friend and relative of the sodomite count who would, no doubt, immediately release the guilty trio and impose a small fine as penance.

The virtuous Monsignor Chigi was so appalled at the Jesuit’s story that he immediately arranged a papal audience for Father Brandano. As the Jesuit was retelling the tale, the Portuguese monsignor Mendoza came flapping into the audience chamber and angrily spewed out the same story. The furious pope denied ever having signed a bull that, in

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effect, permitted two homosexuals to marry and commit sodomy with only a slap on the wrist as penalty.

Innocent refused to believe the story and vehemently defended his employees in the datary. However, given the fact that his reputation and the reputation of the entire church were at stake, the pope agreed to launch an investigation. He sent word for Cardinal Cecchini to come immediately to the papal audience chamber. Eaten up by gout, Cecchini hobbled breathlessly to the pope, hoping that he had been restored to favor. Instead, he heard devastating rumors of forgery in the datary.

The datary offices were searched for the Portuguese bull, but it was not found. A copy was found in the chancery, the department responsible for establishing new dioceses and benefices. The copy of the forged bull had been made by a certain Giuseppe Brignardelli, who had already sent off the original to Portugal. Brignardelli, it was discovered, had fled. But when Cardinal Cecchini’s investigators questioned his wife, she said that three days before her husband’s disappearance her nephew had shown up with thirteen thousand scudi from Francesco Mascambruno to help him escape. When Mascambruno’s lodgings were searched, the investigators found fourteen thousand gold pieces, countless vases and plates of pure gold and silver, and bank records showing enormous deposits. They also found seventy forged papal bulls, which Mascambruno was evidently holding until payment arrived.

Several of the bulls were in the process of being forged, which revealed how he had done it. Official letters of the seventeenth century were works of art, with magnificent calligraphy and pleasing spaces between the paragraphs. Mascambruno had written a summary of the bull at the top of a long sheet of parchment, an innocuous dispensation for third cousins to marry, for instance. The pope, casting barely a glance at the summary, signed at the bottom of a large white space.

Back in his office, Mascambruno cut off the top of the document and wrote a new text, permitting homosexual acts, for example. Then he attached the lead bulla dangling from red ribbons at the bottom and sent it off, not through the datary but through the chancery, where his accomplices worked. Investigators discovered a network of coconspirators across Europe, corrupt officials in different nunciatures

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forwarding the forged bulls to those who had paid for them. It was a brilliant scheme because the only part of a papal bull that was closely examined for forgery was the signature, and that was always genuine.

On January 22, 1652, Francesco Mascambruno was taken to the infamous Tor di Nona prison. During long interrogations he gave up no information, saying only, “Ask Donna Olimpia,” or “The Ludovisis and Giustinianis know all about that.”
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He wanted his captors to know that if he was going down, he would implicate the entire Pamphili family and drag them down with him.

Despite Mascambruno’s dark insinuations, the scandal vindicated Olimpia. While she had queened it over Rome, she had been the scapegoat for all famine, flood, war, and vice. But not even her worst enemies could blame Mascambruno’s conduct on her. The investigation proved that hundreds of Mascambruno’s forged bulls had been written during Olimpia’s disgrace and exile, when the subdatary had publicly dumped her and become the ally of her enemy, the princess of Rossano. The princess had become so close to the subdatary that she even permitted his low-born female relatives the signal honor of riding in her carriage.

It also appeared likely that Olimpia’s earlier supervision of the datary had kept Mascambruno’s corruption within the bounds of polite acceptability. It was only since her exile that Mascambruno had gotten truly out of line, particularly after Innocent’s refusal to name him secretary of state. Mascambruno’s sullying of the pope’s name was a strong brew of greed and revenge.

Reeling from Mascambruno’s betrayal, the pope felt increasingly grateful to Monsignor Chigi for his sober efficiency. Though Innocent had promised Cardinal Astalli-Pamphili that the new secretary of state would not be made a cardinal, he soon changed his mind. In Fabio Chigi, Innocent had finally found a man in some ways similar to himself—hardworking, abstemious, and just. Such a man should be rewarded. The pope instructed Cardinal Astalli-Pamphili to give Monsignor Chigi the wonderful news, which he must have done reluctantly.