Mistress of the Vatican (51 page)

But when Chigi was told of his imminent assumption into the Sacred

College, he “showed no happiness, or change of expression but, as if he

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were discussing foreign affairs, replied that great thought should be given to that, and that he would perhaps better be able to serve His Holiness in his present position. Then he continued discussing other affairs with the same tranquility as before.”
¹⁶
It was an unheard-of reply, rather like a lottery player, hearing that he held the winning $100 million ticket, suddenly turning to discuss the weather.

When Chigi held his regular audience with the pope that evening, he didn’t fling himself on his knees expressing heartfelt gratitude for the immense honor in store for him. In fact, he didn’t even mention the cardinal’s cap. After he departed, Innocent called for Cardinal Astalli-Pamphili and angrily accused him of not imparting the news. The young cardinal protested that he had indeed told him. Dumbfounded, the pope exclaimed, “We have not ever seen such a man; nothing moves him.”
¹⁷

On February 18, the night before the announcement of his elevation, Chigi told a friend that he accepted the dignity reluctantly because with increased honors came increased responsibilities. “I assure you that if the list were in my possession, I would cross out my name,” he said with a sigh.
¹⁸

Innocent assigned Cardinal Chigi three important congregations in addition to his time-consuming duties as secretary of state. He joined the Holy Office of the Inquisition, the Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith, and the congregation that examined potential bishops. Working day and night, Chigi proved himself the most efficient member of the Sacred College.

One evening the pope gave the order that Cardinal Chigi, not Cardinal Astalli-Pamphili, should have the honor of carrying the candles into his office at sunset and staying for a consultation. The two had a long chat behind closed doors while the younger cardinal cooled his heels in the antechamber, fuming that he, as nephew, should have had precedence over the secretary of state and access to the pontiff at all times. And from then on it was Chigi, not the nephew, who carried in the candles.

In the same consistory that saw the creation of Cardinal Chigi, the princess of Rossano saw the elevation of two of her candidates—her

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cousin Baccio Aldobrandini and the French cleric Jean-François Gondi, who became known as Cardinal de Retz. Until then Olimpia had helped Innocent choose the new cardinals, and now she had clearly been replaced by her daughter-in-law. The
avvisi
commented, “The Rossano is becoming the open competitor of her mother-in-law.”
¹⁹
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Though Innocent was wracked with grief over the betrayal of Fran-cesco Mascambruno, a man he had implicitly trusted, he hired two of Rome’s best lawyers to defend him. After a trial lasting two months, with some eleven thousand pages of witness testimony, Francesco Mas-cambruno was sentenced to be hanged. Then his head would be cut off and stuck on a skewer, which would be placed on the Castel Sant’Angelo Bridge, along with his body, hanging by his left foot. After being exposed in such a disgraceful manner for several hours, both head and body would be burned, and the ashes tossed into the Tiber.

Accompanied by Mascambruno’s lawyers, the princess of Rossano swished into the Quirinal arrayed in her most fetching attire, imploring the pope to pardon the forger, who had promised to devote the remainder of his life to prayer and penance in a distant monastery if spared. Sighing, Innocent said, “Pray God to grant the pardon that we cannot concede for justice sake.”
²⁰

Ironically, it was the usually ineffectual Camillo who obtained the pope’s mitigation of the sentence. Mascambruno would be beheaded, his body exposed and then buried decently in a church. But when the forger was informed that the sentence had been mitigated, Mascam-bruno was not at all grateful. In fact, he did not believe the execution would be carried out. He spoke of other cases where the condemned was brought to the place of execution, forced to lay his neck on the block, and at the last minute pardoned. Surely the pope would not execute him and was plotting an elaborate drama to scare him for his misdeeds.

As an ordained servant of the Holy Mother Church, a priest could not be executed. He must first be defrocked. On April 14, Mascam-bruno was taken in a heavily guarded carriage from his prison to the

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Church of Saint Salvatore in Lauro, where before a crowd of cardinals, nobles, and ambassadors, his priestly vestments were wrested from him. Finally, his fate began to sink in. “Pray Lord God and the Holy Virgin that they forgive every one of them for this great persecution!” he shrieked. “God pardon them, pardon them. Great persecution! Great persecution! Pardon to all, pardon from the heart. Be my witnesses that I pardon them all!”
²¹
His howling was so unseemly in a church that his guards shoved a gag into his mouth.

When he returned to his cell, Mascambruno found the Brothers of Compassion there, members of the confraternity that comforted those awaiting execution. When he bewailed his unjust fate, they consoled him with the fact that he would not die unconfessed and unrepentant. If death had struck him down still stained with his foul sins, he would have gone to hell. Now, given holy absolution after confession, he would spend only a little time in purgatory and still might make it into heaven. Mascambruno took them at their word. His final confession lasted seven hours, during which time he admitted countless acts of theft and forgery that he had not even been charged with, including pilfering 35,000 scudi that had been set aside for Olimpia’s granddaughter, Olim-piuccia Giustiniani, in 1650. Stealing from an innocent child of nine was considered as low as a person could possibly sink.

The following day at dawn, the brothers conducted him to the prison courtyard. Given Mascambruno’s frightful theatrics the day before, it was decided to do the job with merciful speed. After the forger said only one short prayer, the executioner pushed him down and struck off his head. For its journey to the Castel Sant’Angelo Bridge, the head was, oddly enough, “sewn onto the body from which blood trickled and the dogs licked it,” a spectator observed.
²²
The body remained there from eleven in the morning until four in the afternoon, thronged by the curious, the jeering, and the compassionate. Finally it was interred in a nearby church.

The day of Mascambruno’s execution, the pope was seen sitting in his Quirinal apartments, crying. The scandal was far-ranging. Dozens of other offenders were in prison and would be tortured, executed, exiled, fined, imprisoned, or sentenced to the galleys. By exiling Olimpia,

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Innocent had hoped to clean up the reputation of the Holy See. But now it was much worse than when she had been at the helm, and no one could blame
her
for this. The Catholics hung their heads in shame, and the heretics laughed at him.

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Over time, the princess of Rossano’s star dimmed a bit, and she found it increasingly difficult to compete with Olimpia’s forty years of interaction with the pope. For if Olimpia had been like an old comfortable pair of loafers, the princess was a new pair of stylish high-heeled shoes that pinched. Innocent had always been able to relax with the older Olimpia. This young Olimpia, though easier to look at, was always prickling him with requests for favors, honors, and money for herself, her family, and her friends. Her shrill, incessant demands were more irritating than his sister-in-law’s measured advice and behind-the-scenes maneuvering.

The princess’s Vatican politicking took the place of a happy marriage. Studying her foolish husband through narrowed eyes, she found much to criticize and often ripped into him for the many things he was always doing wrong. She particularly hated it when Camillo still trembled upon hearing his mother’s name, even though Olimpia was clearly powerless.

It was a cruel irony that Camillo, who had married the princess to get away from the domination of his bossy mother, now found himself dominated by a bossy wife. In fact, appearances aside, the two Olimpias were remarkably similar; both were ambitious, strong, and far smarter than he, and neither would ever let him forget it.

Scorned by his wife, poor Camillo found solace in the arms of pretty singers and dancers, women who looked up to him and told him what a great and clever man he was. He further punished the princess by carefully controlling her purse strings, which he, as her husband, was legally permitted to do. Whenever the princess wanted to go shopping or throw a party, he cracked open his change purse and reluctantly doled out a few coins from her immense dowry, which infuriated her. He called her a reckless spendthrift, and she called him a womanizing idiot.

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Camillo was stung daily by the fact that no one called his wife by the title he had bestowed on her by marriage—the princess Pamphili. Everyone in Rome knew Olimpia Maidalchini as the princess Pamphili, and the matter was further confused because both women had the same first name. And so the princess of Rossano stayed the princess of Rossano, and poor Camillo became the prince of Rossano. The humiliation became too much for him, and he asked the pope to send him to Avignon as legate just to get away.

But Innocent did not send him away. Though he knew his nephew was stupid and useless, the pope was a sentimental fellow who loved his own blood dearly. One day a cardinal asked him about assigning an income to either Camillo or Prince Ludovisi. The pope replied that the shirt was closer to the heart than the coat, and Camillo, who was evidently the shirt, was given the income. Another day the same cardinal asked him which of his three nephews he loved best. Innocent said, “I love Prince Giustiniani out of respect for his wife. I love Prince Ludovi-sio because he is a good prince. But I love Prince Pamfili because he is my blood.”
²³

Sitting motionless in San Martino like a black widow spider eyeing her prey, Olimpia was wreaking her revenge without lifting a finger. Her enemy Cardinal Panciroli was dead. Her enemy Cardinal Astalli-Pamphili had proved ineffectual and had lost his power to Cardinal Chigi. Her enemy the princess of Rossano was losing her initial influence over Innocent with her constant demands, and her fairy-tale-romance marriage was falling apart. Her enemy Pope Innocent X was plagued by constant family squabbles because Olimpia was not there to control her fractious brood.

To top it all off, the pope was embroiled in the most shocking Vati-can scandal in nearly a century, a scandal that would never have occurred had Olimpia still been running the show. She knew that, and fretting on his papal throne, so did he.

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20

Olimpia’s Triumphant Return

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Where there is hatred, let me sow love. Where there is injury, pardon.

—Saint Francis of Assisi

he pope was severely depressed by the Mascambruno scandal and its withering effect on the international reputation of the Catholic Church. For the first time since he was elected, the seventy-eight-year-old pontiff seemed old, fragile. He suffered from insomnia and an odd trembling in his right hand that made it difficult for him to celebrate Mass.

Within days of Mascambruno’s execution, the pope razed the Tor di Nona prison, where his subdatary had been held and executed. Innocent had been thinking about building a modern prison for years, but now he felt compelled to begin the project to erase the revolting memories of the papal forger.

Many prisoners incarcerated temporarily for lesser offenses—debts or drunken brawling, for instance—found that instead of a few months in jail, they had, in effect, received a death sentence due to unhealthy prison conditions. After heavy rains, the Tiber could rise at a moment’s

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notice and drown the first-floor prisoners. Mice, lice, fleas, and human waste turned the cells into sewers raging with infection. One Roman confraternity had the sole purpose of visiting nonviolent prisoners weekly to determine which ones were becoming ill. The confraternity members would then petition the courts for early release, reminding the judges that the penalty imposed had been a few months’ incarceration, and not death. Most of these requests were granted.

As a just monarch, Innocent saw great injustice in the prison system. It was not fair for someone convicted of a misdemeanor to die for the crime. Neither was it fair for a criminal to be let off the hook early without paying fully for his misdeeds. It was clear to Innocent that a new prison must be built that was more conducive to inmate health.

Innocent commissioned his friend Monsignor Virgilio Spada to design the Carceri Nuovi, the New Prison. Spada held the vaunted position of papal almoner, distributing Innocent’s alms to worthy recipients. In addition, he was a trained architect who advised Innocent on all architectural matters. Prison design had not changed since the Middle Ages, and Spada’s plans were trailblazing. Cells had balconies where prisoners, though behind bars, could enjoy fresh air and sunshine. Large courtyards permitted the inmates—who previously had not seen much daylight for the length of their sentences—to exercise regularly. The spacious cells were all well above ground—no more drownings—and would be cleaned regularly to avoid contagion. Convicts could complete their sentences in health, and justice would be served.