Mistress of the Vatican (38 page)

Rome was abuzz with the exciting news of the princess’s flagrant disobedience. Saint-Nicolas wrote Mazarin that Olimpia had a huge fight with the pope because he did not want to throw the pregnant princess out of Rome. Once again, she must have returned to her Piazza Navona palace mystified at Innocent’s stubbornness.

The unexpected arrival of the princess and Camillo caused a vexing problem for the cardinals and members of Rome’s diplomatic community who twittered with unease about whether or not to call on the couple. Would the pope punish them if they did? But if they didn’t visit, and the pope reconciled with his nephew and made him powerful, would Camillo wreak vengeance upon those who had not called on him? They wrung their hands in frustration.

Only Cardinal Girolamo Grimaldi, who enjoyed insulting Olimpia publicly, immediately called at the Palazzo Farnese in great state. Mulling his options, Cardinal Panciroli went a bit later to pay his respects, but the princess of Rossano gave him a very rude reception. When Cardinal Panciroli next called on Olimpia, he informed her of the obnoxious behavior of her daughter-in-law. Olimpia replied dryly that she forgave him.

Olimpia did not forgive the princess, however, when she held dinner parties with poetry contests, awarding prizes to those who could make up the most scathing poems about her mother-in-law. In one poem she

[ 224 ]

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

described Olimpia as a jackass clothed in pontifical vestments and made insinuations that “touched, not lightly, upon her honor.”
²

In April 1648 Don John reestablished Spanish control over Naples. The rebellion was put down, but throughout the Papal States the famine continued. It is likely that Olimpia and Rome’s municipal officials kept the severity of the bread shortage from the pope. Without benefit of live CNN coverage or anything like a free press, the elderly pontiff, sitting in the rarified atmosphere of the Vatican nursing his kidney stones, believed what his advisors told him.

Giacinto Gigli reported that bakers were ordered to bake fine white loaves and pretend to be selling them on the street whenever the pope passed by so he wouldn’t realize how dire the situation was. When the ragged, hungry souls eagerly gathered to buy the delicious bread, the bakers refused to sell it. It was, they said, just for show to keep the pope happy.

The princess of Rossano went into labor on June 24, 1648, the Feast of Saint John the Baptist, the pope’s own saint’s day. It was a good omen. At the first pang, her servants donned their best livery and raced around Rome knocking on the doors of the ambassadors and nobles, inviting them to come immediately to witness the historic event. They congregated in her bedroom, eating, drinking, and gossiping, the women doing needlework, the men playing cards. It must have been a great shock to all when Olimpia strode in to see for herself what was going on. She could not have failed to notice that between her gut-wrenching contractions, the princess had a gleam of triumph in her eye.

At 7 p.m., through narrowed eyes Olimpia saw the baby’s head push out between the thighs of her detested daughter-in-law. When the doctor plucked the baby out and proclaimed it a healthy boy, the princess cried out that he would be called Gianbattista after the pope. The guests cheered but Olimpia did not. She stood up and, without saying a word, left.

When the vice-regent of Rome, Signor Rivaldi, raced to the pope breathless with the news of a healthy boy, Innocent could not contain his joy. “God be praised!” he cried, his face aglow with happiness.
³

Olimpia knew the birth of little Gianbattista Pamphili would bind

[ 225 ]

Eleanor Herman

the tenderhearted Innocent to Camillo and his wife more than all the princess’s youth and beauty. This birth would cause him to lift the exile for good, to invite the presumptuous princess to the Vatican, to listen to her political suggestions. This birth would push the old Olimpia out of the Vatican limelight, supplanted by the new, younger, more beautiful Olimpia.

The old Olimpia marched into the Vatican and had a long talk with her brother-in-law. When he emerged, the pope was once more his usual sober self. He refused to accept congratulations from the ambassadors, cardinals, and noblemen who waited in his antechamber. Thinking this was the most propitious time to request an audience with his uncle, Camillo arrived at the papal palace hat in hand. But the pope sent his steward out to tell him to go home and not come back.

Despite the pope’s insistence that the birth of Gianbattista Pamphili not be celebrated, the international community of Rome reacted as if a royal prince had been born. Ambassadors dispatched couriers to France, Spain, Austria, Tuscany, Germany, Poland, and the Netherlands with the glorious news. The noble palaces of Rome were illuminated with white torches and colorful lanterns. Fireworks were set off in the piazzas. Cannons blasted, drums rattled, and trumpets blared. The pope issued instructions to cease the celebrations at once, but no one listened.

A few days after the birth, the princess told some friends that she intended to order a magnificent gown to wear the first time she went out in public. Hearing this, Olimpia sent her daughter-in-law a note, instructing her to make sure it was a gown suitable for the countryside, as she would be going back very soon.

But Camillo cashed in more chips with sympathetic cardinals and ambassadors who once again knelt before the pope and implored him for mercy. This time, mercy was granted. Innocent was incredibly touched by the arrival of his namesake, who, though his grandnephew, was actually his grandchild in papal terms. Little Gianbattista Pamphili was the continuation of the family line, which for so long had seemed to be tottering on the brink of extinction.

Powerless in her efforts to exile the family, Olimpia was at least able to impose conditions on Camillo and his wife if they wanted to stay in

[ 226 ]

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

Rome. They were to leave the Palazzo Farnese, owned by the inveterate enemy of the papacy, the duke of Parma, and move to the princess’s Palazzo Aldobrandini on the Corso. They were not to involve themselves in any important matters. Camillo, who had earlier tried to have Olimpia locked up in a convent, still found himself locked up by
her
, this time in Rome. The revenge was exquisite.

On June 28, four days after the princess’s delivery, the annual procession of the
chinea
took place, a magnificent pageant in which the king of Spain, through his representative, gave the pope a gorgeous white horse as symbolic payment for the realm of Naples. The horse had been trained to kneel upon command and would do so at the pope’s feet as a sign of Spanish submission. Since there was at the moment no Spanish ambassador to the Holy See, the king of Spain had selected Olimpia’s son-in-law, the staunchly pro-Spanish Prince Ludovisi, for the astonishing honor of leading the horse.

Olimpia had never been overly fond of the fat prince, always trying to push himself into papal government and trudging around town crying that he never should have married Costanza for such a cheap dowry. And now, still licking her wounds over the birth of little Gianbattista, she was forced to watch her unappetizing son-in-law, swollen with pride on this, the greatest day of his life. Huffing and puffing, the prince marched solemnly forward holding the diamond-studded reins of the white horse. The sweat dripped off his red face onto his rich black velvet suit, dimming somewhat the blazing glory of his sewn-on diamonds.

After the ceremony, Cardinal Giovan Battista Pallotta, a man of strict morals, took Innocent aside and informed him of the dire bread shortage in Rome. Perhaps while riding in the procession that morning the cardinal had seen wretched, ragged people begging for bread, or worse, too weak to care anymore. Whatever the reason, Cardinal Pal-lotta flatly informed Innocent that the people of Rome were literally starving to death, and that he was furious the pontiff had done so little to help them. With a parting swipe at Olimpia, whom he must have blamed for the fiasco, he added that he would rather be in a monastery obedient to a monk than in Rome under the domination of a woman.

After Pallotta left, Innocent was uncertain what to do and, as usual,

[ 227 ]

Eleanor Herman

called in Olimpia to ask her opinion. She was livid to hear that the cardinal had spoken to the pope in such a manner, and she yelled at her brother-in-law for putting up with it.

As Olimpia dejectedly rode home, her carriage had the misfortune to cross that of Cardinal Pallotta, whose driver stopped to salute the pope’s sister-in-law out of respect. Olimpia and the cardinal glared at each other from open windows only a couple feet apart. Then Olimpia started shrieking that Pallotta and his family were spies and yanked down her carriage window shade “in his face,” according to Giacinto Gigli. But worse was to come. Yelling at the pulled-down window shade, “the Cardinal replied that he was no spy, but that it was certainly a shame that the government of Rome was in the hands of a whore, and other such similar injurious words, and they departed. It was publicly known that Donna Olimpia had slept with her brother-in-law before he became pope, and people were always talking about this.”
⁴

It was a very public display of bad temper, a tantrum thrown in front of dozens of people on the street who must have enjoyed seeing the pope’s sister-in-law insulting a cardinal who then called her a whore to her face. Word leaped into the Vatican, and Innocent mulled over his waning dignity.

There would be more street battles to aggravate the pope. Unfortunately, the palazzo of the princess of Rossano was only a few blocks from her mother-in-law’s, and the adversaries were bound to run into each other. One day Olimpia’s carriage met Camillo’s carriage on the street. Inside were little Gianbattista and his nurse. Camillo’s coachman stopped to salute Olimpia, as courtesy demanded, and Olimpia’s coachman stopped to return the salute. But Olimpia poked her head out of the window and screamed at her coachman to keep going. Numerous bystanders witnessed the altercation, and word of Olimpia’s latest public display of bad temper flew back to the pope.

Innocent called her to the Vatican and chastised her severely. Yes, the princess had behaved disrespectfully to her mother-in-law, but she had the excuse of youth on her side. Olimpia had long ago lost
that
excuse and as a wise and venerable matron should show greater decorum. Her outrageous behavior was bringing the pope, his family, and the entire

[ 228 ]

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

Vatican into disrepute. Cornered, Olimpia blamed the whole thing on her coachman and fired him. Once again, Innocent had lost his temper with her. After thirty-five years of docile submissiveness, it was becoming an unnerving habit.

Perhaps Innocent’s rising irritation was caused by the continuing famine. After Cardinal Pallotta’s outburst, the pope looked into the bread shortage and was horrified at what he learned. He sent men house to house asking the rich merchants and wealthy nobles for alms for the poor. When this didn’t raise much—even the well off had to pay a fortune for food—he decided to requisition grain from Fermo, a town in the area of the Papal States called the Marches. Having been spared the devastating floods that had swept across the environs of Rome, Fermo seemed to have a bit of a surplus.

But when the governor arrived on July 6, 1648, to commandeer the grain, he was torn to pieces by an angry mob, and the revolt spread to other areas in the Marches. On July 14 the people of Viterbo rose up against their tax collector, Olimpia’s half-brother, Andrea Maidalchini, who had wanted to take their grain and sell it to Rome at a high price. The crowd chased him through the streets firing guns at him, but he managed to escape. Other towns rose in revolt as enraged citizens chased out the pope’s grain collectors.

The prosperous Giacinto Gigli did not eat the
pagnotta
but bought them periodically to try them out and see what the poor had to subsist on. “The bread was very bad in color and in odor,” he reported, “and they said that beans and other vegetables had been thrown in, and the people lamented and could not eat it, and I noted with admiration that the dog and cats in my house would not eat it, but if you gave them better bread they would eat it willingly, so that dumb animals know which bread is not good.”
⁵
In July the bread was whiter but oddly crunchy; it contained pieces of plaster.

Gigli noted that many people sold their few sticks of furniture for money to buy bread and when hunger returned found themselves sitting on the floor with nothing left to sell. Others hunted sewer rats and made them into stew. When the Jesuits opened a soup kitchen, such crowds of desperate people thundered in that many were trampled to

[ 229 ]

Eleanor Herman

death and many others suffered broken bones. No matter how many people the Jesuits fed, more would show up the following day. Even the whitest loaf soothed an empty stomach for only a few hours.

Lawlessness set in as starving people stole whatever they could to sell or trade for bread. Gigli wrote, “During this time it seemed as if Rome had become Naples, so that in the evening after the Ave Maria had rung, one could not leave the house with a hat for the danger that it would be stolen, and there were those who were wounded in trying to defend themselves.”
⁶