Mistress of the Vatican (47 page)

Olimpia and her in-laws were not the only ones shocked at the choice of nephew. Though handsome and charming, Cardinal Astalli-Pam-phili had very little in the way of diplomatic experience and found himself suddenly standing in for the pope. Cardinal Pallavicino wrote, “This was done to the wonder of the court which saw in Astalli only mediocrity and nothing so distinguished or attractive as to warrant such advantages.”
⁸

On October 8, Teodoro Amayden wrote, “The court believes that the pope preferred a youth without experience to all of them, among whom are men of great merit.”
⁹

Leti stated, “This astonished the whole court, seeing a man elevated to such an important position to assist the pope in the most urgent matters of state and in all other political affairs while he was still so inexperienced, not having had the occasion to receive instruction in the management of such affairs.”
¹⁰
Others found it odd that the new cardinal nephew, assigned the responsibility of conducting foreign affairs, had never been more than a few miles from Rome in his life.

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The diplomatic community was confused as to the protocol of visiting the Piazza Navona palace. Having called on the new cardinal nephew, should they also pay a courtesy call on Olimpia, or would this offend the pope? But what if the pope fired this cardinal nephew as well, and put Olimpia back in power? Wouldn’t she be keeping a list of all those diplomats who had snubbed her? Everyone in Rome knew that Olim-pia’s paybacks were hell.

But the new cardinal, feeling uneasy about living in Olimpia’s domain, solved the problem by moving into the cardinal nephew’s apartments in the Quirinal Palace. And Rome’s elite followed him. Olimpia’s antechambers became eerily empty, and the Piazza Navona was strangely devoid of luxurious carriages. Now it was Cardinal Astalli-Pamphili who was wined and dined, and loaded with valuable presents, and given the seat of honor at all the jubilee celebrations. Olimpia wasn’t invited.

Seeing the futility of pretending that Cardinal Maidalchini had any power at all, Olimpia dropped him like a hot potato. And her nephew began to despise her. She was the one who had forced him to become a cardinal at the age of seventeen in the first place. She had used him as a pawn to make her own political moves. She had insisted he open the holy door, even though he had had no right to, without telling him how to hold the holy hammer. She had pushed him to steal the sacred jubilee medals and get into a fight with the church canons. And now that she had made him the laughingstock of Europe, she dropped him. She had, in fact, placed not a cardinal’s cap on his head so much as a dunce cap.

Well, the pope was seventy-six and couldn’t live much longer. One day soon there would be a conclave, and even if Francesco Maidalchini was the dumbest member of the Sacred College, his vote to elect a new pope was worth as much as any other cardinal’s. He would do his utmost to elect a pope who despised Olimpia as much as he did.

q

Carried away by her feelings of betrayal, Olimpia made the tactical error of storming into the Quirinal and throwing temper tantrums before the pope and Cardinal Panciroli. Perhaps she felt she could bully

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Innocent into bowing to her demands. It was a rare miscalculation for Olimpia, who had ruled the pope for decades with a calm and jovial manner. Not only did her rage irritate Innocent, but it obscured from her a more subtle and effective tactic. Had she pretended to welcome Cardinal Astalli-Pamphili’s promotion, she could have stayed at the pope’s side and, when the time was right, sabotaged the interloper.

As it was, Olimpia’s horrific scenes only made the pope realize there was another issue to be addressed, an issue far more disturbing than the selection of a new cardinal nephew. And this issue had been weighing on him for nearly six years. But Innocent, the eternal procrastinator, had put it off.

The pope’s dilemma was this: the woman who had placed him on the pinnacle of power, carrying him step by step on her strong shoulders, guiding him with her agile mind, was now pulling him down. Worse for Innocent, she was pulling the church down, the church he loved and honored. It was the joke of Europe that Olimpia had insisted on taking the prostitutes of Rome under her protection, allowing them to use the Pamphili coat of arms. Then she had exiled Camillo and the princess of Rossano, which caused people to murmur against the pope’s unnatural severity toward his closest relatives. The pope had never even seen the little grandnephew named after him. She had polluted the Sacred College with the creation of two idiot cardinals—Francesco Maid-alchini and Michel Mazarin, although the latter had considerately died within a year of taking office.

There was, of course, the public spectacle she had made of herself when she insulted Cardinal Pallotta in the street, prompting him to call her a whore. Her grain speculation during the Masaniello revolt had given rise to the rumor that Olimpia had caused the subsequent Roman famine. She had pilfered the sacred shoulder of Saint Francesca and put on licentious comedies poking fun at the pope, Camillo, and major public figures. She had stolen the pope’s thunder during the Holy Year. Most painful, because of Olimpia’s actions he had not spoken to his sister Prudenzia for three years before she died.

And that was just Rome. There was the additional matter of international humiliation. The duchy of Savoy had been irked by the nasty

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trick Olimpia had played on the deaf princess. The Portuguese were crying that they had bribed Olimpia with the jeweled portrait frame and not gotten anything in return.

Worse, the pope was still smarting from the Treaty of Westphalia. Despite the Catholics’ efforts at reform, the heretics were looking for the least bit of gossip—a powerful cardinal eaten up with venereal disease, for instance, or a highly respected Vatican official caught stealing a sacrament cup—and
laughing
. It would have been less insulting if the heretics had taken up arms and marched south to attack the Papal States. In that case, at least, they would be taking the Mother Church seriously.

But ridicule has a profoundly withering effect. This cackling laughter, slicing through the Alps like bitter gusts of wind, whistled all the way down the Italian peninsula and whipped between the Seven Hills of Rome. And now the heretics were enjoying a gut-wrenching, bellyaching, falling-on-the-floor howl because the Vatican was being run by a woman who was the star of the Holy Year instead of the pope.

Of course, Innocent had known about the criticism for years. The Venetian ambassador Giovanni Giustiniani wrote that in the first years of his reign he had pretended not to know, as he was “not yet resolute enough in himself to find a solution to put a stop to the tongues, not only in Rome, but throughout all Christendom, and in particular in those northern parts where the Protestants, taking this female liberty as a great joke . . . mocked him licentiously.”
¹¹

On August 16, 1647, Fabio Chigi, the pope’s diplomat to the peace negotiations of the Thirty Years’ War, had written him of the “liberties of the gazetteers of Rome who with bold-faced lies and calumnies injure the holy and innocent current pontificate in such a way that they are more dangerous to the holy Catholic religion than all the sermons of the Calvinists and Lutherans. . . . Is it possible that you cannot remedy this? While the world burns, and religion is in danger of being lost, they speak of nothing other than of . . . giving hats for a price, of female popes and of a thousand infamous sacrileges.”
¹²
But in response to Chi-gi’s plea, Innocent had done nothing.

In the months leading up to Cardinal Astalli-Pamphili’s promotion,

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several events had occurred that greatly concerned the pope. A comedy was reportedly put on at the London court of the Lord Protector of England, the Puritan Oliver Cromwell. Called
The Marriage of the Pope,
it told the story of Innocent’s attempts to get his sister-in-law to marry him. Olimpia refused, saying she would never marry such an ugly man, and the desperate pope offered to give her Saint Peter’s key to heaven. Olimpia replied, “I want the other one, too, because otherwise, when you are tired of me, you will have the devils carry me away.”
¹³
Having received both of Saint Peter’s keys, Olimpia consented to marry him. The joyful announcement was followed by a ballet of friars and nuns, looking forward to their own marriages.

Word got back to the pope that a certain European king, upon sending an ambassador to Rome, bade him farewell with these instructions: “If you cannot make a breach in the mind of the pope through our authority, try to gain it through the authority of Donna Olimpia with our money.”
¹⁴

On one occasion a foreign ambassador, frustrated that Innocent had refused his request, said sarcastically, “Maybe what Your Holiness won’t do for my king, Donna Olimpia will do, and I will now go to see her.”
¹⁵

The pope was infuriated. Having smartly dismissed the ambassador, he banged his hand on a table, crying, “Cursed be women and those who have brought them forward.”
¹⁶
It is likely he was referring to himself.

On another occasion a papal secretary stationed in Paris traveled to Rome via Geneva. When Innocent heard he had traveled through that infamous bastion of heretics, he asked him what they were saying about the Catholic Church there. At first the secretary demurred, saying no one could expect Calvinists to say anything good about Catholics. When the pope pressed him for details, he finally admitted having attended a Cal-vinist church service out of curiosity. The minister had chosen as his sermon the letter of Saint Paul to Timothy: “I don’t permit women to lead, neither to dominate men.” The secretary said, “On the subject he exaggerated a great deal and with great contempt for the Church of Rome that allowed herself to be so scandalously governed by a woman.”
¹⁷

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With the honest Cardinal Cecchini sidelined in the datary, Olimpia had reaped a fortune selling offices. Word had gotten out and winged its way upward to the pope. The cardinal nephew in skirts, as they called her, was reported to have sold the same office seven times, having poisoned the officeholders to sell it again. A story circulating in Paris confidently asserted that she had poisoned no fewer than 150 people to take their benefices and resell them.

The Venetian ambassador Nicolò Sagredo summed up the general feeling when he wrote his senate, “It is not edifying to Catholicism to see that all spiritual graces, concessions of the datary, and dignities depend on her consensus as if the fisherman’s ring was on
her
finger.”
¹⁸

It is possible that Cardinal Astalli-Pamphili helped nudge the pope to break completely with Olimpia, who, he knew, hated him as a vile intruder and was plotting some revenge. One day he gave the pope a gold medal that had been mailed to him anonymously in a packet full of slander, he said. On one side was a portrait of Olimpia wearing the papal tiara, with the keys of Saint Peter in her hand. The other side showed the pope with long hair coifed like a woman, holding in one hand a spindle and in the other a distaff. The pope was horrified. He soon learned that numerous such medals had been struck in silver and gold and were collected throughout the courts of Europe, even in Rome.

The worst embarrassment was when Nuncio Melzi, the pope’s representative in Vienna, handed the Holy Roman Emperor a letter from Innocent chastising him for making peace with the heretics to the shame of Christendom. The emperor replied bitterly that the real shame was a pope who “has placed his government in the hands of a woman about whom all the heretics are laughing.”
¹⁹
The emperor then gave the nuncio a book of unflattering cartoons of Innocent and his sister-in-law, along with some medals, cast by heretics, showing Olimpia majestically enthroned and wearing the papal crown, with the pope sitting abjectly at her feet.

When the nuncio returned to Rome and had his private audience with Innocent, he gave him the book and the medals and told him of the emperor’s reply. This “opened the eyes of the pope who, reflecting

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on himself, said, If the Catholic princes such as those of Austria and Germany make me such reproaches, what will those do who do not have the same veneration for the Holy See?” The pope was “noticeably touched by these discourses, to the depths of his soul.”
²⁰

Gregorio Leti summed up the situation. “In fact, no pope had ever been so little esteemed as Innocent was. The Catholic princes could not help but laugh sometimes to see this form of female government because they saw the Protestant princes laughing about it agreeably. And, at the same time, they deplored the miserable condition of the Roman church because they saw it exposed to the jokes of the heretics. And who would not have shed tears to see that one didn’t speak anymore of sending ambassadors to the pope but to Donna Olimpia, not to the court of the head of the church, but to the palace of a woman.”
²¹