Mistress of the Vatican (58 page)

Though Innocent was greatly cheered by Christina’s abdication, his family problems continued. His three nephews—Camillo, Prince Lu-dovisi, and Prince Giustiniani—were at the moment devout supporters of Spain and were aghast that Innocent was finally planning to receive a Portuguese ambassador. They made a terrible ruckus, storming into the pope’s offices at all hours in high dudgeon. Furious, the pope took away Camillo’s remunerative position as supreme general of the Papal States and fired Prince Ludovisi from his position as general of the papal galleys. Then he exiled the bunch of them.

The papal brief decreeing these actions declared that the pope had been forced to take these measures because of his nephews’ base ingratitude. A few weeks later, the indefatigable Sister Agatha trundled

[ 349 ]

Eleanor Herman

into the Quirinal holding hands with Camillo on one side and Prince Giustiniani on the other, and reconciled them with the pope for the sake of Christian charity. But Prince Ludovisi’s Spanish dignity had been severely wounded. He refused to be reconciled and remained on his estates outside Rome in a huff.

The remainder of 1654 was fraught with strange occurrences. Locusts ruined much of the harvest. In May the Colosseum began to rumble and three and a half arches suddenly collapsed. In June fire raced through the neighborhood near the Barberini Palace, miraculously stopped in its tracks by an image of the Virgin on a suitcase maker’s house. In August the heavens themselves seemed to proclaim the imminent death of the pope. Strange lights were seen in the Roman night sky, perhaps a rare southerly display of the Northern Lights. “They say that at night they see fires and splendors in the heavens and a procession of many lit torches and it seems there is an empty coffin,” Giacinto Gigli wrote the first week of August.
¹

The flames of fear were further fanned by a solar eclipse on August 12 and a lunar one on August 27. Astronomers predicted that the eclipse of the sun would be the darkest in history, except for the one that occurred when Christ had died on the cross. Many Romans, fully expecting to die, went to church and gave confession that day, and stayed there for the length of the eclipse. If they died on sanctified earth, freshly confessed, perhaps God would forgive them their sins more readily.

Giacinto Gigli laughed at such superstitions. On August 12 he stayed home and dined with his family, candles and flints at the ready when darkness came. But it was “not the complete darkness that had been predicted. It was not too dark to read or write or do anything else.” He did not have to light his candles. When the sun emerged fully after three hours of twilight, thousands poured out of the churches rejoicing.

But there was one person in Rome who did not rejoice. For millennia, an eclipse was thought to predict the death of a monarch or the end of an age. “There will be signs in sun, moon, and stars,” Jesus said.
²
And indeed, the day after the eclipse the pope was wracked with diarrhea that nothing seemed to stanch. He could not perform any official functions or even leave the palace due to his constant need for a chamber pot.

[ 350 ]

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

When the pope felt well enough to inquire about the progress on the Church of Saint Agnes, he was furious to learn that during his illness work had stopped completely because the laborers had not been paid. Innocent angrily gave instructions to pay them every Saturday evening. He also called in the police to make sure they worked even on feast days; those who did not work would be rounded up and beaten. The church must be finished to receive the pope’s bones, and he felt that death was coming on faster than the construction.

It was six-year-old Gianbattista Pamphili who spoke the words that the pope himself was afraid to utter. One day when the little boy was spending an hour alone with his great-uncle in the Quirinal, the pope asked him if he had seen the church being built. With the wide-eyed frankness of a child repeating what his parents had said, the boy replied, “I’ve seen it, but if you don’t hurry up, you will never see it finished.”
³

Innocent was furious. “And who told you that?” he thundered. Knowing he had said something terribly wrong, Gianbattista clammed up. Seeing that his anger would get him nowhere, the pope led the boy into another room and gave him some candy. Then he repeated the question. But the child, realizing he was already in big trouble, refused to say another word. The pope slapped him hard on the face and told him to get out. He did not permit his grandnephew to visit him again.

On September 1 the pope was once more felled by severe diarrhea. He went to bed and stayed there for forty-five days straight. A new doctor, Matteo Parision, concocted a potion of coral dust specially designed to stop the diarrhea, which it did. The medicine, in fact, turned the pope’s intestines into something akin to concrete. Violent enemas were required to unstop him, which gave him diarrhea again and caused him to sputter that he had been right all those years to mistrust doctors.

On October 15 Innocent sent word to Olimpia that he was feeling much better and would call on her at the Piazza Navona. Sprucing herself up for the visit, she went to her jewel box and found that many of her most valuable pieces were missing—a gold cross with a piece of the true cross that had been sent to her by the Holy Roman Emperor, a ring given to her by the grand duke of Tuscany, a crown of pearls, and a gold watch.

[ 351 ]

Eleanor Herman

Olimpia was beside herself. Before he left the Quirinal, Innocent received an urgent note from her telling him of the theft. He arrived at the Pamphili Palace to find her in hysterics. For once the unflappable Olimpia was reduced to wretched sobs. The pope had brought with him thirty thousand pieces of gold as consolation for her loss, which comforted her somewhat.

As soon as the pope had himself carried back to the Quirinal, a ru-mor got out that he had died. A jeering crowd gathered in front of Olimpia’s palace and hurled itself against her courtyard doors. Olimpia went onto the balcony above the mob and flung down several hundred of the gold pieces the pope had just given her. Satisfied, the crowd melted away.

But there was the jewel thief to deal with, and Olimpia was determined to find the culprit and punish him. She threw one of her pages in prison as well as a goldsmith who had recently appraised her jewels. The page was tortured for fourteen hours without confessing.

Then Olimpia received an audacious letter from the real thief. He informed her exactly when he had stolen the jewels and how he had opened her locked desk. Olimpia should be grateful to him, he added, because he had not taken everything from her, which he could have done had he been so inclined. He signed himself Felice Felicetti, a mocking and obvious alias, as it meant something like “the happy little happy one.” Happy he might be, as he was one of the few people on earth ever to pull a fast one on Olimpia.

q

Ever since Innocent’s debilitating bout with diarrhea in August, Olimpia had been in charge of his official audiences. Foreign ambassadors and high church officials who needed to speak with the pope were admitted only for brief discussions. Olimpia didn’t want visitors to realize that Innocent’s mind was wandering. Seated next to the pope’s throne as he nodded off, made odd remarks, or began to dribble, she cut short the discussions with her usual obliging manner. The pope, she apologized, had slept poorly the night before. They must let him get some rest.

If the pope was too weak to get out of bed, visitors with urgent business

[ 352 ]

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

were admitted into his chamber for a few minutes only. Olimpia, sitting in a chair next to the pope’s bed and—if Gregorio Leti can be believed— holding his hand, would answer for him. When Innocent was too weak to give audiences at all, Camillo received the ambassadors in the cardinal nephew’s apartments, as if he had resumed his old job.

Those last few months, as the pope slipped into decrepitude, Olimpia was more powerful than ever before. “At the palace one spoke only of Donna Olimpia,” Leti declared. “One heard only her name ringing out, Donna Olimpia this and Donna Olimpia that. All letters were delivered to Donna Olimpia and Donna Olimpia read them. No one gave petitions to the pope anymore but only to Donna Olimpia who reported to him the contents. And she always received the same response from him, which was to do what she wanted.”
⁴

During the first part of December, rain soaked Rome in such quantities that many wondered if God was preparing another biblical deluge as punishment for their sins. The Tiber rose and flooded the Jewish ghetto, the area around the Pantheon, and the Piazza Navona. When the rain stopped and the skies cleared, the pope felt the need for fresh air. On the afternoon of December 14 he had himself carried in a litter to Olimpia’s Ripagrande garden on the Tiber, where he sat on a bench with her. We don’t know what they discussed as the sun started to set— perhaps politics, or family problems, or the good old times all those years and years ago.

As the shadows lengthened, the pope shivered. Night was coming. It was getting cold. He climbed into his litter. When it disappeared into the courtyard of the Quirinal, he would never again be seen alive by the Roman people. Back in the palace, Innocent began to rave.

Popular discontent, which trickled out harmlessly in the form of pas-quinades when a pope was healthy, began to unleash itself in a torrent of rage when it became clear that he was dying. Grievances over bad bread, high taxes, and greedy papal relatives swelled into a tidal wave that flooded the city with riots, murders, and arson until the new pope was elected. Only when the cardinal camerlengo stood on the balcony of the Vatican and announced “
Habemus papam!
” did the mob lay aside cudgels, swords, and pistols and go back to work joyously.

[ 353 ]

Eleanor Herman

Now, as the riots broke out, they focused on Olimpia. As a woman she was an easy target. With a straight face, Gregorio Leti stated that the rapacity of the Barberini nephews was acceptable, given the fact that they were men. “The Barberinis had certainly also been insatiable in heaping up gold and silver under the pontificate of their uncle,” he wrote, but “we should consider that the Barberinis governed a church where they were supposed to remain due to the position of cardinal, which they had, but Donna Olimpia governed a church from which she had to be forced to leave and that far from peacefully, because she was a woman.”
⁵

Angry Romans stationed themselves outside Olimpia’s palazzo during the day, throwing refuse at it and shouting insults. If they could have looked forward 140 years to revolutionary France, they might very well have borrowed the idea of cutting off Olimpia’s head and affixing it to a pike. As it was, whenever the huge double doors to her courtyard opened and her carriage rolled out, they attacked it, crying, “Bread! Bread!” She had to fling them coins to prevent her carriage from being toppled.

Olimpia began to leave for the papal palace before sunrise and return at midnight, hiring public sedan-chair carriers rather than risk being seen in a coach bearing the Pamphili coat of arms. But popular outrage did not die down. Children ran through the streets singing songs about the pope’s whore. Crowds continued to gather in front of her barricaded palazzo, yelling insults and making threats. Olimpia was extremely nervous that a mob would force its way into her house, sack it, and tear her limb from limb. She had the pope send out priests to the poor sections of town, distributing thousands of scudi in alms.

It would have been safer for Olimpia to retire to one of her country estates during the pope’s final illness. No one would have bothered her in a feudal fortress in faraway Umbria. She could have breathed easily in Viterbo, where the citizens still puffed themselves up with pride in the town’s greatest daughter. The inhabitants of San Martino, bursting with gratitude for all she had done for them, would have defended her palace with their lives. It was only in Rome where her life was in danger.

[ 354 ]

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

But Olimpia had three financial goals to fulfill before the pope died, and she had to be in the papal palace until his last moment to do so. The first goal was to sell as many offices as possible. Ambitious office-seekers knew that now was the time to get a cut-rate deal on prestigious positions. Leti noted that Olimpia was selling them for 50 percent of the usual rate.

Such last-minute negotiations were mutually beneficial to buyer and seller. The buyer knew he might never be able to purchase the position during the next pontificate; if the new pope turned out to be less corrupt, it would be impossible, and if he were more corrupt, it would be unaffordable. The transaction was also beneficial to Olimpia, who pretty soon would not be in a position to sell a Vatican office ever again. Bribes reportedly accompanied the cash payments. “On the Vatican stairs one saw only presents being carried up and never any carried down,” Leti asserted.
⁶
Word got out that Olimpia earned a half million scudi the last ten days of the pope’s life.

Olimpia’s second goal was to remove everything of value in the papal apartments. Since the ninth century, it had been customary for a pope’s servants to plunder his rooms as soon as he died, as a kind of final bonus from their boss. Over time, servants began to strip not only the papal palace bare but the papal corpse, as well. When Innocent III died in 1216, a visitor found the pope’s corpse in a bare room, nearly naked and in an advanced state of decomposition. His servants had stripped off the precious vestments in which he had been dressed for burial.