Mistress of the Vatican (64 page)

When the investigators had lined up the main charges against Olim-pia, Alexander sent her a list of accusations and demanded that she respond. She must give an accounting of the money she had taken from the church treasury, which she had used as her personal bank account. She must come forward with the names of all individuals who had bought their church offices from her, and the amounts they had paid.

Furthermore, Olimpia must make restitution for all bribes she had received from criminals to let them out of jail. She must give an accounting of the grain that she had sent out of the country. She must account for all the taxes on foodstuffs that had gone into her hands instead of church coffers. And she must return immediately all jewels that she had pried out of church altarpieces and swiped from the papal palace.

Olimpia’s written response was short and clear. As monarch of the Papal States, Innocent had been legally entitled to do whatever he wanted with church property. He had given her access to church funds, had permitted her to keep a portion of the tax on food, and had allowed her to sell some offices. She added that this was nothing extraordinary, as for centuries almost all popes had done the same thing with their relatives.

Olimpia’s defense was, to a great extent, true. If Innocent had known and approved of all of her dealings, they would have been legal. But obtaining money secretly and without the pope’s blessing would have been illegal. Alexander’s investigators had the difficult job of determining which transactions the dead pope had approved of and which he had not known about.

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It remains unclear how much Innocent knew about Olimpia’s shady dealings. Though blatant nepotism had become part of church tradition, Innocent himself had been honest and thrifty. He had loved the church and had compassion for the poor. Just how much money would he have allowed her to keep? Her replacement of the honest Cecchini in the datary with the corrupt Mascambruno was proof that Innocent would not have approved of all her graft, and she was forced to hide at least some of it from him.

But there was another tricky legal question. Innocent had exiled Olimpia from the Vatican, discovered the extent of her corruption, and then invited her back and pardoned her. Was that, in effect, papal permission to keep all the money she had taken?

After a fair trial in which Olimpia would be given lawyers and every means of defending herself, the pope wanted her to make a full restitution of money determined to be illegally obtained. The investigative committee of cardinals held debates about how much of the Pamphili family wealth and property should be sequestered until a verdict was rendered.

Now the entire family felt threatened. Prince Ludovisi took the opportunity to visit Spain. The rest of the family met periodically at the Piazza Navona palace to devise a strategy. The princess of Rossano felt that Olimpia would be better off leaving Rome under the old adage “Out of sight, out of mind.” She could pretend her health required her to take the country air at one of her estates, or she could go on a religious pilgrimage somewhere.

But Camillo thought a hasty exit would make Olimpia look guilty. He reportedly advised his mother, “Madam, only a crazy person would flee his house before it burned. Stay in Rome and seek no other retreat. Take care of yourself, and we will take care of the rest.”
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But Olimpia must have been worried about leaving her fate in the hands of her bungling son.

The decision whether to stay or leave was made for her. One day she received word from the pope telling her to leave Rome within three days. Camillo raced to the Vatican for an audience with the pope, hoping to change his mind. But Alexander sent word that he would not see

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Camillo until Olimpia had left Rome. On July 22, 1655, she rattled out of the city gate incognito and traveled to her palace at San Martino. The same day, the pope gave orders for witnesses against her to begin giving testimony in a court of law.

The next day, Camillo raced back to the Vatican and asked for another audience now that his mother had left town. When he saw Alex-ander, Camillo told him that punishing Olimpia would scandalize the heretics, who would laugh at proof that the former pope had given his relatives money and power. Alexander replied that heretics would be more scandalized to see wickedness left unpunished rather than justice served, “and that it would be good if the relatives rendered an accounting to the pope while waiting for him to render an accounting to God.”
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On October 21 the pope learned that the despite his earlier instructions to Olimpia to clear the construction material out of the Piazza Navona, it was still littered with heaps of marble stones, planks of wood, and barrels of lime. He sent her notice of a large fine along with the threat of more fines if she did not comply.

But Olimpia had no place to put the building materials, as construction was not moving forward; Borromini felt the foundations built by the Rainaldis would not bear the weight he wanted to add. Stewing in exile, Olimpia was hardly in a position to badger the builders to get back to work. She gave the job to Camillo, along with the expense, as he was now the male head of the Pamphili family. She was, after all, only a woman.

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Five months after the former queen of Rome trundled out in disgrace, a new queen of Rome was arriving in triumph. The most successful conversion of a heretic had taken place; on November 3, Queen Christina of Sweden had publicly abjured her Lutheran faith and converted to Catholicism in a ceremony held in Innsbruck. On the afternoon of De-cember 23, she entered Rome through the Porta del Popolo in a carriage designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini. The pope had restored the gate in honor of the occasion with an inscription that read to commemorate a happy and blessed arrival 1655.

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All of Rome took a holiday to see the queen. Tapestries hung from windows and balconies. The procession was led by Rome’s nobility— gentlemen on horseback and ladies in carriages. Camillo Pamphili continued to wear mourning for the uncle he had refused to bury, perhaps to remind the world that he had been the papal nephew. His black velvet suit was studded with precious diamonds valued at 100,000 scudi. Sewn onto his black hat were several enormous diamonds shining in the winter sun. Riding behind him was the princess of Rossano, also in black, shimmering in gemstones said to be worth seven times as much as her husband’s. The couple was accompanied by numerous pages in expensive black livery.

Behind them came the pope’s guards, and then the queen herself, riding sidesaddle as women were supposed to, and not astride, as many spectators had hoped. She wore a simple gray dress embroidered with a bit of gold, a black shawl, a plain black hat, and no jewels. Many Ro-mans were disappointed that she looked so normal. They had heard strange things about her.

Giacinto Gigli took a good look at her. “Many say that the queen is certainly a hermaphrodite,” he noted, “but professes to be a woman. She is rather short, with a big forehead, big and lively eyes, an aquiline nose, a small mouth, the voice of a man, the movement and gestures of a man. . . . They say she rides like a man . . . and doesn’t ride so much as fly.”
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When Christina was born in 1626, the Swedish people knew that a twenty-one-gun salute would be sounded for the birth of a princess and a one-hundred-gun salute for the birth of a prince. At the twenty-second salute, the populace went wild with joy. But oddly, the guns stopped firing after thirty salutes. In 1965 archeologists, poking around in her coffin in Saint Peter’s Basilica, hoped to find evidence of the queen’s gender(s) but remained confused.

Christina’s hermaphroditic tendencies were one reason for her abdication. She was romantically attracted to women, and the thought of marriage and childbearing appalled her. Whenever her ladies-in-waiting got pregnant, she called them “cows” and refused to see them until

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after they had been delivered. Yet as queen, Christina was expected to marry and have children. Her aversion to marriage, however, does not explain her conversion to Catholicism. After all, she could have abdicated, remained Lutheran, and lived at the Swedish court as a member of the royal family honored for her years of service and her renowned scholarship.

Christina’s free spirit felt stifled by the colorless Lutheran religion and was drawn to the incense, drama, and music of the Roman Church. She spoke eleven languages, ancient and modern, discoursed on the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, eagerly followed scientific advances and encouraged the arts. The flamboyant queen had read much about former popes—the Borgia orgies; the Medici feasts with dwarves, clowns, and jugglers; and the intellectual, artistic, and scientific fecundity of Rome. Ruling socially over this rollicking world, she imagined, would be much more fun than ruling as monarch over the stiff prudes of Sweden.

Unfortunately, Christina was mistaken in her image of Roman life. The freewheeling early-sixteenth-century papal court was a far cry from the priggish Vatican after the Council of Trent. Seventeenth-century Rome was almost as strict—at least on the surface—as uptight Stock-holm. Fascinated as she was by science, Christina was disappointed to find that ever since the Galileo trial of 1633, many top scientists had left Italy and scientific academies had closed their doors for fear of being hauled up before the Inquisition as heretics.

One of the greatest art patrons of her time, the queen was horrified upon moving into the Palazzo Farnese to see magnificent classical nude statues in her palace and gardens defaced by metal bras and underpants and ridiculous fig leaves. She insisted they be removed. The pope, for his part, did not want the fig leaves and metal underpants removed. They had been put there for a purpose. Nudity, even in great art, was no longer appropriate. He insisted the queen put them back on her statues. She refused.

Those who had enjoyed Olimpia’s rowdy Carnival performances found a speedy replacement in Christina’s “lascivious and sinful comedies” held

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in her palazzo, which numerous cardinals attended.
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Invariably the audience included Camillo and the princess of Rossano, who became one of Christina’s best friends. The pope was not amused.

Alexander was further dismayed that the queen tromped around the Vatican wearing thick men’s boots and men’s clothes. The Bible, he pointed out, instructed Christians to wear only those clothes appropriate for their own gender. Christina must stop dressing like a man. The queen, in this instance at least, complied with the pope’s request. She started appearing at Vatican receptions wearing gowns so low-cut her nipples popped out.

Initially, church officials thought that the most proper thing for Christina to do in Rome, considering that she was an unmarried female, was to enter a convent, either as a nun or simply to retire from the world. But though Christina visited convents often—mainly to ogle the nuns—she said that she would rather
marry
than become a nun. Then she surprised all Rome by having a passionate love affair with a man. The pope felt her choice was most unfortunate; it was Olimpia’s protégé Cardinal Decio Azzolini.

Olimpia had been exiled from Rome some five months before Chris-tina’s arrival. The old queen of Rome, who had clawed her way to the top, never met the new queen of Rome, who had been born at the pinnacle and gracefully slid down of her own free will. The one hoped that in her exile from Rome the scandal of her life would be forgotten, while the other hoped to foment as much scandal as possible for the sheer fun of it. Yet it is fascinating to speculate on a meeting between the two women. We can picture the queen marching into Olimpia’s palazzo one day in her thick boots and men’s breeches, flopping down on a chair with legs spread wide, and gulping wine. We can picture Olimpia, in her virtuous black silk, letting slip a hearty guffaw.

When Christina was snubbed by a haughty Roman noblewoman who refused to accompany her down the stairs after a visit, the feisty former queen grabbed her hostess by the hands and dragged her down kicking and screaming. Olimpia, who had been snubbed herself in her early years in Rome, would have approved.

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Though they had few, if any, similar interests, and completely different backgrounds, these two remarkable women had one striking characteristic in common—despite the oppressive misogyny of their world, they had both completely taken charge of their lives and not allowed men to dictate to them. They lived exactly as they wished to—no matter how loudly the men squawked. It is possible that Christina and Olimpia would have truly liked each other.

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On January 17, 1656, Sister Agatha Pamphili died at the age of eighty-six. Camillo wrote Olimpia, “Yesterday morning the signora Sister Ag-atha rendered her spirit to God with such exemplary resignation that we cannot doubt that she is enjoying eternal glory.”
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Indeed, if any member of the Pamphili family ever passed Go in purgatory and flew directly to heaven, it must have been Agatha. For decades she had done all she could to instill the Catholic virtue of forgiveness in her wayward relatives. Now she could finally rest, leaving them to their fractious selves.