The Caravaggio Conspiracy (9 page)

Bosani felt an almost erotic charge pass through his body – an intimation, surely, of the ecstasy to come. Truly he was blessed to be given a central role in these events. But his real reward awaited him in heaven. Once more, he picked up the Qu’ran and drew it to his lips. ‘Allah be praised,’ he whispered. Then he returned to his list of names.

The body of Cardinal Rüttgers was found next morning. An elderly nun became concerned when he failed to emerge from his bedroom for breakfast even though she had knocked twice. It was a young priest, Father Beckmann, who found him, his head almost entirely submerged in the bathwater, his face twisted in a manner that suggested the sudden onset of a stroke. The Vatican chief physician, called in by the Camerlengo, ruled that he had had suffered a massive, if unexpected, pulmonary embolism and drowned after losing consciousness.

His death sent sent shock waves through the Vatican. Rüttgers was one of the most popular men in the Church, who, in the event of a protracted stalemate in the forthcoming conclave might even, it was said, have been considered papabile. What could possibly have gone wrong? A healthy man, not yet fifty, he had rarely troubled his doctor. On the contrary, he regularly disappeared for days on end in the Black Forest and just two years previously had climbed the Matterhorn alone, without oxygen. Fatalists pointed out that God worked in mysterious ways; realists said that what mattered now, at a pivotal moment in the Church’s history, was that he should be replaced as German primate as quickly as possible.

No post-mortem was conducted. After a hasty funeral Mass in the German Church, Rüttgers’ corpse, in a sealed coffin, was interred in the historic Teutonic Cemetery, hidden from public view between St Peter’s Basilica and the Pope Paul VI audience hall. Complaints from the cardinal’s archdiocese, led by members of his family, that he should be buried in his own cathedral in Freiburg rather than locked away behind high walls in the Vatican were overridden. Instead, it was decided that his embalmed heart should, in due course, be sent back to Stuttgart in a glass box.

Superior General O’Malley was doubly disturbed by the news. He had known the German for many years. When they last spoke, just forty-eight hours
previously
, he appeared in rude good health and certain to add a liberal voice to the deliberations over a new pope. Amid a swelling chorus of anti-Muslim rhetoric, his was one of the few liberal voices left in Rome. Now there was talk that his successor as head of the German Church would be Cardinal Wolfgang Von Stiegel, a hardliner, with views on the future of Catholic-Muslim relations similar to those of Bosani. O’Malley was further concerned when he recalled what his friend had told him only two days before his death: that Bosani was a monster, who appeared to have no qualms about orchestrating a new crusade against Islam. The Irishman couldn’t help wondering if Rüttgers’ death might not have been accidental, but refused to allow himself to follow that line of thought lest it lead to an
unacceptable
conclusion. The last time there had been speculation about a possible murder in the Vatican, following the dreadful and unforeseen death of Pope John Paul I, the trauma had run long and deep, doing great damage to the Church’s image in the world. Even so, speaking privately to his nephew Liam he revealed that recent events had an eerily familiar ring to them.

Pope Paul VI died on 6 August 1978. His fifteen-year reign had proved more eventful than the experts predicted. Not only had he overseen the deliberations of the Second Vatican Council – a latter-day Council of Trent, inaugurated by Pope John XXIII – but he had opened a dialogue between the Church and Islam and established the Secretariat for Non-Christian Religions. Among the cardinals attending the conclave called to elect his successor was Albino Luciani, the son of a socialist glassblower from Murano and his devotedly Catholic wife, Bartola, a scullery maid. Luciani grew up to be a priest, then a bishop, and by the time of his election, at the age of sixty-five, was the Cardinal Patriarch of Venice.

Years before, following the publication of a book by O’Malley on the Ottoman and Byzantine legal systems, Luciani, then in Venice, had written the author a letter in which he wondered whether secular law, without faith, could ever hope to hold society together. The Patriarch and the Jesuit later met at an exhibition in Venice celebrating a thousand years of contact between that city and Islam. The Italian remarked on the fact that the Ottomans of the Sublime Port and the Venetians, in their watery republic, had never, in five hundred years of conflict, relaxed their defences, yet always kept trade links open and maintained a sense of mutual respect. This, not confrontation and hatred, was surely the way forward, he said. In the days leading up to the papal conclave, Luciani and O’Malley – now vice-rector of the Irish College in Rome – met once more, this time after Mass in the Jesuit mother church, known as the Gesù. Luciani reflected ruefully, but with understanding, on the long decline of the Church in Asia Minor and expressed his personal regret that Pope Paul had chosen to abolish the patriarchate of Constantinople, with which his own seat in Venice was inextricably linked.

It was clear to the Irishman that Luciani had a sense of mission but considered himself in no way papabile. He had no idea that others saw special qualities in him and took a different view. Accordingly, he was deeply shocked when, on 26 August after one of the shortest conclaves in history, he was elected pope, taking the regnal name John Paul I.

Throughout Rome, and across the Catholic world, the rejoicing, and relief, was obvious. The cardinal electors – more than had attended any conclave in the Church’s long history – had wanted someone of a pastoral disposition after the cold and cerebral pontificate of Paul VI. During a session in the Sistine Chapel made almost unbearable by the intense heat, the various hardliners quickly cancelled each other out until, finally, only Luciani was left. Two future popes, Karol Wojtyla of Kraków and Joseph Ratzinger of Munich, helped prepare him for his new role, which proved to be no easy task. ‘May God forgive you for what you have done,’ the Italian told them. But then the declaration was made by Cardinal Pericle Felici, the ranking cardinal deacon. ‘
Habemus Papam
,’ he announced, almost in tears. ‘We have a pope.’ The bells of St Peter’s rang out and, after the new pontiff had given the crowd his blessing, looking like a man in a daze, the applause was so great that he was forced to come out on to the balcony a second time.

Even the cynics were won round. This shy, modest intellectual would purge Rome of its wickedness and usher in a new age of openness.

Thirty-three days after becoming Pope, John Paul I was dead. He was found by an attending nun, propped up in bed, reading a book. The official explanation for his sudden demise was a myocardial infarction, a form of heart attack, which his physician in Venice dismissed as inconsistent with his known medical history. The issue could not be resolved because the body was embalmed within
fourteen
hours – a process that effectively obliterated the evidence. Rumours began to circulate almost at once that the Holy Father was murdered – possibly because he had resolved to deal with the mounting scandal of the P2 Masonic Lodge, a Mafia-led organization linked to the Vatican; possibly because he had proved less pliable to certain interests in the Curia than had been supposed.

Among those said by some to have been involved were two prominent
archbishops
, Cardinal John Cody of Chicago, under investigation for alleged financial impropriety, and Cardinal Jean-Marie Villot, from Lyon, the century’s
longest-serving
Camerlengo, an authoritarian figure whose theological conservatism put him at odds with his new master. It was Villot, pre-empting all investigation, who called in the embalmers. They arrived on the scene within an hour of the Pope’s death. Their first task, to be carried out before rigor mortis set in, was to restore a sense of serenity to His Holiness’s features, distorted by the pain of his passing.

O’Malley didn’t know what to think. All he knew for certain was that one week prior to Luciani’s death he had been summoned to the private papal
apartment
where the new Pope told him in confidence of his fears about the true nature of Church government. He had learned that the P2 affair, with its links to the Vatican’s own bank, the Banco Ambrosiano, was much more than a local scandal, and had the potential to split the Church. If even half that he had heard were true, he confided, there were men in Rome, including senior figures in the hierarchy, who saw profit, power and control of the Italian state as more important than the law of God. But even that wasn’t all. So-called liberation theology in Latin America turned out to be more about Marxism than mankind’s relationship with God. ‘These priests seek justice,’ the Pope complained, ‘but only justice here on Earth. There is little talk of salvation, none at all of life everlasting. Our Lord is being denied His divinity by His own priests. It is as if He were no more than a more sensitive, less aggressive incarnation of the late Che Guevara.’

But while these discoveries had unnerved the Italian, he had somehow found the time, and the strength, to focus as well on a quite separate emerging crisis, the growing unrest of Muslims around the world. It was in this context, against the backdrop of rising oil prices and the Islamic revolution in Iran, that he specially sought O’Malley’s advice.

The Pope seemed to be reeling from a sequence of blows. The sheer extent of the challenges facing the Church had shocked him. But he was not unnerved. Instead, relying on prayer and a new team of hand-picked advisers, he seemed determined to tackle the issues as they arose and, if God so willed it, to bring each to a
conclusion
. The tragedy, as O’Malley saw it, was that he was not given the chance.

The Jesuit’s unease refused to subside. On 5 October, the day after the papal funeral, O’Malley called Father John Magee, an Irish priest who served as His Holiness’s private secretary, seeking some insight into what happened. But Magee, one of the first on the scene, failed to return his call and refused afterwards to discuss the matter. O’Malley then discovered that Lamberto Bosani, a newly appointed Monsignor and deputy head of the Secretariat for Non Christians, had had an
audience
with the Pope during the evening that preceded his death. He wrote to Bosani, like himself an authority on the Muslim world, but received an anodyne reply. He said he had visited the papal apartment only briefly to suggest possible dates for an important inter-faith conference, but left after five minutes when staff advised him the Holy Father was unwell and planned to have an early night.

The mysterious death of John Paul I was the longest-running news story of the year. Some reports said that he died in his bed while reading, or possibly writing; others that he was found on the floor of his private bathroom with vomit stains on his clothing. To O’Malley, it was inconceivable that anyone in the Pope’s service could have poisoned him. These weren’t the Dark Ages. Popes weren’t monsters, with enemies at every turn. Yet
something
had happened. Was there a link to the P2 affair? Was Opus Dei involved in a clean-up operation? Did someone remove incriminating papers from His Holiness’s bedside? Conspiracy theories abounded. The official story was that, having prayed with his staff, Luciani retired to bed and died, quietly and serenely, consoled by St Thomas à Kempis’
The Imitation of Christ
. In that case, why the rictus of pain, which at least one of the embalmers reported?

O’Malley had no answers.

But the Vatican, like Nature, abhorred a vacuum. On 4 October, following a three-day lying in state and a funeral Mass conducted by Cardinal Carlo Confalonieri, dean of the Sacred College, Albino Luciani, the ‘Smiling Pope’, was entombed in the grotto of St Peter’s Basilica and attention turned to his successor.

Twelve days later, at the conclusion of the year’s second conclave, the Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, Archbishop of Kraków, was elected Pope, the first
non-Italian
to sit on the Throne of Peter since the Dutchman Adriaan Boeymans, Adrian VI, in 1522. Once more the bells of St Peter’s rang out joyously. ‘
Habemus Papam
,’ the proto-deacon announced. ‘We have a pope.’

But still O’Malley’s sense of loss would not go away. He had expected much from the Venetian and mourned his passing as if he had lost one of his own family. The opening remarks of Cardinal Confalonieri’s eulogy rang in his ears:

The death on 3 March of Clement VIII, after a pontificate lasting thirteen years, went unmourned by most of Rome. Thieves, beggars, whores and Jews had good reason to rejoice. But his passing could not have come at a worse moment for Cardinal Battista. When the news was brought to him, he was just about to board a ship from Civitavecchia for Malta, where he was due to conduct talks with Alof de Wignacourt, Grand Master of the Knights of St John. Instead, he returned at once to Rome to preside over the
sede vacante
and organize the conclave.

He would not have missed the conclave at any price. Even so, he was irritated at having to put off his trip to Valletta. De Wignacourt was a good soldier. More than that, he had a fine appreciation of naval tactics and had built up a Hospitaller’s fleet that, in alliance with Venice, could well frustrate the Ottomans in their bid to recapture the eastern Mediterranean. Battista wished to find out for himself how strong a fleet it was and ways in which that strength might be reduced – possibly through the lease of ships to the papal navy that might then, mysteriously, be lost or kept far from any potential action.

But the Camerlengo had another purpose for visiting Malta. He planned
afterwards
to travel south to Tripoli, in Libya, for a secret meeting with his patron in the Sublime Port, Safiye Sultan, grandmother of Sultan Ahmed I. Brought to the royal court as a teenage concubine, Safiye was a native of Albania. Beautiful and
strong-willed
, of peasant stock, she had risen to be chief consort to Sultan Murad III, and, as
Valide Sultan
, or queen mother, exercised considerable power during his reign and that of her wayward son, Mehmed III. A notorious sybarite, like his father, Mehmed was best remembered in Istanbul for having had some fifty of his half-brothers and sisters strangled by deaf-mutes to ensure there could be no pretenders to his throne. No fool, he astutely left affairs of state to his mother, widely reckoned to be the cleverest politician in the empire. Upon Mehmed’s untimely death, in December 1603, Safiye’s direct authority came to an abrupt end, but as effective head of the Ottoman secret service she remained a formidable
operator
. Her principal objective was the recovery of Hungary for the Empire, parts of which, in spite of an unexpected victory by her son over an Austrian-led alliance in 1596, had since defected to the Hapsburgs, and the restoration of Turkish sea power. Battista, by far her most important spy, was the key to both enterprises. The brief she wished to give him was threefold: to prevent the formation of a new Holy League, the isolation of Venice from the papacy and a reduction in the strength of the Hospitallers’ fleet.

With Battista obliged to remain in Rome, she spoke instead with Luis de Fonseca, from Toledo, one of the most senior Knights of Malta and the Camerlengo’s closest confidant. Fonseca had been captured as a boy during the Ottoman conquest of Cyprus and converted secretly to Islam. The Spaniard listened carefully and agreed that as soon as a new pope was elected he would travel to Rome to pass on her orders to the Camerlengo.

‘The West is growing in strength,’ Safiye told him. ‘If we do not strike soon and take Vienna, I fear we never shall. As for the Christian navies, we have done all that we can to match their technology, particularly their firepower, but they may simply be too many for us.’

Fonseca did his best to reassure her. ‘Your Highness should not trouble herself,’ he said. ‘Battista will soon have the new pope in his pocket. He has already instructed the Spanish ambassador that Madrid’s first priority should not be the Mediterranean – which he has told him can easily be left to Venice – but the war against the Dutch Protestants and their English allies. At the same time, His Eminence and I will see to it that, when the time comes, the Hospitallers’ fleet is dispersed to the four winds.’

The Valide Sultan nodded. ‘Let us hope that you are right,’ she said. ‘The empire that ceases to grow creates the circumstances of its decline. But the will of Allah cannot fail. I expect great things from you and the Camerlengo. A place of honour is being prepared for each of you in the Yeni Valide mosque being built even now in Istanbul. Your names shall live forever in the memories of the faithful. I urge you to be worthy of the honour.’

The Spaniard bowed. ‘We shall not fail you,’ he said. 

Fonseca could not have known it, but five hundred miles to the North
preparations
for the papal conclave were not in fact going according to plan. Battista had lobbied hard and paid extensive bribes from the Vatican’s own treasury to ensure the election of Camillo Borghese, the cardinal-Vicar of Rome, as successor to Pope Clement. But then the unexpected occured. Using a fortune of 300,000 écus provided by the king of France, Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, the former cardinal-nephew, had backed Borghese’s rival, the strongly pro-French Cardinal Alessandro de’ Medici, Archbishop of Florence. Battista was outbid and de Medici was duly crowned Pope Leo XI on Easter Sunday, 1605.

It was not, as things turned out, a catastophe for Battista. France and Spain were now at each other’s throats and in no position to threaten Ottoman power. But then, even as the Camerlengo worked hard to consolidate a policy of divide and rule, de Medici died, aged seventy, having reigned for a mere twenty-seven days. Aldobrandini, still only thirty-four and too young to take the prize himself, was completely thrown by the unexpected turn of events. Lacking the funds
necessary
for a second round of bribery, he gave in with as much grace as he could muster. ‘We live at God’s pleasure,’ he told Battista. ‘We know neither the day nor the hour.’

Battista in reply offered the thinnest of smiles. ‘Nor yet, Eminence, the state of our bank accounts when they are most needed.’

At the year’s second conclave, the ill-preparedness of the French camp told quickly. Battista spared no effort and at the second time of asking secured the succession of Borghese. The new pontiff, taking the name Paul V, did not suffer fools gladly. He was also more mindful of his dignity than almost any other pope in the last hundred years. An ecclesiastical lawyer by training, for whom religion was a matter of observance rather than devotion, he quickly buried himself in Church business and privilege. His first concern was the promotion and elevation of his family. Once that was secured, he banished to their dioceses the hundreds of absentee cardinals and bishops who were the scandal of Rome, thus, at a stroke, preventing scores of his enemies from plotting together. Borghese, unlike his famous predecessors of the previous century, was inward-looking, preoccupied with his role as sovereign of the Holy See. To him, the Papal States were his garden and the Ottomans a remote and alien distraction. His one foreign adventure would centre on events much closer to home than the Sublime Port.

The Most Serene Republic of Venice was celebrated for its lagoon but extended west to Verona and south along the Dalmatian coast as far as Dubrovnik. The entire edifice was built on trade. While the Doge could call on an effective army and a large, efficient navy, these existed primarily to sustain the city and its hinterland as the richest entrepot in Europe, independent of the Papal States. Rome had long wished to bring Venice to heel and even to add it to its dominions. When the Doge and the ruling Council of Ten passed laws restricting the property rights of the clergy and required them to seek planning approval before building new churches, Pope Paul decided to act. Advised by Battista, he excommunicated the government and placed the whole of the Republic under an interdict, suspending public worship and denying the sacraments to its citizens. The Turks were delighted. Safiye Sultan was able to tell her grandson, Ahmed I – still just fifteen years old, but impatient to make his mark – that if he wished to expand the prestige of the empire, now was the time.

Less success accrued to Battista from his dealings with de Wignacourt. The wily Grand Master was not happy with the Camerlengo’s proposal that half his fleet be based in the Balearics to protect Spain from the Barbary pirates. Nor did he see the necessity for more than a modest flotilla to be deployed in the Atlantic against the same Moroccan raiders. But he did agree to a secondment of ten ships, and Battista had to be happy with that.

The cardinal’s one undoubted triumph was not of his own making, but an inspired response to events. Shah Abass I of Persia, whose empire had for many years been in conflict with the Ottomans, invited a delegation of Western
diplomats
to Isfahan and, to their great surprise, proposed an alliance with Europe against the might of Turkey. At first, the new Pope was keen to proceed. He could see value in dividing Islam against itself. But Battista would have none of it. ‘Holy Father,’ he argued, holding out his pectoral cross between the fingers of both hands, ‘such an alliance would surely be contrary to the law of God. Can we permit our soldiers to fight alongside the Persians – whose heathen beliefs are, if anything, more anathema to us than those of the Ottomans? Would Our Lord wish us to make common cause with an oriental power that denies his very divinity?’

It worked. Abbas’s overture was politely rebuffed and nothing was done. Pope Paul returned his gaze to the parish politics of Rome. In a letter to Safiye Sultan, sent via Fonseca, Battista boasted that by his action he had saved the empire, and the true faith, from possible destruction at the hands of its enemies.

Across the Tiber, Caravaggio had no triumphs to savour. Instead, as his money ran out, he spent more and more of his time reassessing his career. In some ways, he was his own worst enemy. He liked to shock. He liked to disturb. He saw no point in art that was merely devotional. Where his rivals drew from an established palette of ideas and images, he tried to engage his public in an argument. He was also an impresario, for whom art was, above all, theatre. Patrons knew this. That was why they came to him. They wanted it to be said of them that they were free and independent thinkers. The trouble was that in recent years the arguments he started often ended up as rows, with consequences. A new puritanism, not unlike that said to be stalking England, had entered Rome with Paul V. Orthodoxy, not exploration, was back in vogue. These days, a patron would as likely as not wait to see what the opinion-formers in the Curia had to say about a painting before adopting that opinion as their own. This was good, or at any rate profitable, if the response from the top was positive, but disastrous in the event of a thumbs down.

The way Caravaggio saw it, the consensus among the greybeards was that he was an unsettling, possibly heretical figure, whose influence, formerly given free rein, ought now to be curbed. His own view was that his critics were medicocre men, steeped in the banality of greed, who recognized his genius but would rather die than admit it. The result was that his situation was becoming desperate. His canvases hung in churches, in the halls of cardinals and princes, even in the Vatican itself. But as his enemies and rivals observed with relish, he no longer had the wherewithal to open a knocking shop in Ortaccio.

He thanked God for Orsi, his flagbearer and truest friend, who did what he could for him, settling his wine bill and securing him several private commissions. Longhi, too, mentioned his name all over town. After he was thrown out of his lodgings in the Vicolo Cecilia e Biagio for non-payment of rent, it was the poet who found him refuge near the Piazza Colonna with the lawyer Andrea Ruffietti.

His eviction was a humiliation. Even now, he trembled with rage at the memory of it. It was his own fault. He should have known better than to venture out, with drink taken, wearing a sword. He had been arrested for the same offence just weeks before and warned about his future behaviour. Then again, if bloody Lena Antognetti, that daft little strumpet, who everybody
knew
was his woman, hadn’t got herself pregnant by that bastard lawyer Pasqualone, there wouldn’t have been any need for a confrontation. What was he supposed to have done? Pasqualone was boasting that he’d won out in an affair of the heart against the great Caravaggio. People were sniggering. Even then, if the damned fool hadn’t stepped out in front of him in the Piazza Navona, he might have got away with it. But there he was, plain as day, smelling of cologne, dressed like an undertaker. It was the work of an instant to smack him in the back of the head with the hilt of his sword. It wasn’t a proper wound, it was a challenge Anyone else would have turned and faced him. But not Pasqualone. Instead, he screamed for the
sbirri
, who came running, almost out of nowhere. ‘The painter Caravaggio’ had tried to murder him, the little worm had told them. Well, that was it. He should have done for him there and then. But remembering the warning from Battista, he decided not to hang around. Instead, within a matter of hours, he was on the road to Genoa, where the Doria family had offered him work. 

As it happened, the commission in Genoa, for an ambitious sequence of
frescoes
, didn’t interest him – though it would have made him a rich man. He had never trusted himself at frescoes – all that wet plaster – and was concerned, in addition, that if he stayed out of Rome too long he would be forgotten. Instead, he took the advice of Doria’s lawyer and apologized fulsomely to Pasqualone for his insolence. Groveling was not in his nature, and it rankled with him to beg the forgiveness of a man who had set out to cuckold him. But life away from Rome was, if anything, more unbearable. Two weeks later, after learning that his apology – posted by Pasqualone in the portico of Santa Maria Maggiore – had been accepted, he journeyed south once more to pick up his career.

His return proved as tempestuous as his leaving. His landlady, he discovered, had evicted him from his lodgings and disposed of his possessions as if he were an impecunious student. He had protested, of course. He even threw stones at her windows, causing the small crowd that gathered to erupt with laughter – though whether it was
with
him or
at
him, he wasn’t sure. To add insult to his injury, an inventory of his worldly goods, seized in lieu of rent, was pinned by the official receiver to what had been his front door: a bed; several stools (‘one broken’); a guitar; a violin without strings; two swords; a couple of daggers; two large,
unfinished
paintings; a mirror; three devices used for tightening canvases; a painting on wood; a wooden tripod … and an unopened letter. As a litany of his misfortune, it made dismal reading. No clothing was mentioned, which surprised some people, but not those who knew him. According to Orsi, Guido Reni, a second-rate painter but a first-class cardsharp, had remarked to anyone listening in the Turk’s Head: ‘Any clothes Michelangelo owns, he’s wearing.’