Do not repeat false reports, nor bear false witness for the wicked. Neither shall you follow the multitude in doing evil, nor, when giving testimony, side with the many in perverting justice .
—Exodus 23:1–2
O n the death of Pope Urban VIII, the cardinals met once again to choose a successor. And once again, the conclave found itself divided by clans and disputes. On one side, the Spanish-Austrian party opposed the previous pope’s policies and, therefore, any candidate who had been advanced by Urban VIII. On the other side stood the pro-French party, led by Cardinal Antonio Barberini and supported from Paris by Cardinal Jules Mazarin himself.
Spain had given its clear support to Cardinal Sacchetti, proposed through Cardinal Francesco Barberini (Sacchetti’s cousin), but he was rejected by Mazarin. A few days later, on September 15, 1644, the Barberinis decided to unite behind the candidacy of Cardinal Giovanni Battista Pamphili, an old man of seventy-two who adopted the name Innocent X.
The new pope followed the custom of appointing family members to the highest spots in the Church hierarchy. The problem he faced was that the family figure best equipped to carry out such a leading role was a woman, his sister-in-law Olimpia Maidalchini. 1
Olimpia was a strong woman, the widow of the pope’s older brother, after whose death she had managed to place all her sons in high social positions. Innocent X awarded a cardinal’s purple to his nephew Camillo Pamphili, Olimpia’s oldest son. Thus the new cardinal became a vehicle through whom his mother could direct or counsel the pope. 2
In a short time, Olimpia Maidalchini became one of the most powerful individuals surrounding the pope, in spite of not even being allowed to have a private conversation with him. All communications and orders passed through her son—the pope’s nephew—Cardinal Camillo Pamphili.
During the first three years of this papacy, Olimpia advised the pope only about political issues of minor importance, such as questions relating to the Roman infrastructure, which noble families should be favored, and which should be punished. In January 1647, Camillo Pamphili, the secret channel between Innocent X and Olimpia Maidalchini, renounced his position and his priesthood to marry Olimpia Aldobrandini, niece of Clement VIII and widow of Paolo Borghese. A new messenger was needed—a discreet one, of course.
The pope then granted cardinals’ hats to Francesco Maidalchini and Camillo Astalli, both Olimpia’s relatives, so they might become puppets for himself and his sister-in-law. It was Olimpia who recommended to the pontiff that he name Cardinal Panciroli as both secretary of state and supervisor of the Holy Alliance. This followed the path of Urban VIII, who had wanted the papal espionage service and the Church’s politics to go hand in hand. 3
By way of Panciroli, Olimpia extra-officially pulled the levers of the Holy Alliance. She not only secretly attended the meetings between Innocent X and his secretary of state but also decided what operations should be mounted. One of the main enemies of the Holy Alliance was still Cardinal Mazarin’s France, but Maidalchini managed this situation with a certain feminine touch.
Louis XIII had died a few months after Richelieu and been succeeded by his son Louis XIV. Due to the new monarch’s tender age of five, however, his mother, Anne of Austria, ruled as regent. The queen mother named Cardinal Jules Mazarin head of her council. From then on, Mazarin (called by his enemies “the stingy Sicilian” because of his origins and proclivities) was on his way to absolute control of the state power of France. 4
Mazarin had first developed a close friendship with his patron Richelieu while serving as papal nuncio in France. Then he left the pope’s service and became part of the apparatus of state power in Paris. Queen Anne’s trust in him and the incapacity of the rest of the royal family did the rest.
Little by little, things deteriorated to the point that the mostly Catholic nobility began to conspire against the increasingly absolutist power of the state. 5 These intrigues were partly supported and allegedly financed by the Holy Alliance on the recommendation of its shadow chief, Olimpia Maidalchini.
Cardinal Mazarin had managed to infiltrate spies into the Vatican, who informed him about the pope’s maneuvers against France. In response, Maidalchini created a counterespionage unit within the Holy Alliance, known as the Black Order. Its members’ job was to identify Mazarin’s agents and execute them on the spot. 6
To this end, the unit’s eleven members, chosen from the ranks of the Holy Alliance by Maidalchini herself, received a pontifical seal engraved in silver with the image of a woman in a toga holding a cross in one hand and a sword in the other. Apparently the Black Order’s emblem paid homage to the supervisor of papal espionage herself. 7
One of Mazarin’s best spies in the Vatican was a Genovese priest named Alberto Mercati. He had been recruited during Mazarin’s period as papal nuncio in France. On his return to Rome, Mercati had become part of Cardinal Panciroli’s circle, assigned to the secretariat of state as an expert in French affairs. Between 1647 and 1650, important documents relating to France passed through Alberto Mercati’s hands. He forwarded their contents to Mazarin through a complex system of messengers.
Mercati knew that the monks of the Black Order were on his trail, and that Olimpia Maidalchini herself had promised the capture of whatever mole was operating under the protection of a high church official. 8 For the spy, this contest became a game more than a question of espionage pure and simple. Mercati left false clues at inns and taverns in an attempt to throw the Holy Alliance agents off his trail, but he also knew that sooner or later the Black Order would discover his identity.
One Holy Alliance operation uncovered by Alberto Mercati was the Fronde movement. Anti-Mazarin and anti-absolutist, the movement was created by high-ranking Catholic nobles who had been forced to pay steep taxes that ended up in the coffers of the cardinal and his followers, all with the approval of the regent, Anne of Austria. 9
The movement’s name (“slingshot”) came from a seventeenth-century Parisian children’s game. Many of the Assembly deputies who made up the Fronde refused to accept new taxes without parliamentary approval. They also established that no subject of the king could be detained for more than twenty-four hours without being questioned and sent before a judge. 10
Thanks to a document sent by a French agent to Cardinal Panciroli, the spy Alberto Mercati learned that the Vatican and Innocent X were involved in the conspiracy against Mazarin. The infiltrator tried to send an urgent message to Mazarin informing him of a plot by an organization called the Fronde to overthrow King Louis XIV, Queen Anne of Austria, and Mazarin, but the message never arrived. 11
The unsigned message had been given to a member of the pope’s Swiss Guard, a Frenchman, in fact. He was supposed to get it to Paris, but the monks of the Black Order intercepted Mercati’s coded letter. The papal soldier’s corpse was found hanging from a bridge the next day, with his hands cut off. Attached to his garments was a small strip of black cloth with two red stripes, the symbol of the Black Order.
That same day, the head of the Swiss Guard brought the letter to Olimpia Maidalchini to be destroyed, while the uprising in France went forward. Paris soon filled with street fights and barricades. France teetered on the edge of civil war between the followers of Anne of Austria and Cardinal Jules Mazarin on one hand, and on the other hand the backers of the Prince of Condé, Louis de Bourbon, who wanted the cardinal deposed. 12 To support Condé, Innocent X sent Cardinal de Retz, a Gascon who was also Louis XIV’s uncle. 13
The most important members of the Fronde were not very sure of Retz’s loyalties, but in spite of everything, he was Rome’s envoy and had the favor of Louis de Bourbon and Innocent X.
Within three months, the revolt was snuffed out. A temporary peace lasted until 1650, when Mazarin had Louis de Bourbon arrested, provoking a new “Fronde” that would last until 1652. In fact, the true author of the Prince of Condé’s arrest was Anne of Austria, who was tired of the nobleman’s insolence, his lust for power, and his longing to replace the cardinal. But the Holy Alliance agents in Paris preferred to make the populace believe that his detention had been part of a plot by the hated Cardinal Mazarin, a device that further fed the flames. 14
The provinces of Burgundy and Aquitaine rose against Condé’s detention, as did the Duke of Lorraine and the Count of Harcourt. The citizens of Paris took up arms while Parliament demanded Mazarin’s exile. Mazarin instead decided to release Louis of Bourbon and then to take temporary refuge in Germany.
Meanwhile, in Rome, after the death of Cardinal Panciroli in early 1651, Olimpia Maidalchini held on to control of the Holy Alliance. Innocent X had named Cardinal Fabio Chigi (the future Alexander VII) to replace Panciroli. Chigi wanted to take control of the apparatus of power in the Vatican, including the Holy Alliance. Maidalchini was an obstacle to him.
Finally, with the mediation of Innocent X, Chigi made a deal with Maidalchini that deprived her of control over the Holy Alliance or its agents but left her in charge of the Black Order. 15 The pope’s sister-in-law had no choice but to accept. After all, what she most ardently wanted was to arrest Mazarin’s mole.
On September 6, 1652, the Genovese Alberto Mercati was found hanging from a beam in his house in Rome. Stuffed in his mouth was a small scrap of black cloth with two crossed red stripes. The long arm of the Black Order had reached one of the most brilliant enemy spies operating in the Vatican. Purportedly before he died the spy accused Cardinal Panciroli of having ordered him to pass information to Mazarin, but this has never been proved.
On January 7, 1655, Innocent X died at the age of eighty-one. His body remained on view for some hours in the Basilica of St. Peter, but since no one knew what to do with it, for a time afterwards it was taken to a dark room where workers stored their tools. Later he was given a modest tomb in the Church of St. Agnes, in the much-visited Piazza Navona. With the death of Innocent X, the last of the Counter-Reformation popes passed from the scene.
Yet again, the great powers of Europe had to decide who would lead the Catholic Church. The best-positioned was Cardinal Sacchetti, one of the great enemies of the Holy Alliance, which he called “an instrument of the devil good for nothing but doing evil from the shadows.” Sacchetti had openly declared his doubts about an arm of the Church so powerful that the popes themselves could not control it. He was determined to do away with it, whatever that would cost. This position may have prevented his selection as the successor to Innocent X.
Cardinal Fabio Chigi, who had directed the Holy Alliance since 1651, had no desire to see the demise of the espionage service that had cost so many lives. Therefore he decided on a dangerous game, informing Philip IV of Spain about Cardinal Sacchetti’s evidently pro-French activities and his possible friendship with Cardinal Mazarin. With this information in mind, the monarch decided to block Sacchetti and back the loyal Chigi as successor to Innocent X. 16 Finally, after four months in conclave, on April 7, 1655, the College of Cardinals elected Fabio Chigi, who adopted the name of Pope Alexander VII.
His pontificate would become enmeshed in dozens of political conspiracies and in open conflict with France, in part because of the weakness of the papal states after the signing of the “infamous” Peace of Westphalia in 1648.
Alexander VII was a man with obvious diplomatic skills. Breaking with the nepotism of his predecessors, the new pope preferred to make his own decisions after consulting with experts on each matter.
As his first measure, the new pope decided to reform the entire Roman curia, including its secret services. That measure affected Olimpia Maidalchini, who still had the Black Order under her control. 17 The pope made Maidalchini return control of this mysterious organization to the Holy Alliance, dissolve the Black Order, require its members to pledge obedience to the new pontiff, and, finally, herself retire from public life in exchange for a large sum of money.
In obedience to Alexander VII, the still-powerful Olimpia Maidalchini accepted all his demands and retired to her Roman residence until her death in 1657 at the age of sixty-four. Thus ended one of the darkest yet most interesting periods in the history of Vatican espionage. The new leadership of the Holy Alliance fell to Cardinal Corrado, also datary of the Congregation of Immunity.
Cardinal Corrado lacked expertise in politics, and even more so in questions of intrigue, so essential to running an organization as powerful as the Holy Alliance. He was more interested in the study of religion than in something as worldly as a spy service, even one charged with protecting the interests of the pope and the Catholic Church in a continent ever more antagonistic to the papal states. 18
Relations between Rome and Paris were going through a difficult stage. France had not been able to defeat Spain abroad, and its internal situation remained unstable after the final Fronde. The new strong man, alongside the weakening Mazarin, was the finance minister Fouquet. His ambition and greed surpassed even those of his predecessors, Mazarin and Richelieu. The capital’s streets were plagued with religious riots led by the Jansenites, demanding Catholic reform, which began to affect the government and the crown. 19 The Anglo-French friendship treaty signed in 1655 with Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England, gave Mazarin new strength to continue his war against Spain. The Spanish losses of Dunkirk and far-off Jamaica forced Philip IV to sign a treaty of peace. 20
The negotiations, planned by the French queen, Anne of Austria, and by Cardinal Mazarin, revolved around a possible marriage of the young King Louis XIV and Philip IV’s daughter Maria Theresa. Pope Alexander VII and his counselor, Cardinal Sforza Pallavicino, looked favorably on this plan. Pallavicino had become one of the pope’s closest advisors, even taking control of the Holy Alliance from Cardinal Corrado. He saw this royal marriage as a means to lessen French aggressiveness toward the weak papal states.
The marriage proposed in 1658 led to the signing of the Peace of the Pyrenees on the Spanish-French border, November 7 of the following year. In this document, which also reflected the input of Alexander VII, France made a number of concessions. Condé, leader of the Fronde, got his possessions back. French troops left Catalunya and a number of smaller districts, all of which returned to Spanish sovereignty. France gave up Portugal, which did, however, maintain its independence from Spain. Spain’s power in Italy and in the Franche-Compté of Burgundy remained intact. The Peace of the Pyrenees, like that of Westphalia, was a treaty signed out of exhaustion, but France had the look of a new European power in comparison with the ever-weakening Spain. On March 9, 1661, Cardinal Mazarin died, making way for the absolutist monarchy of Louis XIV and French power over all of Europe.
During these years, Pope Alexander VII was merely an accidental witness to most of the European developments. What the pope in Rome wanted least was to stir up the passions of neighboring and powerful France, but a hidden hand saw to it that those passions would be dangerously stirred up.
Two serious incidents came close to provoking open war between Louis XIV and Pope Alexander VII. The first occurred on June 11, 1662, when France’s new ambassador in Rome, the Duke of Crèqui, escorted by two hundred armed guards, tried to force an audience with the pope. Crèqui thought that Alexander VII had to grant him a hearing as representative of Louis XIV, but the pontiff was not so inclined. Cardinal Pallavicino ordered the pope’s Corsican Guard to mass in the entrance to the papal residence so as to block any attempt by the French armed forces to penetrate the pontiff’s rooms. Ambassador Crèqui then protested to Cardinal Rospigliosi, secretary of state. The duke also told King Louis XIV of the affront he had suffered as representative of the French crown in Rome.
The second incident occurred on August 20, 1662, when four men, apparently Holy Alliance agents, had a run-in with three French diplomats. What started out as an argument escalated into a swordfight in the street close to the Farnese Palace, which housed the French diplomatic legation. The sound of clashing blades caught the attention of a Corsican Guard patrol assigned to the area, and also of a detachment of French soldiers protecting the diplomatic site. On arriving at the scene, they found two Frenchmen, as well as one of the Holy Alliance agents, mortally wounded. The other agents, after a serious confrontation with the French troops, were arrested by the Corsican Guard and placed in a jail cell in one of their barracks. 21
The three Holy Alliance agents, however, were set free when they turned out to be former members of the Black Order under Olimpia Maidalchini. Apparently Cardinal Pallavicino had decided to revive the counterespionage service in spite of the contrary instructions from Pope Alexander VII. Sforza Pallavicino wanted to maintain Maidalchini’s men as a nucleus of power, as well as hold on to control of the secrets amassed during the years in which Innocent X’s sister-in-law had run the papal espionage service.
When news of the second incident reached Paris, Louis XIV ordered the papal nuncio’s immediate expulsion. Mobilized French troops occupied Avignon, and the entire army was ordered to prepare for a long punitive campaign against the overproud Vatican state. 22 War was knocking at the gates of Rome, and this time there was not much that the weak Spain of Philip IV could do.
Alexander VII tried to get the duchess-regent of Savoy, Louis XIV’s cousin, to mediate, but this effort failed. The pope had to accept the humiliating conditions of the Treaty of Pisa, signed February 12, 1664. 23 Cardinal Imperiali, the governor of Rome, was sent to Paris to apologize to the king. Mario and Agostino Chigi, relatives of the pope, were sent to the Farnese palace to apologize to the French ambassador, the Duke of Crèqui. The members of the Corsican Guard were discharged and their unit dissolved. Cardinal Pallavicino retired from the public eye, although he continued to wield the same power behind the scenes. Meanwhile, Pope Alexander VII won his place in history with the proclamation of a “secret bull” of February 18, 1664, which protested the French impositions and the Treaty of Pisa, signed only six days earlier to save Italy from foreign occupation:
We declare, in relation to these doings, that we are opposed to violence and force, although we could not resist that which was imposed without our will or consent. I order that the present statement and protest, written by ourself, should stand in defense of the truth, with all our power, even if we are unable to make it public. 24
Evidently the brutality shown by Louis XIV toward the pope after the incident of August 20 was only a pretext to humiliate Rome, Alexander VII and his administration, and the Catholic Church. On his deathbed, the supreme pontiff upbraided the Duke of Chaulnes about the mistreatment of the nuncio in Paris and the damage done to the church in France by royal authority. Alexander died on May 22, 1667, at the age of sixty-nine and was buried in the magnificent mausoleum that Bernini had built for him in the Basilica of St. Peter.
Alexander’s death provoked a new wave of Holy Alliance operations, this time in Asia.
Beginning in 1668 with the collapse of the Ming Dynasty, European diplomatic legations began to establish themselves in China with the approval of the Qing government. The Dutch went in 1668 and the Portuguese in 1670, followed by the embassies of Russia and of the papal states at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The result was to introduce the political and religious problems afflicting Europe into China, creating a breeding ground for the operations of spies representing all sides. 25
The first such spy to meet his death in China was a Dutchman named Olfert Dapper, who had arrived in Asia in 1667 under the orders of Van Hoorn. His mission was to reach an accord with high officials of the Qing court that would grant Holland an exclusive commercial concession, freezing out other European powers. The accord would include a tax exemption for all Dutch ships that anchored in Chinese ports. 26
When Pope Clement IX, Alexander VII’s successor, learned of the Dutch designs, he ordered his agents to eliminate any such impediment to the shipping and other interests of Catholic countries in China. On October 11, 1668, Olfert Dapper was found with his head cut off in a slum adjoining the harbor of Canton.
European residents concluded that this had been a settling of accounts between some Chinese faction and Dapper, though inside the legations it was also rumored that the Dutch diplomat and trader had been executed by the alleged Octogonus Circle to which Henry IV’s assassin, Jean-François Ravaillac, had belonged, or else by the Black Order. In any case, Olfert Dapper’s death set back the signing of a Dutch-Chinese commercial agreement by many years. 27
Clement IX’s sudden death on December 9, 1669, made him only a short-term, transitional pope. This time no less than six factions contended in the selection of a pope to succeed him. The Spaniards allied with Cardinal Chigi promoted the candidacy of Cardinal Scipio d’Elce, but the French blocked his way. Cardinal Azzolini presented Cardinal Vidoni, former nuncio in Poland, but he in turn was barred by Spain. Only when the monarchs of Venice, Spain, and France ordered their ambassadors to find a compromise choice did the conclave, after four months of fruitless votes, choose the aged Cardinal Emilio Altieri as the next pope. He adopted the name Clement X in memory of his predecessor, who had granted him the cardinal’s purple. 28
This pope did not consider the Holy Alliance’s role in the European chess game to be of much importance. Clement X preferred the subtleties of politics and diplomacy to the rougher methods of the Holy Alliance. The new pontiff chose to delegate his powers, but lacking family members upon whom he could count, he opted for the powerful Cardinal Paluzzi. Politicians and other figures of the era came to refer to Paluzzi as Cardinal Paluzzi-Altieri, playing on the pope’s surname. 29 Within a few months, Paluzzi had not only become the supreme pontiff’s shadow but had also taken over the reins of the papal espionage network and the affairs of state. No one in Rome, including the secretary of state, did anything without his knowledge.
It is generally thought to be Paluzzi who revived the Black Order as a counterespionage service, although no documentary evidence supports this claim. What is clear is that in the slightly more than six years during which Clement X occupied the Throne of St. Peter, Paluzzi concentrated a degree of power in his own hands that has few equals in the history of the Roman curia. Espionage and counterespionage were just a few of the dangerous weapons at his disposal, but they were weapons he knew how to use, and he was willing to do so.
Relations with France were no better under Clement X than before, especially because of the arrogance with which Louis XIV acted in all affairs related to the pope and Rome. The most serious crisis occurred on May 21, 1670, when the French ambassador, the Duke of Estrées, accused Cardinal Paluzzi of vetoing the appointment of all French or evidently pro-French priests to the rank of cardinal. The powerful Paluzzi denied the accusation, accusing the French king of being anti-pope and anti-Catholic; Clement X, meanwhile, stood up from his throne to declare the audience at an end. The Frenchman grabbed hold of the pope and made him sit down. The pontiff looked the diplomat in the eye and swore he would not permit any more such French affronts. Cardinal Paluzzi took note. 30
On the night of May 26, five days after that incident, the secretary of Louis XIV’s legation in Rome turned up dead. 31 Apparently the young diplomat, after taking leave of his ambassador, left the building and walked to Trastevere, on the other side of the Tiber, an area full of taverns and brothels. While eating dinner there, he met two well-mannered men who said they were students from Florence who had come to Rome to consider joining the priesthood, as their noble families had decreed.
At one point, the Frenchman left the room to urinate. When he returned, the two Italians had disappeared. Estrées’s secretary sat down and finished his meal. Afterwards, since it was a balmy spring night, he decided to walk back to his small rented room near the French embassy. Midway, he began to sweat profusely and found it hard to breathe. He sat down by a fountain and never got up. He was dead, poisoned.
The two young Florentines had disappeared into the narrow streets of the Lateran and then climbed over a vine-covered wall. On the other side, Cardinal Paluzzi was waiting. One of the two, actually a priest already, knelt and kissed the cardinal’s ring while handing him a small rolled parchment tied up with a ribbon of red silk—the Informi Rosso. 32 The job was done.
The next day, while the French embassy was still unaware of the death of the young secretary, Pope Clement X named six new cardinals, none of them French. From then on, relations between France and Rome, and between Louis XIV and Clement X, practically ceased. 33
Clement X died on July 22, 1676, not without first beatifying Pius V, the great Counter-Reformation pope and founder of the Holy Alliance. 34
In August, the cardinals went once more into conclave. The leading candidates for the Throne of St. Peter were Gregory Barbarigo and Benedetto Odescalchi, both cardinals who had been close to the late pope.
Barbarigo informed the College that he would not accept the papal crown. This was good news for Paluzzi, because Barbarigo had spoken out on several occasions against the methods of the Holy Alliance. If he were to become pope, spy operations would be reduced to a minimum despite the dangers of a continent in the shadow of a French regime more and more hostile to Rome.
In spite of French opposition, the cardinals voted in Odescalchi on September 21. He adopted the name Innocent XI in honor of Pope Innocent X. Like Pamphili, the new pope would regard the Holy Alliance as a necessary evil and would support its use throughout the thirteen years of his pontificate. Therefore he left Cardinal Paluzzo Paluzzi in charge of the spy corps but subordinated him to the secretariat of state directed by Cardinal Alderano Cibo. Innocent XI did not deal directly with Paluzzi as his predecessor Clement X had done. Instead, anything related to the espionage service went through Cibo. 35
Innocent XI’s priorities—and therefore the main battlefields of the Holy Alliance—were three: the always conflictual relations with France and its Sun King, the struggle with the Ottoman Empire, and the hope of bringing England back within the Catholic fold. Cardinal Paluzzi’s agents centered their activities on France and England.
Innocent XI had no intention of continuing to tolerate Louis XIV’s interference in Church affairs. Therefore he decided to send the Sun King three letters—in 1678, 1679, and 1680—requesting that he renounce the extension of the right of “régale .” 36
Louis XIV, fearing that Catholics would feel diminished obligations to the crown, convoked a meeting with French clergy in 1680 to try to head off any danger. In the meeting, all but two bishops apologized to the king for the words of Innocent XI and reaffirmed their loyalty to the crown. A year later, the king called a new assembly, which recognized the régales as a sovereign right. Cardinals Cibo and Paluzzi urged the pope to counterattack, because the French king would not stop there—and they were right about this.
On March 19, 1682, the year when the court moved to the Palace of Versailles, Louis XIV approved the “four articles” of the declaration written by Bossuet that declared the absolute independence of the King of France in temporal affairs, the authority of the Council of Costanza over the pope, the infallibility of the pope conditioned on the consent of his bishops, and the inviolability of the ancient customs of the French church. To underline his position, he ordered the teaching of these four articles in every school in the country. 37
Innocent XI showed his dissatisfaction with the French bishops’ failure to defend the rights of the Church against their king. With respect to the four articles, he preferred not to interfere, but he denied investiture to all who attended the meetings with the king. In 1687, on the advice of Cardinal Cibo, the pope chose the Holy Roman Empire’s candidate for Archbishop of Cologne over the candidate advanced by France. On Cardinal Paluzzi’s advice, he abolished the right of asylum in foreign embassies in Rome. Spain and Venice submitted to the papal edict, but France refused. This gave rise to an undercover war between France and the papal states, revolving around the so-called Scipio network.
F or two years, the Holy Alliance had known that some French agents had penetrated the Vatican secretariat of state. Louis XIV’s spies were, in fact, three priests who worked archiving documents, many of them classified as “delicate material.” The spies copied these and sent the copies to the French diplomatic legation in Rome. The head of this network was known as Scipio.
Alderano Cibo summoned Paluzzi and ordered him to eliminate the network of French spies within the Lateran, using any means necessary. Paluzzi would indeed use all the means at his disposal, as Cibo had ordered, including the monks of the Black Order.
The first to fall into the hands of the Black Order was a member of the Scipio network. On the morning of May 11, 1687, two Holy Alliance agents followed a scriptor 38 who worked at the Vatican Library. This friar’s task was to transcribe and copy documents of the secretariat of state for later distribution among various members of the curia. The Holy Alliance had discovered that certain documents, especially those having to do with France, fell under the purview of this scriptor. The papal espionage service calculated the number of copies made by the friar and the number later distributed. Whenever a document was classified as “delicate material” and dealt with France or Louis XIV, one of the copies failed to be distributed or simply disappeared.
When this case was reported to Cardinal Paluzzi, the espionage chief ordered the monks of the Black Order to capture this scriptor alive. On May 19, the friar was arrested and sent to the Holy Alliance headquarters, where he was interrogated. Under torture, the Scipio spy was persuaded to reveal the names of the other two members of the network that spied for King Louis XIV in Rome.
On May 21, the tortured corpse of the friar appeared hanging from a bridge over the Tiber with a small scrap of black cloth bearing two crossed red stripes. The fearful arm of the Church had struck at one enemy, but two other spies remained at large.
On May 23, in the afternoon, when Holy Alliance agents deployed to arrest a priest who worked under Cardinal Alderano Cibo, the priest managed to escape their net and seek asylum in the French embassy. Applying the abolition of the right of asylum in embassies decreed by Innocent XI, six monks of the Black Order, with masked faces, entered the Farnese Palace and took the priest by force.
Interrogated by the monks, he revealed that behind the code name Scipio hid a monk who some time before had been part of the Holy Alliance and had been recruited by Louis XIV’s espionage service because of his French origins. Scipio was the son of a Venetian citizen and a Florentine woman, who had been brought up in Mazarin’s France. Apparently he had specialized, within the Holy Alliance, in the elimination of “enemies of the Church” by means of poison.
On May 26, 1687, eight members of the Black Order entered a bedroom in an inn near the papal palace in Rome. From a black carriage with papal emblems on its doors, Cardinals Paluzzo Paluzzi and Alderano Cibo watched the operation unfold. They had previously ordered that no patrol of the Papal Guard should be in the area. There was no need for witnesses to Scipio’s elimination. 39
The first monks were climbing the narrow stairs when Scipio appeared before them, on guard with sword in hand. Thanks to the attackers’ numerical superiority, the fight was brief and Louis XIV’s spy had to retreat. Trying to escape through a small window, he fell several meters to where another detachment of the Black Order waited. One of these monks put his sword through the neck of the spy who, bleeding heavily, was trying to get to his feet to continue fighting. In that instant, three swords pierced Scipio’s body, one of them slicing his heart in two. He was dead before he hit the ground.
Cardinal Paluzzi made the sign of the cross with his gloved right hand and closed the curtain. The carriage moved on. Once again the Church’s secrets were well protected from inappropriate eyes. The corpses of Scipio and the priest pulled from the French embassy appeared hanging from a bridge over the Tiber, as a sign for any Roman or foreigner who might doubt the reach of God’s judgment or of its tools, the Holy Alliance and the Black Order.
The incursion of Holy Alliance agents into the French embassy provoked serious reactions in the Parisian court. In November 1687, Louis XIV ordered his new ambassador to enter Rome escorted by an armed regiment in full battle dress. Innocent XI decided to excommunicate this emissary and refused to grant him an audience. In the beginning of 1688, the pope, through his nuncio in Paris, let Louis XIV know that both the king and his ministers should consider themselves incursus (sentenced) to ecclesiastic censures. 40
Now in the full splendor of his power, Louis XIV paid the pope’s warnings no heed at all. As he had done during the papacy of Alexander VII, Louis ordered his armies to occupy Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin.
The popes’ longstanding wish to see a Catholic monarch wear the English crown seemed to strike a more optimistic note toward the end of the seventeenth century. James II, a fervent Catholic, ascended the throne in 1685. He soon sent an ambassador to Pope Innocent XI and allowed the return of the Jesuits to England. 41 The Holy Alliance deployed more agents throughout England. Cardinal Paluzzi knew that sooner or later the religious situation would return to normal—to Protestantism, that is.
James wanted to imitate the absolutism of Louis XIV in spite of the pope’s contrary advice. The Protestant reaction was not long in coming. An uprising was delayed, according the reports of the Holy Alliance agents in James’s court, because the king lacked sons and his daughters were all married to Protestant princes. 42 So it was only necessary to wait for him to die. But in 1686 the king’s second wife gave birth to a male child, which opened the possibility of a Catholic and authoritarian dynasty in the making.
Rebellion followed, and the Protestants offered the English crown to William III of Orange, the husband of James’s older daughter. On November 5, 1688, William and his troops disembarked in England, and soon he was in power. James II had to flee to France, where he remained a refugee till the day of his death. Catholicism’s defeat in England was complete, and it has lasted down to the present day.
Innocent XI did not witness this, having died three months before. His successor on the Throne of St. Peter was Cardinal Pietro Ottobani, who adopted the name Alexander VIII. This pope would rule for only sixteen months, and he gave way before the despotic passions of Louis XIV until his death on February 1, 1691. His successor, Innocent XII, became the last pope of the seventeenth century; his papacy was in no way quiet, however.
Europe was once again caught up in religious and political wars, and Louis XIV’s power and influence remained strong not only throughout France, but also across the Continent. He exercised absolute power during the time of intrigue that soon arrived.