NATURALLY, OLIMPIA WOULD BE GOING with the new papal nuncio to Naples. Despite her eight years of tutelage, Gianbattista evidently did not feel confident enough to handle his first diplomatic posting without her by his side telling him exactly what to do. And she could hardly accompany the new papal nuncio without dragging her husband and her two-year-old daughter along to give the whole thing an air of respectability.
The Pamphilis would have been accompanied on the journey by their famiglia, those tried and trusted servants who would keep an eagle eye on their property in Naples to make sure it didn’t wander off, and on their lives to make sure they weren’t snuffed out. Romans believed that the Neapolitans were the most thieving, murderous wretches in the world.
It wasn’t entirely the Neapolitans’ fault that so many of them were thieving, murderous wretches. For some two thousand years Naples—and the other half of the kingdom, the island of Sicily—had been ruled by a succession of foreign invaders. The Greeks, Romans, Goths, Byzantines, Normans, Germans, French, and Spanish had governed the area, each conqueror squeezing the locals dry by brutal taxation and stomping them down with cruel repression. When the rich stole from and murdered the poor with impunity, this was called justice. When the poor, out of fury and desperation, stole from and murdered the rich, this was called stealing and murder. Over time, it would be called something else—the Mafia.
All male servants, walking or riding, would have been heavily armed with loaded pistols and knives. Bandits on the road between Rome and Naples were notorious, and the convoy of the new papal nuncio with his trunkloads of silver platters would have offered rich booty. As Olimpia and her family neared the city of Naples, they would have traveled under trees adorned with the bodies and body parts of bandits, hung there by the government as a warning to anybody so inclined as to rob travelers.
On April 3, 1621, the Pamphilis arrived in Naples unscathed and took up residence in the palazzo bought by Sixtus V in the 1580s to house the papal nuncio. But Gianbattista disliked the residence. “It is too small for the family of a prelate who will be situated in an indecent place,” he wrote.1 He wanted the pope to sell it and buy another palazzo, roomier, with better air. It is not known if the pope did so.
When Olimpia had settled into her new home, she would have had the chance to look around the city. Naples had three times as many inhabitants as Rome—some 300,000—most of them crowded in slum apartment buildings in a rabbit warren of narrow medieval streets climbing the volcanic hills. Laundry was strung across the street from every floor. Rubbish and night soil were flung out the windows onto the pedestrians below. Children, often without a stitch of clothing, scavenged among heaps of ordure, competing for food with dogs, cats, and rats.
Hygiene aside, the natural setting of Naples was infinitely more beautiful than that of Rome. At the city’s feet spread out a sparkling carpet of sapphire blue, the Bay of Naples. Behind the city rose the peaks of Mount Vesuvius, trembling now and then and belching sulfuric fumes. In the harbor, connected to land by a narrow causeway, sat the square yellow Egg Castle, the Castel d’Ovo, named such, it was said, because the ancient Roman poet Virgil had hung an egg from the ceiling of a cave deep below the castle. When the egg broke, Naples would be destroyed. And whenever Vesuvius rumbled, many Neapolitans remembered the egg and crossed themselves.
When traveling in the city, even going to church, the Pamphilis would have been accompanied by an armed guard. Kidnappers could capture them and hold them for ransom or simply rob and murder them in broad daylight. Going out at night was a form of suicide. Once dusk fell, everyone but the criminals stayed inside and bolted their doors. A dinner party or ball naturally included an invitation to spend the night and return home in the morning.
Bristling with thousands of Spanish soldiers, its harbor stuffed with Spanish warships, Naples posed a constant low-level threat to the sovereignty of the Papal States to the north. The pope had only the tiniest standing army, relying on a sudden rush of volunteers or the hiring of mercenaries if invasion threatened. The papal navy consisted of a few ships manned by slaves and convicts. His Holiness relied on the goodwill of Spain, with its unlimited firepower, to protect him from invasion. However, if Spain decided to invade the Papal States, it could have easily rolled across the entire country with very little opposition.
But it was unlikely that Spain would do such a thing. For eight hundred years the Spaniards had waged a nonstop crusade against Muslims on Spanish soil, resulting in a militant Catholicism. Spaniards considered themselves to be more devoutly Catholic than any other nation in Europe, certainly more Catholic than the self-absorbed French or the rollicking Italians. In the late sixteenth century King Philip II said that religion was too important to be left in the hands of the pope.
His Excellency Gianbattista Pamphili and his staff would be working on a variety of issues with the Spanish viceroy, the personal representative of the king of Spain. Grain and other foodstuffs were shipped from Naples to the Papal States, and vice versa, depending on the harvests, and were taxed. The Vatican owned property in the kingdom of Naples—churches, monasteries, and farms—from which it received revenues. As a Catholic nation, Naples owed the Papal States a sum of money every year—which was negotiable, depending on war, famine, and plague.
Financial matters aside, there were numerous church issues that required attention. Requests for marriage annulments and dispensations would be presented to the Roman nuncio, who would look them over, write an opinion, and forward them to the Vatican. There was always the pesky problem of criminal clerics—a priest who robbed someone in Naples, for instance. Civil authorities were not permitted to pass judgment on ordained priests, who would be handed over to the nuncio’s men and taken to Rome for trial.
Heresy was to be trampled, and literature on the Index of Forbidden Books was to be rooted out and publicly burned. Then there were issues related to greed and ambition. Neapolitans pushed for honors and pensions from the Holy See, and Roman nobles pushed for honors and pensions from the kingdom of Naples. Often, trades were made to keep everyone happy.
The papal courier service between Rome and Naples was efficient, the trip taking only three days on a fast horse. Gianbattista would have been required to write a weekly diplomatic dispatch that ran some fifteen or twenty pages. His reports would have been coded to prevent spies from understanding them. The easiest way to encode letters was to use numbers to represent the names of people and places, so that Gianbattista’s Italian prose would have had numbers interspersed throughout. However, in highly sensitive cases every letter of every word was represented by a number. Back in Rome, the papal office of ciphers would decode them and deliver them to the pope. Similarly, the pope’s instructions would arrive in Naples encoded, and Gianbattista’s secretary would decode them.
As nuncio, Gianbattista would have been expected to set up his own espionage network, bribing servants in the viceroy’s house or employees in his office. Information could always be bought for the right price, and the corruption of Naples made the corruption of Rome seem downright saintly in comparison.
In addition to the under-the-table bags of gold that stank of corruption, the papal nuncio was expected to give over-the-table gifts that smelled of ambergris—fragrant petrified whale vomit—and musk, the aromatic glandular secretion of the musk deer. The most popular gifts for government officials, local noblemen, and their female relatives were perfumed gloves. Seventeenth-century gloves were of supple leather, heavily embroidered with scarlet and gold thread, with huge tabbed cuffs extending halfway up the forearm, and adorned with tassels woven of real gold. Perfuming the gloves often cost twice as much as the gloves themselves, so rare were the fragrances. In fact, on May 29, 1621, less than two months after his arrival in Naples, Gianbattista wrote to Rome asking for a shipment of gloves.
The position of papal nuncio to Naples was a heavy financial burden and only awarded to the richest candidates willing to spend their own money. The salary was low and very few expenses were reimbursed by the pope. But it was a path to the riches of a cardinal’s hat, and many churchmen were eager for the opportunity.
Without Olimpia’s money, Gianbattista would never have been considered for the post. Olimpia paid for the servants, the food, the festivities, the secret bag-of-gold bribes, and all of those perfumed gloves. As careful as she was with money, all of her Naples expenses were well worth it. For one thing, she would do anything, give anything, to help Gianbattista, the one person who truly appreciated her, the one person she truly trusted. For another, her expenses were actually an investment. If he should be made cardinal, she would be paid back with interest. And most important of all, she exercised real power, which had always been her dearest dream.
We can assume that Olimpia was up to her elbows in intrigue and loving every moment of it—plotting, planning, bribing, manipulating, dictating coded letters, and decoding letters from the Vatican as soon as they arrived. Although they were not aware of it, the viceroy of Naples, the king of Spain, and the pope himself were all dealing with her political suggestions. It was worth all the money she spent to play such a major role in high-level international politics.
The Venetian ambassador to Rome, Alvise Contarini, reported that “to the same signora Donna Olimpia, [Gianbattista] declared himself to be very much obliged for the rich dowry carried into the Pamphili family and for having provided for his needs.”2
Cardinal Sforza Pallavicino, who knew Olimpia well later in life, wrote that she “carried into the Pamphili family much patrimony that was used most instrumentally to honorably sustain the house, and from this came all the greatness which successively followed [Gianbattista]. Let me add that she possessed an intellect of great value in economic government, and she had always administered with care the possessions of the family, with great advantage to the purse, to relieve the cares of her brother-in-law.”3
To Olimpia’s joy, her brother, Andrea, moved just outside Naples and the two saw each other frequently. On September 23, 1621, Olimpia wrote her mother that Andrea was four days into his governorship of Aversa, a town five miles north of the city. Andrea was approximately forty years old and well on his way to siring the ten sons and numerous daughters he would have with two wives. Oddly, Olimpia never resented her brother for being Sforza’s favorite or receiving all of the family wealth; she would remain very close to him until his death.
While close to her brother, Olimpia seems to have distanced herself from her husband. An anonymous document in the Vatican Archives does not beat about the bush when it comes to stating that Olimpia wore the breeches in the marriage. Olimpia, “married to Panfilio Panfilij in the second marriage, showed such a stubborn mind that many times…he was forced to tolerate her many importunities and many insolent rebukes.” 4
Despite the marital tensions or, as some said, because of them, a blessed event occurred. On February 21, 1622, some ten months after arriving in Naples, Olimpia gave birth to a healthy son she called Camillo. The Pamphili family, which had been grinding its way inexorably toward extinction for decades, now had an heir. The proud papa was nearly sixty and the mother thirty. With an uncle rising quickly in the church hierarchy and a rich ambitious mother like Olimpia, the boy, if he lived, was destined for a brilliant career. But many in Naples, aware of the strained state of Olimpia’s marriage and her unusual closeness to her brother-in-law, wondered if the papal nuncio himself might be the father of the bouncing baby boy.
Shortly after the birth, Olimpia and Pamphilio returned to Viterbo for a few months to show her mother, Vittoria, her grandson and manage their business interests there. It is revealing that during her sojourn in Naples, Olimpia had placed her mother, not her father, in charge of her extensive Viterban properties. Family archives contain several letters to Vittoria from both Olimpia and Pamphilio regarding the rents, crops, and improvements. There are no extant letters from Olimpia or Pamphilio to Sforza, with whom relations were, apparently, strained.
In a letter to her mother dated October 11, 1622, Olimpia wrote, “I saw what Your Excellency said in your letter of September 27, and I did not fail to immediately write a letter to my father, which you will see here enclosed. If it seems appropriate to you then pass it on to him. I have tried to write lovingly so that he no longer has any doubts.” At Christmastime, Olimpia sent warm seasonal greetings to her mother, adding, “and to signor father, too.”5
Sforza died in the late spring of 1623 at about the age of sixty-three, suffering agonizing stomach pains. According to a letter Pamphilio wrote to Vittoria Gualtieri on July 22, 1623, Sforza had never finished paying the dowry he had promised Olimpia in 1612. Now Pamphilio wanted the money out of Sforza’s estate. It is not known if he ever obtained it. Certainly, coming on top of the convent story, the dowry issue must have been an additional source of the father-daughter rupture.
It is uncertain when Olimpia’s mother died. The last letter written to her in the family archives is dated 1629. But in their Viterban convent, Olimpia’s sisters would live to old age in excellent health. From Naples, Olimpia often sent her sisters little comforts—macaroni, sweets, and linen undergarments. She frequently mentioned Ortensia and Vittoria in her letters to her mother, and probably wrote them letters that are now lost.
Pope Gregory XV was never entirely healthy during his pontificate and let his nephew, whom he promoted to cardinal, rule for him. “Just give me something to eat and you can take care of the rest,” the pope said.6 On July 8, 1623, Gregory died. “After the death of Gregory the treasury was empty and aggravated by huge debts, without anyone knowing how this occurred,” the Roman diarist Giacinto Gigli wrote. The pope had given everything to his relatives, “who in twenty-nine months accumulated the greatest riches.”7
The city of Rome tumbled into anarchy, which was usual when the See was vacant. Gigli noted, “There was not a single day when there were not many fights, murders, betrayals, finding many men and women killed in various places, and many were found without a head. Many headless bodies were found that had been thrown in the Tiber. Many houses were broken into and robbed at night. Doors were smashed, women were raped, others killed, and many young girls disgraced, raped, and taken away.”8 For once it was actually safer to be in Naples than in Rome.
On July 19, fifty-five cardinals processed with great dignity into their tomblike accommodations in the Sistine Chapel to elect a new pontiff. It was a summer conclave, the dread of every cardinal. In the stifling heat, chamber pots grew rank and fetid. The smell of unwashed bodies oozed through red robes. And malaria struck, “the atmosphere being laden with putrid miasmas and sickening smells of decaying victuals that the potent perfumes of the young cardinals could not manage to disguise,” one chronicler reported.9 Then fleas invaded the premises, eating the cardinals alive.
The decision hastened by the spreading malaria, on August 6 the candidate favored by France, the Florentine cardinal Maffeo Barberini, was elected pope and took the name Urban VIII. Barberini had been papal nuncio to France from 1604 to 1607, and his continued good relations with the French government disgruntled Spain. At fifty-five he was younger than most newly elected popes and promised a long reign, which disgruntled the other cardinals, many of whom would never have another chance to become pope. But to get out of that stinking malarial hellhole of a conclave, the majority of cardinals would have elected the devil himself.
Urban had a square beard, hard, round eyes, and a snub nose that gave him the look of an alert schnauzer. The Venetian envoy Zeno was more flattering in his description. “His Holiness is tall, dark, with regular features and black hair turning grey. He is exceptionally elegant and refined in all details of his dress; has a graceful and aristocratic bearing and exquisite taste. He is an excellent speaker and debater, writes verses and patronizes poets and men of letters.”10
The Barberini family coat of arms featured three gold honeybees on a blue shield, and indeed, it was whispered that two days before Urban’s election a swarm of bees had hovered over his cell in conclave, forming themselves into the shape of a papal crown, surely an omen from the Holy Spirit. The family coat of arms had previously been three horseflies, but the rising family had had the good sense to change it. Bees, it was known, were attracted to honey, the nectar of the gods. Horseflies were attracted to manure, the nectar of horseflies.
At Naples, the Pamphilis waited for news of the conclave. Would the new pope recall Gianbattista from his nunciature, replacing him with a friend or relative as most popes did? The answer came quickly. Pope Urban VIII was pleased with his nuncio’s work in Naples. Gianbattista—and Olimpia—should continue.
After four years as nuncio to the kingdom of Naples, Gianbattista was finally recalled to Rome in March 1625. Olimpia packed up her household and made the dangerous trip back, unloading at the old house in the Piazza Navona. It must have been a relief to be back in the relative safety of Rome. Even better, Gianbattista’s recall involved not disgrace but honor. The pope had chosen him for a special mission.
Urban VIII had three beloved nephews. The eldest, Francesco, he made a cardinal in 1623 at the age of twenty-six, giving him the regal position of cardinal nephew, a kind of secretary of state who was accorded the honors of a sovereign. The second, Taddeo, would be the lay head of the family and marry. The third, Antonio, would be made a cardinal in 1627 at the age of twenty.
Cardinal Francesco Barberini was impatient to make his mark on politics and diplomacy. He prodded his uncle to send him on a difficult embassy to Paris. A dispute had arisen between France and Spain over a small area known as the Valtellina in northern Italy. France had ousted the neutral papal troops and replaced them with French troops, with Spain howling in protest. The pope wanted his diplomats to convince Louis XIII and his powerful prime minister, Cardinal Richelieu, to remove the French troops.
But the pope realized that his nephew was still inexperienced for such a delicate task. Though Francesco would technically head the mission and receive all the honor, Gianbattista, as special assistant to the cardinal nephew, would be the brains behind it. Olimpia would not be able to join her brother-in-law, as it was a temporary mission. And perhaps for the first time, Gianbattista felt confident enough to do without her.
Many at the French court, knowing the urgency of Gianbattista’s mission, asked him for money, pensions, and honors from the Papal States in return for pushing his agenda forward. He routinely replied, “It can’t be done,” earning him the nickname “Monsignor It-Can’t-Be-Done.”11 There was, unfortunately, a personality conflict between the suave silkiness of the French courtier and the prickly suspicion of Gianbattista Pamphili.
The mission to France failed utterly, but Urban realized this was due to French stubbornness rather than the ineptness of his envoys. After all, Cardinal Richelieu was known to dislike the pope’s involvement in political matters, saying, “We must kiss his feet and bind his hands.”12 Urban immediately packed his diplomats off to the court of Madrid to convince Philip IV to force the French troops to leave Valtellina and allow the papal troops to return. But after the long voyage, when the two arrived in Madrid they learned that France and Spain had already made a secret peace. The Protestant enclave known as Grisons would control the Valtellina, quite a slap in the face of the Catholic Church.
Once again, Urban realized his envoys were not at fault. He recalled his nephew Francesco to Rome but instructed Gianbattista to remain in Madrid as the new papal nuncio to Spain. Gianbattista Pamphili, whose career had been stalled when Olimpia first met him, now held the single most important diplomatic position of the Papal States.
Olimpia was not inactive during her brother-in-law’s absence. She continued to work on Gianbattista’s behalf in Rome and was seen walking in and out of the French and Spanish embassies. Not slowed down a bit by the birth of her daughter Costanza in 1627, she invited the wives and daughters of ambassadors to dine with her, listen to music, attend card parties, and go hunting on the rolling hills around Viterbo. She had won over Urban’s sister-in-law, Costanza Magalotti, the mother of the pope’s three nephews. And, when Taddeo married Anna Colonna in 1627, Olimpia went to work on her, too.
An anonymous eighteenth-century pamphlet explained, “With great agility she insinuated herself into the graces of the Barberini brothers and particularly with Cardinal Antonio, through Signora Costanza Magalotti, sister-in-law of the pope and mother of the same Barberinis, and of Signora Anna Colonna, wife of Don Taddeo the prefect of Rome, procuring with her gentle manners the exaltation of the abovementioned Monsignor Pamfilio to the nunciature.”13
Despite the great honor of Gianbattista’s new position, it was a difficult job, and Gianbattista didn’t have Olimpia to advise him. Spain was bristling with rage at the pope, who was thought to be pro-French. But Gianbattista’s caution came to his aid. In contrast to many diplomats of the time, puffed up with self-importance and surrounded by haughty servants brandishing weapons, Nuncio Pamphili was thoughtful, calm, and slow to take offense. He listened carefully to Spanish complaints and propositions and much later gave them a well-considered reply.
Perhaps this long delay had less to do with Gianbattista’s careful deliberation than it did with the papal postal service, which took a full month to get a letter from Madrid to Rome and another month to bring back the reply. Gianbattista and Olimpia kept up an active correspondence during his time in Madrid, and it is certain that he asked her advice and she readily gave it.
Gregorio Leti claimed to have seen a letter written by Gianbattista to Olimpia during this time in which he asked her to respond to political questions outlined by his secretary. Leti recorded it as follows, “My dear Sister, my business does not succeed as well in Spain as it did in Rome because I am deprived of your advice. Far from you I am like a ship without a rudder, abandoned to the inconstancy of the sea with no hope of its own happiness. I feel obliged to let you know this because I would not know how better to show my affection. I ask you to have the goodness to respond at length to that which is attached by my secretary, and believe me always to be, Your Very Affectionate Servant and Brother-in-Law, Pamfili.”
Leti harrumphed loudly about the letter: “It would have been almost impossible, if I had not read this letter, that a public official would have written in this way to a woman without considering his reputation, and without reflecting that letters easily go astray, as happened with this one. But although he had given himself over entirely to this woman, he didn’t need to make it so public by confirming his love for her with his own signature. This letter was a great proof of the love between these two people and an entire confirmation of the rumors of the people, who amused themselves with speculations, that Donna Olimpia gave secret instructions to the Nuncio when he departed to go to the princes where he was destined.”14
Considering that Gregorio Leti’s works were the National Enquirer of his time—a mixture of exaggeration, innuendo, and God’s honest truth—we must sift through his stories carefully. Yet later events, confirmed by cardinals and other reputable witnesses, confirm that the sentiments expressed in the letter, at least, were true.
Gianbattista Pamphili had good reason to write gushing letters to his sister-in-law in Rome. In late September he received the news that on August 30, 1627, Urban VIII had named him cardinal in pectore. In pectore meant literally “in the chest,” and referred to the pope’s holding this news secretly, in his heart, and not publicizing it. What it really meant was that Gianbattista would receive his red hat and officially become a cardinal when the next group of candidates was promoted sometime in the future.
Olimpia had triumphed. She had done it. Fifteen years of her hard work and brilliant intrigues had raised a mediocre prelate to papal nuncio and now cardinal. She had single-handedly lifted the fortunes of the Pamphili family as its men could never have done. She had rewarded Gianbattista for his love and loyalty. And every cardinal, of course, had the chance of becoming pope. Olimpia dreamed big.
Olimpia and her family, as relatives of a cardinal, would sit in the front row at festivities, and near the head of the table at banquets; they would ride in the front of church and diplomatic cavalcades. As the sister-in-law of a cardinal, she would be accorded great honors throughout Rome, as if she were a princess. But best of all, now the noblewomen of Rome would have to wait at the foot of the stairs when she deigned to visit them.