Whosoever will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.
—Mark 8:34
GIANBATTISTA WAS FINALLY REAPING the financial profit of Olimpia’s investment. Traditionally, the king of Spain gave the pope’s envoy splendid gifts and annual revenues. Moreover, the pope expected his nuncio to Spain to sell honors and offices and pocket the money himself, thereby saving the Vatican great expense.
Gianbattista was doing so well financially that he not only paid all his extravagant expenses in Madrid but sent money back to Olimpia. There seems to be only one letter written by Olimpia to Gianbattista that has survived, and she penned it six weeks after hearing the news that Urban VIII had named him cardinal in pectore. She thanked Gianbattista for offering to send money to Pamphilio to pay for the gambling losses of Gualtieri, one of the sons of her uncle Paolo Gualtieri and Gianbattista’s sister Antonia Pamphili. It seems that Gualtieri was troublesome, ungrateful, and ran off at the mouth.
Olimpia used numbers for names in case unfriendly eyes should read her letter. The entire tone is enigmatic, which we can assume was quite intentional.
Most Illustrious and Powerful Signor Brother-in-law;
I was resolved not to want to bother Your Illustrious Holiness with my letters, knowing how busy you are. But then I changed my mind, finding myself obliged to thank you for the offer that you made in a letter to Signor Pamphilio of money for gambling. But I do not want Your Holiness to be obliged with so much. It will not take a little to compensate for the whims of Gualtieri.
And he will know well how to find the means so that Your Holiness will not be able to say no. And what displeases me most is that he does it with the advice of 288 and 260 who have spoken a great deal with little regard of 110 112 and who will make him betray his own. And then it will be explained, here with me, that he never said these things. Instead, he has received from me all the courtesies that he could have desired and 288 thanked me for this, and I think I am the only one to do this.
In one mysterious sentence that evidently broached an extremely sensitive issue, Olimpia substituted numbers for letters of the alphabet. Gianbattista apparently wrote the letters above the numbers, though some vowels were assumed to have an n attached to them. He did not, however, decode the number 95.
I l ? c e a(n) c i a z i t o, m a
V.S. e prudente 15 41> nostro 95 18 40 14 18 15 14 12 15 54 55 46 14
n o(n) s i a m o f o r a di s p e r a(n) za. 50 55 11 55 14 46 55 uu 55 12 14 di 11 19 40 12 14 14
Your Holiness is prudent. There is silent anxiety about our 95, but we are not without hope.
We can only imagine what “95” stood for. Intrigue? Plot? Love affair?
I will continue to serve your Holiness as much as I can. And I assure you I know of few actions that have not been for your benefit. I only regret that I do not have enough strength to do what I am obliged to do.
I hear that you have a beautiful place over there. However, I would not want you to forget your relatives in Rome. I will not bother you by writing any more. I will just remind you to stay cheerful and keep in good health, and I kiss your hand with great affection. Rome, October 11, 1627.
The Most Affectionate Sister-in-Law and servant of your Illustrious Holiness, Olimpia1
In 1627, the one hundredth anniversary of the Sack, Rome was undergoing a government-sponsored building program the likes of which it had not seen since the time of the Caesars. Though several popes since the Sack had widened roads, built fountains, and repaired churches, Urban VIII was the pope most responsible for creating the baroque city we see today.
As soon as he recovered from the malaria that almost killed him in conclave, Urban called together architects, engineers, artists, and sculptors to beautify the city. He affixed the Barberini bee emblem on every new building, fountain, and church, and even on old walls that had only been spackled. One visitor to Rome near the end of Urban’s long reign actually went around counting concrete papal bees and found some ten thousand of them. Certain Romans, reflecting on the pope’s numerous greedy relatives, commented that a swarm had invaded the Papal States and sucked the last drop of honey out of them.
For under the Barberini pope, nepotism flourished as never before. The word nepotism has its roots in nipote, the Italian word for “nephew.” Though the word didn’t come into use until the early seventeenth century, nepotism had started in the eighth century when Pepin the Short, king of the Franks, granted the papacy the central third of Italy as his realm. Suddenly the pope was also a king with lands, castles, and vast incomes to bestow on his relatives.
The fourteenth-century chronicler Lambert di Huy supported nepotism when writing of the then-current pope. It would “without doubt be inhumane if John XXII conferred on strangers, neglecting his own relatives of equal or superior virtue, those offices that the Church gives to lay people, and the associated stipends…. It is wise and praiseworthy that he continues to care for, as he has in the past, his relatives and friends. In fact, as the old proverb says, ‘It is not good to bind strangers to your own navel.’”2
Papal nepotism was exacerbated by the fact that the throne was not hereditary, as in most secular monarchies. A cousin of Louis XIII would still be a cousin of Louis XIV, with the same position and income. But when a pope died, his relatives were immediately ousted from power and replaced by a new family. Because popes were usually elected when elderly and died after only a few years, their relatives had a limited amount of time to squeeze the Vatican treasury dry, conclude prestigious marriages, and obtain noble titles, castles, and lands. As soon as a cardinal was elected pope, his family descended on Rome in hordes, hoping to grab as much as possible before their elderly relative kicked the bucket.
While popes gave their lay nephews dukedoms, they made their religious nephews cardinals. There was a good reason for having a nephew in close proximity. In an environment rife with violence—and numerous popes into the Middle Ages were strangled, stabbed, or poisoned—a close relative was thought to be the best bodyguard possible.
In 1538 Pope Paul III instituted the official position of cardinal nephew. Living in the suite of apartments next to the pope’s, the younger man would help his uncle in politics and diplomacy and truly look out for his best interests. The cardinal nephew would have every reason to keep the pontiff alive, unlike many other cardinals who might be tempted to slip something into his wine to hasten the next conclave.
The people of the Papal States were not, in principal, against cardinal nephews or the enriching of the pope’s family. Sharing good fortune with relatives was, after all, a Christian virtue, and all levels of society did it. It was not the premise of papal nepotism but its execution that was disliked. Excessive sums were given to the pope’s relatives, often from taxes imposed on the daily bread ration of the poor. Nepotism confined within the bounds of good taste would have been quite acceptable. But the seventeenth century was not exactly a time of restraint.
“Christ gave the keyes of his church to Saint Peter…and not to his nephews,” Leti reminded his readers, but they wouldn’t have known it by looking at the Barberini family.3 Urban VIII would become the most nepotistic pope ever, routinely imposing new taxes on a beleaguered population suffering at different times from plague, flood, and famine. The pope taxed the staples of life—bread, flour, salt, and fruit—so heavily that in some years people starved on the street while his relatives received streams of gold from Vatican coffers.
Urban’s deceased brother Carlo had sired three sons, and all were amply rewarded under their uncle’s pontificate. Taddeo, who possessed very little when Urban ascended the throne in 1623, owned landed property worth four million scudi in 1632, a figure that did not include piles of cash and his art collection of Raphaels, Titians, Michelangelos, and Leonardo da Vincis. In 1630 he acquired the principality of Palestrina, becoming Prince Taddeo.
In 1627 Urban arranged Taddeo’s marriage to the scion of one of Rome’s most noble families. Anna Colonna had desperately wanted to become a nun and had successfully held out against marriage until the advanced age of twenty-six. But she suddenly found herself forced by the loss of her family’s fortunes to marry the pope’s nouveau arrivé nephew, whom she couldn’t stand. Perhaps Anna Colonna was consoled by her husband’s immeasurable wealth. The family jewels rivaled those of the royal dynasties of Europe. And no one ate from anything that was not of pure gold, silver, or rock crystal, studded with gems.
Anna Colonna must have enjoyed living in the most glorious palace in Rome. Prince Taddeo hired the greatest sculptor since Michelangelo, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, to design the Barberini family residence on the northwestern slope of Quirinal Hill. This monumental structure had an audience chamber with forty-foot ceilings painted with Greek gods. The niches all the way up the triumphal staircase held ancient Roman statues. Behind the palace were extensive gardens of rare flowers and lemon trees, adorned with ancient statues and fountains. The Barberini Palace was also known as the Palace of the Four Fountains.
Olimpia, the sister-in-law of an important nuncio and cardinal in pectore, would have called frequently on Anna Colonna, the first lady of Rome, to render her respects, attend social events, and loudly praise Gianbattista’s work in Madrid. It is tempting to imagine Olimpia’s feelings as she entered the lofty marble halls and strode through the fragrant gardens cooled by a wholesome breeze.
Olimpia’s Casa Pamphili could never be as impressive as the Palazzo Barberini. Her home was hot, for one thing, in a low-lying, flood-prone area of the city where there were no cool breezes. There was no room for a garden in her tiny courtyard, and certainly not behind the house, hemmed in on all sides by busy streets, vegetable sellers, the post office, and drunken pasquinade writers. Though Olimpia oozed with charm at Anna Colonna’s events, it is possible she was also lime green with envy. If Olimpia ever got Gianbattista elected pope, then she would be first lady of Rome and could own such a palace. Maybe even this palace.
Urban named Prince Taddeo the prefect of Rome, a title of great honor and income but only ceremonial duties. Yet with this empty title he created a diplomatic furor by claiming that he, as prefect, had precedence over all the ambassadors. He would march first in the parades; he would have the more honorable seat at dinner parties. The ambassadors of France and Spain, who were the personal representatives of their monarchs, were so insulted that they boycotted any function where the pope’s obnoxious nephew would push them out of the way. They were finally recalled in protest by their kings, a huge snub to Urban.
The pope was more fortunate in Taddeo’s brother Cardinal Francesco, who had accompanied Gianbattista to Paris and Madrid. The cardinal was a great scholar who translated ancient Greek, experimented in botany, and with his collection of rare books and manuscripts founded the Barberini Library, the most extensive library in Rome after that of the Vatican. With regards to his personality, however, he was not exactly a barrel of laughs. In 1630 the Venetian ambassador Alvise Contarini described Cardinal Francesco as “choleric, melancholy, greedy, and pretentious,” though he was respected for his chaste way of life.4
Not so the third brother, Antonio, who became cardinal in 1627 at the tender age of twenty. “The great inclination he has had to women hath been no small blemish to his reputation,” Leti wrote, and for once in his life Leti was being kind.5 Cardinal Antonio was known for his astonishing agility in swinging both ways and caused scandal with both male and female lovers.
A sinister affair concerned Gualterio Gualtieri—Olimpia’s cousin and Gianbattista’s nephew—probably the same youth whose gambling debts she had mentioned in her letter to Gianbattista. Still in his teens, Gualterio entered the service of Cardinal Antonio as a page to learn cultured manners and the courtly way of life. Evidently, he learned other things as well. One day the cardinal called him away from the gaming table to attend him. “I have him in the ass all night,” the young man cried, slapping down his cards. “He should at least leave me alone during the day!” 6
The impudent remark flew around Rome like wildfire. Cardinal Antonio was so furious that he sent Gualterio to the battlefield in Germany to fight Protestants. No sooner had the boy arrived than he was killed on the field, many said shot in the back by an assassin paid by the cardinal. Whether he was murdered or not, his death had certainly resulted from his master sending him to war in a fit of rage. Gianbattista and Olimpia had been extremely fond of the boy and were devastated by his untimely death.
It was unfortunate that the prudish, studious Francesco was the handsomer of the brothers, while the swashbuckling, lecherous Antonio had eyes set ridiculously close to each other over an enormous nose. The two heartily disliked each other and jealously complained to their uncle if one received more money or honors than the other. The pope forced Francesco and Antonio to have breakfast with each other every morning, but usually the two ate in glum silence, never lifting their eyes from their plates. Once the two cardinal brothers got into a shrieking fight over the possession of a diamond-studded cross sent by Louis XIII; the pope yanked it from them and gave it to Taddeo.
Not all of Urban’s relatives were lost to the deadly sins of greed, pride, and lust. The one member of the family—including the pope—who seemed truly called to a religious life was Urban’s brother Antonio. Antonio had been a Capuchin monk for decades when his brother, newly elected pontiff, called him to Rome to be made a cardinal against his loud protests. He was a humble monk and wanted to remain so.
Leti found the new cardinal entirely unsuited to his glorious station. “Cardinal Onofrio, brother to Urban the Eighth, who was taken from a cloister of Capucines, and introduc’d into the Affairs of the Court, could never accustom himself to live in any other manner, but in that slovenly way of the Capucines,” he wrote, “so that when he was to receive any Embassadours, he committed the most ridiculous pieces of clownishness imaginable.” When the imperial ambassador asked him to convince the pope to assist Christian nations against the advancing Turks, the good cardinal began talking about “the excellence of Turneps, and the manner how the Capucines boil them in good fat broth; seeming to lick his fingers almost at every syllable and to swallow a Turnep at every word.”7
On November 19, 1629, the papal nuncio to Madrid, Monsignor Gianbattista Pamphili, was proclaimed a cardinal by Pope Urban VIII, along with eight others. Gianbattista was not technically a cardinal until the pope placed a red cap on his head in a special ceremony, but he would now receive the remunerative revenues of a cardinal. These would enable him to pay the exorbitant expenses associated with the creation ceremonies when he returned to Rome.
The word cardinal was first used at the end of the fifth century and comes from the Latin cardo, which means “hinge.” Scholars believe that the hinge referred to the flexibility cardinals were expected to show in leaving their local churches and swinging over to Rome to serve the pope. Early cardinals were a kind of super-priest, with greater dignity than regular priests, and over the centuries they steadily acquired more honors, income, and power. A cardinal was “created,” and those cardinals created by a particular pope were known as his “creatures,” a term that sounds extremely odd to us today.
Putting together a list of new cardinals was one of the most difficult tasks of a pope and sometimes took years of negotiations. It was not just a matter of selecting the most educated, diligent, and moral men of the church for the honor. The first consideration was political—France would be angling to have a French cardinal created, or at least an Italian cardinal who had served as nuncio to France and was known to be sympathetic to the national interests. Whenever France learned it would not be getting a cardinal, the French started mumbling darkly about Henry VIII. In 1533, when Pope Clement VII wouldn’t grant Henry a divorce to marry his mistress, the king severed ties with Rome, declared himself the head of the Church of England, and never sent the Vatican another dime.
If France got a cardinal, Spain would screech shrilly if it did not get to choose one, too, and might, perhaps, rattle sabers loudly enough in Naples to make sure the request was heard in Rome. Venice and Florence, though smaller and less important than the “great powers” of France and Spain, would come flapping in pushing their own candidates, their dispatches laced with flattery, threats, and bribes. The Holy Roman Emperor in Austria, fighting to his west the heretics in what would become known as the Thirty Years’ War and to his east the advancing Muslim Turks, would also insist on naming a cardinal. Every now and then a king of Poland would clamor for a cap for his brother, and it was hard to turn down the ruler of the last Catholic bastion next to Orthodox Russia.
Then there were the pope’s family members—brothers and nephews, usually, though some popes into the sixteenth century nominated their own sons. In addition to these considerations, in the first list of cardinals publicized after his election, the pope was expected to name someone from the family of the pope who had created him cardinal decades earlier, as a way of expressing the Christian virtue of gratitude. And if a pope’s niece married into a powerful Italian family, etiquette demanded that the pope name the groom’s brother a cardinal as part of the marriage treaty.
And then, when all these positions had been filled, the pope could look around for a couple of truly brilliant, dedicated clerics from lesser-known families who had worked their way up in the church. It is not surprising that many popes were elected from among these cardinals of merit, rather than those who were created for reasons of politics and etiquette.
Urban VIII would have sent a special messenger to his nuncio in Madrid bearing not only the exciting news of his creation but also the robes of a cardinal. Gianbattista would wear a cardinal’s mourning robes—in fuchsia, oddly enough—until he received his red hat from the pope’s own hand in a special ceremony. Only after that could he wear the traditional red robes and hat. After receiving his fuchsia robes, Gianbattista did not leave Madrid immediately but spent another six months or so tying up loose ends.
In his diary entry of July 6, 1630, Giacinto Gigli noted that Cardinal Pamphili “made a pretty cavalcade” to officially enter Rome.8 In the Piazza del Popolo, in front of Rome’s ceremonial gate, hundreds of carriages bearing Rome’s nobility, ambassadors, and cardinals lined up to welcome the new prince of the church and escort him to the Piazza Navona. We can assume that among them was an excited Olimpia.
According to etiquette, Gianbattista then called on the cardinal nephews Francesco and Antonio Barberini in the Vatican and generously distributed gold coins to their servants as a sign of gratitude to God for his good fortune. After dinner together, the Barberini brothers took Gianbattista to a private audience with the pope, where he knelt and kissed the pontifical foot. Urban took the red hat and put it on Gianbattista’s head, proclaiming in Latin, “Esto Cardinalis.” The celebrated red hat was called a galero; it was an enormous red velvet sombrero laden with ropes of red cords and huge drapery tassels. The hat was too big and too ridiculous to actually be worn other than in the creation ceremony, but it would be carried on a silver pole in parades and hung over the cardinal’s tomb.
After the private creation ceremony, Gianbattista hopped into his carriage and made courtesy calls on all the pope’s relatives, male and female. Then he returned to his house in the Piazza Navona, where he was expected to remain inside until his public Vatican ceremony five weeks later. Protocol dictated that he was not even to be seen at the doors or windows. Yet that first night he was seen with a look of supreme satisfaction on his face gazing out of the windows overlooking the Piazza Navona and, later, those in the rear of the house overlooking the Piazza Pasquino. He was glad to be home.
On the morning of August 12, 1630, Gianbattista burst forth from his cocoon blazing in red robes, leading a brilliant cavalcade to the Vatican. There, in a magnificent ceremony in the Sistine Chapel along with the other new cardinals, he officially received the red hat again from the pope. Olimpia attended the ceremony, beaming from her seat of honor.
Having been created cardinal, Gianbattista was required to give huge tips to all of his servants at the Piazza Navona house—from his private secretary to the little boy who shoveled horse manure in his stables. And countless employees of the Vatican were to receive tips—the dozens of secretaries, notaries, and office managers who had pushed his laborious paperwork through the system. The pope’s personal servants also had their hands out, and Gianbattista would have handsomely tipped the papal master of ceremonies, clerks, singers, trumpet blowers, butlers, buglers, grooms, doormen, and gardeners at the proscribed rates. The protocol in Il perfetto maestro di casa declared that the papal servants alone received a total of 1,162 scudi. It was a huge amount, yet there was simply no way to get out of paying it without acquiring a terrible reputation for avarice as soon as the coveted red hat was plunked on one’s head.
As cardinal, Gianbattista received a new honorific. On June 10, 1630, the pope decreed that effective immediately all cardinals were no longer to be called “Most Reverend” as they had been for centuries, but were to be addressed by the more honorable “Your Eminence,” and were to take precedence immediately after kings. Feeling outranked by this title, European princes claimed for themselves the title of “Highness” instead of “Excellency.” Furious at this title inflation, the pope instructed his cardinals to continue addressing the princes as “Excellency,” with the result that such letters bounced back to them unopened. “My Master receives no Letters from him that knows not his Merit,” wrote one prince’s secretary.9 Another stated, “the Cardinal has a drunken Secretary, and one that did not know what Titles Princes deserv’d.”10
And so Their Eminences were forced to accept the new titles of Their Highnesses, and at the end of the day, the relative stature of cardinals and princes was the same as before but their titles had swollen significantly.
A new cardinal would be assigned to one or more “congregations” or church governing committees. Imbecile cardinals appointed for political or family reasons were assigned to congregations where they couldn’t do much damage—the Congregation of Fountains, for instance, which met once a month to discuss the repair of water pipes, or that most popular committee, the Index of Forbidden Books, where for their homework the cardinals had to read the dirtiest books in Europe and write reports expressing their shock and outrage.
The French historian André du Chesne (1584–1640) wrote that Urban VIII respected Pamphili’s “erudition,” which he employed “in many of the most difficult negotiations and in the trickiest congregations.”11 Immediately after his creation, Cardinal Pamphili was assigned to one of the most important congregations of all—that of the Council of Trent—and in 1639 he would become its chairman. This group met twice a week, on Thursdays and Saturdays, to interpret the rulings of the 1563 council. Gianbattista’s appointment to this prestigious congregation was a sign that he was widely acknowledged as an able churchman.
Cardinal Pamphili joined other important congregations, including the Congregation of Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction and Immunity, which protected clerics from civil prosecution of crimes and defined the often gray area between the legal domains of church and local governments. He accepted a position on the Congregation of Church Rites, which created saints after carefully examining the conduct of their lives and the miracles attributed to them after death. He was named to the Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith, which worked with missionaries spreading the Catholic faith in far-flung regions of the globe such as China and South America.
Cardinal Pamphili was also appointed to the Congregation of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, which included at least twelve reverend theologians who met with the pope every Thursday to look into accusations of heresy. The cardinal chairman of this congregation had a prison in the basement of his palace where he incarcerated unabashed heretics.
Heresy was no recent phenomenon but was almost as old as Christianity itself. Only twenty years after the crucifixion, Paul wrote the Galatians, “Some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ.” From the earliest times, many converts had their own ideas about who Jesus was and what he meant. Those ideas that were not accepted by the mainstream bishops were labeled “heresy,” which comes from the Greek heresias, “choice.”
For the first three centuries of Christianity, heresy was punished by excommunication, not death. Early Christians looked disdainfully at Jews who stoned to death blasphemers; the followers of Jesus treated their disgraced brethren more mercifully. It was only when the religion became entwined with imperial power in the fourth century that disrespect of the church meant treason toward the emperor and the state and, therefore, merited death.
Ironically, heresy served as the impetus for the definition of orthodoxy. Reacting to heresy, theologians performed mental gymnastics to create new dogma. In doing so, they often went well beyond anything stated in the Bible. Over time, these writings of the early church fathers and the decrees of popes and church councils became accepted truth in the same way the Bible was.
The church rationalized this acceptance of later doctrine by concluding that divine revelation does not stop with Scripture. In John 16:12–13, Jesus said, “I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth.” In other words, God’s word is continuously revealed by the Holy Spirit, inserted into the right time and place of the world’s historical matrix. The Body of Tradition, as the church called it, added new layers of thought in between the meat of Scripture, creating a kind of theological lasagna.
The individual most responsible for slicing up the lasagna was a German monk named Martin Luther. A slight man with bruising cheekbones, a square face, and tiny blue eyes tucked beneath a Neolithic brow, Luther studied his Bible and was perplexed to find the conspicuous absence of much of Catholic dogma. Where were monks? Where was the pope? Where was confession, pilgrimage, last rites? Not in the Bible. The writings of others had defined much of the Catholic Church as he knew it.
Beginning in 1517 Luther protested loudly against the Body of Tradition and soon had a rising German nationalistic movement behind him. For centuries the Germans had felt fleeced by Rome. Germany, consisting of some three hundred small states, could not present a strong unified front to the church, as France and Spain did, to protest taxes and political interference. Good hardworking Germans resented giving their gold into the smooth hands of slippery Italians doing God only knew what in their painted perfumed palaces with girls, or boys, or each other. “German money in violation of nature flies over the Alps,” Luther wrote.12 Given the financial advantages, numerous European princes suddenly found themselves convinced of Luther’s theology.
As a belated response to the swelling Protestant movement, Paul III created the Roman Inquisition in 1542. Because the Vatican was the foremost legal organization of the modern world, the Inquisition imposed strict rules of law to prevent unjust executions. Witnesses could not accuse secretly but must come out and testify openly. All those who bore the defendant a grudge, including those who owed him money or were owed money by him, were banned from testifying. And for those cases involving witchcraft—still-births, bad crops, or sick farm animals—doctors and scientists were asked to testify about natural phenomenon that could have caused the complaints. With his rigorous sense of justice, his caution, and his fine legal mind, Cardinal Pamphili would have been a great asset to the Holy Office of the Inquisition and to those poor heretics and witches hauled before it.
In addition to their work in the congregations, cardinals had duties of a ceremonial nature. For instance, all cardinals were expected to ride with their train of gaily bedecked horses and servants to the Porta del Popolo to give a formal welcome to new ambassadors, foreign princes, and their relatives. Having greeted the exalted visitor, they would hop into their carriages and follow him to the Vatican in a colorful cavalcade.
But the most impressive cavalcade was that of the obbedienza ambassador, a special emissary sent by an old king to a new pope, or by a new king to the old pope, as a sign of obedience to the pontiff. An obbedienza procession was a kind of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, sometimes complete with camels and elephants. It had its roots in the imperial Roman past, when victorious legions marched in triumph through the streets of Rome carting booty and slaves captured in foreign countries. In the more civilized days of the Renaissance, foreign countries began sending their own booty, gifts designed to amaze the Romans and bring honor to their donors.
When the new king Ladislas of Poland sent Prince Jerzy Ossolinski as his obbedienza ambassador in 1632, he instructed him to carry out his mission to rival or even surpass the cavalcades of the king of France. “Where the French had silver he was to take gold; where they had gold he was to have precious stones; and where they had precious stones he was to use diamonds.”
Ten camels carried the ambassador’s luggage, and according to a contemporary report, “the astonishment of the Romans was specially roused by six Turkish horses which followed, whose trappings were studded with emeralds and rubies whilst harness, stirrups and even the shoes were of pure gold. The members of the embassy, too, were resplendent in cloaks set with diamonds. Ossolinski’s zupan (Polish coat) of black cloth shot with gold, glittered with diamonds; his sword, set with precious stones, was valued at 20,000 scudi.”13
If the Polish obbedienza amazed the Roman people, it is likely that some cardinals watched it while stifling yawns. A cardinal’s lifestyle was just as regal. The glory of the church was reflected in the glory of her princes, in their gilded carriages, marble palaces, and sumptuous banquets. A cardinal needed to have a minimum of forty horses in his stables—though many had three times this amount—and rich velvet trappings for each animal to match the color of his robes.
The cardinal’s apartments on the piano nobile of his palace consisted of a series of antechambers culminating in his bedroom in the corner of the building. The closer the visitor got to the bedroom, the more honored he was. In the audience chamber the cardinal’s throne was placed on a raised platform under a canopy, or baldachino. When the cardinal was not in residence, the throne was turned to face the wall.
Cardinals drew income from owning benefices, or church lands. Though canon law decreed that each churchman could own only one benefice and must reside there to look after it, this decree was blithely ignored when it came to cardinals “to assist them to bear the burden of expense which their office imposed on them,” according to a 1507 bull.14 In 1503 the church declared that “having to perform higher duties so ought they to enjoy greater privileges than the other servants of Christ.”15
In addition to these revenues, some cardinals were lucky enough to be named “cardinal protector” of a particular realm, a kind of in-house lobbyist paid to look out for the interests of a nation and send back secret reports of Vatican intrigues. The pope’s nephews were given the plum assignments of aiding France and Spain, of course, but the king of Poland, aware of Cardinal Pamphili’s intelligence, sobriety, and hard work, appointed him his cardinal protector. Poland couldn’t pay as much as France and Spain, but it was a great honor.
A new cardinal required several sets of cardinal’s robes and was, indeed, never again to be permitted any other wardrobe unless he was elevated to the papacy. Rustling in layers of dark red satin, with just a touch of lace, the cardinal presented a majestic and powerful figure. Cardinals had not always worn special robes but had dressed as regular priests until the reign of Pope Innocent IV (1243–1254), who invented the impressive red cap as a mark of distinction.
By the reign of Boniface IX (1389–1404), cardinals usually wore red robes as a sign of their willingness to be martyred for the church, though by the seventeenth century the color was mostly appreciated for its ability to conceal wine stains. On days of mourning—the forty days of Lent, All Saints’ Day, and the ten days immediately following the death of a pope—cardinals wore fuchsia. On two feast days a year—the third Sunday in Advent right before Christmas and the fourth Sunday of Lent—they wore rose.
Cardinals first put on a sottana, a long, tight-fitting robe. Then they put on the rochet, a long-sleeved white shirt of finely woven linen adorned with lace, falling somewhere between the thighs and knees, and resembling a bridal negligee. In an era when most men wore ribbons, bows, high heels with pom-poms, ruffs, and puffs, the gorgeous rochet was the only concession to frivolity in a cardinal’s costume. Over the rochet went the mozzetta, or elbow-length cape. The sottana and mozzetta were always of the same color—red, fuchsia, or rose.
The cardinal could choose between hats in the same color as his robes. Etiquette rigidly prescribed when it was appropriate to wear which one. For travel in the sun and rain there was a wide-brimmed felt hat tied under the chin with gold cords. The official cardinal’s hat was the three-peaked biretta, used for formal wear, and for daily wear the small flat red zucchetto—what we would call a beanie—which was very similar to a yarmulke.
In fact, the similarities between the zucchetto and the yarmulke caused problems when, in 1636, the cardinal of Lyons, who was aged and shortsighted, was traveling through the streets of Rome in his carriage and saw a Jew wearing a red yarmulke. The cardinal, mistaking the Jew for a fellow member of the Sacred College, leaned out of the window and saluted him reverently in the name of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, as “Your Eminence.” The horrified Jew scuttled away, but the ridiculous gaffe was witnessed by many. The story, being just too exquisite to keep quiet, leaped into the Vatican within the hour. The pope was so distraught about a Jew’s being mistaken for a prince of the Holy Roman Church that he issued a new edict. Jews, he decreed, could no longer wear red yarmulkes. They would have to wear yellow.
Etiquette regarding the princes of the church was extremely exacting down to the most minor detail. Cardinals had to be seated in identical chairs. It would have been a gross insult to the church for one cardinal to have a lower seat than his colleague, or for one to have the honor of arms on his chair and the other to be dishonored by a chair with no arms. And it would have been unthinkable for one cardinal to sit disconsolately on a cushion with mere silver tassels while his counterpart exulted in a cushion tasseled in gold.
When the coaches of two cardinals met, there was also a rigorous protocol. According to Gregorio Leti’s book on cardinals and their etiquette, “A Cardinal stops his Coach to another that is his Senior,” and by this he meant not the older cardinal but the one who had been created first. “For it is to be taken notice of, that the most antient Cardinal is the last always that stops and the first that goes forward.”16 This rule was, of course, ignored when the cardinals were mad at each other, in which case they pretended not to see each other and galloped on by.
The position of the chairs in an audience chamber was also an important determiner of rank, since those facing the door were more prestigious. This custom had taken root in the Dark Ages when it was always possible that murderers could burst through the doors waving knives and those facing the door had a better chance of surviving.
Once, when the grand duke of Tuscany visited Cardinal Francesco Barberini, he found both chairs facing each other with their sides parallel to the door. The grand duke, a modest soul, moved his own chair a bit so as to place his back more toward the door, giving the cardinal the greater honor. The cardinal, equally polite, did the same. By the end of the conversation, both illustrious gentlemen had their backs to the door and were seated next to each other looking straight ahead, as if they were watching a movie. All that was lacking was the popcorn.
Diplomatic etiquette became so increasingly difficult over the course of the seventeenth century that in 1698 Peter the Great of Russia and the emperor Leopold of Austria had to meet at a “tavern” set up by their protocol officers, where Peter played the innkeeper and Leopold the peasant. They didn’t need to worry about who sat on which chair and which direction the chairs faced, as one monarch cheerfully served beer and the other sat on a stool and drank it.
Stiff and suspicious, Cardinal Pamphili did not make friends easily and occasionally made inveterate enemies. His manner often came across as brusque, sometimes even downright insulting. In 1636 he criticized the artist Guido Reni for some decorations he had made for Saint Peter’s Basilica. Reni was so offended that he decided to avenge himself in his next commission, a side chapel in the Church of Saint Mary of the Conception.
The artist painted the archangel Michael pushing the devil against a rock with the angel’s foot planted firmly on his head. The devil looked exactly like Cardinal Pamphili, with his bald pate, furrowed brow, and straggly beard. When Gianbattista saw the painting, he knew immediately that it was his face on the devil and raced to confront the artist. But after hearing the cardinal’s tirade, Reni merely shrugged. He explained that he had simply tried to paint the most horrible face imaginable on the devil. If Gianbattista Pamphili happened to look like that, it was not the fault of Guido Reni, it was the fault of the cardinal’s face.
In his report to the Venetian senate, Ambassador Alvise Contarini had only a slightly more flattering opinion than Guido Reni. He wrote, “His stature is tall and dry, his eyes small, his feet big, his beard sparse, his complexion olive-green and sunburned, his head bald and, in short, a nice complex of bones and nerves.”17
Looks aside, and despite his sometimes surly demeanor, Cardinal Gianbattista Pamphili had many excellent qualities that were true assets to the Sacred College. He was genuinely devout, and his tall, spare figure lent an air of great dignity to the ecclesiastical rites in which he participated. He was cautious in his congregations, but once he finally rendered a decision, he backed it up with solid canon law. He could be sulky and suspicious, but he also had a great deal of kindness. Even the humblest petitioners could easily obtain audiences with him, during which the cardinal listened patiently. And if he found that an injustice had been committed, he was quick to correct it.
Gianbattista was thoughtful and hardworking, and he did not gossip, except, of course, with Olimpia. He was respected for his diligence; though he was a late riser, he worked into the wee hours, burning the midnight oil. Unlike many cardinals, he was known for the moderation of his personal life, rarely spending money on himself. According to Ambassador Contarini, Cardinal Pamphili was sparing with food and wine and enjoyed robust health, which he attributed to keeping as far away from doctors as possible.
But for all his assets, the one black mark against Cardinal Pamphili was his ill-concealed passion for Olimpia. Gregorio Leti asserted, “The good cardinal was an excellent master in the art of dissimulating everything perfectly, except for the love he had for his sister-in-law. In the congregations he appeared gentle, in conversation he was very humble, and in church he was admirably devout. But with all of his skill, it was impossible for him to hide his affection for Donna Olimpia.
“He loved her,” Leti continued, “he adored her, to tell the truth, in public and in private, and all the world was truly astonished that a Cardinal who had pretensions, although a long shot, to the Pontificate, worked so openly to win the good graces of a woman, and his sister-in-law at that.”18