Who in widow-weeds appears,
Laden with unhonoured years,
Noosing with care a bursting purse,
Baited with many a deadly curse?
—Robert Burns
WITH HER MASCULINE TASTES, Olimpia was interested in science and often discussed scientific advances with great animation at her dinner parties. The most salacious scientific news in decades was the 1633 trial of the astronomer Galileo Galilei by the Holy Office of the Inquisition. The highly respected sixty-nine-year-old Florentine had been hauled before the tribunal for heresy because his new book suggested that the earth moved around the sun. Scripture, which the church considered infallible in matters of science, clearly stated that the sun traveled around the earth. When Joshua, for instance, had prayed for enough daylight to finish smiting the Amorites, God had heard his plea and made the sun stay its course. Nothing was said about God making the earth stay its course.
Galileo had not come up with the theory himself but had picked it up from Copernicus (1473–1543), whose work, ironically, had been admired by the Catholics as a scientific advance and lambasted by Martin Luther as anti-biblical. But attitudes had changed by the early seventeenth century. The church felt threatened by the increasing power of Protestant nations, by Rome’s decreasing importance in international politics, and by a flurry of new scientific theories that contradicted Catholic dogma. In 1616 the Inquisition had warned Galileo not to publish any more books on a heliocentric planetary system. “The view that the sun stands motionless at the center of the Universe is foolish, philosophically false and utterly heretical,” the Holy Office declared, “because contrary to Holy Scripture.”1
But in 1632 Galileo published a book called Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, a fictional discussion among three men on the structure of the solar system. The imbecile character Simplicio blindly defended the old cosmology with stupid arguments, which his more learned friends tore to shreds. Unfortunately, Simplicio greatly resembled Pope Urban VIII, who argued that God had the power to create whatever absurdities he wanted, and make it look like science. The blockheaded Simplicio explained that he clung to old science because its sheer antiquity made it more venerable than new discoveries.
“I must tell you I laughed my heart out when I came across Signor Simplicio,” one of Galileo’s friends wrote him.2 But the pope didn’t think it was very funny. Since he’d become supreme pontiff, Urban’s ego had swollen. It was, most likely, not Galileo’s science as much as his ridicule of the pope that landed him in boiling water.
The Inquisition found him “vehemently suspected of heresy” for supporting the Copernican hypothesis. He was required to make a solemn recantation in which he “abjured, cursed and detested [his] errors and heresies.”3 Due to his compliance, Galileo avoided being burned at the stake and was sentenced to life imprisonment. This sentence was commuted to house arrest due to Cardinal Francesco Barberini’s impassioned intercession for leniency. In addition, the scientist was required to recite the Seven Penitential Psalms once a week for three years.
Many churchmen with scientific interests warned the pope that condemning Galileo would unleash a rabid anti-Catholic reaction across Europe. They were right. Up north the heretics, who had been so violently opposed to Copernicus a century earlier, switched sides and now accused the superstitious Catholics of being stuck firmly in the muck of the Dark Ages. How, they asked between chuckles, could an entire sixteen-hundred-year-old theology be threatened by a telescope and a book?
The prestige of the Catholic Church dropped precipitously in learned and scientific circles, even among devout Catholics. Those in the Vatican knew that the quickest way to send Pope Urban into a foaming-at-the-mouth rage was to whisper the name Galileo. Fortunately for his reputation, Cardinal Pamphili would not be appointed to the Holy Office of the Inquisition until later in the decade, or else his name would have joined the list of numskull cardinals who had signed Galileo’s condemnation.
In 1634 Olimpia bought the two neighboring Teofili houses, one of which Gianbattista had been renting, and incorporated them into her own, thereby tripling the size of her residence and creating a true palazzo. As an important cardinal with papal aspirations, Gianbattista needed an impressive palace to hold audiences and entertain, and the narrow, jumbled Pamphili house had become an embarrassment. The architect Francesco Peperelli was hired to create a harmonious layout and an imposing façade.
For the better part of two years, from 1636 to 1638, the house bristled with scaffolding inside and out. Roofers crawled over the eaves, while carpenters, plasterers, and painters swarmed through the rooms, saws and paint buckets in hand. The sound of hammers rang throughout the corridors, and plaster dust coated the furniture. Olimpia kept a firm eye on the renovations, frequently meeting with artisans and inspecting their work.
Peperelli made a servant’s entrance out of the narrow alleyway that had separated the two houses and extended the rooms above. In the new part of the palazzo, he created a large ceremonial entrance, which led to a wide courtyard, with room for horses and carriages, and a monumental staircase that swept up to the cardinal’s waiting room.
The waiting room was where ambassadors, noblemen, and cardinals sat, chatting with the maestro di casa, eating snacks and drinking wine until Cardinal Pamphili could see them. This room was constructed from two floors of the old Teofili palace, each consisting of several rooms, to create one imposing chamber measuring some fifty by twenty-five feet, with twenty-five-foot ceilings. The new palace, though a great improvement over the old, was still not quite up to cardinalatial standards. The architect designed a false door at the end of the waiting room so visitors believed the house extended beyond it. It didn’t. Beyond the door was the de Rossi house.
Nor could the new house hold all the horses and carriages required for a cardinal. Records show that from 1639 to 1644 Olimpia paid the monthly rent for nearby stalls and a carriage-storage area at the request of her brother-in-law. Though Gianbattista was now wealthier than he ever had been, he was not one of the richest cardinals. He was, in fact, on the pope’s list of “poor cardinals,” those beneath a certain income level who received an honorarium to help them maintain the requisite princely lifestyle. While some cardinals had a staff of two hundred servants, Gianbattista employed only twenty-five. Records show that Pamphilio and Olimpia had another fifteen servants between the two of them.
In the extended palace the Pamphilis continued to rent out shops on the ground floor. Architectural sketches show room for sixteen shops, though some tenants might have rented two adjoining rooms. Tenants included a fruit seller, a flax vendor, a leather-goods store, a restaurant, a lute maker, a grocer, a barber, and a tailor.
As a cardinal, Gianbattista now trumped his brother in position and was given the best suite of rooms, facing the Piazza Navona. Olimpia moved to the back corner of the house, overlooking Pasquino. Pamphilio’s suite was at the rear of the house, overlooking the narrow Via dell’Anima. Olimpia’s rooms had inner doors opening onto the suites of her husband on the one side and her brother-in-law on the other.
With her larger palace, Olimpia was now in a position to hold musical events for Rome’s rich and powerful. If science was on the decline in the 1630s, theater and opera were on the upswing. The church limited theatrical performances to the anything-goes period of Carnival each February, but many nobles, including Olimpia, spent months preparing for their shows. They held amateur performances in their palaces, writing the plays and music, creating the sets and costumes, and even acting and singing in them. Tragedies were popular—suicidal lovers, sacrificial virgins, and breast-beating heroes dying on the battlefield. But comedies were even more popular, and Olimpia particularly enjoyed putting on humorous plays poking fun at contemporary figures.
Theater made use of “machines,” contraptions of floats, pulleys, and levers that could lift actors and even horses into the air by means of almost invisible wires. Some machines held up to a hundred singing angels. Others were decorated as dragons, with flapping wings, swishing tails, and mouths that opened with a shriek to emit a fiery blast. Allegorical figures were extremely popular at the time; actors and actresses representing Divine Justice, Holy Religion, and Saintly Sacrifice would declaim onstage and then fly straight up to heaven.
Rome’s foremost artists contributed to these events. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an artist did not keep strictly to one discipline but was expected to be the master of many. Painters sculpted, sculptors painted, and both were hired as architects for palaces and churches. They were called upon by the powerful to design carriages, furniture, clothing, and even spun-sugar desserts in the shape of statues and buildings. And the rich commissioned them to design machines, extensive sets, and costumes for their Carnival performances.
The darkly handsome Gian Lorenzo Bernini, though known primarily for his genius in sculpting marble, undertook his many theatrical commissions with gusto. He was a showman, a ringmaster who loved to surprise, startle, and frighten with his elaborate stage sets and special effects. Bernini was particularly admired for creating a gradual sunrise and sunset, and for darkening the stage at the approach of a sudden storm, followed by thunder, lightning, hail, and rain. This was an impressive feat, considering he had only torches, oil lamps, and mirrors to work with.
But his most impressive effect was his frightfully realistic simulation of the flooding Tiber for Carnival 1638. The river, which had been represented onstage in the form of wide tanks with actors canoeing on them, was suddenly diverted into the audience as the stage sets collapsed. Thinking this was an accident, the alarmed spectators stood up ready to rush off but soon realized there was a large basin in front of them to catch the roaring waves, and it had all been part of the show.
Opera became popular in Venice in 1637 and spread like wildfire to other Italian cities. While most nobles held performances on a temporary stage set up in their largest room—the reception hall or ballroom—in 1640 Cardinal Antonio Barberini built a theater seating three thousand attached to his palazzo. He and his brother Francesco tried to surpass each other in giving the best operas, each spending thousands of scudi on a single performance.
The brothers were often so immersed in their competing productions that they forgot to visit their uncle the pope, leaving him cooling his heels in the Vatican while they fidgeted with stage sets. Particularly troubling was when the pope went to hear Mass sung in the Sistine Chapel and the pontifical choir was missing; they were at the Palazzo Barberini theater, rehearsing for the next opera.
Olimpia attended the Barberini operas and must have had a good laugh at the 1642 première of Antonio’s The Enchanted Palace. The performance, which had cost the cardinal eight thousand scudi, flopped due to malfunctioning machines. “His Eminence became fearfully enraged, threatening prison and similar things,” wrote the musician Ottaviano Castelli to Cardinal Mazarin in France.4
We aren’t told exactly how the machines malfunctioned, but it is tempting to imagine Divine Dignity toppling out of her flying chariot and landing on the stage below with a thud. Or perhaps a flying Christian Glory belting out an aria became stuck in the air, unable to descend, legs flailing helplessly until he was plucked to safety by a stagehand with a ladder. The audience, which was supposed to have been swept away by the glorious rapture of the moment, fell into paroxysms of laughter.
According to Castelli, the most irritating thing about it was that Antonio’s own brother was seen laughing loudest of all. “It was believed that Cardinal [Francesco] Barberino laughed at seeing these disorders, as if from jealousy that Antonio had wished, with the display of a celebration superior to all the others, to obscure his own.”5
Problems cropped up not only onstage but sometimes in the audience of noble guests as well. Competition for seats was fierce, and Cardinal Antonio kept order by marching up and down the aisles wielding a heavy stick, which he used to push unruly guests out of the way or to force people to sit more closely together. One evening before the performance started, the cardinal and several princely guests were seen giving one another the finger—yes, that particular gesture has been around for centuries—and calling one another sodomites.
Olimpia loved to attend her friends’ operas as well as their tragic and comedic plays. But she preferred to give her own performances, in which she reconstructed the world as she saw it—a colorful place of ridiculous characters, with everything supervised and directed by herself.
Cardinal Pamphili’s astonishing love for his sister-in-law had blossomed unimpeded by the constant presence of his brother Pamphilio in the Piazza Navona house. Not much is known about Pamphilio after the Naples sojourn, and he seems to have lived a secluded life in the 1630s, perhaps due to illness.
Certainly late in the decade, if not earlier, he suffered greatly from kidney stones. In the summer of 1639 one, in particular, tormented him, blocking up the flow of urine, causing violent shooting pains, high fever, chills, and abdominal swelling. The normal rhythm of the family ceased as attention was focused on the sick man. Olimpia would have stopped going out in her carriage—except, of course, to church—as friends and neighbors dropped by to check on Pamphilio’s health. With the best of intentions, Pamphilio’s doctors would have tortured their patient unmercifully, siphoning off his blood with leeches, causing violent diarrhea with enemas and uncontrollable vomiting with herbs known as pukes, all in an effort to dislodge the large kidney stone.
But nothing worked. On August 29, Pamphilio lay in the sweltering heat of a Roman summer, drenching his sheets in sweat and moaning in pain. The end seemed near, and a priest was called to administer last rites, the sacred words to ease the dying person along the path to God. Gianbattista, Olimpia, and her three children would have knelt in prayer with bowed heads.
It is hard for us to judge Olimpia’s feelings as her husband lay dying. It was Pamphilio who had brought her from the backwater of Viterbo into the excitement of Rome. It was this marriage that had given her noble rank, social position, and power within the Vatican courts. Any sadness might have been assuaged by the freedoms of widowhood, however. A rich widow over forty could administer her own legal and financial affairs without any interference from a man, and certainly this would suit Olimpia better than having a husband as titular head of her household.
As Pamphilio lost consciousness and his breath grew labored, it is likely that Olimpia’s eyes would have darted from her rosary beads to her servants. The author of a seventeenth-century book on household management related how servants of Italian noblemen, taking advantage of the uproar caused by their master’s death, routinely stole from the family while the body was still warm in bed. The hall sweepers pilfered the brooms, and the meat carvers swiped the knives. The keeper of the wardrobe became the stealer of the wardrobe. The bedchamber servants purloined the sheets. The wine steward filched the last wine bottle. And the cooks ran off with all the food, pots, and pans. Most disturbing, the family chaplain stumbled out of the house groaning under the weight of the silver Holy Sacrament service. It is likely, however, that when Pamphilio Pamphili breathed his last, and Gianbattista and Olimpia’s children dissolved into wretched sobs, Olimpia was making sure that not a single broom went missing.
Upon Pamphilio’s death, Olimpia, who had never cared much about clothes, immediately threw on widow’s weeds—a bone-chilling concoction of flowing black robes and a billowing black hood peaked over the forehead—which she would wear for the rest of her life. She wore velvet in winter, silk and satin in summer, over a plain white undergarment visible at the neck and wrists. These sober robes gave Olimpia the cachet of dignified virtue and offered the added advantage of saving her a great deal of money on clothing. In addition, she had put on weight in middle age, and black was always so slimming.
Olimpia paid for many Masses to be said for the benefit of her husband’s soul, as each Mass was believed to cut the deceased’s term in purgatory and speed him into heaven. Roman gossips, knowing she was much closer to her brother-in-law than she had ever been to her husband, said she put on these elaborate Masses and wore widow’s weeds only for show, or perhaps to ease her guilt over having been unfaithful to him with his brother.
The most salacious rumor was that Olimpia had actually poisoned the old fellow who had been a stumbling block in her love affair with Gianbattista. After all, her first husband had died suddenly at the age of twenty-three, and she had inherited all his money. But it is unlikely that Olimpia had poisoned Pamphilio, if only for the fact that she had been married to him, and very close to Gianbattista, for twenty-seven years by the time her husband died. If she was up to poisoning Pamphilio so she could roll around in bed with her brother-in-law more freely, she would have dusted off her arsenic decades earlier. Moreover, an autopsy proved that a shockingly large kidney stone had done him in.
Whatever Olimpia’s feelings about Pamphilio’s death, Cardinal Pamphili was devastated. Two days later he wrote to a friend in Spain:
To the duke of Candia in Madrid.
I am obliged to your Excellency to inform you of the news of my family…, having lost the illustrious Pamphilio, my only brother, and head of this family at the age of 76, to my infinite grief, after a very painful illness of the stone, which turned out to have weighed six ounces, and was without remedy.
May it please the Lord God to keep him in glory, as I hope, for the resignation he always demonstrated to the divine will. I trust that Your Excellency will also be grieved, knowing what humanity has always accompanied your every sentiment. He has left an only son, my nephew Camillo, who will always recognize fully his obligations to serve Your Excellency. And so I kiss your hands, and pray for the prosperity of Your Excellency.
August 31, 1639 Rome.”6
With the passing of a family member, Olimpia’s maestro di casa would have hastened to the Jewish secondhand dealers to purchase a deluge of black bunting in which to drape the public rooms of the house, those that visitors saw. A house in mourning had all mirrors covered, as well as the chairs and tables, and black cloth was draped around all doorways and windows. Atop each door was hung the Pamphili family coat of arms, painted colorfully on large sheets of paper. The household used only black candles. The master of the stables covered the carriages in black and put black trappings on the horses. After the eight-month mourning period was over, the mountain of black cloth was usually sold back to the dealers.
While Olimpia was now legally entitled to administer her own Maidalchini-Nini money, Gianbattista insisted that she officially take charge of administering the Pamphili patrimony as well, which included payments for the comforts of his two sisters, Agatha and Prudenzia, in their convents. Being appointed administrator of a noble family’s finances was a rare honor for a woman, but the ambassador of Mantua remarked that Olimpia deserved it for her “great intelligence and economy.”7 He added, however, that the real reason was Gianbattista’s fear that if he did not show his sister-in-law sufficient respect, she would take all her money away from the Pamphilis by remarrying. Indeed, rumors abounded that Olimpia was going to marry Mario Frangipani, the scion of a line of princes stretching back much farther than the Colonnas, just to make Anna Colonna mad.
But Olimpia probably never considered a third marriage. First of all, now that she was forty-eight, there was no longer any talk of immuring her in a convent to protect her virtue. Tottering on the brink of the grave as she was, her advanced age alone would ensure her chastity. And surely she enjoyed being under no man’s thumb—even a hypothetical thumb, since no matter whom Olimpia married, she would run the show. Moreover, Olimpia was now fulfilling the responsibilities of a cardinal, doing much of her brother-in-law’s work. Anyone who wanted something from him was obliged to meet first with Olimpia, who would render a judgment and then tell Cardinal Pamphili what to say.
“It was said that if one wanted some favor from the Cardinal, he would have to ask the sister-in-law,” Gregorio Leti explained. “But those who needed her for some affair were not permitted to address themselves to others. When they left the Cardinal little satisfied, he never grew angry but as they were leaving said, ‘Perhaps he has not yet spoken to Donna Olimpia.’”8
In addition to her work as a cardinal, Olimpia had three children to think about and had, for some time, been plotting their futures. There was her only son, seventeen-year-old Camillo, now the official head of the family, although Olimpia would always hold the real power. And then there were two daughters. None of the three, she vowed, would enter the church. That would be a waste. Olimpia didn’t mind paying a large dowry for her girls as long as they married into powerful families, creating a network of support and prestige for her.
Olimpia’s daughters remain a cipher and seem to have lived in their mother’s shadow. There are no known portraits of them. Neither are there any descriptions whatsoever of their beauty or lack thereof, which might indicate they were average-looking, neither waddlingly fat nor anorexically thin, neither radiantly beautiful nor clock-stoppingly ugly. Ambassadorial reports treat Maria and Costanza Pamphili as extras in the family saga, sweeping in and out of church ceremonies and family banquets with long silken skirts.
A few years later, one diplomat reported that of Olimpia’s three children, the pious elder daughter, Maria, was Gianbattista’s favorite. The youngest child, Costanza, “has no influence but is a good lady, and cannot be decried without doing her injustice, but neither can she be praised without exaggeration.”9 Given the universal lack of comment on their personalities, it is clear that they were in no way like their mother, whose forceful intelligence was much remarked upon.
In 1640 the twenty-one-year-old Maria married a promising young man of excellent family. The marquess Andrea Giustiniani was attractive and likeable, and even if he was not rich himself, he had very rich relatives. But Gianbattista thought the groom had uncouth manners and put up with him only for Maria’s sake. The marriage soon proved fruitful. Within the year Maria had her first child, whom she named after her mother. But to distinguish the two Olimpias, the baby was called by the Italian diminutive, Olimpiuccia. She would prove much like her namesake in terms of her willfulness.
Olimpia fell in love with the infant at first sight. Here was someone she could truly give herself to, a noncompeting female, weak, needing to be nurtured and guided. Here was a safe place to pour out her love, to teach a girl the valuable lessons she had learned so painfully. Olimpia insisted she raise the child in her Piazza Navona palace. The parents gave her up willingly; after all, they were disappointed their child was not a boy. It would prove to be the deepest, longest-lasting love of Olimpia’s life. In Olimpiuccia she would endeavor to create a new Olimpia in her own image.
Immediately after her granddaughter’s birth, Olimpia called in her attorney to write a new will, arranging to leave the infant her own Maidalchini-Nini wealth, thereby disinheriting Camillo, who would receive only his father’s wealth, which was, alas, not much. In an era when family assets were invariably hoarded for the son, Camillo must have greatly resented his mother’s taking money away from him to give to a girl, and an infant at that. And Olimpia must have had a good laugh at her son’s anger. Camillo was the cliché of a weak son dominated by a strong mother, and they bore each other a hearty dislike.
Camillo seemed the exact replica of his father. He had Pamphilio’s sparkling dark eyes, wavy black hair, and strong, chiseled jaw. But as attractive as Camillo was, he was a bit of a dolt. There is no record of Camillo’s having attended one of the excellent boys’ schools in Rome, and Gregorio Leti reported that Olimpia hired tutors to teach him Latin, arithmetic, and deportment for as long as they could persuade him to sit still. With undisguised venom Leti added that Camillo was “so ignorant that he barely knew how to read at the age of twenty.”10 The French ambassador described the good luck the mediocre Camillo had in being born into the right family, sniffing, “Fortune supplied him with what nature had declined to give.”11
As a result, Camillo grew up with the varnish of a seventeenth-century gentleman. He excelled at horsemanship and could cut a pretty figure on the dance floor. He crafted poetic verses with more enthusiasm than wit and spent hours at a time designing imaginary gardens on paper. He admired the great art collections of the cardinals and strolled imposingly around their galleries, tilting his head this way and that to examine statues and paintings. Camillo was charming. Camillo was polite. But Camillo was all varnish and no substance. He seemed to have no drive to excel in politics or finance, and he dragged himself through each day with a general air of lassitude.
If Olimpia looked at her son and heir with ill-concealed disappointment, she must have consoled herself with the knowledge that she had enough brains and ambition for the whole family. It was she, a poorly educated woman, who had raised the Maidalchini and Pamphili clans from nothing to the pinnacle of greatness. Looking at the inert, inept, insipid Camillo from her lofty position, she realized he was a hopeless ditherer.
But it was all right. Camillo could dither as much as he wanted as long as he performed the one duty his mother assigned him. He must marry the girl of her choice.
A widow was supposed to shun society, speak rarely, and fasten her eyes on the floor lest she be tempted by worldly vanities. She was to put away her jewels, pray daily for her husband’s soul, never talk to unrelated men, and above all, never be seen laughing. A virtuous sense of shame was to imbue her every action. Interestingly, advice manuals of the time encouraged widows to shun the society of their brothers-in-law; while virgins didn’t know what they were missing, widows were considered to be sexually insatiable and easily led astray by even the closest relatives.
Olimpia evidently did not read advice manuals for widows. She looked men straight in the eye, spent more time than ever with her brother-in-law, and, bedecked in diamonds, attended theatrical performances at which she guffawed most loudly of all. She also hunted regularly. Now and then the Viterbans were treated to the unusual sight of a grieving widow racing across the fields after a fox, her billowing black weeds flapping around her.
Nor did Olimpia give up speaking to unrelated men. According to the ambassador of Mantua, she was “haughty and entered into conversations more than was seemly for a widow, and spent many hours gambling.”12 Olimpia was passionate about card games and held late-night gambling parties in her palace. She loved beating her opponents, slapping down her cards with a cry of victory and raking in their cash. Gianbattista’s cautious nature was adamantly opposed to gambling, but he enjoyed the parties nonetheless, talking with important guests and listening to the musicians.
Olimpia did not attend the balls or feasts of other noble families very often. Her contemporaries said this was due not to grief over her husband’s death but to her avarice—she would then be required to reciprocate by giving expensive festivities of her own. Considering that she did give expensive festivities of her own from time to time—elaborate theatrical performances in her palazzo—it is more likely that she found the events of others boring. She far preferred small dinner parties at which she could talk to powerful men about politics and finance and win them over to support Cardinal Pamphili in the next conclave.
Olimpia had one sore spot in conversation. She became noticeably disturbed when those around her praised the generosity of other women. “Women,” she would counter, “were to amass riches, not to dissipate them.”13 Most men would have disagreed with her.
In the late 1630s Olimpia found a clever way to avoid dissipating her riches when she wanted frescoes painted in her expanded palazzo. Hearing that the talented artist Andrea Camassei, who had worked for Urban VIII, had been thrown into debtors’ prison, Olimpia generously offered to pull a few strings with her Vatican friends and spring him if he promised to paint her rooms for free. The artist was in no position to argue and worked the next year at the Piazza Navona house without being paid a single scudo.
In the 1630s and early 1640s, Olimpia had one goal—to line up sufficient cardinals to elect Gianbattista pope. He was, more than ever, papabile, having reached the age of sixty in 1634. His reputation as an able if stern churchman had been enhanced by increasing honors and positions of responsibility.
In 1637, Urban VIII suffered a serious illness from which it was thought he would not recover. He did recover, but his health was never the same, and ailments kept him in bed for weeks at a time. Papal power slipped into the hands of his cardinal nephews, and for several years a conclave was expected at a moment’s notice.
One of the main stumbling blocks to Olimpia’s papal aspirations was Cardinal Antonio Barberini, who had been responsible for the mysterious death of her young Gualtieri cousin in the early 1630s. Though Cardinal Pamphili was unfailingly polite, the mere glimpse of him seemed to Cardinal Antonio like a biting accusation. He simmered with resentment and often tried to provoke Gianbattista publicly by pricking and prodding him with cruel remarks. Here Gianbattista’s lifelong habit of caution assisted him; at an insult flung at him by Cardinal Antonio, the older man would merely hold his tongue and politely bow.
It was unfortunate for Olimpia that the cardinal nephew of the recently deceased pope was invariably the leader of the conclave that followed. Antonio would do his best to prevent Gianbattista’s election, if only to avoid the vengeance he so richly deserved for seducing and killing his nephew. Undeterred, Olimpia went to work on other cardinals. “She never spoke of her brother-in-law but with much modesty, trying however with every effort imaginable to discover the sentiments that the other Cardinals had for him,” Leti wrote.14
Olimpia also had to win the favor of foreign ambassadors, particularly those of France and Spain, who had a say in papal elections. It was a delicate diplomatic balancing act. If she too openly courted one faction, the other would oppose Gianbattista in conclave. According to Leti, “When she had occasion to converse with someone from the Spanish faction, she assured him of her brother-in-law’s inclination for this crown. On the other hand, when she spoke to someone from the French crown, she never forgot to persuade him of the secret affection he had for their interests, saying that he could better advance them in secret than in the open.”15
Fueled by the bloody battlefields of the Thirty Years’ War, the dramatic rivalry between France and Spain convulsed Vatican politics, as well as daily life in Rome. Partisans of Spain hung the Spanish royal coat of arms over their doors, and their enemies, the supporters of France, hung the French fleur-de-lis. Both nations sought to attract with lucrative pensions the prelates and cardinals of the Roman court, and some cardinals switched loyalties frequently, depending on which crown offered them the most money. The Roman people were amused to find that sometimes a cardinal’s palace would bear one coat of arms as the sun went down and the rival coat of arms when it rose. As word spread, people would gather to point fingers at the new coat of arms over the cardinal’s door and laugh.
Such was the case of Cardinal Virginio Orsini, who, according to Teodoro Amayden’s newsletter of August 1647, “was a Spaniard and on his palace he had the arms of the Catholic King. When his son died he became a Frenchman and shortly afterwards a Spaniard once more; at present he is French again—for how long no one knows.”16
One day Cardinal Mario Teodoli went to Teodoro Amayden lamenting that he had never received anything from Spain and had large debts to pay. France was offering him a generous subsidy if he would place himself in the French camp. The fiercely pro-Spanish Amayden met with the top Spanish cardinal, Gil Alvarez Carillo de Albornoz, to see if something could be done, but Spain, alas, could not afford it. Cardinal Teodoli said, “Since the Spaniards don’t want to help me, I have gone into the camp of the French, though reluctantly.”17
The rivalry of France and Spain had so infiltrated Roman society that even clothing reflected one’s preference. Women showed their support for France or Spain by the side on which they wore their hair ribbons—on the right of the head for Spain, on the left for France. Men showed their allegiance by the color of their stockings—red for France, white for Spain. The position of the feathers in their hats was also indicative of political preference—right for Spain, left for France. Even the cut of one’s beard had a huge political significance. Cardinal Teodoli first signaled his approaching shift into the French camp by wearing his beard in the clipped, pointed French style. Sure enough, a few days later his palace bore the French coat of arms.
Openly advertising one’s allegiance in the form of stockings and beards often resulted in tumults in the street. Men wearing red stockings, for instance, might attack a group wearing white stockings, which sometimes resulted in murder and days of riots. Some men chose black stockings simply to avoid being assaulted the moment they went out their doors.
It was not known whether Olimpia was pro-French or pro-Spanish, and it seems likely enough that Olimpia was pro-Olimpia. She didn’t wear hair ribbons of any color, and her political leanings seemed impenetrable under her long black widow’s weeds. She instilled in Gianbattista the need to show strict impartiality so that no one faction would oppose his election in the next conclave. And his red stockings, if they could ever be glimpsed beneath his long robes, were simply part of a cardinal’s uniform.
The enmity between France and Spain was further complicated in 1640 when Portugal, which had been a Spanish state since the last Portuguese king died in 1580, rebelled against its heavy-handed overlords. The Portuguese found a relative of the last king and proclaimed him King John IV. Spain was horrified by the rebellion; losing the huge harbor of Lisbon and the colony of Brazil would reduce it to a second-rate power. The Spanish king sputtered angrily about treason and sent soldiers to regain the rebellious region. The French were delighted at the revolt and supported Portugal with men, arms, and money.
But Portugal’s status depended greatly on being recognized internationally. After France recognized the new nation, there was a deafening silence. Portugal pushed for recognition from the Papal States and sent as ambassador the bishop of Lamego in the summer of 1642. The Spanish ambassador, the marquis de los Vélez, was so furious at Portuguese effrontery that on the night of August 20 he attacked the bishop’s carriage in the streets of Rome with a group of armed men. Seven retainers died in the brawl, after which the French and Spanish ambassadors, and the Portuguese bishop, galloped out of Rome in a huff.
While the dispute over Portugal only ruffled diplomatic feathers, the pope’s disagreement with the duke of Parma led to a costly war. Odoardo Farnese, duke of Parma and Piacenza, despised Prince Taddeo’s insistence on precedence and felt irreparably insulted by the pope’s upstart nephew. On a visit to Rome in 1639, he refused to cede precedence to Prince Taddeo and snubbed Anna Colonna publicly. One morning he even barged into Urban’s Vatican bedroom, yanked open the papal bed curtains, and complained bitterly to the startled pontiff under the bedspread about the arrogance of his nephews.
This behavior reminded the pope that Odoardo owed the Papal States loans amounting to 1.5 million scudi. The Barberini nephews thought this was an excellent opportunity to become dukes themselves, seizing Farnese’s tiny duchy of Castro as forfeit for the loans. Urban sent ten thousand troops under the command of Prince Taddeo to take Castro. Cardinal Antonio strapped on armor over his red robes and rode into battle. But the French, Venetians, Mantuans, and Tuscans gave financial support and troops to the duke of Parma. The pope found himself politically isolated, and the cost of the war strained the papal coffers beyond their capacity.
With the Vatican treasury bankrupt, the futile campaign ended on March 31, 1644, when France mediated an embarrassing peace in which everything was returned to the way it had been before the conflict. But the scorched earth of Umbria, the Romagna, and Ferrara—historically the most fertile regions of the Papal States—could not so easily be returned to its former state. Neither could the empty coffers of the Vatican treasury fill themselves up again as if the war had never happened. The pope had spent some twelve million gold scudi on his army, though many thought that the Barberini nephews had pocketed a large portion of this sum.
In all probability the humiliation of the war of Castro hastened the pope’s death. On July 2, 1644, the seventy-six-year-old Urban VIII became alarmingly weak. Cardinal Francesco informed his uncle that there were eight vacancies in the Sacred College at the moment and suggested he stuff the conclave with Barberini friends. But Urban, who knew that quite soon he would be standing before a tribunal even greater than that which Galileo had faced, would not hear of it. He died on Friday, July 29.
The camerlengo, or chamberlain, of the Holy Roman Church, Cardinal Antonio Barberini, performed the ancient and solemn ritual that took place immediately after a pope’s death. He hit the dead pope on the forehead three times with a silver hammer, each time calling his name. If the pope did not answer, the camerlengo solemnly announced, “The pope is dead.”
Surely the cardinals gathered around the bed would have been shocked if the pope had sat bolt upright and cried out, “I am still here. Stop hitting me on the head with that hammer.” But like all popes before and since who were whacked with the hammer, Urban lay still. The camerlengo then broke the papal fisherman’s ring—the pontifical symbol of office—and officially reigned himself until the election of a new pope.
During Urban’s final illness, his servants had, according to tradition, descended on the papal apartments like ravenous locusts. They stripped his rooms of everything not nailed down, with the exception of the bed, which they generously spared for the dying man. According to Teodoro Amayden, Urban VIII “died like the other popes, unhappily, without a holy candle to light, and after much searching one was found in the church of Saint Mary of the Spirit, and taken to him.”18
The papal funeral was held in Saint Peter’s Basilica, the church richly festooned inside and out with black cloth and brightly colored canvases depicting the papal coat of arms. It was customary for the deceased pontiff to be laid out on a bier directly above Saint Peter’s grave, dressed in pontifical vestments, surrounded by an iron grill through which only his feet protruded. This was to allow the faithful to kiss the holy feet but not steal the richly embroidered vestments. Sometimes, though, the shoes went missing.
Along with thousands of Romans, Giacinto Gigli went to pay his respects to the deceased pontiff. “On Sunday, July 31, the body of Urban VIII was exposed in Saint Peter’s for three days to a huge crowd of people,” he wrote, “and there was a great tumult, and two men were killed and there was a great stink coming from the cadaver, very bad on the first day, and on the others there were many homicides.”19
It is doubtful that Olimpia wasted time joining the throngs to see the stinky corpse. The moment she had been working toward for more than thirty years had finally come. Now was the time to get Gianbattista—and herself, of course—elected pope.