ON THE MORNING OF OCTOBER 4, 1644, Pope Innocent X was dressed for his coronation in ceremonial vestments—an alba, a floor-length white linen robe; a cincture, or linen belt; and a stola, the long band of silk worn around the neck and crossed on the breast. Around his shoulders hung the cope, a heavy, stiff cape with glorious gold and silver embroidery of biblical scenes, studded with pearls and precious gems. A dazzling bejeweled miter was placed on his head.
After Mass in the Sistine Chapel, Innocent climbed onto his pontifical chair to be carried into Saint Peter’s Basilica. The chair was a golden throne affixed to a platform with gilded wooden rods on each end. Servants picked up the rods and carried the chair on their shoulders so that the people could see their pontiff lifted high above the crowds. If the pope needed to travel through Rome, the chair could be affixed to an elaborate wagon and pulled by horses. Then, when the wagon reached its destination, the servants would lift the chair and carry the pope up the stairs and into the building. Above the chair was a baldachino, a covering on four gilded columns to protect the pope from the wind, rain, and sun. The sides of the chair were adorned with enormous ostrich-feather fans.
During the coronation ceremony, Camillo, as the pope’s nephew, sat next to him on a lower chair. As part of the ancient coronation rites, the pope ritually washed his hands several times, a gesture oddly reminiscent of Pontius Pilate. First Rome’s city magistrates—the conservators—poured the water over the pope’s hands. Then Camillo did the honors, followed by the French ambassador and the envoy of the Holy Roman Emperor. As the Sistine Chapel choir sang, Innocent was given the fisherman’s ring, which the Vatican jeweler had crafted for him, and took his place on the throne. Two by two, the cardinals came forward to kneel in adoration, followed by the ambassadors, prelates, and nobility.
Then Signor Domenico Belli, the papal master of ceremonies, stood before the new pontiff with a bunch of flax on the head of a cane and set it on fire. It burst into flame and turned to ash immediately as Signor Belli solemnly intoned, “Pater sancte, sic transit gloria mundi.”1 Holy Father, thus passes the glory of the world. It was the reminder that the pope, no matter how exalted at that moment, was mortal, and his power transient. He, too, would return to ashes and dust.
Throughout the ceremony, there were two centers of attention. Most spectators, as if watching a tennis match, glanced from the pope to Olimpia and back. According to the author of the Relatione della Corte di Roma, who witnessed the coronation, “The Most Excellent Signora Donna Olimpia Maidalchini” sat in the place of honor near the main altar on a platform adorned with rich crimson damask and embroidered heavily with gold. “Next to her sat the Marquesa Giustiniani, her daughter, niece of His Holiness; Donna Anna Colonna…and a great number of titled ladies.”2
Olimpia was beaming with joy because for the first time ever her chair was more honorably positioned than that of Anna Colonna, who sat next to her. Anna Colonna had insisted on equal honors for her chair, given that she was of blue blood by birth, a niece of the recently deceased pontiff, and wife of the prefect of Rome. But Olimpia would have none of it, and it must have felt good to tell the haughty Anna Colonna that Urban VIII was dead, thank you very much. Her chair would be several inches behind Olimpia’s.
The ambassadors and princes who attended the coronation were impressed by Olimpia’s appearance. The new power behind the papal throne was a stately widow renowned for her intelligence and financial acumen. Diplomatic dispatches posted that day described the “prudence and valor” of Donna Olimpia. She would certainly be a tremendous asset to the pope, playing his hostess as first lady of Rome.3
After the ceremony, the pope was carried to the loggia of benediction to be crowned in front of the crowd in Saint Peter’s Square, most of whom had camped out overnight to get a good spot. Cardinal Francesco Barberini removed Innocent’s jeweled miter, and Cardinal Carlo de’ Medici, whose gouty toe was healing, placed the shining triple crown on the pope’s head.
The papal tiara was unique among the crowns of European monarchs. Until the late eleventh century the pope wore a simple white cap. But as the papacy increased in power and majesty, so did popes’ hats, which rose like overyeasted loaves. Originally the high hat had two bejeweled circles—the tiaras of the temporal and spiritual realms. But by 1300 the power-hungry Boniface VIII had enlarged his crown to resemble an enormous pointed dunce cap with three jeweled tiaras—the triple crown. It was said that the three crowns stood for the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, though no one really knew. By Innocent’s time the triple tiara was lower, and wider, shaped something like a potato.
At his coronation each pope was expected to choose a motto for his reign. Innocent selected an invocation to God: “Give to your servant a docile heart to judge your people.” 4 Many snickered that the pope’s heart was already docile enough, at least where his sister-in-law was concerned.
As the sun set, Innocent prepared a new delight for the people of Rome. Vatican servants with mountain-climbing experience tied ropes around their waists and knotted them on iron hooks along the observation point at the top of Saint Peter’s dome. Easing down the dome, they affixed torches in the iron spikes projecting out every few feet, all the way down the dome, and then down the façade itself. When darkness descended, the entire basilica glowed and shimmered and seemed to be aflame.
According to one eyewitness, Girolamo Lunadoro, “There was not a street that was not full of lights, not a palace without illumination…. It is sufficient to say that for many, many years Rome has not been as jubilant as it is now for the happy exaltation of its prince, to whom Divine Majesty concede the years of Nestor and the strength to execute his holy thoughts.”5
In seventeenth-century Rome, any individual who found himself suddenly possessed of a fortune was expected to share it with his family. After all, that was what a good Christian of any social standing was supposed to do. Sitting on the zenith of the social pyramid, the pope was no exception.
Moreover, as monarch of the Papal States, the pope was a sovereign and his family members were, therefore, temporary royalty, holding their vaunted positions until their elderly uncle breathed his last. But unlike the Bourbons of France and Habsburgs of Spain, many of the popes had worked their way up from the humblest backgrounds, and the citizens of the Papal States did not want their monarch’s relatives mending nets in fishing hovels or feeding pigs on pork farms. Most of the pope’s subjects wanted to point to their ruling family with pride—the princes and princesses setting out from their sumptuous palaces in elegant coaches and six, just as the royal families of France or Spain did. Over the period of twenty-one years the rapacity of the Barberini family had, of course, exceeded the bounds of good taste. It was hoped that the Pamphili pope would practice a more dignified nepotism.
On September 24, nine days after his election, Innocent made a new will in which he left all his worldly goods to Olimpia, whom he designated as his heir, expressly stating that she could do whatever she wanted with his money. It was highly unusual for a pontiff—or any Italian nobleman, for that matter—to choose a woman as his heir, especially when he had a healthy young nephew. But Camillo, Innocent knew, was a thoughtless ditherer. Olimpia was the only one capable of managing the increasing family wealth. And Innocent’s decision must have made Camillo hate his mother even more.
But Innocent did not reward Olimpia to the exclusion of her three children. Her eldest daughter, Maria, now twenty-five, had married the marquess Andrea Giustiniani in 1640. During the conclave Giustiniani’s uncle had had the good grace to die and leave him his immense wealth. The pope gave Giustiniani the title of prince of Bassano, and Maria became a princess. Innocent also made him the castellan of Castel Sant’Angelo, an honorific post that brought a good income.
At seventeen, Olimpia’s younger daughter, Costanza, was unmarried. Two promising candidates immediately made offers for her hand. The handsome prince of Caserta, twenty-three, seemed a perfect match, but the thirty-one-year-old Niccolò Ludovisi, who had placed two wives in the grave and was casting about for a third, was the most titled man in Italy. He was the prince of Piombino and Venosa, the duke of Sora and Arce, the marquess of Populonia and Vignola, the count of Conza, the signor of Elba and Montecristo, and a grandee of Spain. Some of his titles descended from his great-uncle Pope Gregory XV and others from his dead wives.
Though he dragged such impressive titles in his wake, Prince Ludovisi offered the decided disadvantage of being obscenely fat, so fat that Roman gossip speculated as to whether he was in any position to have children. Looking at his slender, handsome bachelor opponent in the race to marry the pope’s niece, Ludovisi was “debased and humiliated and oppressed,” said one diplomat.6 But in the end, titles won out over looks as they usually did.
The dowry documents were signed in October. The pope gave Camillo 20,000 scudi to give Costanza as her dowry, a pitiful sum for a pope’s niece, who usually fetched 100,000 scudi. But Prince Ludoviso accepted eagerly; the position of pope’s nephew, even a nephew by marriage, almost always guaranteed immense political power. On December 21, Costanza married the fat prince in a grand ceremony in the Sistine Chapel presided over by the pope himself.
The choice of the ardently pro-Spanish, anti-French groom had dangerous international implications. The Venetian ambassador to Rome, Contarini, reported to his senate, “Prince Ludovisi is bursting with private hatreds and is too inclined towards the Spanish faction.”7 Spain rejoiced and France was outraged, demanding that the papal nuncio explain if this was a sign that the new pope despised their kingdom. Innocent sent a calming missive to Paris, explaining that most eligible bachelors in Rome were of the Spanish persuasion, and he was merely trying to find his niece a suitable husband.
With the girls’ futures arranged, that left Camillo. By the end of the conclave, Olimpia had already made plans for him to marry Lucrezia Barberini, sealing the deal she had made to win the Barberini cardinals’ crucial votes for her brother-in-law. But Camillo proved unexpectedly intransigent. It was his life’s greatest misfortune that he had been born not to a woman but to a force of nature. Camillo was fed up with his mother’s domination. Here he was, the pope’s nephew, the number two man in the country, being treated as if he were a mindless child.
Camillo told his friends that he would not marry Lucrezia Barberini because that was precisely what his mother wanted him to do. Moreover, as an art connoisseur he could not have been pleased that the potential bride’s eyebrows were blacker, thicker, and bristlier than most men’s mustaches, or that her nose took up an inordinate amount of her face. Camillo would not marry her. He would become cardinal nephew and wield more official power than his bossy mother ever could.
Camillo’s stubborn refusal to wed Lucrezia put Olimpia in a terrible bind, and he must have relished it. The furious Barberini cardinals would suffer a double loss—Francesco and Antonio would not keep their powerful positions, which would be taken over by Camillo, nor would they be immune from prosecution for corruption as members of the new pope’s extended family.
Olimpia, for her part, wanted to bring the powerful Barberinis into the family for her own protection. Innocent had reached the age of seventy in a century when most men died in their fifties. Whenever Innocent died, the Barberinis would bounce back from ignominy and, using all their wealth and connections, be in a position to harm Olimpia. In Roman politics, one hand always washed the other, and because of Camillo’s stubbornness both of Olimpia’s hands remained hopelessly filthy.
Many Romans expressed surprise that the only son born to the Pamphili family in seventy years would join the church, ensuring the extinction of the line. There was a way around this, however. If the male heirs died out, as happened frequently in the best families, many noble Italians gave the family name to a daughter’s second son to extend it into the future.
In his avvisi of October 15, 1644, Teodoro Amayden informed his readers, “The news of the antechamber is that Signor Camillo will be made a cardinal…. And in the meantime there could be born sons to the Marquesa Giustiniani which would be enough for both families, as a son has already been born and she is pregnant again.”8
Knowing his nephew’s difficulty in applying himself, Innocent did not give Camillo the impressive title of “cardinal padrone,” which Urban VIII’s nephew had held, but called him the “cardinal superintendent of important affairs.”9 On October 24 the pope appointed his good friend Cardinal Panciroli secretary of state. In addition to doing most of the work, Panciroli was to instruct Camillo in foreign affairs.
On November 14, 1644, Innocent created Camillo cardinal. When Camillo approached the throne, his uncle was overcome with emotion. Innocent “seemed not able to speak, and ended his speech with some words concerning the affection of blood relatives.”10
As cardinal nephew, Camillo enjoyed huge wealth. He received the income of the governor of the Papal States, along with the revenues from Avignon, the county of Venassino, and the priory of Capua, together with numerous benefices and posts he received from foreign nations eager for his support. Spain gave him the archdiocese of the metropolitan church of Toledo. The republic of Venice inscribed him among its own nobility.
Though furious at Camillo’s insistence on becoming cardinal nephew, Olimpia decided to make the best out of a bad deal. Knowing her son’s indolence, she initially believed that she could run the Vatican through him. She insisted—and the pope agreed—that Camillo continue to live with her in the Piazza Navona palace instead of taking up the cardinal nephew’s apartments in the Vatican, the very ones she had wanted for herself. Cardinal Panciroli moved into these. Nor would Camillo be allowed one of the chief privileges of his position—bestowing honors and incomes on his friends. Innocent made him first obtain his mother’s approval.
But as usual, Olimpia was doomed to be disappointed in her son. Each evening, when his gilded carriage returning from the Vatican clomped into her courtyard, she pumped her son for information on his daily activities and made suggestions on how to handle business. But Camillo, sweeping past in his crimson robes, rebuffed her.
Wednesday, November 23, was the date of the pope’s possesso, the ceremony in which Innocent officially took possession of the pope’s titular church, Saint John Lateran. This was the greatest of all the celebrations for the new pontiff, and the colorful procession, winding its way across Rome, lasted for hours. The day had started off windy and cold with a driving rain, but by the time the parade left the Vatican at noon the clouds had parted and the sun warmed the tens of thousands waiting to watch the show. The government had spent the eye-popping sum of twelve thousand scudi on the costumes and decorations, and no one wanted to miss it.
Mounted on horses, the sbirri—the municipal police force—pushed the spectators back toward the buildings to keep a clear path for the procession. Faces crowded each window; bodies filled every doorway and balcony and crammed onto every roof. The buildings were alive with the devout, the sneering, and the curious.
All the streets along the procession route had been thoroughly cleaned of dirt—animal droppings, vegetable peels, and night soil—no mean feat. Holes had been filled in, loose stones replaced, and the pavement swept and scrubbed. Flags bearing noble family crests were placed on the roofs and façades of palaces and snapped joyfully in the breeze. Saints’ relics and sacred images were placed in the windows of houses and displayed in front of churches. The season’s last flowers were strewn on the streets.
Precious tapestries, removed from drawing room walls, were hung from windows and balconies. Those who could not afford the outrageously expensive hand-embroidered tapestries hung bolts of cloth, even bedspreads or drapes. The important thing was to have a brightly colored something hanging out of the window. Those items within reach of the crowds below were firmly secured as thieves were known to grab the precious objects, run off with them in the throng, and sell them later to the used-furniture dealers in the flea markets.
John Evelyn, a young Protestant gentleman traveling in Europe to avoid the English civil war, was in Italy when he heard that Innocent’s possesso would soon take place. He raced to Rome and got himself a good observation point at the top of the high steps of the Church of Saint Mary of the Altar of Heaven. Armed with paper and pencil, he wrote down a detailed description of the parade: “Then came the Pope himselfe, carried in a litter or rather open chaire of crimson velvet richly embrodred, and borne by two stately mules; as he went he held up two fingers, blessing the multitude who were on their knees or looking out of their windows and houses, with loud viva’s and acclamations of felicity to their new Prince.”11
The parade climbed up to the Campidoglio, the civic heart of Roman government on the top of Capitoline Hill. Between two huge papiermâché female statues—Rome the Peacemaker and Rome Triumphant—the cortège filed in. Other statues represented Wisdom, Vigilance, and Discipline. The procession marched under an enormous plaster arch with life-sized horses on top.
At the crest of the hill, three palaces framed a large square, in the middle of which stood the colossal bronze equestrian statue of a Roman emperor thought to be Constantine. Here the militia awaited Innocent. The senator of Rome, Orazio Albani, wearing a brocade robe embroidered with gold, got off his horse and marched up to the pope. Kneeling, he ceremonially placed the ivory scepter of state at the pope’s feet, which he kissed. Rising, he offered Innocent the keys of the Capitoline rock as trumpets blared and artillery crackled.
Olimpia, who had not taken part in the procession, watched Innocent receive the scepter and keys from the balcony of one of the three palaces overlooking the square. She had invited twenty-five of Rome’s most influential ladies to join her for the celebrations in the Palace of the Conservators, in a huge hall frescoed with scenes of ancient Roman legend. As the papal procession moved on, the ladies turned from the windows. It was time for Olimpia’s banquet to begin. And now, thirty-two years after she had come to Rome and been snubbed by the noblewomen, it was time for a buffet of revenge, served very cold, which was all that some of her guests would eat that day.
According to Giacinto Gigli, “When it was time to eat, she called eight of them, and led them with her to eat, and the others remained mortified at the windows without being invited.”12 Evidently, the eight that Olimpia invited had been kind to her from the beginning. The other seventeen had offended her. It was payback time. And she must have been absolutely delighted.
The pope’s procession descended Capitoline Hill and marched past the ancient heart of Rome, the Forum, where cows grazed among the tops of arches and columns that stuck out like blackened bones from the dirt of a millennium. Along the route wooden posts had been erected and ropes strung between them. From these ropes hung posters specially painted for the ceremony by noble families, expatriate communities, and various charitable organizations.
As the cortège veered around the Colosseum, the pope saw that the Jewish community of Rome had hung sixty huge posters featuring beautiful paintings of Old Testament scenes inscribed with Bible quotes in Hebrew and Latin. At the end of the posters Innocent halted, and the chief rabbi handed him a magnificent jeweled Torah, imploring the new pontiff to be merciful to the Jews of Rome.
It was a straight shot from the eastern side of the Colosseum to the fourth-century Lateran basilica. Inside the church, the choir sang, candles burned, and incense filled the air with heady perfume. Innocent was seated on a magnificent red porphyry chair with lion legs, one of a matching pair. Dug out of ruined imperial baths in the eighth century, the chairs had been instantly recognized for their beauty and value. As the finest chairs in Rome, they had been drafted for papal coronations in Saint Peter’s Basilica.
The chairs had an unusual feature—a keyhole-shaped opening in the seat. Though many thought the pope’s throne had once been used as a toilet chair, the reclining back makes this doubtful. Given that the chairs had been found in the imperial baths, it is probable that they had been used in the sauna. The sitter could lie back and relax as the sweat ran off his body and out the hole in the bottom of the seat. But the strange hole in the pope’s chair gave rise to the story that during his coronation each pope had his testicles felt by a cardinal to make sure that he was in fact a pope and not a popess. According to the tale, the cleric assigned the task knelt before the pope and, lifting the papal robes, put his hand under the seat. When he felt the pontifical balls, he cried, “He has testicles!” and the people replied with a heartfelt “God be praised!”13
It was commonly believed that the testicle-feeling ceremony was instituted after an androgynous-looking woman had become pope in 855, Pope Joan. Her terrible secret was revealed three years later during a papal procession when she fell off her horse, gave birth in the street, and died. The problem with the Pope Joan story is that it was first reported almost four hundred years later by a Dominican monk. Another problem is that a pope named Benedict III reigned during those years. The story was most likely inspired by a real-life woman named Marozia, who ruled the Vatican behind the scenes in the tenth century and was the lover, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, and great-great-grandmother of popes. But the legend of a female pope was just too delicious for truth to get in the way.
The tale of Pope Joan and the testicle-feeling chair had become so widespread by 1513 that Leo X had the chairs moved from Saint Peter’s Basilica to the Lateran, where they were used for the possesso ceremonies. But the story stubbornly lingered. In describing Saint John Lateran, a 1543 book reported, “Nearby are two porphyry chairs where they check to see if the new pope has testicles, as they say.”14
One Protestant Swedish gentleman, Lawrence Banck, actually stated in his 1644 book on his travels that he had seen Innocent X getting his testicles felt up. Perhaps this story was anti-Catholic propaganda, or perhaps the author, watching the cardinals crowd around the papal throne, couldn’t tell what they were doing.
A more reliable witness, John Evelyn, pencil in hand, had followed the procession all the way to the church but was, alas, unable to enter and report on testicle feeling or lack thereof. “What they did at St. John di Laterano I could not see by reason of the prodigious crowd,” he wrote in his diary, “so I spent most of the day in viewing the two triumphal arches which had been purposely erected a few days before.”15
That evening all of Rome was illuminated by colored lanterns, torches, white wax candles, and fireworks. The magnificent dome of Saint Peter’s was once more glowing with a thousand torches. But the most impressive display was in the Piazza Navona, and we can assume that Olimpia had returned home from her chilly banquet in the Campidoglio to watch the festivities from her drawing room window. A huge Noah’s ark had been built on top of an artificial mountain. Noah and his family were portrayed on deck in plaster of Paris, as elegantly sculpted elephants and giraffes poked their heads out of windows.
In the book of Genesis, God sent a white dove with an olive sprig in its beak to the ark as a sign that dry land was close at hand. And now, a large papier-mâché dove with a burning torch in its mouth was sent careening down a wire from the roof of Olimpia’s palace. When the dove reached the ark, it lit off a barrage of fireworks and firecrackers. Animals went flying out of the ark in a streak of sparks, and comets blasted from the hull into the night sky. The ark and its inhabitants sizzled and crackled and finally went up in a thunderous explosion of red smoke and orange flames. By the time the smoke had cleared, only the dove, still hanging by the wire, remained unscathed. Everything else was ashes. This was seen as an extremely good omen for the success of the new pope.