THOUGH OLIMPIA WAS PREVENTED FROM moving into the Vatican, she set about transforming her Piazza Navona palace into a papal showplace. Her first act was to finally have the pope ban the Wednesday-morning vegetable market. Grumbling, the vendors took their produce, flies, creaking wagons, and donkey droppings to another locale. Olimpia must have been overjoyed that after thirty-two years of the weekly din and mess, it was gone.
Her next step was to buy the two houses next door to the Palazzo Pamphili, the small de Rossi house and the large Palazzo Cibo, and incorporate them into her own. Back in 1634 Olimpia had tripled the size of the old Casa Pamphili to create a cardinal’s palace. With her 1644 purchases she doubled the house again, making it a palace worthy of a papal dynasty. With unlimited funds at her disposal, she could choose from among Rome’s top artists, sculptors, architects, engineers, and craftsmen to redesign her palazzo.
She hired a team of famous architects, the father and son Girolamo and Carlo Rainaldi, to do the designs, and Francesco Borromini to oversee the project. Olimpia met frequently with her architects, studying their drawings, three-dimensional models, and watercolor sketches of paintings suggested for the ceilings. The palace would not be finished until July 1648, and in the meantime Olimpia would have to live once more with hammering, scaffolding, and the ever-present sneeze-inducing film of plaster dust.
The final façade was five stories high and eightcen windows across, with four doorways and a balcony over each. A painting of her finished palazzo in 1651 shows it painted pale gray with white woodwork. Olimpia’s carriage entrance remained the same, though the high double doors were now in the center of the palazzo instead of on the far right side. To the left of the courtyard was the same covered triumphal staircase of the cardinal’s palace. But on the right of the courtyard she had the old de Rossi house demolished and built four stories on top of magnificent arches through which horses and carriages could travel to a second courtyard, where the stables were kept.
Her private apartments—some seven rooms across the front of the palazzo facing the Piazza Navona—were, in seventeenth-century terms, in restrained good taste. The carved doorways were of red marble, splashed with white. The floors were parquet. The sixteen-foot coffered gilded ceilings depicted mythological scenes. Beneath them for about a yard, matching frescoes adorned the walls.
The baroque era was a time of decline politically and economically. The peach was a bit overripe, still beautiful and fragrant, but mold was beginning to form. After the perfection of the Renaissance, there was no place for art to evolve other than into wild excess. Painting comprised the heroic, the theatrical, and the colossal. It attempted not to re-create reality but to idealize it. Amidst sea monsters, dragons, saints, and angels, human bodies twisted and writhed, muscular, fleshy contrasts of light and shadow. Waves crashed. Ships floundered. Among the larger-than-life figures, mouths hung open in shock and eyes blazed with fury. Arms were raised to bestow a heavenly blessing or a fatal blow. And above it all, plump laughing cherubs tossed rose petals.
An extravagant manifestation of the glories of militant Catholicism, Roman baroque art was a counterweight to the decline of papal power. In fact, the word baroque was first used derisively by those classicists who disliked its melodrama. The word was derived from a Portuguese term that meant “deformed pearl.”
Uneasy about leaving any surface unadorned, baroque artists paid particular attention to the ceiling, that most neglected part of a modern room. When those of the twenty-first century enter a neighbor’s house, we never automatically throw back our heads to gape at the ceiling. If we did, we would no doubt be rewarded by the sight of white paint and a lightbulb. But in the seventeenth century, the observer would look up immediately to see clouds parting, revealing Paradise, and must have felt as if he could climb a ladder and just keep going right into heaven itself.
The most awe-inspiring ceiling of Olimpia’s expanded palace was at the end of her seven chambers facing the Piazza Navona. The reception room, designed by Borromini, stretched from the piazza all the way back to the Via dell’Anima. This chamber, measuring one hundred feet long and twenty-four feet wide, was used for balls and large receptions. It is called the galleria of Pietro da Cortona because the famous artist painted the story of Aeneas on the thirty-foot-high curved ceiling. Oddly enough, the pope was depicted as the god Neptune, bare-breasted and holding a trident, his right arm extended to quell the wind and waves. Around him naked youths blow conch shells, as laughing nude girls swim by. In the sky, worried cherubs hold the reins of white horses rearing out of the water.
In addition to her galleria, Olimpia created an enormous music room in the central section overlooking both courtyards. Here she staged her operas and comedies. The acoustics were almost perfect, a great advantage in an era without microphones.
But Olimpia had another building project in addition to the Piazza Navona palace. On October 7, 1645, Innocent named her the princess of San Martino, a church-owned territory three miles outside of Viterbo. The site included a medieval church and abbey and a few hunting lodges of the rich, including one owned by her brother, Andrea Maidalchini.
Olimpia hired Francesco Borromini to design a suite of princely apartments on top of the fourteenth-century abbey and reinforce the load-bearing walls to sustain the extra weight. Suffering from arthritis in her knees, she could no longer walk up stairs. Borromini created a double snail staircase, a spiral within a spiral. The inside spiral comprised low, gentle stairs, and the larger outside spiral was a wider ramp of terra-cotta for her sedan chair or possibly her carriage.
She hired Gian Lorenzo Bernini to decorate the seven-room suite. The large room at the end of the palace was made into a papal audience chamber with a throne for Innocent when he came to visit. For this room Bernini designed a unique movable ceiling. Made of incredibly light wood, sculpted and painted with Innocent’s papal coat of arms, gilded garlands, and riotous flowers, the ceiling was attached to a series of ropes and levers. In cold weather it could be lowered by servants working from the crawlspace above. In warm weather, it could be raised.
Olimpia’s rooms are elegant, with intricately carved and gilded sixteen-foot ceilings and doorways of red marble spattered with white. The windows look out over the church and piazza, toward hills blue-gray in the mists. Oddly, Olimpia’s bedroom is very plain. It is the only room with a hidden spiral staircase in the wall going down to the first floor. The stairs were probably too steep for Olimpia’s aching knees, but perhaps they were used by messengers bringing her secret dispatches from Rome. As in the Piazza Navona palace, Olimpia’s bedroom was connected by a small inner door to the bedroom she designed for the pope. Unseen by servants or visitors, the pope and his sister-in-law could visit each other at night.
The new princess of San Martino set about creating a model town of some 250 houses around the church and palace; these she gave as dowries to dowerless girls who would otherwise have been forced to enter convents. Though documentation is lacking, it was said that she also invited fifty recently released convicts and fifty reformed prostitutes to San Martino with incentives to settle down.
Since time immemorial, European towns had always grown helter-skelter around a castle or river. San Martino, which Olimpia built in a slightly off-kilter form of the Piazza Navona, was one of Europe’s first planned towns and became a model for later urban design.
While Olimpia rolled up her black silk sleeves to begin her construction projects, the new pope settled into his princely suites in the Vatican Palace, a rabbit’s warren of buildings, corridors, gardens, libraries, offices, and staircases connected to Saint Peter’s Basilica. Innocent lived surrounded by the greatest works of art of any palace in Europe.
From the 300s to the 1300s, the main Roman papal residence had been the Lateran Palace on the other side of town, connected to the Church of Saint John Lateran. Nicholas V (reigned 1447–1455) improved the Vatican Palace, creating the clifflike pink building that still stands today, rising to the right of the basilica as the observer stands in the piazza. The papal apartments consisted of a series of antechambers, one leading into the other, culminating in an audience chamber, with the bedchamber behind that.
In the 1490s Pope Alexander VI had commissioned the famous artist Pinturicchio to paint the Borgia family in three large, dark rooms in the papal suite, which are today called the Borgia Apartments. But when his successor, the ill-tempered Julius II, moved into the rooms, he couldn’t bear to wake up each morning and look at his worst enemy, the fat-jowled Borgia pope, on his knees in prayer, sinking under the weight of his gold jewel-studded cope. Nor did Julius wish to see the pope’s daughter, the wiltingly beautiful Lucrezia, and her barbarous brother, Cesare, a sadistic gleam in his eye. In 1508 Julius moved into the suite of rooms a floor higher and commissioned Raphael to paint them. Here, when the pope woke up, he saw edifying works of ancient philosophers, saints, and popes disputing theology, and not a Borgia in sight.
It was across one of these glorious frescoes that during the Sack of 1527 a German soldier used his sword to scrawl, in three-foot-high letters, “Martin Luther.” As soon as the pope returned to the Vatican after the Sack, the graffiti was painted over, of course. But at certain times of day, when the light hit it just so, the name of the arch heretic could be seen as big as life in the pope’s apartments, and it can still be seen by tourists. Sixtus V (reigned 1585–1590) built a new wing of the Apostolic Palace with far more light and fresh air than the old residence. It was this wing that Innocent inhabited in 1644, and where popes have resided ever since, though they moved to the top floor in 1903.
Innocent’s Vatican household included countless secretaries, translators, notaries, accountants, scribes, and decoders. His kitchen served hundreds of meals a day to visitors and servants and employed squadrons of cooks, waiters, and wine stewards. A team of men looked after his clothes, working with launderers, tailors, and embroiderers. Others cared for his jewels, keeping them polished and in good repair.
Innocent had four masters of ceremonies, who planned all ceremonial events down to the last detail and dealt with the irksome issue of which individuals would have the seats of greatest honor. He had his own Sistine Chapel choir, consisting of men, boys, and castrati, who sang for him during his meals. It was said that the unnatural sweetness of the eunuchs’ voices caused the listeners’ hearts to break.
Though the new pontiff was pampered in every way by his efficient palace servants, Olimpia was not about to give up the homely services she had always performed for her brother-in-law. She personally looked after laundering his undergarments, which were delivered to her at the Piazza Navona. There she made certain that his shirts, stockings, and underpants were washed, bleached, starched, and pressed just the way the pope liked it. For this service Olimpia received a monthly salary of eighteen scudi from the papal treasury.
Olimpia’s shirt laundering for the pope would not have disturbed the Vatican power structure. This was a womanly task, the kind that many papal sisters- and nieces-in-law had performed over the years to the approbation of onlookers. That was, after all, what women were supposed to do, stay in the laundry to look after the needs of men. But naturally Olimpia did not limit her ambitions to a tub of hot soapy water.
One of Olimpia’s first acts after her brother-in-law’s election was to search for the priest of Viterbo whom she had accused of trying to sexually molest her nearly forty years earlier. The priest was found. His career had never gone anywhere due to the scandal of 1606. Olimpia called him into her audience chamber at the Piazza Navona and asked him where she would be at that moment if she had followed his advice and become a nun.
The priest said with a sigh, “Most Excellent Signora, my goal was not to advise you to do evil.”
Olimpia replied, “No, but if I had done it, I would not have done well because I would not have become what I now am.”1
Then, to show him her absolute power, and to assuage the guilt that must have rankled subtly over the years, she had Innocent make him a bishop. Having made amends with the priest—sort of—Olimpia turned to helping oppressed women. She continued giving generously to nuns and was now in a position to assist another group of women forced into a life they would not have chosen under different circumstances—prostitutes.
Rome, a city with a large population of single men—priests and monks—and men who had left their wives back home—pilgrims and laborers from the countryside—had always boasted a thriving sex trade. The 1650 census reported 73,978 male residents of all ages and 52,214 females. These figures, however, did not include visitors, which would have inflated the preponderance of men even more. The census also listed 1,148 “courtesans” and 32 “concubines.” We are not sure what the difference was, but possibly a concubine was rented by one wealthy client for months at a time. And these were only the women who kissed and told. We can assume there were many more who kissed and clammed up.
In the Renaissance the cortigiana onesta, or honest courtesan, played the role of a geisha girl, reciting poetry, strumming the lute, and singing at Rome’s best gentlemen’s parties. Many of these women owned their own palaces and rode through the streets in luxurious carriages attended by several servants on horseback. Then there were the lowly cortigiane alla candela—candle tarts—who lit a little candle when their customers arrived and stopped working the moment the candle burned out.
The infamous Borgia pope, Alexander VI, invited prostitutes to the Vatican for orgies as a form of court entertainment, awarding prizes to those of his servants who made love to them the greatest number of times. In the wake of Martin Luther, most popes were stricter with prostitutes. Pius V (reigned 1566–1572) tried to banish them entirely, but the Roman senate begged him to reconsider. If amorous priests could not visit prostitutes, it was argued, they would seduce the wives and daughters of virtuous citizens. Other popes encouraged confraternities to reform the whores of Rome and give them dowries for marriage, which culled a few off the streets. Sumptuary laws were passed limiting the luxury of the clothing they wore in public and forbidding them to keep carriages.
Morals aside, the Roman civic government was concerned about prostitutes because of the illnesses they spread. The Hospital of Saint James, with beds for up to three hundred patients, specialized in treating syphilis. Every day the patients would be bled and administered a concoction that contained mercury. Although mercury diminished the symptoms of syphilis, it made the hair fall out, and eventually the teeth, and sometimes the mind would follow the hair and teeth as they rattled into oblivion.
Olimpia decided to take the prostitutes of Rome under her wing, evidently in return for a substantial donation. This transaction was not unusual as various groups in Rome paid an influential person to act on their behalf as a kind of lobbyist. Having won Olimpia’s official protection, prostitutes affixed her coat of arms over their doors, a warning sign to the police and church officials that they were under the personal protection of the pope’s most excellent sister-in-law. They were permitted to ride in carriages if they painted her coat of arms on the carriage door.
Teodoro Amayden was scandalized. He wrote in his avvisi of August 30, 1645, “The prostitutes parade in their carriages in the most solemn religious festivals, because Donna Olimpia, after having been given presents by the same, was content to take them under her protection, and permitted them to tack the arms of Her Excellency above their door and allowed them to go in carriages without any regard, as if they were honorable people.”2
But there was more scandal to come. It was, indeed, an unusual sight for a woman reputed to be the pope’s mistress to go in a great cavalcade of carriages to the Vatican for political consultations. Olimpia alighted from her coach clutching stacks of petitions and requests for the pope, along with the replies she had already written for the pope to sign. She then stepped into a sedan chair, which was carried up to the pope’s private apartments. In meetings with Innocent and various cardinals, she told them exactly what she wanted them to do, as the pope nodded in agreement.
The Venetian ambassador wrote, “And she from time to time with masterly haughtiness is carried into the palace with a file of petitions, most of them her own decrees, and spends hours with His Holiness to discuss the matters…. The jokes that went about the court were hidden from the pope.”3
The Mantuan ambassador stated that Olimpia clattered around Rome with such a staff of pages and retainers that her “magnificence rendered the sisters-in-law of the three prior popes almost modest.” 4 On February 11, 1645, the Florentine envoy reported, “Olimpia’s influence grows daily; she visits the Pope every other day and the whole world turns to her.”5
Cardinal Pallavicino concluded, “So adding up the pope’s feelings toward her, the close affinity, obligation, esteem, the conformity of interests, and his popularity right after his election, there began to be verified the predictions of the court, that if Cardinal Pamfili would be pope, Olimpia would be the ruler.”6
As pope, Innocent became more suspicious of men than ever, and the only churchman he completely trusted was his secretary of state, Cardinal Panciroli. But Olimpia trumped Panciroli, and the cardinal knew it. Though later events would show that he was irritated by her influence, to keep the pope’s friendship he paid court to her. Gregorio Leti wrote that Panciroli “was fain to go in person very often to wait upon her, and give her an account of all the secret negotiations of the court, and everything that passed through his hands, after which she would from time to time go to the Vatican, followed by a numerous company of coaches.”7
In addition to Panciroli, many other cardinals had the good sense to fawn on Olimpia, flattering her, sending her presents, and asking her advice. They even hung her official portrait in their audience chambers, right next to the pope, as if she were a sovereign herself, or perhaps co-pope.
Olimpia’s house became a second Vatican court. The Piazza Navona was crowded with the carriages of powerful churchmen and ambassadors who came to call on her. Cardinal Pallavicino wrote, “She fed her ambition by having her antechamber full of prelates and principal ministers, who in their ceremony and etiquette recognized her almost as their boss, and it came to pass that even cardinals, in addition to their frequent visits, ran to ask for her intercession in their most serious business.”8
In a document from 1651, Abbot Gianbattista Rinalducci wrote that Olimpia “had all the vices of a woman, and none of the virtues. She was avaricious, insatiable, haughty, scornful, implacable, arrogant, impetuous, sensual, and drunk with the financial prosperity of the papacy, which she alone absorbed.”9
The French ambassador, Bali de Valençais, had a better opinion of Olimpia. In his instructions to his successor in Rome, he compared Olimpia to the mythical Pope Joan. “One cannot deny that Donna Olimpia is a great lady,” he wrote. “Great, because she knows how to advance herself, to absent and present herself in the favor of the pope with such prudence that the court of Rome, which is used to marvels, is amazed. Being a woman, she appears to want to accumulate with too much industry, enjoys vendettas and, finally, makes a great show of her predominance. But I must repeat that she is a great lady, and if one pretends that a woman attained the papacy in former times, she would have had to have been as wise, shrewd and prudent as she…. Your Eminence must procure her affection, and this should not be so difficult seeing how she is the genius most adapted to want good for France rather than to please Spain.”10
The Venetian ambassador, Nicolò Sagredo, wrote that Olimpia’s “judgment is truly of a marvelous quality. She knows how to satisfy all her desires with the authority of a minister.”11
Even Leti, who heartily hated Olimpia, gave her grudging kudos. “Truly this woman deserved all sorts of praise for her mind and judgment, even if some criticized her and called her avaricious and impious,” he declared. “It is certain that no one but Donna Olimpia could have governed even six months in those bad circumstances let alone six years.”12
In addition to her political work, Olimpia had the more traditional responsibilities as the pope’s official hostess and first lady of Rome. The liturgical calendar was crammed with saints’ feast days and processions, and every few months another foreign prince would send an obbedienza cavalcade. At these events Olimpia sat proudly in the seat of honor. Additionally, when the wives of new ambassadors or traveling princes arrived in Rome, they first called on Olimpia to pay their respects. She was then expected to accompany them to papal audiences for the supreme honor of kissing the pope’s holy feet. Visiting men, however, usually called on the pope first, and then on Olimpia.
As the sun set, Olimpia often returned to the Vatican for secret work sessions. She sat alone with the pope behind locked doors, sometimes for as long as six hours at a time. One anonymous source noted, “Donna Olimpia goes to the pope always through the garden, so that no one, not even the butler, knows when she comes and goes.”13 People began to wonder why Olimpia sneaked into the Vatican at night, why she stayed so long, and what she and the pope were doing in there.
But Olimpia was, most likely, doing something infinitely more pleasurable than having sex with her brother-in-law—setting the Vatican finances in order, just as she had done with the Pamphili family finances. Gregorio Leti grumbled, “This woman made the pope retrench all expenses she deemed superfluous, obliging him to reduce wages and the appointments of officers…and finally putting him in the mood to see so great an economy even at his own table.”14
“In everything one sees an exquisite slenderness,” Giacinto Gigli wrote in his diary.15 So slender, in fact, that during the first anniversary celebrations of Innocent’s coronation, the bells of Rome’s churches remained stonily silent because Olimpia had fired the bell ringers.
Olimpia’s official monthly stipend as first lady of Rome was only 250 scudi, plus the 18 scudi a month for laundering the pope’s underwear. But she would make far more money by taking bribes for influence peddling.
The Mantuan ambassador wrote, “Having great authority with the pope, all recognize her to get honors, offices, and favors, purchasing her efficacious intercessions in the form of extravagant gifts, so that giving them becomes obligatory.”16
According to the Venetian ambassador, “Donna Olimpia Maidalchini, sister-in-law of His Holiness, the only recipient of the favors of the pope, is a lady of intelligence and masculine spirit and only makes herself known as a woman through her haughtiness and avarice, from where it is necessary that the favor-seekers at court give her incessant obsequiousness and continual gifts.”17
The ambassador of the republic of Lucca explained, “The signora Donna Olimpia, sister-in-law of His Holiness, governs absolutely the business of the house of Cardinal Pamphili her son. And at the age of 48 or thereabouts [she was 53], of singular valor and greatly esteemed by the pope, it is the universal opinion of the court and of all Rome that she is the most powerful and efficacious means to obtain graces and rewards from His Beatitude. She goes frequently to private audiences with His Holiness once or twice a week where she is always needed, and in this favorable environment she obtains commodious honors and great gifts.”18
The culture of the time didn’t look at gift giving as corruption; bestowing handsome presents in the hopes of influencing the powerful was, after all, only common sense. Olimpia had done it for decades to position her brother-in-law to become nuncio, cardinal, and pope. Now, sitting at the pinnacle, she would reap her reward as other ambitious people gave gifts to her. It was only fair.
Bribery was endemic not only in the Papal States but throughout Europe. When Peter the Great began executing corrupt state officials, one of them summed up the international situation when he quipped, “In the end you will have no subjects for we are all thieves.”19
Pasquino had a field day with the cartloads of gifts trundling into Olimpia’s Piazza Navona courtyard. In ringing Italian rhyme he said,
He who wishes a favor from the sovereign,
Bitter and long the road to the Vatican.
But the shrewd person
Runs to Donna Olimpia with full hands,
And there who wants it attains it,
And the street is wider and shorter.20
Olimpia, always short, had indeed been getting wider lately.
As a close relative of the reigning pope, Olimpia was doing nothing new in accepting bribes in return for her influence. Her zeal for power and wealth would have been lauded in a man; after all, almost every cardinal and Roman nobleman had the same aspirations. But there was one problem with Olimpia: she was a woman, operating at the apex of the oldest continuously existing misogynistic institution in the world.
To understand Olimpia’s position in the Vatican, and public reaction to it, we must first take a look at the historical relationship of the Catholic Church and women. It had started off well enough; Jesus and Paul had been close to women, traveling with them to spread the word of God. Jesus’ female followers stood loyally at the cross when his male disciples ran away to hide. After the crucifixion, many apostles traveled with their wives to spread the gospel. In 1 Corinthians 9:5, Paul wrote, “Don’t we have the right to take believing wives along with us, as do the other apostles and the Lord’s brothers and Peter?”
For three centuries after Jesus, Christianity was not an official Roman imperial religion and as such had no public churches for worship. Church services were held in homes, the accepted domain of women. And here women played a major role—teaching, disciplining, and managing material resources. According to tombstones found in France, Turkey, Greece, Italy, and Yugoslavia, some of these women were priests.
Women lost ground when Constantine legalized Christianity and built grand basilicas—the public sphere of men—for the church. A new generation of male leaders marched in, casting the women aside. The flexible hierarchy of the house churches yielded to a more rigid structure of parishes and dioceses, all run by men.
To excise traces of women’s role in the early church, the apostle Junia, whom Paul hailed in Romans 16:7 as “foremost among the apostles,” was transformed into Junias, a male name that incorrectly persists in Bibles today. In the ancient Roman Church of Saint Prassede, the mosaic of Bishop Theodora has had the feminine ending of her name scratched off, leaving Bishop Theodo wearing a woman’s headdress.
Yet in southern Italy the tradition of women priests was not easily uprooted. Pope Gelasius I (reigned 492–496) expressed his outrage to Christian communities there. “We have heard,” he thundered, “that divine affairs have come to such a low state that women are encouraged to officiate at sacred altars and all matters reserved for the male sex.”21
Not only were women prevented from becoming priests, there was a growing movement afoot to prevent them from marrying priests. Pope Siricius (reigned 384–399) issued the first decretal denying marriage to the clergy. Yet the Bible makes clear that Saint Peter was married, and for 350 years after him the church had no policy against clerical marriage. Paul wrote in 1 Timothy, “A bishop must then be blameless, the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behavior, given to hospitality, apt to teach…one that ruleth well his own house, having his children in subjection in all gravity. For if a man know not how to rule his own house, how shall he care for the church of God?”
Later popes realized that a bachelor priest would not have family issues distracting him from his work and could devote himself fully to the prosperity of the church. But there was a more pressing problem. For more than a thousand years after Constantine, married priests bequeathed their churches, the lands around them, the silver sacrament chalices, and their priestly incomes to their sons. If a priest had no sons, he would give the church buildings to his daughters as dowries. Church property became something owned not by the Vatican but by individual families, passed from generation to generation. Priests’ wives, with a position to maintain, paraded about town decked out in finery paid for by alms intended for the poor.
Some forty popes up until the seventh century were the sons of priests. Several popes were the sons of popes. The major attack on priestly marriage did not occur until the late eleventh century, and even then, most priests ignored it. Some married priests of the time were much like Catholics today who practice birth control—otherwise good Catholics ignoring a papal decree that proves so inconvenient to their personal lives.
Married priests were unfazed by threats of fines or loss of income. They might have to send their wives and children away if a visiting bishop came to town, but they would bring them back the moment he left. Many town leaders refused to accept bachelor priests, fearing they would seduce their wives and daughters. Churchmen sent from Rome with decrees outlawing priestly marriage were often beaten up and kicked out of town, as townsfolk threw the papal documents into a bonfire.
The church had more control over what occurred in Rome. In 1051 Pope Leo IX enslaved priestly wives, making them cook food for the bishops and scrub the church floors. After that, few Roman women wanted to marry priests. But overall, the path to priestly celibacy was long, drawn-out, and hard-fought.
The church believed sexual continence was good for the soul. Finding no decree of abstinence in the Bible, Martin Luther believed it to be a pitiful waste. Sex within marriage, he reasoned, was good. Virginity was displeasing to God, who gave people reproductive organs with the express purpose of bringing children into the world. Priestly celibacy was the real sin. God said in the book of Genesis, “Be ye fruitful and multiply.” By wrongfully insisting on celibate priests, the Catholic Church had prevented the fruitful multiplication of millions of people.
Luther believed there was another problem with prohibiting priestly marriage. Sex, he reasoned, was a valid bodily need just like urination. God created the body to get certain things out of the system. To deny the body sex—or, for that matter, urination—was sure to generate a terrible explosion sooner or later. And scandalous sexual explosions occurred across the board, from the lowliest parish priest up to the popes themselves.
According to accusations made after his death, Boniface VIII (reigned 1294–1303) often said, “To lie with women or with boys is no more sin than to rub one hand against the other.”22 Many popes in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had children. Innocent VIII (reigned 1484–1492) was credited with sixteen, though this was probably an exaggeration. The Borgia pope had at least eight that we know about, by three of his mistresses. Julius II (reigned 1503–1513) had at least one daughter, whom he handsomely maintained, and possibly two more. Paul III (reigned 1534–1549) sired four children, whom he amply rewarded when he became pope, making his grandsons cardinals. Pius IV (reigned 1559–1565) had three bastards, and Gregory XIII (reigned 1572–1585) had one.
As the droves of papal children proved, it wasn’t sex that bothered the church; it was marriage, with its rights of inheritance of ecclesiastical property. Mistresses, male lovers, and bastards posed no threat to the prosperity of the church, as they had no inheritance rights. And so the word celibacy came to denote lack of marriage, rather than lack of sex. Morality became a bit twisted when sex without marriage was deemed a lesser sin than sex within the bonds of holy matrimony, as the Lutherans were quick to point out.
While most papal mistresses stayed quietly in the background, there were a few exceptions. The charming Cecile, countess of Turenne, believed to be the mistress of Pope Clement VI (reigned 1342–1352), evidently did the same things that Olimpia would do three hundred years later and received the same criticism. The scintillating countess sold offices, received bribes for her influence, and paraded around with great haughtiness.
Clement’s contemporary, the Florentine merchant Giovanni Villani, wrote of the pope, “When he was an archbishop he did not keep away from women but lived in the manner of young nobles, nor did he as pope try to control himself. Noble ladies had the same access to his chambers as did prelates and, among others, the Countess of Turenne was so intimate with him that, in large part, he distributed his favors through her.”23 When the pope’s confessor warned him that he must give up women for the good of his eternal soul, Clement reportedly shrugged and said he had gotten used to women during his youth and only continued sexual relations now on the advice of his doctors.
Some 150 years after the countess of Turenne, Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, who became Pope Alexander VI in 1492, took as his mistress the voluptuous brunette Giulia Farnese. When the affair began in 1489, Giulia was a bride of fifteen and Borgia was a fat cardinal of fifty-eight. Giulia wanted no power or riches for herself but accepted Borgia into her bed as the price she had to pay for getting her brother Alessandro made a cardinal.
Unambitious though she was, Giulia was a target for Vatican favor seekers. Anyone who wanted something from the pope stopped off at Giulia’s house to give her presents and heavily larded compliments. “The majority of those who want to receive favors from the pope pass through that door,” said one writer, referring to the large doorway of her palazzo.24
Her brother Alessandro, an able and diligent churchman, would forever feel uneasy about the manner in which he had obtained his red hat. Pasquino called him “the Petticoat Cardinal,” an infuriating name that caught on with the Roman people. Giulia, who had advanced his career, was now a stumbling block to it long after Alexander VI’s reign. She showed her brother great consideration by dying in 1524, a full decade before the Petticoat Cardinal become Pope Paul III.
The other Vatican woman of Borgia’s reign was his daughter Lucrezia, who in 1501 at the age of twenty-one was given official power to run the church and the Papal States when her father toured lands conquered by her brother. Reports spread by Borgia enemies had Lucrezia sleeping with both her father and her brother, and slipping poison from her ring into the wine of enemies, none of which is likely.
Lucrezia was a pawn moved about on the bloodstained chessboard of her male relatives to advance their own selfish objectives. Highly intelligent, she survived in a brutal, male-dominated world by playing the fragile female. Twittering apologies for her headaches and fatigue, Lucrezia was permitted to remain in her rooms for days at a time, temporarily removing herself from the sinister machinations of her male family members.
Washing her ankle-length blond hair was an all-day affair, as it took hours for her ladies to comb and dry it, in front of the fire in cold weather, out on the balcony in warm. Periodically the simpering Lucrezia begged for a retreat to a convent, to get closer to God, she said, though it was more likely she wanted to escape from Vatican men. Lucrezia presented herself as weak, meek, and not terribly bright. Yet she was smart enough to get her way. Not even the most savage warlord, looking at Lucrezia’s golden tresses and trembling smile, would refuse her a hair wash.
Men were less impressed by a woman like Olimpia, stomping into the Vatican with no headaches, no blond curls, and no apologies for being a weak, stupid female. She knew she was smarter than the men and didn’t bother to hide it. And their resentment grew.