THOUGH HE WAS HUMILIATED at home and abroad, Innocent’s luck was about to change. For he had the good fortune to be pope during the jubilee, a yearlong religious festival that Pope Boniface VIII had started in 1300 to bring God into the hearts of men and money into the coffers of Rome. During the jubilee, held every twenty-five years, the pope was the star of the European stage, and the church reigned triumphant.
Pilgrims flocked to Rome to obtain the indulgence of sins. The Catholic sacrament of penance affirms that in order to have sins forgiven the sinner must have a sincerely contrite heart, confess to a priest, who represents God, and make restitution to those he has harmed. Finally, he must endure either an earthly punishment or suffer in purgatory after death. It was far safer, Catholics believed, for the sinner to choose his own chastisement than to wait until after death and let God concoct the appropriate penalty. Self-imposed punishments included fasting, prayer, almsgiving, and making a long journey to a holy site. A pilgrimage was a popular form of punishment as it allowed the sinner to get in a great deal of sightseeing.
Holy Year pilgrims obtained the indulgence of sins by visiting the four major Roman basilicas the number of times specified by the reigning pontiff. They shaved extra time off purgatory by touring the catacombs where early Christians had buried their dead and worshipped in frescoed underground chapels. More heavenly brownie points accrued by praying at the Colosseum, believed to be the site of the martyrdom of so many Christians, and asking for heavenly intercession at the shrines of the saints.
This influx of sinners was a huge stimulus for the Roman economy, with hundreds of thousands of visitors staying at inns, eating and drinking, and shopping for necessities, souvenirs, and luxury items. Most pilgrims piously gave donations to the churches they visited.
But it wasn’t all profit for the Vatican, which invested in preparations years in advance. Hospitals and dormitories were built, trees were planted, and streets were paved. In addition, Rome in the jubilee year was a kind of baroque Catholic Disney World, with easily recognizable biblical characters walking the piazzas in impressive costumes, exquisitely constructed stage sets on every street, and tacky expensive souvenirs for sale on every corner. Holy-Year celebrations awed and inspired with fireworks, feasts, and fountains running with wine.
The Vatican also bore the substantial cost of refurbishing Rome’s famous churches to strike wonder into the hearts of pilgrims. Innocent ordered that all churches be cleaned, repaired, and ornamented. But particular attention was paid to the four jubilee churches—Saint Peter’s, Saint John Lateran, Saint Mary Major, and Saint Paul’s Outside the Walls.
Starting in 1647, Innocent began major renovations at two of these churches. Saint John Lateran was a fourth-century basilica built by Constantine, which over time had been sacked by barbarians, rattled by earthquakes, and blackened by fires. The beautiful Roman columns had become so unstable that earlier popes had surrounded them with ungainly bricks. The floor was wobbly, and some of the walls were leaning out of kilter.
When the first Saint Peter’s Basilica had been in a similar condition in the early sixteenth century, Pope Julius II demolished it and built a grand new church. But times had changed. Seventeenth-century Romans had an appreciation of antiquity that their great-grandfathers had lacked. Though delighted with the new magnificent Saint Peter’s, they realized that the priceless historical and sacred value of the old one was forever lost. It had been a grievous waste to knock it down and throw it out with the trash to build something bigger and newer.
To overhaul Saint John Lateran, Innocent hired Francesco Borromini to recommend repairs. The architect was hell-bent on completely redesigning the building from top to bottom, making it into the Church of Saint John Borromini. Innocent gently reined him in and instructed him to preserve as much of the ancient church as possible. No walls were torn down, and the ancient proportions were retained. Borromini reinforced the wobbly foundations, stabilized the walls, and adorned the church with magnificent decorations.
Meanwhile, Innocent turned his attention to Saint Peter’s. The interior decoration was not yet complete. The pilasters in the nave that held up the giant arches were of plain marble, which, people of the baroque felt, just cried out for adornment. With an eye toward the jubilee, soon after Bernini’s rehabilitation Innocent hired him to decorate the pilasters. Bernini and his team carved cherubs holding three-dimensional medallions of the first thirty-eight popes. The Pamphili dove and olive branch were visible on each pilaster, an eternal reminder of Innocent X’s generosity. Innocent also commissioned Bernini to design and lay down the sumptuous marble pavement in the nave.
In October 1649 Giacinto Gigli wrote that the churches “in other holy years were never this ornamented or beautiful. Because Saint Peter’s looked fabulous with its new floor of colored marble and the chapels of Paul V newly inlaid with marble and all the altars embellished and everything carefully washed and polished.”1
Given the astronomical expenses, the Holy Year was like a Broadway show with elaborate stage sets and a huge cast that had to be paid for before the first ticket was sold. All wealthy Romans were expected to make significant contributions the year before the jubilee. As first lady of Rome, Olimpia was assigned the Trinity Institute of Pilgrims, a huge guest house open for the Holy Year. The Roman people, aware of her avarice, were curious to see how much she would donate.
Using her well-honed administrative skills, Olimpia organized a group of forty-two influential ladies to collect money for the maintenance of pilgrims. A team of three ladies canvassed each of Rome’s fourteen rioni, or districts. Olimpia’s team of fund-raisers collected 16,582 scudi, enough money to feed and shelter 226,771 men, 81,822 women, and 25,902 convalescents for three days each. It was a magnificent sum. It was noted, however, that Olimpia had not contributed a penny of her own.
Dormitories such as Olimpia’s Trinity Institute were never sufficient to shelter all pilgrims. In a day and age when hotel rooms were not reserved in advance—unless you sent someone ahead of you on a horse to do so—many exhausted visitors would arrive in the Eternal City to find there was not a single bed available in inns, pilgrim dormitories, or private homes. They would bed down where they could—in stables with cows and horses, under the loggias of public buildings, or in the vineyards just outside the walls of Rome. In 1649 the pope ordered tens of thousands of comfortable straw pallets for unsheltered pilgrims to buy at cost, as well as blankets, wine, and food.
To protect the pilgrims from racketeering, in 1648 Innocent had already passed a law prohibiting the raising of rents. Severe fines would be imposed on innkeepers and apartment owners who raised their prices to fleece the flock. The cost of food and wine, too, was carefully looked into. Any tavern keeper charging exorbitant prices during the jubilee would be fined and, if he continued, jailed.
On December 10, 1649, the pope issued various edicts regarding the approaching Holy Year. Priests were not allowed to wear long hair, and prostitutes were not allowed to wear crinolines or, as Gigli wrote, “go about in dresses similar to good women.”2
In a rare fit of frivolity, on December 21 Innocent hired back all the bell ringers Olimpia had made him fire in 1644 to save money. He decreed that to show joy during the jubilee, all churches ring their bells three times daily for the next year, at nine in the morning, at one, and at sunset. Considering that Rome boasted 355 churches, it must have made for a merry cacophony.
The jubilee year was officially inaugurated on Christmas Eve by the ceremonial opening of the holy doors of the four basilicas. These doors, which were bricked up during regular years, were opened by the cardinal who was archpriest of the basilica. In front of cheering crowds, the cardinal tapped on the bricks with a ceremonial hammer. The bricks had already been loosened by masons, who were standing behind them. When the masons heard the tapping, they pulled down the bricks, creating a thunderous drama.
Embedded in each holy door was a chest of gold medals minted to celebrate the previous jubilee and struck with the image of the last Holy Year pope. This box was to be given to the door-opening cardinal. The medals were highly coveted and extremely valuable. As soon as the cardinal had taken his chest of holy medals and the masons had carted off the rubble, the crowds of excited pilgrims would race through the door to be the first to claim the indulgence.
On the afternoon of December 24, 1649, four cavalcades wound their way to the four basilicas. Penitents beat their breasts and whipped themselves as they walked. Some of the pious crept forward on their knees. Most pilgrims walked, some barefoot, while the better-off rode on mules or horses. The majority were Catholic, though each procession included several Protestants and a handful of Muslims and Jews who just wanted to see a good show.
Olimpia was itching to get her hands on the holy medals. Luckily, the archpriest of Saint John Lateran, Cardinal Girolamo Colonna, was a friend of hers. He opened the door with due dignity and took the heavy chest of Urban VIII’s 1625 jubilee medals. Without opening it, he gave it to a soldier, who wrapped it in his cloak and took it posthaste to Olimpia.
Cardinal Francesco Barberini, the archpriest of Saint Peter’s, would not open his holy door, as that honor was saved for the pope. But as archpriest, Francesco was entitled to the medals. Since Olimpia had recalled his family from exile and returned most of their property to them, he agreed to give her his medals. He instructed the masons to have a wheelbarrow placed behind the holy door so that the moment the masonry collapsed, the box of medals would fall into the wheelbarrow, which would be covered with a canvas and carted off to Olimpia. But it was not carted off quickly enough, as it was noticed by many of the faithful, including Giacinto Gigli, who recorded it in his diary.
While these two ceremonies went off without a hitch, the others did not. Over at Saint Paul’s Basilica, when eighty-eight-year-old Cardinal Marcello Lante arrived to open the holy door, he found it already open. The masons waiting behind it, unable to see outside, had thought they heard the cardinal tapping and pulled down the door. Some two hundred pilgrims were inside the church milling around and gawking at the decorations.
Seeing the mess that awaited him, Cardinal Lante had the church cleared out and instructed the masons to pile up the bricks as best they could. He then ceremonially tapped on the dusty heap, declaring the church open for pilgrims. The box of medals was already gone, but it was not in Olimpia’s hands. The dean of the basilica, knowing she wanted it, had locked it up in Saint Paul’s treasury.
The archpriest of the fourth jubilee church, Saint Mary Major, was none other than Cardinal Antonio Barberini, but he was still huffing and puffing in self-imposed exile in France. Cardinal Alderano Cibo was next in line to perform the ceremony, but Olimpia insisted that her nephew Cardinal Maidalchini do the honors. She specifically instructed him to get the medals as quickly as possible and bring them to her.
Upon hearing that Cardinal Maidalchini had been chosen to replace Antonio Barberini for the job, Cardinal Federico Sforza raced to the pope to explain that this was a poor choice. The clumsy Cardinal Maidalchini could not represent the holy Catholic Church at such a crucial ceremony with thousands of spectators from around the world, some of them heretics. Another cardinal, Sforza begged, must do the honors. But the pope had already promised Olimpia. And when he told her about Sforza’s plea, she had the popular cardinal exiled to his bishopric on the east coast of Italy.
Cardinal Sforza’s prediction was accurate. The crowds of pilgrims murmured at the sight of the ungainly pimple-faced boy who seemed not to know how to hold the holy hammer. Nervous church officials suggested maybe they should call in another cardinal. But somehow Maidalchini figured out which end was up and managed to tap on the door, and the bricks promptly fell.
The young cardinal reached inside to grab the casket of holy medals, but the church canons, expecting such a move, were waiting behind the door and tried to yank the box out of his hands. The medals, they declared, belonged to them, and not to Cardinal Maidalchini, who was not the archpriest or even a proper substitute. Cardinal Maidalchini, terrified of Aunt Olimpia’s fury, got into a brawl with the canons over possession of the box.
The spectators were furious at Cardinal Maidalchini for several reasons. First of all, he was ugly. Second, he had botched the sacred ceremony. Third, he was trying to steal the holy medals. The crowd rushed him, almost crushing him against the wall of the church. The little cardinal somehow wriggled out of their clutches and in the confusion raced out of the church clutching the box of medals. He jumped into his coach and galloped to the Piazza Navona palace with his mission accomplished.
And so, on the evening of December 24, 1649, Olimpia was the proud possessor of three of the four boxes of holy medals. It wasn’t a bad take, but still, it could have been better.
On January 8, 1650, Innocent, irritated at tourists smoking pipes in the sacred space of Saint Peter’s, became perhaps the first person ever to set up a no-smoking sign. All smokers would be excommunicated immediately and, without the sacraments of the church, would go to hell. Smoking stopped.
On January 9, Olimpia made a pompous cavalcade to the four jubilee churches. She had in her carriage her daughter Maria, Princess Giustiniani, and a retinue of many noble ladies followed in their own carriages. They rode first to Saint John Lateran, where on their knees, they climbed the holy stair, which was believed to have come from the Jerusalem palace of Pontius Pilate, and down which Jesus was said to have walked carrying the cross. Spots of miraculously indelible blood could still be seen on certain stairs. Saying a Hail Mary or an Our Father on each step, they made the painful ascent. It must have been agonizing for Olimpia, whose knees swelled and ached with arthritis.
Olimpia and other wealthy Catholics made the rounds of the four churches in comfortable carriages. For most people, however, the exhausting journey in all kinds of weather was done on foot. The entire circuit was twenty-five miles, since Saint Paul’s was a few miles outside Rome. Innocent had decreed that pilgrims coming from afar were required to make the rounds of the four churches fifteen times to obtain the indulgence, while Romans, who hadn’t already made a long trip to get to Rome, were required to visit all four churches thirty times.
Traditionally, with the pope’s permission sick people could obtain the indulgence with fewer visits than required from the healthy. And historically most popes smiled, gave a benediction, and granted the indulgence to any incommoded person who asked for it. But Innocent, ever the strict jurist, was not quick to grant it to those who hadn’t made even one round of the churches, and he inquired carefully into their efforts.
Giacinto Gigli thought the pontiff a bit stingy. “A gentlewoman sick to death begged the pope to give her the indulgence without going to the churches,” he recounted. “The pope asked how many times she had gone and she said none, and he said what did she expect if she didn’t go? She said she hoped to go in the month of May in warmer weather and the pope replied that in May we will give you the indulgence. Similarly other people who were ready to die sent to ask for the indulgence and it was asked how many times they had visited the churches and if they had never gone it was not conceded to them.”3
Strict though he was, when the pope visited the churches he showed willingness to listen to all those pilgrims who wanted to talk to him. As a canon lawyer he had always listened to petitioners with compassion and patience, and in this way he was no different as pope.
The pope had forbidden Carnival, as the Holy Year was no time for Jews and prostitutes to race down the Corso. The parade of nude hunchbacks was canceled, as was the procession of farters carrying the King of the Defecators on a toilet chair. Those who wished to produce rowdy comedies had to do so in their private palaces outside the gates of Rome. Plays of a sacred nature were, of course, permitted.
The high point of every Holy Year was Easter, and this Easter the number of pilgrims swelled to sixty thousand. During Holy Week the pope several times washed the feet of poor pilgrims, in imitation of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet. But Olimpia, it was noted, was never seen to wash a single poor foot.
As Easter dawned on April 17, the Spanish confraternity of the Holy Resurrection marched into the Piazza Navona holding aloft the Holy Sacrament. The architect Carlo Rainaldi had transformed the piazza into a peristyle of columns, creating 116 arches, surrounded by vines that flickered with the light of 1,600 candles. At each end of the piazza was a magnificent arch and cupola that seemed to be of heavy colored marble but was really made of flimsy painted wood. Inside one was the risen Christ, and inside the other was his Virgin Mother.
Bernini’s fountain of the Four Rivers was still being constructed behind scaffolding. For Holy Week the artist surrounded the fountain with a crenellated wooden enclosure resembling a medieval castle, hung with beautiful religious paintings. On each corner he built a castle tower, on top of which musicians played. Lit by colored lights, the obelisk rose above the construction and at times shot off fireworks.
The jubilee year was a time of frequent miracles. Miracles occurred throughout Italy even in non-jubilee years, of course, but the hysteria of the Holy Year seemed to cause swarms of them. Prayers were answered. Crutches were left at altars. The moribund rose from their deathbeds and danced in the streets. Looking at these miracles from a modern perspective, we are unsure whether they were caused by mind over matter, natural healing, trickery, or divine intervention.
Innocent and Olimpia were kept closely informed of any miracles that took place in the Papal States. It was important, from both a church and governmental point of view, to determine the source of the miracles. Some of them were found to be real, caused by God and his saints to boost faith in the true church. Others were no less real but caused by Satan and his demons to fool the devout, and these had to be driven out by exorcists. The clearest sign of demonic possession was a gyrating pelvis. Anyone caught doing a seventeenth-century version of Elvis Presley—no matter how many cripples he healed—would have been drenched with holy water immediately and would, most likely, have responded with hisses and howls. Alas, most miracles were faked, caused by men and women hoping to defraud the pious.
Throughout Innocent’s reign, the most fascinating case was that of Joseph of Cupertino. Known as “the Flying Friar,” Joseph would go into a trance and then, with a shriek, fly up into the air. His superiors forbade him to meditate in the monastery gardens as his brothers were tired of hauling out the ladder and plucking him out of trees. Joseph was also forbidden to attend Mass in church, as he would go crashing through the air and knock into the high altar, screaming as the candles burned him, or land atop a column, sending the entire service into disorder. Nor was Joseph allowed to eat in the refectory with the other monks; he tended to launch himself airborne while holding a tray of hot soup, spilling it on those below. On some occasions as Joseph started to soar he grabbed hold of a fellow friar and carried the horrified monk into the air with him. Joseph was confined to a low cell, where he could do no flying. At one point he was reportedly brought to the Vatican so Urban VIII could meet him, and he duly soared upward, arms and legs gesticulating wildly, and landed at the pope’s feet with a loud thud.
In 1650 the staunchly Lutheran duke of Brunswick, Johann Friedrich, traveled to Rome to experience the jubilee. On his way, he stopped off at Joseph’s monastery in Assisi to see the Flying Friar. Whatever he saw amazed him so much that he immediately declared he would convert to Catholicism.
While most who witnessed Joseph’s amazing feats were certain they were caused by God, the Inquisition was not so sure. To make sure his levitation was not the work of the devil, Innocent’s chief inquisitor of miracles kept a firm eye on Joseph until his death in 1663. In 1767, Pope Clement XIII decided it had been the hand of God that lifted him up, and he canonized him. Church officials of the twentieth century—no strangers to things flying through the air—have since declared Joseph the patron saint of aviation. As for us, we can offer no explanation and must, for the moment, leave the case of Saint Joseph of Cupertino up in the air.
Not all miracles were as inexplicable as the Flying Friar. In May 1650 a group of Florentines brought to Rome a miraculous cross—which was said to fly from church to church of its own accord—and placed it in the Church of Saint John of the Florentines. Praying before the cross on his knees, a poor crippled Florentine suddenly jumped up and threw away his crutches. A woman possessed of a demon was healed, and another woman threw away her crutches. As a large crowd thronged the church to gape at the miracles unfolding before their very eyes, the vice-regent of Rome marched in to maintain order. He took the cross to the Inquisition so that investigations could be conducted on its healing power. Interrogations revealed that the crippled Florentine who threw away his crutches was a charlatan, hoping to draw excited crowds who in their religious fervor wouldn’t notice when his associates picked their pockets.
Giacinto Gigli wrote, “Every day things get more confusing because no one knows if the miracles are truly done by God, or are false and lies.” 4
It was the biggest Holy Year ever, with some 700,000 pilgrims coming from all parts of Europe over the course of twelve months. While many travelers shuffled into Rome anonymous, dusty, and tired, others arrived with ostentatious panache. The emperor of China sent a delegation bursting with silken Oriental splendor, years in the planning and two years on the road. The king of the Congo sent warriors draped in leopard skin, laden with thick ivory and gold bangles, and brandishing ceremonial spears.
The most spectacular entourage, however, was clearly that of the Spanish ambassador, the duke of Infantado, representing King Philip IV. He arrived escorted by 300 carriages, 100 of them rounded up by Prince Ludovisi from his friends and neighbors. This was a satisfying number because the French ambassador had only managed to scare up an embarrassing 160 carriages for his procession. The duke of Infantado had in his train hundreds of grooms holding the reins of gaily caparisoned horses, a squadron of tall Africans in plumed turbans, and a team of hunchbacks riding small white mules with jangling silver bells on their saddles.
Of all jubilee visitors, the great Spanish portrait painter Diego Velázquez left us the most lasting souvenir. During the artist’s papal audience, he studied Innocent intently. Back in his rooms, he painted the pope without a single sitting. When he presented the portrait to the pope, Innocent took one look at it and cried, “Too true!”5
It is, indeed, almost a photograph of Innocent in all his pontifical majesty, sitting in a red velvet papal chair with gilded woodwork and finials. He wears a frothy white knee-length rochet edged with lace, a shining red satin mozzetta over his shoulders, and on his head the red satin camauro. His small, suspicious eyes look critically at the viewer. His brow is furrowed into a perturbed scowl. His lips are slightly pursed, as if he is about to say something unpleasant. The background, perhaps meant to represent a drape, appears unfinished, almost impressionistic, angry swatches of red and black.
The month of May saw the arrival of another famous pilgrim. Princess Maria of Savoy, great-aunt of the reigning duke, clattered into Rome with impressive pageantry. The princess was a fifty-six-year-old spinster and Capuchin lay nun—she lived the life of a nun but had never taken a nun’s vows. She had, however, founded a convent in Turin where she spent her days in prayer, penance, and good works. She and her ladies wore enormous hoods and billowing coats of many wide folds that made the Romans laugh. She was profoundly deaf and used a silver ear horn to help her hear.
Princess Maria went first to visit the pope, to whom she gave a gorgeous reproduction of the Shroud of Turin encrusted with jewels. Immediately after her papal audience, she should have called on Olimpia as first lady of Rome. But instead of going to the Piazza Navona, the princess’s carriage rumbled straight to the Tor de’ Specchi Convent, where she would be residing. And there she remained.
It was a huge snub to Olimpia because everyone in Rome knew the princess had not visited her. But the devout Princess Maria had no intention of calling on a woman who had been born a nobody and who, it was thought, ruled Rome only because she was the pope’s mistress. At the convent, Princess Maria’s bias against Olimpia was exacerbated by Sister Agatha, who yelled into her ear horn the story of poor Camillo’s miserable exile, the noble suffering of the pregnant princess of Rossano, and their continued estrangement from the pope, all at Olimpia’s wicked instigation. The princess stayed put, and Olimpia’s enemies roared with laughter.
As the days passed and still the princess did not call, Olimpia realized she needed to do something or she would be the laughingstock of Rome. She came up with an invitation so tantalizing that the devout princess would not be able to turn it down. Olimpia’s private chapel in the Piazza Navona palace was stuffed with the relics of saints and a splinter of the true cross. Surely the princess would like to pray before such holy objects. Practically salivating at the very thought, Princess Maria agreed to make a brief private visit as long as no one else knew about it. She certainly didn’t want the Roman public to know she had debased herself by visiting such an awful woman.
When Princess Maria arrived at the Piazza Navona palace, Olimpia smilingly guided her upstairs and opened the doors to her galleria. The princess entered, thinking it was the chapel with the holy relics. To her dismay, she found a crowd of hundreds bowing and clapping. Cardinals, bishops, ambassadors, noblemen, and their wives were standing on both sides of the gallery to witness Olimpia’s triumph. Giacinto Gigli wrote, “There she found all the prelates of Rome, and a good part of the ladies, and she never saw the chapel, and went home disgusted.”6
One of the goals of the jubilee was to encourage conversions. It was hoped that heretics—Protestants—or apostates—Muslims and Jews—would be so overcome by the pageantry and glory of the church that they would recant their false beliefs and spring into the arms of Catholicism.
There were never many conversions, but in a church under threat every single one was greeted with great fanfare. In 1650 six Jews converted, as well as a Turk and several heretics, including a Huguenot who threw himself at the feet of the pope while he conducted Mass and begged to be admitted into the Roman Catholic Church. Innocent embraced the reformed heretic and welcomed him back into the fold.
Sometimes pilgrims were so overcome with religious zeal that they forgot themselves. One gentleman, seeing the papal procession coming out of Saint Peter’s, became so emotional that he darted into the procession, flung his arms around His Holiness, and kissed him. Unfortunately, he had kissed the pope’s bearded, exquisitely robed butler. Innocent was standing farther back, enjoying a good laugh at the comical scene.
Not all pilgrims were so devout. Numerous groups, lining up to march to church to proclaim their Christian devotion, got into bloody fights with other groups who were butting in front of them in the parade line. Some of these fights spilled over into churches, and the high altars were littered with dead bodies.
In June, Giacinto Gigli described a riot involving some two thousand pilgrims marching in two different religious parades, both of whom tried to push in front of the other. “Many were wounded with cudgels, among them the Marchese Santa Croce who was beaten in the head…. The marchese’s coachman was taken to the hospital badly wounded in the face by a paving stone. These tumults happen on the street almost every day because these villains come from their own countries to Rome for the jubilee…and are so haughty they give room to no one and go processing through the streets and won’t let anyone pass by…. If they come upon another group, they fight with their fists, because each wants precedence.”7
The avvisi noted that some pilgrims, after begging God to forgive their sins and whipping themselves, ran to an inn and ate meat instead of fish, got wretchedly drunk, and had sex with whores. A French visitor observed, “No one abstained from eating forbidden meat, and despite their libertinage, you could see them praying and crying out for mercy, mercy, and beating their breasts as if they were the greatest saints in the world.”8
Giacinto Gigli lamented, “Devotion is lost, and the Jubilee will create scandal and damage and make us Christians look like fools to the Jews, the Heretics, and the Gentiles who see and hear of these mishaps.”9
But there were more serious concerns than unruly pilgrims. Crowd control had not yet been mastered, and well-attended events presented mortal dangers. On May 16 a huge throng surged toward the Quirinal Palace to see the pope bestow his blessing from a balcony. Many pilgrims were crushed, trampled, and suffocated, and Innocent was devastated to hear of the deaths and injuries.
Then there was the drought. For the first eight months of 1650 it barely rained at all, which prompted fears of another famine. Every day the pilgrims trudged to the four churches in a thick cloud of dust. An epidemic of some sort began to cull its victims. Gigli wrote, “Many people grew sick and many of the pilgrims and workers and even noble and rich people died suddenly.”10
Pilgrims who came to Rome for the jubilee of 1650 had a long list of things to see—festive celebrations, Roman ruins, medieval churches, the beautiful new Saint Peter’s Basilica, and most fascinating of all, the pope’s sister-in-law, who, everyone knew, ran the Vatican.
Those who lived outside Rome had a hard time picturing this woman who ruled a pope, a church, and a nation. Some thought she had achieved her influence through her beauty. She must be drop-dead gorgeous, a Helen of Troy whose face mesmerized even the most dried-up old churchmen. Others, knowing she was fifty-nine, an age bordering on decrepitude, thought perhaps she was more like Cleopatra, no classic beauty but redolent of charm and seduction. After all, there were many such women at the courts of Europe who were still desirable despite having left the freshness of youth far behind. Yet others, who heard she was neither beautiful nor fascinating, believed her influence was the result of witchcraft. She was in league with the devil, they said, to ruin God’s church. She must be inherently evil, a very monster of iniquity trafficking with Satan himself.
When they saw Olimpia, all three groups of pilgrims must have been grievously disappointed. For what they saw was a short, heavy woman in late middle age whose face once had been handsome but now sported a double chin and sagging jowls, a graying bourgeois matron in plain black widow’s weeds. She was neither radiantly beautiful, nor scintillatingly seductive, nor manifestly malevolent.
This mistress of the Vatican was a woman no one would ever look at twice, had they not known who she was. Here was a woman who could pass unnoticed in a crowd of colorful Italian nobles, bold prostitutes, pompous clerics, prosperous merchants, and ragged beggars. Of all the miraculous wonders the pilgrims saw in Rome that jubilee year of 1650, Olimpia Maidalchini was the most amazing.
Those curious pilgrims who were not worthy of being invited to her festivities at the Piazza Navona palace camped outside, much as modern-day fans might do outside a hotel where their favorite movie star is staying. They studied the countless windows across the broad façade, hoping for a glimpse of her. Whenever the high doors of her courtyard swung open and a carriage clattered out, Olimpia fans thronged it. We can hear them crying, “There she is!” as they rushed her carriage. Had it been the fashion, they surely would have thrust autograph books into her carriage windows.
Pilgrims stationed in front of Olimpia’s house were often treated to the sight of the pope coming by to have lunch with her. But the pope was, after all, just another old man with a beard and funny hat. Popes were pretty much interchangeable—paper-doll figures who all wore the same paper-doll clothes. Olimpia, by virtue of her unique position, truly fascinated them. In 1650 she was a kind of baroque rock star, ruling over the most important event in the world, in the most important city in the world, as if she were a queen.
As the year went by, the pope became uncomfortably aware of Olimpia’s popularity with the pilgrims. As Saint Peter’s successor and the Vicar of Christ, he should have been the center of attention during the jubilee year, and Olimpia was stealing his thunder. One day Innocent’s secretary showed him a letter from a Neapolitan who wrote that most of the pilgrims who left Naples for Rome had done so not for the indulgence of sins or to see the pope but out of curiosity to see his sister-in-law. The Olimpia fans were almost all women, fascinated that another woman had climbed so high against all social restrictions and church regulations.
One day when the pope walked to the loggia of Saint Peter’s to bless the crowds gathered below, a cardinal wondered aloud that there were so many women; usually women were left at home on long, dangerous journeys. The pope replied bitterly that since the pilgrims came to see Olimpia, there were naturally more women among them than men, as curiosity was a strictly female trait.
Some devout pilgrims were confused to see tarted-up prostitutes rolling through the streets of Rome with the pope’s family coat of arms on the doors. True, the emblem lacked the triple tiara and crossed keys of Saint Peter, which Innocent had taken as his papal coat of arms. But it still had the Pamphili dove with the olive sprig in its mouth. What were prostitutes doing with that crest? When it was explained that the pope’s sister-in-law was the official lobbyist of that particular profession, some visitors became angry. What kind of behavior was that? How could the pope allow such a thing? These opinions filtered up to the pope.
As Innocent became more and more uneasy with Olimpia’s image in the Holy Year, he was struck by a bitter blow. On April 25 his sister Prudenzia died suddenly in her Convent of Saint Marta. According to Gigli, “The pope in the first years of his reign went sometimes to visit her and his sister Agatha in the Tor di’ Specchi. But after these nuns favored and welcomed the princess of Rossano who married Don Camillo against the will of Donna Olimpia, the pope stopped going to see them, and the one parted and the other remained with rancor.”11 Because of Olimpia, Innocent had not spoken to his sister in three years, and now she was dead.
One morning, as the devout flocked to the Church of Saint John Lateran, they saw that the wall inscription INNOCENT X, PONTIFEX MAXIMUS had been partially covered with a banner that some enterprising soul had hung in the night. “Olimpia I, Pontifex Maximus,” it said.12 Others started sprouting overnight in various churches, including, “Olimpia, the first female pope.”13
Innocent’s small, suspicious eyes alighted on her, and he decided some changes were in order. Unbeknownst to Olimpia, on June 20, 1650, he made a new will, in which he revoked the total freedom to dispose of all her possessions that he had given her in his will of 1644. The new will specified that everything she had, and everything she would yet acquire, would be left to Camillo.