THE OLDEST ROYAL COURT IN Europe, the Vatican is a place of ancient secrets. The voluminous archives, though stuffed to the rafters with theological decrees, official correspondence, and accounting transactions, do not reveal much of the private lives of long-ago popes. Many records indicate only the most tantalizing fragments of murder, megalomania, and—heaven forbid—anything to do with women. Those stories that scandalized for a time were quickly suppressed or denied and soon forgotten. To paraphrase a modern saying, what happens in the Vatican stays in the Vatican.
One of the most interesting forgotten stories is that of Donna Olimpia Maidalchini (“My-dal-keeny”) Pamphili—donna being the Italian title for “lady.” The widowed sister-in-law of the indecisive Pope Innocent X (reigned 1644–1655), Olimpia was presumed to be the pope’s mistress. Regardless of whether she was mistress of the pope, she certainly was mistress of the Vatican, appointing cardinals, negotiating with foreign powers, and raking in immense sums from the papal treasury. In a church that firmly excludes women from officiating as priests and even from marrying priests, Olimpia’s story is clearly a discomfiting one for the Vatican.
The day that Cardinal Gianbattista Pamphili was elected pontiff, Cardinal Alessandro Bichi angrily declared, “We have just elected a female pope.”1 Mischievous Romans hung banners in churches calling her “Pope Olimpia I.”
Olimpia’s contemporary, Cardinal Sforza Pallavicino, bewailed the “monstrous power of a woman in the Vatican.”2 He fumed, “The court’s predictions that if Cardinal Pamphili became pope, Olimpia would rule, came true. It was nauseating in a nation that excludes women from all participation, and it is much more abominable because she was not able to keep a lid on two female vices—those being ambition and greed. She fed her ambition by having her antechamber full of prelates and the 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. One of these was not even ashamed to have her portrait hanging in his public rooms, as if she were a queen.”3
Another contemporary chronicler huffed, “There has never before been heard of nor seen that the popes allowed themselves to be so absolutely governed by a woman. There was no more talk of the pope; all the discourse was of Donna Olimpia, many taking occasion to say, That it were fit likewise to introduce the women to the administration of the Sacrament, since that Donna Olimpia was pope.”4
If someone broached a subject that the pope had not already discussed with his sister-in-law, he would ask, “What will Donna Olimpia say?”5
Savvy diplomats were prepared to flatter and bribe her to obtain the pope’s favor. “If you cannot make a breach in the mind of the pope through our authority,” said one powerful prince to his envoy, “try to gain it through the authority of Donna Olimpia with our money.”6
Envied, admired, and despised, Olimpia was a baroque rock star, belting out her song loudly on a stage of epic exaggeration. Seventeenth-century Rome boasted the world’s most glorious art and glittering pageants but also suffered terrors of apocalyptic proportions. Buildings spontaneously collapsed. Floods rolled through the streets, sweeping away horses and carriages. Swarms of locusts blocked out the sun and devoured the crops, bringing grinding starvation in their wake. Citizens burst out in black boils as plague culled its grisly harvest. Demons invaded the faithful, who writhed and hissed. Healed by saints’ bones, the sick tossed away their crutches and danced in the churches.
Olimpia lived in an age of corruption and flagrant nepotism. Hers was a kleptocratic society, where everyone from the lowliest servant up to the pope’s august relatives unblushingly stole as much as they possibly could. It was a time when dead pontiffs were left naked on the Vatican floor because their servants had pilfered the bed and swiped the clothes off the corpse. In this society theft was accepted, even admired, as long as the thieves were men.
Though Olimpia’s tale was acted out larger than life on the international stage, there was an intimate, personal story behind it. Olimpia never recovered psychologically from her father’s efforts to force her into a convent as a child. For the rest of her life she remained terrified of being locked up by men. An Italian Scarlett O’Hara, Olimpia vowed she would never be poor and powerless again. To avoid being crushed by men, she would have to acquire enough wealth and power to crush them, if need be. But how much was enough? In her efforts to find safety in a man’s world, Olimpia made powerful enemies, which spurred her on to acquire even more to protect herself.
Unlike the story of the mythical ninth-century Pope Joan, patched together from rumor and fantasy centuries after she supposedly lived, that of Pope Olimpia has been attested to by numerous contemporary sources. Most touching are the personal letters of the Pamphili family kept in the Doria Pamphilj Archives in Rome, although there are, unfortunately, only a handful from Olimpia and the pope. Olimpia’s legal papers—her wills and dowry documents—can be found in the Doria Pamphilj Archives as well as in the Archivio Storico di Roma.
Diplomatic dispatches reveal detailed information about Olimpia. A labyrinth of intrigue and corruption, Rome was the most difficult embassy posting, to which nations sent their ablest diplomats. Nothing was out of bounds in their weekly reports—even the pope’s bowel movements were analyzed. As the pope’s most influential advisor, Olimpia was carefully studied by the envoys of Catholic nations. Unfortunately, Protestant nations—England, Sweden, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and parts of Germany—had no ambassadors in Rome to titillate us with scandalous observations.
The most reliable source for Olimpia’s story is Giacinto Gigli (1594–1671), who kept a diary from the age of fourteen until blindness in old age forced him to give it up. In recording the weather, politics, harvests, processions, murders, fires, and saintly miracles, he is a font of firsthand information for anyone wanting to understand life in seventeenth-century Rome. Gigli, who served on Rome’s city council several times, and whose brother-in-law worked in the most important Vatican office, was well positioned to learn about the politics and scandal of the pope and his sister-in-law.
Another excellent source is Sforza Pallavicino (1607–1667), who became cardinal in 1658. A friend of Innocent’s secretary of state, Cardinal Fabio Chigi, Pallavicino in 1665 wrote Chigi’s biography, chock-full of Olimpia stories, which he either witnessed firsthand or heard about from Chigi, who had witnessed them.
The early seventeenth century saw the advent of the first newspapers. Avvisi—which meant “notices”—were handwritten news sheets of two to eight pages, consisting of small paragraphs in chronological order with no headlines. An avvisi writer sold subscriptions to foreign courts, banking houses, and wealthy individuals. From 1640 to 1650 the Vatican lawyer Teodoro Amayden (1586–1656) penned weekly avvisi to the court of Spain and Spanish embassies throughout Europe. A neighbor of Olimpia’s who knew her and the pope well, Amayden included in his newsletters numerous stories about the pope’s controversial sister-in-law.
Gregorio Leti (1630–1701), who wrote the first biography of Olimpia just a few years after her death, lived in Rome during her reign and enjoyed high-level Vatican connections. Normally, a contemporary biography like Leti’s would be the best possible source, but unfortunately, Leti was biased against the Catholic Church in general and against Olimpia in particular. A convert to that rabidly anti-Catholic branch of Protestantism, Calvinism, Leti is accused by some Catholic scholars of making up his stories out of whole cloth. Yet most of his anecdotes are confirmed by the devout Catholic chroniclers of the time—Amayden, Gigli, Pallavicino, and the foreign ambassadors. In quoting Leti, however, we must bear in mind that he wrote for comic effect and exaggerated his stories to sell books.
Seventeenth-century Italians were extremely creative with their spelling of names, sometimes spelling the same name several different ways in the same letter. Pamphili is spelled Panfili, Panfilj, Pamphilj, and Pamphilio. Maidalchini is spelled Maldachino and Maidalchino. Cardinal Panciroli was also known as Cardinal Panzirolo. The reader is therefore warned of shifting Italian names in contemporary sources and is requested not to blame the copy editor or author.
Most sources disliked Olimpia’s interference in Vatican affairs—she was far smarter than almost all the men in her environment, and it hurt. But some fair-minded ambassadors praised her for her intelligence, dignity, and financial acumen. The French ambassador Bali de Valençais admired Olimpia, informing Louis XIV that she was, without doubt, a “great lady.”7 Even Cardinal Pallavicino, who detested Olimpia, gave her grudging approval for her “intellect of great worth in economic government” and her “capacity for the highest affairs.”8
While most men loathed her, and a few praised her, we don’t have a single line from another woman discussing Olimpia. We do, however, have reports of Olimpia fan clubs—women who camped outside her palace for days just to get a glimpse of her, women who cheered for her. They were fascinated that a female from a modest background had, in the face of all social, legal, and church restrictions, acquired wealth and power and told the pope and cardinals what to do.
The exact nature of the relationship between Pope Innocent and his sister-in-law was the subject of intense speculation at home and abroad. Even while his brother, Olimpia’s husband, was alive, the two were known to be unusually close. Most people believed that a physical relationship had stopped by the time Gianbattista Pamphili became pope, that the dignity of their situation and their advanced age—he was seventy when elected, and Olimpia fifty-three—would have precluded it.
Yet people couldn’t help but notice that many days, as the sun slipped below the Seven Hills of Rome, Olimpia slipped into the papal palace. According to one source, “Donna Olimpia goes to the pope always through the garden, so that no one, not even the butler, knows when she comes and goes.”9 Sometimes she sat alone with the pope behind locked doors for as long as six hours. This nocturnal secrecy led to speculations of steamy senior sex in the Vatican.
But even if the rumors were true, it would not have been the sex that upset so many cardinals and diplomats, but the annoying fact that a woman wielded the power. Moreover, Olimpia was not running a secular monarchy like France or England; she was running the Papal States and the Catholic Church, making her position all the more shocking. The all-male bark of Saint Peter, guided so carefully through the shoals of fortune for countless centuries, now had a woman at the helm.
By the end of the seventeenth century, with new popes and new hopes, the scandal of Olimpia, which had gripped all Europe, faded and disappeared. Long forgotten now is her bittersweet tale of power, greed, and the glory of God.