Mistress of the Vatican (22 page)

Gregorio Leti was, as usual, crueler in his explanation. He asserted, “There were several reasons why Cardinal Pamfili was not desired by many people as I can well say. His poor expression, his somber sad air, and his ugly badly formed face made people take him for a bizarre and uncomfortable soul. Many took the occasion to say that it would not be good to make a universal father, a pope, who had a face so horrible and deformed that it scared the children.”
¹²

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Gianbattista’s looks aside, the specter of Olimpia hovered uneasily over the conclave. Ambassador Giustiniani had heard the gossip that the cardinal and his sister-in-law were sleeping together. He wrote, “Others were aware of the fact that the pontificate would be subject to female influence due to the boundless affection the cardinal showed his sister-in-law, absolute arbiter of all the most serious affairs that concerned the interests of his family, not without the opinion that his deeply rooted affection involved more than platonic sympathies, which was a very important point, considering the vehement spirits of that lady.”
¹³

Cardinal Antonio complained of the “cupidity and haughtiness of his sister-in-law.”
¹⁴
He deplored the likelihood that despite Gian-battista’s advanced age, his robust constitution would keep him alive for years, with Olimpia at the helm of the Vatican.

Francesco Mantovani, the ambassador of Modena, summed up Gian-battista’s strong points: he was highly educated, hardworking, and just. But he added that Gianbattista would surely be handicapped in conclave by his “coarseness of spirit and the greed of the sister-in-law.”
¹⁵

What the diplomats and cardinals were complaining about was not so much Olimpia’s character but that such a character should be encased in a female body. If Olimpia were Gianbattista’s brother-in-law instead of his sister-in-law, her clever accumulation of power and wealth would have been lauded. As a man, Olimpia would have been a remarkable asset to any Holy Father. As a woman, she was his greatest vulnerability.

q

The casting of votes in conclave has a special name: a scrutiny. Twice a day, morning and afternoon, cardinals would anonymously write the name of a candidate on a folded piece of paper, disguising their handwriting, and toss it into a chalice in front of Michelangelo’s daunting
Last Judgment,
which was splayed across the wall behind the altar of the Sistine Chapel. Visions of tortured souls being dragged to hell served as a constant reminder of what was in store for cardinals who voted selfishly and not according to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

Cardinal Antonio was confident of getting Mazarin’s candidate, Cardinal Sacchetti, elected. But according to the old saying, “He who

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enters the conclave a pope, leaves it a cardinal.”
¹⁶
And indeed, the only thing predictable about a conclave was its unpredictability.

From the moment voting began on the morning of August 10 to the end of the month, the Barberinis did everything possible to elect Cardinal Sacchetti pope. But repeatedly the Spanish cardinal, Albornoz, rose and cried that His Most Catholic Majesty, King Philip IV, knowing Sacchetti’s ardent affinity for France, had excluded him. During the meetings held in between the scrutinies, and in late-night visits to cardinals’ cells, the Barberinis used every method they knew to get the cardinals to ignore the exclusion—cajoling, bribing, and threatening—but to no avail.

The Barberinis asked the confessor of the conclave, the Jesuit theologian Vantino Magnoni, if such an exclusion were legal. With furrowed brow, the priest nodded, stating that while an exclusion was an interference, the will of so powerful a monarch as the king of Spain must be heeded or else evil could befall Christ’s church.

Day after day of fruitless voting passed in the stifling heat. Hygiene deteriorated. Those locked inside the murky tomb were overwhelmed by the smells of body odor, urine, and excrement. Even worse, the mosquitoes began to bite. On August 27 two cardinals and five
conclavistas
declared themselves “incommoded,” subject to projectile vomiting, migraines, diarrhea, and high fever.

Terrified of contagion spreading like wildfire in the enclosed space, the cardinals shifted uncomfortably. Given the stalemate over Sacchetti, they would need to elect another candidate if they were to leave the conclave alive. Some cardinals began to speak of Cardinal Pamphili. Stern, dignified, learned, with decades of church legal and diplomatic experience, surely he would make an acceptable pope?

The mosquitoes were on Olimpia’s side. Receiving daily reports of the cardinals’ discussions and moods from her conclave spies, Olimpia knew that opinion was moving toward Gianbattista. One day, waiting in her Piazza Navona palace for news from the Vatican, she received a sign from the Holy Spirit itself.

Olimpia’s three-year-old granddaughter, Olimpiuccia, saw a white dove flying through the upstairs corridor. Delighted, the little girl chased it from room to room until it flew into the bedroom of Cardinal

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Pamphili and perched on the canopy over his four-poster. Hearing the child’s cries, Olimpia and some servants ran to find her. To their shock, they saw the white dove on Gianbattista’s bed, flapping its wings, cooing, and blinking at them. All of them knew the story of how a swarm of bees—the bee was the symbol of the Barberini family—had entered the conclave of 1623 and hovered over Cardinal Barberini’s cell just before he was elected. The dove, the symbol of the Pamphili family and of the Holy Spirit, which directs papal elections, had clearly been sent by God to indicate that Cardinal Gianbattista Pamphili would be the next pope.

Armed with such a sign from heaven, Olimpia played her hand. The only person still blocking Gianbattista’s election was his old enemy Cardinal Antonio Barberini. She was well aware that Antonio was terrified that the family of an unfriendly new pope would prosecute the family of the old pope for stealing Vatican funds, a tradition that had existed for centuries. He also feared losing his political power, being pushed back to the ranks of unimportant cardinals.

In a message smuggled in to Antonio, Olimpia reassured him on both points. If he swung his block of votes to Cardinal Pamphili, Olim-pia would have her twenty-two-year-old son, Camillo, marry Antonio’s niece, the fourteen-year-old Lucrezia Barberini. This marriage would ensure the alliance and mutual support of the two papal families and offered the added advantage that the Barberinis could keep their powerful positions. By marrying Lucrezia, Camillo would give up any chance of being cardinal nephew and ousting the brothers.

Seeing the impossibility of electing his friend Sacchetti, Antonio was tempted by Olimpia’s offer. He smuggled a message out to the French ambassador floating the idea. The marquis de Saint-Chamond replied with icy politeness, “I would like at the expense of my own blood to fa-vor the exaltation of Pamphili, as much as for the esteem I have for his person and the particular affection I have had for him for twenty years, as for the respect of Your Excellency and to conform to your wishes which will always be law to me,
but it is impossible to go against the intentions of the King.”
¹⁷
And so the stalemate continued.

On August 29, Cardinal Bentivoglio took to his bed with a raging

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fever, soaking his sheets in sweat. The other cardinals recalled that in the last conclave, that of 1623, eight cardinals had died of malaria along with forty
conclavistas
. On August 30, only twelve cardinals voted for Sacchetti, a far cry from the thirty-seven votes he needed for a two-thirds majority. In the afternoon scrutiny, Cardinal Francesco Cennini, an avowed enemy of the Barberinis and ardent supporter of Spain, got twenty-five votes from cardinals willing to elect a moron to escape the infected conclave with their lives. Antonio Barberini was stunned. Cen-nini would be far worse for the interests of France and the Barberini family than even Pamphili.

On September 2, Francesco Barberini became feverish but insisted on staying in conclave to vote. On September 4, Antonio wrote Saint-Chamond that Sacchetti’s election was no longer possible. The other French candidate, Cardinal Bentivoglio, was dying of malaria. The only cardinal who stood a chance was Gianbattista Pamphili. If Pam-phili promised to bestow significant favors on France—allowing Maza-rin to name his candidates for cardinals, for instance, granting rich benefices to Mazarin’s relatives, and other concessions, would Mazarin withdraw the exclusion?

Cardinal Alessandro Bichi, an avid friend of France, was furious at Antonio’s capitulation, crying that he would die in conclave rather than vote for an enemy of France. He pointed out that no matter what Cardinal Pamphili promised France, once he was elected pope no one could force him to keep his promises. Over the centuries, countless cardinals had made generous promises to get elected, even swearing oaths on the Bible; but as pope they simply changed their minds, declaring such oaths invalid because they had been made under duress.

Faced with Cardinal Antonio’s eager proposal and Bichi’s warning, Saint-Chamond, the eternal diplomat, hedged. He asked Antonio to wait for twenty days before switching his votes to Pamphili, during which time he would send a courier posthaste to Mazarin asking if he wished to change his instructions. Antonio waited uneasily. Then, on September 7, Cardinal Bentivoglio died wretchedly in his cell. On the morning of Sep-tember 10, Cardinal Gaspare Matthei was carried out of the conclave semiconscious, followed that evening by the vomiting Cardinal Giulio

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Gabrielli. The electors were dropping like flies, and those cardinals who remained healthy were gripped by malaria hysteria.

While Olimpia was Gianbattista’s most ardent supporter outside the conclave, his greatest champion inside was fifty-seven-year-old Giovanni Giacomo Panciroli. The son of a humble tailor, the intelligent Panciroli had worked his way up in the church and attached himself to Gianbat-tista’s coattails. He had assisted him in the Roman Rota and in his missions to Naples and Spain. He had become a cardinal in 1643 in Urban’s last creation and was named nuncio to Madrid. Hearing of the pope’s fatal illness, he rushed back to Rome, arriving in conclave three days after it began. Pro-Spanish and pro-Pamphili, Panciroli would do everything possible to get his friend elected pope.

According to Teodoro Amayden, Cardinal Panciroli saw Cardinal Antonio’s wavering. One day he approached him with flattering words. “See, Antonio, how fortune has carried you to high places,” Panciroli said. “But this is nothing compared to what you can do today. . . . On
you alone the Sacred College depends. You alone can create the pontiff.”
¹⁸

The idea appealed to Cardinal Antonio. For one moment, he would be more powerful than the pope himself; he would be the
pope maker,
the very instrument of God, crowning Saint Peter’s successor. He suddenly decided that it would be better not to wait for Mazarin’s decision. It was, after all, easier to apologize later than to ask permission and then act expressly against orders. If the decision was positive, all would be well. If it were negative, he had arranged to switch sides to Spain, and the Spanish ambassador promised to provide him with revenue equal to that which had been lost from France.

On the morning of September 14, Cardinal Antonio met with the cardinals of the Spanish faction and agreed to switch his block of votes to support their candidate, Gianbattista Pamphili. That evening, some fifty cardinals crammed into Gianbattista’s cell to congratulate him, though many were forced to yell their good wishes from the corridor. As soon as they departed, their
conclavistas
squeezed inside to render their respects. “There was such a multitude of people in that cell,” wrote an anonymous
conclavista,
“that they stole all his silverware.”
¹⁹

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That night, Cardinal Antonio and the pro-Spanish cardinals set their spies to watch the cells of the pro-French cardinals to see if they were plotting a coup. Worried about a last-minute surprise, Cardinal Anto-nio called for the morning scrutiny to be held much earlier than usual, at dawn.

At 3 a.m. Gianbattista sent a messenger from the conclave to bang on the door of Olimpia’s palazzo and give her the news of his imminent election. Standing in their nightclothes holding candles, she and Ca-millo received the message “with great pleasure,” according to the 1650 autobiography of Cardinal Domenico Cecchini.
²⁰
Gregorio Leti described “the transports of joy of Donna Olimpia. She was so beside herself with happiness that she seemed to be only 25 years old, although she was closer to 50.”
²¹
(She was actually fifty-three.)