Mistress of the Vatican (65 page)

There was no rest for Olimpiuccia, a bride at twelve and mother at thirteen. With her grandmother exiled from Rome, the girl felt terribly alone. Her husband and in-laws used her as a brood mare, and neither could she find comfort with girlfriends. According to the French ambassador, “The noblewomen of Rome concluded that the princess wasn’t very smart, basing this judgment on the aversion she had to sleeping with her husband.”
⁹

Her letters make it clear that Olimpiuccia lacked her grandmother’s intelligence. Whereas Olimpia expressed herself well with a clear and lovely handwriting, Olimpiuccia would scrawl ungrammatical missives for the rest of her life. Despite all the tutors Olimpia had brought in for her granddaughter, Olimpiuccia remained barely literate.

January 31, 1656. Signora Grandmother, my most illustrious heart, don’t forget me. Most illustrious, consider that I am alone also I don’t have anyone that does anything for me my mother

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has other daughters to think about if Your Excellency doesn’t think about me I don’t have anyone to think about me. My Signora Grandmother, I have been pregnant since July.

This pregnancy, evidently, resulted in a miscarriage or stillbirth. Nothing more was ever heard of it.

“Don’t forget me,” Olimpiuccia repeated, “and I humbly kiss you.”
¹⁰

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26

The Scourge of God

q

Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, so do our minutes hasten to their end.

—William Shakespeare

hile Queen Christina delighted Rome with her scandal, and the trial against Olimpia ground forward, Olimpia flitted among her many castles and palaces. She spent much of her time in her Nini town house in Viterbo. Perhaps she enjoyed reliving those few happy years with the cheerful young man she had married at seventeen. Then life had been a banquet of mouthwatering possibilities. Now, after all those possibilities had become reality, the taste had become oddly bitter.

In Rome, Alexander VII was having his own change of heart. After a year of fighting against nepotistic traditions, the pope’s resolve began to crack under the pressure. In April 1656, Alexander asked his cardinals whether he should invite his relatives to Rome and give them church and governmental positions or if, given the cost, he should break the tradition. The cardinals almost unanimously agreed that it was unseemly for him to keep his family in poverty in Siena. The Jesuit Father Oliva, one of the most respected churchmen of his time and the pope’s private confessor, solemnly stated, “The Pope

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would have committed a sin if he had not called to him his nephews.”
¹

The pope sent word to his brother Mario and two nephews to join him. Mario, who had worked in an administrative post in Tuscany, was made governor of Rome, governor of Castel Sant’Angelo, and general of the holy Church. Gregorio Leti scoffed, “Was it not a fine sight to see Don Mario, who had never worn a sword in his life, declared Generalissimo of the Holy Church?”
²

In the same vein, Alexander’s nephew Flavio, a hard-drinking wom-anizer, took holy orders in preparation to become the cardinal nephew. The pope decided that his other nephew, Agostino, would be the secular member of the family and was appointed general of the guards. Al-exander took the precaution of moving the whole clan into the Vatican Palace so he could keep an eye on them.

Olimpia must have been relieved to hear that the incorruptible pope had caved in to the clamorous requests to bring his family to Rome. Perhaps he was not so incorruptible after all, and if that were the case, he would not be in such a hurry to point the finger at
her.

In May, word would have reached Olimpia that the first cases of bubonic plague had been confirmed in Naples. Plague had raged across Europe every generation or so since it first struck in the Black Death of 1348, when a merchant ship from the Orient docked in Venice and unloaded its cargo of destruction.

The first European exposure to the bacterium was so deadly that some people were reported to fall down dead in the street in the middle of a conversation before they felt any symptoms. An estimated 40 percent of Europe’s population died in the pandemic, and epidemics flared up every thirty years or so in different parts of the continent. While smallpox and measles offered lifelong immunity to survivors, those who outlived the plague were not so fortunate. Immunity lasted at least a year or two—the length of most epidemics—but decreased over time. When the next epidemic washed over a community decades later, those who had survived the plague could catch it again. No one was safe, and for this reason plague was more feared than war, famine, flood, or fire. Whenever the

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word
plague
was mentioned, people would cross themselves and say, “God deliver us from it.”

Fortunately, Italy had by far the most modern health facilities in Europe. The traveling Englishman John Evelyn was greatly impressed when he toured Rome’s Christ Hospital in 1645; London had nothing like it. “The Infirmitory where the sick lay was paved with various colour’d marbles, and the walls hung with noble pieces,” he gushed. “The beds are very faire. . . . The organs are very fine, and frequently play’d on to recreate the people in paine. . . . Under the portico the sick may walk out and take the ayre. . . . At the end of the long corri-dore is an apothecary’s shop, fair and very well stor’d. . . . Indeed ’tis one of the most pious and worthy foundations I ever saw.”
³

Though Italy boasted the most educated doctors and cleanest hospitals, it was difficult for physicians to cure illnesses when they had no idea what caused them. Plague was thought to be induced by “miasmas,” or poisonous air. The atoms of miasma were believed to be stickier than normal atoms and would cling to clothing, furnishings, skin, and hair. When a person or animal inhaled the miasmas or absorbed them through the pores of the skin, the venomous atoms would poison the body, causing illness and, in at least half the cases, death. Doctors noted that the epidemic festered in dirty places, and assumed that filth exuded the corrupt, plague-inducing miasmas.

To combat plague, city officials cleaned up the sources of corrupt air—plugged sewers, overflowing outhouses, and dirty straw in homes and stables. Filthy areas were aired out, swept, washed with soap and water, doused with vinegar, smoked with sulfur, and covered with lime. Dirty walls were whitewashed. Grungy mattresses were burned, and when the poor objected to losing their mattresses and started to hide them from inspectors, the government bought them new ones. Such measures promoting basic cleanliness often helped keep down incidents of plague, thereby confirming the doctors’ theory of miasmas.

In the 1630 plague epidemic of northern Italy, French physicians invented an anti-miasma suit for doctors to treat victims without fear of infection. A certain Dr. Pona of Verona agreed to try out the suit, which he described as “a long robe of thin, waxed cloth. The robe had to be

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hooded and the doctors had to visit the patients with the head covered and wearing spectacles.”
⁴
The beaklike nose of the sinister costume was filled with perfumes, herbs, and vinegar to filter the miasmas out of the air the doctor breathed. Gloves protected the hands. Oddly, the costumes worked. Doctors who wore it rarely caught the plague even though they worked amongst the most virulent contagion, once again confirming the miasma theory.

But the plague doctor’s costume was unbearably hot most of the year and made it awkward to examine patients. Some physicians refused to wear it. When the Neapolitan plague hit Genoa in 1656, Father Antero Maria da San Bonaventure complained, “The waxed robe in a pesthouse is good only to protect one from the fleas which cannot nest in it.”
⁵

And that, of course, was the real cause of the plague, though no one knew it. The fleas. A part of everyday life in the seventeenth century, fleas carried the plague bacillus we call
Yersinia pestis
. The bacillus, lodged in the flea’s stomach, prevented feeding, and the infected flea threw up its lunch—including the
Yersinia pestis
—into the wound it had made on its human host. Once in the wound, the bacillus raced to the nearest lymph nodes and spread like wildfire. A single flea bite could bring death.

Fleas nested in dirty mattresses, piles of refuse, filthy barns, and unwashed bodies. By cleaning up the filth, people were also getting rid of plague-infected fleas. One scientist, the German Jesuit priest Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680), almost hit upon the real cause of plague but never managed to connect the dots. When examining the blood of plague victims under an early microscope, Kircher was shocked to find “little worms” wriggling around in it.
⁶
And he left it at that. Fleas were never even considered, and it wasn’t until 1894 that they were found to be the cause.

In the spring of 1656, plague spread quickly in Naples, which unlike the rest of Italy had no measures in place to tackle an epidemic. Given the squalid conditions of some 300,000 people living cheek by jowl, infection raced through the city. Soon 2,000 people a day were dying.

Hearing of the epidemic in Naples, on May 20 the Roman government closed its ports to all traffic from the stricken city. Only five of Rome’s twelve gates remained open, and here soldiers and doctors carefully examined visitors and animals entering the city. Those who were

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dripping with feverish sweat, staggering in pain, and covered with black boils were not allowed to enter. But in June a Neapolitan fisherman made it into Rome, where, feeling ill, he went to the Hospital of Saint John. Within hours black boils appeared, and within days he died. No one knew how many Romans the sick fisherman had infected with his miasmas. Plague had hit Rome.

The Roman authorities immediately sequestered large buildings located away from the bulk of the population in which to immure plague victims, keeping them separated from those who remained healthy. Called lazarettos after Lazarus, whom Jesus had raised from the dead, each hospital had hundreds of beds and a staff of doctors and nurses to attend to them. One lazaretto was for the ill and dying; another for those thought to be recovering; and a third for travelers waiting outside the gates of Rome for a health certificate before they were permitted to enter. Although the incubation period of bubonic plague is only three to six days, seventeenth-century doctors insisted on a quarantine of twenty-two days, just to be sure.

Two lazarettos were outside the city of Rome and another was on an island in the Tiber, a convent requisitioned from nuns. In the lazarettos, doctors fortified the sick with meat and eggs, along with special concoctions of hot chickpea juice. The most important step to save the sick was to pop the buboes—black abscesses the size of lemons or oranges that formed in the armpits and groins of the victims and contained foul-smelling seedlike structures. If the buboes could be popped and their poisonous contents extracted from the body, the victim stood a good chance of recuperating. If they did not reach a head, and the poison remained, the victim usually died.

Doctors believed that causing the patient to sweat would make the buboes form a head; patients were covered with hot blankets and seated next to raging fires. If the buboes remained unpoppable, doctors placed over them hot glass suction cups usually used for bleeding, or daubed them with roasted white onion. And if that didn’t work, a skilled physician could try to cut them out, though the bone-shattering pain of such an operation without anesthesia and the resulting infection often carried off an already weakened patient.

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Doctors, their assistants, and courageous volunteers were each given a certain number of houses to visit once a week to check on the health of their inhabitants. At the slightest sign of illness an individual would be taken on a cart to the lazaretto. Many people, believing they were merely getting a cold, refused to enter the contagious miasmas of the plague hospital where, if they didn’t have plague already, they would surely catch it. Their relatives tried to hide them in the basement behind wine barrels or in the thatched roof over the attic, but the doctors, aware of these tricks, usually plucked them out and carted them off. It was especially unfortunate when entire families were dragged away; sometimes upon their return they found their houses cleaned out by robbers.

Those houses from which a resident had been taken to a lazaretto were boarded up on the ground floor to prevent the other inhabitants— who were not yet showing symptoms but might also be infected—from wandering about town. Volunteers trolled the streets in donkey carts, dispensing food to baskets lowered from upstairs windows. Those who could pay for the food did so, while those who could not received it for free.