On Pope Clement’s death the Sacred College awarded the Papacy to Cardinal Alessandro de’ Medici. The cardinal, who took the name of Leo XI, had been largely responsible for persuading Clement to lift the sentence of excommunication on Henry IV and had afterward served for two years as papal nuncio in France. Deeply devout and highly intelligent, he would probably have made an excellent pope; but he was already sixty-nine years old and reigned only twenty-six days before succumbing to a sudden chill. King Henry, who had spent 300,000 scudi in securing his election, cannot have been pleased. Leo was succeeded by a Sienese, Cardinal Camillo Borghese, who at only fifty-two could confidently expect a reasonably long pontificate. He was to reign for the next sixteen years.
Pope Paul V, as he chose to be called, was every bit as devout as his predecessor but not nearly as intelligent. He failed absolutely to understand that the Papacy was now one of a number of European powers; it was no longer possible to uphold the ideal of absolute papal supremacy as it had existed in the Middle Ages. Paul attempted to do so and immediately met his match—in the Republic of Venice. The Venetians would not have dreamed of questioning their duty of doctrinal obedience; their political independence, on the other hand, they held to be sacrosanct. Besides, the very existence of their city depended on international commerce; how could they be expected to discriminate against heretics, any more than in the past they had discriminated against the Infidel?
Already under Clement VIII, they had scored a few victories. In the face of considerable papal pressure, they had maintained their rights over the little town of Ceneda; then, in 1596, Venetian printers and booksellers had somehow managed to obtain a special concordat allowing them to handle—under certain conditions—works included on the Index. The republic had also staunchly defended the religious freedom of foreign diplomats. When reproached in 1604 for allowing Sir Henry Wotton to import Protestant prayer books and to hold Anglican services in his private chapel, Venice had sent Rome a firm reply: “The republic can in no wise search the baggage of the English Ambassador, of whom it is known that he is living a quiet and blameless life, causing no scandal whatever.” The pope did not insist, and Sir Henry continued to perform his devotions undisturbed throughout the fourteen years of his Venetian embassy.
Paul V, on the other hand, was made of sterner stuff. Papal legates now sought ever more frequent audiences with the doge, to remonstrate and protest. Why had the Senate recently prohibited the erection of any more religious buildings in the city without special license? Venice argued in vain that it was becoming impossible to maintain even the existing churches and monasteries, which already occupied half the area of the city, but such arguments were simply not accepted, and the papal communications began to acquire a new, menacing edge. The two parties were thus, from the very beginning of Paul’s reign, set on a collision course. Venice did her best to maintain friendly relations, even going so far as to enroll the Borghese family among the ranks of her nobility, but the polite veil could not be maintained for long.
The storm broke in the late summer of 1605, when two professed clerics, one of whom was subsequently found never to have taken holy orders, were denounced to the Venetian authorities, the first for persistent attempts on the honor of his niece, the second for “murders, frauds, rapes and every kind of violence against his dependants.” In each case the Council of Ten ordered an immediate inquiry and arrogated to itself the responsibility for the trial and punishment of the two offenders. Instantly the pope went on the attack. The two prisoners, he objected, were members of the clergy and consequently outside the republic’s jurisdiction. They must be handed over at once to the ecclesiastical authorities.
All through the autumn the argument went on; then, in December, the pope sent two briefs to the doge. One dealt with the question of Church property, the other with the two clerics. If Venice did not forthwith annul her decrees in the first instance and surrender her two prisoners in the second, the ban of the Church would be laid upon her. Venice, it need hardly be said, had no intention of doing either. But the time for diplomacy was past. What the republic now needed, to present its case before the world, was an expert on canon law who was also a theologian, a dialectician, a political philosopher, and a polemicist, who could argue with clarity and logic. The Senate did not hesitate. It sent for Paolo Sarpi.
Sarpi was fifty-three and had been a Servite friar since the age of fourteen. He was renowned for his learning, which extended far beyond the field of the spirit; indeed, the whole cast of his mind seems to have been scientific rather than philosophical. As an anatomist, he has been credited with the discovery of the circulation of the blood, a quarter of a century or more before Harvey; as an optician, he earned the gratitude of Galileo himself. Now, as official counselor to the Senate, he drafted the republic’s reply. “Princes,” it ran, “by divine law which no human power can abrogate, have authority to legislate on matters temporal within their jurisdictions; there is no occasion for the admonitions of Your Holiness, for the matters under discussion are not spiritual but temporal.”
The pope had no patience with such arguments, which, he claimed, “reeked of heresy.” On April 16, 1606, he announced at a consistory that unless Venice made full submission within twenty-four days, the sentence of excommunication and interdict would come into force. Venice, however, was not prepared to wait. On May 6 Doge Leonardo Donà set his seal on an edict addressed to all patriarchs, archbishops, bishops, vicars, abbots, and priors throughout the territory of the republic. In it he made a solemn protest before Almighty God that he had striven by every means possible to bring the pope to an understanding of the republic’s legitimate rights. Since, however, His Holiness had closed his ears and had instead issued a public monitory “against all reason and against the teachings of the Holy Scriptures, the Fathers of the Church, and the Sacred Canons,” that monitory was formally declared to be worthless. The clergy were therefore adjured to continue as before with the care of the souls of the faithful and the celebration of the Mass. The protest ended with the prayer that God would lead the pope to the knowledge of the vanity of his action, the wrong he had done to the republic, and the justice of the Venetian cause.
Next, the doge, on Sarpi’s advice, banished all Jesuits—who had taken a strongly papalist line from the outset—from the territory of the republic and dismissed the papal nuncio with the words
Monsignor! You must know that we are, every one of us, resolute and ardent to the last degree, not merely the Government but the whole nobility and people of our State. We ignore your excommunication: it is nothing to us. Think now where this resolution would lead, if our example were to be followed by others.
For Pope Paul and his Curia, there was now a terrible truth to be faced: the interdict had failed. The most dreaded weapon in the papal armory—the same weapon the very threat of which, in the Middle Ages, had been enough to bring kings and emperors to their knees—had lost its power. Worse, its failure had been revealed to the world. The effect on papal prestige, already incalculable, was growing with every day that this farcical sentence continued in operation. It must be lifted, and quickly. To do so would not be easy, but somehow a formula would have to be found.
For some time Paul was unable even to contemplate so crushing a blow to his pride, but at last even he was obliged to agree. The French offer of mediation was accepted, and negotiations began. Venice, advised as always by Sarpi, drove a hard bargain. She refused outright to petition for a removal of the ban; any such request must come from the King of France. As for the two prisoners, once the ban was lifted she would consign them to the French ambassador as a token of her regard for the king, but without prejudice to her right to judge and punish them. On no account would she readmit the Jesuits (who were to remain banned for the next half century). Finally, thanks largely to the mediation of the irresistibly named French Cardinal François de Joyeuse, a carefully drafted decree was prepared stating that in view of the pope’s change of heart and the lifting of the sentence, Venice would rescind her solemn protest; it contained, however, no word to suggest that she had at any time been in the wrong or regretted her actions.
And so, in April 1607, after almost exactly a year, the interdict was lifted. It was the last in the history of the Church. No pope would ever dare risk another, and papal authority over Catholic Europe was never quite the same again. But the end of the interdict did not mean reconciliation in any but the most formal sense. Paul V had been publicly humiliated; there were, moreover, several issues which remained unsettled and which he had no intention of allowing to be forgotten. Foremost in his mind was a determination to be revenged on the clergy who had defied his edict—and above all on the architect of his defeat, Paolo Sarpi.
Sarpi did not immediately give up his office on the resumption of relations with Rome. There was still work for him to do, and he continued to make the daily journey on foot from the Servite monastery to the Doge’s Palace, waving aside all suggestions that his life might be in danger. Returning to the monastery in the late afternoon of October 25, 1607, he was descending the steps of the Santa Fosca Bridge when he was set upon by assassins, who stabbed him three times before making their escape, leaving the knife deeply embedded in his cheekbone. Miraculously, he recovered; later, on being shown the weapon, he tested its point and was able to pun that he recognized the “style” of the Roman Curia. There is no proof that he was right; but the fact that the would-be assassins—who had by this time been identified—fled at once to Rome, where they flaunted themselves, fully armed, in the streets and where no charges were ever preferred against them, suggests that the attack, if it was not actually instigated by the papal authorities, at least had not incurred their disapproval.
There were to be two more attempts on Sarpi’s life, one from within his own cloister. These, too, he survived, finally dying in his bed on January 15, 1623. But papal rancor followed him beyond the grave. When the Senate proposed a monument in his honor, the nuncio raised violent objection, threatening that if anything of the sort occurred the Holy Office would declare him an impenitent heretic. This time Venice gave in; and it was only in 1892 that the present distinctly undersized bronze statue was erected in the middle of the Campo di Santa Fosca, a few yards from the spot where he so narrowly escaped martyrdom.
PAUL V NEVER recovered from the Venice affair, nor from the botched attempts on the life of Paolo Sarpi. In England, memories of the Gunpowder Plot,1 which took place only five months before the interdict was pronounced, were reawakened; in France, blame for the assassination of Henry IV in 1610 was laid at the papal door; all over Europe, the pope’s ultimate weakness had been revealed. He continued, however, to act according to his convictions, forever tightening Church discipline and otherwise pursuing the narrow—and by now distinctly old-fashioned—conservatism that seemed to belong more to the sixteenth century than to the seventeenth. He it was, for example, who in 1616 first took issue with Galileo for his championship of the Copernican theory that the sun, rather than the earth, was the center of the universe.
For the rest, Paul continued the Counter-Reformation tradition of the renovation of Rome—above all of St. Peter’s itself. When the work on the new basilica had begun in 1506, Bramante’s original plan had been that of a Greek cross; later, Raphael had favored that of a Latin, with an extended nave to the west,2 but Michelangelo had reverted to the original Greek idea. It was Paul V and his architect Carlo Maderno, who, for liturgical reasons and also to cover the space occupied by the Constantinian basilica, finally decided on the Latin alternative, adding the extension to the nave and the western façade. The pope also gave every encouragement to his nephew Cardinal Scipione Caffarelli, who had in gratitude changed his name to Borghese, in his building of the magnificent Villa Borghese, the first of the great Roman park villas, surely inspired by that of the Emperor Hadrian at Tivoli.
Cardinal Scipione was, in a way, a throwback to Renaissance times. By the seventeenth century the concept of the “cardinal nephew” had long since ceased to arouse comment; for a pope to appoint such a figure from his immediate family as his chief confidential adviser was by now normal practice. Where Scipione differed from the norm was in the immense wealth which he acquired through a veritable flood of benefices and in the conspicuousness of his spending. Few popes—and not a single cardinal—had ever before shown themselves such lavish patrons of the arts.3 But he was equally generous in his restoration of the many churches for which as cardinal he was responsible, in particular that of San Sebastiano fuori le Mura, one of the seven pilgrimage basilicas, on which he worked for seven years.
While apparently giving them his wholehearted approval, Pope Paul shared none of his nephew’s tastes. His own lifestyle, while in no way exaggeratedly austere, was simple and unassuming. He possessed, however, like nearly all his Counter-Reformation predecessors, that same unshakable self-confidence which has done so much to hold the Catholic Church together through the greatest crises in its history. With virtually all Europe except Italy and the Iberian Peninsula in continuing religious turmoil and with the ultimate outcome of the long confessional struggle still undecided, firm leadership from Rome had been essential; fortunately, even the faults of the Counter-Reformation—the Inquisition, the Index, the overinsistence on papal supremacy, the enthusiasm of the Jesuits and one or two other recently founded religious orders—were all manifestations of confidence rather than of cowardice. When, in November 1620, just over a century after Martin Luther had posted his ninety-five theses on the church door at Wittenberg, Paul V suffered a sudden stroke during the victory celebrations after the Battle of the White Mountain, it must have seemed to many that the worst was over and that the Church had survived.
The Battle of the White Mountain is today largely forgotten among the English-speaking peoples, but it had a huge impact in the history of Central Europe. It was a triumph for the Catholic cause and in particular for the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II, who had succeeded to the imperial throne the previous year. Educated and heavily influenced by the Jesuits, Ferdinand was a staunch Catholic, determined to impose religious conformity across his empire. This had not improved his popularity in Bohemia, which had been fiercely Protestant since the days of Jan Hus, and when on May 23, 1618, two of his representatives were thrown out a window of Hradčany Castle in Prague—they fell a good fifty feet, but fortunately into a pile of horse manure—he found that he had a full-scale national revolt on his hands. The following year, he was officially deposed from the Bohemian throne and replaced by the Protestant Elector Palatine Frederick V, and the national revolt developed into what was to become the Thirty Years’ War, the bloodiest European cataclysm known until the twentieth century.
Ferdinand’s Catholic army, which included in its ranks the philosopher René Descartes, met Frederick’s Protestants under the White Mountain, a few miles west of Prague, on November 8, 1620. The early-morning attack took the defenders by surprise; they broke and fled. Of their army of about 15,000, more than a third were killed or captured. Among those who took flight was Frederick himself, the shortness of his reign earning him the title of the Winter King.4 He and his queen—Elizabeth, the daughter of King James I of England—were to live the rest of their lives in exile. As for his kingdom, Bohemia, it was delivered into Habsburg—and therefore Catholic—hands, in which it was to remain for nearly three hundred years.
POPE PAUL PARTIALLY recovered from his first stroke; a second, however, occurring some ten weeks later, finished him off. By the time of his death at the end of January 1621 he had contributed well over half a million florins to the emperor and the leader of the Catholic League, Maximilian I, Elector of Bavaria. His successor, Gregory XV, assisted by his cardinal nephew Ludovico Ludovisi, was to bring this figure up to very nearly two million. Such vast subsidies enabled the Catholics to follow up their success at the White Mountain and to drive back the Protestants on all fronts, to the point where Maximilian in gratitude presented the pope with the entire Palatine Library of recently captured Heidelberg—fifty wagonloads of priceless volumes—to be incorporated into that of the Vatican.
Gregory’s pontificate lasted a little over two years. The sequence of Catholic victories continued well into the twenty-one-year reign of his successor, Urban VIII, but the subsidies soon dried up. It was not that Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, a member of a rich merchant family long established in Florence, was any less committed to the Catholic cause, merely that the course of the hostilities took a different turn with the appearance on the scene of a new Protestant protagonist, King Gustav II Adolf, better known as Gustavus Adolphus, of Sweden. Just why Gustav decided to enter the war remains uncertain; he was presumably concerned at the growing power of the Holy Roman Empire and may well have cherished ambitions to increase his own economic and commercial influence around the Baltic. At all events he invaded the empire in 1630, and immediately the pendulum swung. He consistently drove back the Catholic forces until the Protestants regained much of the land they had lost since 1618.
The successes of Gustavus Adolphus, like those of the Catholics in the previous decade, would have been impossible without heavy financial backing, and this came from what might have been thought a most unlikely source: Cardinal Richelieu, since 1624 the chief minister of King Louis XIII of France. For some time Richelieu had been worried by the growing power of the Habsburgs, who held a number of territories along the northeastern border of France, including the Spanish Netherlands, and to keep this power in check—even though he himself was a member of the Sacred College—he had no hesitation in backing the Protestant cause. In return, therefore, for a Swedish promise to maintain an army in Germany to resist the Habsburgs—and for an additional undertaking that Sweden would not conclude a peace with the emperor without French approval—he was happy to pay King Gustav an annual subsidy of one million livres.
All would have been well for Richelieu had Gustav not been killed at the Battle of Lützen in November 1632. For two more years the Swedes, though deprived of their leader, continued to hold their own; but on September 6, 1634, an imperial army under the emperor’s son the Archduke Ferdinand—the future Ferdinand III—destroyed their army at Nördlingen in the Danube valley, leaving 17,000 dead and taking another 4,000 prisoner. After Nördlingen the whole complexion of the war changed again. The Swedes were relegated to a minor role, and Richelieu took over the leadership, allying France with Sweden and declaring war on Spain in May 1635. Henceforth the protagonists on both sides were Catholics, and a war which had been begun on purely religious issues became political—no longer a contest between Catholic and Protestant but now one between the Habsburg and Bourbon houses.
Pope Urban did his best to reverse this trend. His task, as he saw it, was to reconcile the three great Catholic powers—France, Spain, and the Habsburgs—to create a united front against Protestantism. On the other hand, having served as papal nuncio in France, he was a Francophile through and through, and he was deeply suspicious of Spanish ambitions in Italy. However hard he tried—and perhaps he never tried very hard—he never managed to conceal the direction in which his natural sympathies lay. When the Gonzaga line in Mantua failed in 1624, he unhesitatingly supported the French candidate for the succession. He doubtless deplored in his heart the Franco-Swedish alliance, but despite continued pressure from Philip IV of Spain he never took any action.
In fact, the situation was hopeless, and Urban knew it. Not surprisingly, he turned his attention to two areas in which he could make his presence felt: Church administration and the fine arts. He worked hard on a revision of the breviary, providing several new hymns of his own. He codified the proper procedures for beatification and canonization and sanctioned several new religious orders. Evangelistic work was another special interest: he founded the Collegio Urbano for the training of missionaries, a number of whom he sent off to the Far East, and established a polyglot printing press. Where the arts were concerned, his best-known contribution—perhaps the summation of all that is most vulgarly ostentatious in Baroque Rome—was the vast baldacchino that he commissioned from Gianlorenzo Bernini for St. Peter’s (which he consecrated in 1626), to mark the tomb of St. Peter and the high altar above it. It is wholly characteristic of the time—and of Urban himself—that the four barley-sugar columns should have enormous bees, emblems of the Barberini family, crawling up them, for not since the Renaissance had any pope so shamelessly promoted and enriched his own family. He made a brother and two nephews cardinals and presented another brother and his son with enormous benefices; altogether the Barberini family is said to have left the Papacy the poorer by some 105 million scudi. Conscience-stricken at the end of his life, he sought advice from canon lawyers and theologians on whether such expenditure had been sinful. There was still time for repentance; not, however, for compensation.
Urban has also been bitterly criticized for his treatment of his friend Galileo. Perhaps surprisingly, the popes of the Counter-Reformation had encouraged astronomy—Gregory XIII is said to have founded the Vatican Observatory—and Nicholas Copernicus had actually dedicated to Paul III his book maintaining that the earth revolved around the sun rather than vice versa. Although this idea was clearly incompatible with the story of creation as told in the Book of Genesis, it was some seventy years before the Church raised any objection, and when the heliocentric theory was finally condemned by Paul V in 1616, Galileo, who had been its most powerful champion, was given a personal admonition not to advocate or teach it, though he was still allowed to discuss it hypothetically. For the next few years he occupied himself principally with other matters and stayed well away from the controversy.
As Cardinal Barberini, Pope Urban had done everything he could to protect his friend. He had great personal admiration for him and had even written a Latin poem to celebrate his discovery of spots on the sun. When, in 1632, Galileo sought his personal permission to publish his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Urban willingly granted it, asking only that his own views on the matter be included in the book. It was now that Galileo made the greatest mistake of his life. The character in the Dialogue who defends the old Aristotelian earth-centered theory is named Simplicius and is often made to look a fool. To put the pope’s words in the mouth of Simplicius, as Galileo did, was understandable, even logical; but it was hardly diplomatic. Urban, who had an extremely well-developed sense of his own dignity, was furious; moreover, the whole tone of the book made it clear that it was a work of advocacy, which the Inquisition had expressly forbidden.
Galileo had unnecessarily antagonized his most powerful supporter; now he had to pay the price. In 1633 he stood trial in Rome. The result was a foregone conclusion. He was sentenced to perpetual imprisonment (later, because of his age and eminence, commuted to house arrest) and required formally to abjure the heliocentric theory. The Dialogue was banned, together with all his other works and any that he might write in the future. The pope even pursued him after his death. When the great man died, aged seventy-seven, on January 8, 1642, the Grand Duke of Tuscany proposed to bury him in the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence, next to his father and other members of his family, and to erect a marble mausoleum in his honor; but Urban and his nephew Cardinal Francesco Barberini objected, and the body was eventually laid to rest in a small room at the end of a corridor. There it was to remain for almost a century, until it was moved to the main body of the church and a worthier sepulcher.
POPE URBAN VIII died just two and a half years after Galileo, on July 29, 1644. At the end of his life, encouraged by his nephews, who sniffed the possibilities of further financial gain, he had allowed himself to be dragged into a minor war with one Odoardo Farnese, lord of Castro (a papal fief), on the grounds that Odoardo had defaulted on his debts. Odoardo fought back, having somehow found support in France and in an Italian league which included Venice, Tuscany, and Modena, and the papal army was completely crushed. For the Romans, remembering the vast sums that Urban and his family had already appropriated for themselves, this extremely expensive defeat proved the last straw. The news of the pope’s death provoked open jubilation in the streets.
His successor, the seventy-year-old Giambattista Pamfili, who took the name Innocent X, represented a violent reaction against everything Urban had stood for. He hated France, which he considered had shamelessly enriched itself at the Papacy’s expense, and favored Spain—the only nation, he claimed, on which the Holy See could safely rely. Indeed, he owed his election entirely to the Spanish veto of a rival candidate. (Cardinal Mazarin, who had succeeded Richelieu as Louis XIII’s chief minister in 1642, had tried to veto Innocent, but his letter had arrived too late.)5 One of the pope’s first acts after his enthronement was to set up a commission of inquiry to investigate the fortunes that the Barberini had amassed and to put their possessions under sequestration—an act which caused a degree of panic among the Barberini cardinals, one of whom took flight. The remainder, however, appealed to Mazarin, who managed to persuade Innocent to pursue the matter no further.
Although a model of propriety in comparison with his predecessor, when it came to nepotism Innocent was by no means guiltless. There may have been no cardinal nephew, but there were plenty of Pamfili purses to be filled, and the pope was happy to fill them. The most dangerously powerful of his beneficiaries was his sinister sister-in-law Donna Olimpia Maidalchini—a woman, in the words of a contemporary, “of nauseating greed”—who amassed a vast fortune and at the same time exerted the most extraordinary power over him. There was inevitably much speculation in Rome on the precise nature of their relationship; all that was known was that the pope consulted her on every issue and made no decisions without her approval.
The state of the papal exchequer made it impossible for Innocent to attempt a building program on the scale adopted by his predecessors. We owe him, nonetheless, the Piazza Navona with its glorious Bernini fountain and Francesco Borromini’s baroque transformation of the interior of St. John Lateran. Not altogether surprisingly, there also appeared a Villa Pamfili6—the work of Innocent’s nephew Camillo—on the Via Aurelia to the west of the city. He is best remembered, however, not by the architecture he commissioned but by his superb portrait by Diego Velázquez which now hangs in the Galleria Doria Pamphilj in Rome. (“All too true,” he is said to have commented on seeing it for the first time.)
When Innocent died on New Year’s Day 1655, the ensuing conclave took three months to elect his successor. The delay was due largely to the French, Cardinal Mazarin lodging strong objection to the most popular candidate, Cardinal Fabio Chigi. At last, however, he grudgingly withdrew his opposition, and Chigi was elected as Pope Alexander VII. But his difficulties with Mazarin were by no means over; the cardinal could not forgive Rome for having offered a home to his archrival, Cardinal Jean-François de Retz, who, having intrigued bitterly against him, had escaped from France the previous year. In consequence he gave active support to the Farnese family, who were attempting to reclaim land in the Papal State, and, as a deliberate snub, refused to allow the Papacy to mediate when France concluded the Peace of the Pyrenees with Spain in 1659. Mazarin died in 1661, but the young Louis XIV refused to make up the quarrel; indeed, he exacerbated it by breaking off diplomatic relations altogether, invading the papal territories of Avignon and the Venaissin in 1662 and threatening a further invasion of the Papal State itself. Had Alexander possessed more strength and determination, he might have been able to resist the relentless pressure; alas, he did not. Quiet, scholarly, and deeply spiritual, he was designed for a gentle and contemplative life; the tough, aggressive statesmanship of the unforgiving seventeenth century was not for him. And so it was that he unprotestingly submitted to Louis, accepting without a murmur the humiliating conditions which, in 1664, the king forced on him with the Treaty of Pisa.
The single event of his reign which probably gave him more pleasure than any other was the conversion of Queen Christina of Sweden on Christmas Eve 1654. Christina had taken a long ceremonial route through Italy, arriving in Rome—traveling in a sedan chair specially designed by Bernini and sent out by the pope—on December 20. On Christmas morning, in a magnificent ceremony in St. Peter’s, Alexander personally confirmed her in the Catholic faith, she taking the additional name of Alexandra in his honor. That night she formally took up residence in Palazzo Farnese.7 She was to live in Rome for the next thirty-five years until her death, causing a good deal of trouble to Alexander and his three successors but—by her eccentricities of dress and behavior and the sheer force of her extraordinary personality—leaving a far more indelible mark upon the city than they ever did.
THE FIRST TWO of those three successors, Cardinal Giulio Rospigliosi and Cardinal Emilio Altieri, both took the name of Clement. Clement IX, who was enthroned in June 1667, reigned only two and a half years, during which his principal achievement was to repair relations with France and, at least temporarily, to settle the continuing agitation over Jansenism. This depressing doctrine—first proposed by Cornelius Jansen, a former Bishop of Ypres—emphasized original sin, human depravity, predestination, and the necessity of divine grace; it had split the Church in France for most of the century. Louis XIV was determined to wipe it out, and it was at his stern request that in 1653 Innocent X had condemned five key propositions contained in Jansen’s principal treatise, Augustinus.
Clement mended fences with the Venetians, too. Venice was at the time engaged in a desperate war with the Turks, who for the past twenty years had been laying siege to her last surviving colony in the Mediterranean, the island of Crete. Innocent X had sent out a papal squadron as early as 1645, but its admiral—Niccolò Ludovisi, Prince of Piombino—had shown extreme distaste for the whole expedition and had almost immediately returned home. After that the pope had made all further help conditional on his being given control of Venetian bishoprics—a suggestion that the republic had refused even to contemplate. Alexander VII had also imposed a condition, the readmission of the Jesuits, banned from Venetian territory since the 1606 interdict; this, too, had been rejected. Now, however, the situation was desperate; and when Pope Clement, who was determined to give the Venetians all the help he could, repeated the offer, it was accepted. The Jesuits returned, and the pope succeeded in organizing—with the cooperation of France, Spain, and the empire—two relief expeditions to the beleaguered island.
Alas, it was too late. The first expedition sailed in 1668 and consisted largely of aristocratic young Frenchmen, who fought only for their own glory; in their opening battle they showed considerable courage, but when it was over the survivors could not get out fast enough. (Many of them, even then, never saw France again; they had carried the plague bacillus with them.) The second, which left the following year, was also predominantly French but sailed under the papal banner. Its story was much the same, but without the courage. Within two months of their arrival the French ships had weighed anchor, and in the general despair that ensued the few auxiliaries from the Papacy, the empire, and the Knights of Malta likewise set their sails for the West. The Venetians, left alone, could fight no longer, and on September 6, 1669, their captain general, Francesco Morosini, surrendered.
By this time Pope Clement’s health was already giving cause for concern; soon after hearing the news from Crete he suffered a serious stroke, and on December 9 he died. His successor, Emilio Altieri, or Clement X, elected after a five-month conclave because France and Spain determinedly vetoed each other’s candidates, was already in his eightieth year and hopelessly ineffectual. In the absence of a true cardinal nephew he bestowed the role on Cardinal Paluzzi degli Albertoni (whose nephew had married the pope’s niece), requiring him to adopt the name of Altieri. This proved a grave mistake: the cardinal immediately took over the entire administration, accumulating vast wealth on behalf of himself and his family, and Clement’s reputation in Rome suffered accordingly.
Such personal influence as the pope was able to exert was largely confined to the diplomatic field. Since the fall of Crete, the Turkish threat loomed larger than ever. The sultan had now turned his attention to Poland, the largest state in Europe, and both Clement and Cardinal Benedetto Odescalchi, soon to succeed him as Innocent XI, sent heavy financial subsidies to the Polish general John Sobieski, who was able to inflict a crushing defeat on an Ottoman army at Chocim on the Dniester River in November 1673 and was elected King of Poland six months later. In his dealings with Louis XIV of France, however, Clement was less successful. As he grew older and more powerful, Louis adopted an increasingly bullying attitude, claiming royal control over French episcopal appointments and the revenues of bishoprics which had been allowed to fall vacant (the régale). During an audience in 1675, the French ambassador, himself a cardinal, actually laid hands on the eighty-five-year-old pope, pushing him back into his chair when he tried to rise.
It was only with the succession of Innocent XI in the following year that the Papacy began to assert itself. A man of total integrity and by far the greatest pope of the seventeenth century, Innocent publicly warned Louis to press for further extension of his royal privileges no longer. Such conduct, he pointed out, was an offense to God, who might well punish him by depriving him of heirs to the throne.8 The result was an open breach between Paris and Rome. In March 1682 an assembly of the French clergy formally adopted what were known as the four Gallican Articles, which denied the pope any temporal authority, asserted the superiority of general councils, and reaffirmed the ancient rights and liberties of the Gallican Church. A month later Innocent predictably rejected these articles and refused to ratify the appointments of any French bishops until the matter was settled. By January 1685, no fewer than thirty-five French bishoprics were vacant.
Nine months later the king, whose treatment of his Huguenot subjects had been growing steadily more repressive, revoked the Edict of Nantes by which Henry IV had granted them extensive privileges almost a hundred years before. But if he thought thereby to regain the pope’s favor, he was disappointed; Innocent publicly condemned the violence of what now amounted to an out-and-out religious persecution. King and pope were also at loggerheads over the all-important issue of resistance to the Turks, who never relaxed their pressure on Christian Europe. Innocent had worked hard to unite the Emperor Leopold I and John Sobieski, now King of Poland, in a Holy League against them, and it was thanks only to this that an Ottoman army had been driven back from Vienna in 1683. King Louis, however, would have none of it. The emperor, he well knew, suffered from Turkish pressure far more than he did, and he was only too happy that it should continue. Thus it was that throughout Innocent’s pontificate Franco-papal relations steadily deteriorated. In 1687 the pope refused to receive the new French ambassador; in January 1688 he excommunicated Louis and all his ministers; and in the same year he rejected the king’s nominee for the archbishopric (and electorship) of Cologne, adopting instead the candidate proposed by Leopold. In September the French once again occupied the papal enclave of Avignon and the Venaissin. But if Innocent failed to bring King Louis to heel, he at least showed him—as his predecessors never had—that the Papacy was still a force to be reckoned with. And, even without Louis’s support, he continued his campaign against the Turks, recruiting to his Holy League both Venice and Russia, thus enabling the League to turn the Ottoman tide, liberating Hungary in 1686 and Belgrade the following year.
There has long existed a somewhat surprising theory according to which Pope Innocent secretly encouraged and supported the plans of the Protestant William of Orange to supplant the Catholic James II on the English throne. Despite James’s attempts to bring England back into the Catholic fold, Innocent distrusted him deeply: he was too close to Louis for one thing, and far too aggressive and confrontational for another. Certainly the pope never gave him any support, and he was probably neither surprised nor especially concerned when William defeated him. Still, no serious evidence for this theory has ever been adduced, and the idea can almost certainly be discounted.
Innocent died on August 12, 1689. In his lifetime he had not been particularly popular among his flock; utterly incorruptible, stern, and uncompromising, he had lived austerely and parsimoniously—having inherited a debt of 500,000 scudi, he had had little choice—and, avoiding the faintest breath of nepotism himself, had done all he could to persuade his cardinals to follow his example. After his death, however, his many outstanding qualities gradually came to be recognized, and it was only a quarter of a century before Pope Clement XI began the process of canonization. But French memories were long, and French influence in Rome had lost none of its power: in 1744, at the insistence of Louis XV, the process was suspended. Only in the mid–twentieth century, under Pope Pius XII, did the wheels begin to turn again. Innocent is now at last beatified; but sainthood is not yet his.
INNOCENT XI WAS seventy-eight when he died; Alexander VIII was seventy-nine when he succeeded him. The conclave by which Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni was chosen was the first to be attended by official ambassadors of both the emperor and the King of France, but even before they had arrived the cardinals were virtually agreed on their choice. Needless to say, the French representative had initially protested: Ottoboni had, after all, been the right-hand man of Pope Innocent, who had appointed him Grand Inquisitor of Rome and Secretary of the Holy Office. But in the preliminary discussions the cardinal gave his assurances that Franco-papal relations would be his first priority, and the objections were withdrawn.
The new pope had already been a cardinal for thirty-seven years. He was a Venetian, the first Venetian pope for two centuries. Blameless in his personal life, he was a fine scholar, possessed of one of the largest private libraries in Italy. In marked contrast to his predecessor, he was warm, generous, and endlessly charming to young and old alike. He carried his years well; his mind remained as alert as ever it had been. And he cheered Rome up. He made frequent public appearances, driving informally through the city. He used to say that his twenty-third hour had already struck, so he had to work fast. Back came the lavish spending and extravagance; the manifestations that marked his enthronement were, according to an eyewitness, “the most beautiful seen in our lifetime.” Back, too, came the Carnival and public performances of operas—one of which, Colombo, had come from the pen of Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni himself.
And back, also, came the old nepotism. On his accession Alexander had appointed to the post of cardinal nephew his twenty-year-old grandnephew Pietro, making his own nephew Giambattista secretary of state; both were loaded with rich benefices. As more members of his family hastened down from Venice, they, too, were appointed to highly lucrative posts. Nor was the republic itself forgotten. Venice was at that time engaged in an ambitious campaign to drive the Turks from the Peloponnese, led by the same Francesco Morosini who had been captain general in Crete and was now doge; Alexander threw himself behind it with enthusiasm, sending a large subsidy together with a number of galleys and a force of 1,500 fighting men. In April 1690 he even went so far as to send Morosini a hat and sword blessed by himself.
From the beginning of his pontificate, however, he never forgot that his primary concern must be to improve relations with France. Fortunately Louis XIV, whose position had been much weakened by the Glorious Revolution in England and the deposition of James II, was in a receptive mood. He willingly restored Avignon and the Venaissin to papal hands and raised no objection when the pope put an end to the rights of asylum and immunity from taxes claimed by foreign embassies in Rome. In return, and despite vociferous protests from the emperor, Alexander raised to the cardinalate Toussaint de Forbin Janson, Bishop of Beauvais, for whose elevation Louis had been pressing for years. Forbin had been a signatory to the Assembly of 1682, in consequence of which Innocent XI had repeatedly refused to consider him; but to Alexander, in the improved atmosphere of conciliation, his red hat was a small price to pay.
Despite these minor concessions, however, the fundamental issue remained unresolved: the pope absolutely refused to ratify the appointment of any French bishops unless they formally renounced and repudiated the Gallican Articles, which Louis, on his side, was determined to uphold. In vain did Alexander write personally and privately to the king and even to Madame de Maintenon, to whom Louis was now secretly married and who was said to exercise considerable influence over him. The reply he received dashed his hopes—such as they were—to the ground. Ruefully he had to accept that all his efforts at a reconciliation with the French king had come to nothing and had succeeded only in seriously damaging the good relations he had previously enjoyed with the emperor. With Leopold the elevation of Cardinal Forbin still rankled, the more so since none of his own nominees had been similarly promoted. He resented, too, the impressive sums that the pope had sent to Venice for her Peloponnesian campaign, which had resulted in much-reduced subsidies for his own struggle against the Turks. But Pope Alexander probably cared little for the emperor’s feelings. As late as mid-November 1690 he appointed two more cardinals. Neither was an imperial nominee; both were related to his nephews.
At this time Alexander was still in excellent health, but in January 1691 he developed a severe inflammation of the leg, which rapidly became gangrenous. On the twenty-ninth he summoned to his bedside the twelve cardinals who had been involved in the dispute with France and delivered to them a brief, declaring that the Declaration of 1682 upholding the Gallican Articles was legally null and void. It was his parting shot; three days later he was dead.
—
THE ENSUING CONCLAVE continued for over five months, the longest since 1305. It would probably have lasted even longer had it not been for the summer heat—exceptional even by Roman standards—which raised the temperature in the Sistine Chapel to intolerable levels. The delay was due largely to King Louis, who strongly supported the Venetian Cardinal Gregorio Barbarigo; but the French finally gave way and the vote was cast for the seventy-six-year-old Archbishop of Naples, Cardinal Antonio Pignatelli, henceforth to be known as Innocent XII. A Neapolitan aristocrat born in the Basilicata, he was the last pope from South Italy—and, incidentally, the last to grow a beard.
Having assumed the name of his indirect predecessor, he also took him as his model—with the difference that whereas Innocent XI had been stern and unapproachable, Innocent XII held regular public and private audiences, talking easily and freely with all classes. Nepotism he hated; he refused to confirm the nephews of Alexander VIII in their posts and by means of a bull, Romanum Decet Ponteficem of June 22, 1692, decreed that all relatives of the reigning pontiff should be forbidden to accept estates, offices, or revenues. If a member of a pope’s family was admitted to the Sacred College, it must be on grounds of merit alone, and his annual revenues were not to exceed 12,000 scudi. This bull was to be sworn to at every future conclave by all the cardinals and by the pope himself. It made a widespread impression throughout the Catholic world and effectively marked the end of nepotism in the Holy See.9
Innocent maintained that his own nephews were the poor; and, after the welfare of the Church, the poor were always his principal concern. In 1692 he converted the old Lateran Palace into a hostel for no fewer than five thousand homeless unemployed, and in 1693 he took over the Hospice of San Michele, a boys’ orphanage founded by the family of Innocent XI, commissioning the architect Carlo Fontana10 to remodel it so that it could accommodate three hundred orphans instead of the original thirty. These two buildings, combined with Sixtus V’s hospice and with another asylum for foundlings, now formed a united Apostolic Hospice which the pope placed under the care of three cardinals and which was henceforth so near his heart as to arouse complaints that he often forgot everything else.
As Innocent’s favorite architect, Fontana was given many other commissions during his pontificate. The most ambitious was to complete and enlarge the Palazzo di Montecitorio—which Bernini had begun forty-five years before on the orders of Innocent X—and to use it as a vast palazzo di giustizia, finally bringing all Rome’s various tribunals and courts of law under one roof. The work was never carried out as originally planned—the expense would have been astronomical—but the building as we see it today remains one of the city’s most magnificent examples of the High Baroque.11 In St. Peter’s, Fontana also designed the baptistery12 and the monument to Queen Christina in the right-hand aisle.
Another long-standing abuse against which Innocent took firm action was the sale of church offices. Here he had to face a good deal of opposition, since the practice was highly profitable, but he offset the loss by cutting his own expenses to the bone. He then turned his attention to the harbors of Civitavecchia and Nettuno, both of which were greatly enlarged in order to increase the corn trade. Civitavecchia he also made a free port, endowing it with a magnificent new aqueduct and in May 1696 even paying the city a personal visit, the first pope for over a century to do so.
The pope’s greatest diplomatic achievement was to end the fifty-year deadlock between Louis XIV and the Holy See. First he ratified the appointments of all the bishops nominated by the king who had not taken part in the 1682 Assembly, that which had adopted the four Gallican Articles. In return, Louis revoked the declaration of the French clergy by which the bishops had been obliged to subscribe to the articles, and the bishops formally retracted their signatures. It was, on the whole, a satisfactory accommodation, of which the only serious drawback was that the articles themselves were left intact: the French Church was largely to ignore Vatican authority until the Revolution and beyond. Inevitably, too, this burying of the hatchet aroused imperial suspicions. Innocent had done his best to improve relations with the Emperor Leopold just as he had with King Louis and had sent him 80,000 scudi for his struggle against the Turks. But the unconcealed hostility and arrogance of successive imperial ambassadors in Rome seemed expressly designed to provoke conflict; moreover, the bitter war that was raging between the French and the empire made it impossible to be friends with both. The Holy See was not represented at the peace talks which led to the Treaty of Ryswick13 in September 1697, but somehow managed to arrange for the inclusion of a clause that the Roman Catholic faith be preserved intact in all countries which were subjected by the terms of the treaty to Protestant rule.
At the beginning of November 1699 the eighty-four-year-old pope fell dangerously ill. He never properly recovered but somehow found the strength to celebrate the Holy Year of 1700 with public appearances, blessing the thousands of pilgrims from the balcony of the Quirinal Palace14 and even visiting the principal churches. Then, on August 1, he suffered a serious relapse. He lingered for another eight weeks, dying in the early hours of September 27. In the nine years of his pontificate he had achieved much: the end of nepotism, reconciliation with France. He may even have decided the whole future of Spain; despite his differences with Louis XIV, he certainly advised the childless Spanish King Charles II to nominate as his heir Louis XIV’s grandson Philip, Duke of Anjou, rather than the Emperor Leopold’s younger son, Charles. On October 3, 1700, just a week after Innocent’s death, Charles II changed his will accordingly, himself dying a month later.
Although he never knew it, Innocent XII was to have one further claim to fame: after some 170 years in his grave, he was to enter the canons of English literature. Readers—if such there be—of Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book will recognize him as one of the twelve narrators in whose words the interminable story is told. It does not improve his reputation; fortunately, his reputation does not need improving.
1. A Catholic conspiracy to assassinate the king and to blow up Parliament on November 5, 1605. The conspirators were discovered and the plot failed.
2. When referring to St. Peter’s, which is built in defiance of the normal liturgical rules whereby the high altar is placed at the east end, the points of the compass have to be reversed: east is west and west is east. See chapter 1, this page.
3. His collection was transferred to the Villa Borghese only in 1891; before that it was housed in Palazzo Borghese, which Pope Paul had bought in 1605, the year of his accession.
4. He had actually reigned for a year and four days.
5. By this time the emperor and the kings of France and Spain had gradually established their right of veto on any candidate for the Papacy of whom they disapproved.
6. Now better known (and spelled) as the Villa Doria Pamphilj. It is not to be confused with the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, with its adjoining art gallery, at the beginning of the Via del Corso, just north of Piazza Venezia.
7. She subsequently moved to Palazzo Riario (built by the nephew of Sixtus IV), now Palazzo Corsini. This was to be the home of her astonishing art collection and also of the Arcadian Academy, intended for the study of art, literature, and philosophy, which still exists.
8. God very nearly did: Louis was to be succeeded by his great-grandson.
9. Careful investigation has revealed that the nephews of Paul V had received 260,000 scudi, those of Urban VIII 1,700,000, those of Innocent X 1,400,000, those of Alexander VII 900,000, those of Clement X 1,200,000, and those of Alexander VIII 700,000 from the Apostolic Camera alone. On top of this there was the considerable income derived from various vacant offices.
10. Not, of course, to be confused with the sixteenth-century Domenico Fontana. The two were, so far as is known, unrelated.
11. Since 1871 it has been the seat of the Italian Chamber of Deputies.
12. The huge porphyry font is said to have originally come from the Mausoleum of Hadrian and later to have adorned the tomb of the Holy Roman Emperor Otto II.
13. The treaty settled the Nine Years’ War, which had pitted France against the Grand Alliance of the empire, England, Spain, and the United Provinces (Netherlands).
14. The Quirinal was the principal residence of the popes from Clement VIII until 1870 (Pius IX). It is now the residence of the president of Italy.