The seventeenth century had closed with two very old men occupying the Throne of St. Peter; the eighteenth began with a very young one. Giovanni Francesco Albani was only fifty-one when, after long hesitation, he accepted his election as Pope Clement XI. A cardinal since 1690, he had enjoyed considerable influence under his two predecessors and had actually drafted Innocent’s bull prohibiting nepotism. Thanks to his intelligence, scholarship, and gifts as an orator, he had long been considered papabile (suitable to be elected pope), yet curiously enough he had been ordained a priest only two months before his election.
The deathbed decision of Charles II of Spain to name Philip of Anjou as his successor had had, not surprisingly, an explosive effect, for Charles had been the last male descendant of the Emperor Charles V, and the Spanish crown was now coveted—and indeed claimed—by the two mightiest dynasties of Europe. Philip III of Spain, who reigned from 1578 to 1621, had two daughters: the elder, Anne, had been married off to Louis XIII of France; the younger, Maria, to the Emperor Ferdinand III of Austria. Anne had in due course given birth to the future Louis XIV, Maria to the Emperor Leopold I. In the fullness of time Leopold had married Charles II’s younger sister, Margaret, and their small grandson Joseph Ferdinand of Bavaria was consequently the Habsburg claimant. Already the scene seemed to be set for a struggle. When, in 1698, King Charles made a will confirming Joseph Ferdinand as his heir, the matter might have been thought to be settled; but in February 1699 the young prince unexpectedly died. His sudden death was attributed, rather unconvincingly, to smallpox—though there were many, among them the boy’s own father, who suspected poison and did not hesitate to say so. In any event it was Leopold’s younger son, the Archduke Charles, who now claimed the Spanish throne on behalf of the empire.
Like Innocent before him, Clement favored Philip of Anjou as the next King of Spain. Philip’s grandfather Louis XIV might have had his faults, but he was unquestionably the most powerful existing champion of Roman Catholicism. Moreover, where papal territory in Italy was concerned, the Spanish record was abysmal; it was clear to Clement that the papal lands would be far safer if a Frenchman, rather than a Spaniard, were in control of Spanish-held Milan, Naples, and Sicily. But he could hardly expect the Emperor Leopold to agree with him, nor indeed could King Louis, who lost no time in packing off the young claimant to Madrid to assume his throne without delay, in the company of a bevy of French officials prepared to take over all the key posts of government. What Louis could not have known was how long and how desperate the ensuing war would be or what a price he would have to pay for his grandson’s crown.
And so it was that in February 1701, less than three months after Pope Clement’s enthronement, Philip of Anjou was welcomed in Madrid as King Philip V of Spain while, almost simultaneously, French troops occupied the Spanish Netherlands. Almost before anyone knew it, Europe had been swept up in the War of the Spanish Succession.
THE EMPEROR LEOPOLD, too, was moving fast. If Spain were to pass from the hands of the weakest monarch in Europe into those of the strongest, what chance was there that trade would be allowed to continue? Just as the pope had feared, he was determined to seize all Spanish territories in Italy, beginning with Milan, to prevent their falling into French hands. He found his allies in England and Holland. These two maritime countries were both carrying on an immensely profitable trade with Spain; there were several English and Dutch merchants permanently resident in Cádiz and other Spanish ports. Through much of the seventeenth century the two had been at loggerheads; now, however, they shared with the emperor a common concern: to keep out the French. And so the Grand Alliance was born.
As for Pope Clement, everyone knew of his pro-French sympathies—he had actually sent a letter of congratulation to King Philip in Madrid—so it came as no surprise when his offer to mediate was ignored. On the outbreak of war he did his best to take a neutral stand, though this was by no means easy when both Leopold and Philip demanded to be invested with Naples and Sicily (in which Philip had already been proclaimed without opposition). If we are to believe the Venetian ambassador, the pope feared the power, the boldness, and the pride of the Habsburgs and the frivolity, presumption, and violence of the Bourbons—to say nothing of their Gallican ideas. His greatest weakness had always been indecision; now he vacillated, desperately trying to gain time and thus successfully antagonizing both parties.
Inevitably, the peninsula once again became a battleground. First the French swept in and captured Milan; but then, in 1706, the empire’s brilliant general Prince Eugene of Savoy drove them out of North Italy. A year later, the Austrian troops of Leopold’s older son and successor, Joseph I, invaded papal territory and took possession of Naples, threatening Rome itself. The pope, who had no army worthy of the name, was forced to accept Joseph’s terms, recognizing both the capture of Naples and the Archduke Charles as the rightful King of Spain—which led, of course, to a serious worsening of papal-Spanish relations.
Then, on April 17, 1711, Joseph died in Vienna at the age of only thirty-two—this time it was definitely smallpox—and the whole European political scene was once again transformed overnight. In his six-year reign Joseph had enthusiastically espoused the claims of his younger brother, Charles, to Spain, but Charles was now not just a Spanish claimant; he was his brother’s obvious successor on the imperial throne. The Grand Alliance had been formed to prevent a single family, the Bourbons, from becoming too powerful; if Charles were to succeed to the empire—as indeed he did, being elected the following year—the Habsburgs threatened to become more powerful still, with all their dominions once more united as in the days of Charles’s great-great-great-great-uncle Charles V. Inevitably, many months passed before the European powers were able to come to terms with the new situation; it was not until New Year’s Day 1712 that negotiations began between the Allies and France in the Dutch city of Utrecht.
What is generally known as the Treaty of Utrecht was in fact a whole series of treaties in which, after a European upheaval that had lasted eleven years, France and Spain attempted once again to regulate their relations with their neighbors. Pope Clement, as usual, found himself disregarded. Charles surrendered his Spanish claims to Philip, and was granted Milan and Naples. France and Spain both formally recognized Duke Victor Amadeus II of Savoy, who happened to be King Philip’s father-in-law, as King of Sicily.1 On none of these occasions was the pope consulted. Even the papal fiefs of Parma and Piacenza were disposed of without his consent.
The political and diplomatic prestige of the Holy See was indeed in sorrowful decline; only in doctrinal matters was the pope still listened to—up, at least, to a point. Here his principal headache was caused by Jansenism in France. By this time it had been causing trouble for well over half a century, defying all Louis XIV’s efforts to stamp it out. It had recently flared up again when forty doctors at the Sorbonne had ruled that it was permissible for Catholics to listen to a condemnation of Jansenism “in respectful silence.” This roused the king to a new fury. He now demanded that Pope Clement, who had already rebuked the doctors, publish a bull declaring that passive acquiescence was not enough; the abominable doctrine must be actively and positively denounced, whenever and wherever it should raise its head. Clement did so—but with consequences very different from those he had expected. There was an immediate outcry in France, spreading far beyond Jansenist circles and spearheaded by that most aristocratic of churchmen, Cardinal Louis-Antoine de Noailles, Archbishop of Paris. Louis, angrier than ever, insisted on yet another bull, which would be nothing less than an out-and-out condemnation of Jansenism. Once again the pope did as he was bid, with the celebrated bull Unigenitus, which condemned 101 propositions taken from a recent and hugely popular publication by a leading Jansenist named Pasquier Quesnel, Moral Reflections on the Gospels; but Noailles, together with fifteen bishops, categorically refused to accept it—Gallicanism, it will be seen, was far from dead—and the stalemate continued until the king’s death in 1715.
As Louis XV, his great-grandson and heir, was only five years old, the regency was entrusted to Philip, Duke of Orleans. The duke took no interest in religion; he wished only to be rid of the whole problem once and for all. He forbade any further discussion of the controversial bull and left it to the pope to find a solution. Clement responded with a third bull, upholding Unigenitus and excommunicating all those who disobeyed it. This too was widely condemned, not only by Noailles but by several bishops, the French parlements, and the Sorbonne. It was naturally upheld by the regent, but still the dispute went on, doing more and more to destroy the rapidly waning prestige of the Papacy in France, and it was still raging when the pope died, after a long illness, on March 19, 1721. He was seventy-one and had been in office for twenty years, during which Rome had suffered two catastrophic floods and, in early 1703, a hurricane so furious that the church bells rang of their own accord. This had been followed by a whole series of earthquakes, one of which destroyed three arches on the second tier of the Colosseum.
Clement XI was a man of many virtues. He was deeply devout, hardworking, incorruptible, and a generous patron of the arts. His besetting fault was indecision. He lacked the instinctive political sense which guides a natural leader and was consequently unable to impose his prestige—let alone his will—upon his foreign flock. He had been genuinely reluctant to accept his elevation to the Papacy, and he never deluded himself that he had been a success. Some months before his death, he had dictated his epitaph to his nephew Cardinal Annibale Albani. It read, “Clement XI, Pope, once a chaplain then a canon of this basilica, died on … after a pontificate of … years. Pray for him.”
AS THE EIGHTEENTH century continued, it gradually became clear that the Papacy had a new enemy with which to contend, an enemy a good deal more insidious than the doctrinal differences that had plagued Christendom for well over a millennium. For this was the Age of Reason. For many churchmen, even heretics were preferable to skeptics, agnostics—relatively few people dared call themselves atheists—or anticlericals.
In the face of this new intellectual climate, it is not easy to see what measures the Holy See could have taken; what is clear, however, is that it did not take them. The first two successors of Clement XI were pious enough—they had both renounced dukedoms for the sake of the Church—but neither reigned for long (Innocent XIII, already a sick man and enormously fat, lasted less than three years, Benedict XIII less than six), and neither made much impact in Rome. Innocent, it is true, had some success in resolving tensions abroad. In 1721 he endeared himself to Louis XV by raising the king’s dissolute and debauched chief minister, the Abbé Guillaume Dubois, to the cardinalate, and the following year he invested the Emperor Charles VI with Naples and Sicily, something that Clement IX had always refused to do.
When Innocent’s successor, Benedict XIII, was elected, much against his will, on May 29, 1724, he was already seventy-six and in his dotage. Apart from forbidding the clergy to wear wigs, he refused to act as pope and dealt with Charles, Louis, and Philip of Spain by simply ignoring them; meanwhile, he lived the life of a simple parish priest, sleeping in a small whitewashed room on the top floor of the Quirinal—he subsequently moved to the Vatican—hearing confessions, visiting the sick, and giving religious instruction. Several times a week he waited on thirteen paupers at table. Most of the papal business he entrusted to Cardinal Niccolò Coscia, whom he had known when Archbishop of Benevento and whom in 1725 he promoted—in the face of heavy opposition—to the Sacred College. He could hardly have made a more disastrous choice. Coscia was a scoundrel, deeply corrupt, who thought only of his own self-enrichment, selling off church offices, accepting bribes, filling the Curia with his own Beneventan cronies, and leaving the papal treasury bare. Meanwhile, Benedict accepted all his recommendations without question and would not have a word said against him. Nepotism had been formally abolished by Clement XI; but now the Church, in the words of a recent historian, “had all the evils of nepotism without the nephews.”2
It was somehow typical of Benedict that when he did show firmness he usually did so on the wrong occasion and at the wrong time. A good example of this tendency was provided when King John V of Portugal claimed the right, enjoyed by several other courts, of proposing candidates for the Sacred College. When the pope refused, John broke off diplomatic relations, recalled all Portuguese residents in papal territory, forbade all communication with the Curia, and even tried to prevent the sending of alms from Portugal to Rome.
Thanks to the greed of Niccolò Coscia and the childish gullibility of his master, the Holy See suffered grievously, in terms not only of its finances but also of its political prestige. The pope was too old to learn the arts of statesmanship and good government and too innocent to see the corruption and duplicity of those in whom he put his trust. He died, more of old age than anything else, on February 21, 1730—not a moment too soon.
But the moment Benedict was lowered safely into his grave, the Roman populace exploded in rage. Despite everything, they had loved the old man, just as they had detested Coscia and his Beneventans. Coscia himself—who had been living in the Vatican in far greater comfort and grandeur than the pope himself—escaped without being recognized (he was carried out on a stretcher) and took refuge with his friend the Marchese Abbati in his house on the Corso; but he was tracked down soon enough. The house was surrounded and narrowly escaped complete devastation. Soon afterward, the unspeakable cardinal was arrested and put on trial. He managed to draw out the proceedings for a considerable time, but in April 1733 he was sentenced to excommunication, ten years’ imprisonment in the Castel Sant’Angelo, and a fine of 100,000 scudi. It was one of the harshest judgments ever given against a member of the Sacred College, but not a word was raised in objection.
THE DODDERING OLD Benedict XIII was succeeded by a man only three years younger. Pope Clement XII was a wealthy Florentine, already seventy-eight and—like so many of his predecessors3—in constant pain from gout. He was an intellectual and a scholar who in former days, as Cardinal Lorenzo Corsini, had maintained a distinguished salon in Palazzo Pamfili on Piazza Navona, but within two years of his accession he had become so blind that he could sign papers only if his hand was placed on the spot where his signature was required, and by August 1736 the imperial ambassador Count Harrach was writing, “He has almost completely lost the wonderful memory he once possessed, and his color is so pale that there is reason to fear his demise at the turn of the season.”
On the other hand, Pope Clement had lost none of his youthful energy, and he was by no means ineffectual. He acted with firmness and promptitude against Coscia; in a determined attempt to rescue the papal finances, he revived the state lotteries, which Benedict XIII had forbidden, and approved the issue of paper money. He also created a free port at Ancona and canceled some of the more excessive examples of Benedict’s generosity. But although all these measures proved moderately beneficial, they failed appreciably to diminish the burden of debt.
Moreover, as the economy of the Papacy continued to decline, so too did its international prestige. When Duke Antonio Francesco Farnese of Parma and Piacenza died in 1731 without male issue and Charles VI once again asserted his suzerainty over the duchy, Clement’s protests were simply ignored. He was similarly powerless a year later when it was transferred to Don Carlos of Spain, son of Philip V and his formidable Italian queen, Elizabeth Farnese.4 In 1732 Don Carlos, who, thanks to his mother, was far more of an Italian than a Spaniard, was formally installed as Duke of Parma and Grand Prince of Tuscany. Later in the same year the papal nuncio was expelled from Venice. In 1733 the French blockaded Avignon, which was still under papal control. In the spring of 1734 the pope watched with impotent anxiety while Don Carlos, backed by Louis XV, marched south through the Papal States and made his triumphal entry into Naples, and by the late autumn, despite some resistance from the citadels of Messina, Trapani, and Syracuse, he had effectively taken over Sicily as well. In 1735 the prince resigned Parma to the empire in exchange for recognition as King of Naples, and in 1736 Spain and Naples both broke off diplomatic relations with the Holy See. To restore them, Clement was obliged to invest Don Carlos unconditionally with the Kingdom of Naples.
Meanwhile, the pope’s health was giving increasing cause for concern, his misery now increased by a painful hernia and bladder trouble. On January 28, 1740, he asked to be given the last rites, and on February 6, he died in his eighty-eighth year. Considering his sufferings, his energy had almost to the end been astonishing, and if so many of his diplomatic initiatives failed he can hardly be held responsible; the times were against him. Thanks to his family’s wealth and the profits from his lotteries, he left Rome richer and more beautiful than he found it, building a museum of antique sculptures on the Capitol—the first public museum of antiquities in Europe—providing St. John Lateran with a new façade and the superb Corsini Chapel (both by Alessandro Galilei), laying out the Piazza di Trevi, and commissioning the glorious Trevi Fountain from Nicola Salvi.5 He also enlarged and greatly enriched the Vatican Library, presenting it with some two hundred Etruscan vases and over three hundred antique medals. It was, for an octogenarian, an impressive record.
THE CONCLAVE WHICH followed the death of Clement XII lasted over six months, the longest since the Great Schism. The final choice was a totally unexpected compromise candidate, the Bolognese Cardinal Prospero Lorenzo Lambertini. “If you want a saint, take Gotti; if you want a statesman, take Aldovrandi; if you want a good fellow, take me,” he is said to have joked during the conclave’s last days. The cardinals, it appeared, wanted a good fellow; Lambertini was duly elected, taking the name of Benedict XIV in honor of the pope who had raised him to the Sacred College. He proved worth waiting for. A deeply learned theologian and church lawyer who had written what is still the standard work on canonization, he was also genial and approachable, with a ready wit and an excellent sense of humor. He enjoyed nothing more than wandering informally around Rome, chatting to passersby; it was typical of him that when the King of Naples visited Rome in 1744 the pope received him not in his palace on the Quirinal but in a neighboring coffeehouse.6
But Benedict’s easygoing charm concealed an underlying seriousness and unremitting industry. His task, as he saw it, was to restore the dignity and influence of the Holy See and somehow to drag it into the eighteenth century. Only two months after his accession, however, came the first and greatest crisis of his pontificate: the death, in October 1740, of the Emperor Charles VI. Charles had taken care to obtain solemn guarantees from all the principal European powers that they would respect the right of his twenty-three-year-old daughter, Maria Theresa, to succeed him in the monarchy, if not in the elected empire. The Papacy, the Republic of Venice, England, and Holland had all willingly agreed; Louis XV, though unwilling to commit himself, had been friendly and reassuring; while the new King of Prussia, Frederick II—later to be known as “the Great”—not only confirmed his recognition but even offered military assistance should it ever be needed. He spoke, as was soon apparent, with a forked tongue; but Maria Theresa was not to know it until, on December 16, 1740, a Prussian army of 30,000 invaded the imperial province of Silesia. The War of the Austrian Succession had begun.
Charles’s body was scarcely cold before Elizabeth Farnese forced her ever-compliant husband, Philip V, to lay claim to all the Habsburg hereditary possessions. Their grounds were shaky, and she knew it. What she was really after, as always, was the Italian provinces, and she now had a valuable ally on the spot: her son Don Carlos, now King Charles of Naples. Within weeks a Spanish army had crossed the Pyrenees and was advancing, with King Louis’s blessing, through the Languedoc and Provence; meanwhile, the Spanish Duke of Montemar sailed a further division to Orbetello (near the modern Porto Ercole), where it was joined by Neapolitan troops. At this point King Charles Emmanuel III of Sardinia threw in his lot with Maria Theresa, so henceforth Austria and Sardinia were pitted against the two Bourbon kingdoms of France and Spain. They had other allies, too: in August 1742 a British naval squadron commanded by the sixty-five-year-old Admiral Thomas Mathews appeared off Naples and threatened to bombard the city unless King Charles withdrew at once from the Bourbon coalition. The threat was gratifyingly effective; Mathews then turned against a squadron of French and Spanish ships, driving it back into Toulon and thus cutting off all naval communications between Naples and Spain.
Throughout this period the attitude of the Holy See was uncertain. Despite previous papal assurances, the pope delayed his formal recognition of Maria Theresa’s hereditary right of succession until the very end of 1740. The empire, on the other hand, remained elective. There were two obvious candidates, Maria Theresa’s husband, Francis of Lorraine, and the Elector Charles Albert of Bavaria. Benedict secretly favored Charles Albert; since Francis was already Grand Duke of Tuscany,7 his election would bring the empire to the pope’s very doorstep. Benedict gave careful instructions, however, to his legate at Frankfurt, where the election was to be held, on no account to commit himself, simply to encourage the choice of a candidate who would be able and willing to protect the interests of the Church.
When, on January 24, 1742, Charles Albert was unanimously elected as the Emperor Charles VII, being crowned three weeks later, Benedict lost no time in according him his recognition. Maria Theresa, on the other hand, showing all the spirit for which she would soon be celebrated, immediately declared the election null and void and sent an army to Bavaria. On February 13 it marched into Munich, and in August the furious queen announced the sequestration of all Church benefices in Austria. By that time, too, the Papal States had been overrun by Spanish, French, and Neapolitan troops. The pontificate of Benedict XIV had not begun well.
It was a relief for almost everyone—not least the pope, to whom the new emperor had been a considerable disappointment—when Charles VII died after a short illness on January 20, 1745, less than three years after his coronation. This time there was little question as to his successor, and the Grand Duke of Tuscany was duly crowned in October as Francis I. Despite heavy pressure from France and Spain and his own lively suspicions, the pope recognized him. There were still outstanding questions to be settled, and it was almost a year before Francis made his formal act of obedience; but the way was then clear for a resumption of relations, and diplomatic representatives were duly exchanged.
When at last, after eight years, the war came to an end with the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, the only true victor was Frederick of Prussia, who had started it in the first place. Charles Emmanuel kept Savoy and Nice; the Duchy of Parma and Piacenza, after twelve years as part of the empire, was entrusted to Philip of Bourbon, the younger brother of Charles III, who thus founded the House of Bourbon-Parme, which still exists today. Maria Theresa’s husband was duly recognized as the Emperor Francis I. To many people the War of the Austrian Succession must have seemed hardly worth the fighting.
1. In 1720 he was obliged to surrender Sicily to the emperor, receiving in exchange the comparatively unimportant island of Sardinia. From then until 1861, when his distant cousin Victor Emmanuel II became the first king of the united Italy, he and his successors were also known as kings of Sardinia, though they continued to reign from their ancestral capital of Turin.
2. Duffy, Saints and Sinners.
3. So many, indeed, that one finds oneself wondering whether “gout” in those days was not a portmanteau word covering rheumatism, arthritis, and probably a good many other diseases as well.
4. Elizabeth claimed it as of right, the duchy having been in Farnese hands since its creation in 1545 as a fief for Paul III’s illegitimate son Pierluigi.
5. Begun in 1732, the fountain was completed after 1751 by Giuseppe Pannini and inaugurated in 1762 by Clement XIII.
6. There is a splendid painting of this event by Giovanni Paolo Panini in the Capodimonte Museum, Naples.
7. At the request of the emperor, who wished to compensate the ex–King of Poland Stanislaw Leszczyński, the father-in-law of Louis XV, for the loss of his kingdom, he had received Tuscany in 1736 in exchange for his former Duchy of Lorraine.