Absolute Monarchs (46 page)

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.
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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.)
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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 Pamfili
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—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.)