Murder in the Garden of God (14 page)

One day, some peasants digging near Bracciano found an ancient vase bursting with fat gold coins. Legally, anything found on the duke’s land was his, but the peasants agreed to divide it secretly among themselves, with no one the wiser. But one of them ran off with it, and the others complained to the duke. Paolo Giordano, who desperately wanted the gold to fend off some of his most insistent creditors, put the peasant’s wife and children in prison, hoping he would come back for them. But he didn’t, and the duke didn’t get a single piece of gold.

Apart from his financial issues, the duke’s prestige was taking a battering. At Bracciano, Paolo Giordano was supposed to receive King Philip II’s new ambassador to the Papal States, Juan Enrique de Gusman, Count Olivares, on his journey to Rome. All the preparations were made, and the duke waited for his honored visitor, but the king had ordered the count to bypass Bracciano. This very purposeful insult shocked the duke. When he called on the ambassador in Rome, the count gave him a message from the king. Philip could not tolerate a grandee of Spain wanting to marry a woman of such greatly inferior status. The entire Orsini clan, the de Medicis, and the Spanish royal family would be tainted by the shame of it, and no one would have anything more to do with Paolo Giordano if he married her again.

The duke was, temporarily, beaten once more. According to an
avvisi
of July 18, “Signor Paolo Giordano, seeing how much evil surrounded him by staying in disgrace with the grand duke, wrote letters to the pope, to Cardinal de Medici, and to the duke of Sora in which he declared that he no longer wanted Signora Accorambona as his wife.”
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He also addressed one to Vittoria.

Vittoria was still firmly lodged in the Castel Sant’Angelo, though she had charmed her jailer, Napoleone Malvagia, into moving her to nice breezy rooms upstairs. When the jailer’s wife gave birth to a daughter, Vittoria, whose own pregnancy had disappeared, acted as her godmother at the baptism, and the child was named after her. Vittoria was allowed to walk freely around the fortress, enjoying the view of Rome and the unfinished dome of St. Peter’s from the windy battlements. She was a delightful prisoner and made only one difficulty. She insisted that she be addressed as the duchess of Bracciano. She had in her possession letters of Paolo Giordano, in which he called her his duchess. And she refused to part with the wedding ring.

But one day in the middle of July, a letter arrived from Paolo Giordano addressed to Signora Vittoria Accoramboni. She trembled as she opened it. In the letter, the duke declared their marriage null and void. He was now giving her the freedom to marry someone else. Vittoria seemed shocked. She raced to a window and started to throw herself out. A serving woman was right behind her and grabbed her leg and the thick folds of her gown. She tried with difficulty to pull her in, but for a while Vittoria’s life seemed to literally hang in the balance.

Meanwhile, on the ramparts below, soldiers heard Vittoria’s shrill screams and looked up to see her flailing out of the window. They raced upstairs and helped her servant bring her in. When they carefully placed her on the floor, she appeared to be unconscious. Given the manipulative tactics of the thwarted pair, it is possible that the duke’s renunciation, which resulted in a suicide attempt witnessed by hundreds of Romans in the streets below the fortress, was nothing more than a bit of theater.

If so, the duke achieved his goal. Having renounced Vittoria, he was immediately taken back into the good graces of the king of Spain, the grand duke, Cardinal de Medici, and the pope. The investigations into Francesco’s murder ground to a halt, and the duke was once again living high on the hog with borrowed money.

Clearly, the suicide act had a second goal, which was Vittoria’s release from prison. The pope and Cardinal de Medici feared, however, that the moment Vittoria was free the duke would forget his promises, swoop into Rome, and grab her. Gregory didn’t want to keep her imprisoned forever and tried to come up with another means of preventing a marriage. Perhaps Vittoria wanted to enter a convent? He could arrange the most prestigious convent for her, a beautiful, peaceful place. However, she steadfastly refused to become a nun.

The other option was to marry her to someone else. That way, clearly, Paolo Giordano couldn’t marry her because then it would be bigamy. The pope spread the word that a lovely noble bride was up for grabs. Considering that the duke had killed her first husband and would likely kill her second one to get his hands on her, very few were interested in this offer. A man named Iocovacci said that he would like to take Vittoria away as his bride, which raised the pope’s hopes. But looking into the matter, Gregory discovered that Iocovacci lived at Bracciano and was a servant of the duke’s.

Having wrapped her jailer around her little finger, Vittoria believed that if she could only have an audience with the pope, she might have the same luck with him and convince him to spring her from prison. She sent her mother, Tarquinia, to beg the pope for an audience, which occurred on August 10, 1582. It was a long conversation, but Vittoria was not released.

At this time the pope was extremely busy in ordering Catholic countries to observe the new calendar named after him. Until then, there were six potential starts to the New Year: January 1, March 1, March 25, Easter, September 1, and December 25. Referring to a particular day of the month was also confusing. Sometimes Italians used the ancient Roman system which referred to the days before or after the Kalends – the first day of the month; the Ides – the thirteenth day except in March, July, and October, when it fell on the fifteenth; and the Nones – eight days before the next Kalends. Often they used saints’ days as a reference – three days before the Feast of Saint Michael, for instance – or the numerical system we use today.

Despite this confusion with the calendar, there was a worse problem. The Julian calendar, introduced by Julius Caesar in 46 B.C., was off by some eleven minutes every year. Every one hundred twenty eight years the calendar would be behind by an entire day. Between the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D., which calculated the proper date for Easter, and 1582, the calendar had lagged some ten days behind.

It was a frightening thought that devout Christians might be praying on the wrong day. The saint being prayed to, knowing it was not his or her day, might be off doing something else entirely and not listening to the petitions of the faithful. Those prayers would then be wasted and those praying more likely to suffer greater hardship in this life and more time in Purgatory in the next.

Though Gregory was helpless in maintaining law and order in Rome, he guided calendar reform with a strong hand. Beginning in 1575, he commissioned scholars and mathematicians to look into the matter. After years of study, it was decided that the New Year would begin on January 1. The spring equinox would be fixed on March 21 and serve as a starting point for the rest of the calendar. Every four years an extra day would be added, February 29, to keep the calendar on track. The precision of the Gregorian calendar is so great that an error of one day would only occur after 3,333.3 years.

In February 1582, the pope had issued a bull informing Catholic nations that the calendar would be reformed in October of that year. People would go to sleep on October 4 and wake up on October 15. Protestant nations, who were also painfully aware of problems with the calendar, immediately howled that the pope as anti-Christ was meddling with time itself and wanted to cut short their lives by ten days. Moreover, the calendar reform was done to promote idolatry, they believed, so the Catholic pagans could worship their idols on the right days. Even Catholics were upset – the new calendar was a scheme set up by landlords, they declared, to cheat them out of ten days’ rent.

It was only in 1752 that Great Britain adopted the Gregorian calendar, with Sweden following a year later. Denmark and Germany finally followed suit in 1799. And so, for more than two hundred years, Europe had two different calendars running – Old Style and New Style. Russia didn’t update its calendar until the twentieth century, by which time it was thirteen days behind everyone else.

The calendar reform was a vast undertaking. The pope had tens of thousands of new calendars printed and sent by ship and pack-horse throughout Catholic Europe. Still, many towns didn’t get them by October and were terribly confused about which day it was, and which saint to venerate, and how to date legal documents and baptismal records. Complaints poured in from all sides, and so, in October 1582, the pope didn’t have too much time to worry about Vittoria.

But then Cardinal Carlo Borromeo, the saintly archbishop of Milan, weighed in on her side. The nephew of Pius V, Borromeo was perhaps the most devout cardinal who ever lived. Highly respected by the pope and the entire Sacred College, in 1610 he would be proclaimed a saint. If Vittoria was guilty of murder, he said, punish her. If she was not guilty, she must be released from prison. The pope had to agree and decided to let Vittoria go as long as she promised not to marry the duke again.

He also insisted that she not remain in Rome – that would be like leaving a raw steak out for a slavering bulldog whenever Paolo Giordano came to town. She must sign a document drawn up by a notary that within three days of her release she would leave for Gubbio, where her parents still owned a little palazzo. If she left Gubbio without papal permission, her father would be fined 10,000 ducats, part of which sum he had to put up in advance as security.

On the night of November 8, two hours past sunset, Vittoria was escorted from prison into her mother’s waiting coach and returned to her family’s home. The following day, a notary of the vicar called on her to remind her of the continued validity of the papal decree of May 5, 1581, which prohibited her from contracting marriage without the pope’s permission, and declaring null and void the one she had already contracted.

Vittoria was perturbed that although she had, evidently, been found innocent of Francesco’s murder, there were still conditions attached to her release. She asked for a private audience with the pope, hoping her charms could win him over as they had Cardinal Montalto, Paolo Giordano, and her jailer. The pope agreed to hear her.

An
avvisi
dated November 10 indicated that Vittoria’s melodramatic performance to win the pope’s sympathy was overdone. For added spice, the writer included references to the Biblical tale of Judith and the Punic War story of Prince Massinissa and his wife Sofonisba, whom he forced to swallow poison.

“Sunday evening, near sunset, there appeared another sun at the Vatican, the beautiful, charming, and gracious Signora Vittoria Corambona, accompanied by her relatives, who went by secret paths to the papal audience chamber. His Beatitude was content to listen to this new Judith afflicted by a lengthy prison stay, by the anguish of her divorce, and the pain of exile. She was detained by the pope’s butler, who then introduced her with her mother to the feet of His Beatitude, the other relatives remaining outside. Prostrate on the ground and with a faint voice and tearful eyes and hands on her breast, this new Sofonisba began to talk, sighing in front of Massinissa.”

Vittoria said, “Holy and Sainted Father, I have suffered long travails, the loss of my husband, imprisonment, and many other mockeries, which for a long time have enslaved me, not for my fault so much as for my lack of shrewdness. If I did not have an innocent conscience and did not hope for blessing from your Holiness, the soft heart of a woman of such a tender age would not be capable of enduring such calamity.”

She then spoke bitterly of Paolo Giordano. “I have been oppressed and violated by the shrewdness and greatness of a cavalier well known to your Holiness,” she continued. “I dare now to demand and confidently hope not just for pardon, but to awaken in the most clement heart of Your Beatitude pity for a young and noble woman, deceived and tormented. I implore your compassion, even more because I was born of blood … I implore the clemency of you my lord and father to remove the exile and not insist that I remain deprived of my country, my relatives, and those of my blood, which would add wounds to the death, making the world doubt my innocence and honesty.’”

The
avvisi
continued, “The pope, listening to the affected prayers of this afflicted nymph, accompanied by rivers of tears and with a commotion to soften the hardest stone, as a prince full of clemency and piety, and seeing a great error, with blessings and promises of paternal love, promised to grant her what she had asked, but that in the meantime she had to go to Gubbio to render obedience.”
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Despite her piteous sobs about innocent honesty, the pope knew she couldn’t be anywhere near Paolo Giordano.

As Vittoria was packing to go to Gubbio, she decided she would, oddly enough, call on Cardinal Montalto. She swept into the audience chamber of his villa, her lovely face wreathed in sad smiles, her eyes shining with tears, and knelt before him to kiss his hand. An
avvisi
of November 17 reported, “Cardinal Montalto welcomed her and embraced her with incredible signs of tenderness, as if she were a daughter instead of a niece.”
¹⁰

Vittoria then asked his advice on how she should dress – in full mourning as a grieving widow, or in the drab beige color of a widow preparing to leave off her mourning entirely. Considering the fact that she had already tried to remarry within days of the murder, “The cardinal advised her to wear the tawny habit, which she had taken, to be a color appropriate to her present state.”
¹¹
She knelt once more and fervidly kissed his hand, then rose to depart. We can picture him, watching her slender form and wide skirts rustling out of his audience chamber, wondering,
Did she know about it? Did she?

The day before her departure for Gubbio, Vittoria bade the pope farewell, once more flinging herself at his feet and sobbing. Finally, on November 24, she left Rome accompanied by a cortege of her relatives’ carriages, with all the servants armed to prevent robbery on the road.