Murder in the Garden of God (22 page)

Realizing that the best way to win the pope’s favor was to send him heads, and hoping to cash in on the rich rewards, some people started digging up dead bodies in graveyards, cutting off the heads, and sending them back to Rome in sacks as the heads of bandits.

Cardinal Farnese wanted nothing to do with heads and was as disgusted by the pope’s behavior as he was with himself for approving his election. Summering at his country estate, he didn’t lift a finger to send a single head. When the papal complaints started to arrive about the lack of heads, he replied that he was not “the bailiff of the countryside, and he did not know how to dig up men at church and send their heads to Rome as if they were exiles, who were then found to be alive.”
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But he did manage to find a few criminals and send their heads to Rome just to quiet the pope.

Some young noblemen put ten cats’ heads on spikes and had them delivered to the Vatican in sacks. The pope, eager to examine new heads, drew them out and swore to do to those who had sent them exactly what they had done to the cats. The young men fled, but the pope didn’t pursue them. He actually thought it was a good joke.

Though the pope was pleased with his heads, and “often went expressly to look at them,” not everyone felt the same way. Usually, heads were taken off their pikes after a few days and either buried or thrown down an old well. But Sixtus didn’t remove the heads. He liked to see them pile up, week after week, month after month, and kept an exact count of them. The problem of the unsightly heads became worse in the stultifying heat of a Roman summer. Black swarms of flies buzzed from head to head, and according to one report, “The quantity of those he displayed incommoded many passing by because of their stench.”
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The chronicler wrote, “Some of the cardinals being nauseated at seeing so many heads, and especially smelling the stink in the summer time, asked the conservators [councilmen] of Rome to take away the heads and bury them. The conservators, wanting to please the cardinals, went to the pope asking him to get rid of the heads because they were rendering nauseous the Roman gentlemen, and others of the court, and they begged that they could be thrown into the usual well.

“The pope, greatly enraged, replied, ‘Oh, what a delicate sense of smell you have, my lords conservators, that the heads of dead people stink to you, heads which don’t harm anyone, while we find that living people who offend the liberty of others are the ones who really stink. We want them to stay put. Those who get nauseated and disgusted can leave Rome. We do not lack conservators and cavaliers who are less sensitive and more attentive to our service, and to that of the city.’ He then had the door closed in their faces, and left, and they were terribly scandalized by the pope’s manners.”
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The request had been a grievous mistake. The pope was quite fond of his heads.

“The following day he issued a notice posted in all public places that anyone under pain of death should not dare to remove the heads from the places where they had been placed, and these were his words, ‘There will be no regard for nobility of whatever grade, nor will any person be excepted, who will remove those heads, because the pope wants it this way.’”
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But soon after, the pope arrived in his audience chamber to find gut-wrenching fumes rising from a “rotten stinking head” next to the papal throne.
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Sixtus had his heads counted, and sure enough one was found to be missing. The Romans laughed at this wonderful joke, but the pope didn’t think it was very funny. He believed that one of the conservators who had complained about the heads had done it, but he didn’t know which one. So he fired all four of them.

A report of September 18, 1585, stated that in the first four months of Sixtus’s reign more bandits’ heads had been exposed on Castel Sant’Angelo Bridge than melons had been brought to the Roman markets. Indeed, the heads were like so many overripe, maggot-infested melons harvested from the pope’s garden. With such numerous executions, the pope needed more executioners than the two employed in Rome, who under Gregory had rarely had any work to do. And foreigners were traditionally executed by their fellow countrymen. So Sixtus hired numerous executioners from various parts of Italy, France, Spain, and Germany, and ordered them “to march once a week, two by two through Rome, nooses over their shoulders, or sometimes holding an axe, to strike fear into the hearts of citizens.”
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One of the assassins of Pope Gregory’s advisor, Vincenzo Vitelli, a certain Manlio da Sturi, was captured and admitted to having murdered eighty-two people. He was paraded through Rome strapped down on a cart as the executioner tore off chunks of his flesh with red hot pincers. His right hand was cut off before he was hanged. Safe in his palace in Florence, the bandit king Piccolomini said of Sixtus, “You can’t joke with this pope.”
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Bandits, who for years had lived comfortably in castles and towns, were now forced to flee to woods and caves. Peasants hunted them like animals for the reward, riding out with nets and dogs hot on their scent. The duke of Urbino knew of a gang of bandits who had entrenched themselves in an unassailable position in the hills. Knowing they were low on provisions, he sent a convoy of mules carrying food over the nearest mountain pass. As expected, the robbers plundered the satchels and ate heartily. But the food was poisoned. The next day the duke sent his guards to pick up the bodies, sever the heads, and send them to the pope. “When intelligence of this was carried to Sixtus V, the pope received thereby an infinite contentment.”
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Those bandits with money and connections in another country fled to Venice, Tuscany, or the kingdom of Naples. But Sixtus knew that they could still conduct raids on his territory and then return over the border to safety. Worse, after his death, they would return for good to the Papal States and once more plague his people.

Within days of his coronation, Sixtus had written to King Philip of Spain, asking him to order the rulers of his Italian principalities to refuse sanctuary to criminals from the Papal States. Philip agreed, as did the dukes of Urbino and Ferrara. The grand duke of Tuscany, however, was more reluctant. The pope had to threaten him with the public disgrace of excommunication before he complied.

Venice, too, was a problem. For centuries it had welcomed exiles, even murderers, who could offer their services or talents to the republic and never questioned them about their crimes. The Venetians jealously guarded the right of sanctuary and rarely extradited anyone. Undeterred, the pope negotiated with the Venetian ambassador. “We want people to live in peace in the States of the Church,” he explained, “and the best means of obtaining this end will be to deprive the evil-doers of any chance of escape. Every prince in Italy and His Catholic Majesty [the king of Spain] have assured us that they will refuse them an entrance into their territories; we trust the Doge will do as much, otherwise we will question his good will towards us.”

The pope added that he did not mind if Venice sent these swashbucklers on military missions to fight the Turks, as long as they were far from Italy. “When it is a question of the respect due the Holy See, which must have more weight in the eyes of the republic than a mere individual, I cannot believe, nor does it appear to me right, that the republic should favor rebels.”
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The republic was painfully aware of how badly it had treated Felice Montalto as inquisitor twenty-five years earlier. Would he hold a grudge against them, harming their trade? As a peace offering, Venice agreed to extradite to Rome any bandits the pope requested.

But not all bandits escaping to nearby nations were easily spotted upon entry. There were no passports with photos, no drivers’ licenses to help the guards at the gate identify them. They were allowed in as law-abiding travelers, and once inside, started murdering and robbing again. Some ambassadors complained to the pope that he had driven his own bandits into their territories where they committed heinous crimes. Smiling, Sixtus replied, “If your masters abandoned to me their states, I would clean them as well as I have done the Papal States. If they followed my example, all Italy would be entirely safe. Monarchs make miracles happen when they want to.”
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After leaving Rome on April 26, Paolo Giordano and Vittoria received frequent reports of the pope’s executions. They were horrified to learn that immediately after the election, criminals across the Papal States, as well as those harboring them, were rounded up and executed, even those of the noblest blood, like Paolo Giordano.

The duke realized that the fortified castle of Bracciano itself was not safe if the pope intended to send an army to storm it. He and Vittoria had to leave the Papal States and find sanctuary in a place outside of Sixtus’s jurisdiction. Once again, he returned to the idea of Venice, a nation that did not jump when a pontiff snapped his fingers. Venice would recognize the duke’s marriage to Vittoria and would drag its feet for years at a request to turn him over to papal guards brandishing a warrant.

In the sixteenth century, travel was not a pleasure but a labor. It was a kind of Renaissance chemotherapy through which an individual, after great pain and suffering, arrived at his goal. The idea of anyone traveling for fun would have been the cause of many hearty guffaws. The roads were prowled by bandits, and riders needed their own escort of armed guards. Carriages usually had secret compartments where passengers stashed their jewelry and cash in case of a hold-up.

It was difficult for travelers to reserve lodgings in advance by mail. Often they didn’t know the address of inns they would be passing by, nor did they know exactly when they would arrive. Bad weather hampered travel for days at a time, sometimes weeks. A wealthy person traveling with an entourage would send a rider ahead to find an inn, reserve the rooms and stalls, and then race back to his employer on the road with news of their lodging for that evening.

But some travelers found no inn when they needed one – before the sun set, when they could still see the road – or they discovered that the only inn for many miles was completely booked, and they would have to sleep in the carriage and hope wolves didn’t attack the horses. When Thomas Coryat traveled in Italy, he reported that one night “the Innes were so extreme full of people by reason of the faire, that I could not get a convenient lodging though I would have given two or three duckats for it. So that I was faine to lye upon straw in one of their stables at the horses feete.”
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We can presume that the next day he picked ticks and fleas off himself.

Some travelers lucky enough to find available rooms were often sorry they had. Many such establishments were as filthy and flea-ridden as the stables, only more expensive. Well-heeled travelers often brought their own mattresses, sheets, and even beds. Montaigne wrote of one inn where there was “a great want of cleanliness in the bedroom service, for he is a lucky man who can have a white sheet… They usually have no covering but a feather quilt, and that very dirty.”
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Guests were sometimes crammed into a single bed with several strangers.

Sometimes the food was barely edible, and the wine like vinegar, all for a terribly high price. There were no menus with various dishes to choose from; the host brought out whatever had been recently killed. Many inns had no window panes, and the icy wind slithered in through gaps in the shutters. Innkeepers were stingy with firewood, or claimed they didn’t have any, or tacked on enormous charges to the hotel bill for every single stick. Whether a noble guest liked his inn or not, he was expected to commission a local artisan to create a wooden image of his coat of arms. The innkeeper would hang this escutcheon on the wall of his establishment, advertising the nobility of his guests. Many inns had their outside and inside walls completely covered with them.

Sixteenth-century carriages had rudimentary springs, which were only as good as the roads they traveled on, and the roads themselves were usually riddled with potholes. When the Chevalier Giambattista Guarini was sent to Poland by the duke of Ferrara in 1573 to congratulate the new king, he wrote a letter to his family in Italy stating that he was not “carried, but dragged, jolted, murdered, in carts which defy description.”
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On May 21, Vittoria and her entourage jolted down the northeast road that led away from Bracciano. It was remarked that she looked exhausted physically and emotionally. So much had happened in the past four years, and now it seemed as if it had all been for nothing. The murder, the guilt, the imprisonment, and now the irony of Cardinal Montalto’s belated election. If she had just waited, she would be the pope’s niece, a princess like Camilla, with unlimited funds at her disposal for dresses, jewels, and banquets. Now she was in exile. She sat silently next to her husband as his coach rattled forward.

On May 26, the group reached the popular pilgrimage destination of Loreto, a small town of tidy houses huddled together on a windswept hill overlooking the Adriatic in the distance. Montaigne wrote of Loreto, “There are hardly any other inhabitants but those in the service of this devotion, such as a number of landlords – yet the inns are dirty enough – and many tradesmen, to wit, sellers of wax images, beads… and such wares, for which there is a large number of fine shops, richly provided.”
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Its only claim to fame, and indeed the only reason for the town’s existence, was that at its epicenter stood the holy house of the Virgin Mary, the one-room stone building in which she was thought to have conceived Jesus, and where she had raised him. It was believed that angels, seeing the Muslims chase out the last Crusaders in the Holy Land in 1291, lifted the Virgin’s house and carried it westward to safety, placing it first in Slavonia – present day Croatia – and three years later plucking it up again and setting it gently down on the hilltop of Loreto.