Murder in the Garden of God (23 page)

Recent scholarship has shown that the story is not as ridiculous as it first appears. A family named de Angelis, which ruled the Greek kingdom of Epirus, brought the stones back from Nazareth with the aid of the Knights Templar. The stones were first unloaded in Slavonia, and three years later they became part of the dowry of Margherita de Angelis when she married an Italian prince. Uprooted once again, they found their permanent home in Loreto. Given the legendary flight, more recently the Virgin of Loreto was made the special patroness of aviators.

While Italians revered the holy house and were grateful that it had chosen them to take care of it, Slavonians bewailed the fact that the house had so disliked them that it had flown away. Montaigne recorded that they made “so many protestations and promises to Our Lady to make her return to them, and so many lamentations for having given her occasion for abandoning them, that it is a wonder.”
³²

In a 1960s study, two coins datable to 1285-1308 were found between the stones, as well as five pieces of red cloth in the form of Templar crosses. The stones are of Nabatean make – an ancient Levantine tribe near Judea – and some sixty of them have proto-Christian graffiti on them in Greek and Hebrew, a sure sign the house was revered in the early years of Christianity.
Here the Word was made Flesh,
says one from the second century.

The building had only three walls, a common feature of Judean homes of the time, which were often built projecting out from a cave, where the owners stored supplies or stabled animals. Interestingly, the Loreto house has exactly the same dimensions as a structure that has been removed from inside the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth, the traditional site of the incarnation. In the church, behind the outline of the three walls, is a cave.

In the fifteenth century, an enormous white marble church was built around the resurrected holy house, which stands just behind the main altar. Giuliano da Sangallo completed the huge dome in 1500, and in 1509, Donato Bramante encased the rather pitiful looking brown walls of the holy house in an ornate white marble façade of friezes and statues, which make it look like a huge square wedding cake. Inside the house, a fourth wall has been added with an altar, and the ceiling has been raised to give the room a more impressive height from which to hang lanterns.

At that altar, Vittoria Accoramboni and Duke Paolo Giordano Orsini, sinners sorely in need of forgiveness and redemption, got down on their knees and prayed to the wooden statue of the Virgin on the altar. And Paolo Giordano promised the Virgin a beautiful new bejeweled crown if she would only help them.

In Loreto, Vittoria met with the archbishop of Bologna who was staying there, Cardinal Gabriel Paleotto, and asked him for communion. He noted “her deep piety and religion.”
³³
Or perhaps it was guilt.

From Loreto the Orsinis went to Fossombrone to visit Vittoria’s brother, Bishop Ottavio. Then they trundled on to Urbino, a tiny independent nation. Though he was an ardent supporter of the pope’s campaign against bandits, Duke Francesco Maria II della Rovere had always been friendly to Paolo Giordano and now took Vittoria under his wing as well. It is likely that the couple wanted to know whether they could count on the duke to protect her after Paolo Giordano died.

And indeed the duke’s health had become alarmingly bad. He had gained so much weight recently that when he stood up it seemed as if rolls of meat were falling off of him which stopped half-way to the floor. Perhaps goaded by his increasing obesity, the old arrow wound in his left leg opened up again. When the Orsinis reached the port city of Pesaro, the duke had to undergo treatment before he could continue. Doctors called such an infection a
wolf,
because the wound was flesh-eating. To prevent the wound from devouring the flesh around it, doctors put slabs of fresh meat on it and the infection devoured the meat instead. The disease spread to his face, causing a fire-red rash of oozing blisters.

The healing waters of the Abano baths outside Venice were generally believed to be the best remedy for such an affliction.

Unable to rattle further over bumpy roads, Paolo Giordano asked the republic of Venice to send two galleys to Pesaro to take him, his possessions, and his servants there. Because of the grandeur and merits of his family, which years earlier had been inscribed among the Venetian nobility, his request was granted.

The ships duly arrived. Groaning under the weight of their illustrious burden, four porters carried the great duke of Bracciano on board on a stretcher as Vittoria trudged wearily behind.

Chapter 16

Justice for All

I know that the Lord secures justice for the poor

and upholds the cause of the needy.

– Psalm 140:12

O
nce the pope had initiated the firestorm of activity to round up the bandits, he turned his attention to the courts. Sixtus personally examined the records of criminal cases going back several years and stayed up late at night reading the reports of trials, confessions, and interrogations. Seeing so many injustices in the reports he read, he ordered all governors of the Papal States to examine criminal cases going back at least ten years for miscarriages of justice, despite sentences having been completed by the defendants.

Those judges who had been too lenient were fired, especially if they had given a lighter sentence to a nobleman than they had to a poor man for the same crime. The defendant who had gotten off too easily was rounded up and hauled back to jail and, if he had murdered or raped someone, executed. One man who had obtained a slap on the wrist for a murder he had committed as a youth thirty-six years earlier was dragged from his home and beheaded.

Sixtus threatened all judges with immediate execution if they accepted bribes. He threatened citizens with execution if they knew something about a corrupt judge and refused to come forward with the information. Many judges fled the Papal States. Lawyers, who knew very well their clients were guilty but protested their innocence just the same, were thrown into prison. Unethical judges and lawyers were whipped naked through the streets of Rome to the laughter of the people.

Sixtus held regular open houses where every citizen of the Papal States, no matter how poor, could personally tell him of injustices, or at least present a petition to him that he would read later. He looked into every request. One day the pope received a petition from a poor widow who had been in litigation for three years over a little house she owned. The lawyers had bankrupted her. She asked the pope to render a decision since she could no longer afford to pay for legal counsel. Enraged, Sixtus hauled in the dilatory judge, made him pay her back all her legal fees, and fired him. He then decreed that judges and lawyers must move through their trials in a speedy manner so that the process cost the litigants as little as possible.

The pope had created an atmosphere in which every citizen was supposed to report crimes, injustice, and blasphemy or else be punished himself. Naturally, some people told false tales to avenge themselves on enemies. But Sixtus and his team of investigators looked carefully into every accusation, and those who had lied were punished more severely than people guilty of crimes. One man falsely accused a tailor whom he disliked. The tailor was thrown into prison. When examination of witnesses proved the tailor innocent, he was released. The false accuser was brutally whipped and sent to the galleys for life.

Sixtus was an equal opportunity employer on the look-out for men of a stern nature like himself who could work in the jails or the courts, depending on their education. He even searched for new employees on the streets as he rode by. According to the chronicler, “When he went throughout the city, looking at the people, and seeing some person with a bitter and severe face, he called him to his presence and asked about his quality, and if he found in this examination the person capable of rendering some service to the principality or the Holy Church conforming to his mind, he would immediately confer on him some office.”
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Sixtus wanted to break forever the unbridled power of Roman princes like the Orsinis. He knew that the next pope could return to the old ways in a heartbeat, undoing all of Sixtus’s laws. One means of ensuring that the nobles’ power was broken forever was to dilute it. He would create powerful new noblemen loyal to him, men who, after his death, could not be made to disappear with a signature, as a law could.

The pope invited to Rome the distant relatives of noble families, men who wanted land and a good living and who were willing to devote themselves to serving the pope and the Church. These men would obtain their desires by serving Sixtus and not their baronial relatives who would enlist them in personal armies opposed to the pope. Any crimes they had committed would be pardoned, and they would be given prestigious titles.

Destitute, they trickled in and threw themselves at the feet of the pope, who gave them the titles of count, marquis, and even duke, and turned over to them the lands he had confiscated from bandit-harboring barons. This action offset the power of the old noble families such as the Orsinis, who were horrified that their poor cousins suddenly had equal titles.

The Romans were delighted that their new pontiff was tough on crime and did not spare the powerful their just punishments. No one could saunter away from a murder or rape because of noble birth, high office, or important connections.

When the new governor of Rome, Mariano Pierbenedetti, took office in August, the pope admonished him “to attend to justice without respect of persons, and to particularly aid the causes of the poor.”
²
Many nobles like Paolo Giordano Orsini, knowing the pope was out to get them, fled Rome.

Nor did Sixtus spare diplomatic staff. When the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II sent a delegation to recognize the authority of Sixtus, one of the delegates was arrested and flogged for causing a brawl. Though the ambassador protested vigorously, the pope replied that even if the emperor himself came to Rome, he would have to obey the laws or suffer the punishment. “This prince has no respect even for cardinals or the ambassadors of the crowned heads,” reported a shocked
avvisi
writer on June 26, 1585.
³

Sixtus even executed a cardinal’s son. The Marchese of Gallese, the son of Cardinal Altemps, had raped the beautiful lady-in-waiting of a Roman noblewoman and thrown her out of a window. Sixtus had the man locked up in the Castel Sant’Angelo. Upon further investigation, it was learned that the marchese had in his past butchered a priest, taken out the eye of a Jew, raped a boy and thrown him out of a window, and had sexual relations with a nun. Considering his illustrious parentage, any other pope would have exiled the man. But Sixtus, who had, right before the conclave, “made a very open declaration of the best possible good will and of the eternal obligations that he had” for Cardinal Altemps and his son, ordered the marchese’s execution.
⁴
He also hanged Cardinal Decio Azzolini’s nephew for murder.

There was an hierarchy of humiliation at an execution. Noblemen were routinely spared a public death, which was carried out to the jeers, hoots, and vegetable throwing of the mob, and were decorously executed inside their prisons. And the swift stroke of a beheading was considered far nobler than the slow choking of a hanging. Being strangled sitting stoically in a chair inside a cell was also considered a dignified death. But Marchese Altemps and the young Azzolini were hanged publicly, in front of Castel Sant’Angelo, as if they were the lowest-born criminals. Scarlet-faced, eyes bulging grotesquely from their sockets, grisly sounds gurgling out of their throats, they died after several excruciating minutes.

Under Gregory’s reign, Sixtus had been perturbed at how women were frequently mistreated in the streets – raped, molested, pinched, kissed, and insulted. Now Sixtus had rapists executed. Though many Italians considered ass-pinching funny, Sixtus didn’t. The pinchers were whipped severely and imprisoned. Even those who verbally insulted women in public or flirted with them in a bawdy way received harsh punishments. An employee of Cardinal Giovanni Sorbelloni’s was whipped for saying filthy words in front of ladies, even though those particular ladies liked what he was saying. The cardinal’s personal intercession was, of course, scornfully rejected.

“It is incredible how Sixtus guarded the honor of women,” the chronicler wrote, “whether noble or not – and what an enemy he was to those who harmed or insulted them, particularly on the public streets… So that the streets of Rome were so secure that the girls would go about freely and without fear, as no one dared to outrage their honor, whether they were noblewomen or servant girls, as there was no distinction of persons.”
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Within a few months of his election, the city of Rome and the Papal States were almost completely free of crime. Indeed, people were afraid to argue with each other in case the argument got out of hand and it was reported to the pope. Bandits had either fled, or reformed, or died. According to one papal historian, “It was a matter of great pride and rejoicing to the pope, when ambassadors now arriving at his court assured him that ‘in every part of his states through which the road had led, they had traveled through a land blessed with peace and security.’”
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* * *

In the first half of June, Paolo Giordano and Vittoria, their servants, horses, carriages, and mountains of fine furniture trundled off the Venetian ships which had docked near Abano. It was a short carriage ride to the baths.

In the sixteenth century, bathing was a medical treatment, not a matter of hygiene. As far as personal cleanliness was concerned, a French etiquette book recommended that a gentleman wash his hands every day and “his face almost as often.”
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The Portuguese doctor, Roderigo Fonseco, declared that “washing, scrubbing, and anointing provoke great fatigue, besides being superfluous.”
⁸

Bathing for hygiene was considered superfluous because linen shirts, which men and women wore beneath their doublets and gowns, absorbed sweat and dirt, thereby taking the place of a bath. In 1602, the physician Bartolomeo Paschetti wrote that bathing “was the discovery of the ancients for keeping the body fresh and clean, for since they did not have the custom of wearing linen garments, or even if they did these were used by few, they were apt to become covered in dirt of all kinds… but in our own times since all, rich and poor alike, are accustomed to wear shirts and thereby more easily keep the body clean, the bath is neither so widely nor frequently employed as in the times of the ancients.”
⁹

Sitting in a tub of water was believed to cause blindness unless the individual was under a doctor’s care at a therapeutic health spa. And each bathing establishment had complicated regulations designed to provide patients with the cure they were seeking without, at the same time, blinding them. Some baths mandated that the water was strictly for drinking, so many glasses a day at prescribed times; other baths were for soaking, and yet others were steam baths. Some spas had healing mud, which servants rubbed over the affected body parts. Other baths offered saunas. Doctors encouraged sweating, along with the evacuation of the nose, mouth, ears, and private parts, because it disposed of excrement which would otherwise rise to the brain.

To avoid the spreading of contagious diseases, some bath managers inspected the naked bodies of bathers before they dipped a toe in the water. The manager of one bath proclaimed, “And because, by the benefit of the said baths, God and Nature afford us many cures and reliefs, and that it is essential to maintain a seemly purity and cleanliness, to obviate various contagions and infections which might there be engendered, it is expressly ordered that the Master of the said baths shall take careful heed and examine the bodies of those who enter the baths.”
¹⁰

While we have no records of the Orsinis’ experience at the baths, Michel de Montaigne has left us priceless descriptions from four years earlier. In 1581, the French nobleman toured the baths of France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, on a search for an elusive cure for his appalling kidney stones. He passed them almost every day, carefully jotting down the size, shape, consistency, and color in his travel diary, which makes reading his journal unwise for anyone about to eat dinner.

Montaigne reported that a few establishments had showers. The water, pumped from thermal springs, was hot to begin with. He wrote, “There is also a dripping apparatus here that they call a
doccia,
that is tubes from which you receive hot water upon different parts of the body and especially the head, by means of channels which bring the water down upon you to beat upon that part in a continuous spray and warm it, and then the water is received into a wooden trough, like those used by the washerwomen, along which it flows away.”
¹¹

Baths had a strong social element woven into their healing treatments. Visitors danced, feasted, flirted, and played cards in the evening. Many an infertile woman, hoping to cure her barrenness, came home pregnant – not by her husband, but by another visitor, indicating that her husband’s sperm count had been the problem all along. “Whoever wants his wife to have a child, should send her to Bath and stay at home,” according to a contemporary saying.
¹²

Thomas Coryat was shocked by what he noticed at one bath. “Also I have noted another strange thing amongst them that I have not a little wondred at,” he wrote. “Men and women bathing themselves together naked from the middle upward in one bathe… For mine owne part were I a married man, and meant to spend some little time here with my wife for solace and recreation sake, truly I should hardly be perswaded to suffer her to bathe her selfe naked in one and the selfe same bath with one only bachelor or married man with her, because if she was faire, and had an attractive countenance, she might perhaps cornifie me.”
¹³

Coryat’s cornification aside, many bathing establishments fought their reputation as centers for casual sexual encounters and posted notices that prostitutes were forbidden to come near, under penalty of whipping. By the same token, “All persons are forbidden to use towards the ladies, gentlewomen, and other women and girls, frequenting said baths, any lascivious or immodest language; to touch their persons indecorously; or to enter or quit the said baths disrespectfully, contrary to public propriety.”

The English traveler believed in the “vertue of the bathes, by meanes whereof it heateth and dryeth up all noysome and cold humours. Also it is good for those infirmities which proceede from the cold of the head, as the lethargie, the apoplexie, the diseases of the eares and eyes. It heateth and dryeth up the stomach, helpeth the digestive faculty, openeth the obstructions of the liver and spleene, asswageth the biting and fretting of the guts, appeaseth the paine of the members that proceedeth from cold, and to conclude, it cleanseth the skinne from spots and freckles.”
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