Murder in the Garden of God (27 page)

One section of the population that blithely ignored the pope’s new rules were the employees of cardinals. It had become a tradition that those working for a prince of the Church could not be imprisoned for debts or have their possessions confiscated to pay them. Many people who had never worked for a cardinal in their lives purchased letters from cardinals stating that they were employees. Sixtus decreed that within eight days all the servants of cardinals must pay their debts, and if they did not, the cardinals would have to pay the debts themselves.

Some cardinals agreed with the pope that the time had come to reform this abuse. But a delegation of twelve cardinals who would be obliged to cover their servants’ massive debts went to the pope and said they were outraged at the insult.

The pope replied, “It is certain, my lord cardinals, that you must praise this resolution to remove from your houses the subject of such a scandal that ruins your decorum and good character. … What would the heretics say when they hear that those cardinals, who are expected to edify the world with a good ecclesiastical life … defend those who do wrong to their neighbors?” Such behavior, he continued, “not only scandalizes heretics, but mortifies good Catholics.”
¹⁴
Then he sent the cardinals away.

The pope ordered the governor to obtain from all Roman merchants lists of debts owed not only by cardinals’ employees, but also the servants of Roman barons – such as the Orsinis – and even foreign ambassadors. The ambassadors were horrified that the diplomatic immunity of their debt-ridden servants was being wrested away and made a flurry of protests. But the pope stated that there was no advantage to his realm when foreigners came to Rome and stole from honest merchants. Such servants should stay home. From now on, those embassy employees who refused to pay their debts would be arrested and their possessions seized.

While Sixtus’s measures greatly helped honest merchants, he was also on the lookout for dishonest ones. He hired six secret shoppers who saw first-hand the kind of merchandise being offered and noted which merchants treated poor shoppers worse than rich ones. Wandering through the market with baskets, they noticed quickly if a vendor used the wrong weights and measures. The foodstuffs of these merchants were confiscated and given to the poor. When bad fruit was being sold as good, it was seized and either thrown in the Tiber or given to pigs “so that no shop owner dared to sell bad merchandise,” wrote the chronicler.
¹⁵

Periodically, the pope would have his cortege stop in front of a bakery where he would order his servants to bring him bread. If it was not of good quality, if the baker were mixing in beans and stalks with the grain to pocket money, Sixtus would seize all the bread and give it to the poor. In one particularly egregious case, the pope hanged a baker for mixing ashes in with the grain.

“In the piazzas they found the very best [bread],” wrote a
relatione
author, “and in great abundance, and the bakers didn’t commit any fraud in making it, nor in selling it.”
¹⁶

Having been raised in a family so poor that they often went hungry, Sixtus understood the importance of nutritious bread at a fair price for the poor. He donated 200,000 scudi annually to subsidize Rome’s bread supply and make loans to poor peasants outside the city to grow grain.

In another effort to help the poor of Rome, Sixtus passed a law that all taverns must offer a half-glass of wine because some people simply couldn’t afford a full glass. Mixing a half-glass with water was still a satisfying drink for a poor person. One night, donning shoddy patched robes, he slipped inside a tavern and sat down.

When the tavern keeper asked him what he wanted to drink, Sixtus said he would like a half-glass of wine. The host replied there was no such thing as a half-glass of wine. Sixtus said in a shaking voice, “I only have enough quattrini for half a glass. And Pope Sixtus has ordered tavern keepers to sell a half-glass.”

The host replied that he didn’t care and added, “Go to the pope and tell him that I don’t want to go up so many stairs for a half-glass of wine.”
¹⁷
Sixtus obediently shuffled off. Back in the papal palace he gave orders for the governor to arrest the tavern keeper and build a gallows in front of the building. The man was hanged before noon the next day.

Chapter 20

Desperation

We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed;

we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken;

cast down, but not destroyed.

– 2 Corinthians 4:8-9

S
afely ensconced in Padua, Paolo Giordano received news from Rome that the pope’s edicts were getting worse and worse each day. He must have realized that many of the decrees seemed to be payback aimed at him and Vittoria, and those like them. What would happen to Vittoria after Paolo Giordano’s death? She would probably not be able to return to her family in the Papal States.

The duke wanted to extend a network of support for Vittoria outside the pope’s territory. Already the dukes of Urbino and Ferrara had recognized the validity of their marriage. Now the ducal couple wanted Tuscany – far more powerful and bordering the Papal States – to do so. This was an extremely naive desïre, considering how protective Grand Duke Francesco was of Virginio’s inheritance, which was clearly threatened by the charming new bride.

Undeterred by common sense, as soon as the duke and duchess arrived in Venice they had called on the father and brother of Bianca Cappello, the former mistress and now the wife of Grand Duke Francesco of Tuscany. Three weeks later, on July 19, Vittoria wrote to the Tuscan grand duchess from Padua:

To the Most Serene and Revered Signora,

If up until now I have not made my respects to your Serene Highness, it was only out of observance and humility. Now, being come to Venice, where I have had the fortune to meet and be of service to your Highness’s most illustrious brother and his consort, from whom I have received many favors and graces, I didn’t want to wait for another occasion to make myself known as your most humble servant, as I have been for many years because of your virtue.

Not many spoke of Bianca’s virtue, and we can only wonder if the grand duchess was puzzled when she read this. Vittoria continued:

Since my most excellent lord has deigned to make me worthy of being his consort, I am now much more obliged and wish to serve you. His Excellency is a particularly devoted servant of your Highness, and I ask you to accept me as a true and ardent servant, not ceding to anyone else in terms of respect and fidelity. I ask you to command me and to maintain me in the favor of his most serene Highness your consort. Kissing with humility the clothing of the one and the other Highness [Bianca and Francesco], I pray God to give you every happiness.

You most serene Highness’s most humble and devoted servant,

Vittoria Accoramboni Orsini
¹

When Bianca wrote back with a short note addressing Vittoria as
Excellency,
the honorific of a duchess, Vittoria practically fell over herself with gratitude. Many royal wives would not have lowered themselves to send polite letters to a dubious woman like Vittoria, but Bianca was not exactly to the purple born herself. Her story was somewhat similar to Vittoria’s.

Raised in a noble Venetian family by her father and wicked stepmother, at the age of fifteen the gorgeous Bianca had eloped with a young man whom she thought was a wealthy Florentine nobleman. But her seducer had lied; he was the nobleman’s servant. By the time Bianca found out, she was wedded, bedded, pregnant, and wanted by Venetian authorities as a rebel.

Bianca trudged behind her husband to Florence, where he installed her in a decrepit hovel stuffed with his large family. There, leaning out the window one day, she was spotted by the heir to the throne, Francesco, who fell head over heels in love with her. Though he married the unattractive Austrian princess picked out for him, he never stopped seeing Bianca, whose husband was mysteriously stabbed to death one night right in front of her door.

Starting in 1564, Francesco served as regent for his father and gained more power as Duke Cosimo slipped into depression and illness, dying a decade later. In 1578, Francesco’s unloved wife died, and soon after he married Bianca, to the horror of his entire family. Like Vittoria, Bianca had risen from almost nothing to a vaunted position of wealth and power through her sex appeal, her ambition, and the timely murder of her first husband. Like Vittoria, Bianca knew she would be in grave danger if her powerful second husband died before her. Relatives angry at the misalliance and upset about her inheritance would most likely poison or stab her, or at least take away her possessions and wall her up in a convent.

In 1581, Montaigne attended a banquet in Florence where he studied Bianca carefully. “This duchess is handsome,” he wrote, “according to Italian ideas, a pleasant and dignified face, big bust, and breasts as they like them.” He thought “she was quite capable of having bewitched this prince, and of retaining him at her feet for a long time.”
²
Indeed, the morose Francesco, who had calmly ordered the strangulation of his sister, was known to love only one person in his life, and that person was Bianca.

But recognition by the wife of the grand duke of Tuscany, as sweet as it was, was not the official recognition Vittoria wanted from the grand duke himself. Paolo Giordano wrote Francesco, giving him news of the safe arrival of himself and Vittoria in Padua.

Francesco wrote back, “Your Excellency can imagine my contentment when I learned of your safe arrival in Padua. Here the weather is varied and tends to coolness and to humidity… and it makes me happy that you can expect a season perfectly appropriate for taking the baths. I wish you good health with a good cure.”
³

The reply was shockingly rude in that it did not mention Paolo Giordano’s wife. Every letter of the time was supposed to send greetings to, and wish good health for, the close relatives of the recipient. Yet Francesco wrote as if Vittoria did not exist. Clearly, the grand duke did not acknowledge her as Paolo Giordano’s wife. On August 10, Vittoria set to work once more on Bianca:

To the most Serene and Revered Signora,

I kiss the hands of your most serene Highness for the favor you have done for me with the very short letter, for which I remain to you in perpetual obligation… I beg you to favor me with your commands, and to favor me with your most serene consort, as a creature and servant of your Highness worthy of his favor and of his commands, kissing with all humility and reverence the hands of both of you, I ask God for your complete contentment.

The duke, too, worked on Bianca. The same day he wrote:

It has pleased your Highness to show favor to my wife, even though your Highness is a princess so great…. A tranquil future for me and for my family depends on this as well as on many other favors that flow from the bounty of your Highness in this particular. Since it has pleased your Highness to favor me with so much signal favor, I ask you to work for me so that the grand duke my signor favors me with a similar favor, because all my fortune and my life will be spent for his Highness with all the honor and reputation I have.

Swaggering a bit, he added, “I am not unuseful regarding friends, or things, or relatives.”
⁴

Bianca wrote back that she had gotten absolutely nowhere with her husband, who steadfastly refused to recognize Vittoria. On September 7, Paolo Giordano wrote her again:

To the most Serene and Revered Signora,

I kiss the hands of your Highness for the favor that you have done for me with the Highness of the grand duke, and I want again to ask your Highness to help me receive this signal favor from the grand duke, which I desire above anything else, she being already my wife… Since it is his duty as a just prince… to favor me with his protection and favor, he must not outrage my wife… And if there has been an error, his Highness with his authority should forgive my imperfections.
⁵

But this letter, too, achieved nothing. The duke, who became easily obsessed when he didn’t get his way, wrote Bianca again on October 12, insisting she persuade her husband to recognize Vittoria. This time there was no answer.

* * *

While most men of the time would have gladly lied about childhood poverty, or at least not spoken about it, the pope brought up his former indigence frequently. Looking around crowds of well-born nobles, he realized they had had to accomplish very little to rise to their positions, and frequently pricked them with this fact. He, on the other hand, had accomplished a great deal. “Instead of blushing for his poverty, he made it into an honor,” wrote Gregorio Leti.
⁶

When foreign visitors delivered the usual flowery compliments on the illustrious nobility of his family, he laughed, describing a house with holes in the roof and walls. “With the sun coming in from all sides,” he said, “I can boast of having one of the most brilliant houses in Europe.”
⁷
He then went on to describe his youth spent raising pigs, cutting wood, planting vegetables and, as a monk, ringing the church bells and sweeping the floors. Those listening were often too stunned to respond; it was as if the pope had just confessed to horrible crimes.

Listeners were also shocked when the pope spoke of politics in gardening terms – clipping, uprooting, fertilizing, pruning, watering, and harvesting. He liked to nip things in the bud and separate the wheat from the chaff. He spoke of the Biblical laborers in the vineyard, the barren fig tree, and the farmer sowing his seed on good soil and rocky ground. Once when talking with the Tuscan ambassador, Sixtus said that “the grand duke had cause to wish him well, being like the husbandman who, when he has planted a tree, rejoices to see it thrive and live long.”
⁸

Sixtus had no pastimes, unlike many of his predecessors on the papal throne who played cards for hours at a time. He took no vacations and was a “great enemy of recreation,” according to a
relatione,
scorning the country pleasure villas of the popes and cardinals. “The treasure of the Church is for the Church,” he said, “and must be saved only for the poor… The blood of Christ should not be spent for the recreation of popes and the pleasure of their relatives.”
⁹

He spent every waking moment working, and sometimes he didn’t go to bed at all, reading and writing dispatches until dawn and starting a busy new day without a wink of sleep. At other times, when there were no emergencies, he slept long hours to catch up. Even in his sleep he talked out loud about government business. His servants were instructed to wake him at any time of night if a courier arrived with important news or letters. He said, “We want to be in control of sleep and not permit sleep to be in control of us.”
¹⁰

Sixtus only left the papal palace to attend church services across town, to look into the needs of his subjects, or to check on his building projects. According to one
relatione
author, “The pope felt that time was scarce and therefore did everything at once.”
¹¹
He always had the irksome feeling that his reign would be short.

Sixtus loved wine, and though he never became inebriated, he often had three or four different kinds served at each meal. “He worked continuously and therefore needed sustenance,” reported the chronicler.
¹²
He usually sat two hours at meals, but most of this time was spent in discussing business with his guests or listening to his secretaries read dispatches and reports.

The pope was “most sparing of food, and very temperate in sleep; never seen idle, but even when at leisure ever meditating either study or business.”
¹³

Sometimes he ate on his feet saying, “We don’t even have time to eat.”
¹⁴

The Sacred College was shocked at his non-stop work, and several cardinals took a renewed interest in finding out exactly how old he was. As a wheezing, limping cardinal, he had added seven years to his age, giving the year of his birth as 1514. But once elected pope he deducted six, having been born, he declared, in 1527. Sixtus had gone from the age of seventy to fifty-seven in a matter of hours. The cardinals secretly sent to his birthplace for his baptismal records, which indicated that he had been born in December 1521.

Periodically, the pope would visit without notice his former monastery of the Saints Apostles. He would walk inside, knock on the door of a monk’s cell chosen at random, go in and meet the monk. He wanted to see if the monk had a hangover, or a woman or boy in the room, or if he wasn’t there at all, having perhaps spent the night at a tavern. Similarly, he wanted to see which monks were on their knees praying or studying Scripture.

Early one morning, he happened to knock on the door of a new monk who had just arrived from Naples and hadn’t heard about the pope’s unheralded visits. The monk was sound asleep when he heard the banging on his door. “Who is it?” he asked, groggy and irritated. “It’s the pope,” was the response. Thinking it was a fellow monk playing a joke on him, the monk cried, “You’re full of shit.”

The monastery’s father guardian was horrified and wanted to barge in and punish the monk, but the pope, quoting from a Psalm, said laughing, “The poor are lifted from the dunghill.”
¹⁵
Clearly, he was referring to himself, and his having been born on top of a huge pile of the stuff. In a way, the foul-mouthed monk had been right.

All popes had to be concerned with possible poisoning attempts and Sixtus, due to the hatred he had incurred among the cardinals, nobles, and ambassadors, had much more reason than most popes to be watchful. He had guards in his kitchen keeping their eye on his food the moment it was delivered, throughout its preparation, and all the way up to his table. Then food tasters nibbled from each plate, as everyone else in the room watched to see if they would grab their throats and collapse. Sixtus was even suspicious of the Holy Communion wafer. Instead of eating it whole, he broke it in half and gave one part to the sacristan standing nearby to eat, sometimes the right half, and sometimes the left. If the sacristan didn’t fall over stone dead, the pope would consume his half.