Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition (40 page)

Bernini, the greatest sculptor of his age, was to create the unforgettable image of Baroque Rome, and of the seventeenth-century papacy. The fundamental commission here was the immense baldacchino Urban ordered to be placed over the high altar in St Peter s, which was begun in 1624, and which cost a tenth of the annual income of the Papal States. Modelled on the barley-sugar columns traditionally associated with the Constantinian shrine of Peter, the baldechino was a complete artistic success, instantly dominating and focusing the building on the tomb of the saint and the papal altar above it. Yet it was also a gross example of papal self-aggrandisement. The Barberini bees, monstrously enlarged, crawl up the columns, and the raw material for the commission was collected by stripping bronze girders from great classical buildings like the Pantheon, thereby provoking the observation that ‘The
Barberini have done what the barbarians never managed.’

That mixture of spiritual symbolism and vulgar ambition was characteristic of the entire pontificate. Urban’s reign saw an immense flowering of Christian energy and a new phase of the Counter-Reformation, with the work of great pastoral reformers like the Frenchman Vincent de Paul. Urban himself took an eager interest in Christian missions, and founded the Collegium Urbanum to train clergy for the work of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith. Yet at the heart of the regime was a coarse secularism which inexorably eroded the spiritual prestige of the Baroque papacy. It was manifest in the autocratic absolutism of the Pope himself, who consulted no one and exercised the papal office as though he were an oriental khan. ‘The only use of cardinals these days’, wrote the Venetian Ambassador, ‘is to act as a grandiose crown for the Pope.’

It was even more evident in the gross nepotism of the Pope, the endless promotion and enrichment of his family. There was nothing new about this, of course, but even by the standards of the period Urban carried nepotism to new heights. His favouritism to his family cost the papacy 105,000,000 scudi, and in old age would torment Urban with well-justified fears that he had squandered the patrimony of the Church. His nephews drew him into a disastrous war at the end of his pontificate with their hated rival Odoardo Farnese, who held the papal fief of Castro. This cynical war, undertaken to grab Farnese’s possessions on a flimsy pretext, ultimately drew Venice, Tuscany and Modena into an anti-papal league, left the Papal States devastated, the papal coffers empty, and the ambition of Urban to assert an unchallenged secular power in Italy in shreds.

The war of Castro was not the only political catastrophe of Urban’s pontificate, for his Francophile sympathies led to a steady alienation between the papacy and the Habsburgs in Spain and the empire. Urban understood the need for the Pope to preserve neutrality between Catholic nations, and genuinely struggled to do so. He was convinced, however, that Habsburg dominance in Italy was a greater danger to the papacy than any threat from France, and this assumption, coupled with his natural sympathy for France, consistently skewed his policy. When the Gonzaga line in the duchy of Mantua failed in 1627, therefore, Urban backed the French candidate for the succession. Since Mantua ran alongside the Spanish duchy of Milan, that decision permanently coloured Spain’s attitude towards him.

The same pro-French sympathies coloured Urban’s involvement in the Thirty Years War. Here again his intentions were basically good, for he wanted to settle the rivalry between Richelieu’s France and Spain and the Habsburg empire, in the interests of a concerted front against Protestantism. It was a hopeless task. France worked to inflame the Pope’s fears of Spanish ambition in Italy, and Spain took a high moral line on Urban’s failure to condemn Richelieu’s alliance with Protestant Sweden – as Philip IV wrote to the Pope in 1635, ‘I trust that … your Holiness will deal with the King of France, who has allied himself with the Protestants, as the duty of a Pope demands.’
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The failure of the Pope to achieve peace between the Catholic parties to the Thirty Years War was an eloquent – and for the papacy an ominous – indicator of the increasingly marginal place of religious considerations in determining the politics of Europe.

The rigidities of Urban’s pontificate revealed themselves in other ways, above all in the Galileo affair. By the early 1630s Galileo was the most celebrated scientist in Italy The Pope himself had written a Latin ode celebrating Galileo’s discovery of sun-spots. The pioneers of early modern astronomy had met with papal encouragement. Nicholas Copernicus’ epoch-making treatise outlining the revolutionary heliocentric hypothesis (that the earth and other planets revolved round the sun, not the sun round the earth) was dedicated to Paul III, and the Counter-Reformation popes had encouraged astronomy, Gregory XIII being credited with establishing the Vatican Observatory. The heliocentric theory was in apparent contradiction of the biblical account of creation, but it created no difficulties until 1616, when Galileo’s own attempts to promote Copernicus’ ideas triggered a belated condemnation of Copernicus. Despite this, Cardinal Barberini managed to prevent the inclusion of Galileo’s name in the general condemnation of the Copernican system and its supporters. Galileo’s own theories were freely discussed in Roman circles, and his attack on Aristotelian physics was tacitly approved. He was able to teach that the earth circled the sun under the thin pretext that he offered this as a way of making calculations, and not as a fact. Galileo was elaborately deferential to Church tradition, and careful to insist that he was an honest experimenter, who intended no invasion of the territory of the philosophers or theologians.

In 1632, however, he published a set of dialogues which clearly defended Copernicanism as true, and which made it clear that he
thought his discoveries did indeed have theological implications. He was denounced to the Inquisition. The position was not helped by the fact that Galileo put in the mouth of a foolish character in the dialogues an argument which the Pope had once publicly defended. When it emerged that Galileo had been specifically warned by the Inquisition not to teach the heliocentric theory, the Pope’s attitude to his erstwhile friend and client changed. Urban was an authoritarian. Error and conceit he could forgive: deliberate defiance of ecclesiastical authority was another matter. Galileo, he declared, ‘has dared to meddle with matters beyond his competence … it is an injury to religion as grievous as ever there was and of a perverseness as bad as could be encountered’. Galileo was forced to abjure the Copernican system, condemned to perpetual imprisonment (commuted in view of his age and eminence to house arrest) and forbidden to publish or teach. The contrast between the earlier toleration and indeed lionising of Galileo and the injustice of his condemnation was an eloquent sign of the rigidity of Baroque Catholicism. Underneath the extravagant architecture and showy surfaces was a deep uncertainty, which was resolved by the peremptory exercise of authority.

For the rest of the century the style established by Urban VIII determined the external face of the papacy. His successors Innocent X (1644–55) and Alexander VII (1655–67) continued Urban’s patronage of Bernini, which bore fruit in a series of astonishing projections of the Baroque papacy’s self-image – the Fountain of the Four Rivers in the Piazza Navona, the tombs of Urban and Alexander VII in St Peter’s, and perhaps above all the great curved colonnade in the Piazza outside St Peter’s, and the stupendous and theatrical shrine of the Chair of St Peter in the apse of the basilica itself. It is an unintended irony that this latter extravagant exaltation of papal power should have been built round a chair believed to be that of St Peter, but which was almost certainly the throne of the Frankish Emperor Charles the Bald.

Bernini’s glorification of the Chair of Peter was hollow in more ways than one, for the principal legacy of Urban VIII was debt. He himself had inherited a debt of between 16,000,000 and 18,000,000 scudi, and within twelve years had added another 12,000,000 scudi to it. A huge proportion of papal income went into servicing this growing mass of debt. By 1635 the pope had only 600,000 scudi per annum available for current expenditure, and by 1640, when the debt had spiralled
to 35,000,000, this had shrunk to 300,000. Eighty-five per cent of papal income was being swallowed up by interest repayments.

The political helplessness of the papacy became clearer with every pontificate, and particularly so in the relations of the popes with France. Urban’s elderly and mistrustful successor Innocent X was as hostile to France as Urban had been favourable. France’s gain, Innocent considered, was inevitably the Roman Church’s loss – ‘only on Spain could the Holy See rely with safety’. Cardinal Mazarin, chief minister of France, seriously considered refusing to recognise Innocent’s election (he had sent a veto which arrived too late) and French hostility persisted into the pontificate of Innocent’s successor Alexander VII. The papacy’s international role as peacemaker between Catholic nations suffered as a result, for the French would not permit papal mediation at the Peace of the Pyrenees between Spain and France in 1659. French pressure on the papacy was relentless. In 1664 Louis XIV invaded the papal territory of Avignon and forced the Pope into a humiliating treaty at Pisa. It had long been accepted that a pope must defer to the Catholic monarchs by appointing cardinals to represent their interests in the Curia. In 1675 the French tried to force the Pope to nominate a number of French cardinals. When the Pope, for diplomatic reasons, delayed, the French Ambassador in Rome, Cardinal d’Estrées, badgered the aged and frail Clement X, pushing him back into his chair when Clement tried to end the audience. Louis XIV put steady pressure on the papacy by extending the exercise of the
régale
, royal control over episcopal appointments in France, and over the revenues of vacant bishoprics and benefices. Inexorably the church in France, as in other parts of the Catholic world, was becoming a department of state.

The subordination of the papacy to the Catholic princes was not confined within national boundaries. It reached out into the College of Cardinals, and into the very process of papal election. In 1605 Henri IV of France was said to have spent 300,000 scudi on securing the election of a Medici Pope (Leo XI), favourable to France. If so, it was money badly spent, since the Pope survived only three weeks. In the course of the seventeenth century the Emperor and the kings of France and Spain established their title to a
jus exclusive
, a right of veto on any candidate for the papacy whom they disliked, and by the end of the century it had become routine for the ambassadors of the great powers to attend the Conclave to make their wishes known.
Political considerations began to dominate the election of the Pope, and the required two-thirds majority became harder and harder to achieve. In 1669 during a conclave which dragged on for four months the French Ambassador vetoed Cardinal d’Elce, and the Spanish Ambassador blocked the election of Cardinal Broncaccio.

These political facts of life were accepted by many as part of the natural order of things, but at every conclave there was a strong party of
zelanti
who deplored all political interference. They were rarely able to secure their first choice for pope, but they were often decisive in preventing mere political appointments. Their interventions were admirable in principle, but not always happy in their outcome. The
zelanti
were responsible for the election of the pious and dedicated Pope Clement XI in 1700. A splendid administrator and a likeable man, he turned out to lack judgement and plunged the papacy into conflict with Spain, and with the church of France. His decision to outlaw the so-called Chinese Rites, by which Chinese missionaries had accommodated Christian practice to Chinese culture, effectively destroyed Christianity in China.
Pope Innocent XI (1676–89) tried to halt the slide in the prestige of the papacy. Benedetto Odescalchi was by any standards a very great pope. An experienced papal administrator, who had cut his teeth in Urban VIII’s service, he became an exemplary and effective bishop of Novara in 1650, noted for his efforts to raise educational standards among clergy and laity, and for his lavish generosity to the poor. Ill-health led to his retirement into curial work in Rome, and he accepted election to the papacy with extreme reluctance, and only after forcing the cardinals to agree to a fourteen-point reform programme for the Church. His practical skills and personal integrity were soon demonstrated. As pope he inherited a debt of 50,000,000 scudi. By drastically reducing papal expenditure, abolishing useless honorary posts and introducing a raft of economy measures, he balanced his books and began to build up a financial reserve. He threw himself into promoting missionary activity all over the world, helped unite the King of Poland and the Emperor in a league against Turkish invasion of eastern Europe, and prevented influential Catholic rulers, including the Emperor, from marrying Protestants. Yet he strongly disapproved of religious persecution, condemned Louis XIV’s treatment of the Huguenots, and tried to talk James II out of his aggressively Catholic policies in England.

Innocent’s
efforts to unite Catholic nations against the danger from the Turks in eastern Europe brought him into conflict with Louis XIV, for France welcomed Turkish pressure on the empire. While drawing back from actual alliance with the Turkish regime of the Grand Porte, Louis would not join the Pope’s ‘Holy League’. Innocent had other reasons for distrusting Louis. The Pope was determined to accept no further invasion of the Church’s rights by secular rulers. In 1678 he called on Louis to abandon further extension of the
‘régale’
. The King, declared the Pope, served the Catholic faith well by fighting heresy in his realms. Let him beware of angering God by undermining the Church. He hinted that Louis might die without heirs if he persisted (Louis was in fact pre-deceased by his son and grandson), and declared himself ready to endure persecution to defend the Church’s rights.

Louis was unused to this sort of resistance, and a confrontation developed, in which Innocent’s stand was presented as a breach of the rights of the Gallican church. Anti-papal feeling mounted in France, and in 1682 Louis mobilised the French Assembly of the Clergy against the Pope. The Assembly passed Four Articles which paid lip-service to papal primacy, while denying the Pope’s temporal authority and the irreformability of his decrees even touching matters of faith, and making the Pope subordinate to a general council Unsurprisingly, Innocent condemned these articles, and refused to ratify the appointment of any bishops for France till the matter was resolved. By the beginning of 1685, thirty-five French bishoprics were vacant. Relations steadily deteriorated, with Louis appealing to a general council against the Pope, and the Pope closing down the French quarter in Rome and refusing to receive a French ambassador. At the end of his pontificate Innocent was at loggerheads with Louis, and a schism between France and the papacy seemed inevitable. It would take the efforts of another two popes to heal the breach between Paris and Rome.