As for the sbirri [the papal guards], who tried to make arrests, some were killed outright, and others grievously maimed and wounded. The chief of the Trastevere region was stabbed as he went at night on the rounds of his beat, and other chiefs of the regions were many times in danger of their lives. Many of these outrages and acts of insolence were done by the soldiers who were in Rome as guards of the various lords and princes; as happened especially with those whom the Cardinal of Savoy had brought for his guard, at whose hands were killed several sbirri who had taken into custody a comrade of theirs. In short, from day to day, did the evil grow so much, that had the making of a new Pope been deferred as long as it once seemed likely, through the dissensions of the cardinals, there was ground to apprehend many other strange and most grievous inconveniences.
Eleven days after Pope Gregory’s death, when the novena of funeral services was finally ended, fifty-five cardinals entered into the conclave to elect his successor. Three of them – Campori, a veteran of earlier conclaves, Galamina and Serra – arrived on the very evening the conclave doors were closed. Not one of them wanted to stay in the city longer than was absolutely necessary, and as it turned out they were right. None of the French cardinals had managed to reach Rome at all, though that did not stop the envoys of the French King, Louis XIII, from seeking to influence the outcome of the election both from within and, when the papal palace doors were sealed, from without.
From the moment the doors of the Vatican were bricked up until a new Pope was elected, the cardinals lived in the papal palace, voting twice a day, morning and evening, in an effort to reach a nearly unanimous agreement on a candidate. The rest of the time, in between the obligatory attendances at mass, the cardinals lobbied and intrigued against each other, the older generation trying to hold their own against the younger men, the Spanish fighting to gain the upper hand against those supported by France or by Germany. ‘We know nothing of their sacred procedures,’ wrote Gigli primly. ‘Nor should we.’
Of course, this wasn’t strictly true. Gigli could not help but be overcome with curiosity about what was actually happening behind those sealed-up doors. By the main stove in the Sistine Chapel, he tells us, a stack of grass mixed with crushed charcoal lay ready. If, when the ballots were counted at the end of the day, no agreement had been reached, a small fire was lit. The scrutineers bound up the slips of voting paper, wet them and then burned them in the stove. The charcoal and the damp paper turned the smoke from the burning grass a dark grey, a sign to the people of Rome who stood watching that the throne of St Peter was not yet filled. Only when a new Pope was finally elected was the fire lit with grass alone, save for the last bundle of voting slips, this time dry. The smoke that curled up the chimney would be almost completely white.
With no prospect of an early agreement, the cardinals retired at night to a series of small square cubicles, cells almost, that stretched down the corridors of the Belvedere at the centre of the palace. Each room contained a narrow cot of dark wood. Hanging above it on the wall was a crucifix. There was a jug of cold water for washing, and a prie-Dieu. The fare was hardly luxurious. Tradition had it that if no Pope were chosen within three days, the cardinals would be restricted for five days to one dish only at supper. If after that the chair of St Peter was still vacant, they would be fed for the remainder of their stay in the conclave on nothing but dry bread, wine and water.
The tensions in Rome in the last days of July 1623 reflected those all over Europe. With the counter-Reformation, the Catholic Church was once again flexing its muscles after having been temporarily cowed by the rise of Protestantism across the continent. While it had yet to reach the extremes of the Inquisition, the Catholic power of the counter-Reformation was already a force to be reckoned with. Rome would not be so easily swept aside by the new order. In Germany, the Bohemian revolution would soon spread. France and Spain, always natural enemies, were circling each other once again. Each wanted to extend its influence over the small princeling states of northern Italy and beyond, and saw the election of a new Pope as a heaven-sent opportunity to gain the upper hand.
As always at the start of a conclave there were many interests, many candidates. There was Cardinal Sauli, who at the age of eighty-five had been a major contender in at least two earlier conclaves, and would have been so again had it not been for the fact that he was known to be completely under the influence of his valet and his wife. There was Cardinal Ginnasio, an inveterate gambler who had won 200,000 crowns in one night while he was Papal Nuncio in Madrid. There was Cardinal Campori, who had arrived at the last minute in the hope that he might this time wear the tiara that had been denied him at the previous conclave. And there was Cardinal Ascoli, a monk who regarded uncleanliness as a sign of godliness, and was generally shunned by his more urbane colleagues. There was also the dead Pope’s young nephew, Ludovico Ludovisi, greedy for power and influence. Known as ‘il Nipote’, it was he who introduced the word nepotism to Italian and the other Romance languages.
No clear victor emerged from the first scrutiny on the morning of 20 July. The votes of the fifty-five cardinals were distributed among several of their number, but it was already obvious that the final battle would be between two factions.
Ludovisi, despite his youth, was the leader of one group. He was hampered, however, by the fact that his uncle’s short pontificate meant he had been able to create only a small number of new cardinals. The recently appointed Cardinal Richelieu, who within months would become Chief Minister to the French King Louis XIII, mentions that Ludovisi begged the Pope on his deathbed to strengthen his party with fresh nominations. This the Pope refused to do, adding somewhat unexpectedly, ‘that he would already have to account to God for having made so many unworthy ones’.
The second group, which was made up largely of the cardinals who had been named by Pope Gregory’s predecessor, the Borghese Pope Paul V, was more powerful. Ten months earlier, in September 1622, its leader, Scipione Borghese, Pope Paul’s nephew, had given his fellow Cardinal Ludovisi a copper pendant painted by Guido Reni of the ‘Virgin Sewing’, but this did little to hide the fact that the two men hated one another. During Pope Gregory’s pontificate, Borghese had managed to keep his faction more or less intact, even though some of the cardinals supported him with more enthusiasm than others. Yet, big as it was, this group was not strong enough to carry the day without making strategic alliances with some of the other cardinals who were supported by an array of different interests.
The French, for one, were keen to play their part in the proceedings, and Richelieu regarded the election of a francophile Pope as essential to tilting matters France’s way in northern Italy, where politics were less than stable. Moreover, Richelieu knew that within the College of Cardinals was one who would be devoted to his interests.
Maffeo Barberini came from a Florentine family that had made a fortune in trade. Orphaned as a young boy, he was sent to his uncle, who was a member of the curia. When the lad showed promise, his uncle steered him into an ecclesiastical career, and before long he was appointed Papal Nuncio in France, where he made the acquaintance of Richelieu and the French King. This last was something of a stroke of luck. When the Nuncio in Spain, Cardinal Mellini, had been elevated to the purple, France immediately requested that as a matter of etiquette the same honour should be conferred on Barberini. Cornered, Pope Paul V, Scipione Borghese’s uncle, felt he had no alternative but to comply, which he did, though with little grace. So although technically Barberini was a cardinal of Borghese’s generation, he was not bound to him by any feelings of gratitude or loyalty. Richelieu, who was aware of these undercurrents, made secret arrangements with Ludovisi and the Grand Duke of Tuscany to support Barberini once their own candidates failed, as they were bound to do.
After the first day the scrutinies continued, with the voting swinging between Ludovisi’s first candidate, Cardinal Bandini, and Borghese’s Cardinal Mellini, a Florentine whom everyone knew would never be elected – no
t least because he had eighty-three nephews to provide for, which might risk carrying papal nepotism a little too far. Several days went by. The enmity between the two camps was almost physical, and Borghese and Ludovisi refused even to speak to one another. Matters were not helped by the heat, which was growing daily more oppressive. The cardinals were appalled at the idea of a protracted conclave under such unhygienic conditions.
Then, the calamity they had all feared happened. One by one, the cardinals began to fall ill with the fever. Still worse for some, more than two dozen of their attendants also became indisposed, and were incapable of attending to their duties. The cardinals’ underclothes remained unwashed. Their cubicles and the passages of the Belvedere where they were housed quickly fell into a condition of nauseating neglect, ‘the atmosphere being laden,’ one of them wrote in his diary, ‘with putrid miasmas and sickening smells of decaying victuals that the potent perfumes of the young cardinals could not manage to disguise.’ As Gigli added, ‘It was lacking in all dignity.’
By 3 August, after the college had been in conclave for fifteen days, at least ten of the fifty-five cardinals were ill with malaria. The next day, Borghese too succumbed. The physicians suggested potions, blistering, bleeding. Nothing worked. Borghese began thinking of leaving the conclave. All of a sudden, the francophile Cardinal Maffeo Barberini began canvassing support within his own party, supported by some of the other senior cardinals, including Ludovisi. On 5 August Cardinal Borghese had another and more severe attack of the fever. In a panic, he wrote to the Dean of the conclave asking for permission to quit the proceedings. Apprised of the fact, Ludovisi and his supporters began lobbying the Dean to refuse Borghese’s request. His absence, they argued, would create a deadlock, and the entire assembly would be forced to risk their health, even their lives, for the convenience of one man.
The Cardinal Prince of Savoia was entrusted with the task of telling Borghese that the Dean refused to grant him his request. Borghese fell into a rage, and when it was suggested to him that the election of Barberini might be the quickest and simplest solution to the problem, he realised that he had been outmanoeuvred by his enemies. Judging that anything was better than running the risk of remaining in the fetid atmosphere of the Holy City, he grudgingly gave his consent.
Immediately, Ludovisi ordered the bell of the Sistine Chapel to be rung. Borghese was carried there wrapped in blankets, and Barberini’s election took place at once. When the votes were counted, he fell on his knees to pray. Rising, he announced that he accepted the conclave’s choice, and would take the name Urban VIII. The fire in the stove of the Sistine Chapel was lit with grass only. From its chimney rose a plume of white smoke. ‘Habemus papam,’ Gigli wrote in his diary.
The name Urban, many believed, was for Urbi et Orbi – ‘For the city and for the world’ – the motto of the city of Rome over which Barberini, as Pope, would soon preside as both temporal and spiritual leader.
But the Holy City was about to demonstrate that it had powers of its own. ‘As soon as they left the conclave,’ wrote Giacinto Gigli, ‘nearly all the cardinals fell ill and many were on the point of death. Even Pope Urban himself was among the sick.’
By the beginning of August, less than a month after Pope Gregory’s death, the summer epidemic of malaria was spreading all over the city. Hundreds of people lay sick in the Santo Spirito hospital, by the Vatican. On 16 August a papal avviso reported that forty of the cardinals’ attendants had died of the fever. One of the cardinals had already succumbed. On 19 August it was the turn of Cardinal Serra, one of those who had arrived just as the conclave doors were closing. Four days later Cardinal Sauli, who had been a possible candidate for the papacy, also died of the fever. By mid-September four more cardinals were dead, making a total of six, more than a tenth of those who had assembled for the conclave.
Outside the Vatican, the priests who said mass in the small churches on the lower reaches of the Tiber, and the lay members of the city’s many confraternities who worked so diligently among the poor, died in even greater numbers.
The new Pope too could not throw off his illness. Racked with fever, alternately hot and then shivering with cold, he could feel his spleen hard and swollen by the malaria. His coronation was delayed by nearly eight weeks. Even then, he had barely recovered. At the end of his coronation day Urban’s head ached. His neck was stiff, and for many weeks afterwards, one of his courtiers wrote, he could not bear the weight of the coveted papal tiara upon his head. Giulio Mancini, the senior doctor at the Santo Spirito hospital, was summoned to attend him. The new pontiff took to his bed. For nearly two months he did not leave it. Not until early in November, when the temperature had fallen and the summer fever died down, would Pope Urban be strong enough to undertake the ceremony of the possesso, when he would ride across Rome in a procession that saw him symbolically take possession of the Holy City. There were many who had feared that the new Pope would never be well enough to rise from his bed at all. But Urban would confound them all.
The newly-elected Pope was an educated man; yet although the early days of his pontificate were distinguished by a flourishing of the arts and the sciences, he was also deeply conservative, and in time that aspect of his character would prevail. Despite his championing of artists like Bernini and Boromini, his rule over the Roman Catholic Church would be known more for how it shackled its subjects than for how it liberated them through progress. Urban VIII imprisoned Galileo. He waged war across Europe for years at a time, financing his soldiering by imposing such high taxes on the city that he became known as Papa Gabella, the Tax Pope. Yet, having been educated by the Jesuits at the Collegio Romano, he also supported the quest for scientific knowledge and education that they were promoting; indeed, on the very day of his election, 6 August 1623, he issued the bulls of canonisation that made saints of Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier, the two men who had founded the Society of Jesus a century earlier. The Jesuits believed in educating first, converting later. Pope Urban became a great patron of Catholic missions abroad, and well before the middle of the seventeenth century there were Jesuit missions as far afield as China and South America.
A year after his coronation, Urban paid an official visit to the Santo Spirito hospital to confer a papal blessing upon Giulio Mancini and the other doctors who had helped save his life when he was sick with malaria.
From its earliest history, the order of the Confraternity of Santo Spirito had a special link with the Vatican. It was the conduit through which the Pope directed nearly all his charitable giving, and Giulio Mancini would remain Urban’s personal physician throughout his reign. One of its surgeons became a specialist at dissecting and embalming. It was he who would be assigned the delicate task of embalming the Pope when he died in 1642.
The Ospedale Santo Spirito in Sassia, to give it its proper name, had the official task of caring for poor pilgrims who flocked to the city in Holy Years. An earlier Pope had built a hospice there for sick paupers after he had a dream in which an angel showed him the bodies of Rome’s unwanted babies dredged up from the Tiber in fishing nets. As many as fifty wetnurses were employed in the hospital at any one time, each being able to suckle two or three babies.
The hospital Pope Urban visited could accommodate the wounded and the fevered in 150 beds, and as many as four hundred during the summer epidemics of malaria. Twice a day each doctor, accompanied by his assistant and the assistant apothecarist, would visit one of the four wards, each of which normally held about forty patients. He inspected and palpated the patients and questioned them about their symptoms. He would scrutinise their blood, which after every bloodletting was kept in a special niche by the bed, and he would prescribe treatments.
Although a special ward was reserved for the nobility, and some of the hospital’s doctors also treated the cardinals and bishops who resided within the Vatican – as well as the Pope – the Santo Spirito was primarily intended to serve the poor. Most of the patients would have been artisans – bl
acksmiths, tailors, horsemen, bakers and butchers – but there were also many beggars who were cared for by lay nurses. Johannes Faber, a German physician who studied at the hospital, recalled that in 1600, when he began his five-year training, more than twelve thousand people received shelter, food and treatment from the Santo Spirito, as well as medication from the apothecary which had been established on the ground floor.
Under Pope Urban, the apothecary of Santo Spirito would become one of the greatest centres for dispensing medicine in Europe. It was here that quinine, in the form of dried cinchona bark, would be given to the malaria patients in the city for the first time. In 1630 the Pope named a Spanish archbishop, Juan de Lugo, a Jesuit lawyer and university professor, as director of the apothecary. Elevated to the purple in 1642, Cardinal de Lugo would become responsible for turning the pharmacy from an artisanal studio to something approaching an industrial production line.
Like an apothecary that was being built at the same time by another Jesuit across the seas in Lima, Peru, de Lugo’s Roman medicine house resembled nothing that had gone before it, either in scale or in vision. By the time Archbishop de Lugo took charge of the apothecary of the Santo Spirito hospital, its shelves were filled with recipes for preparations of medicines, prescriptions for their use and descriptions of illnesses and symptoms treated by different physicians. Spread on long tables were all the instruments of preparation: pestles, mortars, presses, beakers, alembics, boilers, distillating tubes, glass containers and ceramic jars. Neatly labelled in thousands of jars and bottles were botanical and chemical ingredients. Camillo Fanucci, one of the hospital’s Jesuit apothecaries, wrote in his Treatise on all the Pious Works of the Holy City of Rome: ‘I resolve to tell Monsignor Teseao Aldobrando, commendatore of this hospital, that after looking over the hospital accounts, every year we distribute more than fifty thousand syrups, ten thousand medicines and twenty-five thousand other medicines. And thus, it is obvious to anyone that no expense is spared in this hospital in the care of the sick.’
The Miraculous Fever-Tree Page 5