Absolute Monarchs

by John Julius Norwich

  The single event of his reign which probably gave him more pleasure than any other was the conversion of Queen Christina of Sweden on Christmas Eve 1654. Christina had taken a long ceremonial route through Italy, arriving in Rome—traveling in a sedan chair specially designed by Bernini and sent out by the pope—on December 20. On Christmas morning, in a magnificent ceremony in St. Peter’s, Alexander personally confirmed her in the Catholic faith, she taking the additional name of Alexandra in his honor. That night she formally took up residence in Palazzo Farnese.7 She was to live in Rome for the next thirty-five years until her death, causing a good deal of trouble to Alexander and his three successors but—by her eccentricities of dress and behavior and the sheer force of her extraordinary personality—leaving a far more indelible mark upon the city than they ever did.

  THE FIRST TWO of those three successors, Cardinal Giulio Rospigliosi and Cardinal Emilio Altieri, both took the name of Clement. Clement IX, who was enthroned in June 1667, reigned only two and a half years, during which his principal achievement was to repair relations with France and, at least temporarily, to settle the continuing agitation over Jansenism. This depressing doctrine—first proposed by Cornelius Jansen, a former Bishop of Ypres—emphasized original sin, human depravity, predestination, and the necessity of divine grace; it had split the Church in France for most of the century. Louis XIV was determined to wipe it out, and it was at his stern request that in 1653 Innocent X had condemned five key propositions contained in Jansen’s principal treatise, Augustinus.

  Clement mended fences with the Venetians, too. Venice was at the time engaged in a desperate war with the Turks, who for the past twenty years had been laying siege to her last surviving colony in the Mediterranean, the island of Crete. Innocent X had sent out a papal squadron as early as 1645, but its admiral—Niccolò Ludovisi, Prince of Piombino—had shown extreme distaste for the whole expedition and had almost immediately returned home. After that the pope had made all further help conditional on his being given control of Venetian bishoprics—a suggestion that the republic had refused even to contemplate. Alexander VII had also imposed a condition, the readmission of the Jesuits, banned from Venetian territory since the 1606 interdict; this, too, had been rejected. Now, however, the situation was desperate; and when Pope Clement, who was determined to give the Venetians all the help he could, repeated the offer, it was accepted. The Jesuits returned, and the pope succeeded in organizing—with the cooperation of France, Spain, and the empire—two relief expeditions to the beleaguered island.

  Alas, it was too late. The first expedition sailed in 1668 and consisted largely of aristocratic young Frenchmen, who fought only for their own glory; in their opening battle they showed considerable courage, but when it was over the survivors could not get out fast enough. (Many of them, even then, never saw France again; they had carried the plague bacillus with them.) The second, which left the following year, was also predominantly French but sailed under the papal banner. Its story was much the same, but without the courage. Within two months of their arrival the French ships had weighed anchor, and in the general despair that ensued the few auxiliaries from the Papacy, the empire, and the Knights of Malta likewise set their sails for the West. The Venetians, left alone, could fight no longer, and on September 6, 1669, their captain general, Francesco Morosini, surrendered.

  By this time Pope Clement’s health was already giving cause for concern; soon after hearing the news from Crete he suffered a serious stroke, and on December 9 he died. His successor, Emilio Altieri, or Clement X, elected after a five-month conclave because France and Spain determinedly vetoed each other’s candidates, was already in his eightieth year and hopelessly ineffectual. In the absence of a true cardinal nephew he bestowed the role on Cardinal Paluzzi degli Albertoni (whose nephew had married the pope’s niece), requiring him to adopt the name of Altieri. This proved a grave mistake: the cardinal immediately took over the entire administration, accumulating vast wealth on behalf of himself and his family, and Clement’s reputation in Rome suffered accordingly.

  Such personal influence as the pope was able to exert was largely confined to the diplomatic field. Since the fall of Crete, the Turkish threat loomed larger than ever. The sultan had now turned his attention to Poland, the largest state in Europe, and both Clement and Cardinal Benedetto Odescalchi, soon to succeed him as Innocent XI, sent heavy financial subsidies to the Polish general John Sobieski, who was able to inflict a crushing defeat on an Ottoman army at Chocim on the Dniester River in November 1673 and was elected King of Poland six months later. In his dealings with Louis XIV of France, however, Clement was less successful. As he grew older and more powerful, Louis adopted an increasingly bullying attitude, claiming royal control over French episcopal appointments and the revenues of bishoprics which had been allowed to fall vacant (the régale). During an audience in 1675, the French ambassador, himself a cardinal, actually laid hands on the eighty-five-year-old pope, pushing him back into his chair when he tried to rise.

  It was only with the succession of Innocent XI in the following year that the Papacy began to assert itself. A man of total integrity and by far the greatest pope of the seventeenth century, Innocent publicly warned Louis to press for further extension of his royal privileges no longer. Such conduct, he pointed out, was an offense to God, who might well punish him by depriving him of heirs to the throne.8 The result was an open breach between Paris and Rome. In March 1682 an assembly of the French clergy formally adopted what were known as the four Gallican Articles, which denied the pope any temporal authority, asserted the superiority of general councils, and reaffirmed the ancient rights and liberties of the Gallican Church. A month later Innocent predictably rejected these articles and refused to ratify the appointments of any French bishops until the matter was settled. By January 1685, no fewer than thirty-five French bishoprics were vacant.

  Nine months later the king, whose treatment of his Huguenot subjects had been growing steadily more repressive, revoked the Edict of Nantes by which Henry IV had granted them extensive privileges almost a hundred years before. But if he thought thereby to regain the pope’s favor, he was disappointed; Innocent publicly condemned the violence of what now amounted to an out-and-out religious persecution. King and pope were also at loggerheads over the all-important issue of resistance to the Turks, who never relaxed their pressure on Christian Europe. Innocent had worked hard to unite the Emperor Leopold I and John Sobieski, now King of Poland, in a Holy League against them, and it was thanks only to this that an Ottoman army had been driven back from Vienna in 1683. King Louis, however, would have none of it. The emperor, he well knew, suffered from Turkish pressure far more than he did, and he was only too happy that it should continue. Thus it was that throughout Innocent’s pontificate Franco-papal relations steadily deteriorated. In 1687 the pope refused to receive the new French ambassador; in January 1688 he excommunicated Louis and all his ministers; and in the same year he rejected the king’s nominee for the archbishopric (and electorship) of Cologne, adopting instead the candidate proposed by Leopold. In September the French once again occupied the papal enclave of Avignon and the Venaissin. But if Innocent failed to bring King Louis to heel, he at least showed him—as his predecessors never had—that the Papacy was still a force to be reckoned with. And, even without Louis’s support, he continued his campaign against the Turks, recruiting to his Holy League both Venice and Russia, thus enabling the League to turn the Ottoman tide, liberating Hungary in 1686 and Belgrade the following year.

  There has long existed a somewhat surprising theory according to which Pope Innocent secretly encouraged and supported the plans of the Protestant William of Orange to supplant the Catholic James II on the English throne. Despite James’s attempts to bring England back into the Catholic fold, Innocent distrusted him deeply: he was too close to Louis for one thing, and far too aggressive and confrontational for another. Certainly the pope never gave him any support, and he was probably neither
surprised nor especially concerned when William defeated him. Still, no serious evidence for this theory has ever been adduced, and the idea can almost certainly be discounted.

  Innocent died on August 12, 1689. In his lifetime he had not been particularly popular among his flock; utterly incorruptible, stern, and uncompromising, he had lived austerely and parsimoniously—having inherited a debt of 500,000 scudi, he had had little choice—and, avoiding the faintest breath of nepotism himself, had done all he could to persuade his cardinals to follow his example. After his death, however, his many outstanding qualities gradually came to be recognized, and it was only a quarter of a century before Pope Clement XI began the process of canonization. But French memories were long, and French influence in Rome had lost none of its power: in 1744, at the insistence of Louis XV, the process was suspended. Only in the mid–twentieth century, under Pope Pius XII, did the wheels begin to turn again. Innocent is now at last beatified; but sainthood is not yet his.

  INNOCENT XI WAS seventy-eight when he died; Alexander VIII was seventy-nine when he succeeded him. The conclave by which Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni was chosen was the first to be attended by official ambassadors of both the emperor and the King of France, but even before they had arrived the cardinals were virtually agreed on their choice. Needless to say, the French representative had initially protested: Ottoboni had, after all, been the right-hand man of Pope Innocent, who had appointed him Grand Inquisitor of Rome and Secretary of the Holy Office. But in the preliminary discussions the cardinal gave his assurances that Franco-papal relations would be his first priority, and the objections were withdrawn.

  The new pope had already been a cardinal for thirty-seven years. He was a Venetian, the first Venetian pope for two centuries. Blameless in his personal life, he was a fine scholar, possessed of one of the largest private libraries in Italy. In marked contrast to his predecessor, he was warm, generous, and endlessly charming to young and old alike. He carried his years well; his mind remained as alert as ever it had been. And he cheered Rome up. He made frequent public appearances, driving informally through the city. He used to say that his twenty-third hour had already struck, so he had to work fast. Back came the lavish spending and extravagance; the manifestations that marked his enthronement were, according to an eyewitness, “the most beautiful seen in our lifetime.” Back, too, came the Carnival and public performances of operas—one of which, Colombo, had come from the pen of Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni himself.

  And back, also, came the old nepotism. On his accession Alexander had appointed to the post of cardinal nephew his twenty-year-old grandnephew Pietro, making his own nephew Giambattista secretary of state; both were loaded with rich benefices. As more members of his family hastened down from Venice, they, too, were appointed to highly lucrative posts. Nor was the republic itself forgotten. Venice was at that time engaged in an ambitious campaign to drive the Turks from the Peloponnese, led by the same Francesco Morosini who had been captain general in Crete and was now doge; Alexander threw himself behind it with enthusiasm, sending a large subsidy together with a number of galleys and a force of 1,500 fighting men. In April 1690 he even went so far as to send Morosini a hat and sword blessed by himself.

  From the beginning of his pontificate, however, he never forgot that his primary concern must be to improve relations with France. Fortunately Louis XIV, whose position had been much weakened by the Glorious Revolution in England and the deposition of James II, was in a receptive mood. He willingly restored Avignon and the Venaissin to papal hands and raised no objection when the pope put an end to the rights of asylum and immunity from taxes claimed by foreign embassies in Rome. In return, and despite vociferous protests from the emperor, Alexander raised to the cardinalate Toussaint de Forbin Janson, Bishop of Beauvais, for whose elevation Louis had been pressing for years. Forbin had been a signatory to the Assembly of 1682, in consequence of which Innocent XI had repeatedly refused to consider him; but to Alexander, in the improved atmosphere of conciliation, his red hat was a small price to pay.

  Despite these minor concessions, however, the fundamental issue remained unresolved: the pope absolutely refused to ratify the appointment of any French bishops unless they formally renounced and repudiated the Gallican Articles, which Louis, on his side, was determined to uphold. In vain did Alexander write personally and privately to the king and even to Madame de Maintenon, to whom Louis was now secretly married and who was said to exercise considerable influence over him. The reply he received dashed his hopes—such as they were—to the ground. Ruefully he had to accept that all his efforts at a reconciliation with the French king had come to nothing and had succeeded only in seriously damaging the good relations he had previously enjoyed with the emperor. With Leopold the elevation of Cardinal Forbin still rankled, the more so since none of his own nominees had been similarly promoted. He resented, too, the impressive sums that the pope had sent to Venice for her Peloponnesian campaign, which had resulted in much-reduced subsidies for his own struggle against the Turks. But Pope Alexander probably cared little for the emperor’s feelings. As late as mid-November 1690 he appointed two more cardinals. Neither was an imperial nominee; both were related to his nephews.

  At this time Alexander was still in excellent health, but in January 1691 he developed a severe inflammation of the leg, which rapidly became gangrenous. On the twenty-ninth he summoned to his bedside the twelve cardinals who had been involved in the dispute with France and delivered to them a brief, declaring that the Declaration of 1682 upholding the Gallican Articles was legally null and void. It was his parting shot; three days later he was dead.

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  THE ENSUING CONCLAVE continued for over five months, the longest since 1305. It would probably have lasted even longer had it not been for the summer heat—exceptional even by Roman standards—which raised the temperature in the Sistine Chapel to intolerable levels. The delay was due largely to King Louis, who strongly supported the Venetian Cardinal Gregorio Barbarigo; but the French finally gave way and the vote was cast for the seventy-six-year-old Archbishop of Naples, Cardinal Antonio Pignatelli, henceforth to be known as Innocent XII. A Neapolitan aristocrat born in the Basilicata, he was the last pope from South Italy—and, incidentally, the last to grow a beard.

  Having assumed the name of his indirect predecessor, he also took him as his model—with the difference that whereas Innocent XI had been stern and unapproachable, Innocent XII held regular public and private audiences, talking easily and freely with all classes. Nepotism he hated; he refused to confirm the nephews of Alexander VIII in their posts and by means of a bull, Romanum Decet Ponteficem of June 22, 1692, decreed that all relatives of the reigning pontiff should be forbidden to accept estates, offices, or revenues. If a member of a pope’s family was admitted to the Sacred College, it must be on grounds of merit alone, and his annual revenues were not to exceed 12,000 scudi. This bull was to be sworn to at every future conclave by all the cardinals and by the pope himself. It made a widespread impression throughout the Catholic world and effectively marked the end of nepotism in the Holy See.9

  Innocent maintained that his own nephews were the poor; and, after the welfare of the Church, the poor were always his principal concern. In 1692 he converted the old Lateran Palace into a hostel for no fewer than five thousand homeless unemployed, and in 1693 he took over the Hospice of San Michele, a boys’ orphanage founded by the family of Innocent XI, commissioning the architect Carlo Fontana10 to remodel it so that it could accommodate three hundred orphans instead of the original thirty. These two buildings, combined with Sixtus V’s hospice and with another asylum for foundlings, now formed a united Apostolic Hospice which the pope placed under the care of three cardinals and which was henceforth so near his heart as to arouse complaints that he often forgot everything else.

  As Innocent’s favorite architect, Fontana was given many other commissions during his pontificate. The most ambitious was to complete and enlarge the Palazzo di Montecito
rio—which Bernini had begun forty-five years before on the orders of Innocent X—and to use it as a vast palazzo di giustizia, finally bringing all Rome’s various tribunals and courts of law under one roof. The work was never carried out as originally planned—the expense would have been astronomical—but the building as we see it today remains one of the city’s most magnificent examples of the High Baroque.11 In St. Peter’s, Fontana also designed the baptistery12 and the monument to Queen Christina in the right-hand aisle.

  Another long-standing abuse against which Innocent took firm action was the sale of church offices. Here he had to face a good deal of opposition, since the practice was highly profitable, but he offset the loss by cutting his own expenses to the bone. He then turned his attention to the harbors of Civitavecchia and Nettuno, both of which were greatly enlarged in order to increase the corn trade. Civitavecchia he also made a free port, endowing it with a magnificent new aqueduct and in May 1696 even paying the city a personal visit, the first pope for over a century to do so.

  The pope’s greatest diplomatic achievement was to end the fifty-year deadlock between Louis XIV and the Holy See. First he ratified the appointments of all the bishops nominated by the king who had not taken part in the 1682 Assembly, that which had adopted the four Gallican Articles. In return, Louis revoked the declaration of the French clergy by which the bishops had been obliged to subscribe to the articles, and the bishops formally retracted their signatures. It was, on the whole, a satisfactory accommodation, of which the only serious drawback was that the articles themselves were left intact: the French Church was largely to ignore Vatican authority until the Revolution and beyond. Inevitably, too, this burying of the hatchet aroused imperial suspicions. Innocent had done his best to improve relations with the Emperor Leopold just as he had with King Louis and had sent him 80,000 scudi for his struggle against the Turks. But the unconcealed hostility and arrogance of successive imperial ambassadors in Rome seemed expressly designed to provoke conflict; moreover, the bitter war that was raging between the French and the empire made it impossible to be friends with both. The Holy See was not represented at the peace talks which led to the Treaty of Ryswick13 in September 1697, but somehow managed to arrange for the inclusion of a clause that the Roman Catholic faith be preserved intact in all countries which were subjected by the terms of the treaty to Protestant rule.