by Antal Szerb
The origin of the Sant’Agnese family was derived by Renaissance scholars from Agnosos, one of the heroes of The Odyssey, who is known only from a synopsis of the great cyclical epic. It records that this Agnosos was rescued from the waves by Pallas Athene’s owl when the Four Winds were misguidedly let out of their bag and promptly capsized the Greek ships. By happy chance the bird brought him to Italy, where he founded the family line with the help of a mountain nymph. More reliable chronicles assert that the original forebear was a Lombard hero called Balmungo, who took an active part in the assassination of King Alboïn and was rewarded with extensive domains in the vicinity of Benevent. Other accounts propose descent from St Agnes herself, but considering the saint’s well-known virginity this argument runs into certain difficulties. Whatever the truth might be, the fact is that at no time in the sixteenth century did the family play a role of any significance in Italian history, until one of its scions, as Callixtus VII, attained the throne of St Peter. Thereafter his brothers and cousins became bishops, papal generals, treasurers, gonfalonieri (governors of the more distant Christian lands) and lords of various lesser dukedoms. The Pope’s one grievance was that in all his long and illustrious reign he never managed to acquire an independent little principality for his own family. Nonetheless the Sant’Agnese wealth grew in this period to such legendary proportions that it rivalled those other nepotistical dynasties the Borghese, the Barberini and the Pamfili.
Marcantonio Sant’Agnese, who was born in 1561, stepped easily into the possession of wealth, grand titles and princely self-confidence. Of his infancy and youth nothing is known, from which we can infer that he went through all the formative childhood experiences that scholars of the period would consider typical, though none left any discernible mark on his character. As a young nobleman he is known to have played a role both at the papal court and in the diplomatic machinations of the Roman aristocracy, and to have taken part in intrigues prior to papal elections. He forged a treaty with the Duke of Modena, negotiated an alliance with the Viceroy of Naples, took money from the wife of the Catholic Spanish King for working against the rather more Christian-like King of France, and from the King of France for working against the King of Spain… In a word, he was active in all the usual historical and political manoeuvrings of his time.
Such political dealings were conducted in this period partly through protracted and highly secret negotiations, including offers of bribes, and partly by the staging of grand parades and other public spectacles. From detailed contemporary reports we know, for example, that Marcantonio was involved in the procession of unparalleled brilliance arranged in honour of Hassan Bey, the Christian convert half-brother of the Prince of Tunis. Three liveried retainers bearing the huge family coat of arms led the way. Next, robed as Neptune and riding on a camel, was a herald holding aloft an embroidered silk banner depicting the martyrdom of St Agnes. Then came two soldiers, dressed as Moors in chains, followed by two knights in armour. These last carried a banner stretched out between them, printed with the words of a sonnet proclaiming that once the heathens had murdered St Agnes, but now they came to worship her—the point being that Hassan Bey had been received into the Church in Sant’Agnese dei Tre Torri, by none other than Matteo Sant’Agnese, the bishop-uncle of our hero.
There followed twenty noble members of the ducal court, on horseback, with lances at the ready, each lance bedecked with a little olive-green flag, and the heads of the horses and knights all resplendent with huge ostrich feathers. Next came the Duke himself, dressed from head to toe in olive-green brocade, as was his horse, down to its hoofs, with the famed Sant’Agnese jewels, fabulous emeralds, visible below the feathers on its head. Apart from the ring and the legendary clasp pinning the three olive-green ostrich feathers of such fantastic size to his cap, the Duke never wore jewellery himself. This was to signify his contemptus mundi, a fashion newly imported from Spain. His own horse and those of the courtiers in the line ahead had reinforcements of pure gold attached over the usual iron shoes, loosely, so that most of them would drop off during the procession, to the delight and advantage of the Roman populace.
In the footsteps of the Duke trundled a huge theatre-cart of the sort that you can still see in the carnival at Nice today. Drawn by four fully dressed horses, it represented the temple of the goddess Bellona, Marcantonio being a strong believer in military glory. In front of this classical-style temple rose a pyramid composed variously of lances, cannonballs and the decapitated heads of Turks. Behind it stood four women in immense hooped skirts embroidered with olive-green quivers, and wearing gold-embroidered headdresses. These were Bellona’s attendants. The age could not imagine any ladies of stature, whether human or divine, without (even in their more intimate moments) an accompanying flock of attendants.
Inside the temple, the Goddess herself, in the person of Imperia Ottomini, sat enthroned. She was robed alla antica, that is to say, rather scantily, to display her splendidly ample curves. Ladies at this time were much given to dressing up as classical deities, reasoning that as such they could afford greater pleasure to onlookers than would be possible in contemporary costume, which covered the person completely, apart from the face, and revealed nothing of the beauty of the female form. Hence Imperia Ottomini, enthroned as the Goddess of War. But neither she nor the Duke wished to present too grim or uniformly martial an aspect, and what emerged from her quiver was not arrows but little artefacts made of sugar, which she held out to a child and a tiny Maltese terrier standing in front of her. The banner above this scene proclaimed: The Blessings of Warfare.
Love played a large part in the life of Marcantonio Sant’ Agnese, that is to say, the love he bore to Imperia Ottomini. No doubt there were other liaisons too, but about those history is silent—in contrast to some fairly lively accounts of his relations with Imperia, which certainly did leave their mark in the pages of historical scholarship.
Imperia was the wife of a nobleman called Guiliano Ottomini. This Ottomini was a member of the Duke’s innermost circle. He made frequent journeys as his diplomatic representative, and in time became the chief overseer of all his domains. From which it clearly follows that he was not in the least troubled by his wife’s intimate relations with his employer, and no doubt took the same gentlemanly and accommodating line with her children, all of whom carried the Duke’s blood in their veins. Which makes it all the more surprising that in 1589 the Duke had this useful and extremely tolerant man murdered. This event is recorded in many sources, consistent in every important detail.
One night Ottomini, who was in Rome, was visited by a messenger on horseback, sent by Marcantonio to summon him urgently to Cortemiglia. The nobleman leapt onto his steed and set off at once. A few streets down the road, near the ill-lit Teatro Flavio, six desperadoes who had been lurking behind a corner leapt out in front of him, fired their pistols at him, then repeatedly stabbed him as he lay wounded. The papal police rushed to the sound of the shooting, and raced off after the killers. Three of them managed to take refuge in the palazzo of the Spanish legation, where they could not be pursued any further, since it enjoyed diplomatic immunity. But three were caught, among them the popular mountain bandit Luca Perotti, who was generally known to be in Sant’Agnese’s pay. The papal court sentenced the three men to death and, once it became clear that Sant’Agnese would make no objection, carried out the executions. A huge crowd followed Perotti on his last journey, and listened with deep emotion as he confessed his sins on the scaffold, in splendid verses, which he sang.
The reasons for this murder can be only surmised, and then very tentatively. There might possibly have been serious disagreements between the Duke and his steward over the accounts, as Konrad Schneyssen argues in his mighty tome Einführung zur Geschichte der päpstlichen Neffen (An Introduction to the History of Papal Nepotism), but that seems rather unlikely, since all the signs are that up to the very moment of his tragic death Ottomini enjoyed his master’s complete confidence and continued to carr
y out important assignments on his behalf. It is also difficult to imagine that after so many years he, for his part, would suddenly begin to disapprove of his wife’s conduct. We ourselves—though, in the total absence of hard fact, this is mere conjecture based on the way people thought at the time—would hazard the view that the murder of the unfortunate Ottomini was another example of Marcantonio’s gallantry towards Imperia, a sacrificial offering made by her lover. There is no doubt that Imperia was a very demanding lady, and the Duke did not stint in offering testimony of his passion, showering the woman he loved with jewels, estates, sonnets penned by his own fair hand and portraits of her; and when he could think of no other way to offer even greater witness of his adoration, he had her husband murdered, as proof for her and the whole world of the unquenchable and boundless force of his passion. The fair Imperia seems to have accepted this extreme manifestation of his love, for not long afterwards she finally moved into the Duke’s palazzo, and remained his loyal companion to the end of his days.
The murder of Ottomini seems to have produced a major spiritual convulsion in Marcantonio. His Court Chaplain, the Jesuit father Marcuffini, who was renowned for the great saintliness of his life, took the view that the only road to absolution lay in the sanctity of repentance, and insisted that he should now give Imperia up for ever, on the grounds that the nature of his ‘regrettable error’ meant that to persist in the relationship would expose his soul to continuing mortal danger. Marcantonio, as a deeply religious man, would no doubt have readily undertaken any humiliating act of penance, especially one of the more picturesque and public varieties favoured by the age, but he had no intention of leaving Imperia: time makes every man the slave of custom. His spiritual crisis lasted almost half a year. During that time he lost a great deal of weight and incurred vast expense for the constant attendance of his doctor. Quite how the crisis was resolved is not clear, but what is beyond doubt is that at the end of that half-year he took part in a large-scale religious ceremony in St Peter’s, which seems to confirm that by then he had indeed undergone the ‘sanctity of repentance’.
In his aforementioned work Konrad Schneyssen offers a rather different account of this episode, but we should bear in mind that, as a Protestant, his purpose is to use every weapon at his disposal to place the Church in a bad light. More recent historians have cast considerable doubt on his conclusions. For example, Aldo Lampruzzi, that outstanding representative of the sceptical spirit prevailing at the end of the last century, questions whether Sant’Agnese was implicated in the murder at all. He considers it simply a matter of contemporary gossip, unsupported by any documentary evidence or demonstrable fact. In more recent years, that elegant Neo-Catholic and Royalist French historian François de Kermaniac, in his celebrated Les Taureaux et les aveugles (The Bulls and the Blind), puts an entirely new complexion on the whole affair.
He begins by endorsing Lampruzzi’s argument that Sant’Agnese could not have known that the hired assassins intended to kill Ottomini. Next, the witty Frenchman continues, even if he had, he had no means of stopping them, since it is common knowledge that these brigands cared not a fig for those set in authority over them. But—and this is his most interesting contribution—even if we do think the worst and conclude that Sant’Agnese did have him murdered, we still have no right to affect moral outrage and judge his action in terms of our own altruistic, post-humanist, neo-puritanical, hypocritical and effeminate standards. The age in which Sant’Agnese—the blessed, divinely chosen Sant’Agnese—lived was the great heroic age of Europe, that is to say of the Latin part thereof, when great passions brought about equally great works and deeds, faith threw up cathedrals, Catholic solidarity raised armies against heathen and heretic alike, and love, that finest flower of the heroic spirit, swept aside all pettifogging, petty-bourgeois inhibitions (then unknown) and every other obstacle in the way, like a cleansing storm washing away so many squalid little hovels—or in this case, the smarmy little Ottomini, this “purblind, jumped-up buffoon”.
While we would not wish to endorse de Kermaniac’s somewhat one-sided enthusiasm, we too think it beyond doubt that there was a certain heroism, or at least an element of yearning after it, in Sant’Agnese, and that in the insatiable and sometimes almost grotesque forms this yearning took he was a true child of the age. Through the good offices of the Academy of Rome his surviving poems and letters have recently appeared in print. Among them we find plans for an epic poem the intention of which, judging from the tiny fragment in our possession, was to immortalise the military achievements of his Sant’Agnese forebears, though only a short mythological section was ever completed. In it, his ancestor Bradmart pays a visit to Venus on an Atlantic island. To commemorate the splendid night they have together she presents him with a magic root with the power to dispel even the most painful toothache within minutes.
Among the letters we find one addressed to Zsigmond Báthory, the Prince of Transylvania. In it he writes, among other things: “because you should know, my most illustrious cousin, that since our youth we have nursed no more ardent desire—in these days when Christianity itself is in such danger on its far-eastern boundaries—than to embark on a journey through the Great Wood [he means Transylvania] to wage war on the evil forces of the heathen Crescent, and so seek both atonement for our sins and the reward of the Life Eternal. How happy are you, the people of Transylvania, living so close to that famous theatre of noble warfare, in which you can take part as if on an almost everyday excursion, while we lie separated by so many thousands of miles from that longed-for arena, and our own daily excursions lead us only deeper into that labyrinth, the despised and empty life of the court, where there is nothing but misery and heartache.”
In the same letter he vows that, come the spring, he too, a latter-day Dux Mercurius, will raise an army and dash to the aid of the man who has for so long inspired him to resoluteness of purpose. However, from letters written some time later it appears that previously unforeseen obstacles have arisen—first the death of a “child very dear to him” (one of Imperia’s), then bouts of almost chronic toothache (it seems the legacy of the magic root of Venus had not survived for later generations) and, above all, the ongoing conflict with his neighbour—all combining to spare him that journey of “many thousands of miles” in quest of military glory.
A long-standing source of annoyance to the Duke was the little fortress of San Felice. Located just a mile or two from Cortemiglia, it represented the domain of his old adversaries, the Dukes of Porta. For years he had tried everything in his power, by purchase or litigation, to acquire it. But the Porta family clung stubbornly to what was theirs, refusing to give way even to papal intervention. Having persuaded himself that by opposing the Holy Father’s will they had fallen into the sin of heresy, Marcantonio decided to destroy them by force of arms. For this purpose he bought three new cannon—so-called ‘battle serpents’—and, to supplement the force already at his command, hired the notorious Mascolo band, who had plagued the borders of the Papal state for years. The bandits, who must have numbered around one hundred and fifty, arrived with a mass of weaponry, sporting huge caps, with their extraordinarily long hair tucked into hairnets. Marcantonio had them all fitted out in olive-green uniforms, and gave Mascolo the title of Commissioner-in-Chief for Cortemiglia. Preparations for the expedition proceeded at an extremely gentle pace. Before turning his mind to this hazardous undertaking, the far-sighted Mascolo saw to the needs of his own family. He packed his wife and younger children off to Naples, sent his eldest son to university in Bologna, and married off his daughter to one of the Duke’s secretaries—all, naturally, at Marcantonio’s expense. The bandits spent the entire winter in Cortemiglia, and the spirited independence of their behaviour caused much concern to the Duke and the townspeople alike.
Finally spring arrived, and Commissioner-in-Chief Mascolo set off with his army. He succeeded in crossing the river Nurio without hindrance, and his advance party reported back gleefully that they h
ad penetrated into Porta territory and met with no opposition. A few days later, Mascolo’s second-in-command appeared in Cortemiglia, with his regular escort of ten men, to announce the first victory in person. The troops had come across four bandits in enemy pay helping themselves to some poultry in a village. With great skill Mascolo managed to encircle all four and compel them to surrender. His men took over the village and thoroughly looted it. During the course of the night hostile forces, in an attempt to free the captives, approached with nearly thirty men to a position near Mascolo’s camp. But the ever-vigilant Mascolo was on his guard, and furthermore his troops had not gone to bed that night as they were celebrating their annexation of the village. Observing this, the enemy took to their heels without so much as drawing their swords.