Murder in the Garden of God (2 page)

Part 1

The Pursuit of Splendor

Chapter 1

The Most Beautiful Girl in Rome

Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting; but a woman

who fears the Lord is to be praised.

–
Proverbs 31:30

I
t was a truth universally acknowledged in sixteenth-century Italy that a girl whose dowry consisted mainly of her beauty was of far greater interest to her suitors than to their families. Gazing at her perfection, a young man imagined the delights of the marriage bed. He saw his bride as a goddess smiling kindly at him over the breakfast table, and a much-envied, highly bejeweled ornament on his arm at public events.

But his parents, uncles, and brothers wanted an infusion of cold, hard cash into the family. An ungainly girl with bad skin, rotten teeth, and slightly crossed eyes would have been a welcome addition to a powerful dynasty as long as she trailed rich booty in her wake. A beautiful girl, with little or nothing to offer financially, would be rejected, and the young man doomed to sigh in vain.

In 1573, such was the dilemma of Vittoria Accoramboni who, at sixteen, was widely acknowledged as the most beautiful girl in Rome. Her face was a perfect ivory oval, her cheeks tinged with roses. Her hair was black as a raven’s wing and pulled back from her face revealed a strong widow’s peak. Her eyebrows were black and arched over large eyes, dark and expressive. Her nose and mouth were exquisitely sculpted. Even when Vittoria was a child, many who saw her exclaimed that her beauty was a miraculous gift from God.

Cardinal Maffei described her as possessing “a rare and extraordinary beauty, and every other excellence which could render marvelous a noblewoman.”
¹

In the Middle Ages, female beauty had been eschewed – at least by churchmen and philosophers – as distracting one’s thoughts from God. But by the Renaissance, beauty was thought to help lift one’s thoughts heavenwards. In 1541, Agnolo Firenzuola wrote a book called
On Female Beauty
and, though a monk, the author was eminently well-versed on the subject, being eaten up as he was by syphilis. “A beautiful woman,” he declared, “is the most beautiful object one can admire, and beauty is the greatest gift God bestowed on His human creatures. And so, through her virtue we direct our souls to contemplation, and through contemplation to the desire for heavenly things. For this reason beautiful women have been sent among us as a sample and a foretaste of heavenly things.”
²
Though certainly most of Vittoria’s eager suitors were not thinking of God as they gazed on her.

It seems that Vittoria’s slender yet shapely figure would also have met Firenzuola’s high standards. “The bosom must be, above all, white,” he stated, before losing himself in musings a bit too heated for a man of the cloth. “In this bosom the fresh and lively breasts, heaving as though ill at ease at being constantly oppressed and confined by the garments, showing they want to escape from their prison, rise up so resolutely and vigorously that they force the viewer’s eyes to rest firmly upon them, and thereby thwart their escape… Wide hips are the foremost attraction of shapely naked women.”
³

But even the most beautiful girl with fresh, lively, heaving breasts, and admirably wide hips would fail to impress if she remained dumb as a stone. To her great fortune, Vittoria’s looks were further enhanced by her gracious manner of speaking. The sincerity and compassion she projected usually had the effect of wrapping her listeners around her little finger. Cardinal Maffei reported, “She had an extraordinary, almost a miraculous attraction in conversation and comportment, accompanied with no affectation or art. If it were possible for someone not to be impressed with seeing her, he could not help but become entangled as soon as he listened to her.”
⁴

Vittoria’s graceful beauty was burnished by blue blood trailing back several centuries. In the 1200s, the Accorambonis had owned a castle in the town of Tolentino, two hundred miles northeast of Rome, but had rebelled against the pope who, in turn, confiscated their property. The family landed in Gubbio, some one hundred miles due north of the capital, where they owned an old palazzo. Many Accoramboni men found success in Rome where they worked for the Church in diplomatic or governmental positions. Vittoria’s grandfather, Girolamo, was the personal physician of Pope Adrian VI (reigned 1522-1523.) Her father, Claudio, was a military man who, having fought in France in his youth, turned to law and worked for the Roman government. In the 1530s, Pope Paul III, who was quite fond of him, arranged Claudio’s marriage to a girl of good family, Tarquinia Albertoni.

Perhaps Vittoria’s greatest misfortune was her mother’s extraordinary fertility, along with the healthy genes Tarquinia transmitted to her offspring. Vittoria, baptized in Gubbio on February 15, 1557, was the tenth of eleven children – eight boys and three girls. The modest means of the Accorambonis were not sufficient by a long shot to provide the girls with dowries and the boys with property to live honorably. Normally the high childhood mortality rate solved such a dilemma, but at least nine of the Accoramboni offspring grew stubbornly toward adulthood, radiating rude good health.

When a family suffered such an embarrassment of riches, some of the sons went into the Church. Here, with diligence and the patronage of a great bishop or cardinal, they could earn a comfortable living and rise in the Church hierarchy. And, indeed, two of Vittoria’s brothers – Ottavio and Mario – had chosen that path. Others might go into the military where, if they survived, the spoils of war would enrich them, and such was the career of her brother Camillo, who fought with Filiberto, the duke of Savoy. But providing dowries for girls to marry well was an unacceptable drain on the limited family resources. In such cases, most families would send all of their daughters to convents where their heavenly husband, Jesus, required only one-tenth the dowry of a flesh-and-blood groom. And so Vittoria’s sisters, Massimilla and Settimia, were packed away in that great warehouse of unwanted women, the convent.

But it would have been a grievous waste to hide Vittoria’s beauty in a place where it would not serve to raise the family fortunes. The right in-laws would help not only Vittoria attain a regal lifestyle, but would boost the careers of her many brothers. Perhaps some elite family, with wealth, property, and Church and government connections, would accept her with a small dowry. The Accorambonis could scrape together some 5,000 scudi, a respectable sum for a middle-class groom, but not nearly the going rate of 20,000 scudi required to win the son of a noble and powerful family.

By the time Vittoria entered the marriage market, her family had moved to Rome and settled into a modest house called the Palazzo Albertoni. Evidently Vittoria’s maternal relations, the Albertonis, had donated the house, perhaps as part of Tarquinia’s dowry, or perhaps out of pity for her straightened circumstances. Three stories tall, with six narrow windows crammed closely together, today it is a patchwork of shades of red burnished by rain, wind, and age. On the left side is a carriage entrance which led to a small courtyard. We can only imagine the frustration of an ambitious clan wedged into the place with numerous children, servants, horses, and chickens.

But the location of their palazzo was excellent, near the Piazza Navona in the heart of Rome. Rome was not only the capital of the Catholic world but also the capital of the nation known as the Papal States, which stretched roughly across the center third of the Italian peninsula. Compared to the limited marriage opportunities of Gubbio, Rome boasted dozens of noble families with strapping single sons and important bishops and cardinals among their ranks.

As paterfamilias, Vittoria’s father, Claudio, should have been instrumental in arranging her marriage and helping her with her many subsequent vicissitudes. But Claudio is conspicuously absent from contemporary records of Vittoria, whose scandalous story would shock all of Italy. It is her mother, Tarquinia, who was known to work with Machiavellian cunning to further her daughter’s rise in the world. Perhaps Claudio, his warrior ways buried in his youth, was now a timid lawyer and hen-pecked husband, and the ambitious Tarquinia ruled the Accoramboni roost.

Surely, she must have reasoned, the luminous beauty of her daughter, a beauty which raised men’s thoughts to God himself, was worth more than the grandest dowry? It was not, alas. Tarquinia was dissatisfied with the bids that came in. Not one of them offered the grandeur that her daughter’s loveliness deserved. But one of them offered
potential
grandeur, and this one she examined closely.

At twenty, Francesco Peretti was an easy-going youth of extremely modest background, whose family hailed from the Marches, a province of the Papal States on the east coast of Italy. His grandfather had been a dirt farmer, raising vegetables and tending pigs on a rented strip of land. His grandmother had done the housekeeping for a wealthy matron. “The family of Peretti was so poor,” according to one early biographer, “that they had not bread to eat, being fain to beg here and there.”
⁵

Francesco’s pious mother, Camilla, had been a laundress married to a farmer, Gianbattista Mignucci, of her hometown of Montalto. Widowed, she had two surviving children, Francesco and his sister Maria, who was close to him in age. But the wild card in the family was Francesco’s uncle, the distinguished theologian and orator, Cardinal Felice Peretti, known as Cardinal Montalto from his natal place. Though the cardinal had suffered great poverty as a child and had helped his father raise pigs, his entrance into a monastery had provided him with an excellent education and a brilliant career.

Having received the red hat in 1570, the new cardinal plucked his sister and her children from the utter poverty of Montalto to a more comfortable life in Rome. “Camilla was so beloved by him,” according to Cardinal Maffei, “that upon receiving his cardinalate and lacking other nephews by way of a brother, he adopted her children into his house, giving them his last name, his coat of arms, and making his heirs the two children… who were now no longer known as Mignucci, but would always be known as Peretti.”
⁶

Cardinal Montalto loved Francesco as if he were his own son. Cardinals, of course, were not supposed to have sons – though some did – and it was their nephews whom they raised and educated, and who became their heirs. Cardinal Montalto, having only one surviving nephew, placed all his hopes for the family in him.

According to an early manuscript in Venice, Francesco was seventeen when his uncle brought him to Rome and enrolled him in a course of humanities supervised by a Jesuit friend. But he didn’t want his nephew to get any inflated ideas of his new position and made him wear clothing of ordinary cloth, “without the least ornament, so that he looked like a peasant, which he was. One day Cardinal Michele Bonelli, who knew he was his nephew, remarked, ‘He should appear a bit more noble.’ Montalto replied, ‘What does your Excellency want? I was born poor and live poor. How can I permit that in my presence my nephew becomes rich and noble?’”
⁷

Cardinal Montalto kept his nephew’s nose to the grindstone and far away from sumptuous parties, where he would have learned refined manners but bad habits as well. He used to say to Francesco, “Remember, my nephew, that you are the only support of our family. The only way you can rise in the world is to have good judgment towards your conduct and apply yourself to your studies. I have done my part, and you must do yours.”
⁸

Though most cardinals lived princely lives in sumptuous palaces, surrounded by exquisite furnishings and some two hundred servants, Cardinal Montalto was one of the “poor cardinals,” those whose income was below what was deemed necessary for a decent lifestyle. Poor cardinals received an extra subsidy from the pope so that a prince of the Church need not be ashamed of his dishonorable living conditions.

To Tarquinia, the cardinal’s financial limitations were certainly a drawback as he was in no position to set up the young couple in a luxurious home. But the Accoramboni family was intrigued by the fact that Montalto was looked upon by many in Rome as the next pope. Cardinal Maffei wrote, “Vittoria’s parents were induced to this wedding not only by the cardinalatial dignity of Montalto but also by the hope of his exaltation to the papacy.”
⁹

Even as a child, Felice’s family believed him to be a future Vicar of Christ. The fascinating family story of his conception was recorded in a contemporary manuscript corrected by Felice himself. One night when Piero Peretti’s wife, Marianna, was residing with her employers, the voice of God woke up her husband, commanding him to pay her a conjugal visit.

“Rise, Peretti,” it said, “and go seek thy wife, for a son is about to be born to thee, to whom thou shalt give the name Felix, since he is one day to be the greatest among mortals.”
¹⁰
To sixteenth-century Italians, the greatest mortal was clearly the pope.

Their son was conceived that night and born on December 13, 1521, the fourth of seven children. Following the command of the angelic voice, they named him Felice – which means
happy
in Italian – for the joyous future that awaited him.

Four children survived childhood – Felice, Camilla, a sister named Flora, who died sometime after having a daughter around 1550, and a brother named Prospero, who died in middle age in the 1560s. Felice and Camilla were extremely close, and to raise money for the struggling family to buy food, sometimes the ragged little girl stood on the main road, holding her baby brother, offering to let passers-by kiss the feet of a future pope in return for alms.

The boy’s seemingly miraculous survival of childhood accidents confirmed the family’s beliefs in his great destiny. One night while he was sleeping, his bed caught fire from a nearby lamp, but he escaped unharmed. As a toddler, he was found floating face down in a pond and was fished out in complete health. And the plague, which killed a brother who slept in his bed, left him unscathed.