Murder in the Garden of God (24 page)

The baths were a kind of Renaissance snake oil for the diseased. One bath, advertising its “principal virtues” on a roadside sign, stated, “It is good for all parts of the head. Cures all stomach troubles, stimulates the appetite, promotes the digestion, checks vomiting, corrects all liver complaints, removes obstructions in liver and blood-vessels, imparts an excellent complexion, benefits those suffering from spleen, heals pulmonary sores, clears the kidneys, reduces the stone, prevents gravel [tiny kidney stones], fattens the lean, cures leprosy if not too far advanced. If drunk, drives out old fevers, and you bathe thirty days. Drink eight or ten glasses after purging. Heals sores on any part of the body.”
¹⁵

Despite the baths’ extravagant claims, bathers rarely obtained the healings advertised. Certainly Montaigne didn’t. “What a vain thing is medicine!” he wrote. “For my part, if I judge aright about these waters, they do neither much harm nor much good.”
¹⁶
Though he did complain about “flatulence without end.”
¹⁷

If the baths didn’t help cure the ill, at least they didn’t kill them, as did so many cherished medical practices of the time. Until the nineteenth century, doctors worked blindly, using accepted cures such as bleeding, pukes, and purges for every ailment from head colds to cancer. Realizing these measures were usually ineffective, some doctors experimented with shocking new remedies.

According to the author Vespasiano da Bisticci, when the virtuous young Cardinal Jacopo di Portogallo “ruptured a vein in his chest” – whatever that meant – his Florentine physician “tried to induce him, as an extraordinary experiment, to submit to a remedy revolting to him, and hurtful to his spiritual welfare.” According to what this man said it would be advantageous to the Cardinal’s health if he slept with a young girl, and that no better remedy than this could be found.
¹⁸
The cardinal was more concerned with his spiritual well-being than his physical health, and angrily refused. He died at the age of twenty-six.

In 1503, when Pope Alexander VI’s son Césaré Borgia was suffering from the same malaria that killed his father, “they bled him until his heart almost stopped beating. They made him swallow enormous quantities of the most potent emetics. They plunged him up to his neck into a jar of ice water from which he emerged practically skinless; and in an effort to sweat the malaria out of his system, they packed him into the still pulsating entrails of a mule.”
¹⁹
But in his case, the bizarre remedies worked, or perhaps if that didn’t kill him, nothing could.

Doctors evinced a similar ignorance regarding drugs made from plants which sometimes killed the people they were supposed to heal. The French physician Bernard de Gordon stated that drugs should first be tested on birds, then on mammals, next on sick people in hospitals, then on Franciscan monks, and finally on human beings.

According to Montaigne, the duke’s health resort, Abano, was “a little village near the foot of the mountains, above which, three or four hundred paces higher, there is a place somewhat elevated and stony. This height, which is very spacious, has a number of springs of hot and boiling water spouting from the rock; around the source it is too hot to bathe in, and still more so to drink… The whole of the district is in vapor, for the streams which flow here and there into the plain carry the heat and the smell a long way.”

He continued, “There are two or three little houses in this place, very poorly provided for invalids, into which they turn channels from those springs, to provide baths for the houses. Not only is there steam wherever there is water, but the rock itself sends forth steam through all its joints and crevices, and gives out heat on all sides; so that they have pierced holes in some places, where a man may lie down in the exhalations and get into a heat and perspiration, which he does very quickly.”
²⁰
The invalid next drinks some of the water, swishing it around in his mouth to cool it. Montaigne found it very salty.

We can only hope that Paolo Giordano liked the baths of Abano more than the French philosopher did. “All these baths enjoy no great advantage,” he scoffed, “unless it be their proximity to Venice, as everything about them is coarse and unsavory.”
²¹

But Abano did offer visitors something more than sulfuric fumes and a short distance to Venice. Here, the gourmand Paolo Giordano would have enjoyed ice cream. Montaigne noticed deep pits around the baths in which residents kept snow all year round. In the dead of winter, villagers hauled it down from the surrounding mountains tightly packed on a stretcher of broom, deposited it in the pits, and covered it over with thick thatched roofs. Mixed with fruit juice and perhaps a bit of cream, in the June heat the snow would have made a delectable dessert.

Having stuffed himself with ice cream, Paolo Giordano sat with fresh slabs of raw beef on his pus-filled leg. He drank enormous quantities of hot sulfur water as rotten-egg fumes rose around him. The dynamic baron had suddenly become a sick old man. But at least he had Vittoria with him, whom everyone called his wife.

* * *

While Paolo Giordano was partaking of the waters of Abano, the pope was focused on the water of Rome, or rather the lack thereof. A good gardener cannot tend his garden properly without water. Sixtus, the gardener of God, wanted to bring water to God’s garden, the holy city of Rome. As soon as he had bought his hilltop villa in 1576, he had become painfully aware of the lack of water. As cardinal he had often met with the architect of his palace, Domenico Fontana, to discuss how it would be possible to bring water not only to his garden, but to all of Rome. Fontana, examining the various ruined aqueducts, thought that one of them, the Acqua Alessandrina, would be the easiest to repair.

In the time of the Roman Empire, fourteen aqueducts had supplied Rome’s one million inhabitants with sparkling water from mountains some twenty miles away. The city boasted 1,300 fountains, hundreds of swimming pools, and dozens of huge bathing complexes where Romans could splash happily in cold, tepid, and hot water. Even public toilets had fresh water running through them.

It often irked Sixtus that a city that had worshiped idols had been blessed with water, while the home of Christ’s Church had been a thirsty shambles for eleven hundred years. Certainly God didn’t approve. Now, as God’s Vicar, he would bring renewed life to parched earth. He would baptize the city with fresh water, cleansing its ancient sins.

On the day of Sixtus’s
possesso,
he announced his intention to restore the Acqua Alessandrina. “These hills,” he said, gesturing to the weed-bedecked mounds dotted with munching goats, “adorned in early Christian times with basilicas, renowned for the salubrity of their air, the pleasantness of their situation, and the beauty of their prospects, might again become inhabited by man.”
²¹²

Deploring Rome’s lack of water, he said, “This condition that has lasted for many centuries has attracted our attention, especially because the low quarters of the city, which are densely populated, are very humid, unhealthy, and exposed to the frequent floods of the Tiber. It is therefore necessary to conduct water sufficient to render habitable the hill regions, which are distinguished by their excellent air and attractive position. Neither the difficulty nor the serious expense of the enterprise will discourage us.”
²³

And indeed, there was plenty of discouragement. It would take decades to fix the aqueduct, experts warned, and millions of scudi. But with characteristic stubbornness, the pope said, “Nothing is impossible.”
²⁴

Domenico Fontana agreed. He was one of the few men of his time who didn’t search for reasons why a particular engineering job
couldn’t
be done. He looked for how it
could
be done. Working hand in hand, Fontana and Sixtus would quickly reshape Rome, using plans they had made years earlier.

The source of the Acqua Alessandrina was some sixteen miles outside Rome but because of the terrain the finished aqueduct would be twenty-two miles in length. On May 28, 1585, the pope purchased the springs for 25,000 scudi from the Colonna family and in June spent another 36,000 scudi to start the work. Sixtus wanted to supply three hills with water – the Esquiline, Viminal, and Quirinal, and other, lower parts of the city as well, so that filthy Tiber water would no longer be necessary.

Much of the aqueduct was built underground, which involved thousands of laborers digging and sometimes blasting away rock. When hundreds of men fell sick with malaria, they were quickly replaced. The pope frequently rode out to inspect the progress personally. Using a team of 4,336 men, at a cost of 300,000 scudi, the pope fixed Rome’s water supply within fifteen months. He ordered that the new aqueduct be called the Acqua Felice, after himself, but it also meant
happy water.

The pope built a public fountain in the Piazza Susanna, where Romans could dip their buckets for fresh water, and placed there a statue of Moses, who had struck a rock in the desert to bring water to the thirsty. Obviously, the stern bearded Moses represented the pope. Over time, Sixtus would build a total of twenty-seven fountains throughout Rome using three ancient aqueducts.

Once Sixtus had his water works underway, he turned his attention to another problem that had bothered him for decades – Rome’s narrow, twisting medieval roads. Sixtus knew that the ancient Romans had built wide streets punctuated by large piazzas. But over the centuries, people had enlarged their houses by building additions into the streets or blocking up the streets altogether.

In 1575, Pope Gregory’s master of ceremonies had written, “If a solemn festival be anywhere held, or if there be a confluence of people on occasion of any public rejoicing or spectacle, or the funeral procession of some cardinal or dignitary, whatever the cause may be, the roads and open spaces are so packed with the crowd of vehicles that it becomes impossible for foot passengers to move along; nay, even public ceremonies and processions are interfered with, to the great inconvenience and scandal of all, sometimes even with danger to life.”
²⁵

But building the new streets involved knocking down ancient churches, convents, palaces, and Roman ruins. A howl of protest went up when the public heard of the pope’s plans. Cardinal Santorio wrote, “When it was perceived that the pope seemed resolving on the utter destruction of the Roman antiquities, there came to me one day a number of Roman nobles, who entreated me to dissuade his Holiness with all my power from so extravagant a design.”
²⁶

The pope insisted that he would “clear away the ugly antiquities.”
²⁷
And down they went, their columns and stones hauled off to be used in finishing Saint Peter’s Basilica. Impatient with what he saw as unproductive space, Sixtus wanted to turn the revered Colosseum into a wool factory, where the poor could live and work. He planned to hang a huge sign on the side which read, “Pope Sixtus’s Wool Factory.” Fortunately, his architects deemed the building unsuited for such an enterprise and too expensive to remodel.

Fontana was also put in charge of building the new roads. In his autobiography, the architect wrote, “Our Lord, wanting to facilitate the streets to those who show devotion, and who often want to visit the most holy places in the city of Rome, and in particular the seven churches so celebrated for the great indulgences and relics, opened many very wide and straight streets to these places, so that anyone on foot, on horse and in coaches can leave from wherever they want in Rome and go almost in a straight line to the most famous devotions. And this is filling up the city because in those streets which people frequent, they are building houses and shops in great number. Earlier, groups got scattered with great inconvenience on the long route, and on certain really rough streets, so that they couldn’t arrive at the desired locations.”
²⁸

The new streets, wide enough to hold five carriages across and straight as swords, radiated out like the points of a star from Sixtus’s favorite church, Saint Mary Major, to all parts of Rome. In six months, the pope’s 1,500 workmen paved 121 dirt roads with large stones and built some 10,000 meters of new roads at a cost of two million scudi. Today, these are still the main arteries of Rome, and a lasting testament to Pope Sixtus V.

Chapter 17

No Respecter of Persons

You will be like an oak with fading leaves, like a garden without water.

– Isaiah 1:29-31

W
hile Paolo Giordano and Vittoria engulfed themselves in the malodorous fumes of Abano, Rome, too, had its share of smells, and not just from the ripe-decay stench of the pope’s beloved heads. Sixtus caused a huge stink by removing diplomatic immunity. True, he gave all embassies fair warning that their employees – including the ambassadors themselves – would no longer be permitted to rabble rouse or carry firearms. He would, however, allow the embassy guards to carry pikes and halberds as a matter of tradition and prestige.

Most ambassadors didn’t listen to his orders and carried on as if the immunity were still in effect. Cardinal d’Este, who was a close friend of the French ambassador’s, repeatedly warned him to clean up the behavior of his large staff of ruffians, but the ambassador merely shrugged.

Riding by the ambassador’s palace, Sixtus could see for himself that the doormen at the gate were armed to the teeth with guns. Back at the Vatican, he commanded the governor to break down the gate and arrest all those inside with firearms. Awed by the regal power of France, the governor merely told the guards to put away their guns by order of the pope. Then he returned to Sixtus and told him that it would no longer be a problem.

When Sixtus heard this, according to the chronicler, his “face was greatly disturbed, and he said, ‘Arrest them immediately, even if you have to go into the ambassador’s bedroom. It is our task to free ourselves from these intrigues because Sunday we want to make a public spectacle.’”
¹

The two guards at the gate, still holding their guns, were arrested despite the furious complaints of the ambassador, who stated that he had given them instructions to carry firearms, and they should not be punished for following his orders. The pope replied that the two men would be carefully interrogated to see whether they were troublemakers or not. If they were law-abiding men, merely guarding the gate with guns as they had been ordered, they would be pardoned. But if they were criminals, he could not, as chief judge and strict Vicar of Christ, let them live.

Alas, it was found that these men were thugs and bandits. They had caroused late at night in the streets of Rome and beaten up honest citizens. In the time of Gregory XIII, they had often chased away the pope’s guards with shots and threats. The men were hanged as an example to other ambassadors to keep their servants in line with the law.

The ambassador immediately fired off a letter to King Henri III of France protesting the incident. The king replied quickly, instructing the ambassador to read his angry response personally to the pope. But before he could finish, Sixtus chased him out of the audience chamber and commanded him and his entire entourage to leave the Papal States within forty-eight hours. There were repercussions, however, and Sixtus soon suffered a diplomatic tit for tat. When he sent a new nuncio to Paris, the king refused to receive him. The pope, in return, threatened to excommunicate the king of France himself.

Sixtus had even worse relations with the Spanish ambassador, Count Olivares, a scion of one of the richest families in Spain. The kingdom of Naples was technically owned by the pope but leased to Spain in return for the annual tribute of a gorgeous white horse on the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul, June 28. The beautifully embroidered myth of papal jurisdiction soothed the pain of having lost the valuable kingdom centuries earlier.

During the 1585 ceremony, the first of Sixtus’s reign, when the ambassador swaggered forward with the noble steed, instead of accepting it graciously, the pope said sarcastically, “Oh, what a nice compliment you are making us today, obliging us to exchange a kingdom for a beast. This will not last much longer.”
²
The ambassador wondered if this meant a papal invasion of Naples.

Sixtus was furious with Philip II for saying that religion was too important to be left in the hands of the pope. How on earth, he fumed, could a foolish in-bred king presume to tell Christ’s Vicar on Earth what to do in matters of religion? Relations between Spain and the Papal States further deteriorated when the pope refused to ship grain to Naples and stored it up in large silos for his own people to be used in time of famine. The grain of the Papal States, he said, was for the benefit of the people of the Papal States, and not for the people of Naples, who could grow their own grain if they ever got off their rear ends and planted some.

Most insulting of all, instead of allowing the Spanish ambassador to walk directly behind him in public processions, a time-honored tradition, the pope gave precedence to the governor of Rome as his top official. When the Spaniard angrily sputtered protests about this insult, the pope declared that he, as Vicar of Christ, and his judicial representative, held a status far above that of all earthly monarchs. Olivares returned to read a letter from his king insisting he take his rightful place and push the governor’s delegation out of the way. The pope whispered something to a servant, and within minutes one of his executioners stood in the corner of the papal audience chamber, grimly holding a noose.

Because Olivares could not tolerate the dishonor of taking a place further back in the parade line, he pretended to be ill for the processions. To catch the ambassador at his own game, Sixtus instructed the governor to bruit it about that he was too sick to participate in the next parade. And sure enough, the ambassador’s health improved suddenly and he lined up with his entourage to march. But at the last minute the health of the governor also improved, and he pushed in front of the Spaniards with ten of his weapon-wielding officers. Olivares suddenly pretended to have an attack of kidney stones and stumbled from the parade line clutching his side.

Olivares didn’t help matters by getting into shouting matches with Sixtus. As the personal representative of the most powerful monarch on earth, the ambassador had an inflated sense of self-importance and argued when other ambassadors would have trembled. “No ambassador got into as much hot water as that of Spain because he was the only one to speak candidly to the pope, and with daring,” the chronicler wrote.
³
Their audiences often ended with the pope rising from his throne in fury, running down the steps that led up to it, and shaking his fist as he chased the ambassador down the long chamber and out the door. Younger and nimbler than Sixtus, Olivares always ran faster and raced out to his carriage before the pope could catch him.

The Spanish ambassador was furious when the pope arrested his court poet, Carlo Matera, whom he had hired to write an epic poem recounting the glories of Philip II. Unfortunately, Matera wrote poems of a less worthy nature, including one which he circulated widely calling a certain Isabella Gigli
una gran puttana,
“a great whore.”
⁴

Isabella Gigli was no whore but the virtuous wife of a successful Roman lawyer, who was livid when he heard about Matera’s insulting poem. The husband paid servants in the Spanish embassy to steal a copy of the poem and bring it to him. Once he had the incriminating evidence in his hands, he obtained an audience with the pope.

“Most holy father,” he said, “I protest that I do not hate this poet who has lacerated the honor of my innocent and honorable wife, nor am I trying to have him punished. I am come to the feet of your Holiness for the debt of honor and the rigor of your Holiness’s justice which everyone praises, and which induced me to take this step, and to avoid causing the indignation of your Holiness.” He was right about the last. If he had not protested to the pope, and Sixtus had found out about the poem, then the husband would have been given the same punishment as the poet.

The pope replied, “You have done your duty, and we will do ours… Your cause is in the hands of a good judge.”
⁵

Matera was arrested as he came out of the ambassador’s palace. Sixtus had him brought into the papal audience chamber where several cardinals, a criminal judge, and other prelates were sitting with him. Matera, who had no idea why he had been arrested, was unafraid, thinking he could talk his way out of any situation.

Sixtus read the poet some of his verses and asked if he was the author, to which Matera replied frankly that he was. Then the pope got to the line that read, “In short this woman is a great whore.”

He asked, “Why are you dishonoring an honorable woman, calling her a whore?”

Matera replied, “Holy father, I swear at the feet of your Holiness that it was never my intention to offend the honor of this lady, because that word was only used in poetic license. It has always been the common opinion of the world that poets and painters are permitted everything, and your Holiness can see that the rhyme in the previous line was
fontana
[fountain], so that I called this
lady puttana
only to accommodate the rhyme, as is usual.”
⁶

The cardinals burst into guffaws at this clever and impudent reply, and even Sixtus couldn’t help but chuckle. “Oh well,” he said, “if this poetic license to accommodate the verses is conceded to you poets, it will also be allowed to us popes, and we want to see if we can make verses and accommodate the rhymes to our taste.” The pope thought for a moment and said, “He greatly deserves, this Signor Matera, to have his own room in the
galera
[galleys.]”

The poet suddenly lost his cockiness and found himself speechless with terror. The pope asked him if he liked his rhyme, but Matera didn’t reply. Sixtus repeated his question, asking whether these verses did not make a nice rhyme. The poet murmured they did, and Sixtus had him returned to prison.

The criminal judge asked the pope if he really wanted to condemn the man to the galleys for such a silly poem. Red-faced, Sixtus cried, “Why do you have any scruples? If you allow this great crime, vice, and insolence to go unpunished under the stupid excuse of poetic license, in the future every poet will be writing such verses and will be able to call the
pontefici
[popes]
eretici
[heretics.] The
Vaticano
[Vatican] rhymes with
Luterano
[Lutheran.] And you make us marvel when you ask us if you should execute the sentence of sending him to the galleys when the crime deserves, upon further reflection, the gallows. And it seems that you doubt this?”
⁷

As Matera was being dragged off to the galleys, Olivares complained to young Cardinal Montalto that papal guards had invaded the immunity of his palace three times, had executed two of his servants, and sent another five to the galleys, where Sixtus was now dispatching his poet, whom he had hired to write an epic poem. When his nephew asked Sixtus to reconsider the sentence, the pope replied, “The sentence of the galleys was made out of respect to the Spanish ambassador because Matera deserved the gallows, and there are not so few poets on earth that another one could not be found to write verses praising Philip II of Spain. The ambassador should be grateful for the favor he has received and not go nudging around for more.”
⁸

The pope began to focus on arresting poets. He said he wanted them to write their verses while on the gallows, in the galleys, or sitting in chains in jail. Sometimes in the morning when the biting pasquinades of the night before were brought to him, he would say of a particular poet, “If he applied his genius to virtuous and relevant matters, he would find his fortune with us, instead of running in danger of his life.”
⁹

It seemed the Spanish ambassador was forever angry at the pope for including Spanish citizens in his justice campaign. Under previous pontiffs, an ambassador need only say the word and the pope would release one of his compatriots for even the most heinous crime, with the request that the ambassador make sure he return home, far from the Papal States. It was a kind of diplomatic courtesy that was, by now, fully expected.

One day, a certain Spanish gentleman was waiting in the papal antechamber when a Swiss guard walked past and unwittingly knocked him on the head with his halberd as he tried to clear the crowds for the pope to pass by. The Spaniard took it as a mortal offense. A few days later at early morning Mass, the Spaniard saw the Swiss kneeling at the other end of the altar and grabbed the pilgrim’s staff of a man kneeling nearby. He marched up to the guard and said, “You have insulted me with your stick, and now I will revenge myself with mine,” and gave him a whack on the head, a tremendous blow that cracked his skull. The guard fell to the floor without even being able to confess, and could only extend his hand while the celebrating priest raced up to him and gave him absolution before he expired. The Spaniard fled from the church, but the Swiss guards, seeing their compatriot dead on the floor, ran after his attacker and arrested him.

The pope was enraged when he heard this story. He cried, “In the time of Sixtus they commit such wickedness in Rome? Hasn’t everyone heard about the rigor of our justice? Very well, we will make them hear it now.” Then he called for the governor. “Is this how they kill the men in Rome, Signor Governor, in the presence of God with no respect for his Church, and for his sanctuary? It is now your job to repair this crime with the execution of justice given to our authority.”

The governor replied that he had ordered testimony to be gathered with all possible speed for the trial. To which Sixtus replied with a voice even angrier than usual, “What trial? In such cases trials are superfluous.”

But the governor replied that it was necessary to have a trial because the accused was protected by the ambassador of Spain. Investigations and interrogations must take place as usual. The pope replied, “Get as much information as you want as long as this Spaniard is hanged before I eat lunch, and I want to eat early today because this morning I have a good appetite.

As the governor was leaving, the pope said, “Build the gallows in a place where I can see it from this window.