Murder in the Garden of God (5 page)

There were many measures a woman could take to cure her infertility, and sometimes they even worked. She could drink a potion of pulverized snake skins, rabbit milk, and crayfish. One remedy was to have a virgin boy place a belt inscribed with prayers around her waist as she chanted three Our Fathers and three Ave Marias. The smell of amber was thought to cure infertility, and we can imagine Vittoria, her nose over a perfume burner, inhaling the fumes of crushed amber. Contemplating a beautiful image of the Virgin and Child was thought to encourage conception.

The truly desperate could drink periwinkles pounded to powder and mixed with earthworms, or a brew made of the ashes of a frog mixed with the genitals of a wild boar. She could munch on the middle finger and anus of a fetus born two months early, and wash it down with a glass of mule’s urine. Or she could drink the blood of a freshly slaughtered hare, infused with the left hind paw of a weasel, steeped in vinegar. And if all else failed, an infertile wife could make a pilgrimage to Loreto, on the east coast of Italy, to the very house where Jesus had been miraculously conceived in Nazareth, and which had been flown to Italy by angels who rescued it from Muslim conquerors.

Oddly, some cases of infertility were believed to be the result of excessive libido, and if in their first year of marriage Francesco and Vittoria were insatiable, they would have been advised to restrain themselves. The sheer heat of lust, it was thought, would burn away the first feeble attempts of a would-be fetus to take root. It was known that prostitutes rarely had children, despite their constant sexual activity, and the reason given was their immoderate lust rather than their routine abortions. Married couples were advised to employ stately decorum in their relations, using dignified positions appropriate for conjugal sex.

When these cures didn’t work, Vittoria became a vicarious mother, a godmother to several neighborhood babies, according to the local parish registry. Holding the little bundle at the baptismal font, Vittoria must have enjoyed for a few minutes the feeling of squirmy warmth against her breast. But then she was forced to relinquish the child to the mother, and her arms were once more empty. Many of her goddaughters were named Vittoria after her.

While Vittoria’s brothers Mario, Giulio, and Ottavio were aided by the cardinal uncle in their careers, her favorite brother, Marcello, also received his assistance. But the cardinal’s intercession did not boost his job prospects; it saved his life. Marcello, a young man of devilish good looks, was a gambling, dueling, womanizing, hard-drinking rogue. At some point in the late 1570s this swaggering sack of testosterone-enhanced bravado had brawled with a pharmacist’s servant and ended up killing him. Little account was taken when a nobleman killed a servant, and so Marcello remained in Rome overlooked by the law.

But the authorities, who yawned when people of the lower classes were mercilessly cut down, howled in rage when a nobleman was murdered. One hot summer night in 1580, Marcello stabbed Matteo Pallavicino, brother of Cardinal Pietro Pallavicino, in the heart, killing him instantly. The governor of Rome issued an order for the murderer’s arrest, but Marcello hopped on a horse and galloped out of the city gates. He found refuge some twenty miles north of Rome, in the fortress of the Orsini family on Lake Bracciano. The duke, Paolo Giordano, was always looking for brave and reckless young men to draft into his personal army of hoodlums.

For the sake of the Vittoria, who dropped shimmering diamond tears onto a handkerchief gaily embroidered by her own fair hand, and for the sake of Francesco, who considered Marcello to be his best friend in the world, Cardinal Montalto used his connections once again. “He [Marcello] fled in great danger,” wrote the chronicler, “and was bravely defended by the intercession of Cardinal Montalto.”
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Little did the good cardinal know how dearly he would have to pay for his kindness.

Cardinal Montalto had mitigated Marcello’s punishment at the hands of Roman law, but he could not prevent the servants of Cardinal Pallavicino from seeking bloody revenge on the man who had killed the cardinal’s young brother. In such cases night ambushes were popular to maintain a modicum of anonymity, but sometimes vendettas were carried out in broad day-light on a bustling city street. When Marcello wanted to visit his family, he snuck into the city incognito and stayed quietly with Francesco and Vittoria. At night Marcello and Francesco would walk the few blocks to the Accorambonis’ palazzo, Marcello disguised in a wig, moustache, and borrowed cloak, and both men armed. Marcello’s visits were always secretive, brief, and dangerous. Vittoria’s infertility and unhappy marriage, along with her brother’s predicament, depressed her.

Worst of all, the one stroke of luck she had been counting on seemed as if it would never come to pass. Pope Gregory XIII had been 70 years old when he ascended the papal throne in 1572, in a century when most wealthy adult males died by their mid-fifties. And despite the fondest hopes of Vittoria, Tarquinia, and Cardinal Montalto, the years slipped by without any serious indisposition. The pope ate fruits and salads, avoided rich food and wine, and exercised regularly in the Vatican gardens, walking so briskly that his young secretaries, huffing and puffing, struggled to keep up with him. He had a calm disposition, and some of his relatives had lived into their nineties.

In June 1577, the Mantuan ambassador wrote, “The pope is now in better health than ever.”
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Neither stifling heat nor piercing cold seemed to bother him. In January 1578, Gregory visited all of the seven main churches of Rome in freezing weather, exhausting the twenty-year-olds in his suite.

During Easter week of 1579, the Mantuan ambassador reported that the pope seemed as vigorous as if he were only forty years of age. Many elderly popes required a chair during long ceremonies, but Gregory insisted on standing, even throughout the entire five-hour Easter service. “He is a very handsome old man,” wrote the French traveler Michel de Montaigne in 1580, “of the middle height and upright, his face full of majesty, a long white beard: at this time the pope is more than eighty years old, as healthy and vigorous as one could possibly wish, without gout, without colic, without stomach trouble.”
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Gregory’s predecessor, Pius V, had died at sixty-eight, and before him, Pius IV had been sixty-six. But it seemed that this pontiff was never going to die. He even leaped briskly onto his horse without any help from his groom. And what was worse for Vittoria, Cardinal Montalto had begun to lean on a stick and wheeze.

Frustrated on all sides, Vittoria’s heart soared when at parties and feasts she was the object of attention of rich and powerful men. She danced gracefully in her silks and showed off the gems Camilla and Francesco had squeezed out of the family budget, or that she had bought on credit, or that Cardinal Montalto had donated to maintain family harmony instead of buying bread for the poor. And here were men who, unlike her bumbling husband, were worthy of her, men who could provide her with the things she wanted. Here for a few hours she was the center of attention, and her beauty was lauded as it always should have been, until she was forced to return to Camilla’s mean home.

If written words could utter a sigh, Cardinal Maffei’s do. “Finally,” he wrote, “you could say this marriage would have been most happy if men knew to measure their happiness with the enjoyment of what they possess, not with the instability of what they hope, the only stumbling-block of true happiness. When we impetuously chase our hopes outside of secure and tangible things, they drag us to perilous precipices, and flee.”
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Cardinal Santorio, who was no friend of the Accorambonis, believed that Vittoria stepped beyond the fatal boundary of flirting into the quagmire of adultery, and that her mother and brother Marcello encouraged it. “The name of marriage she abused with libertinism and voluptuousness,” he wrote. “First a little bit and secretly, then openly, enticing her lovers, immoderate in her splendor, haughty of new conquests… She had a firm step, open eyes, and mouth always ready to laugh and charm.” He added scornfully, “It seemed to the Accorambonis that vices and lust provided a clearer path to fortune.”
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That much, at least, was true.

But it is unlikely that Vittoria actually had sex with her admirers. For one thing, family honor required that female adultery be punished by strangulation with a red silk ribbon – which inevitably broke and was replaced with a thick knotted rope. If the adulteress remained unpunished, the honor of the entire family would tank, and not one of them could hold up his head in public. The unfaithful female relative of a cardinal, especially, would have undergone the punishment or he could not have shown his face in church. But we hear nothing of red silk wrapped around Vittoria’s slender neck, only pearls and gold. Secondly, it is unlikely that a sixteenth-century nobleman would move heaven and earth to marry a woman he was already sleeping with.

According to the ancient epic of the Trojan War, welcoming splendid beauty within one’s doors could be a dangerous thing. Francesco was in some ways like the foolish shepherd Paris, who stole the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen, and brought her to Troy. In stubbornly insisting on possessing a fabled beauty, both Paris and Francesco unwittingly unleashed a brutal war. For other, richer, more powerful men wanted her, too.

Chapter 4

The Lover

See how the faithful city has become a harlot! She once was full of
justice; righteousness used to dwell in her
—
but now murderers!

– Isaiah 1:21

A
fter eight years of waiting for Pope Gregory XIII to die, Vittoria and her family had lost patience. After all, Cardinal Montalto’s future pontifical glory was the only reason the most beautiful girl in Rome had married into the wretched Peretti family to begin with. In particular, her ambitious mother, Tarquinia, was considering Vittoria’s options. In sixteenth-century Italy, divorce was not one of them, of course.

Since the pope seemed to be immortal, Vittoria and Tarquinia began to hope that Francesco was not. Young, healthy men died all the time from malaria or dysentery. With no antibiotics, a simple cold could turn into bronchitis, and then pneumonia. With no means to stanch internal bleeding, riding and carriage accidents culled a few victims, particularly among young men who liked to race. Once relieved of her embarrassing husband, the charming young widow could make a better matrimonial choice and enjoy the rewards that her beauty so eminently deserved.

At the age of twenty-four, and having lost the first freshness of youth, Vittoria must have worried that her good looks might soon decay. Small pox could ruin a woman’s complexion overnight. And many women in their twenties started to lose teeth. Painful cavities were plentiful in a society fond of sweets but ignorant of dental floss, and a “dentist” was a big burly man wielding a large pair of pliers. Once her looks were gone, she wouldn’t be able to snag the kind of man she wanted, trading beauty for wealth and nobility. If Francesco were going to liberate her, it would have to be soon.

And then, a certain rich nobleman made it clear to Vittoria that he would be happy to marry her as soon as she was widowed. Paolo Giordano Orsini, the duke of Bracciano, was the most powerful baron in Rome. Born in 1541, he was the scion of a great Roman family which dated back to the eighth century and was allied to the royal houses of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Poland, Hungary, France, and Naples. Eleven European queens had been Orsinis, and no less than twelve sons of emperors and kings had married Orsini daughters. The clan boasted several cardinals in their family tree, along with two popes. They could thank the poet Dante for their eternal fame in literature; he gleefully put one corrupt Orsini pope, Nicholas III (reigned 1277-1280), in hell where, we can presume, he remains today.

Paolo Giordano was the proud owner of numerous palaces in Rome and the frowning turreted fortress on Lake Bracciano, twenty miles to the north. Though he was the great-grandson of two popes, Julius II (reigned 1503-1512) on his father’s side, and Paul III (reigned 1534-1549) on his mother’s, Paolo Giordano had been dealt several bad cards at an early age, some of them at the moment of conception. His ancestor Gentil Virginio was an egomaniac who enjoyed prancing about in lavish costumes and switched loyalties whenever the wind changed direction. His ancestor Gian Giordano was a megalomaniac afflicted by uncontrollable spending. His uncle Francesco was an arrogant spendthrift who murdered his brother in an ambush.

Paolo Giordano’s father had died before he was born. His mother abandoned him to relatives to remarry when he was four and died six years later. Uncle Francesco, who by this time was thought to be mad, was put in charge of the estate until Paolo Giordano came of age, during which time he almost bankrupted the family. The boy was raised by another uncle, Cardinal Guid’Ascanio Sforza, who allowed him to roam Rome unsupervised, popping into taverns, gambling dens, and whorehouses at will. Raised so haphazardly, the child sustained himself with an unflagging certainty of his noble greatness and developed a shocking lack of self-discipline that would plague his entire life.

Now, at the age of forty, the duke offered any potential bride two enormous disadvantages. First of all, there was his appearance. Of a gigantic stature, he was so morbidly obese that he had difficulty finding a horse strong enough to hold him. He penned urgent letters to friends and cardinals begging them to locate colossal muscular steeds who wouldn’t collapse as soon as he mounted them. On September 15, 1575, he wrote one such letter to Cardinal Antonio Caraffa. “Will your most Illustrious Sanctitude do me the favor of granting one of his bay mares for my person,” he asked, “because of the weight and quality of my body, for which not every horse is good.”
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When the pope and several Catholic states declared war against the Ottoman Turks in 1571 for seizing Venetian vessels, Paolo Giordano insisted on commanding a galley in the upcoming naval battle. But Catholic military leaders were afraid that his ungainly bulk would roll around the deck like a loose barrel – hardly an inspiring sight in a naval commander. They yielded, as they always did, to his illustrious heritage, and Paolo Giordano waddled on board cheerfully. He returned from the victorious Battle of Lepanto gloriously wounded in the leg by a Turkish arrow. But reports filtered back that initial misgivings about his performance had proved correct; he had become the object of ridicule, “revealing himself to be so inept due to his excessive fatness.”
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Paolo Giordano’s face was scarlet, his brown eyes bulging, and his wiry dark hair stuck out straight from his head. He had a strange stiff moustache, which he must have waxed, that curled up at both ends, and a goatee so small it looked as if he had spilled some gravy on his chin. Yet a contemporary wrote that he possessed “every supreme title of excellence; a noble soul, surpassing liberality, royal hospitality, largely charitable, gloriously magnificent, wise as a ruler, gentle and humane to his dependants, of incomparable courtesy.”
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Though renowned as a man of noble tastes and exquisite manners, his good breeding was only a coat of shellac over a rough and brutal soul.

This savage passion was expressed in his second disadvantage, the little matter of his first wife’s demise. In 1558, seventeen-year-old Paolo Giordano had married sixteen-year-old Isabella de Medici, the daughter of Duke Cosimo of Tuscany. A witty, talented beauty, Isabella was dark-eyed with chestnut hair. She spoke Spanish, French, and Latin fluently, played several musical instruments flawlessly, sang like an angel, and wrote lovely poetry. Of the many children of Duke Cosimo, Isabella was called “the fairest star of the de Medici.”
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It was, of course, a marriage arranged for political reasons; Cosimo needed Orsini support to conquer Siena, as the extended family of the Orsinis owned several counties surrounding the city. A son born to the couple, uniting the blood of the Orsinis and de Medicis, would ensure political and military support in the future.

Unfortunately, Paolo Giordano could no more control his finances than his eating and seemed to have had what today we might call compulsive spending disorder. By the tender age of sixteen, he was deeply in debt. He didn’t only spend on himself; he gave valuable presents to servants and hangers-on in an attempt to impress them with his splendid munificence; on one occasion he gave all of his male servants solid gold riding spurs.

He bought horses, carriages, hunting dogs, falcons, furnishings, and fine clothing. He gave banquets, feasts, and lavish entertainments, including one in Rome in December 1563 to celebrate the visit of his in-laws, the ducal family of Tuscany. One of his servants wrote to his friends at Bracciano, “There are triumphal arches, jousts, hunts and such costumes that you could not imagine the money spent on them, but as for us courtiers we cannot touch any funds for household management or to put the palace in order.”
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If the bride was disappointed in the groom’s appearance – he was obese even as a teenager – she must have been consoled by the $20 million dowry her father bestowed on her. Naturally, such a sum could not find its way into the hands of the spendthrift groom. Duke Cosimo kept his daughter, and her dowry, firmly in Florence. Paolo Giordano could visit her whenever he wished, but according to sixteenth-century traditions it was a humiliating situation for a young man, who was expected to take his bride to
his
castle. He took out his frustrations by frequenting the vilest whorehouses in Rome.

In 1559, only a year after his vaunted wedding, Paolo Giordano landed as a witness in the trial of a prostitute known as Camilla the Skinny, who had assaulted another prostitute, Pasqua of Padua, and thrown a candlestick at her head. Camilla the Skinny testified that Paolo Giordano “wanted nothing better than for us to have it out with our fists.”
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Isabella was of course kept informed of her embarrassing husband’s antics. She was delighted to spend as little time with him as possible. She did not have to leave the refinements of Florence for the moated castle of Bracciano or the mosquitoes and garbage of Rome, and best of all, she could blame the situation on her father. When her mother, Duchess Eleonora, died in 1562, at the duke’s insistence Isabella took over her role as first lady of Florence, entertaining foreign dignitaries at feasts, balls, and concerts. Marrying the Orsini duke had been a step down for a Medici princess, who could have wed a ruling prince or even a king, and her husband was not the sort of man, even in the flower of youth, to make a girl sigh with desire. Isabella got on much better when he was in Rome and she could return to planning musical entertainments for her father’s court. She must have heaved an enormous sigh of relief as she waved her scented handkerchief from the palace balcony at his fat form and suffering horse, riding off into the sunset.

Even though Paolo Giordano couldn’t get his hands on his wife’s dowry, he continued his reckless high living. In 1567, the Venetian ambassador wrote, “The house of Orsini has as its head Paolo Giordano, duke of Bracciano, and son-in-law of the duke of Florence, young at about thirty years, of extreme size, but for all that strong enough and vigorous… He is greatly inclined and profuse in spending, and if he has 30,000 scudi a year income, he has debts of more than 150,000.”
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In 1568, Paolo Giordano borrowed 40,000 scudi. He was in such desperate straits that he pawned three silver candlesticks for 115 scudi. For some silver plates and flasks he received 215 scudi, and for silk wall hangings 82 scudi. When this didn’t begin to cover his massive debts, he sold off large parcels of land.

As time went on, Duke Cosimo realized that he had made a terrible mistake in marrying his daughter to the Orsini duke. The debts were bad enough, but he was furious to hear that Paolo Giordano was selling off land; it was his land that had made him a suitable bridegroom to begin with. Additionally, the main purpose of the alliance – a Medici-Orsini heir – remained elusive for many years as several children were either miscarried or died young. Finally, two healthy children were born – Leonora, in 1571, and the heir, Virginio, in 1572.

By then the de Medicis had climbed the royal social ladder a good rung higher; in 1569 Pius V had raised the duchy to a grand duchy. This stroke of fortune put Tuscany above and beyond the prestige of numerous Italian duchies squabbling for precedence at foreign courts, pushing one another out of the way in processions, and shoving one another out of the good seats at banquets. Now the Tuscan ambassadors would have the more honorable spot, and there was nothing anybody could do about it.

Given their sudden rise in the world, the de Medici family became more concerned about the unhappy, embarrassing marriage of Isabella and Paolo Giordano. For his part, Paolo Giordano became increasingly frustrated that he could not get his wife to live with him in his own palaces despite years of flattering, cajoling, and begging. It wasn’t that he wanted her around – looking down her long aquiline nose she certainly would have complained of his all-night orgies in whorehouses – but it was a slap in the face of his Orsini magnificence that his wife was clearly beyond his control, and the whole world knew it.

Though her family was worried, and her husband irritated, Isabella was delighted. She enjoyed more freedom than any woman of her time, freedom which she used to take a lover. The lithe and handsome Troilo Orsini was Paolo Giordano’s relative. Starting in 1564, Isabella and Troilo began a well-publicized affair. While her husband was out of town, Isabella reportedly gave birth to two of her lover’s children, who were whisked out of the de Medici Palace and placed in the local orphanage. To avoid scandal, Duke Cosimo repeatedly sent Troilo on diplomatic missions abroad, but the young man came bouncing back like an unwanted boomerang.

Isabella was safe as long as her powerful and devoted father was alive. But Cosimo died in 1574, and her somber brother Francesco, the new grand duke, heartily disapproved of her adultery, though he had been unfaithful to his own wife for a decade with a married mistress. Francesco had never liked his sister, who was far more attractive, intelligent, and vivacious than he could ever hope to be. Their father had preferred Isabella to Francesco, often siding with her in family disputes. Francesco had taken out his frustrations by concocting poisons, which he tried out on neighborhood cats and dogs, and pursuing alchemy, perhaps a metaphor for trying to turn the dross of his life into gold.

But now the unpopular gloomy boy was a man with real power, and it was payback time. It is possible that Isabella gave birth to another illegitimate child in May 1576. “Lady Isabella has been these past five days at Cafaggiolo [a country villa],” reported Ambassador Ercole Cortile of the duchy of Ferrara, “and there are some saying that a previous time when she went, it was to let her body swell, and that it will be like that other time, when she was healthy again after nine months.”
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If, in fact, Isabella did give birth to another of Troilo’s children, it would have been the last straw for the prudish Francesco. He called in Paolo Giordano one day to discuss the scandal, saying by way of dismissal, “Remember, you are a gentleman and a Christian.”
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This phrase seems to have signified that as a gentleman he must kill her, though as a Christian he must forgive her sins.