Murder in the Garden of God (7 page)

When Michel de Montaigne visited Rome in 1581, he was advised to keep his cash in a bank, withdrawing only what he needed for each day. “Even the houses here are so insecure,” he wrote in his travel diary, “that those who were rather amply provided with means were usually advised to give their purse in keeping with the bankers of the city, in order not to find their strong-box broken open, which has happened to many of them. Item, that to go about by night is hardly safe.”
¹⁵

Unable to flush bandits out of the woods outside Rome, Gregory decided to cut down forests where they hid – an arduous, expensive job that produced no results as he could hardly cut down every tree in the Papal States; the bandits simply moved to other parts of the forest. At a complete loss about how to handle the bandit situation, the pope wrung his hands in desperation.

The most horrible bandit of all was one Alfonso Piccolomini, the duke of Montemarciano, whose castle Gregory had razed as punishment for his crimes. Piccolomini ordered his men to cut their victims’ throats in the presence of their mothers and wives, while his followers danced and sang ribald songs. He robbed a papal courier of 7,000 scudi and declared his one goal was to kill the pope’s son, Giacomo.

This threat deeply troubled Gregory. He had fathered the child in 1543, before he became a priest. Giacomo was a likeable soul, but not terribly bright. After his election, Gregory brought him to the Vatican court, but no one knew what to call him. It seemed irreligious to refer to him as “the pope’s son.” Cardinal Tolomeo Gallio came up with a clever idea. He was to be referred to as Signor Giacomo Boncompagni of Bologna, “closely connected with his Holiness.”
¹⁶
Whatever his title, he was the apple of his father’s eye, and now the pope trembled for his son’s safety. In a rare surge of decisiveness, Gregory tried to raise troops against Piccolomini, but locals refused to serve, fearing the bandit would retaliate by killing their families.

Unfortunately, the pope was as useless in foreign affairs as he was in reducing crime. In 1576, the Venetian ambassador Tiepolo wrote his Senate, “Regarding matters of state, the pope is not at all intelligent and not inclined to them at all. He does not enjoy hearing of them, nor of dealing with them profoundly, and abhors the thoughts and labors necessary to one who must take care of them.”
¹⁷

Though Gregory was a failure as a temporal ruler, he was a great success as leader of the Catholic Church. Gregory gave generously to widows, orphans, and girls who needed dowries. During his first year in office, he personally visited Rome’s hospitals to make sure the sick were being given good care. He decreed that traveling German princes could no longer force monasteries and convents to board their hunting dogs and horses, or provide them with splendid banquets after the hunt. Gregory replaced drunken and illiterate priests with young ones recently graduated from the stellar new Jesuit seminaries.

The pope’s rigor even extended to the Sacred College; in 1575 he severely chastised Cardinals de Medici and Maffei for gambling away 30,000 scudi each, a fortune they could have used for charitable works. Gregory’s sincere piety put a new stamp on the College of Cardinals, at least on the surface. In 1576, the Spanish canonist Martino Azpilcueta wrote, “For many centuries past no Sacred College has been so eminently distinguished for its blamelessness, piety, prudence, righteousness, and continence, as well as for every kind of learning.”
¹⁸

The Venetian ambassador, Mocenigo, wrote, “Masqued cardinals are no longer seen as of yore. They do not now accompany ladies through the streets of Rome either on horseback or driving. They barely walk out alone or in closed carriages. No more feasts, no more games, no more hunting nor fine liveries, no luxury.”
¹⁹

Despite Gregory’s religious gains, his judicial leniency encouraged the roaming gangs of bandits inside and outside Rome to increase and thrive. During the last years of his reign, there were an estimated 27,000 of them. And several dozen of the worst were in the pay of Duke Paolo Giordano Orsini, who wanted to make Vittoria Accoramboni a widow.

Chapter 5

Needful Things

And the cares of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches,
and the lusts of other things entering in, choke the word,
and it becometh unfruitful.

– Mark 4:19

U
nfortunately for Vittoria’s reputation, Rome’s gossip mill soon buzzed with the duke’s infatuation for her. Perhaps society’s elite had seen the two flirting at balls and banquets, and working people had spotted them walking in the streets with Vittoria’s maid, Caterina, trailing behind. No one could mistake the desire in Paolo Giordano’s bulging eyes and Vittoria’s coy body language that stated,
I
am not yours, but how I wish I could be.
The chronicler reported, “People noticed the love that he had for Vittoria, which he manifested by many signs.”
¹

Though gossip flew from person to person, it was aided and abetted by a statue named Pasquino after a papal tailor who, it was said, couldn’t stop chattering about all the scandalous stories he overheard in the Vatican. A block behind the Piazza Navona, right behind the Palazzo Orsini, ironically enough, and across from Camilla’s house, stood a mutilated statue fragment of Hercules. It had once adorned the first-century Domitian Stadium which had stood on the spot, and at some point in the following centuries of earthquakes, pillaging, and neglect, had fallen and been buried by muddy Tiber floods. In 1501, it was unearthed by Cardinal Giovanni Battista Orsini who was making repairs to the road behind his palace.

It was a ridiculous-looking statue, with a comical noseless face and no arms. Perhaps as a joke, the cardinal propped it on a pedestal against the rear wall of his house, right where it had been found. Local students took to dressing the statue up for holidays in classical or mythological garb. Soon they began hanging placards on it criticizing their professors. Others began to tack up nasty little epigrams about the pope and cardinals. In a country with no free press, the anonymous writings quickly became a means of venting popular discontent. Many of the stinging epigrams about sinful popes and cardinals were uncannily accurate and must have come from eavesdropping servants or Vatican employees. Pasquino was the Deep Throat of sixteenth-century Rome, the ultimate mouthpiece of government insiders aching to publicize their fascinating tales but terrified of revealing their identity.

And now Pasquino was chattering about Duke Paolo Giordano Orsini, whose first wife had mysteriously died while washing her hair, and Vittoria Accoramboni, the most beautiful woman in Rome, who was unhappily married to a cardinal’s nephew. The Peretti family must have read the placards and epigrams about Vittoria, as the statue was just yards from their front door. It is not known how they reacted to such slander. Perhaps Vittoria waved it away as nonsense. Surely if Cardinal Montalto truly believed Francesco was in danger, he would have sent him out of town.

It is likely that the duke’s repulsive appearance made Vittoria’s protestations of innocence believable. Had he been a handsome, muscular stud, suspicion would have been greater. But Paolo Giordano was the kind of man more suited to moving a woman’s stomach to convulsions than her heart.

Yet looks aside, and ignoring the fact that he had murdered his wife and was over his head in debt, he was quite a catch. If Vittoria ever married him, she would be the
duchess
of Bracciano. And Marcello, who aided and abetted the affair, driving the impassioned duke into a frenzy, would be the duke’s brother-in-law. Perhaps the most ambitious of the Accorambonis was Tarquinia, who had always hoped to use her daughter’s beauty for family greatness. Events would show that Tarquinia, Marcello, and the duke were plotting.

When a gangster like Paolo Giordano vowed that he would marry a woman as soon as her husband died, it was nothing less than a death sentence. And, for centuries, scholars have debated exactly how much Vittoria knew about Paolo Giordano’s plans to do away with Francesco. The more naïve have seen her as an innocent victim, a pitiful creature swept up in a whirlwind of events beyond her control. Others have portrayed her as a steely-eyed murderess, in on every detail of the plot.

Both theories are unlikely; the truth probably lies somewhere in between. If Vittoria had been completely innocent of any wish for an early widowhood, she would have been alarmed to hear Paolo Giordano’s vow to marry her. She would have informed him that she would never marry him if Francesco met an untimely end. She would have stopped seeing him and fired his accomplice, the waiting-woman Caterina. She would have warned Francesco that an ill-advised flirtation of hers might prove fatal for him, and he should be armed and accompanied by bodyguards at all times. She might even have confessed her dangerous coquetry to the cardinal uncle, and asked him to find ways to protect Francesco. But she did nothing.

Yet it is also hard to believe that the duke would have burdened the delicate, tragic Vittoria with details of the time, place, and means of Francesco’s death. It is likely that, having vowed to marry her, and hearing no protest, he took her silence as a tacit consent. And she must have known that something was afoot. It was strange to speak of Francesco’s imminent demise when he was not in bed with malarial fever. He had not been coughing for months, spitting up blood. Nor had he been injured in a fall from a horse, or crushed by a toppling carriage. Francesco Peretti was bouncing with youthful good health. And Paolo Giordano Orsini was not the kind of man to count his rosary beads for decades until nature took its course.

A sinister prognostication occurred in February 1581 during Carnival, that riotous anything-goes period before the austere forty days of Lent. Paolo Giordano and his brother-in-law, Cardinal Ferdinando de Medici, each sponsored a horse in a race, both decked out in beautiful long velvet trappings. The Orsini horse wore black trappings with huge tears embroidered in silver and the words,
Either tears or blood.
At the time, spectators thought the motto was odd. It seemed to be a coded message of some sort. Some thought it was intended for Vittoria and meant,
Either my tears will melt your resistance, and you will come into my arms, or I will take you with blood.

If Vittoria understood the frightening message, she evidently decided to let the chips fall where they may. It is likely that the Lenten and Easter events of 1581 were stressful for her. Paolo Giordano’s ardent expressions of love and insistence on marrying her must have been exciting, but also nerve-wracking. What if her husband, Camilla, or Cardinal Montalto found out? Was something really being planned to hurt Francesco? How could she smile and chat as normal with the family at the parades, services, and dinners which she, as the close relative of a cardinal, was expected to attend?

The week before Easter, Vittoria and her family would have attended a sacred service in Saint Peter’s Basilica. A priest with red gloves displayed the Veronica, believed to be the towel with which Saint Veronica had wiped the sweat off Jesus’ brow as he passed her carrying the crucifix. It was thought that the image of the savior had been miraculously imprinted on the towel. Montaigne, who also attended that service, called it “a repulsive face, in dark and somber colors, in a square frame like a large mirror.” It was indeed a medieval painting. Saint Veronica never existed; she sprang into legend due to the corruption of the phrase
vera icon,
or true image, used to describe the painting on the cloth.

“It is shown with much ceremony from a high pulpit,” Montaigne continued. “There is nothing regarded with so much reverence as this, the people prostrated on the ground, most of them with tears in their eyes, and cries of commiseration… The priests, walking about in the pulpit, exhibit it to the people, now from this side, now from that, and at every movement there is a shout from the onlookers.”
²
The priests also displayed the lance head the Roman soldier Longinus used to pierce Jesus’ side on the cross, kept in a crystal vial.

On the Thursday before Easter, thousands of the faithful wearing sackcloth robes and brightly colored cloaks processed through Rome carrying white wax candles. Companies of penitents whipped themselves with scourges of many cords, which became stuck together with blood and flesh. Perhaps Vittoria’s brothers and Francesco were among the spectators who poured wine on the scourges to unstick the cords and on the bloody backs of the penitents as a disinfectant.

Vittoria, the Perettis and Accorambonis would have attended another service over at the Church of Saint John Lateran, where the heads of Saints Peter and Paul where shown in theatrical fashion. A bell was rung, and a curtain lowered to reveal them, oddly lifelike with flesh and beards, and then the curtain was quickly raised to hide them again. The Church didn’t want the faithful to get too good a look; the flesh was made of wax, and the beards glued on, though ancient skulls did lurk behind the modern artwork. Montaigne caught on to the trick. “The polish of those faces,” he wrote in his diary, “had some resemblance to our masks.”
³

After Easter was celebrated on March 26, life returned to normal for the Romans. Perhaps Vittoria picked up her embroidery and breathed a sigh of relief. We can picture her, pulling a skein of silk through a piece of fine linen stretched over a hoop, dreaming of the princely lifestyle the duke could offer her.

Oddly, this lifestyle did not involve much comfort – a foreign concept to people of the Renaissance. Even the most luxurious palaces were either freezing cold or boiling hot, drafty, and dirty; reeking of chamber pots, smoke, and sweat; and crawling with bedbugs, mice, and lice. Beds had no springs; mattresses were lumpy sacks of feathers placed on ropes which had to be tightened when they sagged, which was frequently. Carriages had the most rudimentary suspensions; they were ice-cold in winter and stifling in summer. Plague infected rich and poor alike, as did drought, floods, and fires. Many of the noblest people were slowly being eaten up by cancer or tuberculosis with no chance of a cure and nothing to dull the pain.

No, comfort was not expected as it could simply not be attained. Beauty was what mattered, and princes strove to surround themselves with the most gorgeous architecture and furnishings ever produced. It was indeed a direct contradiction to our own lifestyle, where comfort is ubiquitous, and beauty evasive. After studying the elegance of Renaissance clothing and furnishings, we could, perhaps, turn our attention to a tennis shoe or a television set, and wonder what we on earth we had been thinking when we bought it.

The beauty of an Italian Renaissance palace started literally at the huge double front doors, where something as utilitarian as door knockers were crafted in the most fantastical forms of intertwined dolphins, mermaids, seashells, vines, gods, and goddesses. The doors opened to a vaulted passageway with cubicles on either side for guards and servants. Here, protected from the elements, the illustrious nobleman could exit his carriage and walk under a covered loggia in the courtyard to a triumphal staircase. The horses and carriages were led down long ramps into well-lit stables in the basement.

The ground floor of a Roman palazzo usually contained service areas – the laundry, kitchen, and storage for firewood, food and wine. Many Roman nobles rented out ground floor rooms as shops, each one having a little door onto the street, and perhaps a room behind where the shopkeeper lived. The noble family’s grand apartments were on the second floor, called the
piano nobile.
The third floor usually had the servants’ quarters and rooms for small noisy children.

On the main floor, the reception room was splayed across the front of the building. Here guests looked out onto the street through numerous long windows to watch colorful processions, which marched through the streets on the numerous saints’ days. At night, pedestrians, seeing the torches and flickering shadows of dancing revelers, sighed with envy. When not in use for a special event, the reception room was fairly empty, with a few tables and chairs lining the sides. Furniture was brought in and removed as events required.

The walls were lined with enormous, atrociously expensive tapestries of classical scenes woven with brightly colored wool; war trophies such as shields, battle flags, spears, and maces; and busts of hallowed ancestors. We can imagine that Paolo Giordano displayed numerous such trophies from the great battle of Lepanto against the Turks, in which he had proudly commanded a papal galley.

Sometimes even the grandest reception rooms were spiced by strong whiffs of human waste. Many rooms had a chamber pot sitting inconspicuously in the corner, or tucked away in a cabinet. Large houses often had toilets, which were, oddly enough, placed next to the kitchen, producing foul odors for the cooks. The toilet waste flowed into a pit in the basement, which often leached into well water, and fumes rose throughout the house. Doctors were greatly concerned by this, as they feared the bad smells went right to the brain, turning it to mush.

The elaborate reception room fireplace was a masterpiece of architecture and art. Life-sized naked gods and goddesses stood guard on either side of the huge opening big enough for tree trunks. Overhead was an architectural frieze reaching up toward the high ceiling. Often, the family coat of arms was held aloft by fat cupids, columns, and pilasters. Throughout the house, beamed ceilings were painted with coats of arms and scenes from classical mythology.

Bedrooms were at the back of the palace for privacy and quiet. The walls were adorned with tooled and gilded leather wall hangings. Ebony cabinets were inlaid with mother-of-pearl, semi-precious stones, and geometrical designs of light and dark wood. As duchess of Bracciano, Vittoria would have a huge mahogany four-poster bed covered with colorful silk hangings, heavily embroidered. On her elegant cosmetics table, the duchess would have a double-sided ivory comb, a large bristle hairbrush topped with silver chased with the Orsini coat of arms, and crystal containers of rare perfumes and face creams made of crushed rose petals.