Murder in the Garden of God (8 page)

It is likely that Paolo Giordano, as a powerful Renaissance prince, had a study or
studiolo
in at least one of his palaces. Tucked in the mezzanine level between the main floors, the
studiolo
was a small room with no fireplace, a kind of cozy office where the lord and master kept his library and collections of curiosities – fossils, jewels, cameos, ancient coins and manuscripts, and pieces of Roman statues – hands, feet, and heads. Here he could have private discussions with friends and servants, impressing all of them with his love of antiquities and literature.

Oddly, glass windows were few even in the grandest Roman palaces. Glass had to be imported from Murano, an island near the city of Venice with a long history of glass making. Glaziers swore on pain of death to keep their techniques secret; as a result, glass was inexpensive for Venetian citizens but sold at high prices outside the republic. Noble Roman palaces had wooden shutters on the windows with slats that could be opened or closed. In winter, movable frames of waxed and oiled cloth were placed in window openings. Romans traveling to Venice were amazed to see that even the poorest shack had beautiful clear glass window panes. However, they did import Murano glassware, enameled and gilded, which they proudly put on display at banquets.

Despite periodic outbreaks of war and plague, the second half of the sixteenth century was a time of soaring trade and economic upswing for Italy. Jutting out boldly in between the Eastern and Western Mediterranean, Italy received products from all over the world. The major western port of Genoa took in from Spain strange new products from the Americas. On the eastern side of the peninsula, Venice received shipments from her trading partners in the Muslim world, India, Africa, and the Orient. The new fashions in clothing and furnishings filtered up more slowly to France and England.

It was, much like ours, an age of unabashed consumerism. Buyers of all classes eagerly sought more, newer, and bigger products. Houses swelled in size. A noble house, which might have had nine or ten generic rooms in the fifteenth century, now had dozens, each with a specific purpose. There was the dining room, the music room, the library, the office, and the rooms for small, medium, and large receptions.

Furniture became larger and more ornate. The all purpose medieval bench gave way to a variety of chairs – the larger ones with arms being more honorable than smaller ones with no arms. Indeed, it was a sign of good breeding that even the most exalted visitor would sit in the crummiest chair in the room, and only move to the honorable one at the loud insistence of his host. Many chairs were covered with crimson or green velvet, embroidered in silver and gold, and edged with tassels made of real gold wire.

For centuries, clothing had been kept in trunks; now rich and fashionable Italians moved it into large armoires. Books, which also had been kept in trunks, found improved accommodation in the form of elaborate bookshelves. Mirrors, which had been sorrowful bits of polished metal, became large sparkling plates of flat glass backed with tin and mercury, thanks to the clever Murano glassmakers.

There was a profusion of new household utensils cast in mythical forms. Pots, pans, chamber pots, and even lemon squeezers were adorned with grimacing faces, dragons, birds and lions. Waffle irons stamped waffles with the family coat of arms. Family piety was shown by a profusion of jewel-encrusted crucifixes and religious paintings of saints adorning the main rooms. Harpsichords and lutes were strategically positioned where visitors would notice the family’s musical abilities.

In the stables were kept the numerous coaches, the doors painted with the coat of arms. The interiors were lined with silk or stamped leather, and the seats had plump tasseled pillows. A variety of dazzling equipment was invented for horses, who now wore tasseled trappings and ostrich feather hats.

The 1580s was a time of McPalaces, McFurniture, and McCoaches. Given that Rome was the center of the Church where, theoretically at least, poverty and simplicity were hailed as Christian virtues, some of the more virtuous citizens were scandalized. In 1584, the priest Silvio Antoniano complained, “Furnishings have reached such heights of excessive luxury that nowadays the objects used in villas [rustic country estates] greatly surpass those adopted by our greatest, and some of our most noble, citizens, only a few years ago in our capital cities.”
⁴

Paolo Giordano’s palaces would have used expensive white beeswax candles, rather than the rancid tallow candles made from animal fat that Camilla probably used. Even the nobility found candles to be costly and used them judiciously. In winter, candles were not lit until sunset, and then only two to a room for the occupied parts of the
piano nobile.
In summer, they were rarely used at all, as the master and mistress usually went to bed with the late-setting sun. Candle stubs were carefully gathered up and melted into new candles.

But Paolo Giordano would have thrown caution to the wind when he gave a dinner party or ball. Candelabras would have brightened the tables and sideboards of his reception rooms. Dozens of candles would have been set in chandeliers on ropes that could be lowered so the servants could put in fresh candles, light them, and haul the chandelier up. Even if Paolo Giordano didn’t pay his chandler for years, his use of so many candles would have made a clear statement – here was a man to be reckoned with.

All of the duke’s palaces had stables full of horses, and at least three cats – the kitchen cat, the store room cat, and a cat to patrol the wardrobe so mice didn’t eat the clothes. But his country estates would also have had kennels for hunting dogs and mews for hawks. These blood sports had a coded message for the duke’s guests. As he cornered and skewered boar and deer, he was letting his visitors know he was fully capable of cornering and skewering them, too, if they angered him. And when his hawks snapped the neck of a bird, it mirrored the fact that Paolo Giordano could easily snap the necks of his enemies in his hamfisted hands, just as he had his wife’s.

As the duchess of Bracciano, Vittoria would obtain an exquisite wardrobe, the kinds of clothing she had been pining for during her entire marriage to Francesco. A nobleman’s wife was the embodiment of family honor, and the whole Orsini clan would be dishonored if she, as the duchess, appeared in anything less than breathtaking.

One important gown could involve a network of artisans and take a year to produce. The silk, satin, or velvet would be purchased from one retailer, the lining perhaps from another. Sometimes the material was taken to a dyer to obtain a special color. Buttons were obtained from a button seller. Eyelets and laces, which usually contained precious metals, were purchased from a gold or silversmith. Fringes and ribbons were sold by a notions merchant. Furriers provided the edge of fox or mink on the sleeves or hem.

Embroiderers worked solid silver and gold thread into vines, flowers, and coats of arms. Jewelers provided pearls and rubies to be sewn on. And let us not forget the tailor. Sometimes the transactions were so complex that an accountant and lawyer were hired to keep track of the contracts, deposits, and delivery dates. Such a gown was an investment rather than a frivolity. If hard cash were suddenly required, the gown could be picked apart, and the jewels, fur, gold thread, and material sold for healthy sums.

The finest materials and dyes came from Venice. The scarlet red extracted from the pregnant kermes beetle was the most popular and expensive color in the Renaissance. Dyeing one pound of silk with kermes red cost three times as much as producing buttercup yellow or cornflower blue. Other popular and expensive colors were black, purple, and dark blue-violet.

Sleeves were laced onto the shoulder of the bodice and could be removed if the lady were alone in her chamber in hot weather. Removable sleeves offered an infinite number of possibilities in mixing and matching. A black gown might be enlivened by red sleeves, a purple gown with green sleeves. Some popular color combinations might seem strange to us – scarlet with gray, brown with pink, turquoise with orange.

Slashed clothing was still popular for men and woman after its introduction in the late-fourteenth century in Venice, where sumptuary laws were passed to restrain outrageously bright colors. Venetians duly abided by the edict to wear dull-colored outer garments, but had their tailors “slash” them, creating openings in the material to show the gaudy colors of garments below, which were pulled through the slashing. This style quickly spread throughout Europe.

The 1570s and 1580s saw a continuing increase in a gown’s girth. Skirts became enormous, billowing over bum rolls, farthingales and hoopskirts. This fashionable swelling proved to the world that the family could afford yards and yards of exquisite material that served no purpose. It also benefited the men who paid for it because – similar to stiletto heels or imperial Chinese foot binding – their women could not run away from them, at least not very fast. Wearing such a gown, a woman could only muster a measured, stately tread, showing the world that she, to the great honor of the family, had no need to hurry, and indeed couldn’t hurry if the house was on fire. Some sixteenth-century brides were so loaded down with heavy material, furs, and jewelry that they literally could not walk down the aisle; they had to be carried by a muscular man.

And for every sumptuous gown, Vittoria would need matching belts, shoes, purses, cloaks, head pieces, and perfumed gloves. It was not unheard of for some wealthy families to spend forty percent of their annual income on clothes, including the expensive livery of their servants. Sixteenth-century clothing prices were weighted heavily towards the materials, while the labor costs of stitching a gown or a pair of shoes was comparatively quite small.

Perhaps Vittoria daydreamed mostly about the jewels, which were not only beautiful and prestigious but were also thought to have magical properties. Pearls, fished out of the Persian Gulf, were the favorite gem of the Renaissance and were believed to increase marital fidelity. Looking at Renaissance paintings, we can well understand why so many men decked their wives out in pearls. Cultured pearls were not invented until the early twentieth century, which meant that earlier pearls were often not quite spherical. A necklace of perfectly round, matched pearls was so costly that usually only queens possessed them and proudly wore them in their official paintings. It is also possible that queens, married to vile in-bred husbands for political reasons, needed that extra boost of fidelity that only pearls could provide.

Coral, thought to be a sea plant that turned to stone when it hit the air, was found off the coasts of Italy and was believed to stanch bleeding and keep away evil. In ancient times, Romans had begun carving it into charming cameos, which women wore on chokers and bracelets. Emeralds from Columbia, where Spaniards had discovered the mines in 1558, were thought to improve eyesight and increase wealth. Unearthed in India, diamonds were useful in reconciling enemies and ensuring chastity.

Sapphires, found in Ceylon, also kept a wife faithful and increased her piety. Rubies from Burma promoted good health and dried up excessive lust, which could explain why some men refused to give their wives rubies. Amber was picked up on the North Sea beaches of Germany and Poland where entire prehistoric forests had been swallowed up millions of years earlier. Those pieces containing insects were highly prized.

Because they were hand cut, even the largest gemstones were somewhat misshapen and dull with crooked facets, hardly the sparkling machine-polished gems we have today. But they were mounted in stunning gold and silver settings and surrounded by pearls. The overall feel of sixteenth-century jewelry is of solidity, stateliness, and balance.

As Vittoria dreamed of her life as the duchess of Bracciano – the jewelry, gowns, palaces and banquets – perhaps she cast her gaze around dreary reality. She had squeezed her dowry, and the Montalto family, for all she could get. Yet her pretty gowns, if one looked closely, were cheaper copies of the fine Venetian fabrics, the dyes imitations of kermes red. Most of her gems were paste, or semi-precious stones, or mismatched pearls. Camilla never threw a banquet. She never wasted a single candle. Her narrow house was a far cry from a glorious palazzo. And as things stood, Vittoria would never get a carriage.

But that might change. Soon.

Chapter 6

The Cardinal Uncle

O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you;
my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you,
in a dry and weary land where there is no water.

– Psalm 63: 1-3

V
ittoria probably saw her cardinal uncle as a sweet, foolish old man, whom she milked frequently for silk gowns and pearl earrings and badgered for a coach. He was, after all, genuinely fond of her and sacrificed his own wishes to keep her happy.

The cardinal was congenial not only with his family, but also with his Church colleagues. He studiously distanced himself from Vatican politicking and backstabbing, and wreathed his foreboding features in a smile when discoursing with other cardinals. He refused to join a political faction, as this would have put him in a position opposed to another faction, and unable to remain on good terms with all. “In an admirable fashion he procured the favor of the cardinals,” reported one early
relatione,
“honoring them, praising them, and showing himself desirous to grant them every satisfaction… He did not contend with any cardinal to impose his opinion, but preferred with sweetness to let them win.”
¹

One frequent topic of business among the princes of the Church was European kings behaving badly, but whenever the topic came up, Cardinal Montalto excused their errors, pointing out how difficult it was to rule a realm. Word of his compassionate understanding winged its way to the kings of France and Spain, monarchs who played a role in electing a pope, and they made note of it.

Many blue-blooded cardinals were offended that a man of such shameful birth had joined the Sacred College. Loudest in his disdain was Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, the princely grandson of Pope Paul IV. One day at a Vatican meeting of the entire Sacred College, Farnese referred to Montalto – loudly enough for him to hear – as “Cardinal Jackass of the Marches.” Some other cardinals laughed. But Montalto “pretended not to hear them, and turning with a happy face towards his calumniators, thanked them with great humility for the favors he had always received from them.”
²
This was a mild, gentle soul, it was observed, who tried to please everyone and wouldn’t dream of hurting a fly.

Vittoria and her family seem to have assumed that the easygoing cardinal would never make any trouble for them, even if they committed the most heinous acts against him in their quest for riches and power. But this assumption ignored two important clues – Felice’s face, and his past. Cardinal Felice Montalto did not have the kindly face one might expect from such a harmless old man. Indeed, his features were frightening, and he almost always looked angry. He resembled an Old Testament patriarch, with a long gray beard and small, flashing dark eyes under wild unkempt eyebrows. He had – if there is such a thing – a low-class face that bespoke his humble origins, a visage without a single noble angle.

His forehead was deeply lined and strangely short, his eyes set too far north. He had a pudgy slab of a nose, as if a butcher had tossed aside a thumb-sized piece of unwanted beef and it had attached itself to the center of Montalto’s face. Deep folds ran between his nose and his narrow slash of a mouth, which were too close, as the loss of several teeth had shortened his jaw.

Even when Felice was a young man, his fellow monks, laughing at the unprepossessing physiognomy of the man who aspired to the throne of Saint Peter, said, “You, Father Felice, have exactly the face of a pope!”
³

His thick bristly hair was clipped short. His huge boulder of a head was perched on wide shoulders without the benefit of a neck in between. He was barrel-chested, bandy-legged, and he had the odd habit of listening to others with his eyes half-closed. It was generally admitted to be a pity that his sister Camilla looked just like him.

Appearance aside, the Accorambonis would have done well to consider Felice Montalto’s past before they started planning Vittoria’s marriage to another man. The cardinal had not always been so congenial, and earlier in his Church career his reputation had been tarnished by rage and vengefulness.

He had entered a monastery at age ten to learn to read and write as his parents could not afford to send him to school. There the other monks were impressed by the bright, energetic boy, who volunteered to mop the floors and do whatever other grunt work they desired. They began instructing him in Italian first, then Latin, and finally Greek. He made tremendous progress. At the tender age of twelve, on September 2, 1534, he took the vows of a Franciscan monk and became Fra – or Brother – Felice.

As a precocious child, Felice was no threat to the other monks. But by the time he reached his late teens, he had outstripped his colleagues in theological disputation. “All the other students in the monastery were extremely jealous of the progress that he made every day in his studies,” wrote his chronicler, “and many more were jealous when they saw him advance in esteem. He was not only being spoken of in the monastery, but also in the city, and he had trampled all his adversaries in school.”
⁴
If he had veiled his shining intellect with a gloss of modesty or self-deprecating good humor, perhaps he could have lived in peace. But Felice enjoyed letting his better-born colleagues know that he, despite his miserable birth, was smarter than they.

Felice’s fellow students “tried to upset him, throwing water in his face, or pulling his hood over his face, or giving him a blow so that he would fall on the ground, and other insolences. They would then run to the regent and tell him that Fra Felice had done to them what they, in fact, had just done to him.”
⁵

At first Fra Felice, knowing patience was a Christian virtue, suffered everything in silence. It was only when the other boys started making fun of his pig-farming past that he lost his temper. Again and again, when a group of five particularly bad boys saw him, they cried out
gru gru,
the call made to bring home rooting pigs.
Gru gru,
they squealed, even at night through the keyhole of his cell.

“For this persecution, Fra Felice decided to break the head of the first one who did this again, and in a rage he took a baton, which was usually kept next to the door of the monastery, and to which three keys were tied, and hid it under his tunic.” And when the group of taunting boys came toward him, and the foremost cried
out gru gru,
“Fra Felice brought out the baton that he had kept hidden under his habit and hit his adversary two or three times on the neck saying to him, ‘Truly I have made it clear that I was a pig keeper, and not a pig, but just as you have been a bad pig, I am a good pig keeper.’ And he continued to beat him so that he fell unconscious to the ground without being able to raise himself, and moreover one of the keys carried off the earlobe of an ear, shedding much blood.”
⁶

Felice was lashed twenty-five times and kept in a dungeon for nine days on bread and water. When he emerged, he was sent to another monastery. It was a scenario that would be repeated often throughout his long ecclesiastical career – talent and brilliance contrasted with angry bad behavior, and his annoying insistence that he was the future pope.

Tortured as he was by his fellow monks, Felice started carrying in his pocket a little book in which he wrote the names of those who had trespassed against him, and the exact nature of their sins. He also noted down the names of those who had done him kindnesses, with details of the favors given. When he was pope, he declared, he would bring out his little book to reward and punish accordingly. Hearing this, his fellow monks roared with laughter.

In 1543, Felice was ordained a priest and took the name of Father Montalto. He had memorized the entire Bible by heart, along with many works of the early Church fathers. At nineteen he had started preaching and delivered rousing sermons without using notes. Whenever Father Montalto preached, the church was packed, and even better, the usually parsimonious congregations were moved to make generous donations. “So extraordinary were his sermons,” wrote the chronicler, “that he persuaded the people who heard him to give big purses of money.”
⁷
Some sermons, however, were designed especially to insult the illustrious officials sitting in the front row, men whose behavior the preacher did not approve of. These gentlemen complained bitterly to Rome.

Despite the periodic protests trickling into the Vatican about Fra Felice’s insolent sermons and frequent arguments with fellow monks, high-level Church officials heard of the young preacher’s success with his parishioners and summoned him to Rome. Having spent his life in Italian villages and towns, Felice must have been shocked by the international nature of the capital. There was the prickly Spaniard, wrapped in his black cloak, casting looks of scorn all around him and doing battle with pride as his weapon of choice. Over there, the smoothly silky Frenchman rustled in puffed pastel silk, conquering with charm.

Even the different Italian nationalities wore distinctive clothes and spoke with strong regional accents. Here were the somber-robed Venetians, Europe’s best listeners, nonchalantly worming the most dangerous secrets out of the powerful. The courtly Florentine, frugal and talkative, chatted with the Genoan, his pockets stuffed with coins to buy power and information. Neapolitans were easy to spot; their dark good looks were spiced with Arab blood, and they were even flashier and rowdier than the Romans.

In 1552, Fra Felice preached twice a week, and “always twelve or thirteen cardinals came to hear him, a large quantity of noblemen, and prelates, who beat each other out of the way to hear him.”
⁸

In Rome, the young priest lived in the Franciscan Monastery of the Holy Apostles, where his superiority and arrogance once more aroused the ire of his fellow monks, who “told him it was more proper for him to live with pigs than among monks.”
⁹
The esteemed preacher, who had by now received his doctorate in theology, was no longer in a position to beat nasty monks over the head with a baton. He retorted, “Yes, but if you had been a swineherd, you would still be one,” and noted down their transgressions against him in his little book.
¹⁰
Worse, he wrote up lists of their sins on large sheets of paper and posted them on the dining hall door for all to see.

It became clear to Church officials that Felice’s genius was wasted among the petty jealousies of the monastery. He was indefatigable in his efforts for the Church, studying, writing sermons, preaching to large crowds, and formulating briefs and theological opinions for the cardinals. His doctrine was sound, his way of life strict. He required hardly any sleep and spent all his waking hours working. In 1556, his powerful mentors, Cardinal Rodolfo Pio Carpi, Protector of the Franciscans, and Monsignor Michele Ghislieri, Commissary General of the Roman Inquisition, decided to send him into the world as a Vatican representative. They were supported by the strict new pope, Paul IV, who greatly admired Montalto.

Cardinal Carpi arranged a mouthwatering banquet of honorable opportunities for Felice to choose from, far away from the Franciscan monastery in Rome. Felice opted for the most challenging position, that of papal inquisitor to the republic of Venice. If he could bring the independent-minded Venetians firmly under the Vatican thumb, he would win great honor in Rome and perhaps be made a cardinal.

The unique history of Venice shaped its fierce independence. A collection of islands and lagoons, it had hosted small fishing communities going back to time immemorial. But when the Roman Empire began to topple, and hordes of Huns, Lombards, Goths, and other barbarians attacked Roman cities for booty, many of the inhabitants of Aquilea, Verona, and Padua fled to the Venetian islands. No barbarians in their right mind would besiege a pitiful swamp. Those few who tried found themselves lost in the zigzagging natural waterways, or stuck in the sand when the tide went out.

Living on stilts in the sea, the Venetians never felt truly Italian. While the Florentines, Romans, and Milanese sat solidly on the earth and fretted over earthly things, Venice built the most successful merchant marine in the world and a powerful navy to protect her ships and trade routes. Each year their ruler, the doge, elected for life, married the sea in an elaborate ceremony, throwing a solid gold wedding band into the Grand Canal.

As a Catholic nation, Venice was duty-bound to support the pope. Yet Venetian trading interests involved not only Catholic countries, but also heretics to the north and the Ottoman Empire in the eastern Mediterranean. To avoid offending a valuable trading partner or, heaven forbid, becoming enmeshed in a costly war that would block the shipping lanes, Venice often refused to take a hard political stance and blithely ignored papal decrees to do so. Excommunicated several times over the centuries by frustrated pontiffs, Venice shrugged as its priests continued to administer the forbidden sacraments. “We are Venetians, then Christians,” was their motto.
¹¹

By the sixteenth century, as Venetian firepower diminished, its diplomacy intensified; it was, after all, far cheaper to send ambassadors than gunships. Venice fielded the most talented diplomatic corps in Europe, and Venetian ambassadors, who listened compassionately and reported far more than they spoke, became the chief confidantes of many popes and kings. Venetian diplomacy was like a sinuous acrobat, sliding into impossible contortions with a shining smile on her face. Venice sympathized, temporized, offered advice, and made polite excuses, but rarely committed herself.

Because Venice took an elastic approach to politics, the republic expected that foreign politicians adopt the same tractable manner when dealing with Venice. The ambassadors of other European states knew better than to stomp into the Senate and make threats or demands. Even a Vatican inquisitor, in his pious efforts to root out heresy, was expected to have a gracious, conciliatory manner, working hand in hand with the Venetian government, granting favors and making concessions when requested.