Absolute Monarchs

by John Julius Norwich

  His foreign policy, like that of his predecessors, was based on his hatred of Protestantism, as the chief obstacle to the realization of his dream of a universal Catholic Church. He promised vast subsidies to Philip II for his projected invasion of England but, after the expedition ended in catastrophe with the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, refused to pay them. The following year, he let Philip down for the second time when he relaxed his opposition to the Huguenot King Henry IV of France (whom he had excommunicated in 1585) on Henry’s agreeing to convert to Catholicism in return for the French crown.

  But we remember Pope Sixtus V above all for his building. He enabled Giacomo della Porta to complete the dome on St. Peter’s. Meanwhile, his favorite architect, Domenico Fontana, designed a new Lateran Palace, a new papal residence within the Vatican, and a major reconstruction of the Vatican Library. The huge Egyptian obelisk that had once stood in Nero’s Circus was erected, in a scene of considerable drama, in Bernini’s great piazza; on the left bank of the Tiber, three lesser obelisks lent additional majesty to the squares in front of the Lateran, Santa Maria Maggiore, and Santa Maria del Popolo. Broad new avenues connected the main pilgrimage churches. A superb aqueduct, the Acqua Felice, brought water to the city from Palestrina, a good twenty miles away. Two other aqueducts made possible the hundreds of ornamental fountains which soon sprang up all over the city. Sixtus reigned for only five years, but it is to him more than to any other pope that we owe the full baroque splendor of Counter-Reformation Rome.

  He deserved well of his city; alas, his arrogance and choleric temper made him generally detested. Few popes since the Middle Ages had been more unpopular. When he died on August 27, 1590, after successive bouts of malaria, there was general rejoicing throughout the city; and his statue on the Capitol was gleefully torn down by the mob, just as Paul IV’s had been thirty-one years before.

  THE NEXT SIXTEEN months saw no fewer than three popes in Rome. In any history of the Papacy, the names of Urban VII, Gregory XIV, and Innocent IX can very largely be ignored. Giambattista Castagna was a wholly admirable churchman and would probably have made an excellent pope; it was not his fault that on the very night after his election he was struck down by malaria and died less than a fortnight later. He rather charmingly left his considerable personal fortune to provide dowries for impecunious Roman girls; by them, at least, he was not forgotten. Gregory, a friend of both Carlo Borromeo and Filippo Neri, pious, well meaning, but as weak as water, is chiefly remembered as a killjoy who prohibited one of the most popular amusements of the citizens of Rome: the betting on papal elections, the duration of pontificates, and the creation of cardinals. Innocent, despite only two months as pope, was arguably the most effective of the three. He forcibly opposed the still-Protestant Henry IV in France, took strong measures against banditry, regulated the course of the Tiber, and did what he could to improve sanitation. A week before Christmas 1591 he fell ill but insisted on making the traditional pilgrimage to the seven basilicas, an act of devotion which unfortunately proved fatal.

  Stability returned with Ippolito Aldobrandini, the son of a distinguished Florentine barrister driven from his native city by the Medici. He took the name of Clement VIII. In many ways Clement personified the ideals of the Counter-Reformation. He led a deeply pious life, spending hours daily in prayer and meditation, making daily confession, and visiting the seven pilgrimage churches on foot fifteen times a year. Unfortunately, his austerities proved too much for his health—he was a martyr to gout—and as the years went by he tended to rely more and more on his two nephews Cinzio and Pietro, on both of whom, together with a fourteen-year-old great-nephew, he bestowed red hats. With those two taking much of the weight of the administration off his shoulders, he was free to devote much of his time to scholarship. In 1592 he published a corrected version of the Vulgate—which had been hopelessly mangled by Sixtus V—together with revisions of the pontifical, the breviary, and the missal. Four years later there appeared a greatly enlarged Index, including for the first time a ban on Jewish books. This reflected Clement’s besetting sin, his intolerance. Throughout his pontificate he gave every encouragement to the Inquisition, which in his reign sent more than thirty heretics to the stake; they included the former Dominican Giordano Bruno, who met his death on February 17, 1600, in the Campo dei Fiori, where his statue still stands.

  Politically, Clement’s most important decision, made after long hesitation and with deep reluctance, was to recognize Henry IV as King of France. Henry, a former Huguenot, had been received into the Catholic Church in 1593, famously remarking, “Paris vaut bien une messe.”11 Clement still remained unconvinced; it was only after the king had been crowned at Chartres in the following year that he finally accepted his nuncio’s advice, lifted Sixtus V’s sentence of excommunication, and granted Henry his recognition. He may well have regretted doing so when, on April 13, 1598, Henry published his Edict of Nantes, granting extensive rights to the Huguenots and allowing them free exercise of their religion (except in certain towns, which included Paris) and civil equality with Catholics. This caused, it need hardly be said, a furious outburst from Spain, which he felt strong enough to ignore.

  Clement VIII died on March 5, 1605. If he left the Papacy stronger than he had found it, this was largely due to the elaborate jubilee celebrations of 1600, which brought perhaps half a million pilgrims to Rome. The city was now at last—thanks to the sixteenth-century popes—worthy of its position as the capital of Christendom. In the past century the Catholic Church had sustained fearful blows: England and Scotland were now Protestant beyond redemption; in the Spanish Netherlands the Dutch Calvinists had defied all attempts by King Philip to crush them; in Germany the Emperor Rudolph II himself was showing alarming signs of Lutheran sympathies; in France, the effects of Henry IV’s conversion had been largely nullified by the Edict of Nantes. But Rome was now more magnificent than it had ever been; and the 80,000 faithful who watched when, at midnight on December 31, 1599, the pope ceremonially opened the Porta Santa—the Holy Door—bore witness to the extraordinary success of the Counter-Reformation.

  1. It provides the setting of Act II of Tosca and is today the French Embassy.

  2. In 1535 Paul sent Pierluigi to the court of the Emperor Charles V. Pierluigi was particularly enjoined to refrain from sodomy during his stay.

  3. See chapter 19, this page.

  4. The Theatines were a reformist order, forbidden to own property or to beg. They would play an important part in the Counter-Reformation. “They observed the strictest austerity of life, and their habit was distinguished from that of the secular clergy only by their white socks” (Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church).

  5. Duffy, Saints and Sinners.

  6. See chapter 19, this page.

  7. The city has now grown to the point that it is a country villa no more. It now houses the National Etruscan Museum.

  8. By a curious irony, another of the first books to appear on the Index was a work of which Paul IV had been the principal author. It was the report of the committee called by Paul III to investigate the principal abuses of the Church and the areas most in need of reform (see this page). The intention was to keep it secret, for the pope’s eyes only; after it was leaked to the Protestants it was immediately placed on the Index in an unsuccessful attempt to keep it out of Catholic hands.

  9. Charles V had abdicated in 1556 and retired to the Monastery of Yuste in Extremadura.

  10. St. Peter’s, St. John Lateran, Santa Maria Maggiore, San Paolo fuori le Mura, San Lorenzo fuori le Mura, San Sebastiano fuori le Mura, and Santa Croce in Gerusalemme.

  11. “Paris is well worth a Mass.”

  CHAPTER XXI

  Baroque Rome

  On Pope Clement’s death the Sacred College awarded the Papacy to Cardinal Alessandro de’ Medici. The cardinal, who took the name of Leo XI, had been largely responsible for persuading Clement to lift the sentence of excommunication on Henry IV and had afterward served for t
wo years as papal nuncio in France. Deeply devout and highly intelligent, he would probably have made an excellent pope; but he was already sixty-nine years old and reigned only twenty-six days before succumbing to a sudden chill. King Henry, who had spent 300,000 scudi in securing his election, cannot have been pleased. Leo was succeeded by a Sienese, Cardinal Camillo Borghese, who at only fifty-two could confidently expect a reasonably long pontificate. He was to reign for the next sixteen years.

  Pope Paul V, as he chose to be called, was every bit as devout as his predecessor but not nearly as intelligent. He failed absolutely to understand that the Papacy was now one of a number of European powers; it was no longer possible to uphold the ideal of absolute papal supremacy as it had existed in the Middle Ages. Paul attempted to do so and immediately met his match—in the Republic of Venice. The Venetians would not have dreamed of questioning their duty of doctrinal obedience; their political independence, on the other hand, they held to be sacrosanct. Besides, the very existence of their city depended on international commerce; how could they be expected to discriminate against heretics, any more than in the past they had discriminated against the Infidel?

  Already under Clement VIII, they had scored a few victories. In the face of considerable papal pressure, they had maintained their rights over the little town of Ceneda; then, in 1596, Venetian printers and booksellers had somehow managed to obtain a special concordat allowing them to handle—under certain conditions—works included on the Index. The republic had also staunchly defended the religious freedom of foreign diplomats. When reproached in 1604 for allowing Sir Henry Wotton to import Protestant prayer books and to hold Anglican services in his private chapel, Venice had sent Rome a firm reply: “The republic can in no wise search the baggage of the English Ambassador, of whom it is known that he is living a quiet and blameless life, causing no scandal whatever.” The pope did not insist, and Sir Henry continued to perform his devotions undisturbed throughout the fourteen years of his Venetian embassy.

  Paul V, on the other hand, was made of sterner stuff. Papal legates now sought ever more frequent audiences with the doge, to remonstrate and protest. Why had the Senate recently prohibited the erection of any more religious buildings in the city without special license? Venice argued in vain that it was becoming impossible to maintain even the existing churches and monasteries, which already occupied half the area of the city, but such arguments were simply not accepted, and the papal communications began to acquire a new, menacing edge. The two parties were thus, from the very beginning of Paul’s reign, set on a collision course. Venice did her best to maintain friendly relations, even going so far as to enroll the Borghese family among the ranks of her nobility, but the polite veil could not be maintained for long.

  The storm broke in the late summer of 1605, when two professed clerics, one of whom was subsequently found never to have taken holy orders, were denounced to the Venetian authorities, the first for persistent attempts on the honor of his niece, the second for “murders, frauds, rapes and every kind of violence against his dependants.” In each case the Council of Ten ordered an immediate inquiry and arrogated to itself the responsibility for the trial and punishment of the two offenders. Instantly the pope went on the attack. The two prisoners, he objected, were members of the clergy and consequently outside the republic’s jurisdiction. They must be handed over at once to the ecclesiastical authorities.

  All through the autumn the argument went on; then, in December, the pope sent two briefs to the doge. One dealt with the question of Church property, the other with the two clerics. If Venice did not forthwith annul her decrees in the first instance and surrender her two prisoners in the second, the ban of the Church would be laid upon her. Venice, it need hardly be said, had no intention of doing either. But the time for diplomacy was past. What the republic now needed, to present its case before the world, was an expert on canon law who was also a theologian, a dialectician, a political philosopher, and a polemicist, who could argue with clarity and logic. The Senate did not hesitate. It sent for Paolo Sarpi.

  Sarpi was fifty-three and had been a Servite friar since the age of fourteen. He was renowned for his learning, which extended far beyond the field of the spirit; indeed, the whole cast of his mind seems to have been scientific rather than philosophical. As an anatomist, he has been credited with the discovery of the circulation of the blood, a quarter of a century or more before Harvey; as an optician, he earned the gratitude of Galileo himself. Now, as official counselor to the Senate, he drafted the republic’s reply. “Princes,” it ran, “by divine law which no human power can abrogate, have authority to legislate on matters temporal within their jurisdictions; there is no occasion for the admonitions of Your Holiness, for the matters under discussion are not spiritual but temporal.”

  The pope had no patience with such arguments, which, he claimed, “reeked of heresy.” On April 16, 1606, he announced at a consistory that unless Venice made full submission within twenty-four days, the sentence of excommunication and interdict would come into force. Venice, however, was not prepared to wait. On May 6 Doge Leonardo Donà set his seal on an edict addressed to all patriarchs, archbishops, bishops, vicars, abbots, and priors throughout the territory of the republic. In it he made a solemn protest before Almighty God that he had striven by every means possible to bring the pope to an understanding of the republic’s legitimate rights. Since, however, His Holiness had closed his ears and had instead issued a public monitory “against all reason and against the teachings of the Holy Scriptures, the Fathers of the Church, and the Sacred Canons,” that monitory was formally declared to be worthless. The clergy were therefore adjured to continue as before with the care of the souls of the faithful and the celebration of the Mass. The protest ended with the prayer that God would lead the pope to the knowledge of the vanity of his action, the wrong he had done to the republic, and the justice of the Venetian cause.

  Next, the doge, on Sarpi’s advice, banished all Jesuits—who had taken a strongly papalist line from the outset—from the territory of the republic and dismissed the papal nuncio with the words

  Monsignor! You must know that we are, every one of us, resolute and ardent to the last degree, not merely the Government but the whole nobility and people of our State. We ignore your excommunication: it is nothing to us. Think now where this resolution would lead, if our example were to be followed by others.

  For Pope Paul and his Curia, there was now a terrible truth to be faced: the interdict had failed. The most dreaded weapon in the papal armory—the same weapon the very threat of which, in the Middle Ages, had been enough to bring kings and emperors to their knees—had lost its power. Worse, its failure had been revealed to the world. The effect on papal prestige, already incalculable, was growing with every day that this farcical sentence continued in operation. It must be lifted, and quickly. To do so would not be easy, but somehow a formula would have to be found.

  For some time Paul was unable even to contemplate so crushing a blow to his pride, but at last even he was obliged to agree. The French offer of mediation was accepted, and negotiations began. Venice, advised as always by Sarpi, drove a hard bargain. She refused outright to petition for a removal of the ban; any such request must come from the King of France. As for the two prisoners, once the ban was lifted she would consign them to the French ambassador as a token of her regard for the king, but without prejudice to her right to judge and punish them. On no account would she readmit the Jesuits (who were to remain banned for the next half century). Finally, thanks largely to the mediation of the irresistibly named French Cardinal François de Joyeuse, a carefully drafted decree was prepared stating that in view of the pope’s change of heart and the lifting of the sentence, Venice would rescind her solemn protest; it contained, however, no word to suggest that she had at any time been in the wrong or regretted her actions.

  And so, in April 1607, after almost exactly a year, the interdict was lifted. It was the last in the history of t
he Church. No pope would ever dare risk another, and papal authority over Catholic Europe was never quite the same again. But the end of the interdict did not mean reconciliation in any but the most formal sense. Paul V had been publicly humiliated; there were, moreover, several issues which remained unsettled and which he had no intention of allowing to be forgotten. Foremost in his mind was a determination to be revenged on the clergy who had defied his edict—and above all on the architect of his defeat, Paolo Sarpi.

  Sarpi did not immediately give up his office on the resumption of relations with Rome. There was still work for him to do, and he continued to make the daily journey on foot from the Servite monastery to the Doge’s Palace, waving aside all suggestions that his life might be in danger. Returning to the monastery in the late afternoon of October 25, 1607, he was descending the steps of the Santa Fosca Bridge when he was set upon by assassins, who stabbed him three times before making their escape, leaving the knife deeply embedded in his cheekbone. Miraculously, he recovered; later, on being shown the weapon, he tested its point and was able to pun that he recognized the “style” of the Roman Curia. There is no proof that he was right; but the fact that the would-be assassins—who had by this time been identified—fled at once to Rome, where they flaunted themselves, fully armed, in the streets and where no charges were ever preferred against them, suggests that the attack, if it was not actually instigated by the papal authorities, at least had not incurred their disapproval.

  There were to be two more attempts on Sarpi’s life, one from within his own cloister. These, too, he survived, finally dying in his bed on January 15, 1623. But papal rancor followed him beyond the grave. When the Senate proposed a monument in his honor, the nuncio raised violent objection, threatening that if anything of the sort occurred the Holy Office would declare him an impenitent heretic. This time Venice gave in; and it was only in 1892 that the present distinctly undersized bronze statue was erected in the middle of the Campo di Santa Fosca, a few yards from the spot where he so narrowly escaped martyrdom.