Not a day passed without many brawls, murders and waylayings. Men and women were often found killed in various places, many being without heads, while not a few were picked up in their plight, who had been thrown into the Tiber. Many were the houses broken into at night and sadly rifled. Doors were thrown down, women violated – some were murdered and others ravished; so also many young girls were dishonoured and carried off.
As for the sbirri [the papal guards], who tried to make arrests, some were killed outright, and others grievously maimed and wounded. The chief of the Trastevere region was stabbed as he went at night on the rounds of his beat, and other chiefs of the regions were many times in danger of their lives. Many of these outrages and acts of insolence were done by the soldiers who were in Rome as guards of the various lords and princes; as happened especially with those whom the Cardinal of Savoy had brought for his guard, at whose hands were killed several sbirri who had taken into custody a comrade of theirs. In short, from day to day, did the evil grow so much, that had the making of a new Pope been deferred as long as it once seemed likely, through the dissensions of the cardinals, there was ground to apprehend many other strange and most grievous inconveniences.
Eleven days after Pope Gregory’s death, when the novena of funeral services was finally ended, fifty-five cardinals entered into the conclave to elect his successor. Three of them – Campori, a veteran of earlier conclaves, Galamina and Serra – arrived on the very evening the conclave doors were closed. Not one of them wanted to stay in the city longer than was absolutely necessary, and as it turned out they were right. None of the French cardinals had managed to reach Rome at all, though that did not stop the envoys of the French King, Louis XIII, from seeking to influence the outcome of the election both from within and, when the papal palace doors were sealed, from without.
From the moment the doors of the Vatican were bricked up until a new Pope was elected, the cardinals lived in the papal palace, voting twice a day, morning and evening, in an effort to reach a nearly unanimous agreement on a candidate. The rest of the time, in between the obligatory attendances at mass, the cardinals lobbied and intrigued against each other, the older generation trying to hold their own against the younger men, the Spanish fighting to gain the upper hand against those supported by France or by Germany. ‘We know nothing of their sacred procedures,’ wrote Gigli primly. ‘Nor should we.’
Of course, this wasn’t strictly true. Gigli could not help but be overcome with curiosity about what was actually happening behind those sealed-up doors. By the main stove in the Sistine Chapel, he tells us, a stack of grass mixed with crushed charcoal lay ready. If, when the ballots were counted at the end of the day, no agreement had been reached, a small fire was lit. The scrutineers bound up the slips of voting paper, wet them and then burned them in the stove. The charcoal and the damp paper turned the smoke from the burning grass a dark grey, a sign to the people of Rome who stood watching that the throne of St Peter was not yet filled. Only when a new Pope was finally elected was the fire lit with grass alone, save for the last bundle of voting slips, this time dry. The smoke that curled up the chimney would be almost completely white.
With no prospect of an early agreement, the cardinals retired at night to a series of small square cubicles, cells almost, that stretched down the corridors of the Belvedere at the centre of the palace. Each room contained a narrow cot of dark wood. Hanging above it on the wall was a crucifix. There was a jug of cold water for washing, and a prie-Dieu. The fare was hardly luxurious. Tradition had it that if no Pope were chosen within three days, the cardinals would be restricted for five days to one dish only at supper. If after that the chair of St Peter was still vacant, they would be fed for the remainder of their stay in the conclave on nothing but dry bread, wine and water.
The tensions in Rome in the last days of July 1623 reflected those all over Europe. With the counter-Reformation, the Catholic Church was once again flexing its muscles after having been temporarily cowed by the rise of Protestantism across the continent. While it had yet to reach the extremes of the Inquisition, the Catholic power of the counter-Reformation was already a force to be reckoned with. Rome would not be so easily swept aside by the new order. In Germany, the Bohemian revolution would soon spread. France and Spain, always natural enemies, were circling each other once again. Each wanted to extend its influence over the small princeling states of northern Italy and beyond, and saw the election of a new Pope as a heaven-sent opportunity to gain the upper hand.
As always at the start of a conclave there were many interests, many candidates. There was Cardinal Sauli, who at the age of eighty-five had been a major contender in at least two earlier conclaves, and would have been so again had it not been for the fact that he was known to be completely under the influence of his valet and his wife. There was Cardinal Ginnasio, an inveterate gambler who had won 200,000 crowns in one night while he was Papal Nuncio in Madrid. There was Cardinal Campori, who had arrived at the last minute in the hope that he might this time wear the tiara that had been denied him at the previous conclave. And there was Cardinal Ascoli, a monk who regarded uncleanliness as a sign of godliness, and was generally shunned by his more urbane colleagues. There was also the dead Pope’s young nephew, Ludovico Ludovisi, greedy for power and influence. Known as ‘il Nipote’, it was he who introduced the word nepotism to Italian and the other Romance languages.
No clear victor emerged from the first scrutiny on the morning of 20 July. The votes of the fifty-five cardinals were distributed among several of their number, but it was already obvious that the final battle would be between two factions.
Ludovisi, despite his youth, was the leader of one group. He was hampered, however, by the fact that his uncle’s short pontificate meant he had been able to create only a small number of new cardinals. The recently appointed Cardinal Richelieu, who within months would become Chief Minister to the French King Louis XIII, mentions that Ludovisi begged the Pope on his deathbed to strengthen his party with fresh nominations. This the Pope refused to do, adding somewhat unexpectedly, ‘that he would already have to account to God for having made so many unworthy ones’.
The second group, which was made up largely of the cardinals who had been named by Pope Gregory’s predecessor, the Borghese Pope Paul V, was more powerful. Ten months earlier, in September 1622, its leader, Scipione Borghese, Pope Paul’s nephew, had given his fellow Cardinal Ludovisi a copper pendant painted by Guido Reni of the ‘Virgin Sewing’, but this did little to hide the fact that the two men hated one another. During Pope Gregory’s pontificate, Borghese had managed to keep his faction more or less intact, even though some of the cardinals supported him with more enthusiasm than others. Yet, big as it was, this group was not strong enough to carry the day without making strategic alliances with some of the other cardinals who were supported by an array of different interests.
The French, for one, were keen to play their part in the proceedings, and Richelieu regarded the election of a francophile Pope as essential to tilting matters France’s way in northern Italy, where politics were less than stable. Moreover, Richelieu knew that within the College of Cardinals was one who would be devoted to his interests.
Maffeo Barberini came from a Florentine family that had made a fortune in trade. Orphaned as a young boy, he was sent to his uncle, who was a member of the curia. When the lad showed promise, his uncle steered him into an ecclesiastical career, and before long he was appointed Papal Nuncio in France, where he made the acquaintance of Richelieu and the French King. This last was something of a stroke of luck. When the Nuncio in Spain, Cardinal Mellini, had been elevated to the purple, France immediately requested that as a matter of etiquette the same honour should be conferred on Barberini. Cornered, Pope Paul V, Scipione Borghese’s uncle, felt he had no alternative but to comply, which he did, though with little grace. So although technically Barberini was a cardinal of Borghese’s generation, he was not bound to him by any feelings of gratitude or loyalty. Richelieu, who was aware of these undercurrents, made secret arrangements with Ludovisi and the Grand Duke of Tuscany to support Barberini once their own candidates failed, as they were bound to do.
After the first day the scrutinies continued, with the voting swinging between Ludovisi’s first candidate, Cardinal Bandini, and Borghese’s Cardinal Mellini,