Within the Vatican, many of whose buildings were erected on Rome’s lowland, by the banks of the Tiber, malaria was especially prevalent, striking with little heed for the age, rank or title of its victims. In July 1492 Bartolomeo da Bracciano, one of the senior courtiers at the palace of the Vatican, wrote to his friend Virgilio Orsini: ‘The Pope, last night, had a great fever of the quartan variety, alternating between hot and cold. The Pope is confined to his bed, and it is said that perhaps he will never rise from it.’ Indeed, he didn’t. Four days later, on 25 July 1492, Pope Innocent VIII was dead.
Eleven years later Pope Alexander VI died, again most probably of malaria, after dining in the palatial garden of his friend Cardinal Adriano Castellesi da Corneto in August 1503. Adrian VI died of malaria in the summer of 1523, and in August 1590 Sixtus V too died of malaria at the age of sixty-nine, after a brief and very active pontificate. He had caught it a year earlier while sleeping in a hastily erected cabin during a tour of work being undertaken in the marshes around Castello Caetani, not far from Rome. Even the Borgias, who tried valiantly over the years to murder one another, could not kill each other or their enemies so regularly or so reliably as would malaria.
In the summer of 1623, shortly before Gigli, to his immense pride, was made a caporione for the first time, the Pope, Gregory XV, fell gravely ill. In his diary, the twenty-eight-year-old Gigli reported: ‘His Holiness is not well. We must pray to the Lord.’ It was said that the Pope had caught the fever the previous year, and now it had returned with a vengeance. From his study overlooking the city Gigli could see the palace of the Quirinale, nicknamed Monte Cavallo, where the Pope lay on his sickbed. An earlier Pope, also called Gregory, had chosen this superb site, less than a century before, to build his summer residence in an effort to escape the malaria that always plagued Rome during the hot summer months. In the courtyard in front of the palace, another Pope had had statues of four prancing horses installed. Nearly twenty feet high, they were Roman copies of Greek symbols of Castor and Pollux, the patrons of horsemanship who were known as the ‘horse tamers’, and it was they that gave the hill its nickname.
At the centre of the palace itself, dark heavy drapes shut out the light and the world beyond. For some days the Pope had been lying unmoving in his bed, covered only by a light blanket of fine wool. His head ached, his spleen was swollen and his body tormented in turn by fever and sweating, then by shivering and chills. A small troupe of Penitentiaries, the Jesuits who heard confessions in St Peter’s basilica, prayed at his feet. Occasionally one would rise from his knees and another would step forward to take his place. With their gentle voices and indistinguishable cassocks of rough grey wool, they represented an unceasing rosary of care for the souls of the dying.
As a caporione, Gigli was often called upon to make the short journey from his home near the Via delle Botteghe Oscure to Monte Cavallo. During that long summer of 1623 he made the journey more as a way of obtaining news of the Pope’s health than because there was a great deal of work to be done. For while no one knew whether the pontiff would live or die, the papal courtiers lived in an atmosphere of suspended animation, talking only in whispers. ‘We are all weary,’ Gigli wrote at the end of the first week of Pope Gregory’s illness.
Among those who attended the Pope’s sickroom was his nephew Ludovico Ludovisi. Though not yet thirty, Ludovisi had been made a cardinal by his uncle, which had enabled him to amass a considerable fortune in cash and works of art in just two years. Was his life as a man of influence about to come to an end? Should the Pope die, Ludovisi was too young to be elected pontiff himself. His only future lay in seeking to influence the choice of his uncle’s successor. If a candidate with his backing should attain the throne of St Peter, Ludovisi’s eminence would continue. But he had made many enemies, and would have little time to build the alliances that were essential if he were to sway the complicated negotiations that would follow Gregory’s death.
As soon as the Pope died, the seal on the fisherman’s ring that was the emblem of his pontificate would be broken. The new Pope would be given a new seal with his own name. Predictions of Pope Gregory’s death had been made so often that he had often lamented, in the days when he felt better, that his fellow cardinals had scarcely elected him when they began planning the conclave that would select his successor. Now, it seemed, the end really had come. Gone were the badges of his office, the high, pointed, cone-shaped hat, the silken gloves. Gone too were the papal vestments with their strange names handed down through the ages – the flabellum, the falda and the fanon. On his deathbed Christ’s vicar on earth wore a simple cotton shift with a wrap about his shoulders. Beneath it his pale body was only a man’s, and a rotting one at that.
As Ludovisi and the other senior cardinals looked on, together with the Penitentiaries, Giacinto Gigli and the rest of the city waited outside for news. Pope Gregory’s confessor began the sacrament of extreme unction. With holy oil he anointed the pontiff’s eyes, his nose, his mouth, his ears. The palms of the Pope’s hands had been anointed when he became a priest, so the confessor made only the sign of the cross in oil upon the backs of his hands. ‘By this holy unction,’ he prayed, ‘and by His most tender mercy, may the Lord forgive thee whatsoever sin thou hast committed by touch.’ As death drew closer, the priest began the commendation of the soul, calling: ‘Subvenite’.
In a few moments the secretary of state of the curia would knock at the door with a silver mallet, and call out for the Pope by name. Obtaining no response, he would enter the chamber and approach the bed. With another, smaller, mallet he would touch the Pope upon the forehead. Three times he would call the Pope’s name and tap his cold forehead with his silver mallet. Only then would he pronounce him truly dead.
‘Subvenite,’ prayed the papal confessor once more.
‘Come to his help all ye saints of God. Meet him all ye angels of God. Go forth, O Christian soul.’
It was shortly before ten o’clock at night on 8 July 1623. Pope Gregory’s confessor raised his hand and with the tips of his fingers touched his head, his heart, his left side and his right. In his diary that night, Gigli wrote: ‘In Nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.’
On the night Pope Gregory died, only thirty-four members of the Sacred College of Cardinals that would elect his successor were in Rome. The other twenty or so were scattered all over the continent, some as far away as Madrid or the Baltic Sea. For a new Pope to be elected, the cardinals had no choice but to go to Rome. But the decision to travel there was not to be taken lightly. Crossing the continent, whether by sea or coach, or even on foot, was difficult and often dangerous. And Rome in the heat of summer, with the incidence of malaria rising virtually every day, was no place to be. Yet if a cardinal did not go, his vote would not be counted. He would not be able to influence the election, and as a result a Pope from a rival faction might take the throne. Knowing that Pope Gregory himself had died of the marsh fever, the cardinals who made their way towards the Holy City in the summer of 1623 did so with great trepidation. Drawing close, most of them would have elected to spend their last night well beyond the disoccupato, where the country air was still clear and there was little danger of breathing in the noxious gases that were believed to cause the fever. On the final day of the journey, each man made sure to rise early. The coach windows were clamped shut, and the cardinals were careful to wrap scarves about their faces, while high above the coachman would whip his horses through the approaches to the city.
That year there was trouble even before the conclave began. The interval between the death of the Pope and the election of his successor – the sede vacante, the vacant throne – had long been a time of release, a civic exhalation after a period of fierce papal control. By tradition, the jails were emptied. When he was caporione, it was Gigli’s job to carry the key to the jails and oversee the prisoners’ liberation. During the sede vacante the populace could say whatever it wanted, and the people did, many of them writing what they thought of the authorities on little pieces of paper which they then stuck on a statue of the limbless Pasquino, which is why he later came to be known as the ‘talking statue’.
The papal interregnum was never