Murder in the Garden of God (18 page)

Paolo Giordano probably had another script in mind for his feasts, however. Given the brutal society of sixteenth-century Rome, there was perhaps a veiled threat behind the joiliest banquet. “I have the power and wealth to crush you,” the host was saying. “Do not offend me or you will be sorry.” This was certainly the message when his
trinciante,
or carver, gave a brilliant performance slicing and slashing with his knives. It became fashionable for the
trinciante
to hoist a heavy roast in the air spitted on a giant fork with one hand, while the other hand sliced away rapidly, and slabs of meat fell gracefully onto a plate below. But the display was not just about food. If Paolo Giordano’s carver sliced a roast so dexterously, he could do the same to you.

This particular banquet had a unique script. Paolo Giordano was publicly declaring that although Gregory XIII might have stymied him for a time, now that the pope was dead he was flexing his muscles again. He was Paolo Giordano Orsini, and he could do whatever he wanted. This banquet was clearly a message for the next pope – as long as it wasn’t Cardinal Montalto, of course.

Noble families and cardinals often engaged in competitive entertaining, seeking to outdo each other in a dazzling array of dishes and serving vessels, proffered by servants in the most glorious livery – colorful velvet or silk with silver and gold embroidery. Usually beginning around noon, a banquet lasted several hours as course after course was brought out, and jugglers, acrobats, singers, and actors entertained. At a Roman banquet, rival nobles lay down their weapons for a few hours and dueled with their forks.

Among Europeans, Italians were alone in their use of the fork. While subjects of England, France, Germany, and Spain had no problem with thrusting dirty hands into the communal food platter, Italians considered such behavior a disgusting faux-pas. The fork first arrived in Italy in the eleventh century, when a Byzantine princess married the Doge of Venice and brought as part of her dowry a case of two-tined table forks.

Everyone was astonished at this affectation, and the clergy were furious. “God in his wisdom has provided man with natural forks,” wrote the bishop of Ostia, “his fingers. Therefore it is an insult to Him to substitute artificial metallic forks for them when eating.”
¹⁰
The princess’s early demise was attributed to God’s disapproval of her forks. One prelate wrote of this important morality lesson “of the Venetian Doge’s wife, whose body, after her excessive delicacy, entirely rotted away.”
¹¹

After such an unpromising debut, Italians scorned forks for the next three hundred years. In the fourteenth century, it was again introduced through Venice, that portal to the East, and by Vittoria’s time even the poorest folk used forks.

But forks were so unknown in England that Thomas Coryat felt the need to explain them in great detail in his book. “The reason of this their curiosity is, because the Italian cannot by any means indure to have his dish touched with fingers, seing all men’s fingers are not alike cleane. Hereupon I myselfe thought good to imitate the Italian fashion by this forked cutting of meate.”
¹²
When Coryat used his Italian fork back in London, his friends laughed at him. The advantages of forks, however, were clear, and soon the English started using the forks that Coryat had introduced.

Italians – even the wealthiest – brought their personal forks, knives, and spoons to banquets, taverns, and friends’ houses in little wooden boxes called
cadenas.
They were unwilling to put the silverware of others in their mouths; heaven only knew where it had been, or how carefully it had been washed.

Having placed their
cadenas
at their assigned seats, guests carefully inspected the credenza, a large sideboard with shelves, which was set against a wall near the dining table. Here, the host displayed his most expensive platters, bowls, basins, and ewers. Some were gold, others silver, some were colorful majolica. Murano glasses, pitchers, and bowls were considered great luxuries. Plates from China or engraved pitchers from the Middle East were sure to impress. For the wedding feast, Paolo Giordano would have had his best pieces sent from Bracciano to his Roman palace.

Because of its warmer climate, Italians enjoyed a more healthful diet than northern Europeans and a wider variety of fresh fruits and vegetables, available for many months of the year. Moreover, Italians lacked the northern European prejudice against vegetables as being dishonorable. English visitors were shocked to attend a noble Italian banquet and find platters of low-class lettuce, vulgar cabbage, and blue-collar broccoli. Recently brought over from the Americas, tomatoes weren’t much liked. Their acid leeched onto pewter plates and gave the diners stomach aches, leading to the incorrect theory that tomatoes were poisonous.

Italians enjoyed a wide variety of fruit – pears, dates, grapes, figs, peaches, melons, apples, apricots, pomegranates, plums, blackberries, cherries, strawberries, lemons, and oranges. Doctors recommended against eating fruit at the end of a large meal, especially peaches. The fruit, they warned, would float on top of other foods into the veins, sending noxious vapors up to the brain. Italian diners ignored the warning.

Paolo Giordano would have employed a professional huntsman at Bracciano to provide fresh deer, boar, and wildfowl. For his wedding feast, the carcasses would have been brought the twenty miles to Rome. Domesticated meat included veal, pork, lamb, duck, capons and, recently, the American turkey. Most meats were sautéed with pork fat and lard.

Many popular banqueting recipes would make today’s diners – especially vegetarians – shudder. Perhaps for his wedding feast, Paolo Giordano wanted to serve guinea pigs with French mustard or stuffed with braised cherries. Maybe Vittoria chose veal eyeballs mixed with cow testicles and udders, and sweetened with raisins, cinnamon, and butter. Veal brains were generously sprinkled with sugar. For a special event such as a wedding feast, often an entire veal head, garlanded with flowers, was served stuffed with eggs, capers, pine nuts, truffles, candied citron, prunes, and bacon. As one cookbook author noted, “Veal’s head is often served at princes’ dinners boiled, most pleasing to the palate, especially those parts that are nearest the ears, laudably fat and tender.”
¹³

Deer were always popular. Princes “eat the tender points of their horns, the ears, the extremities of the lips and nose, especially with onions, aromatic spices, and fat, with lemon juice, and this meal is very celebrated.”
¹⁴

The duke’s wedding feast might have included porcupines roasted on a spit, larded, and stuck with cloves, or badgers cooked with pears. Other dishes may have been hedgehog and fox, along with wild donkeys, mountain goats, and bears, seasoned with cinnamon and cloves. The legs and arms of a bear were considered the most succulent parts.

Sometimes a whole bird would be put under a pie crust with only the head sticking out, its shocked dead eyes staring reprovingly at diners. The unborn fetus of a deer was presented in a stewpot with herbs. Snipes would be roasted whole with guts intact, which were later squeezed out onto toast. Often, whole animals were baked into pies, even creatures as large as a deer, bones and all.

Fish was an important part of the Italian diet due to Church regulations; meat, eggs, and sex were denied to Catholics on Fridays and the forty days of Lent, unless one had a papal dispensation. Peppered with lakes, surrounded by the sea on three sides, Italy had a rich supply of fish, and the wealthy ate sturgeon, eels, salted anchovies, tuna, oysters, and a variety of freshwater fish. Oddly, beaver tail was served on fast days. Though it belonged to a mammal, the tail was always in the water and was therefore considered to be fish.

Meat and fish were seasoned by orange water, rose water, musk, amber, dried fruits, almonds and pistachios, and sugar and cinnamon. It was considered unhealthy to eat fish and meat at the same meal, as the combination would produce poisonous vapors that leached into the brain. As a side dish, pasta was starting to evolve into its myriad forms but was usually served with butter, or sugar and cinnamon. Tomato sauce, because of its supposed poisonous properties, was not used with pasta until the nineteenth century.

At a noble banquet, presentation was considered just as important as the food itself. Every dish was an artistic masterpiece, and Paolo Giordano, conscious of his illustrious heritage, would have insisted on it. Pies several feet wide were coated with gold leaf. Peacocks were roasted and then had their feathers sewn back on. One trick was to carry the peacock into the banquet with flames spewing out of its mouth, though we are unsure how this was achieved. Oddly, when the hard crust was removed from a large pie, sometimes birds would fly out or rabbits jump around the table to the delight of the guests.

Italians loved color. Dishes were garnished with marigold petals, slices of lemon and orange, the scarlet of pomegranate, and the vivid green of parsley. Tables were decorated with large sugar sculptures depicting mythological scenes, animals, and castles. Brightly painted and gilded, these were the centerpieces of the Renaissance banquet. At a 1574 banquet given by the Doge of Venice to the visiting King Henri III of France, all of the knives, forks and napkins were made of sugar and painted.

Wine was served at all meals, even breakfast, when the lord of the manor dipped his toast into it. Bottled wine was just coming into fashion; most wine was siphoned from casks into pitchers or glasses. If the host gave an all-male drinking party, his guests would be entertained by obscene and lascivious glasses studded with jewels. Recumbent nudes reclining on the brim, or doing a handstand on the base, offered splayed legs where the drinker’s mouth should go.

Given the surging popularity of banquets, advice books lambasted an alarming new trend which sounds oddly modern – an epidemic of obesity, of which Paolo Giordano Orsini was a prime example. Rudolph Goclenius wrote in 1607 that some nobles bear turgid swollen bellies of such size that “for many years they are not able to think about their private parts.”
¹⁵
It seems that the duke, however, still thought about his private parts.

In 1589, Thomas Cogan wrote in his
Haven of Health,
“In our time, for that ryotousenes, and pleasure are growen to the fill, and infinit number are troubled with the gowt, for some never exercise themselves, and drink strong wines next their heart, and use immoderate lust.”
¹⁶

In the 1570s, the author Guglielmo Grataroli wrote that many wealthy people “addict themselves to voluptuosnes and bellychere, to wallo in their disordered and lascivious appetites, tendryng and cockeryng their wanton carkases.”
¹⁷

The last quote seems to describe Paolo Giordano himself, addicted to belly cheer as he was, who had tendried and cockered his wanton carcass with no holds barred. As he joyously worked with butlers, cooks, and huntsmen for his fabulous wedding feast, there was one possibility that dampened his happiness – the slim chance that Cardinal Montalto would be elected pope.

Yes, he had become popular with the people of Rome by giving them food during the famine. And he looked harmless enough leaning on his stick and coughing. But with so many noble, stellar cardinals, would the Sacred College elect a dying pig keeper from the Marches?

In between his banquet preparations, Paolo Giordano made the rounds, begging the cardinals
not
to vote for Montalto. He was even willing to get down on his knees while imploring them, despite the fat stomach which had prevented him from doing so just a few days earlier.

The Venetian ambassador, Lorenzo Priuli, wrote his Senate, “Lord Paolo Giordano Orsini exercised great enmity against him [Montalto] and implored the entire Sacred College that they not create him pope, throwing himself on his knees to each of them as he requested this favor.”
¹⁸

Not only Paolo Giordano’s marriage to Vittoria, but all his wealth and even his life depended on them not electing Montalto.

Chapter 13

Duplicity

Your tongue plots destruction; it is like a sharpened razor,

you who practice deceit.

– Psalm 52:2

O
n April 20, the electors settled into their cells in the Vatican. Soon thereafter, the ambassadors of Spain, France, and the Holy Roman Emperor met with them, pushing their favorite candidates, and excluding certain others. At two hours past sunset, the master of ceremonies cried,
Omnes extra
! And everyone who was not a cardinal, or a
conclavista,
was forced to leave.

On Easter Sunday, April 21, after celebrating Mass, thirty-eight cardinals processed into the Sistine Chapel to officially open the conclave. The Sacred College consisted of sixty cardinals at the moment, but many were out of town. Over the next few days, four more would arrive, bringing the total number of electors to forty-two, and several others would come too late to vote. All were Italian except three Germans, three Frenchmen, and one Spaniard.

And now Paolo Giordano was ready to pounce. As soon as the conclave began, with Cardinal de Medici firmly entombed inside, the duke had the banns read. Father Bartolomeo de Roijas, rector of the little Church of Grottapinta next to the Orsini Campo de Fiori palace, mounted the platform.

“For the first time,” he said, “it is made known to all that his most excellent lordship Paolo Giordano Orsini wants to marry Signora Vittoria Accoramboni. Therefore it is exhorted according to the form of the sacred Council of Trent that if anyone knows any impediment to this marriage, they must reveal it.”
¹
Everyone present knew of an impediment, but no one wanted to get stabbed that night. On the mornings of April 22 and 23, Father de Roijas read the banns again and was again rewarded by an uncomfortable silence.

In conclave, the major factions had already created a deadlock. Tuscany was deeply mired in a boundary dispute with the duke of Parma, who happened to be Cardinal Farnese’s brother. If the popular Cardinal Farnese became pope, he would certainly resolve the disagreement to the satisfaction of Parma. Naturally, if Cardinal de Medici were elected, he would give the land to Tuscany. But even if he weren’t chosen, de Medici needed at all costs to prevent the election of Farnese.

If de Medici worked assiduously against Farnese, Farnese worked just as hard against de Medici. The mutual hatred was fueled by the regrettable fact that Cardinal de Medici had taken as his latest mistress Cardinal Farnese’s gorgeous married daughter, twenty-five-year-old Clelia. Cardinal Farnese fumed, and Cardinal de Medici laughed, and Clelia batted her long black eyelashes at both. And so, at the outset, the electors fell into two main factions – Farnese and de Medici.

Romans were wild about betting, and bookies made good livings. People bet on the gender of an unborn child – though that bet wasn’t terribly interesting as there were only two possibilities. They bet on which prelates would be created cardinals. They bet on the weather. But the most exciting betting centered on the election of a new pontiff. Bets were accepted even when the current pope was alive and well. Pope Pius IV had issued a bull prohibiting betting on papal elections as undignified, but no one paid any attention. People recorded their bets with notaries and bought tickets with the names of the chosen cardinals, which they would cash in if they won.

In January 1584, Cardinal Farnese had been the favorite, with an 18.5 percent chance, and Cardinal Montalto was given only a 6.5 percent likelihood. But when Gregory died, Montalto led the pack at 18 percent.

Each vote in conclave has a special name – a scrutiny. Twice a day beginning April 21, morning and afternoon, cardinals disguised their handwriting when scribbling the name of their candidate on a slip of paper. Then they would fold the paper several times, walk to the chalice in front of Michelangelo’s daunting Last Judgment, and toss it in. When all had voted, the names were read and tallied. A two-thirds majority was required for the winning candidate.

In the first scrutinies, numerous cardinals were proposed by their friends. The worthy Cardinal Gugliemo Sirleto, a great scholar of irreproachable morals, was opposed by several because he was beloved by Spain. Many cardinals feared that Sirleto would govern the Church as the “chaplain of the Catholic king.”
²

Cardinal Giambattista Castagna was proposed, but the older cardinals were reluctant to vote for someone who had received his red hat only in the last promotion. Cardinal Giacomo Savelli, though he had been well liked by Gregory XIII and came from one of the principal families of Rome, was annoying and unpopular with his colleagues. He had the advantage of ill health, but this was offset by his brood of greedy bastards who would plunder the papal treasury, leaving little for the cardinals.

On April 22, there was still no clear favorite. When a cannon fired – the traditional sign that a pope had been chosen – word spread that Cardinal Farnese had been elected. The Roman people went wild with joy as they wanted a splendid, generous pope. It was an old custom that as soon as a pope was announced, crowds raced to his palace to sack it thoroughly. Luckily, Farnese had stationed armed guards to prevent his palace from being sacked until the word was official. The cannon, it was discovered, had been fired to quell a riot.

Voting continued on April 23. Cardinals Gabriele Paleotto and Giovanni Antonio Fachinetti were from Bologna, which weighed heavily against them. The Bolognese Pope Gregory had stuffed all the good Church positions with his countrymen. The ambassador of Urbino noted, “At court they are all Bolognese, and they pass the ball from one to the other.”
³
Now, after thirteen years, the non-Bolognese cardinals wanted balls for themselves.

Cardinal Montalto did not get swept up in factional disputes. He spent much of his time alone in his cell, praying. When a cardinal attached to the interests of Cardinal San Sisto, Gregory’s cardinal nephew, asked Montalto about his choice, he replied that the college must elect a man agreeable to San Sisto out of respect for Pope Gregory’s years of service. He told Cardinal Farnese’s supporters that he could not understand why their man had not yet been elected. He told the
conclavistas
of Cardinal de Medici that their master had the greatest merit in the entire Sacred College. According to Gregorio Leti, “He said much good about the others and showed great self-deprecation… He was angry that he didn’t have as many votes as there were cardinals.”
⁴

Cardinal Alfonso Gesualdo, a Neapolitan nobleman and pious reformer of the Church, was scorned because of his strange habit of bathing every day. Such eccentricity made his colleagues wonder if he was all right in the head. Agostino Valerio, Cardinal of Verona, was too young at fifty. He might reign for decades, outliving several worthy cardinals who would never have another chance to become pope. As the Venetian envoy wrote, “The Roman courtiers like the wheel to turn often, because each man hopes to win in the lottery. They give each Pope five years to live, and are displeased when the lease is renewed.”
⁵

The powerful factions of Cardinals Farnese and de Medici were blocking each other, and several compromise candidates had failed. Thoughts now turned to Cardinal Montalto, who was somewhere between sixty-three and seventy. Even if the younger age was true, it didn’t seem as if he would last too long what with his wheezing and limping. Cardinals Luigi d’Este, Michele Bonelli, and Girolamo Rusticucci met with de Medici in his cell and proposed Montalto “as a good person, completely quiet and grateful, not mistrustful of anyone, without family, zealous of serving God, by nature benign and loving.”
⁶

He had won numerous supporters by his gentle, submissive air. Unlike many cardinals, Montalto never pushed his opinions on others but was prepared to renounce his own sentiments and agree with other prelates as being more learned than he. He had earned many points by forgiving the slights of the Franciscan monks who had tormented him. “He was civil and courteous with everyone,” Gregorio Leti reported, “even his servants, and particularly with those monks who had persecuted him the most and who had most openly declared themselves his enemies. He embraced them when he saw them, as tenderly as if they had always been friends.”
⁷

But the event that helped him most in obtaining support for the papacy was his startling forgiveness of his nephew’s murderers. He had openly declared his acceptance of the murder as God’s will, had publicly pardoned the malefactors, and had received Paolo Giordano and Vittoria with demonstrations of great affection. Such a man would not be one to hold a grudge against cardinals or make their lives miserable.

At this point, Cardinal de Medici was ready to drop Paolo Giordano like a hot potato and start focusing on protecting young Virginio. It is likely that he had received news of Paolo Giordano’s marriage banns. If so, he must have been livid that after four years of embarrassing edicts against him, Paolo Giordano continued to drag the family name into the mud with his irrational passion for an unsuitable woman. And once elected, Cardinal Montalto, always a supporter of Cardinal de Medici, could easily be persuaded to renew Gregory’s decree against the marriage.

Naturally, Cardinal de Medici also had political reasons for electing Montalto. He desperately wanted to block the election of certain unfriendly cardinals and thought he could effectively use his friend to accomplish this. His enemy Cardinal Savelli was starting to gain support. And Cardinal Farnese, realizing he was too controversial to be elected, now pushed his friend, Cardinal de Torres, who was racing to Rome from Spain. Farnese and his party were planning on adoring him as pope the moment he walked into the conclave.

Like a scrutiny, an adoration was an accepted way of electing a pontiff. If it seemed that two-thirds or more of the cardinals pointed at a colleague and starting crying,
“A pope! A pope
!” a scrutiny would be held to confirm the number of votes. Sometimes embarrassingly few cardinals joined in, and the adoration was an abject failure. Other times, however, cardinals feared to be the last ones to cry out. In that case, surely the new pope would notice their lack of enthusiasm and punish them. As a means of ensuring their survival in the next pontificate, many cardinals ended up vociferously supporting their deadliest enemies.

Cardinal de Medici knew that Cardinal de Torres was nearing Rome and would arrive any day. He began meeting secretly with the main supporters of Spain and France, who reported that their monarchs had nothing against the kind-hearted, harmless Cardinal Montalto, who seemed to have good will towards all.

When other cardinals learned that de Medici was hell-bent on electing Montalto, they “found strange his resolution … to create as pope an enemy of Prince Don Paolo Giordano Orsini,” wrote the chronicler, “because Cardinal Montalto had received not small disgusts from Orsini, the in-law of Cardinal de Medici, and among these they attributed the murder of the cardinal’s nephew in Rome. At any rate, it seemed more important to him [de Medici] to exclude Farnese and de Torres than to keep the goodwill and respect of his in-law.”
⁸

On the night of April 23, Cardinals Bonelli, Medici, and d’Este swept into Montalto’s cell. Speaking in a very low voice so others couldn’t hear him, Bonelli said, “Courage, Monsignor, for we have come to tell you some good news, that we have resolved to make you pope.”
⁹

No sooner did Montalto hear this declaration, than “he began to cough so hard it seemed he was rendering up his soul, which obliged him to say that his reign would be of few days, that besides the continual difficulty he had in breathing, he did not think he had sufficient strength to carry such a heavy burden.”
¹⁰

In addition to his poor health, Montalto pointed out that he had never worked in international affairs, or even in Roman government. How would he know what to do? He said he would accept the papacy only on the condition that “those signors would be obligated to assist him night and day to govern the state and the Church.” Montalto seemed heartened by their promises and said they must accept powerful positions to steer the ship of state, since he would have no idea what he was doing. “These were the words that made these big fish swim into the net,” according to his chronicler.
¹¹
We can imagine, at this point, the kindly old man slipped his hand into his pocket and felt the little leather book of debts owed and debts to be paid.

Having left Montalto’s cell, the three conspirators spoke among themselves. They were pleased at the thought of running the Church and government for a sweet, sick old man. They would have the power and wealth. Nor was it likely that Montalto’s family would push themselves forward, according to the chronicler, “his relatives being young, inexpert, and addicted to planting vines. They have no thoughts of governing the state, or of matters most relevant to the court of Rome, and are not good to command the people. And they said moreover, that Montalto knows quite well that we are very expert and capable of sustaining him with advice, and if we make him pope then we will surely have a great part in the papacy.”
¹²

The trio did not have enough votes to elect Montalto and had to win over Cardinals San Sisto and Farnese and their parties. Cardinal San Sisto, who knew his uncle Pope Gregory and Montalto had heartily disliked each other, was quickly brought around because, as Cardinal de Medici wrote, “He would have elected the devil himself to get out of the conclave and return to the arms of his mistress.”
¹³

Perhaps it is no surprise that Cardinal Farnese held out longer than the others. He couldn’t easily swallow the fact that a pig feeder was going to be placed on the pontifical throne, and not his magnificent self. But even Cardinal Farnese came around. According to one report, “It appears that Farnese had two reasons for not blocking Montalto’s election. The first was the infirmity of Montalto, who had seemed languishing for years, and his simplicity which seemed not to hold any resentment. It didn’t matter to Farnese whether a man as dying and stupid as Montalto became pope or remained cardinal. He only asked Cardinal Bonelli why he should concur to this election, and he replied that it was due to his [Montalto’s] easy and complaisant humor, and because during his pontificate he [Farnese] would play a great role. ‘I am of the same sentiment,’ Farnese replied, ‘because this is a man who does not have the spirit to do much evil, nor the discernment to do much good.’”
¹⁴