Born in 1574, Gianbattista Pamphili was a thirty-eight-year-old priest trained as a canon lawyer when the rich and lively young widow, Olimpia Maidalchini, married his older brother Pamphilio. Though highly intelligent and hardworking, Gianbattista was plagued by paralyzing indecision which had kept him from rising in the church hierarchy.  He soon found that his charming new sister-in-law could quickly point out the right choices for him to make, and she was almost always right.  For her part, Olimpia saw that she could grasp real power – something not legally permitted a woman – through her brother-in-law. 

Together the two were a formidable team.  Olimpia threw the right dinner parties, gave sumptuous gifts to the right people, and courted the most powerful cardinals.  She had Gianbattista appointed to high-level Vatican embassy positions in Naples and Madrid, and then used her influence to have him appointed cardinal. 

Word got out that the two were conducting a very public affair right under the nose of Pamphilio Pamphili, the husband of one and brother of the other.  And the affair would not only have been adulterous, but according to church law it would have also been incestuous.  It was delicious gossip.

Olimpia’s first biographer, her contemporary Gregorio Leti, sniffed, “This woman went more often in the carriage around town with her brother-in-law than with her husband.  They were locked up for hours on end in his cabinet, longer than propriety could approve of, longer than her husband could tolerate.  Sometimes he sought his brother and his wife without finding them, which is proof that he found it necessary to look for them together, and that she didn’t take a step without being accompanied by her brother-in-law.”

When Olimpia’s husband Pamphilio died in 1639 at the age of seventy-six, many believed that Olimpia had poisoned him.  But if Olimpia had been up to dusting off her arsenic to get rid of the old fellow so she could more openly sleep with her brother, she would have done it decades earlier.  Besides, an autopsy revealed a six-ounce kidney stone.

In the conclave of 1644, according to Ambassador Contarini of Venice, “Many thought Gianbattista Pamphili was worthy of the pontificate because his words were few and weighty, which made people believe he was really wise.”

Despite these advantages, some cardinals heatedly expressed their dislike of both Gianbattista’s appearance and personality.  Cardinal Antonio Barberini described Gianbattista’s character as “rigid and bitter.”  Another Venetian diplomat, Giustiniani, noted, “Some were offended by his dismal and saturnine aspect, the reflection of a contumacious and restless soul, and in him one could see customs poorly suited to the placidity that the person carrying the name of the universal father should have.”

Gregorio Leti was, as usual, crueler in his explanation.  He asserted, “There were several reasons why Cardinal Pamfili was not desired by many people as I can well say.  His poor expression, his somber sad air, and his ugly badly-formed face made people take him for a bizarre and uncomfortable soul.  Many took the occasion to say that it would not be good to make a universal father, a pope, who had a face so horrible and deformed that it scared the children.”

The nephew of Pope Urban VIII, Antonio Barberini became a cardinal in 1627 at the tender age of twenty.  “The great inclination he has had to women hath been no small blemish to his reputation,” Gregorio Leti wrote, and for once in his life the writer was being kind.  Cardinal Antonio was known for his astonishing agility in swinging both ways and caused scandal with both male and female lovers.

A sinister affair concerned Gualterio Gualtieri – Olimpia’s cousin and Gianbattista Pamphili’s nephew.  Still in his teens, Gualtierio entered the service of Cardinal Antonio as a page to learn cultured manners and the courtly way of life.  Evidently, he learned other things as well.  One day the cardinal called him away from the gaming table to attend him.  “I have him in the ass all night,” the young man cried, slapping down his cards.  “He should at least leave me alone during the day!”

The impudent remark flew around Rome like wildfire.  Cardinal Antonio was so furious that he sent Gualtierio to the battlefield in Germany to fight Protestants.  No sooner had the boy arrived than he was killed on the field, many said shot in the back by an assassin paid by the cardinal.  Whether he was murdered or not, his death had certainly resulted from his master sending him to war in a fit of rage.  Gianbattista and Olimpia had been extremely fond of the boy and were devastated by his untimely death.

Born in 1622, Camillo was Olimpia’s only son, and a caricature of a weak son dominated by a strong mother.  He clearly lacked his mother’s forceful intelligence.  With undisguised venom Leti added that Camillo was “so ignorant that he barely knew how to read at the age of twenty."  The French ambassador described the good luck the mediocre Camillo enjoyed by being born into the right family, sniffing, “Fortune supplied him with what nature had declined to give.”

As a result, Camillo grew up with the varnish of a seventeenth-century gentleman.  He excelled at horsemanship and could cut a pretty figure on the dance floor.  He crafted poetic verses with more enthusiasm than wit and spent hours at a time designing imaginary gardens on paper.  He admired the great art collections of the cardinals and strolled imposingly around their galleries, tilting his head this way and that to examine statues and paintings.  Camillo was charming.  Camillo was polite.  But Camillo was all varnish and no substance.  He seemed to have no drive to excel in politics or finance, and dragged himself through each day with a general air of lassitude.

Olimpia had made plans for Camillo to marry Lucrezia, the niece of the powerful Barberini cardinals, after his uncle was elected pope.  But Camillo wanted to ruin his mother’s carefully laid plans, and decided he wanted to become cardinal nephew, the prime minister of the Papal States.  Unfortunately, he was a terrible cardinal nephew and was horrified that his uncle expected him to listen to the most boring conversations about politics, trade, war, and finance.  Camillo often doodled plans for gardens and villas while ambassadors and other cardinals tried to speak to him.  Complaints about Camillo’s uselessness began to percolate up to the pope who lectured him sternly. 

Some days the Vatican corridors echoed with the pope’s shouting at Camillo, tearing into him for being a lazy bum, leaving all the hard work to his poor elderly uncle.  In response, the cardinal nephew locked himself in his rooms in the Piazza Navona and took to his bed for days on end, claiming illness.

Though Camillo was bored by his work, he had never been bored by beautiful women.  And indeed, the dashing cardinal nephew, with his flashing black eyes, glistening black curls, and swirling red robes, was the object of fascination of numerous noble Roman ladies.  But Camillo, who flirted with many, was particularly fascinated by one of them, Olimpia Aldobrandini, the princess of Rossano. 

The princess of Rossano was a slender woman who took up a great deal of space in a room.  She was the spectacular amalgamation of sparkling wit, exquisite breeding, a peerless papal bloodline, and radiant beauty – all chestnut curls, ivory curves, and silken bows.  She had gloriously rich hair, strong black brows and sparkling dark eyes.  Her complexion was peaches and cream, her nose straight, her lips full and wavy.  Her figure was perfect, and her taste in clothing exquisite.  When the princess of Rossano entered a gathering, jaws dropped – even those of the oldest, most chaste cardinals. 

In addition to being beautiful, she was spirited, bold, and confident.  She was one of the few women in Rome whose speaking was considered well worth listening to.  Swishing into a room with her long silken train, smiling and nodding to the men assembled there, she opened her mouth and they listened spellbound.  “Highly gifted by nature and by fortune,” Cardinal Pallavicino wrote of the princess, who was “furnished with intelligence, grace, and excellent power of speech.”

When the princess’s first husband died suddenly, the rich twenty-four-year-old widow started looking around for a new husband, and her choice fell on the cardinal nephew.  The marriage of a prince of the church was not necessarily forbidden.  Until 1917 cardinals were not required to be ordained as priests.  The pope had wisely conferred on Camillo only minor orders and not priestly ordination, a sacrament which was thought to tattoo the human soul with an invisible but ineradicable seal which prevented marriage.  The cardinalate, on the other hand, was a dignity.  And a dignity was like a coat; it could be put on and taken off at will.  Remaining unsealed, Camillo could legally take off his coat and marry. 

When Camillo told his mother that he wanted to marry and his choice had fallen on the princess of Rossano, Olimpia was horrorstricken.  She had encouraged him to have an affair with the princess as a means of keeping him far from the Vatican so that she could do his work.  According to the Venetian ambassador, “His mother consciously fomented a love affair to distract him from the applications of business, sending him often to various gatherings and conversations” with the princess.  Now her plot had backfired horribly.  She had never envisioned he would want to marry the woman.

She was not appalled at the idea of Camillo’s marrying; she of all people had known he was hopelessly ill-suited for the job of cardinal nephew.  But Olimpia realized that allowing the princess of Rossano into the family would be like opening the gates of Rome to the Goths, or perhaps inviting the Lutherans back in for another Sack.  This was not a woman to meekly accept orders from her mother-in-law.  Here was a woman as smart, grasping, ambitious, and manipulative as Olimpia herself. 

When Camillo gave up the job of cardinal nephew in 1647 to marry the princess of Rossano, the pope needed a new family member to take the job.  It was unthinkable not to have a close relative helping the pope with official business.  But Olimpia needed someone who would do her bidding, and persuaded the pope to appoint her seventeen-year-old nephew, Francesco Maidalchini, as the new cardinal nephew.

Francesco Maidalchini had very little in the way of intelligence and an unattractive appearance to boost.  The writer Gregorio Leti described him as having “a stupid expression, neither the air nor the appearance of a man, with no experience of the world, ignorant of letters and even incapable of learning them, brutal and disagreeable in his actions and his words, badly made in body and mind, and carried away entirely with exercises and diversions low and unworthy to people of quality.”

Seeing that the pope had his doubts about the appointment, Olimpia offered to put the boy under the instruction of top cardinals to bring him up to speed quickly.  “But this was no more than to sow Corn upon a Rock,” Leti sneered.  “Maidalchini had no capacity to receive any thing at all, having brought an incredible stupidity along with him, even from his Mothers belly.”  And, alas, Francesco’s ignorance would prove invincible.

Leti grumbled, “And in fact this cardinal will forever be the laughingstock of the Sacred College, the scandal of the church, and the disgrace of all the Roman court.  The instructions given him by his aunt, who did everything to persuade him to always keep beside him learned men, didn’t help much as he didn’t have the mind to reap any advantage.”

Olimpia knew she could not let this boy loose in the Vatican.  Camillo, while forced to live with his mother, had still worked in the Vatican offices.  But Cardinal Maidalchini would not only live with Olimpia, he would also hold court there.  In his impressive office in the front rooms of the Piazza Navona palace, Cardinal Maidalchini held his meetings with Olimpia sitting next to him, elbowing him to blurt out the answers she had taught him. 

Giacinto Gigli wrote, “She didn’t want him to stay in the palace next to the pope, but to live in her house so she would not lose dominion.  And she did not want the prelates and the rest of the court, who without doubt would have gone to the antechamber of the cardinal, to abandon her own antechamber.”  Finally, the beating heart of the Vatican had been transferred to Olimpia’s own house.

But it did not last long. Seeing his uselessness, the ambassadors and other cardinals began to ignore him.  The worst came on Christmas Eve, 1649, when Cardinal Maidalchini was tasked with opening the Holy Door of Saint Mary Major to inaugurate the 1650 Jubilee.  The little cardinal did not know how to hold the holy hammer.  When he tried to grab the box of jubilee medals which had been bricked up in the door, he got in a fight with the church canons who also wanted them, and the sacred event became a brawl.  Spectators, furious at the cardinal, mashed him against the wall and he barely escaped with his life, clutching the holy medals, to the hoots and jeers of pilgrims.

When Olimpia dropped her nephew like a hot potato, Francesco realized she had put not a cardinal’s cap on his head so much as a dunce cap.  He began to despise his crafty aunt.  In the conclave that followed the death of Innocent X, Francesco tried to elect a pope who would punish Olimpia and made dramatic speeches denouncing her. 

Cardinal Mazarin, Prime Minister of France (1602-1661)

The crafty, Italian-born Giulio Mazzarini had transformed himself into the suavely French Jules Mazarin, prime minister of France, by sleeping with Anne of Austria, the Queen Mother and regent for her young son Louis XIV.  He had been ferociously against the election of Cardinal Pamphili and tried to interpose a veto.

Throughout the difficulties that lay ahead, Mazarin courted Olimpia assiduously, knowing she wielded Vatican power.  When, in May 1647, the new French ambassador, the marquis de Fontenay, called on Olimpia at her Piazza Navona palace with a most brilliant suite – twenty-four pages, forty valets and three hundred men – he found that she had created a kind of court with herself as queen and numerous ladies-in-waiting hovering attentively nearby.  The marquis respectfully saluted her, noting that she “was accompanied by ten principal ladies of Rome, richly dressed.”

Fontenay was dumbfounded by the dignity of a woman whom he had heard to be a yokel from Viterbo.  In a letter to Mazarin, he gushed, “The Queen [Anne of Austria, queen mother of France] has not demonstrated more gravity and majesty than this lady on that occasion.”

Mazarin wrote back, “We must do favors for the signora Donna Olimpia, and it must go beyond everything His Holiness could desire for her.”  The prime minister now considered Olimpia to be his best friend.  Indeed, the two were remarkably similar; born to nothing, they had both scrambled up to the pinnacle of wealth and power because of their street-smarts.  Gazing at each other from either side of the Alps, they saw each other as useful pawns on their personal chessboards of power; it is also likely that they greatly admired each other.

As a reward for Olimpia’s invaluable aid in making Cardinal Mazarin’s idiot brother a cardinal, the queen of France suggested sending her a splendid tapestry and a silver dinner service.  But Mazarin, in a rare and egregious miscalculation, instead sent Olimpia a large trunk of the queen’s old clothes.  The gowns, of the finest materials edged with the richest lace, were valued at 4,000 scudi, a significant sum.  Perhaps the prime minister thought Olimpia would be honored to have the clothes of a queen who, a widow like her, always wore black.  But he was dead wrong, and Olimpia was highly insulted to be given hand-me-downs from a queen or anyone else. 

When Ambassador Fontenay next called on Olimpia, she threw a royal conniption fit about the queen’s old clothes.  The horrified diplomat wrote Mazarin immediately, letting him know he had made an awful mistake.  On November 17, the prime minister replied, “I believe that it is most important for the service of the king to correctly cultivate her friendship, and to omit nothing possible to conquer her entirely, knowing full well that her credit will prevail always with the pope over all his other relatives for the duration of this pontificate…  I ask you to discover what would please her most in terms of silver plate, precious stones or beautiful tapestries, and if she desires that these gifts come from the queen or from myself, if she prefers that the gifts go to her nephew [Maidalchini] or to her, if the thing should be publicly known or extremely secret, in fine, to conform exactly to the above punctually and in a manner that would be the most agreeable to her.” 

It is probable that the gifts were sent by the queen instead of the cardinal, to Olimpia instead of her nephew, and quite publicly.
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In the spring of 1654, a messenger galloped into the papal palace bearing glorious news for the pope.  The twenty-eight-year-old Queen Christina of Sweden, who had been talking secretly to Jesuit priests since 1651, was prepared to convert from Lutheranism to Catholicism.  She would abdicate on June 6 in favor of her cousin, Karl Gustav, and retire quietly until such time as her pensions and annuities were firmly fixed by the Swedish government.  If she became a Catholic before receiving her financial settlement, it was feared that the horrified Lutheran government would make sure she never got a dime. 

Unfortunately for Innocent, Christina did not publicly convert until Christmas Eve, when the pope lay dying.  It was another tragedy of Innocent’s reign that although the queen had converted under his pontificate, his successor would reap all the credit.  But if Alexander VII reaped the credit, he also had to deal with Christina’s scandal.  She removed the metal bras and underpants the pope had placed on statues, allowing the genitals to dangle freely.  The queen, who was thought to be a hermaphrodite, or at least a lesbian, tromped around the Vatican wearing thick men’s boots and men’s clothes.  The pope pointed out that the Bible instructed Christians to wear only those clothes appropriate for their own gender.  Christina must stop dressing like a man.  The queen, in this instance at least, complied with the pope’s request.  She started appearing at Vatican receptions wearing gowns so low her nipples popped out. 

Initially, church officials had thought that the most proper thing for Christina to do in Rome, considering that she was an unmarried female, was to enter a convent, either as a nun or simply to retire from the world.  But though Christina visited convents often – mainly to ogle the nuns – she said that she would rather marry than become a nun.  Then she surprised all Rome by having a passionate love affair with a man.  The pope felt her choice was most unfortunate; it was Olimpia’s protégé Cardinal Decio Azzolini.

The greatest artist since Michelangelo, at the tender age of ten Bernini was already a favorite of the popes.  In the 1620s he sculpted the magnificent baldachino, the enormous bronze canopy over the grave of Saint Peter in the Vatican basilica, and thirty years later designed the embracing columned arcade surroundings Saint Peter’s Square.  He also co-wrote and produced naughty comedies with Olimpia, performed to crowds of noble spectators in her palazzo.  One play made such fun of Innocent X and Olimpia’s foolish son, Cardinal Camillo, that Camillo convinced the pope to have Bernini’s St. Peter’s bell towers torn down as punishment.

Though Bernini’s theater scripts brought him disgrace, he had better luck with his elaborate special effects.  He was a showman, a ringmaster who loved to surprise, startle, and frighten his audience.  Bernini was particularly admired for creating a gradual sunrise and sunset, and for darkening the stage at the approach of a sudden storm, followed by thunder, lightening, hail, and rain.  This was an impressive feat, considering he only had torches, oil lamps, and mirrors to work with. 
But his most impressive effect was his frightfully realistic simulation of the flooding Tiber for Carnival 1638.  The river, which had been represented on stage in the form of wide tanks with actors canoeing on them, was suddenly diverted into the audience as the stage sets collapsed.  Thinking this was an accident, the alarmed spectators stood up ready to rush off but soon realized there was a large basin in front of them to catch the roaring waves, and it had all been part of the show.