In Olimpia’s time, Rome made no products for export, such as cloth, ships, or guns.  The economy was primarily focused on the church and its bureaucrats, and the services that supported them.  Architects, masons, carpenters, painters, and roofers built palaces for high-level Vatican officials.  Cabinetmakers and drapers furnished them.  Artists, sculptors, and gardeners adorned them.  Tailors, seamstresses, hat makers, cloak makers and shoemakers dressed those who lived and worked in them.  Grocers, butchers, bakers, and fishmongers fed them.  A large chunk of the population worked as domestic servants for the rich – a cardinal usually employed a staff of two hundred individuals, many of whom took care of his one hundred horses and numerous carriages.

But Rome had countless poor citizens unable to find work in wealthy households.  In the seventeenth century, the disparity of rich and poor was as great as it would ever be.  The rich few lived in sumptuous palaces, gorged themselves to vomiting at banquets, rode in the finest carriages, and wore satins and silks embroidered with gold and pearls.  The poor fretted over the number of ounces in the brown bread they bought on the street, a small loaf called the pagnotta.   The price was fixed at one bajocco, which might translate into a penny, but the weight of the bread was determined by papal decree.

In some ways, seventeenth-century Rome resembled a Hollywood version of the American Old West.  Street fights would erupt between the armed entourages of two feuding families or two dueling ambassadors.  Shots would ring out, swords clash, and all those who had been lounging, working, selling on the streets would vanish in an instant behind bolted doors and shuttered windows.  Only once the violence had stopped would the Romans come out to gape at the dead bodies littering the pavement. 

Worse dangers lurked in Rome than the spontaneous eruptions of baroque cowboys.  Until 1875 when flood banks were built, the Tiber River was level with the streets and houses around it.  Floods were an ever-present problem, and every decade or so a raging torrent killed hundreds of Romans in low-lying areas.  In a few hours entire sections of the city could be flooded to a depth of ten or twelve feet.  The Jews suffered most of all as they had been crammed into the lowest-lying part of Rome right next to the river by papal decree. 

Sometimes when the river surged suddenly, inmates incarcerated in Rome’s Tor di Nona prison drowned in their cells as water poured in the barred windows and rose to the ceiling.  During the two or three days the waters remained at their peak, Rome resembled Venice.  Red-robed cardinals canoed through the streets offering blessings and – more importantly – bread, to the starving who lowered baskets from their second floor windows. 

When the waters receded, houses, roads, and public buildings were filled with sewage and mud.  Sometimes typhoid broke out.  And with each new deluge the ruins of the ancient forum disappeared a little more into the twenty feet or so of silt, deposited there by centuries of floods.  The jagged tops of triumphal arches and colossal temples stuck out of the mud, tombstones commemorating the glories of a vanished race.

Fires, too, were an ever-present threat.  Logs rolled out of fireplaces; untended candles shed sparks on straw-covered floors, and suddenly a whole city block was ablaze.  As residents ran naked into the streets, dragging out chairs and tables, the volunteer fire brigade passed buckets of water from the nearest fountain, which was often quite a distance away.  Since water thrown from a bucket had little effect on a raging inferno, most fires were simply allowed to burn themselves out, while “firemen” doused the roofs of buildings across the street to prevent sparks from igniting.

Communion, which had been taken frequently in the early centuries of Christianity, had almost stopped completely by the sixteenth century.  Catholic theologians argued loudly that the consecrated bread really was the body of Christ; this terrified people who thought it a desecration to have something so holy slide down their gullets, rumble into their stomachs, and come shooting out the other end. 

Given the widespread fear of the Eucharist, the Council of Trent mandated that Catholics must confess and receive communion at least once a year.  According to custom most Catholics, having abstained from sex for three days, did this on the Thursday before Easter.  The faithful received only bread as their communion, as the wine was reserved for priests.  Lay people with their clumsy hands could drop the chalice, thereby literally spilling the blood of Christ all over again.

In 1614 Olimpia would have noticed a novelty in her Easter confession, a grill between her and the priest.  Pope Paul V had issued an edict mandating that all confessionals be outfitted with grills because of the many complaints he had received from women who, when they confessed their sexual sins in graphic detail, suddenly found themselves pawed and groped by hormonally overwrought priests who could no longer contain themselves.

Olimpia was an avid collector of relics.  Catholics believe that the body parts of saints retain the essence of holiness that can perform miracles, or at least bring good luck.  Saints’ bones, blood, hair, skin, teeth, skin, and even clothing and household items are treasured as miracle-working totems, encased in gold and crystal and studded with diamonds. 

The royal family of Spain was fortunate to possess entire saintly cadavers which, if a member of the dynasty became gravely ill, would be put into the sickbed.  Sometimes the royal four-poster became a charnel house of moldering corpses, and peering out from beneath them, the bright eyes of a feverish prince or princess.  Oddly, the miraculous corpses sometimes affected a cure.  Or perhaps, if that experience didn’t kill the invalid, nothing would.

In the Dark and Middle Ages, merchants in the Byzantine Empire, hearing of the European thirst for relics, were seen in crumbling cemeteries digging up rotten bones – of pagans – and selling them to pilgrims as the bones of early Christian martyrs for high prices.  No one seemed to mind that some saints’ bones had a disturbingly canine appearance.

One of the most daring feats of relic stealing occurred in 828 AD when two Venetians smuggled the body of Saint Mark the Evangelist out of Muslim-controlled Egypt where he had been buried.  It was thought that Muslims, who had their own cult of saints, would never allow their enemies the Catholics to cart off such a powerful relic which could even be used against them in battle.  They would sooner hide it or destroy it than let it fall into the hands of Christians. 

The two Venetians, having secretly dug up the body, put it into a barrel of pickled pork, a food despised by Islam.  Then, when Muslim customs officers arrived on board to check the cargo, the smugglers smilingly opened the barrel.  “Unclean!” the Muslims cried, running off the ship in terror.  And that is why Saint Mark is in Venice until this day, and crowds still throng to see the magnificent church that sprouted around his bones.

One of Martin Luther’s beefs with the Catholic Church was the veneration of false relics and the belief that doing so would confer on the visitor a get-out-of-Purgatory-free card.  Until Luther’s followers tossed them in the trash, one German church boasted a feather from the wing of the angel Gabriel, and the Bishop of Mainz had a magically solidified flame from Moses’ burning bush.  Even today, the cathedral at Aachen has Jesus’ diaper and the loincloth he wore on the cross.  Most of all, Luther was disturbed that eighteen disciples were buried on German soil, when Christ had had only twelve. 

The Jewish community was a source both of pride and embarrassment to the Holy See – pride because unlike other nations, the Papal States had never slaughtered its Jews; embarrassment because just a short walk from the Vatican lived a stubborn population of non-believers. 

Jews had lived in Rome since at least the time of Jesus.  In 1555 Pope Paul IV had crammed all Jews into a two-acre walled ghetto in Trastevere on the Tiber.  During Innocent’s reign, the population had risen to some 4,000.  Jews were not permitted to own property or work in the government or the military.  They were only allowed to sell old clothes, run small shops, and lend money.  They were also expected to pay enormous taxes to the Roman government.  The purpose of these punitive measures was to induce the Jews to convert, and each convert was given his choice of career – possibly a high office in the Vatican itself – a generous pension, and the right to move out of the ghetto.  Unmarried female converts were given ample dowries and strapping Christian husbands.

But converts from the ancient, closely-knit community were few.  Frustrated by this, in 1584 Pope Gregory XIII decreed that 155 Jews over the age of twelve had to attend a church service every Saturday – the Jewish holy day – in which a Dominican friar preached to them of their theological errors.  If less than the required number showed up, the community was forced to pay a heavy fine.  And so they attended, but some stuffed their ears with cotton, and others used the opportunity to catch up on their sleep.  The church hired a bailiff to patrol the sermon stick in hand and whack those who were not listening.  This, too, had little effect. 

On January 7, 1645, John Evelyn attended such a service and left us a priceless description of it.  “A Sermon was preach’d to the Jewes at Ponte Sisto,” he wrote,  “who are constrained to sit till the houre is don; but it is with so much malice in their countenances, spitting, hum’ing, coughing, and motion, that it is almost impossible they should heare a word from the preacher.”  He added, “A conversion is very rare.”

The Roman Carnival was an uproarious celebration right before Ash Wednesday.  Carnival was permitted by papal edict for a specific number of days – usually ten – but permission was withheld if the Papal States were suffering from plague, war, or famine.  A sorrowful face, liberally bedaubed with ashes, was more likely to win God’s forgiveness than a jester’s hat with jingling bells.

Carnival began with the tolling of a bell on a Saturday and a procession of city officials.  Two days later naked Jews were forced to race along the Corso, the main thoroughfare of Rome and the heart of Carnival, to the cheering of thousands of spectators who pelted them with eggs, vegetables, and dead cats.  But this was not meant as a special denigration to Jews.  On other days there were naked races of old men, cripples, little boys, whores, buffaloes, jackasses, and of riderless horses with tacks stuck in their backs to make them run faster, and everyone got pelted.  Called palios, the races were considered great fun for all – except, perhaps, for the horses – and the prizes were valuable bolts of cloth.  One race was reserved for naked hunchbacks, “very remarkable for the variety of their humps.”

A popular parade featured the king of the defecators, hoisted aloft on a toilet chair and farting loudly.  Horses, decked out with jingling silver bells and tall feathered headdresses, pulled extravagantly decorated floats through town.  Carts rolled through the streets, some with musicians, and others with costumed revelers.  Jousts were held in large piazzas, including the Piazza Navona, along with mock naval battles as ships drawn on wheels shot firecrackers at each other.  At night the entire city was illuminated with lanterns and torches, and fireworks were set off. 

Day and night, costumed revelers thronged the Corso and surrounding streets and squares.  Some paraded as doctors, lawyers, Jews, animals, and devils.  Some men dressed as women, and some women dressed as men.  All wore masks, and many were armed with syringes – the seventeenth-century version of a water pistol – which they squirted at each other.  They also pelted passers-by with oranges and painted eggs filled with scented powder, jam, perfume, or water.  One popular prank was to pour honey out of an upper window onto the heads of pedestrians below.

On Ash Wednesday the boisterous extravagance of Carnival disappeared, replaced by the funereal atmosphere of Lent, which commemorated Jesus’ forty days in the desert.  During this time, Romans wore black, ate no meat, attended no festivities, and meditated on the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross.  One Turkish ambassador visiting Rome was absolutely perplexed by the riotous Carnival followed by the sudden solemnity of Ash Wednesday.  He wrote the Sultan in Constantinople that Carnival was a ten-day mania which afflicted the Christians annually and was only cured by the application of ashes to the face.

Pasquino

In 1501 workmen digging in the street in front of the Orsini palace found a mutilated torso of a statue that had evidently been part of the decoration of the nearby Domitian Stadium.  Cardinal Orsini placed the statue on a pedestal over where it had been found, and soon students began hanging virulently anti-government poems on it.  The statue was called Pasquino, after a papal tailor who, it was said, couldn’t keep his mouth shut about Vatican gossip.

Pasquino had a “friends,” other statues in Rome who would hold “conversations” with him.  People would run from one statue to the other to see their responses.  Most of the conversations were about Vatican corruption, gluttony, and sodomy.  In an era before a free press, the talking statues of Rome were the only way for the disenchanted to vent.  Most popes let the statues talk freely; a few Pasquino poets, however, were burned at the stake.

Pasquino despised Olimpia, and the nastiest poems of Innocent X’s reign focused on her.  Crowds gathered around the statue day and night, laughing at the nasty verses.  Unfortunately for Olimpia, Pasquino was located right outside her bedroom window.

Referring to Olimpia’s accepting bribes for influencing the pope, Pasquino trilled:

He who wishes a favor from the sovereign,
Bitter and long the road to the Vatican.
But the shrewd person
Runs to Donna Olimpia with full hands,
And there who wants it attains it,
And the street is wider and shorter.

Olimpia was bit wide and short herself.

During a famine, Pasquino declared:

‘The Roman people are dying of hunger,’  
It was said in the Vatican hall
So the pope, to put an end to the loss,

Said Maidalchini would eat for us all.”

Household Management of a Noble Family

As a Roman nobleman’s wife, Olimpia would have employed a large domestic staff known as the famiglia.  These individuals were far more than servants and were, in a sense, family members as their name implies.  The master or mistress of a household was expected to bail a troublesome servant out of jail, pay for his medical and burial costs, and help his daughters with dowries.  In return servants were fiercely – sometimes violently – loyal to their employers, ready to cut down anyone in the street who insulted them.

The most important member of Olimpia’s famiglia would have been her maestro di casa, an exalted butler who supervised all her other servants.  The maestro di casa arranged the delivery of meat, fish, fruit, vegetables, wine, and firewood from local farms, and drew up contracts with local bakers, butchers, poulterers, fishmongers, and candle-makers. 

One of Olimpia’s servants would have played the role of master or mistress of the wardrobe.  This person would have been in charge of the purchase, laundering, storage and repair of their clothing, sheets, tablecloths and napkins.  Only undergarments were washed.  The outer garments of wool, silk, satin, and velvet, embroidered with gold and silver thread and edged with fur, would have been ruined by water.  These were cleaned with wine, hung out in the courtyard overnight to air, and beaten with brooms to get the dust out.

A scalco, or meat carver, was a sign of great prestige.  The scalco’s exuberant slicing of fish, beef, poultry, and game rivaled a theatrical performance.  He was in charge of all the knives in a household, and kept them sharp and sparkling.  More importantly, he guarded the food from the time it was purchased to the time it reached his master’s table, making quite sure no one had spiced it with a bit of arsenic.  The 1668 butler’s guide to a noble household, Il Perfetto Maestro di Casa, declared that the scalco “has his master’s life in his hands.”

The coppiero, or wine steward, was in charge of all wine and water for the table.  He worked with local wine dealers and vintners outside Rome to purchase the finest wines available for his master’s entertaining.  He obtained the cleanest water possible for the waiters to pour from silver ewers over the guests’ hands at the start and end of meals, the water running off into silver bowls.   He stocked the family carriage with a traveling bar of crystal goblets and fine wines should his master or mistress require refreshment on a journey.  And he kept the wine under lock and key to make sure the other servants did not quaff it down and show up drunk for work, a common occurrence in noble households. 

But according to Il Perfetto Maestro di Casa, the coppiero had one duty of greater urgency than all others; he “must use great diligence especially in households where there are enemies, and hatred, keeping a watchful eye on the wine cellar and the lesser servants, because if wine, water, or their containers are switched, there can be disastrous consequences.”

Olimpia’s household was required to follow the painstaking etiquette required for a Roman nobleman.  For instance, whenever her husband Pamphilio raised his glass to drink, all his servants standing stiffly in the dining room were required to remove their hats in veneration.  And when the Ave Maria bells rang out from Rome’s hundreds of churches at sunset, all the servants were required to fling themselves on their knees and pray while the nobles removed their hats and bowed their heads.

A seventeenth century Italian girl required a hefty dowry to marry a man of her social class or higher.  It would have dishonored the family if she were to marry a man of lower social class who would accept a meager dowry.  Many families got rid of their unwanted daughters by forcing them into convents.  This was considered an honorable and thrifty solution to the problem.

A nun slept alone in a narrow cell, on a hard bed, with an unlocked door through which the abbess could enter at any time to see what she was doing.  Fraternization was frowned upon as nuns, having devoted themselves to God, were not supposed to have any friends, even among their fellow nuns. Nuns who laughed and gossiped when cooking together or sewing in small groups could be subject to severe punishment.  Forbidden to have pets, many nuns adopted the chickens they raised for eggs.  Some nuns sent letters to their bishops complaining bitterly that the upstairs convent corridors were ankle deep in chicken turds because the nuns, looking for love where they could find it, kept so many pet chickens.

Nuns attended prayer service six times a day, and in between prayers they worked – tending the chickens in the henhouse, cooking the communal meals in the kitchen, doing the laundry, sewing, and cleaning.  To become closer to God, they sometimes whipped themselves, starved, and spent their nights praying rather than sleeping.

They were not permitted to go into town.  Servants bought supplies, knocked on the wooden window by the convent’s front door and, when it was opened, placed the items on a turntable that was rolled inside.  The nun receiving the goods had no contact with the servant, no friendly word, not the merest glance at a worldly person, and the entire transaction was handled exactly as if the convent were a leper colony. 

Nuns were not supposed to have even a glimpse of the outside world and its temptations.  All convent windows opened onto the inner courtyard, a place of contemplation, and never onto the rowdy street.  Some convents even stopped up the ventilation shaft in the privies if it gave the nuns a view of the street below, or the street below, perhaps, a view of the nuns’ behinds.

Nuns were allowed to meet friends and relatives in the convent parlor, a gathering place where lay people waited for a religious relative to come to the grill that separated the nuns’ world from the real world.  Male visitors were limited to a short list of fathers, brothers, and uncles, but female visitors could be more distant relatives, former neighbors, and friends.  An older nun past the age of indiscretion – forty – was instructed to stand nearby and listen to the younger nuns’ conversations in the parlors to make sure nothing inappropriate was said. 

Usually the relatives would bring food and drink and make merry in the parlor, slipping wine and food through the grill to the nun while she, in return, slipped them the delectable convent cakes.  Bishops routinely tried to clamp down on such excesses but just as routinely failed.  It was, after all, the only fun a nun could have.  And the rowdy relatives were not nearly as troubling as another problem in the parlor, which was becoming a favorite pastime of adventurous Italian youths.  Boisterous young men – drunk, bored, or on a dare – pretended to be nuns’ brothers, snuck in and exposed themselves, waving their members and grinning at the shocked virgins behind the grill.  The Neapolitans were the worst, some of them making the grand tour of Italy with the express purpose of flashing all the nuns.

Doctors’ visits to nuns in their cells were viewed with suspicion.  Physicians were encouraged to wait in the parlor and speak with patients through the grill without examining them.  If the patient was too ill to rise from her bed, he spoke with another nun about her symptoms and prescribed remedies.  The only men allowed in the convent with some sense of ease were priests who were required to hear confessions and celebrate Mass.  And sometimes even this resulted in pregnancy, thereby confirming popular beliefs about the incurable lechery of women.

One of the pope’s most important duties was to appoint the right men as cardinals.  But the pontiff was often limited in his choices.  France, Spain, and the Holy Roman Emperor would squawk to have their supporters made cardinals, and threaten to withhold church revenues, or even wage war, if the pope did not agree.  A new pope was expected to create a cardinal from the family of the pope who had made him a cardinal, years earlier.  Additionally, he had to give “the red hat” to someone in every family that had married into his own family.  Sometimes these candidates were poorly suited to the religious life.  Only after all these requirements had been fulfilled could the pope look around for truly intelligent, devout churchmen.

Cardinals drew income from owning benefices, or church lands.  Though canon law decreed that each churchman could own only one benefice and must reside there to look after it, this decree was blithely ignored when it came to cardinals “to assist them to bear the burden of expense which their office imposed on them,” according to a 1507 bull.  In 1503 the church declared that “having to perform higher duties so ought they to enjoy greater privileges than the other servants of Christ.”

Rustling in several layers of dark red satin, with just a touch of lace, the cardinal presented a majestic and powerful figure.  Cardinals had not always worn special robes but had dressed as regular priests until the reign of Pope Innocent IV (1243-1254) who invented the impressive red cap as a mark of distinction. 

By the reign of Boniface IX (1389-1404)), cardinals usually wore red robes as a sign of their willingness to be martyred for the church, though by the seventeenth century the color was mostly appreciated for its ability to conceal wine stains.  On days of mourning – the forty days of Lent, All Saints’ Day, and the ten days immediately following the death of a pope – cardinals wore fuchsia.  On two feast days a year – the third Sunday in Advent right before Christmas, and the fourth Sunday of Lent – they wore rose.

The word “nepotism” has its roots in nipote, the Italian word for “nephew.”  Though the word didn’t come into use until the early seventeenth century, nepotism had started in the eighth century when Pepin the Short, King of the Franks, granted the papacy the central third of Italy as his realm.  Suddenly the pope was also a king with lands, castles, and vast incomes to bestow on his relatives. 

The fourteenth century chronicler Lambert di Huy supported nepotism when writing of the then-current pope.  It would “without doubt be inhumane if John XXII conferred on strangers, neglecting his own relatives of equal or superior virtue, those offices that the Church gives to lay people, and the associated stipends…  It is wise and praiseworthy that he continues to care for, as he has in the past, his relatives and friends.  In fact, as the old proverb says, ‘It is not good to bind strangers to your own navel.’”

Papal nepotism was exacerbated by the fact that the throne was not hereditary, as in most secular monarchies.  A cousin of Louis XIII would still be a cousin of Louis XIV, with the same position and income.  But when a pope died, his relatives were immediately ousted from power and replaced by a new family.  Because popes were usually elected when elderly and died after only a few years, their relatives had a limited amount of time to squeeze the Vatican treasury dry, conclude prestigious marriages, and obtain noble titles, castles, and lands.  As soon as a cardinal was elected pope, his family descended on Rome in hordes, hoping to grab as much as possible before their elderly uncle kicked the bucket.

While popes gave their lay nephews dukedoms, they made their religious nephews cardinals. It is estimated that some forty early popes were succeeded on Saint Peter’s throne by their nephews, though many of these nephews may well have been sons.  There was a good reason for having a nephew in close proximity.  In an environment rife with violence – and numerous popes into the Middle Ages were strangled, stabbed, and poisoned – a close relative was thought to be the best bodyguard possible.

In 1538 Pope Paul III instituted the official position of cardinal nephew.   Living in the suite of apartments next to the pope’s, the younger man would help his uncle in politics and diplomacy and truly look out for his best interests.  The cardinal nephew would have every reason to keep the pontiff alive, unlike many other cardinals who might be tempted to slip something into his wine to hasten the next conclave. 

The people of the Papal States were not, in principal, against cardinal nephews, or the enriching of the pope’s family.  Sharing good fortune with relatives was, after all, a Christian virtue, and all levels of society did it.   It was not the premise of papal nepotism but its execution that was disliked.  Excessive sums were given to the pope’s relatives, often from taxes imposed on the daily bread ration of the poor.  Nepotism confined with the bounds of good taste would have been quite acceptable.  But the seventeenth century was not exactly a time of restraint.

Ever since the first bubonic plague hit Europe in 1348, epidemics struck various regions about every thirty years.  Italy had the best health care in Europe, but it was hard to contain a plague when no one understood the cause.  The bacterium yersinia pestis, which lives in the stomachs of infected fleas, would not be discovered until 1894.  Fleas feasted on rich and poor alike throughout the year.

The papal government understood, however, that the plague spread from one sick individual to another.  During an epidemic, doctors visited every house in a given neighborhood to ferret out the sick and cart them off to a pesthouse.  Many people, believing they were merely getting a cold, refused to enter the contagious miasmas of the plague hospital where, if they didn’t have plague already, they would surely catch it.  Their relatives tried to hide them in the basement behind wine barrels or in the thatched roof over the attic, but the doctors, aware of these tricks, usually plucked them out and carted them off. 

Still, many Romans died at home, and grave diggers were supposed to collect the bodies and bury them.  Some of them grew tired of hauling the non-stop cartloads of dead bodies far out of town and burying them eight feet under; it was easier to bury them closer to town.  Sometimes as a joke they would dump the bodies in shallow graves next to the homes of people they didn’t like.  Additionally, gravediggers were supposed to burn the contagious clothing and bedding of the deceased, but they often sold them, along with the bubonic fleas they harbored. 

As soon as the pope died, the cardinal camerlengo tapped him on his forehead three times, each time calling his name.  Surely the cardinals gathered around the bed would have been shocked if the pope had sat bolt upright and cried out, “I am still here.  Stop hitting me on the head with that hammer.”  But this has never happened in the history of the papacy.  The camerlengo then broke the papal fisherman’s ring – the pontifical symbol of office – and would officially reign himself until the election of a new pope.

The pope’s master of ceremonies and his assistants removed his body from the bed and carried it to another room to be washed with cold water and herbs.  His barber shaved his head and beard.  His body was washed again with white wine warmed with fragrant herbs, then oiled with balsam. 

The pope’s servants usually had difficulty finding suitable clothing in which to dress the corpse as it had been stolen during the pope’s final illness by his servants.  Almost all of his furniture, too, had disappeared, though they usually left the bed for the dying man.  Only once his body was taken away to be washed did his servants steal the bed and sheets.  Sometimes after the pope had been dressed, they came back and stripped him naked.

The papal funeral was held in Saint Peter’s Basilica, the church richly decorated inside and out with festoons of black cloth and brightly colored canvases depicting the papal coat of arms.  It was customary for the deceased pontiff to be laid out on a bier directly above Saint Peter’s grave, dressed in pontifical vestments, surrounded by an iron grill through which only his feet protruded.  This was to allow the faithful to kiss the holy feet, but not steal the richly embroidered vestments.  Sometimes, though, the shoes went missing.

On the fourth day after his death, the pope was laid in a casket of cypress which was placed in a lead coffin engraved with his name, coat of arms, and the years of his reign.  Before the coffins were sealed, a scroll listing the dead pope’s pious deeds was placed at his feet.  It is not known when or why this tradition began.  Perhaps it was for the dead pontiff to read to Saint Peter to convince him to open the pearly gates.
 
Interestingly, a sack of gold was also placed beside the pope’s corpse, probably a vestige of the ancient Greco-Roman tradition of putting a coin on the mouth of the deceased to pay the ferryman to take his soul over the River Styx.  The pope, however, as a Catholic, would have used it to pay the heavenly gatekeeper if he had remained unconvinced by the papal scroll of pious deeds. 

While the funeral solemnities, rich with music and incense, took place inside the church, in the streets of Rome violence usually broke out against the dead pope and his greedy family.  Angry mobs raced around Rome with hammers, disfiguring as many papal statues and coats of arms as they could reach on fountains, walls, and bridges.  Ferocious pasquinades were placed all over the city. 

For centuries, the vacant See had been a time of anarchy in Rome.  Those wanting to settle an old score would wait for years if necessary to carry out the deed after the pope died, when the police were hopelessly overwhelmed with crime.  Bodies, many headless, appeared on the streets every morning or were seen floating down the Tiber. 

Vacant See violence was exacerbated by the fact that upon a pope’s death prisoners were let out of jail in imitation of Pontius Pilate freeing Barabas at the time of Jesus’ crucifixion.  After their release, many of the more violent prisoners immediately formed gangs which roamed the streets, broke into houses, plundered, raped, and murdered.  The princely households barricaded themselves inside and hired armed guards to stand watch with loaded pistols and drawn swords.  Servants patrolled the roof, ready to throw rocks at any would-be attackers below.

Conclaves in the seventeenth century often proved fatal for the participants.  Malaria and other epidemics raged through the cramped, dark, and dirty space.  Realizing the health risks, most cardinals made their wills before reporting for duty.  On several occasions, cardinals elected a pope they disliked in order to escape the conclave with their lives.

The conclave was preceded by the sound of hammering echoing from the Vatican halls as carpenters boarded up all windows in the cardinals’ area.  They left a couple of inches open at the top to let in a little humid air, swarms of mosquitoes, and a faint beam of light; candles would be used throughout the day.  The boarding up of windows was supposed to prevent cardinals from making gestures, signs, or giving messages of any kind to the outside world.

Though supposedly sealed off from communication with those outside, the conclave leaked like a sieve and would continue to do so until Pope Pius X enforced absolute secrecy in 1904.  Until then journalists and diplomats wrote daily newsletters with conclave updates, reporting with uncanny accuracy on who had voted for whom.  In the 1644 conclave Cardinal Antonio Barberini routinely corresponded with the French ambassador, the marquis de Saint-Chamond, who sent back replies.  And Olimpia received frequent reports from Gianbattista, friendly cardinals, and their servants, and responded with new instructions.

Messages were often smuggled in and out of conclave in food platters.  Meals were brought in twice daily by the cardinal’s household servants who marched in stately procession carrying large silver bowls swinging from wooden poles.  Having arrived at the door assigned for food deliveries, they handed over the bowls to the guards who were supposed to examine all platters and wine bottles for secret messages going in and out.  But the guards often cast a careless glance at the victuals, even more careless than usual if a handsome tip was offered.  Instructions to the cardinals were hidden among the roasted gizzards in a duck’s body cavity, or tucked under the crust of a chicken pie.  Cardinals replied by concealing messages in the secret compartment of a silver salad bowl returned for washing, or in a hollowed-out wine cork.

Foreign ambassadors exerted tremendous pressure on the cardinals to select the candidate favored by their kings.  If a cardinal did not follow instructions from the king of France or Spain, the monarch would stop paying the cardinal’s lucrative pensions.  Many ambassadors brought bags of gold into the conclave, before it was sealed, to bribe the cardinals.

There were two signs that a pope had been elected – the bells of Saint Peter’s would ring out in jubilation, and carpenters would demolish the masonry that blocked the windows of the loggia overlooking Saint Peter’s Square.  The tradition of sending smoke out of the Sistine Chapel chimney after each scrutiny – black for an unsuccessful vote, and white for a successful one – was not instituted until 1903.  

Sometimes the carpenters tearing down the boards would yell out the name of the cardinal elected pope.  Crowds would race to the cardinal’s palazzo and pilfer it, even taking away the roof tiles, doors, rain gutters, windows, and mantelpieces.