Murder in the Garden of God
MURDER
IN THE
GARDEN OF GOD
A TRUE STORY OF RENAISSANCE AMBITION, BETRAYAL, AND REVENGE
BY ELEANOR HERMAN
Murder in the Garden of God
Copyright © Eleanor Herman
Cover designed by Crisy Meschieri.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced by any means, nor transmitted, nor translated into a machine language, without the written permission of the publishers.
Eleanor Herman has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Condition of Sale
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
This book is dedicated to all those
who tend God’s garden.
Other books by Eleanor Herman
Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery,
Power, Rivalry and Revenge
Sex with the Queen: 900 Years of Vile Kings,
Virile Lovers, and Passionate Politics
Mistress of the Vatican: The True Story of Olimpia
Maidalchini, The Secret Female Pope
King Peggy: An American Secretary, Her Royal Destiny, and
the Inspiring Story of How She Changed an African Village
Contents
Chapter 1
The Most Beautiful Girl in Rome
Chapter 7
Murder in the Garden of God
Chapter 17
No Respecter of Persons
Chapter 19
The Root of All Power
Chapter 22
The Little Book of Debts Owed
Chapter 23
The War of the Furniture
Chapter 26
An Illustrious Death
Chapter 28
The Greatest Pontificate
Introduction
I
will open my mouth in parables, I will utter
hidden things, things from of old.
–
Psalm 78:2
R
evenge, it is said, is a dish best served cold. Hot and steamy servings of the stuff come as no surprise, as the intended victim is fully prepared to fend them off with lips glued tightly together. But when the dish has cooled, and the victim unwittingly takes a bite, only then does he discover the poison within.
Pope Sixtus V (reigned 1585-1590) served perhaps the chilliest dish of revenge ever, cooked up with deceit, salted with calculation, and spiced with the overpowering belief in his own glorious destiny. Felice Peretti was an unimportant cardinal when the powerful Duke Paolo Giordano Orsini selfishly took away that which he cherished most in the world. Peretti seemingly bided his time in prayerful forgiveness – until he was elected pope. From that day forward, all his formidable power would be directed at punishing his transgressor and those noblemen like him who had ever harmed the poor, the powerless, and the innocent. Italy shuddered as hundreds of gaping heads adorned the streets of Rome, grisly testament of the pope’s retaliation.
At the center of the pope’s vendetta stood Vittoria Accoramboni, widely acknowledged as the most beautiful girl in Rome. She possessed loveliness so astonishing and a manner so ingratiating that they allowed her weaknesses to escape scrutiny. She was vain, selfish, and shallow, never satisfied with the blessings of today, but impatiently angling to receive new ones tomorrow. Given the hardships such behavior caused her, it seems that she ultimately may have realized the error of her ways. By then, of course, it was too late.
The story of Vittoria Accoramboni and her obese, powerful, lust-addled admirer, Duke Paolo Giordano Orsini, is strikingly reminiscent of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, whose passionate and bloody saga occurred only fifty years earlier. Both women were raven-haired sex kittens bent on trading their bodies for wealth and position, refusing to assuage their suitors’ desires until after the wedding. Both Henry and Paolo Giordano were apoplectic at not getting their way. Both boldly fought the Church and the pope to have their dubious marriages validated.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that the riveting story of Pope Sixtus and his family occurred when William Shakespeare was a young man, scanning foreign tales to find ideas for his plays. For the Sixtus story has elements of
Macbeth, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet,
and
Othello –
ambition, jealousy, and hatred that lead to murder, dead lovers, revenge, and a grand finale with cadavers piled high on the stage. The epilogue, which sums up a gratifying morality lesson, is loudly declaimed by the last man standing.
We think of the Renaissance as a civilizing influence on brutish medieval ways. Fueled by the invention of the printing press, literacy was on the upswing, in several languages ancient and modern. The first etiquette books informed readers they should no longer fart at the dinner table or blow their noses on the bread. Dark frowning castles became gracious light-filled palaces. The arts – sculpture, painting, and architecture – reached what many historians consider to be the pinnacle of Western civilization.
Sadly, this fashionable refinement did not sink deeply into men’s souls; it merely slathered a shiny veneer on top of the still-present medieval savagery. In examining this story, we will find a shocking dichotomy, a world where faith and sin, charity and murder, magnificence and filth flourished side by side, often within the psychological make-up of an individual. Noblemen might lay aside their weapons to study ancient Latin love poetry but at the slightest provocation picked them up again. Inside the most refined nobleman, clad in gorgeous bejeweled velvet, a pendulum oscillated wildly between the extremes of cultured generosity and primitive violence. Starting around 1500, such violence was increased by the use of guns.
In today’s world, it is usually the poorest person who pulls out a pistol and murders someone who accidentally stepped on his foot. A man who owns nothing is touchy about perceived disrespect. In the Renaissance, it was the wealthiest who murdered frequently and with little cause. One reason for this difference is clear – the law rarely punished a nobleman, whose blue blood was a source of awe and wonder. Such a distinguished individual was let off with an admonishment, or banished from the city for a time, or sentenced to open a soup kitchen. If a poor man committed a murder, he stood a greater chance of being executed.
Another reason for noble atrocities was the Renaissance ideal of honor, which was usually connected to murder. The sixteenth-century honor code demanded that a man rely on valorous deeds to keep himself and his family safe. Only cowards and women took their cases to court, where they had little hope of justice anyway. Many judges were corrupt, favoring the side that slipped them the most money under the table.
In the name of honor, straying noble wives were strangled with red silk ribbons by husbands fresh from the whorehouse; defenseless enemies were mercilessly cut down in nighttime ambushes or poisoned during daytime dining. Some three centuries after our story, murder and honor became opposites in Western nations, but here they are Siamese twins, inextricably bound together.
Astonishing contradictions existed at all levels of society. Having burglarized a home, the thief might stop off at the nearest church to give some of his booty as alms. Prostitutes kept a picture of the Virgin Mary next to their beds, and when the church bells rang, pushed their perplexed customers off them and knelt down to pray. Assassins often waited for their wounded victims to give their last confessions before administering the coup de grace, and then made the sign of the cross over the bloody body.
In such a world Cardinal Felice Peretti felt justified in using deceit as his weapon of choice, hiding his anger and thirst for revenge until the time was right to reveal them. Indeed, the most compelling character in this curious assembly of murderous noblemen and sensuous women is the pontiff himself. Raised as a dirt-poor peasant who loved green growing things, he saw himself as God’s gardener. At his accession to the papal throne, Rome was a long-neglected garden, untended, thirsty, overrun with creepers and thorns.
As pope, he brought water to a parched Rome by repairing the ancient aqueducts. He weeded out the noxious elements of society. He fertilized his garden – God knew there was a great deal of fertilizer in Rome. He hoed wide paths straight across the city, ridding Rome of its maze of narrow medieval alleys and creating today’s modern street system. He planted great trees of stone, ancient fallen obelisks which continue to serve as landmarks today, including the one in Saint Peter’s Square.
For over a thousand years, from the founding of the Papal States in the eighth century until the loss of them to a united Italy in 1870, popes found themselves in a nearly impossible situation requiring completely contradictory talents. A saintly pope devoted to the spiritual interests of the Church was usually not a general or executioner, nor even much of an administrator or statesman. Yet popes who rode into battle with armor and gladly executed enemies usually weren’t effective spiritual leaders. It seems hard to imagine the current pope donning army fatigues and body armor, slipping into a tank, and leading men with missile launchers into battle. The Church is much better off for it.
Sixtus V was one of those rare pontiffs who had everything the job required; he was a statesman, an administrator, a judge, a theologian, an orator, and a devoutly moral Catholic with no mistresses or bastards in tow. Considering his achievements and the brief duration of his reign, Sixtus V was one of the greatest popes ever. He saw himself as a terrifying avatar descended from the heavens to enforce justice so long denied, an avenging fury sent by God to punish criminals. At the root of his harshness was a deeply personal wound that would never heal, caused by Vittoria Accoramboni, the most beautiful girl in Rome.
Sources
F
ueled by Church scholarship and Europe’s oldest universities, sixteenth-century Italy boasted a surprisingly large number of extremely literate people. Those interested in writing a narrative about a particular subject or individual would use available archives – scouring documents that in some cases are now lost to us – and, when possible, speaking with elderly people who had witnessed events first-hand. Handwritten by a professional scribe, these anonymous
relationi,
as they were called, were often copied by the wealthy to enlarge their libraries.
Sometimes the writer leaves us fascinating clues about his research:
When I spoke to the pope’s butler,
for instance, or
Looking through the pope’s old letters…
Countless such manuscripts about Sixtus – his early years, the conclave in which he was elected, and the sudden brutal blow which changed his life forever – exist in Italian archives. Two relationi are located at the Shakespeare Folger Library in Washington, D.C, one attributed to Cardinal Orazio Maffei, who died in 1610. Many conclave
relationi
were clearly written by individuals in attendance; some are attributed to the cardinals themselves, and others to their servants.
In addition, the author purchased an invaluable four-hundred-year-old, six-hundred page
relatione
of Sixtus and Vittoria via the internet from a little Italian bookshop. The writer of this tome, sadly anonymous as well, provides the most detailed information on Pope Sixtus’s remarkable character and is referred to in this text as “the chronicler.”
The chronicler and many other
relatione
authors report that Felice Peretti feigned his illness to win the papal election; cardinals sometimes preferred to elect a sickly, kind old pope, one who would require their advice, rather than a vigorous, independent pope. Some twentieth-century historians have questioned the accuracy of these reports. Such a commanding, straightforward individual as Sixtus, they claim, would never have bamboozled his fellow cardinals regarding his health, coughing and leaning on a stick for several years before the conclave. Yet modern historians cannot deny that he lied when he repeatedly and publicly forgave the murderers who caused him pain, and then pounced on them as soon as he ascended to the papacy. Deceit, it seems, was a tool he used to accomplish his goals, as it was with most Renaissance princes.
There are two interesting English translations of books on the life of this extraordinary pontiff. In 1669 Gregorio Leti used various
relationi
to create his Italian
History of Sixtus V,
which was translated into English in 1704. Though Leti was vociferously anti-Catholic, and generations of Church historians have been horrified by his somewhat undignified anecdotes, I found the biography surprisingly positive. Clearly Leti admired the pope’s tough stance on crime. In 1870, Baron Joseph Huebner, former Austrian ambassador to Rome, used diplomatic archives across Europe to write his French
Life and Times of Sixtus the Fifth,
which was translated into English in 1872.
Pope Sixtus is better known in Italy than any other country. The biographies by Italo de Feo (1987) and Fabrizio Sarazani (1979) have been helpful. Most useful of all was Domenico Gnoli’s 1872
Vittoria Accoramboni, Storia del Secolo XVI,
priceless in its thorough documentation of original archival sources. Cardinal Giulio Antonio Santorio, who was created cardinal along with Felice Peretti in 1570, wrote his autobiography in about 1600, where he mentioned Vittoria several times.
In addition to possessing numerous
relationi
describing Sixtus, Duke Paolo Giordano Orsini, and the duke’s violent cousin Lodovico Orsini, the Correr Museum Library in Venice has Lodovico’s touching last letter to his wife, as well as his secretary Francesco Filelfo’s “Defense” of his actions in the great final conflict. It must be noted that in these contemporary documents, Italians took liberties in the spelling of family names. Accoramboni seems to have stumped many of them, who morphed it into Coramboni or the feminine Corambona. Similarly, Orsini is sometimes spelled as Orsino.
Diplomatic dispatches provide another rich source for our story. Foreign ambassadors living in Rome wrote in-depth weekly reports to their home governments, mixing scurrilous street gossip in with the pope’s official theological decrees. Usually the Venetian diplomats were most successful in worming their way into a pontiff’s confidence and enjoyed private heart-to-heart conversations over wine-soaked meals. Every detail would, of course, be reported immediately to the Venetian Senate. Such diplomatic records still exist in national archives across Europe.
Early newssheets known as
avvisi
were just becoming popular.
Avvisi –
which meant “notices” – were hand-written documents of two to eight pages, consisting of small paragraphs in chronological order with no headlines. An
avvisi
writer sold subscriptions to foreign courts, banking houses, and wealthy individuals. In 1580s Rome, countless
avvisi
reported on crime, politics, and the riveting story of Vittoria Accoramboni. Roman
avvisi
often had to be smuggled out of town, as local authorities took a dim view of spreading gossip abroad about Church corruption or bad government. Venice, however, operated presses more freely than Rome, and there printed newssheets could be bought on the street for a Venetian penny – a gazette – and soon became known as gazettes themselves.
Two travel diaries have provided us with tantalizing glimpses of late Renaissance Rome, Venice, and Padua as seen by outsiders, such as we ourselves are. A visitor’s description of a city is much more useful to historians than that of a native; the stranger describes in detail sights and customs that the resident might take for granted and fail to mention. From 1580-1581 Michel de Montaigne, a French nobleman, traveled throughout Italy seeking a cure for his appalling kidney stones at the salutary baths. He recorded minutely the filth of the inns, the monuments of the cities, and even the beauty – or lack thereof – of the prostitutes.
In 1608, an Englishman named Thomas Coryat walked to Venice and back with the express purpose of writing the first tourism book. He is credited with introducing the fork to England and the Italian word
umbrella
into the English language. At the time, the idea of travel for sightseeing alone was laughable, given the paramount discomforts. Coryat’s book was so successful that it launched the Grand Tour of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, a kind of traveling finishing school whereby young British gentlemen perfected their education by visiting the continent, especially Italy. In 1611, Coryat took on a more ambitious project – this time walking to India. But the eccentric traveler suffered an explosive bout of diarrhea on his way back and died a parched husk in the Indian province of Surat. Perhaps due to his unfortunate end, this time young Englishmen failed to follow.
Using all available sources, and having visited the places associated with this story – Rome, Bracciano, Loreto, Venice, Padua, and Salò – I have attempted to recreate the astonishing world of late-sixteenth-century Italy, a world of breathtaking magnificence, shocking brutality, and a pope’s most fitting revenge.