Murder in the Garden of God (15 page)

Vittoria did not like being stuck in Gubbio. On January 3, 1583, she wrote the pope:

Most Holy Father,

Your Holiness, having found me worthy in leaving Rome to kiss your most holy feet, I now dare, assured in the great goodness and kindness of Your Beatitude, to come to you to remind you how you granted me mercy. I petitioned you not to force me to stay in Gubbio, and your Holiness replied that I should obey. Since then I have arrived and rendered obedience. Now my honor and reputation are weighed down by being condemned like a criminal. I race to the holy feet, imploring you for the mercy of Jesus Christ to grant me the favor that it be cancelled because I desire nothing more than honor, assuring you that having received this boon, I will obey or pay with my life. Receiving this from your most holy and benign nature, I will pray for the long and most happy life of Your Beatitude.

Your most humble and devoted Servant

Vittoria Accoramboni
¹²

On January 23, the pope sent word to Vittoria that she was permitted to leave Gubbio. However, he expressly stated that the May 5, 1581, decree remained in effect, which prohibited Vittoria from marrying anyone without express papal permission, and if she did marry, the marriage would be null and void.

Vittoria was not satisfied with this. The one decree still in effect was precisely the one she wanted revoked. Vittoria must have had reason to believe that another wedding with the duke was in the offing, and it was urgent to obtain a document of some sort that seemed to revoke the decree prohibiting their marriage.

She wrote to Monsignor Lodovico Bianchetti, the pope’s master of the chamber, that such a decree hanging over her head stained her honor and reputation and disturbed the tranquility of her soul. She swore that she would never marry “you know who.”
¹³

The monsignor took her request to the pope, and on February 11, 1583, Gregory revoked the earlier decree, with one stipulation: “His Holiness has given permission to Signora Vittoria Accoramboni to contract marriage with whomsoever she wants, except with that person whom his Holiness has forbidden.”
¹⁴

Monsignor Bianchetti was delighted that he had obtained the favor for Vittoria and on February 12, he wrote gleefully:

Most Illustrious and Respected Sister,

… God has conceded this favor. I went to Our Lord [the pope], explaining to him as best I could that I know the desire of your ladyship, which would not move you to do anything if not for the tranquility of soul and honor and reputation, assuring him that you promised never to marry you know who, and that you had written me this and given me your word. He was content at hearing this and on Thursday ordered Monsignor Pirro Taro to revoke the decree so that nothing would be left against you. I rejoice with you with all my heart…

From your most illustrious ladyship’s most devoted servant, Lodovico Bianchetti
¹⁵

That day, February 19, Vittoria received another letter, this one from Monsignor Pirro Taro, the vice regent.

Illustrious lady, honored as a sister,

This is to advise you that Our Lord is content to annul all the decrees and warnings that he has made up until now… With regards to the future, it is up to your ladyship to observe inviolably that which his Holiness has written. I am certain that now that he has shown himself favorable, you can hope for much more in the future if you follow the same path, and you can rely on me.

Rome, February 12, 1583.

Your most illustrious ladyship’s affectionate servant, Pirro Taro
¹⁶

Although the pope had revoked the decrees with the express stipulation that she not marry Paolo Giordano, Vittoria now had in her hands an official letter from one of the pope’s top officials declaring that
all
decrees had been revoked. And Monsignor Bianchetti’s letter did not forbid her from marrying Paolo Giordano Orsini, only “you know who.” Legally, such a vague term had no meaning. These were exactly the documents she wanted. Two days later, Vittoria replied to Monsignor Taro in general terms, which if read carefully could indicate that she was stretching the favor she had received to indicate that she was permitted to marry the duke.

Illustrious and Reverend Monsignor, honored as a brother,

I thank your Lordship with a lively heart for the news given me of the signal favor that his Holiness has deigned to do for me in annulling all the decrees and putting me at liberty, recognizing it comes only from his Holiness’s great goodness. For my part, I will not lack to make known the results, which have been and always will be the firm desire to obey his Holiness as I have done until now, not being able in any other way to show the true devotion that I bear for his Holiness, with infinite obligation, and I will pray daily for his long and happy life. I also remain obliged to your lordship for your kindness and pray you to command me and keep me in your good graces, and I kiss your hands. From Gubbio, February 21, 1583.

From one who is obliged to your most Reverend Lordship as a sister,

Vittoria Accoramboni
¹⁷

Chapter 10

Disobedience

“This is what God says: ‘Why do you disobey the Lord’s commands?

You will not prosper. Because you have forsaken the Lord,
he has forsaken you.”

–
2 Chronicles 24:20

V
ittoria had ardently pushed for papal permission to return to Rome. Oddly, after she obtained it, she lingered in Gubbio. For Paolo Giordano had let her know he would be traveling to Venice and would swing by Gubbio to pick her up on the way. If he married her in the republic instead of in the Papal States, the pope would have less authority over the legitimacy of the marriage. The independent Venetians enjoyed ignoring edicts from Rome. Some of them got lost, and the pope had to resend them. Others were held up in lengthy senatorial debates that went on for years. The very characteristics that had so irked Felice Montalto as inquisitor could now help Vittoria be recognized as the duchess of Bracciano.

An
avvisi
of March 30, 1583, reported that the duke was planning to visit the city of canals “to enjoy his liberty in that city, and maybe to do with Signora Accorambona in that country what he was not permitted to do here.”
¹

But just as his baggage was packed and loaded, the duke learned he had to stay in Rome to attend to a major legal mess. Unbeknownst to him, all Orsini property had been entangled by a recently discovered decree made in 1477 by Napoleone Orsini, which was “as narrow,” according to the
avvisi,
“as his Excellency’s waist is large, by which all the sales that he had made up until now, which are many, are rendered invalid.”
²
And Paolo Giordano, always hemorrhaging money, had sold a great deal of land.

The decree stated that to prevent the loss of Orsini lands, any properties sold starting in 1477 by Orsinis who were now deceased must be returned by the purchasers to the Orsini family without any compensation. Any sales made by the current duke would have to be revoked, with the duke returning the purchase price. Several cardinals who had bought property from Paolo Giordano’s father were threatened with financial ruin by the decree and resolved to fight it in court. And Paolo Giordano certainly didn’t have the money to buy back properties he had sold in recent years to pay his exorbitant debts. Reluctantly, the duke unpacked his bags and remained in Rome consulting his legal advisors.

Pope Gregory’s weakness with regards to the bandits sunk to a new low on March 30 when he permitted the most vicious criminal in Italy, Alfonso Piccolomini, the duke of Montemarciano, to enter Rome accompanied by thirty noble cavaliers, ten of them exiled from Rome for murder. The cortege rode into the courtyard of Cardinal de Medici’s palace where Piccolomini was welcomed as if he were royalty.

Piccolomini had come to Rome requesting the pope’s spiritual and legal absolution for his many murders. Fearing the bandit king would murder his son if he didn’t comply, the pope agreed. When asked how many murders he had committed, Piccolomini blithely replied three hundred and seventy. The pope duly filled in the number and sent back the dispensation.

In May, Piccolomini and his men rode to Bracciano as guests of the duke. The pope, fearing he might join with Paolo Giordano’s men and attack Rome, agreed to give Piccolomini back his confiscated lands on the condition that he not return to the Papal States. The bandit duly left the country, settling into a Florentine palace as a guest of the grand duke.

But even as Piccolomini’s brutality was being neutralized, violence erupted in Rome from another bold and reckless young man. One of Paolo Giordano’s most faithful adherents was a young cousin named Lodovico Orsini, who had been born about 1560. The
avvisi
described Lodovico as “a man of amiable and gracious nature.”
³
Known for jealously guarding what he called his honor, he had recently returned from the battlefields of Portugal, which he had helped conquer for Spain.

In April 1583, the bailiff of Rome breeched the immunity of the Orsini palace known as Monte Giordano, located near Castel Sant’Angelo. While the Orsinis and their servants were taking part in a religious procession, the guards arrested two wanted criminals living there. Upon his return, Lodovico roused the other men to find and punish the bailiff and his guards. Racing through the streets of Rome, they found them in a piazza, and a free-for-all took place. Shots rang out, swords were drawn, and the cries of the dying and wounded resounded in the square. Three noble thugs, including Lodovico’s half-brother, seventeen-year-old Raimondo Orsini, died.

It so happened that an old man and his beloved servant were walking home on a nearby street when they heard the fracas. A stray bullet wounded the servant, and the old man had to drag him to the house of a church canon and bang on the door, begging for help. There they stayed the night, too afraid of continuing street violence to send for a doctor. The servant died the next day. The old man was Cardinal Montalto, who once again had been caught up in the violence of the lawless young men of Rome. He had to send word to the Sacred College requesting troops to guard him on his way home.

Goaded by Lodovico Orsini, the families of the dead noblemen swore vengeance and led hundreds of their followers rioting through the streets. For four days, shops and government offices were closed, and only the foolish went outside the safety of their homes. When asked what should be done to quell the violence, the pope replied that the grand fury must be allowed to burn itself out. Then, fearing for his own safety and that of his son, he complied with the families’ requests to hunt down and execute the bailiff and his guards, though they had just been following his own orders. Five of the guards found hiding in the Vatican were murdered on the spot.

The pope’s weakness in the face of violence encouraged further crimes. The Venetian ambassador wrote, “This incident will serve as an impediment for a long time to the future execution of justice.”
⁴
The new bailiff, seeing his predecessor’s head on a pike, refused to arrest anyone protected by a nobleman. On June 25, the Mantuan ambassador reported that there was so much violence outside Rome that no one dared venture past the city gates. Crime was rampant even inside the city. Bandits took to breaking into stables and wounding helpless animals, threatening to return and kill them unless the owners sent them protection money.

There was very little grain in the city. The bandits had burned large sections of farmland, and floods had ruined others. Those crops that had been salvaged could not reach Rome because of muddy roads and lurking bandits. The pope’s family bought what grain there was, and sold it outside the city at double the price.

Bread was no longer sold in the piazzas but grass mixed with parsley at ridiculously high prices. The hungry banged on the doors of the wealthy who turned them away as they barely had enough grain to feed their large numbers of servants. Famished citizens rioted outside bakeries. Some starving people broke into homes and stole food or furniture and clothing that they sold on the street to buy bread. In broad daylight, pedestrians were mugged, and coaches were held up by the desperate.

As one
avvisi
put it, “In short, the three things without which it is impossible for humankind to live tolerably are in short supply at this time – justice, peace, and food.”
⁵

Of all the cardinals, Montalto gave the greatest help to the people. When he ran out of money he borrowed it to feed them, and the cry went up that the most saintly man in Rome was Cardinal Montalto. “He acquired great fame as a good man,” the chronicler reported, “so that the poor gushed over him as the true father of the country in giving alms to his children. Others said, ‘Cardinal Montalto himself lives on alms, and gives alms to others, and the cardinals who manage the goods of the Church merely point the way to the hospital.”
⁶

Though the pope was useless in dealing with the famine, he thought this might be the time to show his people he was, at least, tough on crime. His bailiffs had recently arrested some thirty murderers, and his advisor, the nobleman Vincenzo Vitelli, pushed the pope to execute them rather than letting them off scot-free with a promise to mend their ways. Some of these men were in the service of Paolo Giordano and Lodovico Orsini, who both begged for their release and promised to be responsible for their actions. Fed up with street violence, on August 27 the pope executed three of Lodovico’s grooms along with Paolo Giordano’s favorite servant. Then Vitelli proposed that the violent Lodovico Orsini himself be arrested for disturbing the peace.

The evening of September 4, 1583, Vitelli was returning home from having dinner with the pope’s son when his coach was surrounded by men who fired guns at him. One horse fell dead, three servants were wounded, and Vitelli was shot in the thigh. He stumbled out of his coach, sword in hand, but was cut down by an assassin with a sword. The attackers tried to cut off Vitelli’s head, but his servants fended them off. Vitelli was carried home alive, but died from his grievous wounds two days later, and Lodovico escaped from Rome.

When Vitelli’s widow – the mother of thirteen children – and his wealthy family pushed the pope for justice, he confiscated Lodovico’s properties and sent guards to despoil Lodovico’s palace of Monte Giordano. But all his expensive furnishings had been cleared out.

Though Paolo Giordano had been at Bracciano when Vitelli was killed, no one doubted that he had ordered the assassination. After all, his favorite servant had been hanged at Vitelli’s instigation; his honorable name had been besmirched; his power doubted, and his cousin Lodovico threatened with arrest.

Three days after the murder, the duke announced his intention to leave Rome immediately on a pilgrimage to the holy house of Loreto. Given the uproar over Vitelli’s death, he asked the pope for assurance that he would not seize Bracciano during his absence. As a sign of good will, he sent the pope some wanted murderers and ordered others out of the Papal States. Not only did the pope agree to Paolo Giordano’s request, but he gave him a paid commission to look into the fortifications of Ancona, seventeen miles from Loreto, to determine whether they were up to withstanding a Turkish siege.

From Loreto, the duke sent word to Vittoria, who had been vegetating in Gubbio for ten months, to pack up her household and ride the twenty-five miles to the town of Trevi. There she would be staying at the home of his friend, Cavalier Lelio Valenti. Finally, after twenty-one months of vicissitudes, the two lovers were reunited. The papal decrees, her imprisonment, and the enforced separation had only served to increase their devotion to each other.

Vittoria remained at Trevi while her lover fulfilled his mission to Ancona. Paolo Giordano was supposed to visit his children and his illustrious in-laws in Florence on the way back, but with Vittoria by his side, he ignored the de Medicis and took her directly to Bracciano. There he left her in the care of her brother, Marcello, while he went to give the pope his report on the fortifications.

During the duke’s absence, Vittoria had a chance to explore the castle that his first wife had scorned as a drafty pile of rocks. The structure was much like Paolo Giordano himself – brooding, dominating, enormous, and violent. It was a sacred site for the Orsinis, the manifestation of their power, the symbol in stone of domination. The high crenellated walls were interspersed with five turrets bristling with anger. Built in the 1470s, it was the last hoorah of the medieval fortress which would soon develop into the Renaissance palace designed not for defense but for pleasure.

Inside the roughly triangular castle courtyard was a monumental staircase leading up to the
piano nobile.
One side had two stories of loggias, low arches resting on solid columns. The kitchen was enormous, suitable for creating royal banquets, with a hearth the size of a small room. The noble apartments had thirty-foot ceilings, coffered and painted, and floors of orange glazed tiles. The labyrinth beneath the stronghold was strewn with human bones – victims, it was said, of Orsini wrath.

In 1559, Paolo Giordano had commissioned lavish frescoes on the ceilings and walls of a suite of rooms for his new bride which took months to complete. Early in her marriage, Isabella had spent one horrifying winter at Bracciano and never returned. She cooked up every excuse possible to avoid going there. She had to stay in Florence due to bad feet, a dysfunctional liver, a possible pregnancy that never materialized, a troubled head, intermittent fever, the pregnancy of her sister-in-law, and her father’s ill health.

Vittoria, on the other hand, almost swooned with delight at the palatial rooms with magnificent furniture and attentive servants. The castle was situated on a circular lake formed by a volcanic crater. Teeming with pike, perch, eel, and whitefish, the lake was a sparkling, silvery-sapphire mirror, its shores dotted by three equidistant, sand-colored villages. The surrounding emerald, gently rolling hills were full of wildlife – boar, fox, pheasant, quail, and partridge. Standing on the windswept battlements of the castle, Vittoria’s gaze took in the richness of the land. She would be duchess of all this. She had come a long way from living with Camilla and the chickens in Rome.
It had been worth it.

While Vittoria explored her castle, the duke called on the pope. There was general surprise that Gregory received the duke with such demonstrations of affection, according to an
avvisi
of October 8, “so that the world believed that his Holiness had stopped the disfavor that he had shown against this signor, having humiliated himself and shown himself obedient to the orders of his Holiness, especially in the matter of the bandits, and that the pope does not hold anything against his Excellency for having participated in the murder of Vitelli, as people said.”
⁷

The pope’s warm welcome of the duke gave rise to rumors that he had finally agreed to let him marry Vittoria. Some ambassadors believed the marriage had already taken place during his trip to Ancona. Others thought he would marry her quietly in Rome. Word leaked out that Paolo Giordano had been conferring with theologians about the legality of marrying Vittoria again. He had showed them Monsignor Pirro Taro’s letter to Vittoria stating that all decrees had been removed. Fortunately for the duke, Taro had died and was, therefore, in no position to rebut the strange interpretation of his letter. The theologians responded not only that Paolo Giordano
could
marry her, but marry her he
must
for the health of his soul.