Mistress of the Vatican Read Online Free Page A

wide, high forehead, sparkling dark eyes under black, arched brows, and a beautiful, perfectly straight nose. Her cheekbones were wide, her lips thin, her jaw square, and her chin, though not overly large, prominent. It was a face of ambitious angles and resolute determination. It was a face that was intriguing on a slender blooming girl but that would become ferocious on a plump, hard-bitten older woman.
    Olimpia grew up in a jewellike medieval town whose heyday had passed some three hundred years earlier. Viterbo sat snugly inside massive eleventh-century walls studded with turrets, towers, and gates. It was a town of thick strong stone the color of pearl gray and soft sand. Narrow streets wound between sturdy medieval houses and opened up onto charming piazzas with sparkling fountains. Adorning fountains, buildings, pillars, and palaces were stone lions—the heraldic symbol of Viterbo and the emblem of strength.
    Rich volcanic soil and healing sulfuric baths had first drawn the Etruscans to the site, and then the Romans. In the eleventh century, Viterbo became a papal city, which the popes visited to escape Rome’s malarial summers and perennial violence. The thirteenth century was a time of splendor, when new churches, towers, and palaces rose from the ancient citadel.
    Viterbo’s climactic moment in history came in 1268 after the death of Pope Clement IV in Viterbo’s papal palace. Eighteen cardinals met to elect his successor but couldn’t make up their minds. When the voting extended into 1269, and then 1270, Viterbans became frustrated at the lack of law and order in the popeless Papal States, and decided to make the electors’ lives as uncomfortable as possible to hasten a result. Instead of allowing the dithering cardinals to return to their sumptuous palaces
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    Eleanor Herman
    every night, they locked them in the building cum clave, the Latin for “with a key” and the origin of the term conclave.
    When that didn’t work, one cardinal jokingly remarked that the palace roof should be removed to give greater access to the Holy Spirit, who was believed to direct cardinals to elect the right man. Taking him at his word, the exasperated Viterban authorities removed the palace roof, exposing the cardinals to the wind, rain, and sun. They lowered down baskets of bread and water, all the food the sluggard cardinals could expect. The cardinals responded by threatening the entire city with excommunication, but this left the Viterbans unfazed. Finally, after two years and nine months, the longest election in church history, on September 1, 1271, the cardinals elected not one of themselves but a deacon named Teobaldo Visconti of Piacenza, who took the name Gregory X.
    Some thirty years after the election, the popes became fed up with Rome, where noble families fought one another in daily street battles and sometimes held the pontiff himself hostage. The papal court moved to the peace and quiet of Avignon, in southern France, and the importance of Viterbo dwindled. When the popes returned to Rome for good in the fifteenth century, they had for the most part forgotten their once beloved haven, returning now and then only to soak in the salutary baths. By the time of Olimpia’s birth, the town had no great political or church importance, though it was the seat of a bishopric.
    Viterbo’s bustling prosperity was due to its location; it was the last town of any size for visitors traveling to Rome from the north. Here countless pilgrims and diplomats ate, shopped for supplies, shod their horses, and rested before the last march to the holy city.
    Pilgrims also prayed at the shrine of Saint Rosa. In 1250 fifteen-year-old Rosa led an uprising of Viterbans against their conqueror, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, who had invaded Italy to seize territory from his enemy, the pope. Two years later Rosa died in a cell in her father’s house, worn out by penance and bodily mortification, and, it was said, performed many