THE SUCCESSORS OF URBAN VIII
[1632-1660 A.D.]
Urban VIII was succeeded in 1644 by Innocent X, who revived with more success the pretensions of the holy see to the fiefs of Castro and Ronciglione. The unliquidated debts of the house of Farnese were still the pretext for the seizure of these possessions; but the papal officers were expelled from Castro, and the bishop, whom Innocent had installed in that see, was murdered by order of the minister of Ranuccio II, duke of Parma. The pope was so highly exasperated by these acts, that he directed his whole force against Castro; the Parmesan troops were repulsed in an attempt to succour the place; and when famine had compelled it to surrender, the pope, confounding the innocent inhabitants with the perpetrators of the assassination, caused the city to be razed to its foundations, and a pyramid to be erected on the ruins commemorative of his vengeance. The restitution of these fiefs to the house of Parma was made a condition of the peace of the Pyrenees; but Alexander VII, who succeeded Innocent X in 1656, contrived after many negotiations to obtain permission to hold them in pledge, until Ranuccio II should discharge the debts of his crown. By the failure of the duke to satisfy this engagement, the disputed states remained finally annexed to the popedom.
The pontificate of Alexander VII proved, however, an epoch of grievous humiliation for the pride of the holy see. In 1660, an affray was occasioned at Rome through the privileges, arrogantly claimed by the French ambassadors, of protecting all the quarter of the city near their residence from the usual operations of justice; and Louis XIV determined, in the insolence of his power, to support a pretension which would be intolerable to the meanest court in Europe. He sent the duke of Créqui as his ambassador to Rome, with a numerous and well-armed retinue, to brave the pope in his own capital. Créqui took formal military possession of a certain number of streets near the palace of his embassy, according to the extent over which the right of asylum had been permitted by usage to his predecessors. He placed guards throughout this circuit, as if it had been one of his master’s fortresses; and the papal government, anxious to avoid a rupture with the haughty monarch of France, overlooked the usurpation. But every effort to preserve peace was ineffectual against the resolution which had been taken on the opposite side to provoke some open quarrel. The duke of Créqui’s people made it their occupation to outrage the police of Rome, and to insult the Corsican guard of the pope. Still, even these excesses of the French were tolerated by Alexander, until they rose to such a height that the peaceful citizens dared no longer to pass through the streets by night. At length the Corsican guards were goaded into a fray with the followers of the embassy, which brought matters to the crisis desired by Louis. While the Corsicans were violently irritated by the death of one of their comrades in the broil, they happened to meet the carriage of the duchess of Créqui; they fired upon and killed two of her attendants, and the duke immediately quitted Rome, as if his master had received in his person an unprovoked and mortal affront.
Costume worn by the Member of the Brotherhood who accompanied the condemned to the scaffold, Venice
[1660-1664 A.D.]
Alexander VII soon found that Louis XIV was resolved to avail himself of the most serious colouring which could be given to this affair. The king expelled the pope’s nuncio from France; he seized upon Avignon and its papal dependencies; and he assembled an army in Provence, which crossed the Alps to take satisfaction in Rome itself. The pope at first showed an inclination to assert the common rights of every crown with becoming spirit; and he endeavoured to engage several Catholic princes to protect the dignity of the holy see. But none of the great powers were in a condition at that juncture to undertake his defence. His own temporal strength was quite unequal to a struggle with France; the spiritual arms of the Vatican had now fallen into contempt; and he had the bitter mortification of being obliged to submit to the terms of accommodation which Louis XIV imperiously dictated. The principal of these were the banishment of all the persons who had taken a part in the insult offered to the train of the French ambassador; the suppression of the Corsican guard; the erection of a column, even in Rome, with a legend to proclaim the injury and its reparation: and, finally, the mission of one of the pope’s own family to Paris to make his apologies. All these humiliating conditions were subscribed to, and rigorously enforced. Cardinal Chigi, the nephew of Alexander VII, was the first ecclesiastic despatched to any monarch, to demand pardon for the holy see.
[1600-1700 A.D.]
Alexander VII did not survive this memorable epoch of degradation for the papacy above three years. He was succeeded in 1667 by Clement IX, who wore the triple crown over two years, and was replaced in 1670 by Clement X. The unimportant reign of this pope occupied seven years, and closed in 1676. The pontificate of his successor, Innocent XI, was more remarkable for the renewal of the quarrel respecting the privileges of the French embassy. To terminate the flagrant abuses which these privileges engendered, Innocent published a decree that no foreign minister should thenceforth be accredited at the papal court, until he had expressly renounced every pretension of the kind. This reasonable provision was admitted without opposition by all the Catholic monarchs, except Louis XIV: but he alone refused to recognise its justice; and on the death of the duke d’Estrées, his ambassador at Rome, he sent the marquis de Lavardin to succeed him, and to enforce the maintenance of the old privileges. For this purpose, Lavardin was attended by a body of eight hundred armed men; and the sovereignty of the pope was again insolently braved in his own capital. The guards of Lavardin violently excluded the papal police from all access to the quarter of the city which they occupied; and Innocent at length excommunicated the ambassador. This proceeding would at Paris have excited only ridicule; but in Rome the outraged pride of the court, and the prejudices which still enveloped the ancient throne of papal supremacy and superstition, excluded Lavardin from the pale of society; and he found the solitude in which he was left so irksome that he at last petitioned to be recalled.
The pontificate of Innocent XI terminated in 1689; and it was not until three years after his death that Louis XIV was at length persuaded to desist from the assertion of a pretended right, which could have no other object than to gratify his pride at the expense of multiplying crime and anarchy, in the chosen seat of the religion which he professed. This was the last event in the papal annals of the seventeenth century which deserves to be recorded. We have already found the reigns of several of the popes entirely barren of circumstance; and after that of Innocent XI, we should be altogether at a loss how to bestow a single comment upon the obscure pontificates of his next three successors: of Alexander VIII, who died in 1691; of Innocent XII; and of Clement XI, who was placed in the chair of St. Peter in the last year of the century.
The two contests with the popedom, which the house of Farnese maintained for the possession of the fiefs of Castro and Ronciglione, were almost the only remarkable circumstances in the annals of the duchy of Parma during this century. Ranuccio I, the son of the hero Alessandro Farnese, who wore the ducal crown at its commencement, resembled his father in no quality but mere courage. His long reign was distinguished only for its habitual tyranny and avarice; and for the wanton cruelty with which he caused a great number of his nobility and other subjects to be put to death in 1612, that he might confiscate their property under the charge of a conspiracy, which appears to have had no real existence. He was succeeded in 1622 by his son, Odoard, whose misplaced confidence in his military talents plunged his subjects into many calamities. Vainly imagining that the martial virtues of his grandfather Alessandro were hereditary in his person, he eagerly sought occasion of entering on a career of activity and distinction in the field, for which his egotistical presumption and his excessive corpulence equally disqualified him. By engaging, in 1635, in the war between France and Spain in northern Italy, as the ally of the former power, he exposed his states to cruel ravages; and though, in the subsequent war of the Barberini he was indebted to the misconduct of the papal army for the preservation of his fiefs, that contest did not terminate until he had consumed the resources of his duchy by his prodigality and ignorance.
The death of Odoard, in 1646, relieved his subjects from the apprehension of a continuance of similar evils from his restless temper; and the mild and indolent character of his son Ranuccio II seemed to promise an era of greater tranquillity. But Ranuccio was always governed by unworthy favourites, who oppressed his people; and it was one of these ministers, whose violence, as we have seen, provoked the destruction of Castro, and entailed the loss of its dependencies on the duchy of Parma. The long and feeble reign of Ranuccio II, thus marked only by disgrace, was a fitting prelude to the extinction of the sovereignty and existence of the house of Farnese. Buried in slothful indulgence and lethargy, the members of the ducal family were oppressed with hereditary obesity, which shortened their lives. Ranuccio II himself survived to the year 1694; but he might already anticipate the approaching failure of the male line of his dynasty. Odoard, the eldest of his sons, had died before him of suffocation, the consequence of corpulence; the two others, Don Francesco and Don Vincente, who were destined successively to ascend the throne after him, resembled their brother in their diseased constitutions; and the probability that these princes would die without issue rendered their niece, Elizabeth (Elisabetta) Farnese, daughter of Odoard, sole presumptive heiress of the states of her family.