By noon the statue no longer existed. The pope had been dead for barely an hour. The crowd that came through the gate of the Roman College, the Jesuit school where Maffeo Barberini had learned his Latin sixty years before, pulled down the full-length figure of their most illustrious pupil and broke it into pieces. It was only plaster over a frame, which made the work easier.

The fragments went into the street, and then the crowd moved up the Capitoline Hill, where a marble statue of Urban by Bernini stood in the great hall of the Palazzo dei Conservatori, and tried to do the same to that. The marble was harder, and the building had guards, and there was fighting on the steps. The Bernini survived, and it is still there today, but for a few hours in the summer of 1644, Rome had made its verdict plain: a man who had been dead since morning was already, in the city’s eyes, nothing. The man who had once been Maffeo Barberini, Pope Urban VIII, had died that morning, the 29th of July 1644, in the Quirinal Palace, at seventy-six years old, twenty-one years almost to the week after the fever-ridden conclave that had made him pope.

He had ruled the church and a good part of central Italy for two decades, and by the time he was gone, the Romans hated him so thoroughly that his statue was in pieces before his body was cold. The bronze of the Pantheon was the least of what they held against him. The city’s bookmakers had been taking bets on the date of his death for weeks, an activity that had been technically illegal for fifty years and happened every time a pope fell ill. This time the odds were short.

He had been ill through the winter, his gout spreading from his feet into his hands until he could not hold a pen, and the physicians had bled him repeatedly, taking pints out of a man already weakened by age and sickness. The diplomats’ dispatches from that spring and summer were almost entirely about his body—the fever that came and went, the bleeding, the relapses, the rallies—as if they were reporting the movements of an army. In the streets, the pasquinades had been coming thick. One line had the Barberini bees, the family emblem that had been stamped on fountains, churches, and altars across Rome, having sucked the honey out of the city and left the hive empty.

Somebody put a notice on Pasquino, the talking statue where Romans had been leaving anonymous insults for a hundred years, to the effect that the pope had gone to be with the dead astrologer Morandi. Even by the standards of a talking statue, that was dark. Inside the palace, the old custom ran its course. When a pope died, his household stripped his rooms—the furniture, the plate, the hangings, the linen, anything that was not nailed down, and a good deal that was—carried off by the servants and officials as their traditional due, so that by nightfall the apartments where Urban had died were bare walls.

It had happened to every pope for centuries, and it happened to him. The nephews had already removed what they wanted. His body was embalmed, dressed in the papal vestments, and taken to St. Peter’s to lie in state with the feet exposed so that the faithful could kiss them.

The dispatches said the crowds were smaller than usual, and the guards had to be doubled. Nobody needed to explain why. Nine days of requiems followed, sung over him in St. Peter’s by cardinals who were already counting votes.

When they were over, the body was put into a temporary tomb in the crypt to wait for Bernini to finish the real one. It waited three years. The nephews attended every one of the nine days, and Rome watched them attend, and the ambassadors noted where they stood in the processions, since where the Barberini were allowed to stand in the weeks after the death would tell everyone what the family could expect to keep. They stood for now where they had always stood.

It did not last the autumn. The cardinals went into conclave in August, in the heat, in the same rooms, and the fever came back in with them. It was 1623 all over again, and everybody knew it. The conclave of 1644 ran from the 9th of August to the 15th of September—five weeks in a Roman summer—and cardinals fell ill in the same beds their predecessors had died in twenty-one years before.

Cardinal Antonio Barberini ran the family faction and tried to get a Barberini creature elected, a cardinal named Sacchetti, and the Spanish, who had waited two decades for this, vetoed him. Francesco Barberini tried to hold the family’s votes together and could not. On the 15th of September, the conclave gave the tiara to Giovanni Battista Pamphili, who took the name Innocent X, a severe, suspicious man who had disliked the Barberini for years and now had the means to do something about it. The Barberini had backed the wrong horse, and everybody had watched them do it.

Cardinal Antonio went into the conclave as if the family still ran Rome and came out having learned that it did not. Innocent was seventy, and he had waited a long time. He began with an audit. Where had the money for the War of Castro gone?

Twelve million scudi had been raised in taxes, and the Papal Treasury was empty. Innocent wanted to know, in detail, how much of it had passed through Barberini hands on the way to the army. The nephews were called to answer. They stalled.

The audit went on, and its findings, so far as they were ever published, were what everybody had assumed: the Barberini had been skimming the war they had started. A good part of the twelve million had never reached a soldier at all, and had gone instead into salaries and commissions and the purchase of offices for Barberini clients, while the army in the Ferrara marshes went unpaid. Innocent sealed the Palazzo Barberini. He put guards on the library.

He stopped the pensions. Cardinal Antonio was the first to go. In September 1645, with an arrest warrant in the air, he slipped out of Rome disguised, rode for the coast, and took a ship to France, where Cardinal Mazarin, who had once been a Barberini client himself, took him in. Francesco and Taddeo went in January 1646, with Taddeo’s children, by sea in the dead of winter.

Innocent confiscated everything they had left. The palaces were sealed. The libraries were inventoried. The bees came down.

France did not let it rest. Mazarin, who needed the Barberini for his own reasons, threatened the pope and sent ships toward the papal coast, and Innocent, who was less brave than he was spiteful, backed off. By degrees the family crept back. Cardinal Antonio was allowed home.

Cardinal Francesco was allowed home. Taddeo was not. He died in Paris in November 1647, forty-four years old, in exile, having never wanted any of the jobs his uncle had given him, and having been the man in command when the army lost. His wife had stayed in Rome to fight for the children’s property.

He died among strangers, and the French buried him, and it was some years before anyone brought him home. The whole thing was patched up in 1653 by a marriage between Taddeo’s son Maffeo and Innocent’s great-niece Olimpia Giustiniani, and the Barberini went on being one of the great families of Rome for another three centuries. How it had come to this was a long story, and the city remembered every part of it. It began, in a sense, with the bronze that had held up the porch of the Pantheon.

The Pantheon had stood since the reign of Hadrian, and its porch was held up by bronze beams that had been in place for fifteen hundred years. Every conqueror who had passed through Rome had left them alone. In 1625, the fifth year of Urban’s reign, he had them stripped out. The bronze came to about 450,000 pounds.

The popular story, which you still hear on any walking tour, is that it went to Bernini to cast the great twisted columns of the canopy over the high altar in St. Peter’s. The papal accounts tell it slightly differently. A scholar called Carlo Fea went through them in the early nineteenth century and found that about nine-tenths of the metal was used to cast cannon for Castel Sant’Angelo.

More recent work on Bernini’s own records suggests the canopy was made almost entirely from copper bought in Venice, and that only a small fraction of the Pantheon bronze ever went near it. So the bronze that had held up Hadrian’s porch was melted into guns to defend the pope. Urban is supposed to have said that it was more important to protect the papacy than to keep the rain out of the Pantheon. The diarist Giacinto Gigli, who lived through the whole reign and wrote most of it down, recorded that people went to watch the workmen pulling the beams out, curious at first, and then found that they could not help grieving as the thing came apart in front of them.

That was when the line went up on Pasquino: *Quod non fecerunt barbari, fecerunt Barberini. * What the barbarians did not do, the Barberini did. The barbarians in question had sacked Rome twice back in the fifth century and had carried off most of its gold and a good deal of its marble, and had somehow left alone the bronze beams of the Pantheon. The line is usually credited to Carlo Castelli, the Mantuan ambassador, and it outlived everything else about the reign.

When the family’s builders later hauled marble off the Colosseum for their new palace, people simply said it again. The work itself took weeks. Scaffolding went up inside the porch, and the workmen got at the beams from below, and the whole neighborhood heard it, since bronze that has been in place for fifteen centuries does not come out quietly. Each beam was lowered, loaded onto a cart, and hauled across the city to the foundry near Castel Sant’Angelo, where it was broken up and melted.

Some accounts say it took the founders the better part of a year to work through it all. When it was done, Urban had a plaque put up in the Pantheon explaining that the metal had been removed for the good of the church, which struck Romans much as a note from a burglar, and the porch has had a wooden roof ever since. The bronze was the least of what they held against him. This was a man who sat at least twice in a sealed room hung with white silk, with seven flames burning on a table in front of him, while a friar who had survived the torture chambers of Naples tried to hide him from an eclipse the astrologers said would kill him.

An abbot who forecast his death died in one of his prisons with, according to Gigli, poison in his food. A provincial gentleman lost his head in the Campo de’ Fiori for stabbing a wax doll dressed as the pope. An old astronomer who had once been his friend went blind under house arrest and was refused a grave with his name on it. And through all of it, Urban was afraid mostly of dying.

And he did an astonishing amount of damage to other people in the process of trying not to. Maffeo Vincenzo Barberini was baptized in Florence on the 5th of April 1568. The family had made its money in wool and then in banking, and by the time Maffeo came along, the Barberini were comfortable rather than grand—the sort of Florentine house that had a palace but not a title. His father, Antonio, died when the boy was three.

His mother, Camilla Barbadori, took him to Rome, where his uncle Francesco Barberini held a good position in the papal bureaucracy as a protonotary apostolic, one of those offices that sounds like nothing and in fact meant access. The uncle had no children of his own. He poured everything into the nephew. If you want to know where Urban learned the idea that a churchman’s first duty is to his family, you can start there, in a house in Rome where a fatherless boy was being groomed by a bachelor uncle to carry the family upward.

The Jesuits schooled him at the Collegio Romano. He was clever, quick with Latin, good at verse, and he never lost the taste for it. Then Pisa for law, a doctorate in 1589, and back to Rome, where the uncle’s connections started to pay out. He became a referendary of the Segnatura, a sort of junior judge in the papal courts, then governor of Fano on the Adriatic coast.

In 1604, Clement VIII made him titular Archbishop of Nazareth, a title with no diocese attached, purely a rank so that he could be sent to Paris as papal nuncio to the court of Henry IV. Paris changed him. He spent years at the French court, and he came away with a lasting affection for France and a lasting suspicion of Spain and the Habsburgs, who at that time ruled Naples and Milan and effectively boxed the Papal States in from both ends. That preference shaped almost every big decision he made later, and it made him enemies who would spend two decades trying to frighten him to death.

Paul V gave him the cardinal’s hat in 1606, and then the bishopric of Spoleto, and then in 1611 the legation of Bologna, the richest governorship in the papal gift. By his mid-fifties he was a senior, wealthy, very well-connected cardinal with a French faction behind him and a reputation as a poet. The Venetian ambassador Zeno wrote up a description of him around the time of his election: fifty-six years old, tall, dark, with black hair going gray, exceptionally elegant, refined in his dress, an excellent speaker who enjoyed an argument and enjoyed winning it, who wrote verses and kept poets around him. Take that as an admiring sketch if you like.

One can hear a man who was very aware of how he looked and how he sounded, and the Romans came to hear it, too. The chance came in the summer of 1623, and it came in the worst possible season. Gregory XV died on the 8th of July. The cardinals went into conclave on the 19th, fifty-four of them sealed into the Apostolic Palace at the height of a Roman July, in a city surrounded on almost every side by marshland that bred fever.

Everybody knew what Rome was like in summer. The wealthy left for the hills. The poor stayed and died. And now fifty-four elderly and middle-aged men, plus their secretaries and servants and cooks, were shut up together in rooms with the windows nailed and the air going stale, for as long as it took to agree on a pope.

The fever got in almost immediately. The accounts differ on the exact toll. One writer going through the records for a history of malaria puts it at ten cardinals dead, along with hundreds of their attendants. The Italian epidemiologist Antonio Celli, who spent his life studying the Roman fevers, counted eight cardinals and about thirty scribes and secretaries.

Either way, the conclave that elected Urban VIII killed roughly a sixth of the men who walked into it, and it did so slowly over a fortnight in the heat, with the sick men lying in their cells, listening to the voting going on next door. Cardinal Borghese, the nephew of the previous pope but one and the head of the biggest voting block, fell ill and had to cast his votes from his bed. Others were carried out on litters. Nobody could open a window.

The servants blamed the food. The cardinals blamed the servants. And the mosquitoes went on doing what they had done to every conclave held in Rome in August since anyone could remember. It got its name from all of this: the Conclave of the Fever.

The politics inside the walls were as unhealthy as the air. Cardinal Ludovisi, the nephew of the pope who had just died, controlled one block of votes and wanted a man who would protect his family’s gains. Cardinal Borghese, nephew of the pope before that, controlled another, and wanted the same for his. The Spanish had their list of names they would accept and their list they would not, and the French had theirs, and a candidate had to slide between all four without anybody quite noticing until it was too late.

Meanwhile, men were dying. A cardinal would miss a scrutiny because he was too weak to be carried to it, and then miss the next because he was dead, and his servants would carry the body out through the one door that was allowed to open. And the tally of votes needed for two-thirds would shift by one, and the whole count would have to be done again by men who were themselves sweating and shaking with the first symptoms. Barberini stayed on his feet longer than most.

Whether that was luck or constitution or a better room, no one can say. He emerged as the compromise. He was acceptable to the French, and he was not so obviously French that the Spanish could veto him outright. On the 6th of August, the tellers counted fifty votes for him, comfortably past the two-thirds he needed.

A story attached itself to the moment that Romans went on repeating for years afterward. When the count was announced, Barberini himself asked for the ballots to be counted again. He had, according to this version, spotted something wrong with the numbers and refused to be pope on a miscount. The papers were gone through a second time.

The result held. Whether that happened exactly as told, or whether it was a piece of theater he staged to look scrupulous, depends on which cardinal’s memoir you trust. And the cardinals who were there did not agree with each other. Another story from the same afternoon has him prostrate on the floor before he was vested, praying aloud that God should strike him dead if his reign was going to do the church harm.

Given what the next twenty-one years held, one wishes somebody had written down the exact wording. He took the name Urban. Almost at once, the fever that had been killing cardinals around him for a fortnight got him, too. He was so ill through August and September that his coronation had to be pushed back to the 29th of September, nearly two months after the election.

For a while it was an open question in Rome whether the Conclave of the Fever was going to have to be held all over again. He recovered. He was fifty-five, robust, vain, ambitious, and now he had the tiara and a family to feed. The coronation, when it finally came, had the usual ride across the city to take possession of the Lateran, and the usual moment on the way that sits worse than most of the executions in this story.

At a fixed point on the route, the rabbis of Rome were required to come out of the ghetto and meet the new pope and present him with a scroll of the law held up in its cover, and the pope was required to look at it and pronounce the formula that had been used for centuries: “We acknowledge the law. We condemn your understanding of it. ” Then he rode on, throwing coins to the crowd from a bag his chamberlain held open, and the crowd fought over the coins in the road, and the rabbis went back inside the walls. And that was the Jews’ part in the beginning of every pontificate.

Urban went through it in September 1623 from a litter, still weak from the fever. Something about that summer never left him. He had watched men die in the next room while he waited to become the most powerful churchman on earth, and then he had nearly died himself before he could be crowned. He came out of it with a horror of his own death that most people who write about him mention within the first page or two.

Almost everything horrible in this story comes back to a man who was terrified of dying and had the power to punish the people who suggested he might. The first thing Rome noticed about the new pope was that he did not like to be contradicted. The Venetian envoys who wrote home about everything kept returning to it. He would ask for advice and talk over it.

He would listen to a cardinal for a minute before delivering a lecture. One of them remarked that Urban had stopped consulting the cardinals almost entirely and simply told them what had been decided. He was proud of his learning and let people know it. He was proud of his Latin.

He had by every account a temper that could go from nothing to shouting inside a sentence and then subside into charm as if nothing had happened, and the men around him learned to wait it out. He liked being a poet more than he liked being a pope. He had a collection of his Latin verses printed, and he spent the early years of the reign, from about 1629 to 1632, sitting with a committee of Jesuit scholars rewriting the ancient hymns of the church’s daily prayer so that they scanned properly in classical meter. Hymns that monks had been singing for a thousand years came out of the Vatican with their lines rearranged to please a Florentine humanist’s ear.

Some of the friars who had to sing the new versions hated them, and a few of the older orders quietly kept the old words. He decreed in 1630 that cardinals were to be addressed as “Eminence,” a title that had previously belonged to a handful of German prince-electors, on the reasoning that a prince of the church should outrank a prince of the world. Small things—but he minded about rank more than most men in his position, and his position was already the highest there was. One anecdote has survived about the gardens.

The story, as it is told in museum accounts to this day, is that one summer the birdsong in the papal gardens was distracting him from his work, so he ordered every bird in the gardens killed. Nobody has ever pinned it to a document with a date on it, and it may be a tale that got attached to him because it sounded like him. Romans found it believable, and that says something about how they saw him. He had barely been crowned when the first foreign crisis landed on his desk, and it came from an alpine valley that most of his cardinals could not have found on a map.

The Valtellina is a long trench of a valley in the mountains north of Lake Como, and in Urban’s day it was the one road by which Spanish troops in Milan could reach the Habsburg lands in Austria without crossing French territory. Whoever held it held the Spanish supply line. It was governed awkwardly by the Protestant Grisons, the Swiss leagues to the north, while its people were Catholic. In the summer of 1620, three years before Urban’s election, the Catholic peasants of the valley had risen with Spanish encouragement and killed something between four and six hundred of their Protestant neighbors over a few days, in their houses and in the churches where they had run to hide.

The valley called it the *Sacro Macello*, the Holy Butchery, and did not mean it as a criticism. Spain had marched in afterward to protect the survivors of the massacre it had encouraged. France wanted Spain out. And when Urban became pope, both sides asked him, as a neutral, to garrison the forts of the valley with papal troops until something could be arranged.

He sent the troops. His nephew Francesco, freshly a cardinal, was sent first to Paris and afterward to Madrid to negotiate a settlement, and failed in both places, since neither capital had any intention of being talked out of the valley by a twenty-seven-year-old with a new hat. In 1624, French troops simply attacked the papal garrisons in the Valtellina forts, took them, and turned the pope’s soldiers out into the snow. The papal flag had been fired on by the pope’s favorite kingdom.

Urban protested and did nothing else, and the affair was settled two years later between France and Spain without reference to him. Rome took note. The new pope would put his soldiers in harm’s way for the sake of looking important, and leave them there when the price of looking important went up. 1625 was a holy year as well, one of the great jubilees that Rome held every quarter century, when the pilgrims came from all over Catholic Europe to walk between the basilicas and earn their indulgences.

It fell in the second year of his reign. Plague was in Sicily and southern Italy that year, and Urban, who had already had one summer of fever, ordered the roads from the south watched and the pilgrims from infected places turned back. The rest came in their hundreds of thousands and slept in the hospices and in the porches of the churches, and a good many of them died in the Roman heat of the same fever that had thinned the conclave, and were buried by the confraternities in unmarked pits. The pope washed the feet of a dozen of the pilgrims in a ceremony at the Trinità dei Pellegrini, with the crowd watching, and the accounts say he did it well.

He was good at the parts of the job that had an audience. In the first year of the reign, while he was still finding his feet, the Inquisition gave him a demonstration of what the machinery he now controlled could do, and it did it to a dead man. Marco Antonio de Dominis had been Archbishop of Split on the Dalmatian coast, a genuinely clever man who had written on optics and worked out a good part of how a rainbow forms. He had also fallen out with Rome, gone to England, been fêted by James I, made Dean of Windsor with a fat English income, published attacks on the papacy, quarreled with the English as thoroughly as he had quarreled with Rome, and then, in a decision that ended his life, changed his mind and come back.

The pope at the time, Gregory XV, was a relation and had promised him safety. Gregory died in that fever summer of 1623. Urban did not consider himself bound by his predecessor’s promises, and within a few months de Dominis was in a cell in Castel Sant’Angelo, charged as a relapsed heretic—meaning a man who had recanted once already and could not be forgiven twice. He died in the castle in September 1624, of what the records call natural causes—an old man in a damp fortress on the Tiber—and the Inquisition did not stop.

The process against him continued as if he were still alive to answer it. The corpse was kept. On the 20th of December, three months after his death, the body was laid out in the church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, beside a painted portrait of him and a sack of his printed books, and sentence was pronounced over it. The next day, the 21st of December, the remains were dragged out of the coffin, taken through the streets on a cart with the portrait and the sack, and burned in the Campo de’ Fiori.

The Minerva was the headquarters of the Dominicans in Rome, and the Dominicans ran the Inquisition. The spectacle was aimed at the crowd, with the message that the reach of the Holy Office did not stop at the grave. Urban had been pope for just over a year. He had not invented the practice, but he had signed off on it.

The following year, in the same month the Pantheon bronze was coming down, the Eternal City got its first look at the family that was about to run it. Nepotism was normal. Every pope of the period raised his relatives. What Urban did was on a different scale, and he did it fast, and he did it with a bad conscience that never quite stopped him.

Within weeks of the election, his nephew Francesco, twenty-six years old, was a cardinal. Shortly afterward, another nephew, Antonio, got the hat at twenty, and went on to be Camerlengo, the treasurer of the church and commander-in-chief of the papal armies, a job for which he had no training and no talent. The pope’s brother, also called Antonio, a Capuchin friar who had spent his life in a coarse habit, was given a bishopric in 1625, made a cardinal in 1628, and then made Grand Penitentiary and Librarian of the Vatican, and he took to being called the Cardinal of Sant’Onofrio after his titular church, since it saved everyone confusing him with the younger Antonio. A third nephew, Taddeo, was kept out of the church so that he could marry and carry on the line.

Taddeo became Prince of Palestrina, Prefect of Rome, Governor of the Borgo, commander of Castel Sant’Angelo, and General of the Church, which meant that when the papacy went to war, the army was commanded by a man whose chief qualification was his uncle. The father of the three nephews, the pope’s other brother, Carlo, was made General of the Church and Duke of Monterotondo, and sent north to command the papal troops in the Mantuan business, and died at Bologna in February 1630. The family’s arrival was announced in the Roman way, with a wedding. In 1627, Taddeo Barberini married Anna Colonna, the daughter of one of the oldest princely houses in the city, a family that had been giving Rome cardinals and condottieri since the thirteenth century and had not until then needed to notice the Barberini at all.

The Colonna were not enthusiastic. They were, however, in debt, and the pope’s nephew came with the pope. The wedding was staged as a public event, with processions, with the Colonna palaces lit up with the bees, and with Rome standing in the street watching a Florentine wool family marry into the oldest blood in the city. The money is where it gets hard to believe.

Leopold von Ranke, going through the figures a couple of centuries later, put the family’s total gains from the reign at 105 million scudi. To give some scale, the entire annual income of the Papal States in this period was somewhere around two million. Individual estimates for the nephews run to forty-two million for Taddeo alone and over sixty million for Cardinal Antonio. Whatever the exact totals, the old Catholic Encyclopedia, hardly a hostile witness where popes are concerned, describes the Barberini fortune with the phrase “scarcely credible.

” They bought Palestrina. They built the palace on the Quirinal Hill. They took the Colosseum’s marble for it. They put the family emblem, three bees, on everything—fountains, churches, altars, the canopy in St.

Peter’s, the pope’s own tomb—until the bee became the signature of the reign. Urban knew. He was troubled enough by what he was doing that on two separate occasions he convened a commission of theologians and asked them formally whether it was lawful for his nephews to keep what they had been given. Both times the theologians told him it was.

He had picked them. They knew who was asking. With the family provided for and the cannon cast and the Inquisition warmed up, Urban turned to the thing that consumed him most, which was the sky. Astrology in 1620s Rome was not a fringe interest.

It was taught in universities. Physicians used it to time bloodlettings, and cardinals had their charts drawn as a matter of course. The Barberini family gave it a great deal of credit, and Urban more than most. He had his own horoscope cast.

He had the horoscopes of his cardinals cast, so that he could work out, much in the way a modern actuary would, which of them were likely to outlive him and which were not. He does not seem to have doubted for a moment that the stars governed the length of a man’s life. What frightened him was the thought that other people could work out his date from the same charts—and they were working on it. Around 1628, the talk started in Rome that Urban’s chart, laid against a solar eclipse due that year, and a worse configuration coming in 1630, pointed to his death.

The Spanish party seized on it. Spain wanted this French-leaning pope gone, and if the stars could be made to say he was going, then perhaps the fright would finish him. Astrologers in Madrid and Naples published predictions. Copies came to Rome.

Cardinals started quietly to plan for a conclave. And the pope who believed in all of it began to fall apart. Into this walked Tommaso Campanella, and the man Urban chose to save him from the stars had already been through something close to hell on Earth. Campanella was a Calabrian Dominican, born the same year as Urban, 1568.

A philosopher with a huge, undisciplined mind who wrote about the ideal society and about magic and about the stars in the same breath. In 1599, he was accused of plotting a rising in Calabria against the Spanish crown, a rebellion that was supposed to coincide with the arrival of a Turkish fleet and usher in a new age. The Spanish authorities in Naples took him and tortured him. And when the torture did not get what they wanted, they tried again.

He decided to feign madness, since the law would not burn a madman. So in 1601 they tested it. The test was called the *veglia*, the vigil. They stripped him and bound his arms behind his back and hoisted him off the floor by a rope.

Beneath him they placed a seat fitted with wooden spikes. The rope let him down just far enough that if he relaxed his body, his weight came onto the spikes. If he pulled himself up, the strain went into his shoulders. They kept him like that, alternating, for something like thirty-six hours—some accounts say forty—without sleep.

By the end, the flesh of his lower body had been torn open, and he had lost, by his own reckoning later, more than a pound of it. He kept up the madness through all of it. They concluded he was genuinely insane, which under the law of the time meant he could not be burned, and so he lived. He wrote afterward that it took him months in bed to be able to sit.

He stayed in the prisons of Naples for twenty-seven years. He wrote his best work there. He wrote a treatise on how to avoid the fate written in the stars, with the careful technical detachment of a man who had every reason to think about fate. In 1626, largely because the new pope asked the king of Spain for him, he was released, and allowed to come to Rome by 1628.

Then the pope had in his own city a friar who believed that the influence of a hostile eclipse could be counteracted by constructing the right conditions around the threatened person—and who had written the manual. They went to work. The manual, which Campanella called *De siderali fato vitando*, was quite specific. Seal the windows and the doors against the outside air.

Sprinkle the room with rose vinegar and perfumes. Burn laurel and myrtle and rosemary and cypress until the smoke hangs under the ceiling. Drape the walls in white silk. Bring in branches from the gardens and prop them round the edges until the place is closer to a grove than to an apartment.

Light two lamps and five torches on a table arranged as the seven planets. Have musicians play pieces that belong to Jupiter and Venus, the two friendly planets. Surround the patient with stones, plants, colors, and scents that belong to the good planets, and shut out anything that belongs to Mars or Saturn. Then sit in the middle of it, breathing the smoke, and wait for the eclipse to pass.

They are reported to have done this for the eclipse of 1628, and again for the dangerous alignment of 1630. The head of the Catholic Church, whose office had spent a century burning people for magic, sat in a sealed room with a torture survivor and a table full of flames, and tried to hide from the sky. He lived, which if you believed in the method, proved the method. Then it leaked.

Campanella’s treatise on avoiding sidereal fate was printed without his consent, apparently through the maneuvering of enemies, as part of a larger book on astrology in 1629. Now half of Europe could see what the Holy Father had been doing in the dark with a heretic. Campanella went into a panic and wrote a defense arguing that everything in the room had been perfectly natural—sunlight and fresh air and pleasant smells, nothing supernatural at all. Urban stood by him for a while.

Then a fresh conspiracy in Calabria in 1634, involving one of Campanella’s own disciples, brought the Spanish down on him again, and this time the pope could not or would not shield him. Cardinal Barberini and the French ambassador got him out of Rome dressed as a servant, and he died in a Paris convent in May 1639, a few days before an eclipse he had been dreading for months. He had performed the ritual for himself first, the same one he had built for the pope, with the candles and the silk and the burning laurel in a small room alone. And it had not been enough.

He was seventy. Now come back to Rome, and to the year 1630, and to a Benedictine abbot who ran the most fashionable astrology practice in the city. Orazio Morandi was abbot of the monastery of Santa Prassede up near Santa Maria Maggiore, a former general of the Vallombrosan order, a friend of Galileo, a collector of forbidden books, and the man that cardinals and ambassadors and rich men’s wives went to when they wanted to know what the year held. His monastery was an information exchange.

Letters came in from all over Europe—gossip, predictions, dispatches—and Morandi turned all of it into charts, and the charts into forecasts, and the forecasts went back out along the same channels. He had a library stuffed with prohibited works, and the Inquisition had not troubled him because the people who might have complained were his clients. Morandi kept, behind the ordinary shelves, a collection of books on the Index, works of astrology and politics and the occult that no layman could legally own, and he lent them out quietly to cardinals and gentlemen who wanted to know what they were not allowed to know. The historian Brendan Dooley found the borrowing records in the trial papers.

The names on them were the names of half the Roman court, and that more than any horoscope is what made the affair so dangerous to so many people once the pope decided to open it up. In 1629, Morandi wrote an astrological commentary on the popes. And when he reached Urban, he did two things that would have been dangerous individually and were fatal together. He wrote that the pope’s French policy would bring ruin on Italy.

And he wrote that the pope would die violently within a short time, and named the summer of 1630. It got out. Everything Morandi wrote got out—that was the point of him. The prediction went down the diplomatic channels to Spain, and the Spanish cardinals, who took astrology as seriously as the pope did, started packing.

Some of them actually set out for Rome, expecting to arrive in time for the conclave. Urban learned that the College of Cardinals was on the road to bury him on the say-so of an abbot with a horoscope. He did believe the horoscope, or half believed it, and so the rage and the fear ran together in him, and there was no separating them. He ordered the inquiry himself.

The governor of Rome’s court took Morandi in the spring of 1630, on charges of keeping prohibited books, fortune-telling, and political intrigue, and they began to question him. The questioning did not stay with him. Morandi’s clients, his correspondents, his fellow monks were pulled in, and the trial record grew and grew until it ran to around 2,800 pages, which sit today in the state archives in Rome. Names of cardinals were turning up in it.

Names of people close to the pope. Dooley, who worked through all those pages for a book on the affair, describes a case that was in the process of implicating a good part of the Roman elite when it stopped. What the testimony showed before it stopped was how deep the thing went. Witness after witness described a Rome in which the death of the pope was being forecast professionally, on commission, by a circle of astrologers working from the same birth data, and in which cardinals paid for the forecasts, and in which the forecasts moved money, since a bondholder who believed the pope would die in July arranged his affairs differently from one who did not.

Morandi had been the center of that trade, and the trade was in effect a market in the pope’s death, with Morandi setting the price. It stopped because Morandi died on the 7th of November 1630, in the Tor di Nona prison, the old fortified jail on the bank of the Tiber where they kept the important prisoners. The abbot of Santa Prassede died of a fever, according to the official record. Gigli, who wrote his diary that week, put down what the city believed without any hedging: “Everyone held for certain that he had been poisoned in his food and hurried into the grave to end the trial.

” No autopsy, no confession, no order from the pope with his signature on it. A man who had predicted the pope’s death had died in the pope’s prison before he could name any more of the pope’s cardinals, and the Romans drew the obvious conclusion, and Dooley, three and a half centuries later, does not think they were wrong to draw it. Urban never commented, so far as anyone has found. The trial papers were bound and put away.

The other accused were quietly dealt with. The library was seized. Among the papers taken from Santa Prassede were letters from Galileo. He and Morandi had corresponded for years on comets and horoscopes and the politics of the Roman court, and Galileo, who had cast charts for money as a young professor and cast them for his own daughters later, had been a client of sorts as well as a friend.

The letters went into the trial file. Nothing was done about them at the time, but the Holy Office does not lose paper. And two years later, when the same men sat down to consider what to do about the author of the *Dialogue*, the name of the abbot who had predicted the pope’s death was already in the room with them. The following spring, the pope did something that turned his private terror into public law.

On the 1st of April 1631, he issued a bull with the title *Inscrutabilis iudiciorum Dei altitudo*, “the unsearchable height of the judgments of God. ” A previous pope, Sixtus V, had condemned astrology in general back in 1586. Urban confirmed that, and then narrowed the whole thing down to one specific crime, drawn so sharply that you can almost see his hand shaking on the page. Anyone who cast a horoscope to predict the death of the pope or of any of the pope’s relatives to the third degree was excommunicated, lost all their goods, and was to be put to death.

The bull left ordinary astrology more or less alone, and it left the deaths of kings and cardinals alone. It cared about the death of the pope and his family—meaning, at that moment, the Barberini nephews and the Capuchin brother. D. P.

Walker, one of the great scholars of Renaissance magic, went through the bull and concluded that its wording is the best evidence we have of how frightened Urban was: a man who half believed the astrologers had just made it a capital crime to be an astrologer who looked at him, and he had sat in a room full of torches with Campanella eighteen months before. In the same month that bull went out, the last Duke of Urbino died, and the pope got a duchy for his trouble. Francesco Maria II della Rovere had been ruling Urbino, in the hills east of Florence, since 1574. His only son, Federico Ubaldo, had died in 1623 at twenty-two, in a fit that the reports call epileptic, at the end of a short life spent mostly on pleasure.

The old duke had a granddaughter married off to the Medici, but no male heir, and Urbino was technically a papal fief, which meant that when the main line failed, the land came back to the church. Urban made sure of it. He had his people at the duke’s side for years, pressing the old man, who was by then nearly paralyzed, not to remarry or do anything else that might complicate the return of Urbino to Rome. Francesco Maria died on the 23rd of April 1631, and the papal commissioners moved in before the funeral was over.

The great library of the dukes went to Rome. The art collection went to Florence with the granddaughter. The people of Urbino went from being subjects of a duke who lived among them to being subjects of a pope who had never seen the place and needed its taxes for the war he was about to start. By 1631, then, the pope’s Italy looked like this: a family growing rich past counting, an army with new cannon, a prison with a dead astrologer in it, and a law on the books that made it a hanging matter to say out loud what everybody in Rome was already whispering.

The war he was about to start was in fairness not entirely his. Europe had been at war since 1618 and would be until 1648, and Urban’s pontificate sits almost exactly in the middle of it. The conflict began as a Protestant rising in Bohemia, swallowed Germany, and then everybody else, and by the time Urban took the throne it had become, underneath the religious language, a fight between the Habsburgs of Vienna and Madrid on one side and the French on the other. A pope was expected to be the leader of the Catholic side.

Urban’s difficulty was that the Catholic side in practice meant the Habsburgs, and he had spent his adult life learning to distrust them. The first test came close to home. In 1627, the Duke of Mantua died without a direct heir, and the succession to Mantua and Montferrat, two small states in northern Italy, became a proxy war. The French candidate was the Duke of Nevers.

The Spanish and the emperor wanted someone else. Urban backed Nevers quietly and then less quietly, and the emperor Ferdinand sent an army over the Alps to settle the matter. The papal contribution to the defense of Mantua was a small force that arrived late and did very little, and the people of Mantua paid for the whole episode. The imperial army sat outside Mantua through the winter and spring of 1630.

The city was already sick. Plague had come into northern Italy with the German troops, and inside the walls people were dying in the streets while the siege went on. On the 18th of July 1630, the imperial soldiers, mostly German mercenaries, got in. For three days they had the city.

Men were killed in doorways. Women were taken. The palaces of the Gonzaga, which held one of the finest collections of art in Europe, were emptied down to the door hinges, and what could not be carried was smashed. Churches were stripped, and the soldiers, having done all of this in a plague city, marched out carrying the disease with them into the rest of Lombardy.

Mantua’s population, by the estimates, fell by more than seventy percent between 1628 and 1631—between the siege, the sack, the hunger, and the plague. A city of 30,000 became a city of a few thousand. It did not recover for a century. Urban’s man had won in the end, since Nevers kept the duchy at the peace—what was left of it.

The plague that walked out of Mantua with the soldiers was the great killer of the middle of Urban’s reign, and it touched his own state directly. Milan under Spanish rule lost something like 60,000 of its 130,000 people. Venice lost 46,000. Florence lost about one in eight.

Bologna, the second city of the Papal States, the city Urban himself had governed as legate, lost around 15,000 people in seven or eight months, its population dropping from 62,000 to 47,000. Bologna was his. He had governed it. He knew its streets.

And the man he had sent there as legate, Cardinal Bernardino Spada, lived through that year and wrote about it afterward. The city shut its gates in the spring of 1630, and it made no difference. The sick were carried out to the Lazzaretto, the plague hospital beyond the walls, where the beds ran out and the people lay in the corridors and then in the yard. Carts went round at first light collecting the dead from the doorsteps, and the drivers were convicts who had been promised their freedom if they lived, and most did not.

Streets were boarded up with the families still inside. Confessions were heard through windows. The pits outside the walls filled faster than they could be dug. Fifteen thousand dead in the pope’s second city, and the pope in Rome, two hundred miles away, sealed the roads and prayed and kept the sickness where it was.

Rome was spared the worst. And this is where Urban’s fear of death did some good for once. He and his health board shut the borders of the Papal States, set guards on the roads, quarantined travelers for weeks in makeshift stations, and burned goods coming from the north. Trade collapsed.

Bread got expensive. The Jews of Rome, who as always were made to pay for whatever the city needed, spent 40,000 scudi on the plague measures over those years. But the mass death that emptied Milan did not get past the gates. In the middle of all his other cruelties, you have to grant him that his terror of contagion kept the sickness off the streets of his own capital.

The good came at a price, and the price was paid at the gates. The health board that Urban set up, the Congregation of Sanità, ran on fear. A traveler who came in without a health pass or who lied about where he had come from could be hanged, and the accounts of that year describe gallows put up outside the city gates so that anyone approaching from the north walked toward them. Goods were burned in front of their owners.

Whole convoys were turned back into the countryside to take their chances. It worked in the sense that the plague stayed out. Urban himself through those summers was mostly not in Rome at all. He had rebuilt the old villa at Castel Gandolfo in the Alban Hills as a papal summer residence, the first pope to use it, and from 1626 onward he went up there whenever the heat came, with the road guarded and the gates watched, and ran the state from a hilltop above a lake while the fever season passed below.

Every pope since has done the same. He started it, and he started it out of fear. Look north from Rome in those same years, and you see the pope losing the argument about who he was. The Emperor Ferdinand was fighting Protestants in Germany and expected the pope’s money.

Urban sent some and grumbled about it and refused the larger sums. Ferdinand wanted a formal Catholic league with the pope at its head, and Urban refused to join, since the league was aimed at France as much as at the Protestants, and he would not put his name to anything that might help Vienna against Paris. Meanwhile, Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister of Catholic France, was paying the king of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus, a Lutheran, to march an army into Germany and cut the Habsburgs down. Every Catholic in Europe could see the pope’s ally funding the Protestant champion and the pope doing nothing much about it.

He sent letters to Louis XIII and to Richelieu urging them to stop the payments. He did not threaten them with excommunication, out of fear of provoking a French schism on the model of England and losing France to the church altogether. So he wrote strongly worded letters, and Gustavus Adolphus went on winning battles. It is fair to say the war was not being fought gently on either side, and that Rome’s response to its horrors depended entirely on who was doing them.

When the Catholic general Tilly took the Protestant city of Magdeburg in May 1631, and the city burned and something like twenty thousand of its people died in the fire and the sack in a single day, the news reached Rome as a victory and was celebrated as one. When the Swedes did comparable things to Catholic towns the following year, Urban wrote letters of grief. The Spanish did not confine themselves to letters. In early 1632, with the Swedes deep in Germany and Catholic cities falling by the week, the emperor sent Cardinal Pázmány, the Archbishop of Esztergom, a Hungarian and a formidable man, to Rome to demand money and a public commitment.

Urban would not receive him as an ambassador, on the grounds that a cardinal could not represent a foreign prince. And when he did receive him, he gave him, by Pázmány’s own furious account, a lecture on the finances of the Holy See and very little else. Pázmány went home with a fraction of what he had asked for. Then, on the 8th of March 1632, in a full consistory of the cardinals, the Spanish cardinal Gaspar de Borja stood up and did something no one in the room had seen before.

He took out a written protest in the name of the king of Spain and began to recite it aloud to the pope’s face. It accused Urban of neglecting the defense of the Catholic religion, of leaving the emperor to fight the heretics alone, of favoring France against the interests of the church, and it warned him, in effect, that the king of Spain held him responsible. Urban shouted at him to stop. Borja pressed on.

The pope, by the accounts, was on his feet, red in the face, ordering him to sit down, and Borja kept going, and the cardinals of the Spanish faction stood with him, and the cardinals of the French faction shouted back, and the two groups came close enough to blows that the old Capuchin, Cardinal Sant’Onofrio, tried to get between them and was pushed aside. It ended with Urban leaving the room. Borja was later ordered out of Rome, and the protest was printed in Madrid and circulated across Europe, so that the word in every Catholic court was that the king of Spain had publicly told the pope he was failing the faith, and the pope had been unable to stop him saying it. Within a few years, the same man had sat in the dark with a heretic to hide from an eclipse and stood in the open in front of the College of Cardinals being called a traitor to Christendom.

Neither was a thing a pope was supposed to survive. He survived both. It did not make him any calmer. Then the Swedish king was killed at the battle of Lützen in November 1632, and a story went around that is still argued about.

The story was that when the news reached Rome, the pope’s reaction was closer to sorrow than relief, and that he had a requiem mass sung for the soul of the Lutheran king who had spent two years killing Catholics. Spanish and imperial pamphlets spread it. Catholic writers ever since have called it a slander, and the old Catholic Encyclopedia describes it as the worst calumny ever laid against him. What is in the accounts is that Urban sent something in the region of two million francs from his own resources to the Catholic armies in Germany between 1632 and 1634—hardly the behavior of a man in mourning for the Swedes.

What is also in the accounts is a pope who never once in twenty-one years put the full weight of his office behind the Catholic war effort, since the Catholic war effort was Habsburg, and he was more afraid of the Habsburgs than of the Lutherans. Whether the mass was sung, no one can say. The rumor itself shows how far his own side had stopped trusting him. The Roman crowd had its own version.

They did not much care about Sweden. They cared that the money going north was coming out of their bread, and that a pope with a family that rich was asking them to pay for German wars that he himself did not seem to believe in. The taxes had already started. They finished him in the end.

First, though, 1632, and a book. The book was Galileo’s *Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems*, and the first thing to say about it is that Urban and its author had been friends. Maffeo Barberini as a cardinal had admired Galileo openly. He had written a Latin poem in his honor in 1620, praising the telescope and the new stars, and the title of the poem was *Adulatio Perniciosa*, “Dangerous Flattery.

” It was about the harm that praise does to the man who receives it. When he became pope, Galileo came to Rome to congratulate him and was given six long audiences, walks in the gardens, a medal, a pension for his son. Galileo went home to Florence believing he had a pope who would let him write about the new astronomy so long as he was careful. And in those conversations, Urban had offered him a favorite argument of his own, a theological one.

God is omnipotent, the pope said. However cleverly you explain the tides or the planets, God could have arranged them by any means he chose, and so no physical explanation can ever be called certain. Galileo listened and nodded and went home and spent eight years writing his book. The *Dialogue* came out in Florence in February 1632.

It is a conversation between three men. Two of them are clever, and one of them, Simplicio, is the slow, old-fashioned Aristotelian who keeps getting corrected. Near the very end, almost as an afterthought, the pope’s argument about the omnipotence of God appears. Simplicio says it.

The Jesuits, who had their own long quarrel with Galileo, saw to it that the pope found out. Urban did not need it explained. His words, or the words his ambassador reported, were that Galileo had not been afraid to make sport of him. The Tuscan ambassador Niccolini, who had to sit through the audiences that followed, wrote home that he had never seen the pope in such a rage—and Niccolini had seen him in a rage before.

The affection of ten years went sour in an afternoon. In August, the Inquisition banned further sale of the book. In October, Galileo, sixty-eight years old, was ordered to Rome. Niccolini tried everything an ambassador could try.

He went to the pope and pointed out the man’s age and his health and his thirty years of service to the Medici, and asked whether the business could be handled in Florence by letter. Urban told him that Galileo had walked into a most dangerous path of his own accord, that he himself had been the man’s friend and had warned him, and that the matter now touched the faith and was out of his hands. It was not out of his hands—he chaired the meetings that decided it—but that was the line. And Niccolini went back to his embassy and wrote to Florence that there was no moving him.

Campanella, still in Rome, wrote to Galileo that he had hoped to be put on the commission examining the book and had been kept off it, and that he was praying for him—a man who had hung over a bed of spikes for the Inquisition, praying for a man about to be shown the instruments. Urban was not well. He had a hernia that troubled him, and gout, and his eyesight was already failing. His doctors wrote to the Inquisition certifying that the journey might kill him.

The Inquisition wrote back that if he did not come voluntarily, he would be brought in chains, and it was the pope, by all accounts, who insisted on that. Galileo set out in January 1633, in a litter, in winter, and at the border of the Papal States he was held in quarantine for the plague for most of a month, in a shed, with the wind coming through the boards—an old man waiting to be allowed into the city where his friend was going to put him on trial. The Holy Office had a file on him already, from 1616, when the Copernican doctrine had first been condemned and Galileo had been warned off it in a private audience with Cardinal Bellarmine. Bellarmine had given him a signed note afterward saying only that he had been told not to hold or defend the opinion, but somebody had also put in the file an unsigned memorandum saying he had been told not to teach it in any way whatsoever.

And that document, which Galileo had never seen and may never have known about, was what the Inquisitors of 1633 built their case on. He arrived in Rome with a note from a cardinal that he thought protected him, and the file held an unsigned note that condemned him. Whether Urban knew the unsigned paper was in the file when he ordered the trial, no one can say, but he had been a cardinal in Rome in 1616, and the Holy Office does not keep secrets from popes. Galileo was treated in Rome with an unnerving courtesy.

He was lodged at first with the Tuscan ambassador, and then when the questioning began in April, in comfortable rooms in the Inquisition’s own building, with a servant and decent meals. The men questioning him were polite. They wanted one thing. They wanted him to admit that he had believed and defended the motion of the earth, which he had been forbidden to do in 1616, and he tried for weeks to argue that the book was a balanced discussion, and that he had never held the opinion himself.

Nobody believed him. On the 16th of June, at a session of the Inquisition in the Quirinal, with the pope present, it was decided that he would be examined under threat of torture. The Latin phrase is *examen rigorosum*, “rigorous examination,” and the meaning was known to every man in the room. On the 21st of June 1633, a sixty-nine-year-old man with a hernia and failing eyes was brought before the inquisitors and told that if he did not tell the truth, the instruments would be used.

In Rome, that meant the *corda*, the strappado. The prisoner’s arms are tied behind his back and he is hoisted off the floor by the wrists, and left hanging, and dropped, and hoisted. Whether the pope actually intended to have it done to Galileo, or only meant to frighten him, is one of the questions historians still argue over, and it cannot be settled from this distance. Galileo did not test it.

He said that since his book had been published, he had not held the condemned opinion and did not hold it now, and that he was in their hands, and they could do with him what they pleased. The next morning, the 22nd of June, in the great hall of the Dominican convent at Santa Maria Sopra Minerva—the same church where they had sentenced de Dominis’s corpse nine years earlier—he was made to kneel in the white shirt of a penitent, with his hand on the Gospels, and hear his sentence: vehemently suspected of heresy, the book prohibited, imprisonment at the pleasure of the Holy Office. Then, kneeling, he recited the abjuration they had written for him. He abjured, cursed, and detested his errors.

The old story that he muttered under his breath that the earth moves anyway is a later invention, and the truth is sadder. He had already decided, upstairs the day before, with the corda in the air above him, that his ideas were not worth his shoulders. Urban commuted the prison to house arrest. First with the Archbishop of Siena, who was kind to him, and then from December 1633 at his own villa at Arcetri, in the hills above Florence, where he was not to leave and not to receive visitors without permission.

His daughter, Suor Maria Celeste, a nun in the convent a few hundred yards down the hill, had been his comfort through the whole trial, writing to him almost daily. She fell ill and died in April 1634, four months after he came home. He wrote that he felt he had been called to the grave after her. His sight went completely over the next few years, from cataracts most likely, and by 1638 he was fully blind, dictating to a young assistant, and he wrote that the universe he had enlarged with his own discoveries had now shrunk for him to the space of his own body.

The letters she wrote him survive—more than a hundred of them—and they are mostly about small things: a cake she had baked, a collar she had mended, medicines from the convent pharmacy for his gout, and running underneath all of it, a daughter’s steady worry about a father being tried for heresy by the friend he had trusted. He had put her in the convent at thirteen because she was illegitimate and could not be married, and she had never left it. And now she was dead of a dysentery that ran through the convent in the spring, at thirty-three. And the old man up the hill had nobody left to write to.

He died at Arcetri on the 8th of January 1642, still under sentence, still under arrest. The Grand Duke of Tuscany wanted to bury him properly in Santa Croce, with a monument. Urban sent word that there was to be no monument, no public funeral, and no oration, since a man condemned by the Holy Office should not be honored in a church. So they put him in a side room off a chapel, in a corner, and he stayed there for ninety-five years before anybody dared move him.

The room was a closet, more or less, under the bell tower beside the novices’ chapel. And when they finally did move him in 1737, to the monument the pope had forbidden, the men who opened the coffin helped themselves. Three fingers came off the right hand. A tooth.

A vertebra. One of the fingers, the middle one, is in a glass case in Florence today, pointing upward, and people queue to see it. Urban had wanted him forgotten in a corner, and Florence’s habit of keeping pieces of its dead went the other way. Urban outlived him by two and a half years.

Whether he ever thought about the six audiences and the medal and the poem, no one recorded. While Galileo was being questioned in Rome, something far stranger was going on in a cellar a hundred and fifty miles to the east, in the hills behind Ascoli Piceno. And it would end with a head on the stones of the Campo de’ Fiori. Spinetoli is a small place in the Marche, then part of the Papal States, and the family that mattered there were the Centini.

Cardinal Felice Centini was a Franciscan who had been made a cardinal in 1611, the same year Barberini got the legation of Bologna, and he had gone into the conclave of 1623 with a real, if modest, chance of coming out as pope. He had not. Barberini had. And his nephew Giacinto Centini, born in 1597, had been one of the two gentlemen the town of Ascoli sent to Rome to congratulate the new pontiff on his election.

He had knelt and kissed the foot of the man who had taken the throne his uncle wanted. Whatever went through his head at that moment, he carried it home and nursed it for ten years. Giacinto was by the accounts a restless man with more ambition than money, and he did the sums that everybody in Rome was doing in the 1630s. If Urban died, there would be a conclave.

If there was a conclave, Cardinal Centini, who was old and respected and belonged to no faction, might come through it as a compromise the way Barberini had. And if Felice Centini were pope, then Giacinto Centini would be the cardinal nephew, and the Centini would be what the Barberini were now. It only needed the pope to die. Urban was in his mid-sixties, and had a constitution that kept surprising the astrologers.

Morandi had predicted his death for 1630 and been wrong, or at least early. Giacinto was not a patient man. He decided to help. He found a friar.

Fra Bernardino da Montalto was an Augustinian from Palermo whose real name was Diego Gargiulo, and he had a reputation, in the way certain friars in the provinces did, for being able to command spirits. Bernardino confirmed everything Giacinto wanted to hear. The stars said the cardinal would be the next pope, and the pope’s end could be brought forward by the right methods, if Giacinto was willing to pay for the materials and provide a suitably private space. Bernardino brought in two more men of the same sort.

Fra Domenico Zangone of Fano, another Augustinian, nervous and easily frightened, and Fra Cherubino Serafini of Ancona, a Franciscan—the one who turned out to have the strongest stomach. The ritual took place in a cellar under Giacinto’s house at Spinetoli. They made a wax figure of the pope. They dressed it in tiny vestments and set a tiara on its head, so that there could be no doubt in the spirits’ minds about who was meant.

They laid it in the middle of a circle traced on the cellar floor with linen cord that had been spun by a virgin, because that was what the book said. Bernardino recited the invocations, calling on demons by name and mixing in prayers turned backward. And as the wax began to soften in the heat of the candles, Fra Cherubino took a knife and drove it into the figure over and over—into the chest and the belly and the crowned head—while the others called out for the pope’s death. Nothing happened.

No demon appeared to announce that Urban was dead in Rome. Bernardino explained that a murder must once have been committed in that cellar, and the shed blood was keeping the spirits away. So they moved the whole apparatus to a farmhouse outside the village and tried again. And again, nothing.

They moved to a house at Corropoli, over the border in the kingdom of Naples, where the pope’s police could not follow. This time they added a consecrated host stolen from a church, and holy oil, so that the sacrilege would be complete and the spirits could not doubt their seriousness. They stabbed the wax pope with the body of Christ lying on the table beside it. And the pope in Rome went on breathing.

Giacinto had by now spent a good deal of money and was beginning to say out loud that if the friars could not deliver, he would kill them himself—which, for three men in a cellar with a knife-wielding necromancer, was a serious threat. Bernardino, thinking fast, produced a bigger plan. What was needed, he said, was a proper Mass of the Dead. Seven priests.

One of them, chosen by lot, would be sacrificed to the devil at the altar, and with that blood the thing would finally be done. Giacinto liked this. He liked it so much that he threw a banquet for his accomplices to celebrate the coming reign of Pope Centini. And at the table, drunk on the future, he promised each of them a cardinal’s hat.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, the nerves of Fra Domenico Zangone gave way. He had stood in a cellar and watched a Franciscan stab a wax pope beside a stolen host. He had heard a plan to murder a priest at the altar, and he had just been promised a red hat by a provincial gentleman who threatened to cut his throat. He went to the Holy Office and told them everything.

Giacinto did not run. He was the nephew of a cardinal, and that seems to have been the whole of his reasoning. The accusation was so grotesque—wax dolls and stolen hosts and seven priests—that he seems to have been confident no serious court would credit it, and that if it did, his uncle’s rank would put a stop to the whole thing before it got anywhere near a scaffold. He stayed at Spinetoli and waited to be cleared.

He had misjudged his moment as badly as a man can. The pope who would hear about this had sat in a sealed room with Campanella against an eclipse, and had written a bull making it a capital crime to predict his death. Now here was a man who had gone beyond predicting it. Urban called the crime execrable, and demanded a punishment that would be remembered.

Campanella, still in Rome at that point, was brought in to reassure him with counter-predictions that the stars were entirely in his favor, and by every sign the pope needed it. They took Giacinto in 1634 and put him in the prison of the Inquisition. He was examined, according to the trial records, fifty-six times. Some accounts say torture was used.

Some say only the threat of it, and in the Roman system, the difference was not always large. Over the course of a year, the confident nobleman who had expected to walk out came apart. And by the end, he had confessed to all of it—the cellar and the wax and the host and the seven priests and the banquet. The Congregation of the Holy Office gave its verdict at Santa Maria Sopra Minerva on the 21st of April 1635.

That church keeps turning up in this story. On Sunday the 22nd, Giacinto Centini was taken to St. Peter’s to make his public abjuration. The crowd that came to see the man who had tried to kill the pope with a doll has been estimated at twenty thousand people.

They filled the basilica. They filled the square. In the crush inside the church, one of the *sbirri*, the pope’s police, was trampled and killed. Blood had been shed inside the greatest church in Christendom on account of the spectacle, and so when the abjuration was done and the crowd had gone, the basilica had to be reconsecrated.

He knelt on a platform set up in the nave, in the sight of all of them, with a candle in his hand, while a notary of the Holy Office went through the sentence aloud—every article of it, the wax and the circle and the stolen host and the seven priests—so that twenty thousand Romans heard the whole plan for the pope’s death described in the pope’s own church, in detail, by the pope’s own officials. Then he repeated the abjuration after the notary, line by line. Urban was not there. He did not attend such things.

He was up the hill in the Quirinal, and it would be interesting to know what he was doing while the city listened to how it had nearly lost him. The sentence had been death by burning alive. As a man guilty of treason against God and against the pope together, as a nobleman and the nephew of a cardinal, he was granted a commutation. He would be beheaded instead.

In the language of the time, this was a grace. The night before, the brothers of San Giovanni Decollato came for him. That was their office. Two or three of them, in black robes and black hoods with the eyeholes cut, sat with the condemned man from evening until dawn in the chapel of the prison, talking to him, praying with him, hearing anything he wanted to say.

And their books, which they kept carefully, record that Giacinto Centini spent the night in confession and prayer, and was calm by morning. At first light there was Mass and communion, and then the door. On the morning of Monday the 23rd of April 1635, they took him to the Campo de’ Fiori. The square was, and is, an irregular open space in the middle of the old city, with tall houses all around it, and on execution days people paid for window space, and the poorer ones climbed onto the roofs.

One eyewitness described the crowd as innumerable. Another wrote that the roofs seemed likely to give way under the weight of the people standing on them. The scaffold was in the middle. The Confraternity of San Giovanni Decollato, whose job it was to accompany the condemned, had been with him through the night, and they walked with him now, holding up before his face the small painted board with the image of Christ on it that was supposed to keep his eyes off the block.

He was thirty-eight. The accounts say he died well, with courage and contrition beyond the ordinary, and one detail has survived that stays with me. When the executioner reached out to pull back his collar and bare his neck for the sword, Centini pushed the man’s hands away and did it himself. The sword came down.

His head went onto the boards. Rather than being carried away afterward, the body was left where it fell, laid out on the scaffold in the middle of the square between two lit torches, and the crowd was allowed to look at it for the rest of the day, until the light went, and the brotherhood of San Giovanni Decollato came with their cart and took what was left to their own cloister to bury it. The friars had it worse, as friars always did. Fra Bernardino da Montalto and Fra Cherubino Serafini, the one who had wielded the knife, were hanged on the same scaffold, and the Roman method was not the long drop of a later century.

They were turned off a ladder and strangled slowly, kicking, while the executioner sometimes hung on their legs to help them along. When they were dead, or near enough, the bodies were cut down and thrown onto a pyre that had been built at the foot of the scaffold, and burned to ash in front of the same crowd. And the ash was shoveled into buckets and carried to the river and tipped into the Tiber, so that nothing of them remained for anyone to bury or remember. Fra Domenico Zangone, who had told the Holy Office everything, was rewarded for his cooperation by being sent to row in the papal galleys, which was a slower death than the rope on the whole.

Cardinal Felice Centini was not charged with anything. He was an old man who had, as far as anyone could show, known nothing about what his nephew was doing in the cellar. He lived on in Rome for six more years, in a disgrace that nobody needed to put into words, and died in 1641. No record survives that the pope ever spoke to him again.

Giacinto Centini believed that wax and knives could kill the pope. The pope believed it too. Both of them took the stars for granted, and the whole apparatus of the Holy Office—the twenty thousand in St. Peter’s, the torches on the scaffold, the ashes in the river—rested on that shared belief.

On one side of it, a man was beheaded. On the other, a man went on sitting in sealed rooms, waiting for the next eclipse. Down by the river, a few streets from the Campo de’ Fiori, was the ghetto, and the people who lived in it had their own account of what Urban’s reign was like, though nobody at the time asked them for it. The Jews of Rome had been shut behind walls since 1555, in a few damp acres beside the Tiber that flooded every winter, with the gates locked at night.

Urban inherited the arrangement and tightened it where he could. He ordered the community to pay 1,200 scudi a year, until 1634, to a man called Leonardo Masserano, a convert from Judaism who had written a book attacking the religion he had left. The Jews of Rome, in other words, were made to fund the publication of an attack on themselves, by a man they would have known by name. The compulsory sermons went on every Saturday at a church near the ghetto gate, where a set number of Jews were required to attend and listen to a preacher explain why they should convert, and the officers of the church moved down the benches with sticks to be sure that nobody had stuffed wax into his ears, which people did.

At carnival there were the races. Every year, down the Corso, the city ran a series of races for the crowd’s amusement—horses, donkeys, buffalo, and on one day of the season, a race of Jews—old men mostly, picked from the ghetto and made to run the length of the street half naked, while the Romans lined the route and threw things. That had been going on for a century by Urban’s time, and it went on for another twenty-five years after his death, until a later pope agreed to take a payment from the ghetto instead. Urban, who reformed the hymns of the breviary for their meter, did not reform that.

The river had its own opinion of the ghetto. In the winter of 1637, the Tiber came over its banks, as it did every few years, and the ghetto, which sat on the lowest ground in the city, went under first and drained last. Families lived on the upper floors for weeks, with the water standing in the rooms below, and when it went down, it left the mud and the sickness behind it, and the community’s own accounts record what it cost them to dig out. The papal government left the ghetto where it was, and the river came back for it every few winters.

He went further with the dead. A decree of the reign ordered that Jewish graves in the burial ground on the Aventine were to carry no names and no inscriptions of any kind, so that the cemetery became a field of blank stones, and the people underneath them could not even be found by their own children. And he went furthest of all with the living children. Two children of a Jew named Foseratino were taken from their family and baptized by force, which under church law made them Christians forever and made it a crime for their parents to keep them.

The ghetto rose over it. In May 1639, the pope’s police went in and put the rising down, and no record survives of how many people were hurt doing it. The two children did not go home. When the war with Parma came at the end of the reign, the ghetto’s taxes were raised to a sum it could not pay, on the understanding that it was a loan, and the loan was never repaid.

Rome was full of people that Urban’s government treated as a resource. The Jews were simply the ones with the fewest ways to complain. The machinery that had processed Centini was busy through the whole reign, and it worked like this. Public execution in Urban’s Rome happened in two places mainly: the Piazza di Ponte, at the city end of the bridge that crosses to Castel Sant’Angelo, where the heads of the executed were displayed on spikes along the parapet so that everyone coming into the Vatican side of the city walked past them, and the Campo de’ Fiori.

The method depended on who you were and what you had done. Nobles were beheaded with a sword if the executioner was competent, and an axe if he was not, and the difference mattered, since a sword in a good hand took the head in one stroke, and an axe in a bad one could take three or four while the man on the block was still alive. Commoners were hanged slowly from a ladder. Heretics were burned alive if they refused to repent, and after strangling if they did.

And for the crimes that the city regarded as beyond ordinary killing, there was the *mazzatello*. The mazzatello was a mallet. The condemned man was made to kneel on the scaffold, and the executioner walked round behind him with a heavy wooden hammer, the sort used for driving stakes, and brought it down on his skull. If the first blow did not do it, there was a second.

When the man was down, the executioner cut his throat to finish him, and then usually quartered the body, and the four quarters were hung in different places around the city as a warning. Romans came to watch. The Confraternity of San Giovanni Decollato, the black-hooded brothers who had walked beside Centini, buried whatever was left afterward in their own cloister. The pope was a member of that confraternity.

It was a Florentine brotherhood, and he was a Florentine, and it was the fashionable thing. They had the privilege, once a year, on the feast of the Beheading of John the Baptist, of choosing one condemned prisoner and setting him free. One. The Tor di Nona itself, where Morandi died and where the condemned spent their last nights, was a medieval tower on the riverbank that had been turned into a prison, and its lower cells were below the level of the Tiber, so that in a wet winter the water came in through the walls.

Prisoners waiting for trial could wait a year or more in the damp, and the fevers that took Morandi took plenty of men who had never predicted anything. The tower was pulled down in the eighteenth century, and an opera house put up on the spot, and there is a theater there still. Against that ordinary, unremarkable level of horror, Urban’s own cruelties have to be measured. Up the hill, meanwhile, the family was putting on operas.

The new palace on the Quirinal, the Palazzo Barberini, had been going up since 1627, on the marble that came off the Colosseum, and by 1632 it had a theater. In the winter of 1632, with Bologna still burying its plague dead and the price of bread in Rome climbing, Cardinal Francesco Barberini staged an opera about the life of St. Alexis, with stage machinery, painted clouds that descended from the ceiling, and a cast of dozens. The Roman nobility came in their carriages.

Three thousand people, one account says, for a single performance. Cardinal Antonio, the younger nephew, kept musicians and singers on his payroll the way other men kept horses, and had a taste for street theater and firework displays and enormous public entertainments that the Barberini paid for. And the city stood around and watched. The pope’s poems were set to music and performed.

The bees were on the curtains outside the palace gates on those nights. The carriages of the guests backed up along the street, and the torches burned, and the Roman poor stood and watched the cardinals go in. Bread in the city that winter was dearer than it had been in living memory. Nobody at the time seems to have put the two facts in the same sentence.

When Urban became pope in 1623, the debt of the Papal State stood at around sixteen million scudi, which was already a burden. By 1635 it was twenty-eight million. By 1640 it had reached thirty-five million. And by then, the interest on that debt alone was consuming more than eighty percent of everything the papal government took in every year.

Four scudi out of every five that came in from the whole of the Papal States went straight out again to the bankers and bondholders, and most of the rest went to the family and the army. The state was for practical purposes bankrupt, and the pope dealt with it the way governments in that condition always have. He taxed. He put new duties on flour, on wine, on meat, on the salt that everybody had to buy and that the government sold as a monopoly, which meant that the salt tax fell hardest on the poorest, since a laborer and a cardinal used about the same amount of salt.

By one count, he introduced more than fifty new taxes over the reign, and each of them was a small thing on its own, a few baiocchi here and there, and together they meant that a Roman family in 1640 was paying the Barberini for the right to eat. Prices went up. The value of the coin went down. And every time a new tax was posted, somebody nailed a verse to Pasquino about the bees.

Rome did protest, in the only way it was allowed to. The city had its own civic government on the Capitoline Hill, a council of the Roman people with conservators and a priori which had almost no power but a great deal of ceremony and the right to petition the pope. Laurie Nussdorfer, who wrote the standard study of that council under Urban, found it drafting one appeal after another against the new taxes through the 1630s and 40s—on flour especially, arguing that the poor of the city could not bear another baiocco on bread. The appeals went up the hill to the Quirinal and came back down with nothing in them.

The council’s own members were many of them holders of the papal bonds that the taxes paid the interest on, which limited how hard they pushed. And when the war came, the same council was made to vote the war taxes itself, so that the pope could say the Roman people had agreed to them. Some of the money went into stone. Urban was a builder of walls in a way no pope had been for a century.

Castel Sant’Angelo was rebuilt, with the Pantheon cannon on its bastions. He put up a fortress called Fort Urbano, at Castelfranco on the frontier of Bologna facing Modena, a huge star-shaped thing that cost more than it ever defended. He built an arsenal at Tivoli, and in the last years of the reign, in a panic that is coming, he threw a new circuit of walls around the Janiculum Hill on the far side of the Tiber—three miles of it, with bastions, in a matter of months, paid for with taxes on everything that came in through the city gates. The walls are still there.

Romans call them the Barberini walls, and the name is not affectionate. In fairness to him—and there has to be some—a few of the things he did in those same years were the things a pope was supposed to do. He founded a college in Rome to train missionary priests from Asia and Africa and the Americas. And he tightened the rules on who could be called a saint, so that no one could be publicly venerated until fifty years after their death and only after a proper examination, which put a stop to a good deal of local invention.

In 1639, he issued a letter forbidding the enslavement of the native peoples of the Americas in any form, under pain of excommunication, and the Portuguese settlers of Brazil rioted against the Jesuits who published it, which suggests it had some teeth. He does not appear to have applied the same thought to Africans, and neither did anyone else in Rome. He was, on paper, a scholar and a reformer. None of it reached the ghetto or the Tor di Nona or the Campo de’ Fiori or the tax on salt.

Behind the walls, the man himself was getting old and afraid in new ways. He had gout badly by the late 1630s, and the attacks laid him up for weeks. The Venetian ambassadors reported a pope who had grown suspicious of his own household, who kept his food tasted, who had night terrors. The eclipses came and went, and each one was a small private siege.

He had outlived Morandi’s prediction and Centini’s wax, and the more of them he outlived, the more certain he seems to have become that the next one would be the true one. His nephews ran the state. He wrote hymns and lost his temper and worried about his soul and the family fortune in roughly equal measure. By every diplomat’s account, the man who had once liked to argue had become a man who could not bear to be told anything.

The newsletter writers felt it. Rome ran on the *menanti*, men who wrote out weekly sheets of news and gossip by hand and sold them by subscription to courts and bankers across Europe, and the pope’s health was the single most valuable item any of them could report. Under Urban, they were watched. A paragraph about a bad night at the Quirinal, if the governor’s police could trace it to a hand, could put that hand in the Tor di Nona for a season, and more than one of them went there.

It did not stop the sheets. It made them more careful about the pope, and more interested in the nephews, who were, as it turned out, the better story. So the man who decided at seventy-three to go to war with a duke over a small town in the marshes was tired, ill, suspicious of his own kitchen, and surrounded by nephews who wanted the town. Castro sat on a spur of volcanic rock in the hills of northern Lazio, above the marshes near Lake Bolsena—a walled town of perhaps a few thousand people, with a cathedral and a palace and not much else.

It had been carved out of the Papal States a century earlier by Pope Paul III as a duchy for his own son, and it had stayed in that family, the Farnese, ever since. Paul III had been a Farnese—in other words, the Barberini of a hundred years before—and the two families understood each other perfectly and could not stand one another. The Duke of Parma in 1639 was Odoardo Farnese, twenty-seven years old, tall, handsome, expensively dressed, married to a Medici, and living so far beyond his means that the interest on his debts had become a topic of conversation in Roman banking houses. The Farnese had borrowed heavily by issuing bonds, the *monti*, against the revenues of Castro, mainly the grain trade, and the bondholders were Roman investors, and a good many of the Roman investors were people close to the Barberini.

In the summer of 1639, Odoardo came to Rome to pay his respects, and by every account, the visit went wrong within days. He would not yield precedence to Taddeo Barberini, whose office of Prefect of Rome entitled him, in the Barberini view, to walk ahead of a mere duke. He was rude to Cardinal Antonio. He was rude, apparently, to everyone except the pope, who was charmed by him and gave him more of his time than the nephews thought wise.

Odoardo went home to Parma and told people what he thought of the pope’s family. And the nephews began to explain to their uncle what they thought of the Duke of Parma. What they did next was clever in the sense that a trap is clever. In 1641, the papal government banned the export of grain from the duchy of Castro.

The grain was where the money came from. Without it, Odoardo could not pay the interest on the monti. And when he defaulted, the bondholders—many of them the Barberini’s own friends—petitioned the pope for redress. And the pope, as feudal overlord of Castro, had every legal right to intervene.

On the 13th of October 1641, papal troops under Taddeo Barberini marched into Castro and took possession. The fortress was strengthened. The Farnese officials were sent home. Odoardo would neither submit nor negotiate, and would not concede that the pope could take a Farnese town.

And on the 13th of January 1642, Urban excommunicated him and declared all his fiefs forfeit to the church. An excommunicated duke with a large army and nothing to lose is a dangerous thing to make, and Urban had just made one on his own border. Odoardo did not wait to be attacked. In September 1642, he rode south out of Parma at the head of about three thousand cavalry—thirty years old, in a plumed hat, excommunicated and enjoying it—through the passes of the Apennines straight into the Papal States.

The papal army that was supposed to stop him was larger on paper, ten thousand men or more, under the two nephews, Taddeo and Cardinal Antonio, neither of whom had ever commanded anything in a fight. The papal army did not stop him. It fell back. Some of it ran.

Odoardo came down through Romagna and Umbria with his horsemen, past Perugia, and by early October he was at Acquapendente, on the road that runs straight to Rome, sixty miles from the gates. The city panicked. Romans who could afford to leave left with their valuables in carts. The bells rang, shops shut, the price of grain jumped.

The pope, who had spent twenty years waiting for the sky to kill him, now found a duke with three thousand cavalry coming down the Via Cassia to do it instead, and he threw everything he had at the walls. The Janiculum fortifications went up in these weeks—three miles of wall and bastion on the hill above the Vatican, thrown together by conscripted labor, paid for by a new tax on food coming through the gates, so that the poor of Rome paid for the wall that was supposed to protect the pope from the consequences of the pope’s own war. The Pantheon cannon were run out onto the bastions of Castel Sant’Angelo. Urban shut himself in the Vatican, and by the ambassadors’ reports was in a state that alternated between fury and collapse.

Odoardo in the event did not come on. His three thousand horsemen were a raiding force, with no guns to take a city, and he had made his point. He sat at Acquapendente while the French ambassador shuttled between him and the pope, and then he turned round and went home to Parma, leaving behind him a swathe of pillaged villages and a Roman government so humiliated that the pasquinades practically wrote themselves. The villages he left behind him are the part of that autumn that gets forgotten.

Three thousand horsemen on the move have to eat, and they eat what they find, and what they found on the road from Parma to Acquapendente was the grain of the pope’s own peasants, stored against the winter. Barns were emptied. Where there was resistance, there was burning. The papal army falling back ahead of the Farnese did much the same to the same villages, from the other direction, since a retreating army is hungry too.

By the time both sides had passed through, the hill towns of Umbria had been stripped twice, and the winter that followed in that part of the Papal States was one of empty granaries and families on the roads. None of it reached the pope’s table. The war did not end there. It got bigger.

Venice, Tuscany, and Modena, who had watched a pope seize a fief by force and did not care to be next, formed a league with Parma in the summer of 1642, and by 1643, all of them were at war with the Papal States. The fighting spread across Romagna and the Ferrara marshes and the hills around Lake Trasimeno. The papal armies were mostly mercenaries—French and Corsican and Swiss companies hired by the month—and the pope could not pay them by the month. And unpaid mercenaries in the seventeenth century behaved exactly as you would expect.

They took what they needed from the villages they were supposed to be defending. They mutinied. They deserted. The Farnese and the League used German companies, and the Germans did the same.

So the countryside of the pope’s own state was eaten by both sides. And the peasants of Romagna, who had no interest in Castro and could not have found it on a map, watched their grain go into the bellies of soldiers who would be dead of fever within the year. That was the other enemy. The lowlands around Ferrara are marsh, and armies that sat in them in summer died in them.

The papal camps in 1643 lost more men to sickness than to the enemy, by a wide margin, and the descriptions of those camps are of men lying in their own filth under canvas, shaking with ague, with nobody paid to bury them. Cardinal Antonio was there in person at one point, and reported back to his uncle that the army could not fight, and was told to fight. The papal army did win once, near Mongiovino in Umbria in September 1643, against a Tuscan force, and Rome had a day of celebration for it, with fireworks paid for by the Barberini, who were good at fireworks. It did not last.

In March 1644, at Lagoscuro on the Po near Ferrara, the papal army under its Barberini generals was beaten badly by the League, and the road to Bologna, the second city of the state, was open. The war was lost. Everybody in Italy knew it. Urban, who had started it to enrich his nephews and punish a rude duke, had spent something in the region of twelve million scudi on it—more than the entire annual revenue of the state, six times over—raised almost entirely by new taxes on the people of Rome, and he now had no army worth the name and three foreign powers on his frontier.

When the news of Lagoscuro reached the Quirinal, the ambassadors reported that the pope took to his bed. He had spent a year shouting at Cardinal Antonio’s letters from the front, demanding attacks that could not be made with men who had not been paid, and now the army he had been shouting at had stopped existing. In Rome, the crowd that had cheered the fireworks for Mongiovino went quiet. And the quiet, the dispatches suggest, unsettled the Barberini more than the shouting had.

The French made the peace. Cardinal Mazarin, who had once been a papal diplomat and knew exactly how to handle Urban, brokered a treaty that was signed at Ferrara on the 31st of March 1644. Castro went back to Odoardo. His fiefs were restored.

The excommunication was lifted. The monti were rescheduled. The pope got nothing—nothing at all except the bill, and an entry in the histories as the man who had made the papacy look ridiculous in front of the whole of Europe by picking a fight with a duke and losing it. Mazarin’s part in it stung more than the rest.

He had been a Barberini man once, a young Italian diplomat whom Cardinal Antonio had pushed forward and Urban had made a cardinal. And now he was the chief minister of France, and he had settled the pope’s war for the pope, on the pope’s enemy’s terms, and sent his compliments. Urban, by the reports, could not bring himself to say Mazarin’s name in the weeks that followed. Old men do not take humiliation well, and this one had spent a lifetime avoiding it.

Urban had been ill through the winter. His gout had turned into something more general. The physicians could not agree what, and he was seventy-six, and he had just signed away a war that had bankrupted his state. The reports say that after the peace he declined visibly, week by week, and never came back.

The dying took about four months, and Rome watched every day of it. The health of a pope was public business, and the diplomats’ dispatches from that spring and summer of 1644 are almost entirely about his body. He had a fever that came and went. The gout had spread from his feet into his hands, and he could not hold a pen.

He was not sleeping. The physicians did what physicians did, which meant they bled him repeatedly, from the arm and from the foot, so that a man already weakened by illness and age was having pints taken out of him on a schedule. And the ambassadors reported each bleeding and each relapse and each rally as if they were reporting the movements of an army. In the streets, the bookmakers took bets on the date.

It had been illegal for fifty years, and it happened every time a pope fell ill. And this time the odds were short. He was frightened in the way he had been frightened his whole life. Only now the thing he had been waiting for was in the room.

The nephews were around him constantly, which was as much about the succession as about affection, since the moment he died, the whole Barberini structure would be exposed to whoever came next. And it was in these last months, according to the tradition that grew up almost at once, that the second commission of theologians was brought in to reassure him one more time that what he had given the family was lawfully theirs to keep. The theologians said yes. He does not seem to have been comforted.

The stories of him asking from the bed whether he had sinned are stories. But the commission was real, and the question it was asked was real. And a man who has to ask that question twice is a man who already knows the answer. He received the last sacraments in the Quirinal Palace.

The Barberini brother, the old Capuchin, was there—of all of them, the one with the least to gain from any of it and the one most often at the bedside. The accounts of the last days that reached the ambassadors are of an old man in great pain, mostly conscious, sometimes lucid enough to give orders and sometimes not, with the physicians still bleeding him almost to the end. He blessed the cardinals who came in. He is supposed to have asked more than once what day it was, and whether the eclipse had passed.

No eclipse was due that summer. It was simply what he had been asking for twenty years, and it was the question that was in him when the words ran out. Urban VIII died on the 29th of July 1644, in the morning, in the Quirinal, seventy-six years old, twenty-one years almost to the week after the Conclave of the Fever had made him pope. And Rome, which had been waiting, did not wait one hour more.

The statue in the courtyard of the Roman College was down by noon. The crowd went up the Capitoline and tried for the Bernini marble, and the guards held them off on the steps. The Barberini palaces had to be guarded. Rioting went on into the evening and for days afterward.

The papal police were thin on the ground, since a papal vacancy meant the ordinary government of the city stopped. The courts closed. The governor’s authority lapsed. And Rome went, for the weeks between one pope and the next, into a condition close to lawlessness, with settlements of old scores and knifings in the alleys every night and nobody to answer to.

Every sede vacante was like that. This one was worse. The dead pope had left a city that hated him and a family that everyone wanted to see fall. The city council on the Capitoline took over the policing, as it did in every vacancy, with a militia of Roman householders who patrolled the streets at night with torches and pikes, and were in practice as likely to settle their own quarrels as to stop anyone else’s.

Nussdorfer counts the killings recorded in those weeks in 1644 and finds them running well above the ordinary rate, which for Rome was already high. Bodies were fished out of the Tiber in the mornings. Nobody was pursuing anybody for it. The courts would open again when there was a pope.

Gigli, who had lived through the whole reign and had not enjoyed it, put down his own summary of the mood, and it comes to this: the taxes, the war, the family. Nobody in the street pretended to mourn. He was a sober, careful man who worked for the city government, and had no reason to exaggerate, and he wrote as if he were recording the weather. Castro fared worse than the Barberini.

Odoardo Farnese died in 1646, and his son quarreled with Innocent as his father had quarreled with Urban, and this time the papacy won. In 1649, a papal army took the town, and Innocent ordered it razed to the ground. The walls were pulled down, and the houses were pulled down, and the cathedral was pulled down, and the people who lived there were sent to live somewhere else. And on the empty ground where the town had stood, they put up a single stone column with three words cut into it: *Qui fu Castro*.

Here was Castro. The war Urban had started over a fief he wanted for his nephews ended five years after his death, with a town of several thousand people wiped off the map of Italy. And the column is still standing in the scrub, on a hill of broken stone where the goats graze. And if you climb up to it, you can find the line of the cathedral floor under the brambles.

Urban’s own monument was finished three years after he died. He had commissioned it from Bernini in 1627, in the fifth year of the reign, when he was fifty-nine and healthy, and Bernini had worked on it on and off for twenty years, so that the pope was able to visit his own tomb and inspect it and suggest changes through most of the time he was alive. It stands in St. Peter’s, to the right of the high altar, opposite the tomb of Paul III, the Farnese pope who had made Castro a duchy—one of those coincidences Rome specializes in.

Urban sits at the top of it in gilded bronze, larger than life, one arm raised in blessing. Below him, on either side of the dark marble sarcophagus, are two white marble women—Charity, with a child at the breast, and Justice, with her sword—both of them looking away. And between them, rising out of the lid of the sarcophagus itself, half hidden in the folds of a bronze shroud, is a skeleton. It is Death.

Bernini gave it a quill pen. The skull is bent over a scroll that hangs down the front of the tomb, and on the scroll, in letters it is in the act of writing, is the name: URBANUS VIII BARBERINUS PONTIFEX MAXIMUS. The bones of the hand are closed around the pen. The pope above is blessing the empty church.

The skeleton below is writing him down. The bees are on the tomb, too—three of them in bronze, crawling across the base of the monument as if they had wandered in from the Pantheon canopy across the way. And they are the last thing most people notice.

And that is where Maffeo Barberini has been since 1647, under his own name, in the building he stripped the Pantheon to defend, with a skeleton that is still, after nearly four hundred years, halfway through spelling it out.