Pope Innocent X
Pope Innocent X | |
|---|---|
| File:Pope Innocent X by Velazquez.jpg | |
| Installed | September 15, 1644 |
| Term ended | January 7, 1655 |
| Predecessor | Urban VIII |
| Successor | Alexander VII |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Giovanni Battista Pamphili May 6, 1574 |
| Died | January 7, 1655 |
Innocent X born Giovanni Battista Pamphili (May 6, 1574 – January 5, 1655) was Pope from 1644 to 1655. Born in Rome of a family from Gubbio in Umbria who had come to Rome during the pontificate of Innocent VIII, he graduated from the Collegio Romano and followed a conventional cursus honorum, following his uncle Girolamo Pamphili as auditor of the Rota, and like him, attaining the dignity of cardinal, in 1629. Trained as a lawyer, a member of the congregations of the Council of Trent and the Roman Inquisition, he succeeded Urban VIII on September 15, 1644, as one of the most politically shrewd pontiffs of the era, who much increased the temporal power of the Vatican.
Gregory XV sent him as nuncio to the court of Naples. Urban VIII sent him to accompany his nephew, Francesco Barberini, whom he had accredited as nuncio, first in France and then in Spain, where Pamphili had the firsthand opportunities of forming an intense animosity towards Barberini. In reward of his labors, Giovanni Battista was made nuncio apostolic at the court of Philip IV of Spain.
The conclave for the election of a successor to Urban VIII was long and stormy, lasting from August 9 to September 15, 1644. The French faction objected to the Spanish candidate, as an enemy of Jules Cardinal Mazarin— who guided French policy— but found Pamphili an acceptable compromise, though he had served as legate to Spain. Mazarin himself, bearing the French veto of Cardinal Pamphili, arrived too late, and the election was accomplished [1].
Soon after his accession, Innocent initiated legal action against the Barberini for misappropriation of public funds, an easily demonstrated crime in 17th-century courts anywhere. Antonio and Francesco Barberini fled to Paris, where they found a powerful protector in Mazarin. Innocent confiscated their property, and on February 19, 1646, issued a bull ordaining that all cardinals who might leave the Papal States for six months without express papal permission, should be deprived of their benefices and eventually of their cardinalate itself. The French parliament declared the papal ordinance void in France, but Innocent did not yield until Mazarin prepared to send troops to Italy. Henceforth the papal policy towards France became more friendly, and somewhat later the Barberini were rehabilitated.
The death of Pope Urban VIII is said to have been hastened by chagrin at the result of the First War of Castro, a war he had undertaken against Odoardo Farnese, the Duke of Parma. Hostilities between the papacy and the Duchy of Parma resumed in 1649, and forces loyal to Pope Innocent X destroyed the city of Castro on September 2, 1649.
Innocent objected to the conclusion of the Peace of Westphalia, against which his nuncio in his name vainly protested, and against which he issued the bull Zelo Domus Dei in November 1648, which was ignored by the European Powers. The most important of his doctrinal decisions was his condemnation of five disputed Jansenist propositions, May 31, 1653.
During the Civil War in England and Ireland, Innocent strongly supported the independent Confederate Ireland, over the objections of Mazarin and the Queen Mother, Henrietta Maria, exiled in Paris. Innocent sent as nuncio extraordinary to Ireland, Giovanni Battista Rinuccini, archbishop of Fermo, who arrived at Kilkenny with a large quantity of arms and military supplies including twenty thousand pounds of gunpowder with a very large sum of money. At Kilkenny Rinuccini was received with great honours, asserting in his Latin declaration that the object of his mission was to sustain the King, but above all to rescue from pains and penalties the Catholic people of Ireland in securing the free and public exercise of the Catholic religion, and the restoration of the churches and church property. But in the end Oliver Cromwell restored Ireland to the Parliamentarin side, with great bloodshed, and Rinuccini returned to Rome in 1649, after four fruitless years.
The following year Innocent celebrated a Jubilee. He embellished Rome with inlaid floors and bas-reliefs in Saint Peter's, erected Bernini's Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi in Piazza Navona, the Pamphili stronghold in Rome, and ordered the palace corresponding to the one by Michelangelo at the Campidoglio.
Olympia Maidalchina, who had been married to his late brother, was accounted Innocent's mistress because her influence with him in matters of promotion and politics were so complete, a state of affairs alluded to in the Encyclopaedia Britannia 9th edition (1880), "Throughout his reign the influence exercised over him by Olympia Maidalchina, his deceased brother's wife, was very great, and such as to give rise to gross scandal, for which, however, there appears to have been no adequate ground... The avarice of his female counsellor gave to his reign a tone of oppression and sordid greed which probably it would not otherwise have shown, for personally he was not without noble and reforming impulses." A lively biography of her, Vita de Donna Olimpia Maidalchina (1666), Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition (1911) dismissed as "gossipy and untrustworthy".
A measure of the rivalry between two arriviste papal families, the Barberini and the Pamphili, can be judged from Guido Reni's painting of the Archangel Michael, trampling Satan (illustration, right) in which the features of the Cardinal Giambattista Pamphili are immediately recognized. The less-than-subtle political statement still hangs in a side chapel of the Capuchin friars' Church of the Conception (Sta Maria della Concezione) in Rome. During the papacy of Urban VIII (Maffeo Barberini, 1568-1644), whose princely rival among the College of Cardinals was Giovanni Battista Pamphili. Antonio Barberini, the pope's brother, was a Cardinal who had begun his career with the Capuchin brothers. About 1635, at the height of the Thirty Years War between Protestants and Catholics in Germany, in which the Papacy was intricately involved, Cardinal Antonio commissioned a painting of the combative archangel Michael, trampling Satan (the source of heresy and error) for the church of his old Order.
The legend that the high-living patrician painter Guido Reni, whose personal dash was at least as great as his brilliant drawing and brushwork, had been insulted by rumors circulated, he thought, by Cardinal Pamphili, serves to place on the painter's shoulders the vengeful act that could not have been overlooked— or discouraged— by his Barberini patron. Though when a few years later Pamphili was raised to the Papacy, Antonio Barberini fled to France on the embezzlement charges that have been mentioned, the Capuchins held fast to their chapel altarpiece.
Innocent X died January 5, 1655, and was succeeded by Alexander VII.