Fiammetta Rocco - The Miraculous Fever-Tree - Malaria, Medicine and the Cure that Changed the World

As soon as the Pope died, the seal on the fisherman’s ring that was the emblem of his pontificate would be broken. The new Pope would be given a new seal with his own name. Predictions of Pope Gregory’s death had been made so often that he had often lamented, in the days when he felt better, that his fellow cardinals had scarcely elected him when they began planning the conclave that would select his successor. Now, it seemed, the end really had come. Gone were the badges of his office, the high, pointed, cone-shaped hat, the silken gloves. Gone too were the papal vestments with their strange names handed down through the ages – the flabellum, the falda and the fanon. On his deathbed Christ’s vicar on earth wore a simple cotton shift with a wrap about his shoulders. Beneath it his pale body was only a man’s, and a rotting one at that.

As Ludovisi and the other senior cardinals looked on, together with the Penitentiaries, Giacinto Gigli and the rest of the city waited outside for news. Pope Gregory’s confessor began the sacrament of extreme unction. With holy oil he anointed the pontiff’s eyes, his nose, his mouth, his ears. The palms of the Pope’s hands had been anointed when he became a priest, so the confessor made only the sign of the cross in oil upon the backs of his hands. ‘By this holy unction,’ he prayed, ‘and by His most tender mercy, may the Lord forgive thee whatsoever sin thou hast committed by touch.’ As death drew closer, the priest began the commendation of the soul, calling: ‘Subvenite’ .

In a few moments the secretary of state of the curia would knock at the door with a silver mallet, and call out for the Pope by name. Obtaining no response, he would enter the chamber and approach the bed. With another, smaller, mallet he would touch the Pope upon the forehead. Three times he would call the Pope’s name and tap his cold forehead with his silver mallet. Only then would he pronounce him truly dead.

‘Subvenite,’ prayed the papal confessor once more.

‘Come to his help all ye saints of God. Meet him all ye angels of God. Go forth, O Christian soul.’

It was shortly before ten o’clock at night on 8 July 1623. Pope Gregory’s confessor raised his hand and with the tips of his fingers touched his head, his heart, his left side and his right. In his diary that night, Gigli wrote: ‘In Nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.’

On the night Pope Gregory died, only thirty-four members of the Sacred College of Cardinals that would elect his successor were in Rome. The other twenty or so were scattered all over the continent, some as far away as Madrid or the Baltic Sea. For a new Pope to be elected, the cardinals had no choice but to go to Rome. But the decision to travel there was not to be taken lightly. Crossing the continent, whether by sea or coach, or even on foot, was difficult and often dangerous. And Rome in the heat of summer, with the incidence of malaria rising virtually every day, was no place to be. Yet if a cardinal did not go, his vote would not be counted. He would not be able to influence the election, and as a result a Pope from a rival faction might take the throne. Knowing that Pope Gregory himself had died of the marsh fever, the cardinals who made their way towards the Holy City in the summer of 1623 did so with great trepidation. Drawing close, most of them would have elected to spend their last night well beyond the disoccupato , where the country air was still clear and there was little danger of breathing in the noxious gases that were believed to cause the fever. On the final day of the journey, each man made sure to rise early. The coach windows were clamped shut, and the cardinals were careful to wrap scarves about their faces, while high above the coachman would whip his horses through the approaches to the city.

That year there was trouble even before the conclave began. The interval between the death of the Pope and the election of his successor – the sede vacante , the vacant throne – had long been a time of release, a civic exhalation after a period of fierce papal control. By tradition, the jails were emptied. When he was caporione , it was Gigli’s job to carry the key to the jails and oversee the prisoners’ liberation. During the sede vacante the populace could say whatever it wanted, and the people did, many of them writing what they thought of the authorities on little pieces of paper which they then stuck on a statue of the limbless Pasquino, which is why he later came to be known as the ‘talking statue’.

The papal interregnum was never so tumultuous as it was following Pope Gregory’s death in 1623, when Rome erupted in an orgy of violence. It was such, Gigli recorded, as no one could remember ever having witnessed.

Not a day passed without many brawls, murders and waylayings. Men and women were often found killed in various places, many being without heads, while not a few were picked up in their plight, who had been thrown into the Tiber. Many were the houses broken into at night and sadly rifled. Doors were thrown down, women violated – some were murdered and others ravished; so also many young girls were dishonoured and carried off.

As for the sbirri [the papal guards], who tried to make arrests, some were killed outright, and others grievously maimed and wounded. The chief of the Trastevere region was stabbed as he went at night on the rounds of his beat, and other chiefs of the regions were many times in danger of their lives. Many of these outrages and acts of insolence were done by the soldiers who were in Rome as guards of the various lords and princes; as happened especially with those whom the Cardinal of Savoy had brought for his guard, at whose hands were killed several sbirri who had taken into custody a comrade of theirs. In short, from day to day, did the evil grow so much, that had the making of a new Pope been deferred as long as it once seemed likely, through the dissensions of the cardinals, there was ground to apprehend many other strange and most grievous inconveniences.

Eleven days after Pope Gregory’s death, when the novena of funeral services was finally ended, fifty-five cardinals entered into the conclave to elect his successor. Three of them – Campori, a veteran of earlier conclaves, Galamina and Serra – arrived on the very evening the conclave doors were closed. Not one of them wanted to stay in the city longer than was absolutely necessary, and as it turned out they were right. None of the French cardinals had managed to reach Rome at all, though that did not stop the envoys of the French King, Louis XIII, from seeking to influence the outcome of the election both from within and, when the papal palace doors were sealed, from without.

From the moment the doors of the Vatican were bricked up until a new Pope was elected, the cardinals lived in the papal palace, voting twice a day, morning and evening, in an effort to reach a nearly unanimous agreement on a candidate. The rest of the time, in between the obligatory attendances at mass, the cardinals lobbied and intrigued against each other, the older generation trying to hold their own against the younger men, the Spanish fighting to gain the upper hand against those supported by France or by Germany. ‘We know nothing of their sacred procedures,’ wrote Gigli primly. ‘Nor should we.’

Of course, this wasn’t strictly true. Gigli could not help but be overcome with curiosity about what was actually happening behind those sealed-up doors. By the main stove in the Sistine Chapel, he tells us, a stack of grass mixed with crushed charcoal lay ready. If, when the ballots were counted at the end of the day, no agreement had been reached, a small fire was lit. The scrutineers bound up the slips of voting paper, wet them and then burned them in the stove. The charcoal and the damp paper turned the smoke from the burning grass a dark grey, a sign to the people of Rome who stood watching that the throne of St Peter was not yet filled. Only when a new Pope was finally elected was the fire lit with grass alone, save for the last bundle of voting slips, this time dry. The smoke that curled up the chimney would be almost completely white.