Christina Queen of Sweden: The Restless Life of a European Eccentric by Buckley Veronica

Author:Buckley, Veronica
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

Christina and Azzolino swiftly became important to each other for reasons apart from their mutual love. She became politically useful to him, and he, in turn, gave her something to do. Azzolino belonged to a new group of cardinals who wanted to strengthen the papacy and hold it to a politically neutral course in relation to the great Catholic states. For decades, successive popes had depended on either France or Spain for support in their foreign policy. In doing so, they had lost much of their temporal authority, already greatly weakened in the years following the Protestant Reformation. The Westphalian peace treaties had undermined it further – thanks, in part, to Christina herself. Now, with France and Spain at war, neutrality was imperative. The cardinals also wanted to reform the feudal-style administration of the papal states. They wanted to see the kind of modernization which other European countries, including Sweden, had introduced in recent decades, with themselves in the role of senior civil servants. This would put an end to the time-honoured practice of papal nepotism – the position of Papal Nephew was formal and powerful – and it was on this platform that they had come to prominence in the recent election of Fabio Chigi, himself an opponent of nepotism, as Pope Alexander VII.

That conclave had markedly increased Azzolino’s prestige, but also his reputation for intrigue. It had fallen to him to draw the lottery determining which ‘cells’ the cardinals would live in during the deliberations, and the conclave’s official diarist recorded a ‘curious’ circumstance: the Chigi supporters’ cells adjoined one another. Though a small group, they managed to hold the balance, repaying French and Spanish vetos with an intransigence of their own: in round after round, they returned blank sheets, voting for nemini – no one – before finally ensuring Chigi’s election, as the Venetian ambassador remarked, ‘at the spry age of 56’.

Their independence from both French and Spanish influence had earned the new group the dashing name of lo Squadrone Volante – the Flying Squadron – swift, energetic, unfixed to any faction. A contemporary described them as ‘vivacious of spirit, acute in judgement, brave of heart’, and all the more inclined to work for the best possible candidate, since as cardinals they had all been too recently elevated to be candidates themselves for the papal throne.7 At 32, Azzolino was the youngest of them, their undoubted leader nonetheless. The Squadrone was a small group, only eleven out of the Sacred College’s 70 cardinals. Most came from fairly modest families, and their sudden success at the recent conclave was not enough to maintain them as a force for the longer term. Other groups had looked to a Papal Nephew, or the Pope himself, or some French or Spanish dignitary, to draw them together and give them a collective public identity. The Squadrone needed a patron of their own.

Within a matter of weeks, Christina had stepped into the breach. She had known of the Squadrone, and even known some of its members, before her arrival in Rome.

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