Aristocratic Power in the Spanish Monarchy by Weber Samuel;

Author:Weber, Samuel; [Weber, Samuel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2023-02-25T00:00:00+00:00

Federico Borromeo’s Career in the Court of Alexander VII

One of the fortune-seekers who hewed to the ideology of disinterested service was Federico Borromeo. Since arriving in Rome in 1635, he had failed to make significant headway. Having struggled to climb the first rungs of the Roman career ladder under Urban VIII, his career stalled under Innocent X and Donna Olimpia, who instead promoted his toughest competitor, his cousin Giberto from the main line of the Borromeo family.65 Much of his bad luck was down to the lack of financial support from his family, which was necessary in the early steps of a curial career when the expenditures of an office regularly exceeded the salary that was paid out to officeholders.66 The Pamphili rated his chances of sustaining the costs of a nunciature—the ticket to the cardinalate—so low, they parked him as a local administrator of Montalto, a town in the Marches, for the better part of five years. Such were his financial dire straits, he complained, that his debts “are a ladder for my rivals and a liability for myself, for in Rome it is now a maxim that I will not be able to recover.”67 As he wrote to his family, he had resigned himself to “having a cushy time watching the merry-go-round turn until the next scene change.”68

When the scene did change with Chigi’s advent, Federico turned his lackluster career into an asset. Sensing the austere turn underway, he embraced the posture of the disinterested papal servant, saddled with debt and suffering from intermittent fever attacks and hemorrhoids,69 who deserved a promotion but had been ignored by the powers that be for shunning their corrupt ways. (In reality, his letters indicate that his refusal to resort to venality was due to entitlement rather than genuine anti-corruption. When his brothers suggested he bribe the papal family to secure a remunerative office, he responded: “It is unbecoming of a house of the quality of ours that there should be rumors that we acquired through money and interested interventions what we are owed anyway.”70) Under Chigi, Federico’s greatest shortcoming—his slow advancement over the previous two decades—was construed as a sign of his willingness to defer gratification and put in long years of hard graft on missions far away from Rome before earning a spot in the more prestigious nunciatures.71

Chigi actively assisted Borromeo in revamping his image along these lines.72 In an audience he had with Innocent X shortly after Chigi’s appointment as secretary of state, the pope spun Borromeo’s tenaciousness in the face of adversity as “disinterested conduct,” and argued that his “good services” in the provincial administration of the Papal States cut him out for the diplomatic service Chigi was relaunching.73 As the pope saw it, Federico was exactly what the papacy needed after Westphalia: a “subject who, thanks to his distinguished birth and other qualities, restored the reputation” of the pope’s diplomatic network. Although Chigi first appointed him to the inquisition of Malta, he promised him “a more suitable and important post” as soon as the first nunciature became vacant.

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