1635_ Cannon Law - Eric Flint [7]
Only two years before he had made it plain—loudly, publicly and with the crashing lack of tact that was practically the man's signature—that that view did not apply only to the Church in Spain. Two hundred years of being the only power in Spain whose writ ran untrammeled in every one of the kingdoms of Spain—even His Most Catholic Majesty had limits to his powers outside Aragon and Castile—two hundred years of inquisitorial power unmatched anywhere outside of the papal states, and the Church in Spain clearly believed it was time for the Roman dog to stop wagging the Spanish tail.
Unlike England a century before, they had the guns and ships and tercios to give their opinion weight, not least by reason of owning enough of northern and southern Italy that they had the Papal States in a strategic vise that they could screw closed at any time. What stopped them was a need, for the time being and only grudgingly recognized in Madrid, to maintain at least a passing semblance of obedience to Rome.
Not that that had stopped Borja from loudly condemning the See of Rome's inaction against Gustavus Adolphus, failure to burn Galileo like the heretic he plainly was, and willingness to appoint a near-Protestant like the American Mazzare to the purple.
The criticism of the failure to act against the Swede had been the only one Urban VIII had chosen to answer. He had, with some accuracy, pleaded poverty. A military undertaking that had strained the resources of the entire arrayed might of the house of Habsburg, with all their imperial dominions and an annual treasure fleet from the Americas was beyond the pope's means to put in any more than the proverbial widow's mite. Two million widow's mites, to be exact, but still a pittance next to the cost sunk in failing to stop Gustavus Adolphus from reversing every success of Catholic arms of the last fifteen years.
Still, it had been grounds for Borja to accuse the pope of being, in so many words, insufficiently Catholic. He had nearly been ordered out of Rome for that, and then his performance after the Galileo affair—which had, in truth, been a whitewash but it was tactless to say so—had got him slung out.
And now he was back. He had at least had the good grace to confine himself, before today, to sulking quietly in his villa on the outskirts of Rome, but he had not wasted his time back in Spain. If Vitelleschi's reports were right—and seldom were the Jesuit father general's formidable spymasters not in possession of accurate information—then Borja was here in the van of a small horde of prelates and cardinals, each of whom was coming to Rome to demonstrate how much more Catholic than Pope Urban VIII, né Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, he actually was. And he had stopped off in Naples on the way here and apparently met with the duke of Osuna. What deal those two had done was anyone's guess. None of the channels of spycraft Barberini could access had been able to divine what had happened behind that closed door. But it was sure to be a devils' bargain for someone.
The Spanish prelates, meanwhile, had been arriving in Rome every few days for weeks now, all direct from Spain, and as soon as they had washed off the dust of travel had paid an immediate visit to that villa outside Rome, followed by long hours in closed sessions with their compatriots all over Rome. Barberini had engaged his own staff in imagining what they might be up to, in more detail than the obvious "no good," as had his brother Francesco Barberini. The results varied from the uncomfortable to the downright alarming. At the very least, among them they held enough offices and concomitant rights to intervene and interfere that they