They had provided for weapons, respectable attire, and even written missives intended for the guards. It remained only to foresee what the man charged with the first blow would do when standing face to face with the Pope. Upon this vital point, the preparations of Benedetto Accolti fell far short of his promises. Within the Vatican, the enterprise ground to a halt. Pius IV passed by; no man struck him down. The conspirators who were to alter the course of the world returned to their lodgings, where their first act was to fall into bitter recriminations.
The affair might well have ended in this farcical retreat. It found its way into the prisons of Rome solely because one of the participants, Giangiacomo Pelliccione, hastened to speak. In December 1564, he who had perhaps dreamed of the bounties of a new reign now demanded of the prevailing order the price of his betrayal.
A Future Foretold
Accolti was a man of letters who made a profession of astrology. The son of a cardinal, he had traveled widely and frequented circles wherein prohibited or contentious religious treatises circulated freely. His interrogations evoke Geneva, Venice, and Bologna, clandestine loans of volumes, whispered conversations, and prophecies. Through them emerges a man of vast reading, but one who claimed above all to possess knowledge denied to other men: that the order of the world was on the eve of absolute upheaval.
He proclaimed the advent of a holy pontiff, an angelic pope, under whose shepherd’s crook the divided Churches would reunite and the schisms of Christendom would cease. Yet when pressed regarding the identity of this savior, his years, or his dwelling place, Accolti’s answers grew evasive. He could point to no living man; he nonetheless held the advent to be an absolute certainty. The tangible world was commanded to yield to a spiritual dominion whose very address remained unknown.
Around him gathered, most notably, Count Antonio da Canossa, Taddeo Manfredi, Pelliccione, his nephew Pietro, and Prospero de’ Pittori. The archival records do not ascribe to all of them an equal knowledge of the plot. Personal ties, intellectual curiosity, millenarian yearnings, and the pursuit of advancement mingle throughout their depositions. One claimed to have awaited a miracle, another a divine revelation; the inquisitors, however, sought a pact to murder.
According to the testimony recorded from Canossa, Accolti had spoken of a spectacular ordeal: before an assembly of theologians, he would step into a great blaze and emerge unscathed. This divine proof was to silence all dispute. Yet the trial by fire never came to pass. The design shifted toward a papal audience, and the promised miracle gave way to a far more perilous question: what was to be done if Pius IV refused to acknowledge the revelation?
Accolti reportedly answered that such an obstinate refusal would prove he was not the true pope. Thenceforth, to strike him down would no longer be an assault upon the Vicar of Christ, but the slaying of a private adversary of the Lord. A mere turn of phrase had dissolved the sacred taboo before any dagger could extinguish the man.
Penetrating the Palace
The judicial summary of the inquest details sharpened, concealed daggers, liveries designed to facilitate entry, and prepared missives intended for the various guards and municipal magistrates. These scrolls were to explain that the Pope had not been slain, but merely the Cardinal de’ Medici, and that a true pontiff was already among them. Certain letters even promised broad domains to those officers whose neutrality was to be bought.
The accused had thus prepared far more than a physical approach. According to the bill of indictment, they had also crafted the opening rhetoric intended to render regicide acceptable. Once blood was shed, parchment sheets were to hold every man in his place and persuade the soldiers that their own interest lay in remaining motionless.
They entered the Vatican during a session of the Signature. Accolti was to draw near under the pretext of presenting a petition. The trial summary records two conflicting accounts of the failure: that the press of the crowd prevented him from reaching the Pontiff; or that his companions observed his countenance turn pale and his courage abandon him entirely. In his own narrative, Canossa insists upon this latter impression. The man whose fervent rhetoric had seduced the others could summon, before the reality of the deed, no shred of authority.
Upon their return, mutual recriminations erupted. Accolti did not immediately abandon the venture; fresh entreaties were set on foot to secure a private audience. Yet this was also the hour when each conspirator could gauge the mortal peril of remaining bound to the rest. The shared secret that had united them had turned into a mutual death warrant, and the first to cast it aside might hope to escape the fate reserved for the last.
Pelliccione outran them all.
The Answers Demanded by Rome
The interrogation commenced at Tor di Nona on December 14, 1564, and continued after the prisoners were transferred to the Castel Sant’Angelo. That no murder had been consummated did not mitigate the gravity of the cause. The target was simultaneously a temporal prince and the Supreme Pontiff; a suspected attempt upon his person provoked an exhaustive search for accomplices, noble protectors, and the doctrines responsible for the heresy.
The examiners pressed Accolti hard regarding his reading. He named Reformed authors, described the noble houses where he had consulted their works, and confessed to having perused chronicles of ancient conspiracies. The judges demanded names, dates, and locations; he constantly retreated to his vision of a preserved Church, of the righteous people soon to arise, and of the promised angelic pope.
Then the strappado was applied. The transcript bears witness to the sudden fracture in his discourse: he begs to be lowered from the cord, attributes his designs to the influence of books, and claims to recall forgotten conversations. This passage forbids us from treating these depositions as the deliberate utterances of a tranquil mind. Bodily torment shaped the investigation; the explanations wrung forth bear its unmistakable imprint.
Before the Curia, the Pope portrayed the conspiracy as having been hatched in favor of Calvin, while firmly dismissing the notion that foreign princes had taken part. Yet this royal interpretation fails to resolve the contradictions of the docket. Accolti awaited an all-encompassing spiritual restoration; the diverse library he had absorbed permitted his accusers to ascribe to him the most discordant motives. A Calvinist plot, a vendetta of families dispossessed by the ruling house, or the ecstatic delusion of a handful of visionaries: each explanation found currency, yet none rendered entirely transparent what these men had truly believed and intended.
Meanwhile, the guards at the Vatican were doubled. Access to the antechambers was restricted to cardinals and accredited ambassadors. The enterprise that had failed to alter the governance of the world had already altered the manner in which its sovereign could be approached.
Canossa’s Final Testament
On January 10, 1565, the Ferrarese envoy Francesco Priorato visited the prisoners. He recorded their words and transmitted them to his master. His dispatch judges Accolti severely; it also relates Canossa’s claim that he had attempted to warn the Pope prior to his arrest, but had been unable to obtain an audience. Thus, in this line of defense, the very palace reproached for being too porous had proved as formidable an obstacle to a loyal warning as it had been an open gate to treason.
Canossa subsequently amplified his defense in a treatise composed for his lineage. He denied ever having consented to the shedding of blood. He claimed to have followed Accolti solely to witness a divine manifestation, recognizing his own folly the moment he saw the leader tremble. Under his pen, the treasonous billets were reduced to political banter; the concealed daggers became the sole responsibility of his companions. He pleaded that his naive credulity be distinguished from a murderous will.
This memorial is a desperate apologia, not an acquittal wrested from oblivion. Yet it reveals a condemned man contesting his sentence even while piously submitting to the religious necessity of his death. He emphasizes that no overt act of violence was ever executed, and bitterly reproaches the temporal power for reducing the Vicar of Christ to an earthly despot forced to maintain his sway by terror.
Pelliccione was granted a full pardon. Pietro Accolti and Prospero were condemned to the galleys in perpetuity. Benedetto Accolti, Canossa, and Manfredi were sentenced to death.
On January 27, following the customary religious preparations, they were paraded through the streets of Rome on low carts drawn by horses, and brought back to the Capitol. The execution was conducted with such ferocity that the register of the Confraternity of the Beheaded, charged with attending the condemned, recorded the spectacle as utterly horrific. Their remains were subsequently gathered and committed to the earth.
The holy pontiff prophesied by Accolti never appeared. The three dead men left behind depositions whose irreconcilable contradictions persist to this day: an aborted regicide, promises of heavenly wonders, confessions torn from the rack, and an eloquent defense that saved no one. Rome was able to close the docket. She was never able to impose a single, coherent truth upon their words.