Regime Change in Papal Rome

Abstract

On June 7, 1560, Cardinals Carlo and Alfonso Carafa were arrested and imprisoned alongside Carlo’s brother Giovanni, Duke of Paliano and other members of the late pope’s regime. Paul IV, who had died less than a year previously, had not been a popular pope, but his successor’s strike against his family – men who had been instrumental in Pius IV’s own election – shocked the city and Sacred College. Within a year, Carlo and Giovanni were dead and Alfonso disgraced – victims of a ruthless political and judicial process. This chapter sets the Carafa’s story in the context of the problems all sixteenth-century popes faced at the start of their reigns. The pope, an absolute monarch chosen by God through the cardinals, could do in theory as he pleased. Yet, in practice, he was constrained by having been elevated from below and by his inability to guarantee the succession. Pius IV’s decision to attack his predecessor’s family shows the threat a bad succession posed to those around an old pope and the lengths to which they needed to go to indemnify themselves from its effects. Pius, like other popes, tried various strategies to protect his family at his demise but was not entirely successful. The Carafa case – and its aftermath – thus reveal something important about regime change in papal Rome. Those who were to be its losers had to work hard to anticipate what might happen when they fell, and even its winners had no time to savor their victory before they had to do the same.