Francesco Mascambruni was only a small cog in the machinery of the Holy See, but a very ingenious cog. In order to earn some extra money from his modest church salary, he started ... forging papal bulls. On a massive scale and with original signatures!
Mascambruni was born in 1609 in the town of Macerates. As a young man he came to Rome and began working as a copyist with his relative - Giovanni Camilla Mascambruni, a consistorial attorney. In 1641, after completing his legal studies, he found employment at the office of Cardinal Giovanni Battista Pamphilli.
When his employer was elected to the Chair of Peter as Innocent X, the modest copyist's career took off. Thanks to the protection of the Pope's sister-in-law - Olympia Maidalchini Pamphilli, he was appointed canon of the famous basilicas of Our Lady Major and Saint Peter. Three years after the election of Pamphili, he became a subdate of the Apostolic Camera, an office dealing with the administration of the property of the Papal State and the issuing of papal documents.
Innocent X was very surprised to learn about the causes in which Francesco Mascambruni had drawn him into. Sculpture by Alessandro Algardi (photo Ricardo André Frantz, license CC BY-SA 3.0).
A Peculiar Dispensation
The canon's fall came unexpectedly, like a bolt from the blue. At the beginning of 1652, at the seat of the Secretariat of State, in front of the pope's right hand, monsignore Chigi, an enraged Jesuit appeared, Father Luigi Brandano - the special envoy of the Kingdom of Portugal to the Holy See. In his indignant tone he recalled that the pope had issued a scandalous dispensation for a Portuguese nobleman, Count Villafranca, for a wedding with a wealthy lady.
There would be nothing strange and disrespectful in the whole affair if the woman did not turn out to be ... a young and beautiful boy . Both the priest administering the sacrament, the Count and the "bride" were imprisoned by the Holy Inquisition. Even more distasteful was the fact that the count allocated as much as 40,000 gold for the papal indulgence, which transferred the consideration of the case from the inquisitors to the local ordinary, related to the sodomite.
When Rome was having fun during the jubilee carnival, the pope was struggling with quite a scandal ...
Both Cardinal Chigi and Pope Innocent X listened eagerly to history. They immediately ordered an internal inquiry into the Roman Curia. The audit brought unexpected results. In the datary's office, in the department dealing with the formation of the diocese and the distribution of benefices, counterfeit papal bulls were found. Their author was a certain Giuseppe Brignardelli, but the client turned out to be Francesco Mascambruni.
The scandal of the century
Bull of Pope Innocent X. This one is (probably?) True. There was not much.
The wife of the scribe Brignardelli confessed that a few days earlier the canon had brought 13,000 scuds for the service he had rendered to finance the escape. A search of the subdate's apartments revealed that the clergyman had immeasurable luxuries.
He kept in his rooms not only purses filled with gold, but also wonderful sets of silverware, upholstery and other gifts. Investigators also found 70 counterfeit bulls awaiting shipment .
It was found that Mascambruni wrote summaries of a document in the header of a roll of parchment and presented it to the Pope for signature. Then he cut off the headline and wrote a fair copy with a completely different content than before. For example, he edited consent to same-sex relationships.
Finally, he attached a lead seal on a red ribbon and sent the bull through the chancellery to the appropriate branch of the nunciature where his henchmen worked. This network covered the whole of Europe and the proof of the authenticity of the documents was in fact the real signature of the Pope.
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How do the church scammers end up?
One month after the investigation, Mascambruni was imprisoned in the infamous Tore di Nona jail. During the questioning, the accused confessed that he did all this out of envy towards Cardinal Camill Astalli-Pamphilli, a favorite of the Pope and Chigi's secretary of state. He stated that he felt humiliated because it was not he who was appointed the first functionary of the Papal States after the Pope.
Innocent X regarded the canon's actions as high treason. After a two-month trial in which 11,000 people were interviewed , was sentenced to death. The intercession of Princess Rossano - Olympia Aldobrandini, and the casuistry of the lawyers did not help. It was only thanks to the efforts of Cardinal Pamphilli that the Pope allowed Francesco to be beheaded and not have to suffer agony.
Castle of St. Angelo. Here the unfortunate counterfeiter has died.
On April 14, 1652, Francesco Mascambruni was deprived of his priestly ordination and then gagged and taken to the place of execution - the Castel Sant'Angelo. During confession to members of the Society of Mercy, he confessed his sins, including embezzlement of money belonging to Olympia Pamphilli, which raised him to the top, and falsification of privileges for the collegiate church in Fermo. At dawn the next day, he was decapitated. His head was sewn to a dead body and exposed to the public.
Upset and paralyzed by these events, the Pope began to show arrogance towards his surroundings. He unexpectedly and severely humiliated his majordomo and butler, and rebuked Cardinal Astalli-Pamphili and Virgilie Spadę, governor of the Holy See.
Full of suspicion, he began to distance himself from his family, servants and clergy. Suffering from gout and kidney stones, he died two years after the accidents described. He went away lonely and poor, thanks to his sister-in-law, who had appropriated the treasures and valuables of the Church in time. This is how perhaps not the first, but the loudest VatiLeakes scandal in the history of the modern Church ended.