When I was researching the pages of «Malta 1565» devoted to the defence of Fort Saint Michael, I had to dig deep into its commander, fray Pietro del Monte: an Italian nobleman, already a veteran of the 1522 Siege of Rhodes, and nephew of Pope Julius III. A note in the margin of my research, about his uncle the Pope, made me jump out of my chair, and it turned into a rabbit hole of vice and perversion I only climbed out of several hours later: that Pope, according to the true history documented by many sources, had another — let's call him, ahem, ahem — "nephew," considerably less honourable than fray Pietro.
That other one was called Innocenzo, and his meteoric rise from the streets of Piacenza, where he was a poor, illiterate beggar of about twelve, to the very top of the College of Cardinals, remains, almost five hundred years later, one of the most talked-about, spiciest and most uncomfortable episodes in the entire long history of the papacy and its two hundred and sixty-six popes.
A poor beggar on the streets of Piacenza
Around 1544, a teenager with no known surname and an uncertain name barely survived, drifting around Piacenza. Son of a beggar woman and an unknown father, he entered — nobody quite knows how — as a servant, a «valero», a cross between a lackey and a boy-of-all-work, in the household of the nobleman Baldovino Ciocchi del Monte, governor of the city. The boy soon caught the morbid attention (a rather inappropriate one for a man of fifty-seven) of Baldovino's brother, Cardinal Giovanni Maria Ciocchi del Monte, who fell in love with the lad, wanted him entirely for himself and, once he had him in his household — that is, in the cardinal's own palace — put him in charge of something as trivial and transparently made-up as looking after his pet monkey. A very small capuchin monkey, the same kind that the famous corsair commander of the Order of Saint John, fray Mathurin Lescaut de Romegas, always carried on his shoulder.
On top of that, he secured his beloved a title — purely decorative but very well paid — as provost of the cathedral of Arezzo, in Tuscany. In Rome, some years later, once the former illiterate beggar Innocenzo had been made a cardinal, they still called him, for that very reason, «il Cardinale della Scimmia»: the monkey cardinal.
From monkey-keeper to cardinal within months
In February 1550, to Innocenzo's great good fortune, his sugar daddy, Cardinal Ciocchi del Monte, was elected Pope and took the name Julius III. Before the year was out, Julius had already made his protégé a cardinal. The boy — whose real age was never clear, though chroniclers of the time place him between thirteen and sixteen — took the name Innocenzo. Two years later, faced with the vibrant, furious protests of the College of Cardinals over his young age, his utter ineptitude in matters of state, his ignorance and his illegitimate birth, Julius III solved the problem in his own way: rather than dismissing or removing him, he simply had his brother Baldovino formally adopt the boy and decreed, without any further procedure or a shred of proof, that he had been born in 1532. A birth year invented by papal decree, purely to close down an awkward argument and allow him to say he had already turned eighteen.
From then on, Innocenzo took up residence right by the Pope's own apartments in the Vatican, and Julius III showered him with honours: commendatory abbot of Saint-Michel du Tréport in Normandy and of San Zenone in Verona, as well as San Saba, Grottaferrata and Frascati. And, above all, the title of Cardinal Nephew, which made him — at least on paper — responsible for the entire papal correspondence. By the way, the word "nepotism" — when someone abuses their power to shamelessly favour a relative and promote them over more capable people — comes precisely from this.
However, since the boy had only recently, and badly, learned to read and write, and was plainly incapable of carrying out that diplomatic office, Julius III went as far as inventing a brand-new post tailored to him: that of "private secretary" -a perfect description for the situation-, a post that would, in time, evolve into today's Vatican Secretariat of State: so, would you believe it, the most powerful office in the modern Roman Curia was born, in part, out of the need to disguise the fact that the Pope's boyfriend could not even manage a diplomatic desk whose job basically consisted of reading, sorting and answering the many letters that reached the Pope.
The scandal that swept across half of Europe
None of this went unnoticed in the courts of Europe, from Madrid to Paris, taking in London, Vienna and Venice along the way. The Venetian ambassador Matteo Dandolo, for instance, wrote to his government that the Pope took the boy to his bedchamber and into his own bed as though he were his son or grandson. The Augustinian friar Onofrio Panvinio, a chronicler of the time, described Julius III as a man excessively given over to vice and to the pleasures of a life of luxury, as well as to his uncontrolled, unbridled libido.
Around Rome ran the cruel joke that young Innocenzo had been made a cardinal for knowing so well how to attend to all the "needs" of a monkey, and the French poet Joachim du Bellay, a direct witness from his own residence in Rome, recorded in verse his own astonishment, disgust and revulsion at a scandal that was undermining the Vatican's sanctity and credibility in the eyes of Catholics across all Europe. Cardinals as different from one another as the Englishman Reginald Pole and Gian Pietro Carafa — the future Pope Paul IV, scourge of heretics — agreed in formally and personally warning Julius III that this was a scandalous, intolerable abuse of papal power. The Pope turned a deaf ear.
After Julius III: a cardinal off the leash
Julius III's protection died with him, in 1555. With no Pope left to shield him, Innocenzo became a serious problem for his successors. In 1559, while travelling to the conclave that would elect Pius IV, he stabbed a father and son to death in Nocera Umbra for, it was said, having spoken ill of him. Which, in my humble opinion, translated into plain English, means those two men were probably able to call him, to his face, that ugly word we're all thinking of, but which we can't say out loud here. The one that in Spanish starts with M, in English with F, in French with P, in Italian with R, in German with S, and in Portuguese with B.
Over this double murder, the beggar-cardinal spent a good stretch imprisoned in the Castel Sant'Angelo and was then confined to the abbey of Montecassino, until the intervention of Cosimo I de' Medici, Duke of Florence, secured his freedom in exchange for a fine of 100,000 scudi and a "voluntary" exile to Tivoli. In 1567, Innocenzo was back in court, this time accused of raping two women near Siena; he survived that accusation too, unscathed, though with a fresh exile, first to Montecassino and then to the north of Italy, to Bergamo. He died in Rome in 1577, buried within hours under an unmarked stone slab in the Ciocchi del Monte family chapel: nobody was even willing to say a prayer for him.
The other nephew: the one who wore the habit with honour and exalted his faith
And this is where the true story crosses paths again with my own book, «Malta 1565». Because the Ciocchi del Monte family also had, besides the sadly notorious Innocenzo, another relative who made the family name into something genuinely worth remembering: that man was fray Pietro del Monte, nephew (a genuine one this time, not adopted) of Julius III, a veteran of the great 1522 Battle of Rhodes against the Ottoman Muslims and commander of Fort Saint Michael during the Islamic Great Siege of 1565, who three years later would go on to become the 50th Grand Master of the Order of Saint John.
Two nephews, two fates: one buried — or rather, hidden away — with no name and not a single prayer said over him; the other buried with full honours in the magnificent marble floor of the Co-Cathedral of Saint John in Malta, wrapped in the magistral mantle of Christendom's oldest hospitaller order. History, when you let it speak plainly, without detours and without the half-truths of the politically correct so fashionable nowadays, rarely needs anyone to dress it up.
Sources and references
- Francis A. Burkle-Young and Michael Leopoldo Doerrer, The Life of Cardinal Innocenzo del Monte: A Scandal in Scarlet (Edwin Mellen Press, 1997) — the standard academic biography of Innocenzo del Monte.
- Salvador Miranda, The Cardinals of the Holy Roman Church — Biographical Dictionary, "Consistory of May 30, 1550" (Florida International University).
- P. Messina, "Del Monte, Innocenzo," Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 38 (Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, Rome, 1990).
- David S. Matrecano, Malta 1565 · The Great Siege of Malta (tactical layout of Senglea and Fort Saint Michael, under the command of fray Pietro del Monte).
There is no fiction in this article
Everything recounted here — the beggar teenager, Pope Julius III falling in love, the boy's adoption by the Pope's own brother, the granting of a cardinal's hat to a teenage boy using a fictitious birth year decreed by the Pope himself, the popular nicknames and the slurs aimed at his sexual orientation, the double murder at Nocera Umbra, the rape accusations, the various exiles — is all documented in primary sources of the period and in the full academic biography cited above. There is not a single novelistic liberty in this article: reality, in this case, had already far outstripped fiction and needed no help at all.
Ibiza, August 2026
