Paluzzo Paluzzi Altieri

Paluzzo Paluzzi Altieri governed the papal states for six years for a pope who was not related to him until he arranged to be. Clement X was elected in 1670 at seventy-nine, after a conclave of four months, and had no nephew of an age to serve as cardinal-nephew - the office that combined the papacy's political direction with its patronage. Paluzzo Paluzzi degli Albertoni was already a cardinal, and the problem was solved by marrying his own nephew to the pope's grandniece, whereupon he took the Altieri name and arms and the position with them. He ran the administration, the diplomacy and the finances, and did it with more competence than the arrangement suggests: he handled the negotiations over the Polish succession and the subsidies to Jan Sobieski against the Ottomans, and the fortification programme along the coast. He was also thoroughly resented, accumulated a great deal for his family, and was blamed for the shortages and taxation of the period, so that when Clement X died in 1676 the Roman crowd looted his palace. His successor Innocent XI, elected on a reform platform, stripped him of the office and abolished the post of cardinal-nephew in practice, and in 1692 it was formally suppressed by the bull Romanum decet pontificem. He spent his last years without influence. The Altieri library and the family palace in Rome are largely his. The bull that ended the cardinal-nephew system had been drafted decades earlier and repeatedly shelved; the reaction to his tenure is what finally carried it. He was also Prefect of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith and took a genuine interest in the missions. His nephew's descendants held the Altieri name and estates into the twentieth century. He died in Rome in 1698.

• Lived: 1623 CE – 1698 CE
• Nationality: Italian
• Roles: religious, politician