mistress of the vatican.pdf - End Time Deception

Eleanor Herman
feet. Only half finished at the pope’s death, it was being sculpted by the
incomparable Gian Lorenzo Bernini.
While the funeral solemnities, rich with music and incense, took
place inside the church, in the streets of Rome violence broke out against
the dead pope and his greedy family. Papa Gabella, they called Urban;
Pope Tax. He had placed sixty-three new taxes on the Roman populace
to support his nephews, and despite the increased taxation, at his death
the Vatican treasury was nineteen million scudi in the red. Angry mobs
raced around Rome with hammers, disfiguring as many Barberini bees
as they could reach on fountains, walls, and bridges. Crowds waving
hammers tried to hack to pieces the statue of Urban in front of the civic
government building of the Campidoglio, but soldiers with guns and
cannon successfully defended it.
Ferocious pasquinades were placed all over the city. Giacinto Gigli
noted sadly, “The people vented against the dead pope and the Barberinis
with injurious words, their pens writing every evil, and there
were an infinite number of compositions published, some in Latin, some
in Italian, some in prose and some in verse, so that I believe there was
never anything like it. . . . If Christians treat the head of their own church
this way, what will the Turks and Heretics do? . . . Many other verses
were against the Cardinals, making fun of the customs, vices, inclinations,
and defects of each one, especially those who aspired to be pope.” 1
For centuries, the vacant See had been a time of anarchy in Rome.
Those wanting to settle an old score would wait for years if necessary to
carry out the deed after the pope died, when the police were hopelessly
overwhelmed with crime. Every morning bodies, many headless, appeared
on the streets or floating down the Tiber.
Vacant See violence was exacerbated by the fact that upon a pope’s
death, prisoners were let out of jail in imitation of Pontius Pilate’s freeing
Barabas at the time of Jesus’ crucifixion. Sometimes debtors didn’t
want to be released, knowing that their creditors were waiting just outside
the prison door ready to beat them. The jailers would try to smoke
the reluctant debtors out, accidentally suffocating some of them.
On the day of the pope’s death, Giacinto Gigli, serving a stint as one
of Rome’s fourteen caporioni—a kind of city councilman—went into
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