mistress of the vatican.pdf - End Time Deception

Mistress of the Vatican
aging the increasing family wealth. And Innocent’s decision must have
made Camillo hate his mother even more.
But Innocent did not reward Olimpia to the exclusion of her three
children. Her eldest daughter, Maria, now twenty-five, had married the
marquess Andrea Giustiniani in 1640. During the conclave Giustiniani’s
uncle had had the good grace to die and leave him his immense
wealth. The pope gave Giustiniani the title of prince of Bassano, and
Maria became a princess. Innocent also made him the castellan of Castel
Sant’Angelo, an honorific post that brought a good income.
At seventeen, Olimpia’s younger daughter, Costanza, was unmarried.
Two promising candidates immediately made offers for her hand.
The handsome prince of Caserta, twenty-three, seemed a perfect match,
but the thirty-one-year-old Niccolò Ludovisi, who had placed two wives
in the grave and was casting about for a third, was the most titled man
in Italy. He was the prince of Piombino and Venosa, the duke of Sora
and Arce, the marquess of Populonia and Vignola, the count of Conza,
the signor of Elba and Montecristo, and a grandee of Spain. Some of his
titles descended from his great-uncle Pope Gregory XV and others
from his dead wives.
Though he dragged such impressive titles in his wake, Prince Ludovisi
offered the decided disadvantage of being obscenely fat, so fat
that Roman gossip speculated as to whether he was in any position to
have children. Looking at his slender, handsome bachelor opponent in
the race to marry the pope’s niece, Ludovisi was “debased and humiliated
and oppressed,” said one diplomat. 6 But in the end, titles won out
over looks as they usually did.
The dowry documents were signed in October. The pope gave Camillo
20,000 scudi to give Costanza as her dowry, a pitiful sum for a
pope’s niece, who usually fetched 100,000 scudi. But Prince Ludoviso
accepted eagerly; the position of pope’s nephew, even a nephew by marriage,
almost always guaranteed immense political power. On December
21, Costanza married the fat prince in a grand ceremony in the
Sistine Chapel presided over by the pope himself.
The choice of the ardently pro-Spanish, anti-French groom had dangerous
international implications. The Venetian ambassador to Rome,
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