mistress of the vatican.pdf - End Time Deception

Eleanor Herman
governments. The agent of the duke of Modena was arrested because in
his newsletter he wrote that the ministers of the tax department had held
a meeting before the papessa—the female pope—where it was decided
that the pagnotta should fall by two ounces. It was a great insult to the
Holy See to call a woman the papessa and to insinuate that Olimpia was
responsible for holding meetings to decide the vital issue of the bread
supply. The worst part of it was that this avvisi was being sent to a foreign
ruler. What messages had been sent out that had not been caught by
the censors? What were heads of state thinking about Innocent?
Olimpia knew that the pope cared a great deal for the dignity of his
office. All popes had to put up with nasty pasquinades, of course; that
came with the office. But most of the pasquinades during Innocent’s
reign were about Olimpia, not the pope. She was the cause of scandal,
the cause of the waning dignity of the papacy. In front of the pope, she
shrugged off the popular hatred, hid a great deal of what was going on,
and presented a smiling face. But deep down she was worried. If it really
came to a contest between Olimpia and the dignity of the papacy,
she was not completely certain which one Innocent would choose.
The pope’s bouts with kidney stones led him to seek improved health in
ways that would avoid encounters with doctors, whom he despised. In
truth, seventeenth-century medical care was often more fatal than the
disease it attempted to treat. The human body can often cure itself of
many life-threatening ailments if given bed rest and hot soup; but the
doctors’ interventions so weakened the body that it simply gave up and
died. Blood was drained out in alarming quantities, and the nutrition
needed for healing was forced either to explode upward or downward
after the doctors’ administration of pukes or purges.
The pope decided that perhaps the only nonviolent way to improve his
health was to improve the air he breathed. He moved to the Quirinal
Palace on one of the Seven Hills of ancient Rome. The palace was also
known as Monte Cavallo, or the Hill of Horses. Two immense sculptural
groups of the Dioscuri, or Horse Tamers, had been unearthed from a
nearby ancient temple and placed in the piazza in front of the palace.
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