mistress of the vatican.pdf - End Time Deception

Mistress of the Vatican
skirmishes of the carriages, the insulting epigram contests, and Olimpia’s
never-performed Carnival comedy. Yet not all was victory; the
princess began to see signs of defeat very close to home.
The bloom was off the bud in terms of her marriage. After two years
with Camillo, the thrill of the forbidden love affair had gone, and the
steamy sexual passions had burned themselves out. Now, looking across
the breakfast table, the princess realized that she was married to a dolt.
Cardinal Pallavicino put it diplomatically when he described Camillo as
“a man very much inferior to the mediocrity of others, while his wife
was far above the mediocrity of other women.” 4
Using his wife’s money, Camillo designed improvements to her gardens
and collected statues. He spent an inordinate amount of time trying
to give the Pamphili family an ancient noble lineage, instead of the unimpressive
descent from the fifteenth-century Pamphilis of the Umbrian
backwater of Gubbio. The legendary king of Rome in the sixth century
b.c. was called Numa Pompilio. In writing his history of the family, Camillo
fudged the name to Numa Pamphilio and claimed direct descent.
He was terribly proud of his genealogical accomplishment and didn’t
seem to notice that people—including his wife—were laughing.
Olimpia was an avid collector of relics. Catholics believed that the body
parts of saints retain the essence of holiness that can perform miracles
or at least bring good luck. Saints’ bones, blood, hair, skin, teeth, and
even clothing and household items were treasured as miracle-working
totems, encased in gold and crystal and studded with diamonds.
The royal family of Spain was fortunate to possess entire saintly cadavers,
which, if a member of the dynasty became gravely ill, would be
put into the sickbed. Sometimes the royal four-poster became a charnel
house of moldering corpses, with the bright eyes of a feverish prince or
princess peering out from beneath them. Oddly, the miraculous corpses
sometimes affected a cure. Or perhaps, if that experience didn’t kill the
invalid, nothing would.
In the Dark and Middle Ages, merchants in the Byzantine Empire,
hearing of the European thirst for relics, were seen in crumbling cem-
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