mistress of the vatican.pdf - End Time Deception

Mistress of the Vatican
Then there was the drought. For the first eight months of 1650 it
barely rained at all, which prompted fears of another famine. Every day
the pilgrims trudged to the four churches in a thick cloud of dust. An
epidemic of some sort began to cull its victims. Gigli wrote, “Many
people grew sick and many of the pilgrims and workers and even noble
and rich people died suddenly.” 10
Pilgrims who came to Rome for the jubilee of 1650 had a long list of
things to see—festive celebrations, Roman ruins, medieval churches,
the beautiful new Saint Peter’s Basilica, and most fascinating of all, the
pope’s sister-in-law, who, everyone knew, ran the Vatican.
Those who lived outside Rome had a hard time picturing this woman
who ruled a pope, a church, and a nation. Some thought she had achieved
her influence through her beauty. She must be drop-dead gorgeous, a
Helen of Troy whose face mesmerized even the most dried-up old
churchmen. Others, knowing she was fifty-nine, an age bordering on
decrepitude, thought perhaps she was more like Cleopatra, no classic
beauty but redolent of charm and seduction. After all, there were many
such women at the courts of Europe who were still desirable despite
having left the freshness of youth far behind. Yet others, who heard
she was neither beautiful nor fascinating, believed her influence was
the result of witchcraft. She was in league with the devil, they said, to
ruin God’s church. She must be inherently evil, a very monster of iniquity
trafficking with Satan himself.
When they saw Olimpia, all three groups of pilgrims must have been
grievously disappointed. For what they saw was a short, heavy woman
in late middle age whose face once had been handsome but now sported
a double chin and sagging jowls, a graying bourgeois matron in plain
black widow’s weeds. She was neither radiantly beautiful, nor scintillatingly
seductive, nor manifestly malevolent.
This mistress of the Vatican was a woman no one would ever look at
twice, had they not known who she was. Here was a woman who could
pass unnoticed in a crowd of colorful Italian nobles, bold prostitutes,
pompous clerics, prosperous merchants, and ragged beggars. Of all the
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