mistress of the vatican.pdf - End Time Deception

Eleanor Herman
With the honest Cardinal Cecchini sidelined in the datary, Olimpia
had reaped a fortune selling offices. Word had gotten out and winged
its way upward to the pope. The cardinal nephew in skirts, as they
called her, was reported to have sold the same office seven times, having
poisoned the officeholders to sell it again. A story circulating in Paris
confidently asserted that she had poisoned no fewer than 150 people to
take their benefices and resell them.
The Venetian ambassador Nicolò Sagredo summed up the general
feeling when he wrote his senate, “It is not edifying to Catholicism to
see that all spiritual graces, concessions of the datary, and dignities depend
on her consensus as if the fisherman’s ring was on her finger.” 18
It is possible that Cardinal Astalli-Pamphili helped nudge the pope
to break completely with Olimpia, who, he knew, hated him as a vile
intruder and was plotting some revenge. One day he gave the pope a
gold medal that had been mailed to him anonymously in a packet
full of slander, he said. On one side was a portrait of Olimpia wearing
the papal tiara, with the keys of Saint Peter in her hand. The other side
showed the pope with long hair coifed like a woman, holding in one
hand a spindle and in the other a distaff. The pope was horrified.
He soon learned that numerous such medals had been struck in silver
and gold and were collected throughout the courts of Europe, even in
Rome.
The worst embarrassment was when Nuncio Melzi, the pope’s representative
in Vienna, handed the Holy Roman Emperor a letter from
Innocent chastising him for making peace with the heretics to the
shame of Christendom. The emperor replied bitterly that the real shame
was a pope who “has placed his government in the hands of a woman
about whom all the heretics are laughing.” 19 The emperor then gave the
nuncio a book of unflattering cartoons of Innocent and his sister-in-law,
along with some medals, cast by heretics, showing Olimpia majestically
enthroned and wearing the papal crown, with the pope sitting abjectly
at her feet.
When the nuncio returned to Rome and had his private audience
with Innocent, he gave him the book and the medals and told him of
the emperor’s reply. This “opened the eyes of the pope who, reflecting
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