mistress of the vatican.pdf - End Time Deception

Mistress of the Vatican
loudly, “I marry you to Jesus Christ, Son of the Father Almighty, your
protector. Accept therefore this ring of faith as a sign from the Holy Spirit
that you are called to be the wife of God.” And in this moment it was
believed that the girls’ souls were marked with a spiritual tattoo proclaiming
them to belong to God alone. Then the bishop added, “Forget your
people, and your father’s home.” 1 But this injunction was almost never
obeyed. Until the end of her life, Olimpia and her family would visit her
sisters in the convent parlor, laden with food, wine, and gossip.
The girls stretched themselves out in front of the altar, their lips
touching the cold stone floor. A black cloth was thrown over them, and
lighted candles were placed at their heads and feet, the same ritual as in
contemporary funeral customs. And indeed, to the world these young
nuns were dead.
In ancient Greek legend, the warrior king Agamemnon sacrificed
his adolescent daughter Iphigenia to the gods in return for favorable
winds to take his fleet to Troy. Now, shrouded by the black death cloths,
lay two baroque Iphigenias, sacrificial virgins to Sforza Maidalchini’s
dynastic ambitions.
Watching her sisters marry Jesus and die to the world, Olimpia must
have shuddered and thought, There but for the grace of God go I.
Within a few months of her wedding, Olimpia discovered she was
pregnant. She sailed through the pregnancy and gave birth to a girl she
called Costanza, but Costanza died at only a few months old. The loss
of an infant was a frequent occurrence. Only 1 or 2 percent of women died
in childbirth, while some 30 percent of children died in the first year of
life.
Olimpia was pregnant soon again, and in early 1611 she gave birth to
the long-awaited heir to the Nini fortune, Nino Nini, named after his
grandfather. Perhaps Olimpia, carefully monitoring the health of her son,
was surprised that it was her husband who became sick. Having survived
the perils of childhood disease, most early-seventeenth-century men of
Paolo’s social status lived to be somewhere between fifty-six and sixty. But
at twenty-three, Paolo Nini fell mortally ill. He died on June 6, 1611.
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