mistress of the vatican.pdf - End Time Deception

Mistress of the Vatican
matters through an obliging, politically connected husband who confided
in her and asked her advice. And of course, the prospective groom
couldn’t be a domineering type whose abrasive personality would clash
with hers. He must be a limp and languid person who would let her
have her way.
As luck would have it, the perfect candidate presented himself as her
son’s body was still cooling in the grave. Olimpia’s uncle Paolo Gualtieri
had married Antonia Pamphili of Rome. The Pamphilis were a family
of the minor nobility with a long tradition of church and government
service. One of them had married the great-granddaughter of Pope Alexander
VI, a Borgia, the one papal family no one liked to trumpet as
ancestors. The family success was crowned in 1604 when Uncle Girolamo
had been made a cardinal, reaping a harvest of wealth and prestige.
Girolamo lived with his widowed brother, Camillo, a papal historian
who had fathered eight children. Two daughters had married honorably;
two others had been honorably stuffed into convents. Two sons
had died young, and two still lived in the Pamphili palazzo. Camillo
and his sons enjoyed the financial benefits that were bestowed on Girolamo
as a prince of the church.
But on August 11, 1610, Cardinal Girolamo Pamphili died at the age
of sixty-six, the unfortunate result, according to Teodoro Amayden, of
having slept in a room that had been recently whitewashed. Perhaps
Camillo, too, inhaled the whitewash fumes, because he died two weeks
after his brother. The income disappeared. Now, less than two years
after the deaths, Camillo’s sons were bereft of funds, living in a crumbling
house, and in dire need of an heiress.
Born on May 6, 1574, thirty-eight-year-old Gianbattista Pamphili
would have been closer in age to twenty-one-year-old Olimpia, but he
was a priest trained as a canon lawyer—an expert in all matters of
church law—and had the title of monsignor. However, his older brother,
Pamphilio, the lay head of the family, was available, and it is unclear
why he was unmarried. Perhaps he had been widowed early in life and
had been reluctant to put his head in the noose again.
It is also possible that he had been a lifelong bachelor, though this
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