mistress of the vatican.pdf - End Time Deception

Eleanor Herman
would be destroyed. And whenever Vesuvius rumbled, many Neapolitans
remembered the egg and crossed themselves.
When traveling in the city, even going to church, the Pamphilis
would have been accompanied by an armed guard. Kidnappers could
capture them and hold them for ransom or simply rob and murder
them in broad daylight. Going out at night was a form of suicide. Once
dusk fell, everyone but the criminals stayed inside and bolted their
doors. A dinner party or ball naturally included an invitation to spend
the night and return home in the morning.
Bristling with thousands of Spanish soldiers, its harbor stuffed with
Spanish warships, Naples posed a constant low-level threat to the sovereignty
of the Papal States to the north. The pope had only the tiniest
standing army, relying on a sudden rush of volunteers or the hiring of
mercenaries if invasion threatened. The papal navy consisted of a few
ships manned by slaves and convicts. His Holiness relied on the goodwill
of Spain, with its unlimited firepower, to protect him from invasion.
However, if Spain decided to invade the Papal States, it could have
easily rolled across the entire country with very little opposition.
But it was unlikely that Spain would do such a thing. For eight hundred
years the Spaniards had waged a nonstop crusade against Muslims
on Spanish soil, resulting in a militant Catholicism. Spaniards considered
themselves to be more devoutly Catholic than any other nation in
Europe, certainly more Catholic than the self-absorbed French or the
rollicking Italians. In the late sixteenth century King Philip II said that
religion was too important to be left in the hands of the pope.
His Excellency Gianbattista Pamphili and his staff would be working
on a variety of issues with the Spanish viceroy, the personal representative
of the king of Spain. Grain and other foodstuffs were shipped from Naples
to the Papal States, and vice versa, depending on the harvests, and
were taxed. The Vatican owned property in the kingdom of Naples—
churches, monasteries, and farms—from which it received revenues. As a
Catholic nation, Naples owed the Papal States a sum of money every
year—which was negotiable, depending on war, famine, and plague.
Financial matters aside, there were numerous church issues that required
attention. Requests for marriage annulments and dispensations
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