mistress of the vatican.pdf - End Time Deception

Mistress of the Vatican
would be presented to the Roman nuncio, who would look them over,
write an opinion, and forward them to the Vatican. There was always
the pesky problem of criminal clerics—a priest who robbed someone in
Naples, for instance. Civil authorities were not permitted to pass judgment
on ordained priests, who would be handed over to the nuncio’s
men and taken to Rome for trial.
Heresy was to be trampled, and literature on the Index of Forbidden
Books was to be rooted out and publicly burned. Then there were issues
related to greed and ambition. Neapolitans pushed for honors and pensions
from the Holy See, and Roman nobles pushed for honors and pensions
from the kingdom of Naples. Often, trades were made to keep
everyone happy.
The papal courier service between Rome and Naples was efficient,
the trip taking only three days on a fast horse. Gianbattista would have
been required to write a weekly diplomatic dispatch that ran some fifteen
or twenty pages. His reports would have been coded to prevent
spies from understanding them. The easiest way to encode letters was to
use numbers to represent the names of people and places, so that Gianbattista’s
Italian prose would have had numbers interspersed throughout.
However, in highly sensitive cases every letter of every word was represented
by a number. Back in Rome, the papal office of ciphers would
decode them and deliver them to the pope. Similarly, the pope’s instructions
would arrive in Naples encoded, and Gianbattista’s secretary
would decode them.
As nuncio, Gianbattista would have been expected to set up his own
espionage network, bribing servants in the viceroy’s house or employees
in his office. Information could always be bought for the right price,
and the corruption of Naples made the corruption of Rome seem downright
saintly in comparison.
In addition to the under-the-table bags of gold that stank of corruption,
the papal nuncio was expected to give over-the-table gifts that
smelled of ambergris—fragrant petrified whale vomit—and musk, the
aromatic glandular secretion of the musk deer. The most popular gifts
for government officials, local noblemen, and their female relatives were
perfumed gloves. Seventeenth-century gloves were of supple leather,
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