"Follower IV"

Before he was elected to the Holy See, Pope Alexander VI of the Borgia family had bribed the cardinals.

Monasteries were originally built in vast, sparsely populated places. The monks not only had to clear forests and fell trees, but also engage in farming and handicrafts. Life was extremely dull, with virtually no entertainment.

Later, monasteries began accepting gifts from kings and lords. They not only engaged in agriculture, but could also brew wine, and served as schools, courts, and centers of various privileges. Peasant rebels and pirates often attacked monasteries. After the Reformation in the sixteenth century, monasteries throughout England and Scandinavia were shut down, and much land was liberated.

Sfogliatella was a shell-shaped Italian pastry. It looked very much like a lobster tail and was filled with plenty of cream. This pastry originated in a monastery. In the seventeenth century, a pastry chef from Naples obtained the original recipe and began selling it in his shop.

The food sent by Caffè Florian included it.

Among all grains, people in the Middle Ages considered wheat the foremost of them all, the most nutritious and the most expensive. The bread eaten by nobles was made from refined flour, while lower-class people could only eat rough, dry, dark bread full of bran.

During famine, the poor used chestnuts, dried bean pods, acorns, and ferns in place of grain.

Regardless of status or occasion, oats, rye, barley, and buckwheat were sometimes boiled into thin porridge or milk porridge to drink. For bishops accustomed to eating roasted eel, it was truly hard to swallow.

The problem was that this was what the cardinals could eat while the Sistine Chapel was holding its secret conclave to elect a pope.

For these wealthy bishops, fasting meant it was time to stop eating red meat and