Imprimatur

by Rita Monaldi;Francesco Sorti

  The few letters in cipher were all accompanied by their decoded version. I noted with surprise, however, that the only one which I had translated—the first and most important of all—was not thus accompanied. It was as though someone, in view of the extreme gravity of the contents, had arranged for the disappearance of the deciphered version... Moreover, the letter was not in its proper place, far from the packet of letters which contained the other missives.

  Despite the difficulties, I succeeded at long last in reconstructing an extraordinary story, which no historian had yet brought to light.

  The motive for the citizens of Orange wishing to come under the papal flag was as simple as it was troubling. William of Orange had accumulated a mountain of debt to Innocent XI; and the subjects of Orange, who had already had to disburse a great deal of money to the papacy, thought that they could best resolve their problems by directly offering their own annexation to the state of the Church: "Here in the Kingdom," writes Monsignor Cenci, "it is quite widely believed that the Prince of Orange still owes the previous pontificate large sums, in payment whereof he believes he can offer possession of a State from which he can gain little capital."

  Precisely for that reason, however, not all the subjects of Orange were in agreement: "In the Past, we have already given too much Money to the Church!" protested Monsieur de Saint-Clement, former Treasurer of the Principality.

  In Rome, however, Beaucastel's proposal was coldly turned down. The Secretary of State, Cardinal Rubini, and the nephew of the new

  Pope, Cardinal Ottoboni, ordered Cenci to reject the embarrass­ing offer. It could not be otherwise: the new Pope knew absolutely nothing about such debts. It was, moreover, out of the question that the glorious Pope Innocent XI might have lent money to a heretic prince...

  I was deeply shocked. The letters found in the Secret Archives of the Vatican confirmed what Dulcibeni had revealed to the young apprentice: William of Orange had been in debt to Innocent XI. Not only that: if the Prince of Orange did not pay up, that would result in the seizure of his personal property. Indeed, the debt had become so high that William's possessions and his subjects considered sponta­neously donating themselves!

  I could not, however, remain content with this. I had to find con­firmation of the declarations of the subjects of Orange. I therefore needed to clarify my ideas about William: where did he obtain the money to finance his warlike undertakings? And who had financed the invasion of England?

  All the histories of the Glorious Revolution, as the coup d'etat whereby the Prince of Orange grabbed the throne of England is now called, sing from the same hymnal: William is good, William is strong, William is so idealistic and disinterested that he does not even want to become King!

  If we are to believe the historians, the valiant William seems to have lived on air: but who on earth had given him, since his youth, the wherewithal to fight and to defeat the armies of Louis XIV? Someone must have found him the money to pay for the munitions, the mercenaries (who in those days accounted for the greater part of all armies), the cannons and a few generals worthy of the name.

  All the European monarchs then bogged down in wars were be­set by the same problems of finding money with which to finance them. The Prince of Orange, however, had an advantage: if there was one city in which money circulated in the seventeenth cen­tury—a great deal of money—it was Amsterdam, where, not by chance, the banks of Jewish moneylenders flourished. The capital of the United Provinces was the richest financial market in Europe, just as Cloridia, and later the other guests, told the apprentice of the Donzello.

  I consulted a few good books on economic history and discovered that, in the days of William of Orange, a good many of the businessmen in Amsterdam were Italian. The city was full of names like Tensini, Verrazzano, Balbi, Quingetti, and then there were the Burlamacchi and the Calandrini who were already present in Antwerp (almost all of whom were mentioned in the apprentice's tale, first by Cloridia, then by Cristofano). They were Genoese, Florentine, Venetian, all merchants and bankers, some also agents of Italian Principalities and Republics. The most enterprising had succeeded in penetrating the closed circle of the Amsterdam aristocracy. Others were well placed in the lucrative but perilous slave trade: such was the case of Francesco Feroni.

  The most interesting case, however, was that of the Bartolotti, from Bologna: originally humble brewers, then merchants, and, in the end, the most prosperous of financiers. They had intermarried with a Dutch family until all trace of their original Italian blood was lost. In fact, the Protestant Bartolotti had in the space of a few decades become wealthy enough to be able to finance the House of Orange, lending money in quantity, first to William's grandfather, then to the Prince himself. The loans were sometimes secured against mortgages on lands in Holland and Germany.

  Money against land: according to Dulcibeni, the Odescalchi had entered into an identical pact with the House of Orange. An interest­ing coincidence.

  For the time being, I had learned enough about the Italian mer­chants and financiers of the House of Orange. It was time to pass on to the Odescalchi, and to get their papers to talk.

  I spent months and months, I no longer recall how many, in the archives of Palazzo Odescalchi and the Rome State Archives, with only the help of one young assistant, both of us tormented by the cold and the dust, all day long with our heads bent over papers. We combed through all the papers of Innocent XI, in search of anything that could lead us to William of Orange: letters, contracts, rescripts, reports, memoranda, diaries, ledgers. All to no avail.

  Much time had passed since the start of my research, and I had the feeling that I had run into the sands. I began to toy with the idea of giving up: until the thought came to me that Dulcibeni had spoken of Venice, saying that all the money for Holland had been sent from there. And in Venice, there was a branch of the Odescalchi concern: it was there that I must seek the way through to my goal.

  From the will of Carlo Odescalchi, Benedetto's elder brother, I learned that the property of the family had always remained commune et indivisa between the two: in other words, what belonged to the one belonged to the other. That was why the Pope seemed so poor on pa­per. Only by examining his brother's accounts was I able to discover how much he really possessed.

  Carlo Odescalchi was in fact the fulcrum of the family's economic activity: he administered the family's considerable possessions in Lombardy; he also directed from Milan the branch in Venice, which was managed by two procurators. I therefore sought the two books containing the Inventory of Property referred to in Carlo's will. These could have resolved the problem. If a list of debtors were annexed to them, William of Orange would have appeared among them. Strange­ly enough, however, there was no trace of any such inventory.

  I then took a look at Carlo's private ledgers, and at last found what I sought. In the heavy vellum-bound volumes kept by the brother of the Blessed Innocent XI until his death, and today held by the State Archives of Rome, there emerged trading and transactions on a co­lossal scale: millions and millions of scudi. A small proportion of the operations concerned commercial transactions: revenue from excise duties and rents. Then came what interested me: hundreds of finan­cial operations, largely carried out from Venice by two procurators, Cernezzi and Rezzonico, who received commissions for these trans­actions. The blood in my temples throbbed violently when I saw that most of these operations were directed towards Holland. I wondered how the matter had never yet come to light; an archivist explained to me that these two ledgers had for centuries lain forgotten in the cellars of Palazzo Odescalchi and had only recently been sold to the State Archives of Rome. No one had yet looked into them.

  It was not difficult to get to the bottom of the matter. Between 1660 and 1671, Carlo Odescalchi had ordered payments in various currencies from Venice to Holland totalling 153,000 scudi: a sum al­most equal to the entire, gigantic annual outgoings of the ecclesiasti­cal state (173,000 scudi) at the time when Benedetto was elected
pope.

  Within the space of nine years, between 1660 and 1669, the Odescalchi sent a good 22,000 scudi to the financier Jan Deutz, founder and proprietor of one of the principal Dutch banks. The Deutz family were literally a piece of Holland, not only for the vast wealth which they had accumulated, but the government posts which they occupied at all levels, and their links of kinship and marriage with the most prominent members of the country's ruling class. Jan Deutz's brother-in-law had been the Grand Pensioner Jan de Witt, preceptor and mentor of the young William III. Jan Deutz the Younger, the banker's son and partner, was a member of the Amsterdam city council from 1692 until 1719; Deutz's daughters and granddaughters married burgomasters, generals, merchants and bankers.

  That was only the beginning: between June and December 1669, a further 6000 scudi were sent by the Odescalchi to a company of which Guillelmo Bartolotti, one of William of Orange's financiers, was a partner. That was the decisive proof: the Odescalchi sent money to the Bartolotti, and they lent it to William. Thus, the money passed from the coffers of the Odescalchi to those of the House of Orange.

  The more I knocked, the more doors opened up to me. Between November 1660 and October 1665, the Venetian procurators of the Odescalchi sent another 22,000 scudi to a certain Jean Neufville. Now, Neufville was certainly no minor figure in William's entou­rage; his daughter Barbara married Hiob de Wildt, who served first as Secretary of the Admiralty at Amsterdam and later as Admiral- General, appointed by William himself. The de Wildts had, moreover, always had ties with the House of Orange; Hiob's grandfather, Gillis de Wildt, had been appointed to the Haarlem city council by Prince Maurice of Orange. Hiob de Wildt, however, gathered the finance necessary for the invasion of England in 1688 and, after William as­cended to the English throne in 1688, acted as his personal repre­sentative in Holland.

  Finally, in October 1665, a small sum was also sent by the Odescalchi's procurators to the company of Daniel and Jan Baptista Hochepied, the first of whom was a member of the Council of Amsterdam as well as Chairman of the East India Company: the commercial and financial powerhouse of Protestant Holland.

  So it was true. Dulcibeni had invented nothing: the Dutch secretly financed by the Odescalchi were precisely those whom the Jansenist had finally revealed to the young apprentice. This tied in with one important detail: in order to leave no traces, the money was sent to friends of the House of Orange by the two Venetian proxies of the Odescalchi, Cernezzi and Rezzonico. Sometimes Carlo Odescalchi noted in his ledgers that such and such an operation was to be made in the name of Cernezzi and Rezzonico, but the money was his; and thus, his brother's too.

  Finally, I also found loans to the slaver Francesco Feroni: 24,000 scudi in ten years, from 1661 to 1671: who knows how much those loans may have earned? That would explain the Odescalchi's willing­ness to accept Feroni's claims on Dulcibeni's daughter.

  Not only that: the Odescalchi had also lent money to the Genoese Grillo and Lomellini, holders of the Spanish royal charter for the traf­fic in slaves, and in their turn friends and financiers of Feroni. Since these documents, too, have never been studied by historians, I shall indicate where they are to be found (Archivio di Stato di Roma, Fondo Odescalchi, XXIII, A (1), p. 216. Gf. also XXXII E (3), (8)).

  I checked how many scudi were sent by the Odescalchi to Hol­land and have drawn up a graph of these operations:

  The money was certainly used to finance wars. That is confirmed by the dates: in 1665, for instance, when payments reached their maximum of 43,964 scudi, Holland went to war with England.

  My work would have been considerably easier if I had been able to compare Carlo Odescalchi's ledgers with his commercial correspondence. Strangely, however, the letters from 1650 until 1680, which must give the names of debtors in Holland, are nowhere to be found: they are neither in the Rome State Archives nor in the Archives of Palazzo Odescalchi, the only two places holding the family's docu­ments where these may be consulted.

  Nor is it the first time that there have been strange disappear­ances in this affair. Louis XIV had a high-ranking spy in his pay in Rome: Cardinal Cybo, a close collaborator of Innocent XI. Cybo passed the French a most precious piece of information: the Vatican Secretary of State Lorenzo Casoni was in secret contact with the Prince of Orange.

  Whether true or false, at the end of the eighteenth century, un­known hands spirited away the volumes of Casoni's correspondence preserved in the Vatican.

  Even the saddest and most embarrassing details of my two old friends' typescript have turned out to be true. It was not possible, I had at first thought, that Innocent XI and his family should have disposed of Cloridia as their own chattel, going so far as to cede her to Feroni, like common slave merchants.

  After consulting a number of well-documented papers on the subject, however, I was compelled to revise my ideas. Like many patrician families, the Odescalchi family kept slaves as a matter of course. Livio Odescalchi, the Pontiff's nephew, for example, was the master of fifteen-year-old Ali, a native of Smyrna. And the Blessed Innocent XI possessed Selim, a nine-year-old Moorish boy. Nor was that all.

  In 1887, the Archivist Emeritus Giuseppe Bertolotti published in an obscure specialist periodical, the Rivista di Disciplina Carceraria (.Review of Prison Discipline), a detailed study on slavery in the Papal State. From this emerged a surprising picture of the Blessed Inno­cent, which is certainly not to be found in any of his biographies.

  All the popes, down to and beyond the baroque age, made use of slaves acquired or captured in war, either on the pontifical galleys or for private purposes. But the contracts signed by Innocent XI in regard to slaves were by far the most cruel, observed Bertolotti, who was disgusted by the "slaver's contracts in human flesh" personally subscribed to by the Pontiff.

  After years of inhuman labour, the galley slaves, by now incapable of working any longer, begged to be freed. To ransom them, Pope In­nocent claimed the poor savings which, year after year, these wretched slaves had somehow scraped together. Thus, Salem Ali from Alexan­dria, suffering from a disease of the eyes and declared unfit for work by the doctors, had to pay 200 scudi into the papal coffers in order to be freed from the chains of the papal galleys. Ali Mustafa, from Constantinople, acquired from the Maltese galleys for 50 scudi and suffering from "incapacity owing to pains and sciatica" had to pay 300 scudi into the Vatican treasury. Mamut Abdi from Toccado, sixty years old, of which twenty-two had been spent in slavery, had to part with 100 scudi. Mamut Amurat, from the Black Sea, Sixty-five years old and in poor health, could afford only 80 scudi.

  Those without money were made to wait until death resolved the problem. Meanwhile, they were thrown into prison, where the doc­tors found themselves having to cope with poor bodies destroyed by overwork and hardships, horrible ulcers and unhealed wounds dec­ades old.

  Upset by this discovery, I looked for the documents used by Ber-tolotti, who described them as "easily consulted". Here again, I drew a blank: these too had disappeared.

  The documents should have been in the Rome State Archives, Acta Diversorum of the Chamberlain and Treasurer of the Apostolic Chamber for the year 1678. The Chamberlain's volumes cover all the years until 1677, then start again in 1679; the volume for 1678 is the only one missing.

  As for the Treasurer, a single miscellaneous volume covers opera­tions between 1676 and 1683. Here, too, there is no trace of those for 1678.

  ***

  Belua insatiabilis, insatiable beast: was that not what the prophecy of Malachy called Innocent XI?

  After months spent coughing amidst the dust of seventeenth- century manuscripts, I took up a printed work, the Epistolario Innocenziano. one hundred and thirty-six letters written by Benedetto Odescalchi over a period of twenty years to his nephew Antonio Maria Erba, a Milanese senator. The patient curator of this volume, Pietro Gini of Como, cannot have realised, in his enthusiastic devo­tion, what kind of material he was feeding to the printers.

  These are, it is true, private le
tters. But it is precisely from his family correspondence that the man's overbearing character and his attitude to money emerge. Cadastral acts, lands, inheritances, mort­gaged loans, claims for damages, sums to be demanded, confiscations from debtors. Every sentence, every line, every note is poisoned by an obsessive fixation with money. Apart from a few other family dis­putes and inquiries after the health of spouses, the letters of Inno­cent XI contain nothing else.

  There abounds, however, advice on how to keep close watch over money, and how to obtain repayment from debtors. It is always better not to have anything to do with the courts of law, the Pope reflects in a letter dated 1680, but if one wants to see one's money back, then one should be the first to sue: there will always be time to come to an arrangement.

  Even his close circle seemed somewhat perplexed by the Pope's consuming passion. A manuscript note by his nephew Livio, from about 1676, states that "some minister" must be found "to corre­spond about the family's business affairs, for if the Pope continues to want to do everything with his own head and in his own hand, his health will not be able to stand the strain."