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 letters. 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.'
The obsession with money consumed even his flesh.
Dear Alessio, now I know. Under my eyes, day after day, the memoirs of the apprentice of the Donzello have become reality. The secrets which, in the end, Pompeo Dulcibeni revealed to the young man, and which motivated his attempt on the life of Innocent XI, are all true.
The Blessed Innocent was an accomplice of Protestant heretics, thus gravely damaging Catholic interests: he allowed England to be invaded by William of Orange for the sole purpose of obtaining repayment of a monetary debt.
Pope Innocent was also a financier of the slave trade, nor did he renounce the personal possession of slaves; and he treated those who were old and dying with sanguinary cruelty.
He was a niggardly and avaricious man, incapable of raising himself above material concerns, obsessed by the thought of lucre.
