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
