Imprimatur (81 page)

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.

The figure and the work of Innocent XI were thus unjustly celebrat­ed and elevated, using false, devious and partial arguments. Evidence was concealed: the inventory of the will of Carlo Odescalchi, the let­ters and commercial receipts of the Odescalchi archives from 1650 until 1680, the correspondence of Secretary of State Casoni, the contracts concerning the redemption of slaves cited by Bertolotti, together with other papers of which I shall have to report the, at best, inexplicable disappearance in my final documents.

Thus the lie triumphed in the end. The financier of heretics was pronounced the Saviour of Christendom. The greedy merchant be­came a wise administrator; the stubborn politician, a capable states­man. Revenge was dressed up as pride, the miser was called frugal, the ignorant man became simple and plain-living, evil stole the clothing of goodness; and goodness, abandoned by all, became earth, dust, smoke, shadow, nothing.

Now, perhaps, I understand the dedication chosen by my two friends: "To the defeated". Fouquet was defeated: to Colbert, glory; to him, ignominy. Defeated, too, was Pompeo Dulcibeni, who could not obtain justice: his leeches failed. Defeated, likewise, was Atto Melani: he was constrained by the Sun King to kill his friend Fou­quet. And, despite a thousand vicissitudes, he failed to extract from Dulcibeni his closely guarded secret. Defeated was the apprentice-boy who, faced with the vision of evil, lost his faith and his inno­cence: from aspirant gazetteer, he descended to taking refuge in the hard and simple life of a son of the soil. Defeated, too, was his very memory which, although composed with so much care and labour, lay forgotten for centuries.

All the agitation of these personages was in vain. Against the ma­lign forces of injustice which dominate the history of the world, they were powerless. Their strivings were, perhaps, useful only to them­selves, to discover and to understand what—for a long, long time— none would be privileged to know. Those strivings served perhaps above all to augment their sufferings.

If this should be a novel, it is the novel of labour lost.

***

I hope that you will, dear Alessio, pardon me for the outburst to which I abandoned myself in these last lines. For my part, I have done what I could. It will be for historians one day to complete the labour of selection from the archives, the scrupulous verification of sources, of circumstances, of details.

First, however, it will be for His Holiness, and for Him alone, to judge whether the opus of my two friends should be published or kept secret. The implications of its dissemination would be mani­fold, nor would they concern only the Church of Rome. How, in­deed, will the British Orangemen be able stubbornly and arrogantly to parade through the streets of Derry and Belfast when, on the 12 th of July each year they celebrate the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne, the victory in which William of Orange finally crushed the Catholic forces? What meaning will be left to their celebration of Protestant extremism when they know that they owe that victory to a pope?

The ancient vaticinations do not lie; the Holy Father will now take the right, the inspired, decision. According to the prophecy of Saint Malachy, as evoked by Padre Robleda, our well-beloved (and rather long-lived) Pontiff will be the last, and the holiest Pope:
De Gloria Olivae,
as he is called in the prophecy.

I am aware that the list of popes attributed to Malachy has long been recognised as a forgery dating from the sixteenth century, and not the Middle Ages. Yet no scholar has succeeded in explaining how it correctly foresaw the names of modern popes right down to the present day.

That list tells us that time has now run out:
Fides intrepida
(Pius XI),
Pastor angelicus
(Pius XII),
Pastor et nauta
(John XXIII),
Flos florum
(Paul VI),
De Medietate Lunae
(John Paul I),
De labore Solis
(John Paul II) and last of all
De Gloria Olivae:
all the 111 Pontiffs. The Holy Father is, then, perhaps he who will prepare the return of Peter to this earth, when each shall be judged and every wrong set right.

Cloridia told the apprentice that she had come to Rome following the way of numbers and the oracle of the Tarot: the Arcana of Judge­ment called for "the reparation of past wrongs" and the "equitable judgement of posterity". If the prophecy of Malachy is true, then, that time has come.

All too often, history has been insulted, betrayed, distorted. If, now, we do not intervene, if we do not proclaim the truth out loud, if the writings of my two friends are not published, it is possible that evidence will continue to disappear: that the letters of Monsieur de Beaucastel and Monsignor Cenci will be lost, placed by mistake in the wrong folder, or that the ledgers of Carlo Odescalchi will vanish inexplicably, as have so many documents.