Veritas (Atto Melani) (106 page)

Behind the Queen Mother came Joseph’s sisters and elder daughter, also escorted by a cluster of torches, buffeted mercilessly by the raging wind.

The court musicians intoned the
Libera me Domine
and Joseph was at last escorted to his final resting place: the crypt of the Capuchins. In that very year the Emperor had prophetically
enlarged it, doubling its capacity. Now it would receive him in the large central sarcophagus, the golden key to which would be preserved forever in the imperial treasure chamber along with all the
other tomb keys of the Habsburgs of Austria. And so ended the barely thirty-three years of the earthly adventure of His Caesarean Majesty Joseph the Victorious, first of his name.

Vienna
D
ECEMBER
1720

After Abbot Melani’s death I left Paris, as did Domenico.

The War of the Spanish Succession is over. It has left behind it thirteen years of famine, devastation and death. In 1713 the Treaty of Utrecht was signed, in 1714 the Peace of Rastatt and that
of Baden.

Everything has gone as Atto foretold: the English merchants have grabbed the most appetising booty. England has snatched Gibraltar and the monopoly of slaves from Spain, and the North American
colonies from France.

But it is not only the instigators but also the accomplices of these new times who have been rewarded.

Emperor Charles VI, brother and successor of Joseph, has been awarded the Spanish Netherlands, Milan, Mantua, Naples and Sardinia. In Spain, on 11th September 1714, the Franco-Spanish troops of
Philip of Anjou, now King Philip V of Bourbon, entered Barcelona and put a bloody end to the independence of the city Charles had abandoned in his haste to ascend the longed-for imperial
throne.

The Savoys have been raised from the rank of double-dealing dukes, as Atto described them, to that of kings, and have been awarded Sicily: all thanks to Eugene. And so the Italian peninsula is
caught in the Savoyard vice: to the north Piedmont, to the south Sicily. The perfect prelude for the other project of the dervish’s friends: that one day Italy will have a king.

In 1713 Landau was besieged once again, but this time by the French, as it had remained under the Empire since 1704, when Joseph reconquered it for the second time. Yet again the garrison
commander, Prince Karl Alexander von Wüttemberg, had to coin money using his own gold and silver dining service. A repetition, though in reverse: this time the French won. It was Prince
Eugene’s fault: if he had not gone on with the war to the bitter end, the Empire would have kept Landau.

Atto’s prophecy about Eugene has come true: Charles VI made him (and makes him) do what he wants. Delivering the forged letter to the Queen Mother has proven totally useless.

But on the horizon, clouds are gathering for the Caesarean dynasty: as the dervish foretold, the House of Habsburg will soon peter out and Germany will have its own king. Charles VI has no male
children, just two girls. And the heir to the imperial throne can only be male. To tell the truth, Charles’s firstborn was a son, born four years ago, in 1716, but he died just a few months
later: exactly what happened to Joseph’s little son. What a coincidence.

Charles VI’s heirs should be Joseph’s daughters. But obviously he does not relish the idea. This was made clear in 1713 when, even though he still had no progeny after five years of
marriage, he issued the Pragmatic Sanction: on his death his own children, if any – not Joseph’s – would ascend the throne. Therefore it will be his elder daughter, Maria-Theresa,
born three years ago, who will inherit. An arbitrary act, in every sense. The other countries in Europe refuse to accept it, and so for years Charles has been pleading with them, one by one,
imploring them to recognise the Pragmatic Sanction. In exchange he makes endless promises, even the surrender of territory. Anything to prevent a daughter of his hated brother from sitting on the
throne.

But Charles’s hatred is weakening the Empire. The German princes are chafing: the moment is coming when Germany will secede (as Palatine predicted) and will have its own sovereign, no
longer in Catholic Vienna.

In short, as Atto feared, this war has marked the end of the world, but has not replaced it with a new one; no, the agony of humanity has simply begun. Now it is an oligarchy that coldly decides
the destinies of lands thousands of miles away: the colonies of the New World and the Italian territories were reorganized from Utrecht. Political alliances are no longer the fulcrum of
international diplomacy, but just token operations: they are decided by the financial backers of the crowns. And those, like the Most Christian King or Joseph the Victorious, who will not let
themselves be manipulated, are rendered impotent, along with their descendants. Dynastic rights or military conquests no longer count for anything; only just money, or rather finance matters.
Wasn’t it during the war of succession that coins began to be replaced by paper?

From the friends we still have in Paris, I have heard that life has got harder there; even harder than in Rome, and that is saying something.

Five years ago, in 1715, the Sun King died: of gangrene, exactly as Palatine had foretold. And he died almost without heirs. Between 1711 and 1712
all
his legitimate children and
grandchildren died (this, too, was predicted by the dervish), except a child aged two, Louis, saved by his nurses, who locked themselves up with him in a wing of the palace, preventing the doctors
not only from touching him, but even from seeing him. They were convinced that the other members of the royal family had not died from their sicknesses but from their treatments . . .

Atto Melani had been right: “With a king like the Grand Dauphin, France would finally emerge from its downward spiral of arrogance and destruction; England and Holland want the opposite to
happen. The country must continue to degenerate, the court must be hated by the people. It annoys them that the Most Christian King has adult sons and grandsons; the ideal would be if there were no
heir, or if he were a baby, which amounts to the same thing.”

The days when the Most Christian King, aged just four, ascended the throne are over. In those days, to defend the country from the interference of other powers there were the Queen Mother, Anne
of Austria, and the Prime Minister, Cardinal Mazarin. Now there is no longer a queen, nor a prime minister.

“Louis XIV has taken everything into his own hands,” said Atto. “After his death a regency would leave the country at the mercy of the first scheming meddler, who might just
happen to be sent by England or Holland to set off a mine under France’s backside.”

Exactly. The death of the Most Christian King is exactly what Palatine’s friends were waiting for: just a few months later their man dropped in from Holland. It was the Englishman John
Law, with his theory of finance, which led France to an economic collapse unprecedented in centuries and centuries of history.

This year the swindler’s treatise was published:
Money and Trade Considered
. There was a French translation, but I never managed to find it. I do not know English but my son does;
Atto knew that England would be the real winner of the war and, although reluctantly, he arranged for him to be taught the merchants’ language, alongside Italian, Latin, Greek, German and
French.

And so, finally, thanks to my little boy’s reading (actually he is now a handsome lad) I can see in plain black and white the heresy with which Law delivered the death blow to France:
according to him the best incentive for the country’s productive growth is . . . loans and property in banknotes! Not the good old coins of old, which were worth their weight in gold. In
short, he was a friend of the usurers.

With this cheap huckster’s fib he managed to persuade the Regent Philip II of Orléans to let him found the General Bank in 1716. The war of succession has brought France so low that
the Regent hoped to have found the solution to his debts in this man Law. From 1718, under the new name of the Royal Bank, the institute issued gigantic quantities of notes, which it distributed to
the French with promises fit for nincompoops, demanding in exchange all the gold, silver and lands they owned. If their goods were worth a hundred, Law would give them a note with the words:
“This is worth five hundred”, with the promise they could have their property back whenever they wanted it. The subjects of the Kingdom of France all rushed to entrust their property to
him, in exchange for scraps of paper stained with ink.

It is incredible how ingenuous these French are: they feel superior to everyone else and are always ready to glorify themselves, but then they go flocking after the first charlatan that comes
along.

In January this year, the Regent even granted Law the post of General Controller of Finances, the job held by Superintendent Fouquet and then by Minister Colbert!

It did not last long. In March Palatine’s friends delivered the final blow: they circulated doubts about Law’s credibility, and all of a sudden the French went rushing to the Royal
Bank to ask for the gold, silver and lands that they had pawned for his banknotes. The Regent first halved the value of the banknotes, then stopped all payments. “We no longer have
anything,” the bank candidly responded to the French subjects. The bank was closed, John Law fled to Venice and the French were left stony broke.

Atto had foreseen it, the dervish had predicted: the typhoon of financial ruin and popular outcry struck France, and then passed on to the rest of Europe, already prostrated by the war of
succession.

Money, for centuries and centuries has always had the same value, but now that there is just paper and no more gold or silver, it is worth less every day. I am among the privileged few who can
sleep easily: I still have the vineyard in the Josephina.

And so I went back to Vienna. But the city is no longer what it was. On the bell tower of St Stephen’s is the magnificent bell that Joseph had had cast from the Turkish
cannons, which the people soon nicknamed Pummerin. It did not ring for the Emperor’s thirty-three years, as had been planned: death came first. And so they hung Pummerin in October, and
inaugurated it in January 1712 to celebrate the arrival of the new Emperor, Charles VI. A few months later, in December, divine wrath fell upon the usurper: the plague broke out, and raged for the
whole of 1713, carrying off eight thousand innocent victims. And here was another echo from the past, another circle closing in on itself: the
secretum pestis
that thirty years earlier had
saved Vienna from the contagion deliberately procured by the besieging Turks could do nothing against the scourge of God this time.

I have heard of the bad end of Countess Marianna Pálffy, Joseph’s young lover, whom Abbot Melani had vainly tried to approach. As soon as Joseph had died, the Queen Mother, the
ministers and the whole court lashed out at her, even forcing her to give back the presents received from her deceased lover. Fallen into disgrace, banned from the court, she was forced into a
lowly marriage, to the despair of her father, the poor Count Johann Pálffy ab Erdöd, one of the most faithful and valiant commanders of the Caesarean house.