HISTORY:Did Pope Innocent XI bankroll King Billy? It is a question which historians have been mulling over for years, and a new book threatens to generate more debate.
The thriller/historical novel Imprimatur, written by Italian academics Rita Monaldi and Francesco Sorti, quotes many intriguing documents, including a letter written in November 1688 by Cardinal d'Estrées, French ambassador to the Holy See, to the French king, Louis XIV: "That the said man upheld the missionary in the conviction that the Prince of Orange had great respect for the pope and would do many things for him; that in recent times these relations had grown firmer and that the Prince of Orange had certainly given it to be understood that he had only good intentions."
Within days of William of Orange's landing in England in 1688, pamphleteers were suggesting that Pope Innocent, via his Odescalchi family firm, had loaned huge sums of money to the cash-starved William.
Since then historians have argued the point with men like Frenchman Pierre Bayle in the 17th century and Scotsman John Dalrymple in the 18th century producing elaborate but inconclusive evidence that Pope Innocent XI did indeed bankroll King Billy.
For the landing in England, William is said to have received 200,000 ducats, perhaps because he had misled the pope into believing that he would use his army not against James in England but rather against Louis in France.
In the light of documents they have unearthed during research in Vatican and Italian state archives, Ms Monaldi and Mr Sorti emphatically confirm the Innocent-William of Orange money relationship, saying: "A whole chapter of European history will need rewriting in the light of the documents which reveal the secret manoeuvrings of Pope Innocent XI and the Odescalchi family. But to do that will mean raising a curtain of silence, hypocrisy and lies."
Last weekend, the authors took a number of reporters on a tour of the "Archivio di Stato", state archives in central Rome, showing us some remarkably heavy and dusty 17th-century ledgers. These were the Odescalchi account books that, they claim, prove that otherwise inexplicable payments were made to certain "gentlemen" in Amsterdam and Antwerp, payments that were in fact intended for the House of Orange.
What is certain is that Pope Innocent came from a well-known family of bankers. On the day of his election as pope, one wag attached a satirical comment to the Pasquino statue in central Rome, reading: "Invenerunt hominem in telonio sedentem" (They have chosen a pope seated at the usurer's table).
Imprimatur is published by Polygon on May 15th