Q by Luther Blissett (poetry books to read txt) 📕

In the expectation that I shall soon able to supply my Lord with fresh and useful information, I kiss Your Lordship’s hands.

Viterbo 27th June 1543

Your Lordship’s faithful servant

Q.

Letter sent to Rome from the headquarters of the Fugger company in Augsburg, dated 6th May 1544.

To the most illustrious and eminent Cardinal Giovanni Pietro Carafa in Rome.

To Your most reverend Lordship I send greetings and very best wishes, nurturing the hope that these lines, penned by a pious Christian servant entirely devoted to the Holy Roman Church, shall reach no eyes but those of Your Lordship.

The long years of friendship linking my family with Your Lordship free me from the obligation to use false words to embellish the favour that I am about to ask of You. On more than one occasion Your Eminence has been so good as to grant us the honour of lending our services to the affairs that You have conducted on German soil: on more than one occasion this soul has been honoured to lend his assistance, with the means granted him on earth by the good Lord’s munificence, to the deals and negotiations that Your Lordship has undertaken here. Among those services one might certainly number the fact of my having made available a considerable sum of money for the agents that Your Lordship maintains on German soil and at the Emperor’s court.

Well, such a debt could be wiped out at a stroke, as though it had never existed, from our company accounts, were you to grant us our request.

You should be aware that our company has been the object of a huge and terrible fraud, which must be remedied as soon as possible; and since I consider it injurious to our family interests to allow the matter to come to the public attention, I am impelled to request Your Lordship’s intervention.

Without going too much into the details of the infernal ruse, it should suffice for you to know that for some time I had noticed a certain incongruity in the company’s annual accounts; something was not quite right: a matter of a few commas, a few unimportant figures in the accounts books. And yet a nagging doubt remained. Since the vastness of the interests of the Fuggers throughout Europe is almost by definition incalculable, it is far from easy to spot every little leak. But a leak there was, and with each passing year it assumed the features of a suspicion and gradually of a certainty. It was as though the peripheral branches of the company were making minimal errors in their accounts, as though they were being excessive in their approximations of the sums issued in the form of letters of credit. So at first I thought one of our agents might be responsible for the fraud. And yet that seemed strange, since before choosing the men to whom to entrust the care of our interests, we vet them from head to toe and often bind their personal fortunes to ourselves, in such a way that they are entirely at one with the interests of the company.

And in fact I was mistaken. The parasite came from without.

Your Lordship cannot imagine how much time and expense it has taken to discover the guilty parties: we have been obliged to send a special commissioner to each branch and agency of the Fugger bank, to supervise their loan activities for a whole year. Taking agencies and branches together, there are more than sixty of them across the continent of Europe.

It took a whole year to trace back, from merchant to merchant, the trajectories of the letters of credit that we had issued, and to understand what was going wrong in our accounts. In that way we were able to discover that some of the letters of credit drawn on our agencies were fake.

Well, the factor common to all the deals under examination was the presence of an apparently innocuous merchant of linen, sugar and furs. Peculiar as this appeared to us, we followed up his commercial movements and found them quite unusual. Although he was not trading in very precious goods, he was covering twice the distances that he would have needed to sell his own merchandise: goods from Sweden that could have been sold on the market in Antwerp were transported to Portugal: goods from Brest that would have found an excellent market in England ended up being sold in Hamburg, and so on. In short, our merchant preferred peripheral markets. At first we thought he was doing this in the hope of making bigger profits, but we discovered that that was not in fact the case, since his prices were not significantly higher than the average. But an even more curious detail is that he turns out to be a creditor of our company, who opened an account with our Antwerp branch six years ago.

His name is Hans Gr�eb, which would indicate that he is German by birth. Yet my commissioners have found no trace of that name on any of the German markets. He seemed to have made his first appearance in Antwerp in 1538. So we made inquiries there, discovering that his business associate is an even more shady and suspect character, a certain Loy, or Lodewijck de Schaliedecker, or Eloi Pruystinck, who was until ten years ago a simple roofer, and who is already known to the authorities in Antwerp, where he is suspected of heresy.

By now we were sure that we had identified the parties responsible for the terrible fraud done to us. We still do not know how they managed to reproduce perfect copies of Fugger letters of credit; nevertheless, we have no intention of waiting any longer and subjecting ourselves to further damage.

So, the reason why I decided to request Your Lordship’s intervention is that I do not consider it useful, in a situation of this kind, to denounce the two suspects to the local authorities. Irreparable damage would be done to the company if news got out that fake letters of credit of ours were circulating on the markets. It would cause a terrible crisis of trust where we were concerned, and in a short time we would risk seeing the creditors withdrawing their money from our coffers. I might add that this would have dreadful consequences for many people, and not only for the Fuggers: the company’s interest are closely linked with those of many courts, not least that of the Holy See.

So, there is a path that we can take to our common benefit, which would allow us both to resolve this problem without either of us suffering any great harm.

As I said, this Eloi Pruystinck has already been suspected of heresy for some time, since he practises and preaches common ownership of wives and abandonment of private property and denies, my most trustworthy informants tell me, the existence of sin. Hitherto, this little heresiarch’s cunning has been such as to allow him and his peers to escape accusations of blasphemy and apostasy. But since His Holiness Paul III re-established the Inquisition, putting it under Your Lordship’s command, I would entertain the hope that these Loists might finally be indicted and put on trial.

I should like to beg Your Lordship to be so magnanimous as to direct the attention of the Tribunal of the Holy Office towards these damned heretics and low tricksters, that they may desist from the dissemination of their blasphemous ideas and at the same time stop doing harm to our company, while also ensuring that no one knows about the damage that they have done to us already.

Humbly trusting in Your Lordship’s intervention, and confirming the friendship that binds us, I kiss Your Lordship’s hands

Augsburg the 6th day of May 1544

Anton Fugger servant of God

Basle

(1545)