I came across the term “Black Nobility” while reading an exceptionally outrageous old conspiracy theory book titled The Conspirators Hierarchy: the Committee of 300. The lunatic who wrote it seemed to like peppering in ominous sounding names paired with sinister insinuations that these spooky societies were the architects of the most dastardly geopolitical misdeeds throughout history. Early on in my reading I would look up the names to see what truth there could be to any of the accusations, but after so many goose chases I gave up and treated the book like a fun world building exercise.
At the time, I was also reading A History of Europe by J.M. Roberts, which is very much not a conspiracy theory book. Imagine my shock when I got to the section covering the quirky political structure of the Venetian Republic and found a casual mention of the Black Nobility. So back to the internet mines I went, and what came after was one of the most confusing and unsatisfying research projects I’ve ever subjected myself to.
The non-tinfoil definition of the Black Nobility refers to a group composed of various members of aristocratic Italian families that, with their powers combined, support the Papacy in the face of any crisis that may come. The most recent, most notable conflict that they came to bat for occurred in 1870. The Savoys, another old and fancy Italian family, led an army into Rome and overthrew the Pope1. This act was the beginning of the end of Papal Rule in Rome. By the time the crisis concluded, Italy had come under a secular government.
The Pope spent the next fifty years claiming that he was being kept a prisoner in the Vatican despite not being physically imprisoned and continuing to go about his daily duties. It was more of a papal sit-in to protest the loss of the Papal States and refuse recognition of the newly consolidated Kingdom of Italy. I have a very dry timeline about this available for curious nerds. In the meantime, those aristocrats who had been Made by the Pope or were otherwise the fancy subjects2 of the Papal States donned their funeral black and closed their palaces in mourning over the Pope’s predicament. This is supposed to be the origin for the term Black Nobility.
I can’t provide the tinfoil version of the term’s origin story because the author of that conspiracy book sucks and he fluttered between subjects like he had a bucket of cocaine on his desk.
Pius’s voluntary confinement ended in 1929 with the Lateran Treaty. A truce between the Italian government, signed for by King Victor Emmanuel III and Prime Minister Benito Mussolini. The treaty granted the families of the Black Nobility dual citizenship in Italy and the Vatican City. As far as non-tinfoil research goes, this is the last notable thing that happens with the Black Nobility until 1968. That year, Pope Paul VI turned the Papal Court into the Papal Household and got rid of most of the positions that were held by members of the Black Nobility families. Someone has probably claimed this was done for devious and/or Jesuit reasons, but the statement from the Pope suggests these people were squatting in what had over time become useless honorary positions that soaked up too much money. So that was that.
Or was it? This story above is what you get when you read about the Black Nobility on sites like Wikipedia or Britannica. There’s plenty to be said for information websites with large footprints putting out half-baked articles, but a screed on Dead Internet et al. theories will have to wait its turn. For now, it can be said that those websites were fucking wrong.
Onward down the rabbit hole…
The term “Black Nobility” didn’t originate in the 1800s. It first shows up in reference to a set of oligarchical families of pre-Roman days. These ancient dandies were based in Babylon, Persia, Greece, Tyre, and Phoenicia. They built their power on maritime commerce. With the passage of time and many political marriages, these families were condensed and the bulk of them set up shop in the strategically located city-state of Venice. They spent the next few centuries expanding their trading rights and fiddling with the Croatian/Dalmatian coast. Then a golden opportunity arrived for Venice as the city of Rome drew its last ragged breaths as the seat of empire.
Venice, the almost-empire, came within spitting distance of being Rome’s successor as the big-dick power of the west Mediterranean. The city’s isolated location on a cluster of islands in a shallow lagoon spared Venice from the kind of barbarian assaults suffered by other cities. The almost-empire was cut short in the 12th century by an uneasy Holy Roman Empire in mainland Italy that viewed the Venetian autonomy with suspicion. A small war was had over it and Venice lost.
Their civic model was one of a city-state republic, ruled by a doge who was elected by a council of twelve tribunes who representing the twelve communities of Venice. A pillar of the Venetian oligarchical system had been the fondo, or the family fortune, or the continuity of said fortunes by way of a family’s respective enterprises. The largest fondo was the endowment of the Basilica of St. Mark. Closely tied to the city Treasury, the Basilica absorbed the family fortunes of those who died without heirs. This fondo was administered by the procurers of St. Mark, and their position was one of the most powerful in the Venetian system. Around this centralized fondo were grouped the individual fortunes of the great families.
After the Venetian Republic was smashed to bits many of these families migrated to Northern Europe and took their parts of St. Mark’s fondo with them. Their capital was used to open the coinage institutions of the Bank of Amsterdam and the Bank of England. These northern banks prospered until 1255, when Henry III nearly bankrupted them with the English crown’s insolvency. Economic crisis was imminent, and then the Black Plague came depopulated the continent’s tax base.
This is where a lot of tin-foil theories are rooted. The Black Nobility, according to crazed conspiracy writers, carried their vaguely evil ways of banking to the north and spread it through the trade hubs. It was at this time that the Black Nobility became international again, rather than just being wealthy and up-to-shit in Italy. This money migration created the primordial goop which would come to spit out shadowy elite societies like the Illuminati and the Club of Rome centuries later. The key to their successful control of the world is their ability to create and manage economic recessions and eventual depressions.
Anyway, under a later king, Edward III, the Venetian ex-pats sought to recover their Henry-era losses by offering generous investment capital to Edward in exchange for the spoils expected to be reaped from Edward’s aggressive insistence of England’s claims to the French crown. The Black Nobility’s generous investment gave Edward the resources to spark the Hundred Years War.
Meanwhile, the Black Nobility was also regaining their northern footing using the timeless aristocratic tool of political marriages. Most of these were concentrated into two particular families, the House of Hohenstaufen and the Weifs. The Weifs, latinized as the Guelphs in Italy, were also called the Neri, the Black Guelphs, or the Black Nobility.
The Hohenstaufens were a dynasty of unknown origin. They first ruled the Duchy of Swabia from 1079 and then came into the royal rule of the Holy Roman Empire from 1138 to 1254. In their time, the territory HRE was rapidly expanded. The Guelphs/Weifs were the elder branch of the House of Este in north Italy. They came to rule Bavaria by inheritance. After an early death in another childless union, the family ended up in possession of Tuscany, Ferrara, Modena, Matua, and Reggio. That particular payday would play a major part in the Vatican’s Investiture Controversy.
Meanwhile, in the moody Mediterranean…
Shown above: the flag of the Ghibellines and flag of the Guelphs.
So with these two families tangled together through so many marriages with the core Black Nobility families, conflict eventually emerged when the Hohenstaufens, who of course also had familial counterparts in Italy, asked the Guelphs/Weifs to help them with the Italian War in the 12th century. Conflict turned into war and the Weifs branch got stomped so hard they lost their duchies in Bavaria and Saxony. On the brink of extinction, with only Brunswick still in their northern possession, the Weifs managed to pull off a kidnapping of King Richard I of England and demand so huge a ransom that their coffers were replenished. Hilariously, centuries later, one of their offshoots became the ruling house of Britain3.
A re-cap before getting into the spaghetti dramas of Italy.
- Weif (Germany-ish) = Guelph (Italy); they end up siding with the Pope.
- Hohenstaufen (Germany-ish) = Ghibellines (Italy); they end up siding with the Holy Roman Empire.
In Italy, the Guelphs consisted of wealthy mercantile households whose cities tended to be in places where the Holy Roman Emperor poses a territorial threat. The Ghibellines wealth came from agriculture, their cities tended to be in places that were threatened by the expansion of the Papal States.
The two families and their associated factions would constantly fight over territory, perceived threats, and whatever disagreements perennially flared up between the Vatican and the Empire. An end to the fighting seemed near in 1289, when the Tuscan Guelphs kicked them Ghibellines to the curb, regaining control of their city-state. Unfortunately, all of these people were fucking crazy, so immediately after this triumph the Guelphs started in-fighting and split up into the Black Guelphs and the White Guelphs. The Blacks backed the Papacy while the Whites opposed it. And so the song of slaughter kept on playing. The Blacks and Whites overthrew each other back and forth over the rule of the same old city for a couple more generations. Then they got bored and reignited the dumb conflict with the Ghibellines, setting off another series of massacres and conspiracies. By 1334 even the Pope was sick of this shit, so he threatened to excommunicate anyone who used the name Guelph or Ghibelline politically.
Back to the future…
If reading all that didn’t give you a mild tension headache, you may be wondering where the Black Nobility is now. The only answer to that curiosity is wrapped in a whole box of tin foil. The weirdo’s answer is that they’re strewn throughout Europe, most notably in London, Genoa, and of course, Venice. In close cooperation with Anglo-American fat cats, they operate conspiratorial umbrella organizations. As mentioned earlier, they control the world by creating and managing economic recessions and eventual depressions. They use social convulsions on a global scale, followed by depressions, as a softening-up technique for bigger schemes. The purpose of all this mustache-twisting evil is to create masses of people all over the world who will become its welfare recipients in the future.
The core philosophy of this cabal is based around the ideas of Felix Dzerinski, AKA Iron Felix, the Polish aristocrat turned Soviet Revolutionary. He set up the first three secret police forces for the new Bolshevik government, ran the Red Terror apparatus, and crafted the policy of de-Cossackization. It is claimed that he once said, “Man is of no importance. Look what happens when you starve him. He begins to eat his dead companions to stay alive. Man is only interested in his own survival. That is all that counts. All that Spinoza stuff is a lot of rubbish.” And that this is the sort of thinking that became central to these geopolitical twiddlers.
These villains are said to have control over every major intelligence network with only the East-German Stasi remaining out of their reach, apparently. They even have their own apparatus in the form of INTERPOL, apparently created and funded by David Rockefeller, but good luck verifying that on any website that isn’t an antique hosted on Angelfire.
They drafted their devilish plots in properties owned by the former Queen of England. Their freaky little fingers are said to be all over the U.S. Federal Reserve. They orchestrated the Bay of Pigs fiasco in order to sell Kennedy on their dystopian crisis management program, which would become FEMA. Then they killed him and infiltrated NASA to steal away their tech secrets and seal them up within the bowels of the Stanford Research Institute and the Rand Corporation. They organize tribal conflicts in African nations when the population gets too high. They’ve caused the downfall of multiple Italian governments and, with the help of Henry Kissinger, assassinated Prime Minister Aldo Moro. They invented abortion then rammed it through legislatures. They destabilized Asia and the Middle East in order to curb the upward trajectory of a post-WWII United States. They make moves that tilt the world closer to a One World Government. They probably even turn the frogs gay.
The Black Nobility and their cohort are the stuff of nightmares, if you believe in them. Most don’t because most read these kinds of accusations as crazy talk. But imagine the bottomless disappointment, were this all to be true, that the conspiracy theorist takes to his grave after a lifetime spent shouting their crimes from the rooftops. And after all, it’s not like they disappeared in the throes of some plague or war, or lost their fortunes and declined into middle-class anonymity. Their bloodline still sits on throne in England, even if it is only for decorative purposes. They’d need a LOT of money to rule the world, but how much would they need to manipulate it?
That’s the synopsis of the Black Nobility. A spooky name, a violent and Shakespearean past, and for those who really want to squint between the lines, a murky cabal of ambiguously powerful entities that twiddle with the lives of the plebs to this day.
- This is that same hapless Pope I wrote a bit about before. ↩︎
- The families that made up the Black Nobility had settled in Rome to benefit from their connections to the Vatican. All of these families had relatives among the high ranking clergy and some, like the Borgia, had descended from previous Popes. Many of their members held ceremonial positions in the Papal Noble Guard. Notable names include the Colonna, Massimo, Orsini, Pallavicini, Borghese, Odeschalchi and Ludovisi. There were more, but they’re now extinct. ↩︎
- The Weifs fortified their territory around Brunswick and by early 18th century they formalized their lands into the Kingdom of Hanover. This would become the ruling house of Britain one day when the Act of Settlement placed the granddaughter of James I in the line of succession rather than suffer a Catholic crown. This granddaughter was the wife of the Duke of Hanover, House of Weif. ↩︎
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