The Colonna and the Orsini, two of Rome’s oldest families, have both claimed Julius Caesar as an ancestor.

The Massimo say they descend from Quintus Fabius Maximus, the general who wore Hannibal down in the third century BCE.¹

When Napoleon asked Prince Massimo if his family really came from Fabius, the prince answered that he couldn’t prove it, but the story had been going around the family for twelve hundred years.²

What these families inherited from the Roman aristocracy was its playbook.

They held land and married for advantage. They stayed close to the most powerful institution in the city, and they outlasted every government that tried to replace them. My argument is that the families known as the black nobility are extensions of the old Roman ruling class and that they still hold power today through banks, foundations, palaces, and the Order of Malta, the sovereign Catholic order that stands beside the papacy.

In my book The Hidden Hand: Wealth, Power, and Control from Pharaohs to Corporations, I argue that a handful of Roman patrician family lines, the same houses that ran the Republic’s networks of patrons and clients, found a new and lasting home inside the Papal States during the Middle Ages. The families that survived did what the Church did after Rome fell. They stopped depending on any one office and wove themselves into the institutions around them.

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In 1870, Rome’s aristocracy lost its uniform but kept everything else. On the morning of September 20, 1870, Italian artillery blew a hole in the Aurelian Walls near the Porta Pia. Soldiers of the new Kingdom of Italy poured into the city, and a papal government that had ruled central Italy for about a thousand years came to an end. Pope Pius IX pulled back behind the Vatican walls. He refused to recognize the kingdom and called himself a prisoner.⁴

Rome’s old families had to pick a side. Some went over to the new royal court, and the city called them the white nobility. Others shut their palace doors and dressed in black to mourn the pope’s lost kingdom. Romans called them the nobiltà nera, the black nobility.⁵

How does a ruling class survive when the state that created it dies? My book names four mechanisms that elites have used for five thousand years to stay on top. Coercion is force or the threat of force. Alignment means separate institutions backing each other up without anyone giving orders. Amnesia wipes out the memory of how things used to be, so the present setup feels like the only one possible. Conflict keeps ordinary people fighting each other instead of looking up. The black nobility used all four.

The Barons: A Feud That Built a City

The heads of Rome’s baronial families ruled their own subjects from hilltop castles and used their own troops to control the roads and borders around their lands. In the 1400s, King Ferdinand I of Naples complained that the barons of the countryside, the Orsini and Colonna among them, didn’t recognize the pope’s authority “in life or in death.” They were, he said, “the true lords of the land.”⁶ A family with a son on the papal throne could also make loyalty to itself look like loyalty to God.

The Orsini rose in the late 1100s, when Giacinto Orsini became Pope Celestine III in 1191. His gifts to his nephews started the family’s land fortune. Over the next century, the Orsini led the Guelphs, the faction that backed the papacy. Their rivals, the Colonna, led the Ghibellines, who sided with the Holy Roman Emperor. The fight between the two houses ran Roman politics for generations.⁷

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In 1303, the Colonna took part in the armed seizure of Pope Boniface VIII at Anagni, an attack the family’s own history calls the “Anagni Slap.” A little over a century later, the family gave the Church Oddone Colonna, who became Pope Martin V in 1417. He ended the Great Western Schism and brought the papacy back to Rome in 1420. Once in power, he loaded his relatives with church and government offices and gave them estates such as Marino and Rocca di Papa.⁸ The Orsini answered with popes of their own, from Celestine III in the 1190s to Benedict XIII in 1724.⁹

Accounts of the black nobility name about a dozen houses, including the Colonna, Orsini, Massimo, Borghese, Chigi, Barberini, Odescalchi, Ruspoli, Pallavicini, Sacchetti, and Theodoli.¹⁵ The black nobility was never one bloodline. It was many, tied together by marriage, and it kept taking in new money and new names as long as they came in through the papal throne.

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The papal throne kept a black noble at its side for almost a century and a half after the Papal States fell. The influence these families carried into Europe ran through marriage and money, into royal houses and the banking world. It survived every change of government in the twentieth century because none of it looked enough like power to be worth abolishing.

The Order of Malta: Sovereign Without a Country

The Order of Malta, whose top offices these families held for centuries, has lost its territory more than once, and each time it came back with more standing.

It started in Jerusalem in the eleventh century as a hospital brotherhood that cared for sick pilgrims. Its members later became known as the Knights Hospitaller of St. John. After Jerusalem fell in 1187, the knights moved from one Mediterranean base to another until they settled on Rhodes. Along the way, the hospital brotherhood turned into a military and naval power with its own fleet and its own courts.³¹

The Knights Templar had built a network across Europe and had gone into banking and lending.

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Kings fought the handoff. The Hospitallers got nothing in Portugal, where King Denis moved the Templars’ land and members into a new Order of Christ, approved in 1319. Valencia’s Templar estates went to another new order, Montesa, and Castile gave the Hospitallers very little. They did take over the Templar holdings in Aragon, Catalonia, Navarre, and Majorca, and across much of the rest of Europe.³³ So the Order of Malta inherited a big share of the Templar fortune through a papal decree that kings bargained down. A military order that had become a banking power was wiped out, and its land went to a rival order loyal to the same pope. That’s alignment.

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Reporters started connecting the Order to American intelligence in the 1980s. Mother Jones in 1983 and The Washington Post in 1984 reported that William Casey, then the director of the CIA, was a member, and an earlier CIA director, John McCone, has been named too. In 1986, the magazine CovertAction ran a full exposé on the Order’s ties to American intelligence. In 2011, the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh told an audience in Doha, Qatar, that top commanders in U.S. special operations were members or supporters of the Knights of Malta.³⁹ A body with no territory and no voters holds a seat at the United Nations and has ambassadors in more than a hundred capitals. Standing like that has to be paid for.

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Venice and the Three Hundred: The Making of a Legend

Online and in a few books, a bigger version of this story circulates. It says the black nobility is a secret bloodline that has ruled Europe, and now the world, from behind the scenes for a thousand years. These families never gave up power, and on that point the legend is correct. They didn’t need a secret government to keep it. They held it in plain sight, through palaces, banks, marriages, and a sovereign order with a seat at the United Nations. The legend’s wild claims do them a favor, because they make the real power easier to laugh off.

Part of the legend comes from Venice. In 1297, Venice passed a law called the Serrata, Italian for “closing.” It locked the city’s Great Council, the body that ran the government, to the families who already had seats in it. Those families’ names later went into an official register called the Golden Book, and only they could hold office or help choose the Doge, Venice’s elected ruler. After a few generations, people could hardly remember a time when Venice had been more open. This closed group ran the city for five hundred years. It ended on May 12, 1797, when Napoleon’s army was closing in and the Great Council voted to shut itself down, taking the Republic of Venice with it.⁴⁸

Venice’s closed nobility and Rome’s black nobility were two different groups. They lived in different cities, and more than seventy years separate them. Venice’s ruling families gave up power in 1797, and Rome’s black nobility didn’t get its name until 1870. The legend glues them together into one “Venetian Black Nobility” and claims it never died.

We know who built this legend, because they put their names on it, and each writer added a new layer. In September 1981, Webster Tarpley, then writing for Lyndon LaRouche’s political movement, published “The Venetian Conspiracy” in the movement’s magazine, The Campaigner. LaRouche’s publications spent years presenting a “Venetian oligarchy” as the hidden hand behind European history.⁴⁹ About ten years later, John Coleman’s Conspirators’ Hierarchy: The Story of the Committee of 300 listed a “Venetian Black Nobility” among the branches of a single committee he said ran the world.

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Coleman’s number has a real source. Walther Rathenau was the heir to the fortune behind AEG, Germany’s version of General Electric. He sat on dozens of corporate boards before he took over the company himself, so he saw up close how Europe’s money moved. In a newspaper article on Christmas Day 1909, he wrote that about three hundred men, all of whom know one another, direct the economic destiny of Europe and choose their successors from among themselves. He was describing the boardrooms he sat in.

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Today’s Power Bases

The Torlonia fortune shows how much of the old machine is still running. In 1923, Giovanni Torlonia founded the Banca del Fucino. For nearly a century, it was a princely family’s private bank and the oldest private bank in Rome.⁵⁵ It took its name from the Fucine Lake, which Alessandro Torlonia had drained in the 1860s and 1870s.⁵⁶ After the younger Prince Alessandro Torlonia, the last Prince Assistant, died in 2017, the family sold the bank to Igea Banca in 2019. The sale turned into a legal war among the heirs, and Roman prosecutors have investigated it.⁵⁷ The bank was gone, but the fortune it had built stayed with the family.

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Old power now sits on bank boards and in religious orders that carry diplomatic passports, not in parliament. These families don’t publish their guest lists.

Via https://www.globalresearch.ca/bloodlines-beneath-vatican/5944192

A new campaign launched in Ireland is warning that plans by the European Union (EU) to restrict dosages of vitamins and minerals in supplements could have severe consequences for millions of people worldwide.

Called ‘Save Our Supplements’, the campaign is opposing efforts to introduce Europe-wide maximum permitted levels for popular essential nutrients such as vitamin C, vitamin D, magnesium, and vitamin B6.

With campaigners warning that the restrictions could not just remove higher-dose supplements from the European market but set a precedent for other countries as well, they are calling on people everywhere to support their petition defending consumer choice and free access to effective, safe nutritional products.

The focus of the campaign centers on the EU’s ‘Food Supplements Directive’, controversial legislation adopted in 2002 that provides for the introduction of maximum permitted levels of vitamins and minerals in supplements. Although at the time the law was passed the European Commission – the unelected executive body in Europe – did not set specific limits on dosages, it is now edging closer to doing so.

A Threat to Supplement Choice Across Europe

Following pressure from a group of countries led by Germany, the Commission has confirmed that setting maximum levels is on its agenda. Significantly, Germany is Europe’s largest pharmaceutical market and the third largest globally, after the United States and China. Our Foundation has long warned that the drug industry would be a major beneficiary if supplements were subjected to draconian restrictions.

Countries supporting the setting of limits on dosages claim that having common EU-wide levels would improve consumer safety and establish consistent rules across the European market. But opponents fear the move could prevent people from easily obtaining nutrient levels they have used safely for years.

The potential impact of the plan is illustrated on the Save Our Supplements website, which compares potential maximum levels with amounts currently available in Ireland. According to the figures highlighted by campaigners, the maximum permitted daily amount of vitamin B6 in supplements could fall from 25 mg to just over 5 mg. Zinc could be reduced from 25 mg to a mere 7.4 mg, while manganese may even be banned altogether.

At the time of writing, these figures are not official EU proposals. Nevertheless, they demonstrate why campaigners are becoming concerned about the possible consequences.

Regulators Are Ignoring Modern Nutritional Science

One of the central arguments of the Save Our Supplements campaign is that vitamins and minerals should not be regulated in the same way as harmful environmental chemicals. As the website points out, traditional methods of assessing chemical safety were largely developed to protect people from over-exposure to toxic substances such as pesticides and industrial pollutants. Essential nutrients are different, the campaigners argue. Unlike pesticides, vitamins and minerals are safe essential substances that the human body needs in order to thrive and survive.

The Save Our Supplements campaign also points out that a one-size-fits-all approach ignores important differences in people’s nutritional requirements. While age, diet, lifestyle, medical conditions, medications, and individual biology can all influence a person’s nutrient needs, the EU essentially appears to be taking little account of this.

Vitamin D provides a particularly vivid example. People living in northern hemisphere countries such as Ireland tend to have limited exposure to strong sunlight for much of the year, making achieving adequate vitamin D status a significant public health concern.

Yet even in Mediterranean countries, where sunshine is far more abundant, research has found that vitamin D deficiency remains widespread. This illustrates why individual circumstances, rather than geographical location alone, need to be considered when assessing vitamin D requirements. Imposing a single maximum supplement level across an entire continent risks overlooking these important differences.

Other factors also deserve consideration. Certain prescription medications are well-known to negatively affect nutrient absorption or metabolism. Categories of drugs that have been found to deplete nutrient levels in the body include antacids, antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, antiretrovirals, beta-blockers, cholesterol-lowering drugs, contraceptives, corticosteroids, diabetic drugs, diuretics, gout medications, laxatives, psychotherapeutics, ulcer drugs, and others.

Against this background, the Irish campaigners argue that regulations on maximum limits should reflect the full range of scientific evidence, rather than concentrating disproportionately on the potential risks associated with higher doses and giving insufficient consideration to the consequences of inadequate nutrient intake.

Why the Rest of the World Should Pay Attention

There is also a particularly important historical precedent for these concerns. Between 2003 and 2007, as an official observer delegate, I attended seven international meetings of the Codex Alimentarius Commission and its various committees. When doing so I witnessed firsthand the development and completion of the so-called ‘Codex Guidelines for Vitamin and Mineral Food Supplements’, which were adopted in 2005.

During those negotiations, the EU played a major role in promoting provisions closely aligned with its own ‘Food Supplements Directive’. The similarities between the finished Codex and EU texts remain striking, with the sections dealing with vitamin and mineral maximum levels containing almost identical wording.

This history raises an obvious question: If the EU succeeds in establishing restrictive maximum permitted levels for supplements in Europe, could it then seek to extend the same approach internationally through Codex? Given what happened during the development of the original 2005 Codex guidelines, there are strong grounds for taking this possibility very seriously.

Such a development could have consequences far beyond Europe. Although Codex standards and guidelines are not automatically binding on individual countries, they can strongly influence national regulations and international trade policies. Restrictions that begin in the EU could easily eventually affect supplement availability in other parts of the world.

Health Stores Ireland President Erica Murray believes this possibility makes international support for the Irish campaign essential.

“Once set, EU limits will likely set a precedent for global guidelines to be brought in by the Codex Alimentarius Commission, severely restricting consumer choice worldwide,” she says.

“Such restrictions would significantly limit access to effective doses of essential vitamins and minerals,” Murray explains. “We’re therefore urging people everywhere to stand with us by signing and sharing our petition.”

Murray’s warning highlights an important concern. People living outside the EU, including in countries such as the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have good reason to follow these developments closely.

In our increasingly globally connected world, regulations developed in one major market can often influence policy debates and commercial decisions in others. A restriction introduced in Europe today could potentially have serious consequences far beyond Europe’s borders tomorrow.

Does the Government Really Know Best?

Ultimately, this dispute raises questions that go far beyond the technical details of conducting vitamin and mineral safety assessments. Should governments and regulators even have the right to enact draconian restrictions on the available dosages of essential nutrients, for example? And is it morally acceptable to prevent individuals from making informed decisions about their own health? Moreover, if certain pharmaceuticals are available over the counter in higher dosages than vitamins and minerals, does that send a signal that regulators bizarrely consider such drugs to be safer?

Consider the example of aspirin, a pharmaceutical drug that is widely available without prescription and carries well-established risks, including gastrointestinal bleeding. Yet while consumers can purchase aspirin over the counter, the EU is considering limits that could restrict the availability of supplements containing higher amounts of the essential mineral magnesium. Does it make sense to restrict access to essential nutrients while allowing potentially hazardous drugs to remain freely available?

These types of questions have been central to the Dr. Rath Health Foundation’s work for over two decades now. Throughout that time, we have fought for people everywhere to have free access to science-based nutritional approaches for protecting and improving their health. The developments in Europe are a timely reminder that the fight isn’t over yet.

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Via https://www.globalresearch.ca/campaigners-ireland-warn-eu-supplement-restrictions-spread-worldwide/5944254