Hans de Witte

Hans de Witte (* 1583 in Antwerp , † September 11, 1630 in Prague ) was a Calvinist, imperial financier and court banker during the Thirty Years' War .

Live and act

Hans de Witte, knight of Lilienthal, raised to the hereditary Bohemian nobility by Emperor Ferdinand II on May 10, 1627, was a Calvinist from Flanders and financier. In 1622 he leased a coin rack from Emperor Ferdinand II , together with Jacob Bassevi , Karl von Liechtenstein , Albrecht von Wallenstein and Paul Michna von Waitzenhofen. This consortium carried out a coin deterioration , which led to great inflation with famine , which, however, initially enriched the coin tenants.

Hans de Witte was one of the directors of the merchant class in Prague in Bohemia and the outward leaseholder of the coin rack of the imperial financial administration. In a contract dated January 18, 1622, he and other people took over the entire coinage in Bohemia, Moravia and Austria above and below the Enns until February 16, 1623 for a lease of six million guilders of the deterioration of the coins. Within that year, inflation caused them to ruin the people of these countries.

Hans de Witte von Lilienthal, who had advanced the greater part of the lease, quickly lost the wealth he had acquired. In August 1630 he was insolvent and no longer able to give Wallenstein , who had been dismissed as a general, further loans to support his political and military advancement and private life financially. This let him fall mercilessly. On September 11, 1630, Hans de Witte committed suicide and plunged into a well behind his house on the Lesser Town in Prague .

There are numerous other examples after the end of the Thirty Years' War in 1648 for the financing of wars by leasing the coin shelves to court factors and the subsequent inflation through coin deterioration with all the consequences.

media

• Second and third part of the four-part television film Wallenstein , D 1978, first broadcast on November 22, 1978 on ZDF

literature

• Anton Ernstberger : Hans de Witte, Wallenstein's financier . Steiner Verlag, Wiesbaden 1954. (= quarterly for social and economic history , supplement 38)
• Golo Mann : Wallenstein . S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main, 2nd edition 1971, ISBN 3-10-047903-3 , on Hans de Witte: Text passages in the register, p. 1339.

Web links

• Detailed biography
• Karl Walker . (Excerpt from the book): The money in history. The ways of counterfeiting . Rudolf Zitzmann Verlag , Lauf near Nuremberg, 1959.
• Barbara Staudinger: From silver dealers ...
• Peter Ilisch : Money and Coin during the Thirty Years War