At the beginning of 1776, a nobleman of Italian origin who called himself Alexander and claimed to be Count of Cagliostro arrived in London. According to rumors, he was a high-ranking German intelligence officer. He rented a magnificent house on Whitcomb Street with his young and beautiful wife, Countess Serafina. He set up an alchemy laboratory in the stables, as he cultivated this science and had a very rich library. “His secretary claimed that not even the Vatican had seen so many rare and valuable books,” said the 1972 Black and White.
Who was this strange character who achieved great fame in Europe in the second half of the 18th century without his true identity ever being revealed? “Magician or adventurer, miracle worker or trickster, Cagliostro was more powerful than kings and more defenseless than a vagabond,” reads the subtitle of the same article. However, the name was only the newest and most well-known of the many Giuseppe Balsamo adopted during his life. Not even his origins were certain, as he always claimed to have been born into a Christian noble family and abandoned shortly after his birth on the island of Malta.
He had only been in the British capital for a few months when he decided to briefly pause his alchemy experiments to perform a series of “indecipherable calculations while consulting an ancient Egyptian manuscript.” His own secretary later said that the Earl had given him numbers to play the lottery for several days and he and the rest of the workers at his manor won more than £1,500. He never missed a single draw until he grew tired of the expectations he created among his neighbors. “I cannot bear this persecution!” he exclaimed.
“Mysteriously, rumors began to circulate about his extraordinary predictions. There was an unusual and embarrassing movement around the palace: people looked in amazement at the chimney, from which smoke of the strangest colors was coming out. It was said that the Italian count practiced magic, freed a demonized abbess from spirits, turned mercury dust into gold and buried diamonds and precious stones on full moon nights, which they “lost” in a short time “the volume has increased enormously”, was in to read the magazine.
The pilgrimage
Although he enjoys unusual fame across the continent for someone so mysterious, his character has attracted interest in recent years and even a biography published. It states that Balsamo was actually born in Palermo in 1743 into a humble family. His childhood in the streets of the Italian city would never have allowed him to meet the elite of the European nobility, to which he later said he belonged. His mother, who was widowed at a young age, sent him to the seminary in Palermo and to the Misericordia monastery in Caltagirone to give him a dignified future.
However, he escaped the first and was excluded from the second despite his demonstrated talent. Before he left, however, he hinted at what his life would be like when he stole the secrets of his medicine book from the apothecary and sold the supposed map of a treasure that was never found to a jeweler. From that moment, under various identities, he began his busy pilgrimage around the world, which took him through Rhodes, Cairo and Alexandria until he entered the Order of the Knights of Saint John of Malta in 1765.
It is known from documents from the time that he was already considered a great doctor there, mainly thanks to the remedies he stole. A year later he settled in Rome, where he married the young Lorenza Feliciani, who took the name Serafina. Both of them, united in holy matrimony, began to deceive the numerous pilgrims who came to the city, selling them amulets and love potions that, as they themselves said, they had brought with them from Egypt.
Cagliostro, the Freemason
Cagliostro and his wife did not last long in the Italian capital as they had to flee again two years later. Balsamo was baptized with such different names as Tischio, Harat, Fenix or Pellegrini. One could say that he was still a bit of a ruffian, even though he was already posing as a Prussian officer and devoted himself to defrauding other innocents in cities like Venice and Paris until he settled in London. In the British capital he finally created the figure that would make him famous: the Count of Cagliostro, an aristocratic healer from Egypt.
With another of his tricks, he gained the respect of the most powerful in London by managing to enter a humble Masonic lodge in London’s Soho district, known as Hope, a loyal follower of the Rite of Strict Observance. He presented himself as an emissary of the Great Copt, an “unknown superior” who, according to his dubious account, had given him the task of establishing the cult of Egyptian Freemasonry in Europe. Cagliostro fascinated everyone with his magic tricks and healing ointments. One of them was an “elixir of eternal youth” that he sold to the richest and that gave him a lot of money for a comfortable life.
At the end of 1777, Cagliostro decided to venture to the continent, where the Rite of Strict Observance was in full swing. Two years later, while traveling through the Duchy of Courland – present-day Latvia – he again deceived the Masonic officials in the region, who were considering the possibility of proposing him to Catherine of Russia as governor of the region. Cagliostro skillfully rejected the proposal, earning the people’s respect for his supposed modesty, but he did not hesitate to use the public attention to address the court in Saint Petersburg.
Strasbourg
There he tried to tie up the Tsarina herself, but when the clever Catherine noticed that Cagliostro’s Egyptian mysticism was beginning to hypnotize Duke Paul, her weak eldest son and heir, she gave credence to the rumor that she believed him to be a spy for King Frederick of Prussia held and ordered his immediate exclusion. Cagliostro fled again and settled in Strasbourg, where he healed many poor people and fed them free of charge. This helped clear his reputation, but he also catered to a few rich people, which no doubt gave him a large bank loan to make ends meet.
The city’s bishop, Cardinal Louis René Éduard de Rohan, took part in some of the miraculous alchemy experiments that this Egyptian magician had begun to use to heal those most in need and increase his fame. And it convinced him, because for three years he benefited from this member of the Curia… until the scandal broke out on August 16, 1784, which put an end to his adventures once and for all.
On that day, a group of jewelers in the city discovered that the bishop had purchased a valuable diamond necklace free of charge under the name of Queen Marie Antoinette. Rohan was imprisoned in the Bastille, and with him our protagonist, who was accused of collaborating with the cardinal. Both were tried by the Paris Parliament and during the long and highly publicized trial it emerged that the powerful religious had acquired the necklace in the belief that he had done so out of love and on the orders of the Queen herself.
Back to England
The bishop had a stack of letters that he had forged from Marie Antoinette, believing that he had slept with her, when in reality he had been cheated on with a mere prostitute. This mess was never fully resolved, as the diamonds never turned up and, moreover, Cagliostro and Rohan were acquitted by a parliament determined to discredit the monarchy. “The trial was fair in the end.” The prosecutor himself demanded that the Count of Cagliostro be acquitted and completely absolved of guilt. “The court’s 49 judges unanimously approved the verdict,” Blanco y Negro reported.
“One day these walls will collapse,” the count assured upon his release in June 1786, while the people accompanied him in procession like a king. The count’s fame reached unimaginable limits for someone who neither belonged to the nobility nor the monarchy nor held political office. Proof of this is that those who encouraged this conspiracy against him were “whipped, publicly stripped, branded with a hot iron and sentenced to life imprisonment.”
Cagliostro took the opportunity to demand exorbitant compensation from the French monarchy for the damage suffered. He also published a “Letter to the French People” in which he described the humiliating treatment he had suffered in the Bastille and in which he called on Parliament to “convene the States General and work for the revolution.” However, the letter pitted him against the monarchies of France and England, which were funding a campaign to discredit the Prophet.
inquisition
As a result, publicists like Casanova exposed his true identity and the endless frauds he had perpetrated across Europe over the past few years. Balsamo denied everything, but, disgraced and impoverished, had to go into exile first in Switzerland and later in Rome, where he arrived on May 27, 1789. Meanwhile, his demands were met because that same summer the French Revolution broke out and the Bastille fell. Cagliostro regained importance and some Freemasons contacted him again.
The Vatican then ordered the Inquisition to arrest him immediately. He was found guilty of heresy and sentenced to the sentence: “Speak to no one, see no one and be seen by no one.” On April 20, 1791, Balsamo was transferred to the castle of San Leo, where he died four years later. Despite his imprisonment, the count managed to spread disturbing omens against the papacy from his cell. As the revolution destroyed everything and changed history forever, Cagliostro’s prophecies took on apocalyptic undertones, making his enigmatic figure even greater.
