NO  TRUMPETS
announced the Rothschild accession to world power. At the end of the 1780's Mayer Rothschild meant little or nothing to Prince William in his high castle at Wilhelmshohe. Mayer's name remained entirely inconspicuous in the Frankfurt ghetto itself.
The premise of the family's conquest lay in the very unobtrusiveness of their crouch and the silence of their leap. Their aim was so high; compared with it, their position so low; their first foothold so precarious, their resources so feeble; any alerted rival could have destroyed them with a single stroke.
Yet the three puissant devices by which Mayer's house was to overwhelm a continent were already doing their work in miniature.

1. The Rothschild clientele consisted, to a calculated degree, not of other bourgeoisie but of some of the noblest personages in Germany---and never mind if their high posi-dons exacted low profits.

2. Rothschild courted the Landgrave with low prices (thus faithfully imitating William's own tactics with the imperial palace in Vienna). This earned Mayer the increasingly crucial cooperation of Buderus who, as the prince's financial lieutenant, exerted influence over the greatest money hoard in Europe.
3. Mayer had sons.
Here was, and is, the simplest, most important power instrument of all: to have sons. In essence the dream poem in Mayer's soul was dynastic. All the connectionmaking, the storytelling and charming, the bit-by-bit selling he did at local courts was dynastic investment. Had he not been a father, it would have been vain gesticulation; he would have died unknown, a species of feckless Semitic troubadour. But since he had sons, he became a mover of mountains. All his travail turned out to be the perfect seed for his children to grow and pluck; and all their tireless harvesting toil would be but new sowing for their children and their children's children.
Perhaps the early Romans were the most successful nation we have known; perhaps Napoleon the most formidable individual. It is quite possible that the people still bustling obscurely at the Green Shield were the family par excellence in modern history. As long as Mayer lived alone with his wife, he was just another Jew---or, if you will, a Caesar without centurions. But soon those boys marched out of Gutele's womb like so many dauntless legions.
First came Amschel, future treasurer of the German Confederation. Then Salomon, who in the end achieved exactly the exalted station in imperial Vienna that remained Landgrave William's perpetual daydream. Then Nathan, who rose to more power than any other man in England. Then Kalmann, who wound the Italian peninsula around his hand. Then Jacob, who was to lord it in France during Republic and Empire.

In the beginning, of course, those five, together with their five sisters, were just an eager litter of ghetto apprentices, taking the load off Mayer's stooped shoulders. They ran errands, manned counters, added figures.
But swiftly their characters became plain. They were quite different from old Rothschild. When Mayer talked Jewish history (would one of them perhaps go to the Yeshiva?) or spun yarns about his coins, their eyes, while obedient, turned blank. They became alive at the market place. They vibrated at the Wechselstube. They were fiendish calculators. They came running into the house with something---often cotton cloth---they had snatched up for a song and which they sold dearly, with an astounding pressure and speed, a few hours later.
Success itched in their bones. Yet their gentler father was needed to release it. A precedent established itself to pattern the future: in the House of Rothschild, brilliance may be individual but accomplishment is joint. Brothers and cousins complement each other, and so do generations.
The harsh, tremendous new energies in the House of the Green Shield might have foundered if not for Mayer Amschel. He softened them. He supplied graciousness, the one thing the brothers would always lack. He put forward a pleasant face at a time when the skill of pleasing was still more useful than the ability to negotiate. In other self-made success stories the more polished sons build from the spadework done by the father. Here the father put the subtle touches on the sledgehammer schemes of his boys.
The first scheme consisted of a complex and ingenious putting together of two and two. On the one hand, there was the Rothschild cotton-cloth line, paid for with money going to England---that is, to textile jobbers in Manchester.

On the other hand, his soldier-vending Serenity, the Landgrave, got money from England in the form of drafts. On the third hand (Rothschild reasoning is usually octopus-armed), those English cotton jobbers could be paid directly with the Landgrave's London drafts---and the discount fees pocketed both ways---if only William would give Mayer such discount business again and in more generous quantities. On the fourth hand, why couldn't Mayer show up at William's new court in Cassel right now, with some good stories and a do-me-a-favor-priced collection of fine old coins?
"Right now" meant 1787, two years before the French Revolution. Mayer packed his velvet case of numismatic treasures. Shortly afterwards the Landgrave acquired very cheaply a score of rare items, together with a petition from M. A. Rothschild recalling Mayer's Court Factorship and some of the minor discounting he had done in years past.
The court took its time. At last, in 1789, drafts worth 800 pounds sterling arrived at the Wechselstube. It was a first  trickle that became steady and strong and hugely profitable.
But this new income did not nearly satisfy the dynamic new impatience at the Green Shield. What was draft-discounting---which was really just check-cashing---compared to the handling of bonds in which the Landgrave invested much of his gigantic income? And who did the handling? Wasn't it those big Frankfurt bankers, Bethmann Brothers and Rueppell & Harnier? Weren't there spats between court and counting house?
Suddenly the Rothschild boys stood, hat in hand, before the big bankers. "Please," they said in their funny Jew Street German, "let us be go-betweens between you, the dignified financiers, and him, the difficult William."
The bankers looked amused at these eager, uncouth apparitions.

Yes, in them there wasn't an iota of dignity to be hurt, and maybe they had just the raw vitality to satisfy Serenity's "mach' schnell" needlings. Established Frankfurt agreed. It paid those young ghetto louts a small commission for being its messengers and William's butts.
Established Frankfurt was served well. William liked the way the youths snapped to. And his treasurer, Buderus, became a secret partner in the Wechselstube now turned regular bank.
Soon Salomon was an almost daily fixture at Cassel, incorporating Rothschild into the financial apparatus of the court. Soon Amschel was arranging---and participating in
---some of the Landgrave's mortgage business. Soon Nathan, who had quarreled with an English textile salesman over prices, found himself in Manchester; soon he sent directly discounted cotton right through the French Revolution to the Rothschild store, just as prices started rocketing. Almost by accident the family had taken its first step toward forming an international network.
Soon the Green Shield team fanned out in all directions. In every stagecoach a young round-faced Rothschild sat, portfolio wedged under one arm, eyes avid but impenetrable. And Mayer himself followed, soothing where there had been too much sharpness, conciliating and smiling as consummately as his sons had argued and promoted.
Soon the Jewish community at Frankfurt took a surprised look at the phenomenon in their midst. For over twenty years Mayer Amschel's tax assessment had been the same, a moderate figure of 2,000 gulden. Abruptly in 1795 the amount was doubled. The next year his official worth reached 15,000 gulden, the highest possible fiscal category in the ghetto.
This change did not constitute a world-shaking event, like some others about to take place. Napoleon was invent

ing imperial France. Corsican thunder rolled down the shores of Europe. But in Frankfurt another brand-new power reached beyond national borders. It marched on tip-toe, and not with hobnailed boots. Mayer Rothschild executed in total secrecy his first important loan operation involving a foreign state.

Someone once said that the wealth of Rothschild consists of the bankruptcy of nations. There is more to it than that, of course. But certainly the family's initial international coup took place in 1804, when the entire treasury of Denmark consisted of a deficit.
Mayer, kept au courant by Buderus, knew the fact well. He knew furthermore that Landgrave William suffered from an almost unbearable surplus. Highness, therefore, was beyond doubt willing to help out Denmark---particularly since a kingdom makes pretty good collateral. Only, the Danish monarch was Highness' uncle. It's always bad business to show poor relations how rich you are: loans within the family can easily degenerate into gifts.
The thing to do was to make the loan incognito. Not through Bethmann Brothers, of course, or through Rueppell & Harnier, or any of the other big banks identified with his Highness. Why not use an obscure but efficient outfit; an outfit which would turn the trick for a smaller commission, yet with guaranteed anonymity; an outfit---well, let's see now . . . an outfit, say, like Rothschild's?
Mayer just dropped his intricately wrought hint to Buderus. Buderus redropped it into Highness' ear. Highness smiled. From Frankfurt to Copenhagen the stagecoaches began to swarm with Mayer's boys.

Bethmann Brothers and Rueppell & Harnier, the big Frankfurt bankers, did not notice anything at first. After a while, though, they could not help wondering. The Rothschild outfit seemed so awfully preoccupied each time they asked it to do some menial brokerage chores. Furthermore, quite some time had passed since the Landgrave had last asked them to arrange foreign loans.
Inquiries directed to his Highness' treasurer, the Honorable Herr Buderus, received polite impassive answers. Questions put to Copenhagen met with a most curious statement: all Danish loans, replied the finance minister, had been handled by people acting for some nameless but terribly nice millionaire.
"What people?" exclaimed Bethmann Brothers.
". . . .schild something." These people moved so fast it was hard to catch their names.
". . . .schild?" Rothschild? Rothschild! Bethmann Brothers were in an uproar of investigation. And the cat was out of the bag. Those ghetto hawkers! Daring to undercut the most powerful and long-established bankers in Germany!
Furious appeals went out from Bethmann and Rueppell & Harnier to the Danish government, to the Landgrave, even to Buderus---flaming statements about Mosaic presumption and Christian loyalty. Patrician Frankfurt was up in arms. Broadside after broadside crashed against the Jew Street schemers, who were still, after all, chained in at night.
The court at Cassel hemmed and hawed. In the end the shouting did no more than make the shouters hoarse. That family was simply too useful to his Highness. Buderus said so, and the prince knew it for the truth. Their energy, their funny accents, their ubiquity had become indispensable.

The last quality was decisive. They were everywhere. One father and five sons had become a preternatural force that devoured distance, precedents, limits and frontiers.
Old Mayer now gave this new force formal status. In 1800 he entered into a partnership with his two eldest sons. He established rules which became pillars of a dynastic constitution. All key posts in the firm were manned by members of the family---luckily a large one---not by hired hands. (To this day, only Rothschilds are partners or owners of the great Rothschild banks.) When Schonche, the eldest daughter, married, her husband was not employed in the business; but when Amschel wed a year later, his wife promptly received a position. (To this day the female line is as rigidly kept out of Rothschild affairs as the male line is included.) Mayer also began a system of secret bookkeeping in addition to the official one. (Today Rothschild business is "secret" to the extent that it consists, despite its immense size, of private partnerships which need publish no balance sheets or other information.)
Family and business were welded into one formidable machine. Daily the Rothschilds exerted smoother and greater power. They still lived in Jew Street, but their commercial quarters expanded to offices and a stockroom outside the ghetto. In the subterranean passages under the Green Shield counting house the gold mounted, together with packets of securities.
Above all, the Rothschilds' position with the Landgrave was supremely entrenched. Mayer had been appointed Oberhofagent (Superior Court Agent); the two eldest sons could now call themselves Hessian Pay Office agents. Daily their influence over the Hessian court, and over its income of a million thalers per year, was widening. They loaned money to the Landgrave's son, in loyal imitation of the Landgrave, who loaned to the royal dukes of England. They were on the point of becoming chief bankers to Wilham, one of the world's richest monarchs.

And then, in the year 1806, when Mayer's dream almost became substance, Napoleon seemed to sweep it away. He was sweeping away everything else. Prince William, like the cautious billionaire he was, tried to straddle the fence between Bonaparte and the Austro-British alliance. But the French Emperor had small patience with vacillators. When the Grande Armee came down on Prussia in October, 1806, it came down on Hesse as well.
It appeared to be all over. Frankfurt suffered occupation. The lines of international commerce were shattered. Nathan, the Rothschilds' foreign bastion, looked marooned in England. And in the wee hours of the morning of November 1 Prince William himself panted into his carriage and had the horses goaded northward to Schleswig.
The next day French troops flooded into his castle, Wilhelmshohe. "My object," read Napoleon's order, "is to remove the house of Hesse-Cassel from rulership and to strike it out of the list of powers."
Thus Europe's mightiest man decreed erasure of the rock on which the new Rothschild firm had been built. Yet, curiously, the bustle didn't diminish at the House of the Green Shield. The clouds which the great Emperor had blown so grandiosely across Europe were joined by smaller but no less portentous counterparts. Dust whirled behind the carriages in which those round-faced young Rothschilds still sat, avid and impenetrable, portfolios wedged between body and arm.
They saw neither peace nor war, neither slogans nor manifestoes nor orders of the day, neither death nor glory. They saw none of the things that blinded the world. They saw only steppingstones. Prince William had been one. Napoleon would be the next.