The Knights Hospitaller had appeared in the Kingdom of Sardinia this time at Franz's behest. He truly needed a pair of gloves.
But the old pair was too dirty, so Franz decided to wash them before using them again. He had no intention of employing a half-baked pyramid scheme that could do nothing but tell stories. He did not even want the Order's current organizational framework.
At this time, the Knights Hospitaller operated under a model familiar to modern people but baffling to those of the nineteenth century.
They believed themselves to transcend nationality, yet internally they wanted to divide people apart. Thus, they used ethnicity as the dividing line, voluntarily carving the Order into one little group after another.
To the Austrian Empire, such a model was poison among poisons. Franz would never accept it. He had fought separatism his entire life—how could he possibly fail to understand his own position at such a critical moment?
Moreover, all Franz wanted was the Order's name, not to genuinely prop up the Knights Hospitaller. Although he had once shared out many benefits to the nobility and certain old power blocs, that did not mean he was obliged to keep doing so.
Now, Franz had no desire to save this bizarre organization. Rather than waste time purging and remolding it, he might as well build a new stove from the ground up.
As for getting his hands on the Grand Master's authority, that was no problem at all for Franz. An empty shell left with nothing but a gimmick naturally could not resist imperial power.
Naturally, those who had taken the money could not easily take it out of the Austrian Empire either. Once they lost their exalted status, they no longer enjoyed those privileges. Franz had no shortage of ways to