Not long after the New Year, all of Europe was rocked by a papal tour.
Well, the tour itself was nothing remarkable. The important part was that France, Baden, Parma, and the Flemish Republic had announced, one after another, that they were joining the "Holy Trade Alliance" called for by the Pope.
And the Pope had not stopped traveling. Less than four days after leaving the Flemish Republic, he appeared in Münster, the capital of the Cologne federation. The hall of St. Paul's Cathedral had only a little over seven hundred seats, but more than a thousand people had squeezed inside, all craning their necks toward Pius VI at the pulpit at the far end.
After all, no Pope had visited this city in over a hundred years.
Yet Sir Briggs, the British counselor to Cologne, stood on the second-floor Reviewing Stand with mockery in his eyes. Since Cologne was one of the few parliamentary states in North Germany, it maintained certain ties with the United Kingdom, which had allowed Briggs, a Protestant, to enter the cathedral. Pius VI's rich, elderly voice rang out from the pulpit: "Jehovah said, 'You shall not have in your bag two kinds of weights, one large and one small. You shall not have in your house two kinds of measures, one large and one small. You shall have full and fair weights, full and fair measures, that your days may be long in the land Jehovah has given you...
"The many unfair tariffs and transit fees that now stand between nations are those unequal weights.
"Why should some people be burdened with heavy taxes, while others are exempt from paying..."
He was quoting a passage from Deuteronomy in the Old Testament. As Europe's foremost "holy charlatan," he did not even need to prepare in