Willem van Enckenvoirt and the Dutch Network in Rome in the First Quarter of the Sixteenth Century

In the absence of family relations, Pope Adrian had to rely on his compatriots. Willem van Enckenvoirt was the central ‘spider’in the Dutch web in Rome in the first quarter of the sixteenth century. Throughout the Dutch papacy, Van Enckenvoirt acted as the intermediary between Adrian and anyone who wanted access. Soon he was made datarius, responsible for the sale of offices in the papal bureaucracy and for the approval of ecclesiastical benefices. He knew his way around the Roman bureaucracy and was deeply embedded in local patterns of patronage. A reconstruction of his Roman network shows Van Enckenvoirt to have been a leading representative of a group of ecclesiastical entrepreneurs from the Low Countries, who participated fully in the mechanisms of distributing the Church’s resources. In fact, he embodied the Roman corruption that Adrian had set out to combat. Yet the Pope needed this ‘Romanized’ country man in order to hold his own in the intricacies of Curial politics.