Hanse de Witte

Hanse de Witte was a Dutch entrepreneur. Born in Amsterdam, where he appears to have made his beginnings as a trader, he first appeared in Prague in 1603 as a factor of the Dutch Calvinist firm of Nikolaus Snoukkaert, in the service of the emperors Rudolf II and Matthias. After the battle of the White Mountain (1620), he emerged as the most active financier in the country, risking his capital in the political chaos and buying up properties. Ennobled by the emperor Ferdinand II in 1624, he married the daughter of the treasurer of Bohemia. Having built up a powerful consortium that traded to Genoa, Venice and Antwerp, in 1625 he signed contracts that made him director of the financial and industrial operations on the estates of the imperial commander Wallenstein. By 1627 he was one of the richest and most powerful men in Bohemia. But in 1630 the vast apparatus crumbled, he had to sell his own house, and he shot himself.