The Rothschild banking dynasty, at its height of power and influence during the 1800s, is believed to have possessed by far the largest private fortune in the world as well as by far the largest fortune in modern world history.

Frederick II, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, had in 1747 left his wife and children and soon converted to Catholicism, and in 1755 formally ended the marriage.

His father, Landgrave William, had granted the newly acquired principality of Hanau to his daughter-in-law and grandsons, and young William, Frederick’s son, became technically the reigning prince of Hanau, though under his mother's regency.

The young prince William, together with his two younger brothers, were with their mother the landgravine Mary and from 1747 had been fostered by Protestant relatives and soon moved to Denmark, to the care of family of her sister Louise of Great Britain, who had died in 1751.

William of Hanau had married his first cousin Wilhelmina Caroline of Denmark and Norway (1747–1820), the second surviving daughter of Frederick V of Denmark and Norway, on September 1, 1764 at Christiansborg Palace.

William's younger brother Charles followed suit and in 1766 married another of their Danish first cousins.

William and Wilhelmina Caroline had remained mostly in Denmark until the death of his father on October 31, 1785, when he became William IX, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel and as such, is said to have inherited one of the largest fortunes in Europe at the time, largely gained through the loan of Hessian mercenaries, not least to Great Britain during the American Revolution.

Already in the lifetime of his father, William had received the Principality of Hanau south of the Hessian territories, near Frankfurt, as successor of its newly extinct princes, since the Hanau people did not want to have a Catholic ruler.

Already at Hanau, William had utilized the financial skills of Mayer Amschel Rothschild, who resides in the nearby Frankfurt; the two had become acquainted in 1775, although William doesn’t formally designate Rothschild as overseer until 1801.

During the Napoleonic wars, William has seen the necessity of hiding his fortune from from Napoleon by using his long standing association with the Frankfurt Rothschilds.

This money had then seen its way through to Nathan Mayer, (N.M.) in London, where it had helped fund the British movements through Portugal and Spain.

The budding banker barons have used the interest made from this venture to swiftly develop their fortune and prestige in Europe and Britain.

It is not long before their riches outweigh that of their benefactor.

In 1803, Landgrave William had been created His Royal and Serene Highness The Prince-Elector of Hesse, but his electorate had been annexed in 1806 by the Kingdom of Westphalia, ruled by Jérôme Bonaparte, after Napoleon invaded Hesse in response to Wilhelm's support for Prussia.

The Landgrave went into exile with his family in Schleswig-Holstein, but Rothschild has been able to continue as his banker, investing funds in London.

He has also profited from importing goods in circumvention of Napoleon's continental blockade.

Following the defeat of the Napoleonic armies in the Battle of Leipzig, William had been restored in 1813; he will rule until his death in Kassel in 1821.

In the Congress of Vienna, his ambition is to get recognized as King like other prince-electors (his officials coin for him the title of king of Chattia), but this is not approved, purportedly because his principality had not been electorate in any of the imperial elections.

This leads to him holding extremely tightly the electoral rank, deeming it at least regal.

The founding fortunes of the Rothschild family are made through a conjunction of financial intelligence and the wealth of Prince William I, Elector of Hesse (the House of Hesse is both related and allied to the House of Hanover) in hiding his enormous wealth from Napoleon.

Due in part to the wealth of his estate, William is especially notable for his role in affording the late Mayer Amschel Rothschild both the relationship, and situational means, by assigning some of the care of his properties and tax-gathering, for founding the Rothschild family dynasty.

Mayer had sent each of his five sons to a prominent European commercial center in order to found branches of the family banking empire.

In 1798, at the age of twenty-one, Rothschild’s son Nathan Mayer Rothschild had settled in Manchester and established a business in textile trading, then from 1804 he began to deal on the London stock exchange in financial instruments such as foreign bills of exchange and government securities.

From 1809 Nathan began to deal in gold bullion, and developed this as a cornerstone of his business.

Mayer’s youngest son, Jacob, had been sent to Paris in 1811, enhancing the family's ability to operate across Europe.

This had enabled them to profit from the opportunity of financing Wellington's armies in Portugal, requiring the sourcing of large quantities of gold on behalf of the British government.

In negotiation with Commissary-General John Charles Herries, Nathan had undertaken to transfer money to pay Wellington's troops, and later to make subsidy payments to British allies when these organized new troops after Napoleon's disastrous Russian campaign.

The family has made huge profits over a number of years from this governmental financing by adopting a high-risk strategy involving exchange-rate transactions, bond-price speculations, and commissions.

Nathan’s four brothers help coordinate activities across the continent, and the family has developed a network of agents, shippers and couriers to transport gold—and information—across Europe.

This private intelligence service had enabled Nathan to receive in London the news of Wellington's victory at the Battle of Waterloo a full day ahead of the government's official messengers.

The Emperor of Austria, Francis II, makes the five Rothschild brothers barons in 1823.

Nathan Mayer Rothschild in London chooses not to take up the title.

The family will become famous as bankers in the major countries of Europe.

The Rothschilds are rewarded for their financial services to the Crown with positions in the City.

Nathan Rothschild had arranged a five million pound loan to the Prussian government in 1818; the issuing of bonds for government loans formed a mainstay of his bank’s business.

He has gained a position of such power in the City of London that by 1825–26 he will be able to supply enough coin to the Bank of England to enable it to avert a liquidity crisis.

In 1824 he founds the Alliance Assurance Company (now Royal & SunAlliance) with Moses Montefiore, who was born in Leghorn (Livorno in Italian), Italy in 1784.

His grandfather, Moses Vita (Chaim) Montefiore had emigrated from Livorno to London in the 1740s, but had retained close contact with the town, then famous for its straw bonnets.

Montefiore was born while his parents, Joseph Elias Montefiore and his young wife Rachel, the daughter of Abraham Mocatta, a powerful bullion broker in London, were in the town on a business journey, their first child.

The family returned to Kennington in London, where Montefiore went to school and began his career as an apprentice to a firm of grocers and tea merchants.

He then entered a counting house in the City of London, and ultimately became one of the twelve "Jew brokers" licensed by the city.

His brother Abraham had joined him in the business, and their firm gained a high reputation.

Moses married Judith Cohen (1784-1862), daughter of Levi Barent Cohen, in 1812.

Her sister, Henriette (or Hannah) (1783-1850), married Nathan Mayer Rothschild (1777-1836), for whom Montefiore's firm acted as stockbrokers.

Nathan Rothschild headed the family's banking business in Britain, and the two brothers-in-law became business partners.

Montefiore retires from his business in 1824, and uses his time and fortune for communal and civic responsibilities.

Salomon Rothschild founds the Vienna branch of the family bank in 1825.

Junius Spencer Morgan becomes a partner, with George Peabody, in the English banking house of George Peabody & Co., started with financing from the Rothschilds.

Morgan had begun his business career in 1829 by entering the employ of Alfred Welles of Boston, and later entered the the dry-goods business.

Eighteen-year-old Cecil Rhodes and his brother Herbert leave the Natal Colony for the diamond fields of Kimberley in October 1871.

Financed by N M Rothschild & Sons, Rhodes will succeed over the next seventeen years in buying up all the smaller diamond mining operations in the Kimberley area.

Cecil Rhodes was born in 1853 in Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire, England, the fifth son of the Reverend Francis William Rhodes and his wife Louisa Peacock Rhodes.

His father is a Church of England vicar who is proud of never having preached a sermon longer than ten minutes.

His siblings include Francis William Rhodes, who will become an army officer.

Rhodes had attended the Bishop's Stortford Grammar School from the age of nine, but, as a sickly, asthmatic adolescent, he had been taken out of grammar school in 1869 and, according to Basil Williams, had "continued his studies under his father's eye...His health was weak and there were even fears that he might be consumptive, a disease of which several of the family showed symptoms. His father therefore determined to send him abroad to try the effect of a sea voyage and a better climate. Herbert [Cecil's brother] had already set up as a planter in Natal, South Africa, so Cecil was despatched on a sailing vessel to join Herbert in Natal.The voyage to Durban took him seventy days, and on 1 September 1870 he first set foot on African soil, a tall, lanky, anaemic, fair vhaired boy, shy and reserved in bearing." (Cecil Rhodes, Makers of the 19th century, H. Holt & Company, 1921, retrieved from http://books.google.com/books?id=A1txHgXvlU4C on 8 November 2012)

His family expected he would help his older brother Herbert, who operates a cotton farm.

When he first came to Africa, Rhodes had lived on money lent by his aunt Sophia.

After a brief stay with the Surveyor-General of Natal, Dr. P.C.

Sutherland, in Pietermaritzburg, Rhodes had taken an interest in agriculture, and joined his brother Herbert on his cotton farm in the Umkomazi valley in Natal.

The land is unsuitable for cotton, and the venture had failed.

External debts force Said Pasha's successor, Isma'il Pasha, to sell his country's share in the Suez Canal for four million pounds to the United Kingdom in 1875, but French shareholders still hold the majority.

Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli is accused by William Ewart Gladstone of undermining Britain's constitutional system, because he had not referred to, or obtained consent from, Parliament when purchasing the shares with funding from the English branch of the House of Rothschild.

The oil firm Branobel experiences one of the first oil tanker disasters.

In 1881, the Zoroaster's sister-ship, the Nordenskjöld, explodes in Baku while taking on kerosene.

The pipe carrying the cargo is jerked away from the hold when the ship is hit by a gust of wind.

Kerosene then spills onto the deck and down into the engine room, where mechanics are working in the light of kerosene lanterns.

The ship then explodes, killing half the crew.

Ludvig Nobel responds to the disaster by creating a flexible, leak proof loading pipe that is much more resistant to spills.

The first oil well had been mechanically drilled in the Bibi-Heybat suburb of Baku in 1846, though a number of hand-dug wells predate it.

Large-scale oil exploration had begun in 1872, when Russian imperial authorities auctioned the parcels of oil-rich land around Baku to private investors.

Within a short period of time Swiss, British, French, Belgian, German, Swedish and American investors have appeared in Baku.

Among them are the firms of the Nobel brothers, together with the family von Börtzell-Szuch (Carl Knut Börtzell, who also owns the Livadia Palace) and the Rothschild family.

An industrial oil belt, better known as Black City, is established near Baku.

Ludvig Nobel, as head of Branobel, had begun to adopt a single-hull design, where the ship's hull forms part of its tank structure.

In November 1880, he had ordered his first single-hulled tanker, the Moses.

Within a year, he had ordered seven more single-hulled tankers: the Mohammed, Tatarin, Bramah, Spinoza, Socrates, Darwin, Koran, Talmud, and Calmuck.