The Richest Man Who Ever Lived: The Life and Times of Jacob Fugger

by Greg Steinmetz

  Still, Fugger wasn’t childless. At some point, he had met a woman named Mechtild Belz and took her as his mistress. They had a child together. Mechtild, perhaps with Fugger’s intervention, married a doctor and together they raised Fugger’s daughter, also named Mechtild, as their own. Society attached little shame to illegitimacy and when the girl grew up, she married Gregor Lamparter, the rector of Tübingen University, the oldest and most prestigious university in Germany. There is some doubt about Fugger’s paternity, but there is no other way to account for the generous financial assistance Fugger gave Lamparter. When Lamparter served a five-year stint as a counselor to Maximilian, a job Fugger may have secured for him, Fugger paid his annual salary of 8,000 florins. When a knight kidnapped Lamparter, Fugger paid the ransom. The duke of Württemberg also tried to nab Lamparter and use him as a hostage in a dispute with Maximilian. Lamparter eluded the duke, but the mere fact that the duke targeted him suggests an especially close relationship between Lamparter and Fugger. The emperor didn’t care about Lamparter, but he did care about Fugger.

  We don’t know if Fugger took other mistresses, but we know that Sybille took a lover herself. Conrad Rehlinger was an Augsburg merchant, a family friend and a frequent guest in the Fugger home. When Fugger needed a witness to sign a document, he called Rehlinger. A portrait by Bernhard Strigel of Rehlinger and his nine children hangs in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. Sybille married Rehlinger within weeks of Fugger’s death.

  Fugger’s most notorious contemporary was Cesare Borgia, the bloodthirsty son of Pope Alexander VI. While Fugger was in Augsburg piling up profits, Borgia was in Rome murdering his way up the professional ladder. Borgia was not the only one using assassination as a means of advancement. The practice was widespread in the Renaissance. The death of Pico della Mirandola, the champion of humanism, was also a case of poison. The prevalence of assassination led the great Fugger historian Gottfried (Götz) von Pölnitz, who spent more time in the Fugger Archives than anyone, to ask if Fugger himself was a murderer. In 1502, Sigmund Gossembrot, Fugger’s most dangerous rival, died. His death came just a few months after the death of his brother and partner George. Fugger certainly had a motive: The Gossembrots were out to get him. At the time of their deaths, they were proposing a new plan for Maximilian to drop Fugger. But the only evidence for murder von Pölnitz cites is the absence of documentation about either death. This proves nothing. Even leaving aside that murder was a capital offense and carried enormous risk to the killer, murder wasn’t Fugger’s game. He didn’t need to kill people like the Gossembrots to succeed. He could beat them with his intellect. After Sigmund Gossembrot died, Fugger betrayed no joy. He assumed Sigmund’s children would continue to fight him, saying, “Although Gossembrot is dead, his envious seeds have been left behind.”

  That same year, three salesmen from the Swiss city of Basel came to visit Fugger. They were selling jewelry and their sources told them Fugger was interested. He often bought jewels for Sybille, including, in Frankfurt, a ring big enough that it had all of Augsburg talking. “She had gold jewelry and gem stones to surpass a princess,” wrote a friend.

  The men visited Fugger in his office. Located in the house of his brothers, the office was in the back of the building and overlooked a quiet alley instead of the busy street where the men presumably entered. The office became legendary as Fugger’s influence grew. Visitors called it the Golden Counting Room. Servants showed the men in. They didn’t have the actual stones, only sketches. But that was good enough because the salesmen hawked the most spectacular jewels in Europe and the paint-on-parchment drawings they unrolled for Fugger were stunning. One showed the Little Feather, a jeweled hatpin. Another showed the White Rose, a heart-shaped ruby in a circle of diamonds. The third piece was a diamond-studded garter that once belonged to England’s Edward III. One can imagine the Swiss saved the best for last and, after they unveiled the final drawing, they said nothing and let it speak for itself. It showed one of the world’s largest diamonds. The jeweler had cut it in a rectangular shape, mounted it in a gold setting and surrounded it with three rubies radiating from the center like rays of the sun. They called it the Three Brothers. It later found its way to England where Queen Elizabeth wore it for the Ermine Portrait. Along with her exaggerated lace collar, hooped skirt and frilly sleeves, the Three Brothers advertised her wealth and power.

  Before Fugger saw these four pieces, Charles the Bold owned them and had brought them on his ill-fated, do-or-die invasion of Switzerland twenty-six years earlier. Like Maximilian and his faith in the magic of the imperial crown, Charles believed in the power of objects and that the Lord only granted great things to great people. He also believed in the corollary, that the more objects a person accumuluated—and the more value they had—the stronger the possessor. That’s why he also brought to Switzerland his silver plate, gold decanters, ivory ornaments, jeweled swords, high-backed thrones, saintly bones, canopied bed, gilded ostrich eggs and his collection of shoes, including the stylish ones with the impossibly long toes. Maybe the sultan of Turkey had more treasures, but no European collection could compare. And if no collection could compare, no owner could compare, not when it came to power and might. As Charles saw it, he was invincible. He had the stuff to prove it.

  The Swiss surprised Charles near Lake Geneva at the Battle of Morat and chased him from his camp before he could grab his things. The quality of the items, not to mention the overwhelming quantity, awed the Swiss generals. They ordered death for anyone who took loot for themselves. The order came too late. The most valuable items, particularly the small ones like jewels, had already vanished into pockets. A witness described how a soldier found the largest of the diamonds beneath a wagon wheel in the mud of Morat. The soldier sold it for a florin—about a month’s wages for a mercenary—to a Swiss bishop who sold it to the city of Basel.

  Jewels like these were in high demand. Monarchs bought them to advertise their power. Businessmen bought them as a form of savings. They could sell them in a pinch or carry them on a flight to safety. And while diamonds generated no income sitting in a chest, they held up against inflation. They also made handy gifts. But the Swiss found the Burgundian loot hard to sell. Ten years after Morat, they tried to sell one of the larger pieces, most likely the Three Brothers, and received an offer of only 4,000 florins, a sliver of its true value. The trouble was that the items were stolen. Or at least that’s what Maximilian and the Habsburgs, as inheritors of Burgundy, would have said. If the items turned up, they still had the right to claim the pieces and demand them back.

  Charles the Bold had been dead for eighteen years by the time the Swiss approached Fugger but the men still had to operate in secrecy. Their sketches dazzled Fugger. After more than a year of negotiations, he bought the complete set for 40,000 florins, a large amount of his capital at the time. Like the city elders of Basel, he put them in a vault and said nothing about them.

  Fugger was not a wild-eyed speculator. When he advanced money to Sigmund or Maximilian, ore in the ground stood behind the loans. When he built a smelter, the prevailing price of copper supported a winning return. When he bought jewels, a bargain price compensated for the challenges of trying to sell them.

  But even the gimlet-eyed Fugger was subject to the passions of his age. Columbus’s discovery of America, Vespucci’s discovery of the Amazon and Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India excited even the landlocked people of Augsburg. A public gripped by exploration fever collected coconuts, parrot feathers and other Asian curios. Even Fugger caught it and, in 1505, he took a flyer on a Portuguese spice voyage to India. Portugal was battling Spain for mastery of the seas. Portugal was a backwater stranded on the edge of western Europe. It was hopelessly poor, but it had big dreams. While the Spanish focused on America, the Portuguese concentrated on rounding Africa and opening a water route to India. They aimed to smash the Venetian lock on the European pepper trade. Following on da Gama’s success, King Manuel I sought investors for a return trip to b
ring back pepper. Fugger joined in. The investment involved him in a violent trade war and benefitted him in ways he could not have foreseen.

  Fugger knew that an ocean journey, especially in the lightly charted water around the Cape of Good Hope, was perilous. By jumping in, he weighed the risk against the return. He would lose his entire investment if the ships splintered on the rocks. He would make a killing if they returned to Lisbon, stuffed with pepper.

  Negotiations dragged on for months. When the investors finally signed the papers, Fugger’s Augsburg neighbor Anton Welser put down 20,000 florins and Fugger a mere 4,000. Maybe Fugger didn’t want to risk more than that. But the energy he put into the effort—he replaced his agent after the first agent failed to make progress with the king—suggests he wanted a larger stake. The Germans leased three ships in Antwerp. Two Augsburg scribes boarded the ships to record events for the folks back home. The ships sailed to Lisbon where they joined a fleet of Portuguese gunboats. Augsburg city manager Conrad Peutinger spoke for all when he wished the voyage well: “It gives us Augsburgers a feeling of great pride to be the first Germans to travel to India.”

  The Portuguese needed guns because they had to fight to get the pepper. Arabs controlled most of the ports along the way. They bought pepper from Indian growers and shipped it up the Red Sea, where porters loaded it on camels for the walk up to Alexandria or Damascus and the Mediterranean voyage to Venice. The Arabs and their Venetian partners had been trading like this for hundreds of years. But if the Portuguese could secure the trade route, they could win it all because they had several advantages. As Fugger knew, their enormous, square-sailed carracks with their large cargo bellies offered efficiencies that camels could not match. By staying on the water all the way to Lisbon, the Portuguese could avoid the punishing tolls that the sultan of Turkey charged to pass through his territory. Then there was the simple fact that Lisbon was closer than Venice to Spain and the markets of northern Europe. Buyers from Germany, France and Spain would buy from Portugal because it could offer lower prices. The Portuguese writer Guido Detti thrilled over the idea of beating the haughty Venetians: “When they lose their commerce in the East, they will have to go back to fishing.” Venice itself feared disaster. Wrote the Venetian banker Pruili: “I clearly see in this the ruin of the city of Venice.”

  King Manuel entrusted the fleet to an ambitious nobleman named Francisco Almeida. The king wanted him to strike deals for safe passage with the cities along the way and seize or even destroy those who refused to agree. The king offered him a staggering incentive. He promised to make Almeida viceroy of India if he succeeded. As viceroy, Almeida would have complete authority. He would rule Portugal’s holdings in the region as a dictator.

  Almeida and his ships left Lisbon in March. After an easy trip down the west coast of Africa, the ships swung around the cape and ran into a storm that toppled masts and cracked rudders. They survived to face an even more perilous encounter in Mombasa. Mombasa is an island city directly across the Indian Ocean—what the Portuguese called the Barbarian Gulf—from the Indian spice ports. It is now the second biggest city in Kenya. Then it was the largest city in eastern Africa and belonged to Arab traders. The sheik who ran Mombasa had a palace inside the city wall with gardens and fountains. The rest of the city was lined with streets so narrow that only two people could walk abreast. Balconies hung over the streets as a second road system. Pepper was one source of income. The other was slaves. The sheik sent raiding parties to the mainland and captured slaves for the bazaars of Aleppo, Alexandria and Cairo. Almeida had to have Mombasa to secure the coast. The whole enterprise depended on it. Unless Mombasa could be won over or neutralized, Portuguese ships could look forward to pirate attacks whenever they came near.

  Almeida’s ships, the king’s flag flying from the masts and guns pointing from the decks, made a fearsome sight as they anchored in the harbor and threatened an attack. But the sheik felt safe behind his fortifications and refused to negotiate. Almeida opened fire. Mombasa harbor echoed with the boom of mortar and the shouts of soldiers. The city was soon ablaze. Almeida ordered a landing party to beach and, after surviving an attack by two elephants the sheik let loose to trample them, the men saw that they had weakened the city’s defenses enough to justify a full landing. The Portuguese went ashore the next morning. While the main force fought hand to hand in the city, Almeida easily took the palace. The sheik hitched up his robe and fled with his men into the palms. Slaves, women and children were the only ones left to defend the city. The Portuguese killed everyone they captured. Satisfied with a job well done, Almeida raised the king’s red-and-white flag over the palace. Balthazar Sprenger, one of the Augsburgers on the trip, thanked the Lord. “What happened could not have been accomplished without a merciful god,” he wrote. “Without God, many of us would have fallen. We conquered and kept the city with happiness thanks to the all-powerful.” The sheik wrote a warning letter to a neighboring ruler. “A great Lord came with such strength and fury that few escaped with their lives,” he wrote. “The smell of bodies in my city is so repulsive that I can’t return.” The Portuguese lost five men. The sheik lost 1,500. Mombasa never threatened the Portuguese again.

  With the west coast of Africa now under his control, Almeida kidnapped an Arab pilot to guide him across the Indian Ocean. Almeida and Fugger’s investment faced more danger on the Indian side. By now, the Arabs had a new ally in the Republic of Venice. The pope had long before ordered Venice to do no business with infidels. But while the Muslims might have been heathens to the pope, Venice embraced them as brothers when money was on the line. Venice had a saying for this: “First Venetians, then Christians.” Faith in the slogan was never more evident than in its dealings with Arab spice dealers.

  Venice considered two options. The first was to copy the ancient Persian king Darius and dredge a canal to connect the Mediterranean with the Red Sea. Once it did that, it could send ships from Venice to fight. But that cost too much so Venice instead sent shipbuilders from the Arsenal to Alexandria to make planks, ribs and masts that the Egyptians could haul, like the blocks of the pyramids, across the desert to assemble into war ships at Suez. Egyptian crews manned the ships and got as far as Diu in Gujarat where they planned to join the Zamorin of Calicut, a powerful Indian king, to attack Almeida. Almeida got to them first. He overwhelmed the Egyptians, firing cannons at point-blank range and collecting Egyptian heads to hurl into other towns as warning shots. After that and a few more altercations, Almeida grabbed as much pepper as he could and charted a course to Lisbon.

  The ships returned to Europe with so much pepper that prices crashed before they even docked. Welser and Fugger wanted to sell the haul immediately. They could still earn a huge profit despite the price drop. King Manuel stopped them by confiscating the cargo and putting it in a warehouse. The Germans accused the king of theft and spent three years in court to get it back. But it ended well. When Welser and Fugger finally got the pepper and sold it, they tripled their money.

  The voyage whetted the appetite of the Welsers for more. Although Lucas Rem, their man in Lisbon, found the Portuguese insufferable and thought the spice trade a horrible business, the Welsers funded more voyages and made so much money on it that, despite being commoners, one of their own married an archduke. But as far as Fugger was concerned, the Welsers could have it all. King Manuel’s double cross spoiled his appetite for shipping. He preferred doing business close to home. Besides, he had another way to profit on spices. He could make just as much money as a middleman, buying pepper from the Portuguese and selling it in Germany.

  Anyone could be a wholesaler but Fugger had an edge because he had something the Portuguese needed to stay in business: metal. The Portuguese got a lesson in the importance of metal when da Gama went to India in 1498 and tried to entice the Zamorin to trade pepper for European honey and fashionable hats. Arab traders laughed when they saw the wares and the Zamorin seethed at the perceived insult. A friendly Tunisian trader warned
da Gama to bring gold next time or else. “If the captains went ashore, their heads would be cut off,” he said. “This was the way the king dealt with those who came to his country without gold.” Alemeida ran into the same hurdle. No one wanted his honey and hats. The Portuguese realized they needed more than guns if they wanted pepper. Fugger’s silver and copper weren’t gold, but India wanted these metals, too. Soon, Portugal became Fugger’s best customer for metal. He sent wagons full of the ores of silver and copper from Hungary to Antwerp where porters loaded it on ships for Lisbon. Portugal paid him with pepper, making him one of Europe’s largest spice wholesalers. Detractors called Fugger a profiteer, a monopolist and a Jew among other things. The spice voyage earned him another name: Pepper Sack. His pepper deals were more visible than his mining activities. Many assumed pepper was his main business.

  As the chronicler Pruili feared, Portugal’s success devastated Venice. The city went from exporting pepper to becoming an importer. In 1512, a Venetian diplomat was complaining to the sultan of Egypt about money problems. In 1514, Venice suffered the ultimate humiliation by becoming a Portuguese customer. It was over for the republic. In a last gasp to hold on, it shifted its economy from trade to industry. Glass, soap, silk and wool makers surpassed the Arsenal shipyard as the city’s leading manufacturer. But the old spark and work ethic disappeared, and Venice began its decline. Changing with the times, Fugger shifted the center of his foreign activities to Antwerp. As for Portugal, it dominated the spice business until the next century when the Dutch broke its grip.

  One of Fugger’s tricks was keeping public officials on his payroll, including several who worked for Maximilian. The funny thing is, Maximilian not only knew that Fugger paid his men but tolerated it because it saved him money. He didn’t have to pay them himself. Lucas Rem, the Welser agent in Lisbon, found Maximilian’s financial naïveté beyond belief. He somehow missed that they might not have his best interests at heart. In his diary, Rem praised Maximilian as pious and honorable but blasted him for financial stupidity. “He has advisors who are parasites that control him completely,” he wrote. “They are almost all rich but the emperor is poor.” Machiavelli, then a city official in Florence, had a similar take. He called Maximilian a “great general” who was patient and gracious with his subjects but a disaster with money. “His easy nature causes him to be deceived,” he said. “A friend of the emperor told me that anyone could cheat him without his knowing it.”