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

Page 14

by Greg Steinmetz


  The report contained other bombshells. It found that Fugger sometimes paid the emperor less for copper than the emperor paid to have it produced. In other words, Maximilian was losing money with every shovel of ore. Another finding noted that Fugger and other merchants often loaned to the emperor with diluted currency or in wool or silk that Maximilian’s people didn’t know how to value. Maximilian may have thought he was getting 40,000 florins worth of coins or goods. The truth was he got far less.

  Not everything in the report was true. It was full of errors and exaggerated claims. But it nevertheless put Fugger in a dangerous spot. If Maximilian agreed with the council and turned on him, he could be finished. No one mentioned Jacques Coeur, once the lead banker to Charles V of France. But Coeur might have been on Fugger’s mind. Coeur had been the richest man in France. His palace in Bourges rivaled that of the king and made him a target for the envious nobility. The king liked Coeur—Coeur funded his wars and enabled his victories—but he needed the nobles more than the banker. Caving to the pressure, Charles tossed Coeur in jail and snatched his holdings. Coeur escaped by bribing his jailers but never regained the king’s favor. Coeur died in exile in Italy. Some members of the Tyrolean council wanted the same for Fugger.

  The council argued Fugger’s contracts with the emperor were invalid because Fugger had abused the emperor’s trust. Moreover, Fugger had corrupted Tyrolean officials and manipulated copper prices by flooding the market with copper from his smelter in Fuggerau. The officials offered Maximilian 400,000 florins of their own money—an amount equal to several years of Schwaz’s output—to break with the banker.

  Unfortunately for them, Fugger was worth more to the emperor than that. The council could keep its money, Maximilian told them. Maximilian closed the diet and went back to his business. He was willing to risk a rebellion because he was about to embark on the most important project of his life. The project would cement Habsburg hegemony in Europe if successful. To make sure it did, he needed Fugger.

  If the story of the imperial election held a universal truth it was this: Left to their own devices, many politicians will milk a financial opportunity for all it’s worth. Why shouldn’t they? After all, once in power, the point is to stay in power. The more money a politician has, the more he can spend on private armies, television commercials, ballot-box stuffing or whatever else he has to do.

  The election campaign began in 1517, when Maximilian dragged his casket and weary body to the Netherlands to beg his grandson Charles to succeed him. Maximilian considered emperor to be the best job on earth. He believed that the possessor of Charlemagne’s crown could rule all of Europe. But his time was ending. He was now fifty-eight, and syphilis was eating him alive and a riding accident had badly damaged one of his legs and left him in horrible pain. He needed to set the stage for the future before it was too late. Charles, seventeen, was a confused teenager still learning how to be a king. But as monarch of Spain and the Netherlands, he already knew the burdens of the crown. The prospect of adding Germany to his duties intimidated him. Charles shared none of his grandfather’s romantic ideas about the job. Charles hesitated and Maximilian had to appeal to family honor to get him to come around.

  The Golden Bull, the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire, mandated an election but inertia had made the events meaningless. Just as Frederick had passed the crown to Maximilian, Maximilian believed he would pass it to Charles. Besides, before Maximilian revitalized the office with his determination, cunning and Fugger’s money, no one even wanted it. A generation earlier, the electors had to beg Maximilian’s father, Frederick, to take the imperial crown. Frederick dithered for months before agreeing because the job had few powers and could be more burden than benefit.

  This election was going to be different because for the first time in memory, it was going to be contested. The French king, Francis, the dashing adventurer who had stunned Europe by defeating the mighty Swiss, feared Charles. He knew that if Charles became emperor, he’d have Francis surrounded. Charles would use his influence in Germany to attack him in Italy, then come looking for him in France. Francis could stop him by becoming emperor himself. With self-preservation in mind, he announced his candidacy. “The reason that moves me to seek the empire,” he said, “is to prevent the Spanish king from doing so.”

  Francis was the better qualified of the candidates. Several years older than his rival, he was considered by Machiavelli and others to be the strongest and most capable king in Europe and, should the day come, they wanted him to lead the fight against the Turks. The fact that he was French and the empire was German posed no hurdle. The rules said nothing about nationality and, besides, Charles was no more German than he was. Charles may have spoken German to his horse, as the wags noted, but at court he spoke French.

  As the contestants knew, greed drove the electors and the race would be an auction. And why not? An election between the rich king of Spain and the rich king of France offered the electors a spectacular opportunity for gain and a once-in-a-lifetime pay day. Maximilian warned Charles against frugality. “If you wish to gain mankind, you must play at a high stake,” he said. “It would be lamentable if, after so much pain and labor to aggrandize our house and our posterity, we should lose all through some pitiful omission or penurious neglect.” Francis spoke the same way. When an advisor suggested persuasion as a low cost alternative, Francis dismissed his naiveté: “If I only had to deal with the virtuous, your advice would be expedient. But in times like the present, when a man sets his heart on the papacy, the empire or anything else, he has no means of obtaining his object except by force or corruption.”

  To pay the bills, the candidates needed financing. Fugger was the most obvious banker for Charles. He had long served the Habsburgs and had unsurpassed resources. But he made no assumptions. Charles had never been to Germany, had never met Fugger, had presumably seen the scathing report of the Tyrolean Council and already had his own set of bankers in Spain. These bankers included several Italians as well as Fugger’s Augsburg rivals, the Welsers, who had operations in Spain because of their work in the Portuguese spice trade. Charles could go to any of them. But Fugger had no intention of letting anyone except himself, least of all the Welsers, win the deal.

  Just as the election got underway, Fugger prepared a marketing campaign. Louis of Aragon, an Italian cardinal, was coming to Augsburg as part of an exhausting sightseeing tour that, over nine months, would take him to forty-eight cities in eight countries and would include a visit with Leonardo da Vinci. Louis planned to cap it off by meeting Charles in the Netherlands. Confident that Louis would report everything he heard to the young Habsburg, Fugger treated him like royalty. After the cardinal arrived, he gave him a tour of the Fugger Palace. He showed him the Fugger chapel at St. Anne and threw him a party. The cardinal enjoyed himself. “These Fuggers entertained my master with dancing and the company of many beautiful ladies in their garden,” wrote Antonio de Beatis, a writer Louis brought to take notes. Fugger boasted to the cardinal that the funeral chapel cost him 23,000 florins and that he had loaned money to every bishop in Germany.

  Fugger’s publicity assault worked and made Beatis gush over what he saw and heard: “These Fuggers are among the greatest merchants to be found in Christendom, for without any outside help, they can lay their hands on 300,000 ducats in ready money and still not touch a hair of their property, which is by no means small.” He went on to praise the Welsers but added that “they are in no way to be compared with the Fuggers.”

  As it happened, the imperial diet was meeting in Augsburg that year. The Turks led the official agenda; Pope Leo wanted the electors to fund a crusade and sent the papal legate to Germany to press the case. He had been in a panic since the Turks captured Belgrade in 1521 and created a path into Hungary and, from there, the rest of Europe. He feared Rome would fall just like Constantinople and, if that happened, Christendom itself would perish. But the electors could care less about the Turks. The election and the
inevitable payoffs consumed them. Three of the electors—Bohemia, Palatinate and Frederick of Saxony—leaned toward Charles. As long as Charles paid them fairly, he could have their votes. Three others—Trier, Cologne and Fugger’s client Albrecht of Mainz—leaned toward Francis. If he greased them, they were his. Nothing was certain until the electors actually cast their votes. But as the Augsburg diet got under way, it looked like a dead heat with each candidate confident of at least three votes.

  The seventh elector was Joachim of Brandenburg. He led the House of Hohenzollern, which produced Albrecht of Mainz and later produced Kaiser Wilhelm I, who with Bismarck unified Germany, and Kaiser Wilhelm II, who led Germany into World War I. Joachim joked that he only cared about falcons, but he had founded a university and reformed the justice and administrative systems of his territory. Clever with money, he worked with Fugger on the indulgence scheme for Albrecht. Now he employed his talents to extract all he could from Maximilian and Francis. The Habsburg negotiator in Augsburg, Max von Berges, called him “a devilish man regarding money matters.” His French equivalent said Joachim was “blinded by greed.”

  Francis tried to preempt the bidding with a spectacular offer. In addition to cash, he offered his niece, the princess Renée. This tantalized Joachim because the Hohenzollerns—B-grade players in the game of Hausmachtpolitik—had historically made nothing better than local matches. A Hohenzollern might marry a duchess of Pomerania or a countess of Mecklenburg, but never someone from a powerful house like the Valois. But as the ascent of Albrecht showed, the Hohenzollerns were climbing the ladder. A Valois marriage would be another boost. Renée, however, dashed their dreams. She defied Francis and skipped off to marry a French duke.

  Before Francis could deliver another princess, Charles offered one of his own—his sister, the Spanish princess Catherine. He threw in a dowry of 300,000 florins. Joachim liked the offer—the Habsburgs were now as prestigious as the Valois—and he accepted. But he insisted Charles pay a third of the money up front. As Fugger suspected, Charles lacked the cash. Only Fugger could deliver it quickly, so Charles turned to him. Fugger insisted the negotiators produce a marriage contract first.

  The families held a provisional wedding at the diet with only the bridegroom in attendance. A wedding without the bride might seem a hollow event. But Augsburg celebrated for three days anyway. The city regarded the Habsburg-Hohenzollern union as good for business and security. Fugger, always willing to throw a party, hosted a costume ball.

  After Joachim came over to Charles, support for Francis evaporated. The other electors saw what Joachim got and demanded their own payoffs in return for votes. As the papal legate fumed over the inability of the electors to care about the Turks, Maximilian corralled them in a room to negotiate the bribes. Maximilian invited a special guest to the meeting: Fugger. Since the diet of Constance, where Fugger produced the wagons of gold, the Fugger name was magical. No one doubted he could pay whatever Charles promised. There is no record of what Fugger told the electors. Maybe he said nothing and his mere presence was enough. In any case, all seven electors signed a pledge for Charles.

  The Golden Bull decreed the election occur in Frankfurt. By voting in the city of the Franks, the empire honored the memory of Charlemagne, who was king of the Franks before becoming emperor. The electors wanted cash and Fugger got busy on the logistics. He needed horses, wagons and armed guards to transport sacks of gold to Frankfurt. He needed gifts to bribe every lord whose borders he crossed. And he needed one more essential item. Despite his boast about being able to whip up 300,000 ducats in an instant, he didn’t actually have the money. He had to raise it. But this is where he excelled. As evident already in his dealings with Duke Sigmund, when he persuaded friends and family to loan him all he needed without the benefit of a track record, he knew how to woo investors. Now, thirty years later, he had the best track record of any banker in Europe. If there had been telephones, he could have raised all he needed with a few calls. As it was, he raised the money with face-to-face conversations at the diet. The largest deposit came from Duke George of Brandenburg. George was forty-six and related to Frederick the Wise. He met Fugger for the first time at the diet. He owned ore deposits near the border with Bohemia and shared Fugger’s interest in mining. After George invested, Fugger wrote to him for the rest of his life. These letters, resembling the letters CEOs write every year to shareholders, are among the few Fugger letters that survive. Fugger keeps a formal tone, but he nonetheless reveals his thoughts about religion, social unrest and late-paying Habsburgs. The letters are among the most important documents in the historic record about Fugger.

  Fugger had everything in place to pay the bribes when he received shocking news from Spain: Charles wanted to use other bankers and cut him out. Fugger had pushed too hard for favorable terms and made Charles opt for a cheaper course. The details are missing, but it may have been that Fugger demanded more valuable collateral than the others. None of the bankers, at least not as individuals, could loan the required sums, but they could collectively. The group was all Italian except for one, Fugger’s rivals—the Welsers. The aides to Maximilian were aghast because only Fugger had credibility with the electors. The electors might jump if Charles went with the Welsers. One of the aides condemned the Welsers as worthless: “We could never find a way to get a loan or a penny from the Welsers, so we always had to go to the Fuggers.” Fugger himself must have been furious. The electors didn’t sign on for Charles because a Welser was in the room. They signed because Fugger was in the room. Charles tried to appease Fugger by throwing him a bone. He assigned him to handle the money transfers and hold the necessary documents in his safe. This was easy money for Fugger. But it was the loan Fugger wanted. The profits on the loan would dwarf those from transfer fees. He had to get back in.

  As the electors groveled for cash, Albrecht Dürer grabbed his easel, brushes and sketch pads and headed to Augsburg. He was the greatest German artist of the age and an excellent businessman. Sensing an opportunity for commissions, he counted on wealthy dignitaries at the diet lining up for their portraits. Dürer specialized in woodcuts because woodcuts could be mass-produced and sold several times over. He stamped a logo on every one to deter counterfeiters. But he knew the dignitaries didn’t want woodcuts. They wanted luminous oil paintings on canvas. That’s certainly what Fugger wanted. When his time came, Dürer had him turn slightly to capture a bit of his profile. Dürer, his golden locks tucked under a cap, began with a quick charcoal sketch. That way, Fugger could be on his way quickly. Dürer would fill in the colors later.

  Fugger sat for several portraits in his life but the one Dürer painted in Augsburg is the best. It shows Fugger wearing his gold cap and a cape with a fur collar, and offers a sharp contrast to the portrait of Maximilian painted at the same time. The emperor looks tired. His brilliant jewels are unable to hide the fact that death looms. Maximilian’s daughter, to whom Dürer tried to sell the painting, hated it and refused to buy it. Fugger was the same age as the emperor but looks wide-awake in his portrait. The gaze is calm, intelligent and dignified—a look of confidence. The painting now hangs in the Augsburg city museum.

  Just as the diet concluded, Martin Luther appeared at the gates of Augsburg. The pope wanted him to recant and had ordered him to Augsburg to give a statement. The pope promised not to arrest him if he showed up, but Luther thought about Jan Hus, the Czech reformer burned at the stake for heresy in 1415. Hus, too, had been promised safe conduct. Luther prepared for the worst. “Now I must die,” he said.

  In his Ninety-five Theses, Luther denied the pope’s ability to absolve sins, thereby attacking the bedrock of papal authority and power. Cardinal Cajetan, a papal emissary in town for the diet, intended to bully him into retracting his statements. Cajetan was a Dominican who made a name for himself when he debated Pico della Mirandola before the priest’s arrest. Although Cajetan defended papal authority to the last, he was himself a voice of reform who argued against Vatican extravag
ance. He got a strong dose of extravagance in Augsburg, where he stayed as a guest of Fugger’s at the Fugger Palace. Luther met Cajetan at the palace and surprised him by holding his ground. Instead of apologizing, Luther argued scripture and, threats notwithstanding, refused to renounce anything in the theses. The third and final meeting between the two ended with a sputtering Cajetan ordering Luther out of his sight. Luther was staying with the monks around the corner at St. Anne. The monks liked Luther and his message. They feared authorities might arrest and even kill him if he left through a main gate. They showed him a secret passage in the city wall. A horse waited for him on the other side. As much as he disliked horses, he needed to make a quick getaway. Luther escaped Augsburg undetected.

  Although Luther had been in his home, Fugger might not have seen him during the visit. Luther was still an obscure figure and Fugger had the electors on his mind, not a Saxon monk. For his part, Luther didn’t need to meet Fugger to form an impression. He could create one from seeing the Fugger Palace and hearing about Fugger’s exploits from the St. Anne brothers. However he formed his opinions, this much is clear: He left Augsburg with a new target. Over the next few years, Luther wouldn’t leave Fugger alone.

  The encounter with Luther closed a difficult trip for Cardinal Cajetan. When the legate finally got the diet to consider the Turks, the debate became a one-sided harangue against Rome. The electors were not Lutherans, at least not yet. But even before Luther became popular, Germans were turning against Rome. The indulgence campaign, the sale of church offices and the lazy and lecherous priests: Many Germans, including some of the electors, had lost patience with all of it. Popular anger with Rome would soon have dangerous consequences for Fugger.

 

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