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

by Greg Steinmetz

  Even worse, the imperial diet immediately demanded that he betray Fugger. The lawmakers feared that Charles would put his own interests before those of Germany and drafted a thirty-four-article contract to keep him in check. It demanded that Charles defend the empire and the church; enter no foreign wars without its consent; use only German and Latin for official business; hire only German speakers for imperial offices. Article 19 had a commercial agenda. It demanded Charles investigate Fugger and other rich bankers. “We should consider,” it read, “how to limit the big trading companies which have up to now governed with their money and acted in their own interest and caused damage, disadvantages and burden to the empire, its citizens and subjects through their rise in prices.”

  Habsburg ambassadors signed the document on behalf of Charles a week after the vote. With that, Charles launched an investigation into the man who just put him in office.

  Charles looked more like a footman than a king. He was slim, ungainly and cursed with an oversized lower jaw—the Habsburg jaw—that made it difficult to chew. Embarrassed to be seen when eating, he dined alone. He was quiet and sober. He cultivated carnations and took the imperial choir along when he traveled. He lacked the rakish flair of Francis and the robust energy of Henry. Maximilian thought his appearance repulsive but would have been impressed by his intellect if he had spent more time with him. “There is more at the back of his head than appears in the face,” said a papal official. Like Maximilian, Charles made the rookie mistake of believing the election gave him dictatorial power: “It is our view, that the empire of old had not many masters but one, and it is our intention to be that one.” After the election, he convened the Cortes, the Castilian parliament, and demanded tax increases to pay his election debts to Fugger. The Cortes resisted. It saw no reason to pay for Charles’s empire building and his debts to a German banker. There was nothing in it for Spain, the lawmakers argued. Germany wasn’t a promising new possession like Cuba or Mexico. It offered the people no riches, only entanglements in France and Italy. The body begrudgingly approved the tax hike but only after Charles made compromises. After the vote, Charles went to Germany for his coronation as king of the Germans and appointed his former tutor, the bookish Cardinal Adrian of Utrecht, to rule in his absence.

  Wool workers in Segovia, incensed by the tax hike, seized the city hall ten days later and captured the town clerk. They cinched a rope around his neck, beat him with wooden bats and hung him by his feet to die. This was the first act in the Revolt of the Comuneros, a sixteenth-century Spanish civil war incited by Fugger’s demand for repayment. Toledo, Tordesillas and Valladolid followed Segovia’s lead. In Madrid, the militia joined the rebels. Most of Castile belonged to the insurgents after five months. Talk spread of overthrowing the king. Fugger agents in Spain sent updates to Augsburg. One was a monument of understatement. “Spain is not well,” it read.

  Charles stayed in Germany and let Adrian cope with the uprising. Thirteen Castilian cities belonged to rebels when Charles bowed before the electors in Aachen Cathedral and swore to protect the church, the weak and the innocent. Fugger, now sixty-two, stayed home. His nephew Ulrich watched in his stead as Charles received the crown, orb and sword. We can assume Ulrich spoke to Charles or his counselors. We can also assume he outlined the consequences of a Habsburg default and argued how it would ruin the emperor’s reputation and make future borrowing impossible. We can assume this because Charles got busy for Fugger immediately after the diet. He wrote to Adrian from Germany, demanding that he find a way to collect the taxes and to forward the money to Augsburg.

  The request floored Adrian. Had Charles forgotten Madrid and other cities belonged to the rebels? He told Charles to be realistic. “Your Highness is making a great error if you think that you will be able to collect and make use of this tax,” he wrote. “There is no one in the Kingdom, not in Seville or Valladolid or any other city who will ever pay anything of it.” Adrian questioned his former pupil for even asking: “All the grandees and members of the council are amazed that Your Highness has scheduled payments from these funds.”

  Fugger may have been asking himself how this could be happening. He had always been careful. Now he risked the same end as his cousins, the Fuggers of the Roe, who had lost it all when the taxpayers of Leuven refused to pay Maximilian’s bills. Fugger now found himself in the same corner.

  Brushing aside Adrian’s rebuke, Charles ordered him to mobilize the army and arrest and execute the rebel commanders. Adrian, who later became pope, dutifully attacked. The Habsburgs won back the rebellious cities one by one and, after taking Toledo, ended the war. The loser was Fugger. To ensure peace, Charles signed a treaty that cancelled the tax hikes. With that, Fugger could no longer count on the Spanish people to pay the election debts. If he hadn’t already, he might have now questioned himself for not demanding collateral. In what should have been his greatest moment, Fugger found himself in the most vulnerable position of his life.

  At some point in the middle of the imperial election, workers nailed a plaque onto a high brick wall on Augsburg’s eastern edge. Latin words covered the plaque. They described what became Fugger’s most enduring legacy—more memorable even than putting Charles on Charlemagne’s throne. Fugger probably wrote the words himself. After acknowledging his brothers, he attempted modesty before lapsing into self-praise.

  The brothers Ulrich, George and Jacob Fugger of Augsburg, who are convinced they were born to serve this city and feel obligated to return property received from the all mighty and just God, have out of piety and as a model of openhearted generosity, given, granted and dedicated 106 homes with all fixtures to the diligent and hardworking but poor fellow citizens.

  The plaque described the Fuggerei, a housing project for Augsburg’s working poor. The settlement remains in service 500 years later, housing the poor just like always. The only difference is the tour buses. It is Augsburg’s top attraction. Visitors from as far away as Japan and Brazil come to see how people lived in the Age of Fugger. They peer inside the houses, stroll the neatly ordered grounds and take pictures to capture the achievement of Augsburg’s great banker and philanthropist.

  Fugger started the project by buying four small houses at the bottom of Jew Hill on a creek that ran into the Lech. The Welsers sold him the houses, but it’s unlikely they ever spent much time in the area. The neighborhood was coarse, dirty and working class. If Augsburg had enemy territory for the bankers, this was it. Crews cleared the land for a set of two-story row houses with small gardens behind each. They built a hospital on the grounds to tend to the sick, a wall to keep out the riffraff and three gates to let in residents. The official papers called the development the Houses at Hood Point but no sooner did it open than it became known as the Fuggerei. Like Fugger’s similarly named factory in Austria, it translates to the Place of Fugger.

  There was nothing on its scale in Europe. Leiden had its St. Anne almshouse and Bruges had its Godshuisen (God’s Houses) for the elderly. Augsburg had several homeless shelters. But none was more than twelve units. The Fuggerei smashed precedent with 106 units. At five people per unit, the Fuggerei could house more than 500 people or one in every 60 Augsburgers.

  Thomas Krebs built the Fuggerei. It was his second job for Fugger. He had also built the sacristy at St. Moritz. At the Fuggerei, he gracefully combined form and function. The top floor of each house had a separate entrance so that a family living upstairs would not inconvenience the family below. Each unit had 450 square feet with four rooms—two bedrooms, a living room and a kitchen. The kitchen had a stove that doubled as a heater and a window to the living room that let a mother keep her eye on the kids. Tenants used chamber pots and emptied them into the creek that ran through the settlement. Recognizing the comforts of private life, Krebs, with Fugger’s approval, purposely omitted a central square from the complex. He and Fugger wanted the settlement to be a refuge from the bustle of public life, not an imitation of it.

  Late in life, Dürer wr
ote books on artistic theory and, after being dazzled by a schematic of Tenochtitlan in Mexico, pronounced his views on city planning. He rejected the quaint randomness of medieval cities, with their twisting alleyways and mix of styles, in favor of symmetry, unity and proportion. Krebs felt the same. He made the rooflines at the Fuggerei even with the surrounding walls and the streets between the houses straight. The sameness of the homes created a sense of order and kept the costs down by eliminating the need for multiple designs, but made the houses hard to tell apart. Krebs solved the problem by painting a number on each house, giving each one its own address. Written in Gothic script, these were the first house numbers in Augsburg. Along the same lines, he gave each house a uniquely shaped doorbell pull—some curled, some square, some shaped like anchors—that allowed residents to identify their entrances in the dark. He livened up the place with gables that matched those on the homes of Augsburg’s rich. The simple elegance of the Fuggerei attracted imitators. Row houses with similar proportions popped up in Augsburg and other cities in the years following.

  If Fugger had wanted a lasting monument to himself, there were flashier options than housing. He could have built another chapel or given a stipend to another priest like he gave Speiser at St. Moritz. If he wanted to help the poor, he could have given money to the church and its programs to feed the needy. These alternatives would have satisfied a common sixteenth century motive for charitable giving: guilt relief. In his last will and testament, the Cologne businessman Johann Rinck spoke for his class when he confessed, “Commerce is hard on the conscience and the soul.” Public relations also motivated givers and it no doubt motivated Fugger. With enemies gunning for him, he sought to project a generous image. He wanted people to think, as they walked past the gates and looked into the neatly maintained houses and gardens and saw children playing by the fountain, that he had a heart and that, despite his wealth, he cared.

  Fugger never said what attracted him to housing. The bylaws of the Fuggerei spoke only of his desire “to honor and love God, to help day laborers and hand workers.” This was boilerplate. But the admission rules provide some clues and give an example of how rich people—then and now—believe themselves to know what’s best for the poor. For starters, Fugger refused to let people live in his houses for free. A tenant had to pay one florin a year to stay at the Fuggerei. That was a bargain; the price came to only a quarter of the market rate. But it was a sufficient burden for tenants, given that a weaver at his loom had to work six weeks to earn the required amount. If someone wanted to live in Fugger’s complex, he or she needed a job to afford the rent.

  Another condition excluded beggars. Augsburg was full of them. Some Augsburgers liked having them around as an outlet for soul-saving largesse. But Fugger was suspicious. For him, the poor fell into two camps, the worthy and the unworthy. Day laborers working odd jobs might be poor, but they deserved sympathy and assistance. The beggars scurrying into Augsburg each morning when the gates opened were undeserving. By excluding them from the Fuggerei, he betrayed a core belief: Everyone had a duty to work. It was his way of saying, Get a job.

  The town council felt the same. During Fugger’s lifetime, the council passed increasingly harsh laws against begging. The first outlawed door-to-door panhandling and sleeping on church stairs. The second required them to carry a license in the form of a lead medallion. The third prohibited begging entirely. Beggars slipped in every morning despite the laws. Better vigilance would have kept them out, but the city couldn’t screen everyone. The Fuggerei, a city within a city, could. Its guards kept beggars out.

  Fugger insisted on a curfew. Like the gates of Augsburg itself, the gates of the Fuggerei were locked at night. Those who came late had to pay a penny. The penalty aimed at excluding drunks and prostitutes. A drunk, after a night at the tavern, couldn’t afford the fine and a prostitute, who might only earn a penny or two for an evening’s work, needed accommodations even more economical than the Fuggerei. Fugger led a temperate and disciplined life. He expected the same of his tenants.

  One rule was particularly striking: Tenants had to say prayers for Fugger, his nephews and his late mother. Prayers, even those made by third parties, counted as points toward admission into heaven. Fugger wanted the points. But he asked for little compared to others. Residents of Augsburg’s St. Anton hospice had to attend church for an hour a day and recite two prayers—the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary—fifteen times every morning and evening. They had to say three other prayers before and after meals. If a mass took place in the house chapel, they had to say fifty Lord’s Prayers and fifty Hail Marys. Noncompliance meant expulsion. Fugger required only three prayers a day and, consistent with his appreciation of privacy, took it on faith that the residents prayed as asked. Maybe he thought that, with five hundred people praying for him, three prayers a day from each were enough.

  Fugger created an endowment for the Fuggerei to last generations. In the letter that created the endowment, he commanded that it exist “as long as the name and male line of the Fuggers lives.” Over the years, weavers, distillers, toy makers and artists called the Fuggerei home. There was at least one butcher. He kept a slaughtering table out front. The most famous resident was Mozart’s great-grandfather Franz. He lived in the house at Mittelere Gasse 14, from 1681 to his death in 1694.

  Eighteen generations later, the male line of Fuggers continues and so does the Fuggerei. It is now a residence for elderly Catholics. The Fugger family pays for the upkeep from timber sales on the land Maximilian sold to Jacob. It still charges the equivalent of one florin a year, or eighty-five euro cents. If the Fuggerei lifted Fugger’s image while he was alive, the improvement may have been limited to Augsburg. But in terms of a lasting legacy, Fugger could not have done better.

  10

  THE WIND OF FREEDOM

  In 1891, the president of Stanford University needed a motto for his new school. He turned to the words of the sixteenth-century German writer Ulrich von Hutten. Hutten spent his life arguing for social justice and urging revolution. In Palo Alto, David Starr Jordan found parallels between Hutten’s struggles and his own fight for academic freedom. There was one phrase of Hutten’s that particularly resonated. Die Luft der Freiheit weht (The wind of freedom stirs). Since 1906, that obscure German phrase has encircled the Stanford Tree in the school emblem.

  Before the imperial election, Fugger’s enemies were commercial rivals, assorted lawmakers and some humanists upset by the rapacious character of big business. After the election, the general public joined in the condemnation. Fugger became a target for workers fed up with the changes sweeping Europe. Like Jordan at Stanford, the people took inspiration from Hutten. Hutten wrote a series of pamphlets that targeted Fugger. Hutten was to Fugger what Ida Tarbell was to John D. Rockefeller. He was the one who made Fugger a public enemy.

  Hutten wrote with passion, power and courage. While another social critic, Erasmus, used his pen like a classical pianist, reserving his brilliance and perfect Latin for the elite, Hutten blasted a trumpet for all to hear. He was born in 1488, at a castle outside Frankfurt, into a family of knights. His father recognized that young Ulrich would never be a warrior and sent him to school to learn Latin and read the classics. Constantly on the run from creditors, he bounced around different universities before taking to the road as a roaming intellectual. He won notice with a poem that turned a petty rent dispute into a struggle between barbarism and modernity. Maximilian liked his work and made Hutten his poet laureate in 1517. He crowned Hutten at an Augsburg ceremony within earshot of Fugger’s office. Hutten was a young man on the rise. Needing someone with a quick mind to send on a diplomatic mission, Albrecht of Mainz hired him as a counselor.

  Hutten, like Maximilian, Erasmus and Cesare Borgia, suffered from syphilis and his illness sparked his first thrust against Fugger. It came in an essay, considered the first medical testimonial, in which Hutten described his boils as “acorns from whence issued filthy stinking matter.” The stan
dard cure—mercury—killed as many as it saved. In Augsburg, Hutten learned that West Indian natives used a safe remedy made from the bark of the guaiacum tree. He proclaimed it a miracle cure and, in a digression praising oatmeal and denouncing the German craze for spiced food, he blamed Fugger for the spiraling price of pepper. Hutten would have been furious to know that Fugger later won the monopoly for guaiacum imports and used Hutten’s tract to boost sales. The pioneering physician Paracelsus, who had studied with Fuggerau alchemists, later debunked guaiacum. Fugger’s nephews fought back with papers attacking Paracelsus.

  Hutten earned a good living as an elector’s counselor, but his sense of mission overwhelmed his desire for comfort. He joined Luther in attacking the papacy and pointed out Fugger’s complicity: “The Fuggers have earned the right to be called the princes of the prostitutes. They have set up their table and buy from the pope what they later sell for more . . . There is no easier way to become a priest than to be friends with the Fuggers. They are the only ones who can achieve anything in Rome.”

  Hutten’s most exhaustive attack on Fugger came in a dialogue called The Robbers (1519). In keeping with the ancient Greek practice of putting imagined words in the mouths of real people, he cast Franz von Sickingen, the knight the Habsburgs hired for security during the imperial election, as his hero. Sickingen had charisma, leadership skills and the ability, based on a series of successful campaigns, to attract volunteers for profitable, mercenary adventures. As the owner of several castles and estates, he lived in luxury and, owing to his intellectual curiosity, kept his homes full of poets, musicians and artists. Hutten was his favorite. Rome wanted to arrest Hutten for calling the pope the antichrist. Needing a place to hide, Hutten found shelter with Sickingen.