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

by Greg Steinmetz

  Sickingen and Hutten, as knights, belonged to a dying order. The word “knight” was as much a social class as it was a job description. Knights were the lowest order of the nobility, but they were nobles nonetheless and had privileges that commoners lacked, such as the right to carry swords. Commoners had to step aside when a knight came through or risk being struck down for insolence. Although Sickingen was rich and powerful, the days of knights had passed. Guns were now widespread, reducing the importance of individual battlefield heroics. Monarchs increasingly valued infantry over talent with a horse and sword.

  Out of work and needing to supplement meager feudal dues from their estates, knights took to highway robbery. They saw nothing immoral in it. They were noblemen and, as such, believed themselves entitled to grander lifestyles than commoners. If they had to cut throats to obtain the entitlements, so be it. The knights even tried to enshrine their often murderous activities in imperial law, although the attempt failed. Fugger hated the knights because highway robbery disrupted trade and made his staff afraid to travel. He had personally escaped their attacks, but his cousins, his son-in-law and other acquaintances had been victims.

  In The Robbers, Hutten pits Sickingen in conversation with a Fugger manager. What has Fugger ever done for anybody, Sickingen asks. He never plowed a field nor built a wall. Nor, as a moneylender, did he even take risks. A trader could be stuck with unsalable merchandise and lose everything. But a banker, safe behind a desk, is always covered. If a borrower defaults, the banker takes the borrower’s property and sells it at a profit.

  The Fugger man is outraged. “We? Thieves?” Knights are the real crooks, he says. They’re savage criminals. What else is a highway robber if not that? Sickingen responds with an argument that only a knight could accept. It’s one thing to take money with physical strength. That’s “honest theft.” What Fugger does—earning money with trickery—is truly criminal. “You do not steal by force but by underhanded practices,” Sickingen says. Sickingen’s anger turns to disgust when he considers how Fugger bought his way into the nobility. Knights earned noble status by risking their lives for their lords. They are truly noble. All Fugger ever did was swindle the innocent. Hutten condensed his feelings in a blistering generalization: “The great robbers are not those whom they hang on the gibbet. They are the priests and the monks, the chancellors, the doctors and the great merchants, especially the Fuggers.”

  Hutten was relentless. He followed The Robbers with a tract that called on Emperor Charles to “abolish the mercantile monopolies” and “stop the drain of money to Rome by the Fuggers.” In another, he claimed Fugger once tried to still his pen with bribes: “Fugger money won’t silence me, not when it concerns freedom for Germany.” Hutten’s attacks hit a nerve with the public and printers pumped out copies of his works. Owing to Hutten, Fugger became a symbol of oppression in the popular imagination.

  Hutten’s solution to Fugger and Germany’s other ills came down to a single word: revolution. He campaigned to throw out the old order in favor of a centralized power structure with the emperor on top and knights replacing the bishops and dukes as regional administrators. He called for a German church built on Lutheran principles. He demanded the liquidation of Jacob Fugger & Nephews and the other giant banking houses. Unwilling to stop there, he called for the execution of their leaders. The bankers, he said, deserved “the gibbet.” He vowed to make the revolution happen or die trying: “I’ll play the game and all the same, even though they seek my life.”

  Luther wanted change as much as Hutten but disagreed with Hutten’s call to violence. He tried to steer Hutten to peaceful measures. “You see what Hutten wants,” wrote Luther to a friend, commenting on Hutten’s call to arms. “I do not wish that we should fight for the gospel with fire and sword. I have written the man to this effect.” In the same year as The Robbers, Luther offered his own attack on big business in his Treaty on Usury. While Hutten wanted to kill the rich merchants, Luther, a technocrat, suggested regulation in the form of price controls. Luther argued that a merchant should charge no more than his costs plus a trifle—the wages of a laborer—for his efforts. To enforce the rule, he advocated self-regulation because, as he sarcastically noted, government officials were useless. “We Germans have too many other things to do,” he wrote. “We are too busy drinking and dancing.” But Luther’s pacifism only went so far. If the government found a flagrant violator, it should hang him.

  Luther’s prescriptions showed a hopeless misunderstanding of human motivation. No reasonable business person would build a factory or even buy a loom for no more than laborer wages. But Luther’s list of sharp practices—price fixing, monopolies, padding the scales—betrayed real-world knowledge. Merchants used these “dangerous and wicked devices” to “skin” their customers, he wrote. He mentioned no names, but he might have had Fugger in mind throughout. A merchant who drives down prices to put rivals out of business? Fugger. A merchant who strives to corner the market? Fugger again. A man “who cares nothing about his neighbor”? Fugger would deny this, but his poor neighbors, despite the Fuggerei, might have appreciated more charity from the man. Later that year, in his Open Letter to the German Nobility (1520), Luther pleads with the princes to crack down on big business. This time, he dispenses with the generalities and attacks Fugger directly: “We must put a bit in the mouths of the Fugger.”

  Even without the direct assaults, Luther would have had Fugger’s attention by now because of his enthusiastic use of a fairly new technological device: the printing press. Gutenberg made his first press in 1450. Its use only took off in the 1520s. This was in large part due to Luther himself. His popularity, the sheer volume of his output, and the fact he wrote in German kept the printers busy. The presses in Germany produced just thirty-five works in the German language in 1513. In 1520, they printed 208, of which 133 were written by Luther. As Luther’s sermons, rants and musing found their way to the presses, he developed a huge following. All of Germany seemed to support him. As the papal envoy to Germany reported to Rome, “Nine of ten support Luther and the tenth hates the Pope.” Fugger almost had another chance to meet Luther in 1521. The diet that year was scheduled for Augsburg. But because of logistics, the electors moved it to the Rhineland city of Worms. A more experienced politician might have better gauged the public mood and made peace with the monk. But Emperor Charles, living in Spain and untroubled by indulgences and the sale of clerical offices, was naturally inclined to see him as a heretic. Besides, the pope wanted Luther’s head and Charles wanted the pope. He needed him as an ally against France. So Charles ordered Luther to appear before him and the electors. He would give Luther one more chance to recant.

  Hutten was under a papal arrest warrant when he snuck into Worms to see Luther the night before the first hearing. He begged Luther to lead a revolution and promised to follow him until the end. Now was the time to attack. The people liked the emperor, Hutten told Luther. But they hated the princes. They hated Rome. And they hated the rich merchants. If the peasants joined with the knights—an unlikely coalition given the class barriers and snobbery of the knights—they could take over Germany and purge it of wickedness. Luther refused. He didn’t want to fight the princes. He wanted them to join him against Rome.

  Luther’s appearance at the Diet of Worms defined the Reformation. Despite the risk of being arrested and burned as a heretic, he appeared before Charles, his prosecutors and a packed meeting hall. Just as in the Fugger Palace four years earlier when he sparred with the cardinal, he refused to recant. His conscience forbid him from doing otherwise. In declaring such, he uttered the phrase that made him immortal. “Here I stand,” he told the emperor. “I can do no other.”

  A riotous crowd was gathered outside to support him. When he emerged from the hall, the crowd mobbed him. Frederick the Wise pushed his way through and greeted Luther with beer in a silver mug. Frederick enjoyed the moment. His boy had done well. The other princes and Fugger, however, had reason to fear. Reb
els had scrawled a picture of a leather boot on the walls of Worms. This was the symbol of the Bundschuh, a peasant revolutionary movement. The graffiti was a blood-chilling warning to the elite. Luther endorsed nonviolence, but by facing down the establishment and winning, he showed that anything was possible. Luther had ignored Hutten when Hutten wanted Luther to lead an armed revolt. But to the followers of the Bundschuh, “Here I stand. I can do no other” wasn’t about a negotiated settlement. It was permission to attack.

  Fugger’s nephew Ulrich represented Fugger at Worms. Compared to the drama of Luther, Ulrich’s activities at the diet seemed trivial. But they mattered greatly to Fugger. With little hope of Spanish tax revenue, Fugger had ordered Ulrich to find other forms of repayment. Ulrich struck a deal with the Habsburgs, but it offered less than Fugger hoped. Charles acknowledged his 600,000 florins of election and other debts; he didn’t deny that he owed the money. But rather than pay at once, he assigned 400,000 florins, or two-thirds of the obligation, to his nineteen-year-old brother Archduke Ferdinand. Ferdinand governed Austria and agreed to satisfy the obligation by extending the mining concessions a few more years. Charles said nothing about how he intended to pay the other 200,000 florins, only that he would somehow make good. The agreement left Fugger unsatisfied but solvent, and let him sidestep the disastrous end of his cousins.

  Charles gave Fugger a job as part of the deal. Private individuals owned Augsburg’s printing presses. Recognizing the danger of free speech, Charles took them over and assigned Fugger to run them. The emperor hoped to censor Luther, Hutten and anyone else opposed to him or the pope by putting Fugger at the controls. But as he and Fugger discovered, control of the presses could not still the opposition.

  Inspired by Worms, Hutten wanted to do more than criticize. He wanted action and after Luther turned him down, he concentrated his zealous energy on recruiting Sickingen, the powerful knight, to lead the revolution. Sickingen had a limited education but he enjoyed ideas. In the evenings, he and Hutten dined by candlelight and Hutten read to him from Luther or his own works. Sickingen initially laughed at Hutten’s rebellious chatter. But little by little, Hutten made him a revolutionary. Their evening conversations became not about whether to fight but how to fight. Sickingen invited other knights to the castle. Lacking Sickingen’s money and property, they felt even more aggrieved than their host and signed a pledge committing them to war. Hutten, Fugger’s enemy, finally had what he wanted. He had a chance to take the field.

  Contemporaries called the coming conflict the Knights’ War. The knights didn’t fight for territory and the sake of Hausmachtpolitik but for ideas and systems. It was a class war that put the entire system at risk. An aide wrote to Duke George that it had been centuries since he and other German princes faced a greater threat. The Knights’ War heralded a new phase for Fugger. He had previously financed military campaigns for his clients. This time, he funded soldiers for himself as much as anyone. Fugger embodied the system Hutten sought to capsize. If the system went down, so would Fugger. He had to defend it.

  The knights selected Trier as the first target. Near Luxembourg, Trier belonged to the elector—Bishop Richard von Greiffenklau. Fugger knew Greiffenklau from the imperial election. Greiffenklau was in the room with Fugger and Maximilian when Fugger guaranteed Maximilian’s lavish bribes for Charles. Fugger paid Greiffenklau 40,700 florins for his vote. By taking on a bishop who was also an elector, Sickingen could attack papal and secular oppression in one stroke. He considered Trier vulnerable. The other ecclesiastical electors—Albrecht of Mainz and Herman of Cologne—were Greiffenklau’s natural allies, but they were not inclined to fight. Sickingen assumed Greiffenklau would be on his own.

  Sickingen also expected help from within the walls. He believed the people of Trier, inspired by Luther and Hutten, would side with the knights and he only had to light the spark. Full of confidence, he looked ahead and planned to take the war along the length of the Rhine once he took Trier. He would take his revolution across Germany from there. He needed resources to fund his ambition and sent Hutten to raise money in Switzerland where anti-Vatican sentiment ran high.

  The knights numbered 10,000 and easily seized the towns on the way to Trier. Trier itself posed a greater challenge. As the attacker, Sickingen could choose the timing of the fight but not the terms. Knights preferred to engage the enemy on horse in an open field. The feast of Michaelmas was approaching. Nothing would suit Sickingen more than to play the role of the archangel Michael, who defeated Satan with sword and shield. He would ideally confront Greiffenklau, one on one, in a dramatic fight to the death. Then the world would see who deserved to live and who should die. But Trier would be siege warfare, not a fight in an open field. The outcome would not depend on the thrusts and parries of Sickingen’s sword but on the power of his guns and his stores of ammunition. Cannons had made knights obsolete. Now Sickingen depended on them.

  When Sickingen reached the city, he shelled it like Almeida had shelled Mombasa, but with less success. Sickingen discovered he had underestimated Greiffenklau. Like Julius II, the warrior pope, Greiffenklau was more fighter than priest. In the days leading up to the siege, he inspected the towers, walls and weapons. He gave a rousing speech. He shed his bishop’s robes for armor. When the battle came, he told the soldiers when to fire. Sickingen shot letters over the wall exhorting the people of Trier to rebel. They ignored him and rallied around the bishop. Sickingen soon ran out of gunpowder and limped back to Ebernburg to wait out the winter and gather strength for another assault.

  Fugger and his allies worked on a faster schedule. Fugger gave money to the Swabian League, a military organization that kept the peace in southern Germany, to fight the knights. The league hunted down the rebels one by one in their homes. With his friends either killed or in custody, Sickingen fled Ebernburg to a more formidable castle in Landstuhl. Greiffenklau followed him and pummeled the sandstone walls with his cannons. One of the shells sent Sickingen crashing into a shattered roof support and ripped open his side. Sickingen, poetically felled by a cannon, finally got his dramatic confrontation with Greiffenklau, but only as he lay dying and Greiffenklau climbed over the rubble to accept his surrender. “What has impelled thee,” the duke asked, “that thou hast so laid waste and harmed me and my poor people?” Sickingen was short of breath and struggled to talk. “Of that it were too long to speak,” he said, “but I have not done nought without cause. I go now to stand before a greater lord.”

  He died the same day. His death enfeebled the knights as a political class and consigned to history this colorful vestige of the Middle Ages. The princes chased the knights from their castles and made sure they never returned. In Swabia and Bavaria alone, the lords seized twenty-six castles and destroyed the ones they didn’t want for themselves. They torched the castle in Absberg. They set gunpowder into the eight-foot walls of Krugelstein castle and blew off the top. The Augsburg guard captain took his men into the forest to blow up the old castle in Waldstein. For Fugger, the triumph in the Knight’s War removed an immediate threat by finishing Hutten’s days as an agitator. Hutten was still in Switzerland three months later when Fugger’s tree bark let him down. He died from syphilis with a pen as his only possession. But his dream of violent struggle survived in the hearts of a larger, less predictable force. This group hated Fugger and his friends as much as he did. They were Hutten’s would-be allies, the great mass at the lowest rung of society and the followers of the Bundschuh. They were the peasants. Their anger and resentment was coming to a boil.

  The Renaissance gave rise to a new breed of professionals that instantly won the scorn of the general public. The people hated their haughty manners and fancy robes. They hated their use of Latin and their bewildering arguments. Hutten called them “empty windbags.” Another writer likened them to locusts: “They are increasing like grasshoppers year by year.” Another remarked on their ability to sow chaos: “In my home there is but one and yet his wiles bring the whole country a
round here into confusion. What a misery this horde brings upon us.”

  Who were these windbags, locusts and misery bringers? They were, of course, lawyers. Arising from the swamps of canon law, they made their secular debut in Fugger’s lifetime. They arose because the emergence of capitalism and the growth of trade necessitated a new, modern body of law and practitioners to make sense of it. The old legal system, known as customary law, used common sense to settle disputes and torture to extract confessions. It worked well enough on feudal estates where everyone knew each other, but failed to keep pace as society transitioned from the medieval to the modern. Rather than develop a new system, society adapted an existing system that was robust enough for commerce and dovetailed with the Renaissance love of everything ancient. This was Roman law, a set of laws Emperor Justinian I codified in 529 to govern the empire and apply common rules from Egypt to England.

  Roman and customary law took contrary views of property rights. Customary law, based on Christian values, saw property as communal. To the extent anyone owned anything, it came with a duty to share. The peasants who plowed a lord’s fields could hunt in those fields and fish in his streams. Everything belonged to everyone. Roman law, on the other hand, honored the individual over the communal and emphasized the privileges of property ownership instead of the duties. Under Roman rules, a lord paid the peasant for his work and, if the peasant wanted to hunt in his fields, the lord charged him a fee. The Roman system went hand in hand with capitalism because it acknowledged private ownership of property. The princes liked the Roman system because it put property in their hands and left them with more than they had before. The rich merchants liked it because they discovered that a good lawyer could use clever arguments to defeat common sense and win cases they should have lost. Ambitious parents liked it because a legal career could provide a path to riches for their sons. They dreamed their sons would one day work as imperial advisors, town councilors or as hired guns for rich men like Fugger. German universities filled with law students. But the common people hated the new system. The peasants, miners and the working people in the cities viewed Roman law as a system designed not for justice but for deprivation, and as a contrivance unsuitable for those who wanted to live free. They saw Roman law as a system made for slaves and masters.