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

by Greg Steinmetz

  Fugger agreed to take part and loaded five ships with copper in Lübeck. He sent them to Spain, where they joined a fleet captained by García Jofre de Loaísa. Loaísa planned to trade the copper for nutmeg, cloves and whatever else he could find. Unfortunately for Fugger, storms scattered the fleet and only one ship reached the islands. The Portuguese knew the ship was coming and captured it. Fugger lost his entire investment.

  The most interesting aspect of the episode is that Fugger’s involvement supports the idea that he funded Magellan’s voyage. Officially, Emperor Charles and the Flemish businessman Christopher de Haro paid for Magellan. But according to a lawsuit Fugger’s nephews later brought, Haro merely fronted for Fugger. The Fuggers claimed that Haro owed them 5,400 ducats, the exact amount Haro had invested in Magellan’s journey. Haro denied owing anything and claimed the money came from his own pocket. There is no question that Fugger and Haro worked with each other; Fugger employed him as his agent on the Loaísa venture. But there is no other record of Fugger backing Magellan, so Fugger’s participation is unclear. The lack of documents is easy to explain. Portugal, which hated Spain, was one of Fugger’s best customers, and Fugger had no interest in alienating it. That also explains why we have only German records and no Spanish ones of Fugger’s funding of Loaísa. Fugger wanted to keep his two-timing secret.

  11

  PEASANTS

  In 1525, Germany exploded into the largest mass uprising Europe had ever seen. Called the German Peasants’ War, it left behind a country of scorched fields, incinerated villages and ravaged monasteries. About 100,000 people lost their lives. So extensive was the barbarism and devastation that the war deterred future generations of would-be rebels. It took another three and a half centuries before the European working class, with the French Revolution, found the courage to try again. Frederick Engels, the collaborator of Karl Marx, wrote a book on the war and argued it prefigured the clash between capitalism and communism of his own day. “It is high time to remind the German people of the clumsy yet powerful and tenacious figures of the Great Peasants’ War,” he wrote in his preface. The opposing camps of modern times, he said, “are still essentially the same.”

  Fugger and Engels would have had little to talk about. Fugger, as events will show, defended private ownership to the last. Engels would have taken everything Fugger had and given it to the people. But both saw the rebellion in economic terms. Referring to the peasants as “common riffraff,” Fugger argued with unintended irony that the peasants only thought about money. He dismissed their complaints about fishing rights, corrupt priests and inequitable justice. To him, the grievances were a smokescreen for what he considered their real objectives: debt forgiveness and wealth redistribution. Fugger’s creation of the Fuggerei housing project showed that he respected anyone who put in a full day’s work. But the rebellious peasants failed to qualify. To him, they were lazy parasites looking for handouts. “They want to be rich without working,” Fugger wrote in a letter to his client Duke George of Brandenburg. Fugger was more than an observer of the Peasants’ War. He was a catalyst. To peasant leaders, he was an oppressor. Many would have been happy to kill him. Forced to take a side to preserve order, Fugger became an agent in their annihilation.

  The war began with a countess who lived in a castle in the Black Forest. The countess of Lupfen was an enthusiastic knitter. To wrap her yarn, she used snail shells as spools. They were just the thing—lightweight, the right size, and more attractive than sticks. In the fall of 1524, she ran low and ordered her peasants to suspend their chores. Fetch her some snails, she commanded. It was a trivial request, the sort of order only a pampered countess could get away with. But this day was different. The peasants were in the middle of the harvest and too busy for silly errands. Enraged, they threw down their tools and went on strike. One observer, shocked that the normally obedient peasants defied a countess, said it was as if the crops demanded water or the cows asked for food. That was an overstatement; there had been protests before. The significance of Lupfen was that it spread. Before long, peasants across Germany followed the example.

  In Memmingen, sixty miles from Fugger’s home in Augsburg, some 10,000 peasants gathered in the fields outside town. A furrier named Sebastian Lotzer was among the few in that large group who could read and write. He wrote a petition to the Swabian League, the regional army that Fugger funded in the Württemberg and Knights’ Wars. Lotzer’s document became the manifesto of the movement. Some of the demands in the Memmingen Articles—tax relief, hunting privileges, fishing rights—were progressive. Others—the end of private property and serfdom, and the right to choose one’s own priests—were revolutionary.

  Archduke Ferdinand was the most powerful member of the league. He took notice of the peasants after the exiled duke Ulrich tried to enlist them in a scheme to regain his duchy. Ulrich wanted their numbers and offered the peasants privileges if they helped him chase the Habsburg occupiers out of Stuttgart. Ferdinand wanted to attack. But the league depended on mercenaries and they were still limping their way back from Pavia. Besides, Ferdinand had no money for them. He told the league’s commander, George von Truchsess, to stall while he looked for funds. Hochstetter, the Augsburg banker who sometimes worked with Fugger, hemmed and hawed. The city of Ulm expressed doubts about strategy. Others politely declined. After much effort, Ferdinand found a backer. He wrote Truchsess with the news: “We inform you that we have arranged to borrow from the Fuggers.”

  For Fugger, this was no time for hesitation, no time for tactical quips of being old and tired, and no time to argue about terms. He recognized the need for haste and became the league’s most enthusiastic financier. He knew he and his business were in danger and unless Truchsess defeated the rebels, the peasants would overrun Augsburg and hunt him down. A secondary consideration was commercial. Fugger and other Augsburg merchants had spent hundreds of thousands of florins for goods at the Frankfurt spring fair. With peasants in control of the roads, wagons could not safely transport the items to Augsburg. Fugger wanted to disperse the peasants and liberate his inventory.

  Truchsess was a member of the minor nobility. He was one of several remarkable figures who emerged during the war, but he had none of the clumsiness of the tenacious and powerful peasant leaders that Engels venerated. Truchsess cut a striking figure with his powerful frame, curly hair and neatly trimmed beard. Over the ensuing months, he was everywhere. He demonstrated a mix of daring, cunning and single-mindedness that no peasant leader could match. Fugger was lucky to have him on his side. Truchsess had experience with peasants. In 1514, he led troops against the Poor Conrad rebels that ended with the torture and imprisonment of nearly two thousand of their number. In Memmingen, confronted by Lotzer’s manifesto, he masterfully strung the peasants along. When they presented demands, he asked for more information. When they gave him the information, he asked for clarifications. He went to meetings where he scheduled more meetings. This continued for weeks and the peasants grew frustrated. But Lotzer, who knew Scripture but nothing about the duplicity of the powerful, became more enthusiastic as Truchsess pumped him with reassurance. He wrote a constitution calling for a peasant-led Christian brotherhood to replace the princes, bishops and bankers at the top of society. The talk of fraternity prompted Leonhard von Eck, the money-loving chancellor of Bavaria, to make a joke. “I’m repulsed by the peasant offer of brotherly love . . . I’d rather the Fuggers share some of theirs.”

  Fugger was in no mood for brotherly love. A splinter group from Memmingen had parked itself outside the gates of Weissenhorn, the largest of his fiefdoms. They had stolen a cannon and were now shelling the city walls.

  A priest from the little town of Leipheim named Jacob Wehe led the group. He had grown weary of talk in Memmingen. He thought all of Lotzer’s negotiations and manifestos were getting the peasants nowhere. Using parish funds, he stocked sixty wagons with provisions, recruited 3,000 peasants and marched north. He targeted Ulm, the headquarters of the Swabia
n League and a regional powerhouse. Its looms produced even more cloth than those of Augsburg and the city was home to what is still the world’s tallest church, the spidery Ulm Minster. To take Ulm would be a tremendous victory for the peasants. Wehe first turned to smaller targets in search of weapons. His path took him into the heart of Fugger country. Biberbach, the castle where Fugger had fled during the Augsburg uprising, surrendered without a fight. So did Pfaffenhoffen, another Fugger fiefdom. Weissenhorn was the next stop.

  Fugger was fond of Weissenhorn. He had poured money into the city after Maximilian sold it to him in 1507. He renovated buildings, gave money to weavers to buy looms and created a trade fair. The population stood at only a few thousand. But with Fugger’s help, Weissenhorn had emerged as a rival to Ulm and was gaining on it every day. Still, there was sympathy for the peasant cause behind the walls. The guilds supported the prevailing order, but the workers supported the peasants for the same reason that thousands of peasants had congregated in Memmingen. They felt exploited by their social betters and wanted revenge and a better life. In a scene now immortalized in a painting on the old city wall, the mayor met Wehe when the priest arrived at the gates. Wehe offered him a choice between obliteration and submission. The mayor refused to surrender. Wehe ordered his men to bring out the guns. He started firing and troops behind the walls fired back. Weissenhorn would not have normally had the forces to resist. But as the peasants massed in Memmingen, Fugger took advantage of the time wasted on negotiations to hire soldiers and ship them to Weissenhorn to defend the city. Weissenhorn was not going to let itself go down like Biberbach and Pfaffenhoffen. It was going to resist with all its might. The shooting went on all day and, by nightfall, the peasants had still gotten nowhere. Supporters threw food over the wall for the peasants. But the peasants needed stronger guns more than food. Not wanting to waste his ammunition on a futile cause, Wehe gave up.

  He marched the next day on an easier target, the neighboring abbey of Roggenburg. What happened in Roggenburg revealed the disarray of the peasant movement. A rich bishop ran the abbey. The bishop had once tried to divert the streams to bypass Weissenhorn and throw a wrench into Fugger’s development efforts. He fled before the peasants arrived and left the abbey unguarded. Wehe and his men destroyed the church and its organ. They grabbed the silver plate and emptied the wine cellar. A drunk peasant put on the bishop’s hat and stood at the altar as his friends playfully bowed before him.

  When peasants took over a settlement, the smart ones looked for weapons and treasure. The rest drained the wine cellars and pantries. When there was no more loot, they set fire to the buildings. Tapestries, paintings, libraries went up in flames in the name of social justice. At the height of the conflict, much of the country was burning and most of the peasants were drunk. “A more drunken, more full-bellied folk one had hardly ever seen,” wrote a witness. If not for the bloodshed, it was debatable whether the rebellion was “a carnival’s jest or a war . . . and whether a peasants war or a wine war.”

  Truchsess, flush with Fugger cash, selected Wehe and his mob as his first target. They had attacked Fugger. Now Fugger’s captain, before confronting peasant bands elsewhere, would go after them. Informed that Wehe was back home in Leipheim, Truchsess took it over. His dogs found Wehe crouching in a secret passage in the rear of his parsonage. “Sir,” Truchsess said upon confronting Wehe. “It had been well for thee and us had thou preached God’s word instead of rebellion.”

  “You do me wrong,” Wehe said. “I have not preached rebellion but God’s word.”

  “I have been informed otherwise,” Truchsess said. The sun was setting over Leipheim when Truchsess escorted Wehe to a meadow for his execution. Wehe said a prayer and put his head on the block.

  Fugger might not have wanted executions. But he could justly claim self-defense. There were plenty of men like Wehe who would love to slit his throat. So, like it or not, as the head of Wehe, the assailant of his fiefdoms, rolled in the grass, Fugger had his first victim. Fugger blamed Luther for the war, writing to Duke George that the monk was “the initiator and primary cause of this uprising, rebellion and bloodshed in the German nation.”

  Blood was spilling everywhere. An early incident in the war involving the countess Margarethe von Helfenstein dramatized the stakes and gave legitimacy to Fugger’s concern for his personal safety. The countess was the illegitimate daughter of Maximilian. When Ferdinand ordered her husband to defend Weinsberg Castle, she thought she would be safer with the count than at home so she went with him to Weinsberg. Count Helfenstein slew every peasant he met on the way. Peasants followed him to the castle and looked for revenge on the morning of Easter Sunday. Helfenstein lacked a Fugger-financed army. The peasants scaled the walls and captured him and his wife. When the countess begged for mercy, the peasant leader, a baker named Jacklein Rohrbach, pinned her to the ground. “Behold, brethren,” he said. “Jacklein Rohrbach kneels on the emperor’s daughter.” Helfenstein offered Rohrbach his fortune—60,000 florins. Rohrbach laughed and forced Helfenstein to run a gauntlet. He made the countess watch as his men skewered her husband with spears. The Black Hoffman, a gypsy woman who traveled with the peasants, killed him with a final jab. Rohrbach made the countess wear the gray tunic of a peasant and put her on a manure wagon bound for the nearby city of Heilbronn. “In a golden chariot you came. In a dung cart you leave,” he said. “Tell that to your emperor.” She clutched her son to her breast and cried that she found consolation in Christ. “I have sinned much and deserve my lot,” she said. Her son became a priest and she died in a convent. Archduke Ferdinand vowed revenge: “The crime must be chastised with an iron rod.”

  Peasants had taken Heilbronn early in the uprising and peasant leaders had made themselves comfortable in town hall. As the leaders plotted strategy, they found the Memmingen Articles hopelessly tame. For one thing, the manifesto said nothing about big business. The Heilbronn peasants considered big business just as responsible for their oppression as the church and the princes. They corrected the omission in a version of their own. “The trading companies, such as the Fuggers, the Hochstetters and the Welsers and the like should be dissolved,” read one of the articles.

  Not knowing when and if the rebels might come for him, Fugger stayed in Augsburg. With the countryside in flames and Biberbach in peasant hands, no place was safer than home. He joined the planning to defend the city. Like Weissenhorn, Augsburg made a call for soldiers. Precaution was no guarantee of safety. In Austria, the people of Salzburg rose up against Matthaus Lang, the bishop who crowned Maximilian in Trent and oversaw Fugger’s mining contracts in Schwaz for the emperor. Lang came from a rich Augsburg family. He was greedy and cruel. After buying his job as bishop, he revoked ancient privileges and raised the taxes on city dwellers and peasants alike. The threat of Luther gave him an excuse to take by force what he failed to get through edict. “First I must undo the burghers,” he said. “Those of the country must follow.” Like Julius II and Greiffenklau in Trier, he was a cleric with the heart of a general. He left the city in search of troops and returned battle ready on a white charger with four companies of soldiers. After Lang executed a peasant who had liberated a condemned Lutheran priest, the peasants joined with the city dwellers looking for revenge. They surprised Lang’s men with sickles and pitchforks, and chased Lang up the hill to Salzburg Castle. The castle had high double walls and was set against a cliff. Cannons could not bring it down. But Lang was trapped. The people of Salzburg, facing no opposition, pounded the gates as Lang cowered inside. He spent four months inside before Truchsess finally sprang him. The four months of bombardment took its toll on Lang. He lost his mind to insanity.

  Of all the peasant leaders, Thomas Müntzer was the most dangerous to Fugger. It was not because he had the most guns but because his populist agenda held enormous appeal. A priest from Thuringia, Müntzer was a self-proclaimed mystic who believed in communal property and that only the abolition of private ownership could clear the p
ath for grace. His followers cheered when he promised God would come to kill the rich. “If someone wants to properly reform Christendom, one must throw away the profiteering evildoers,” he declared. “The lords themselves are responsible for making the poor people their enemy.” The contrast between Fugger and Müntzer could not have been greater. One was the archcapitalist and the other the archcommunist. They became heroes of the competing systems during the Cold War. West Germany put Fugger on a postage stamp and East Germany put Müntzer on a five-mark bill.

  Most of the peasant leaders focused on local matters. Müntzer thought globally and took to the road to export his brand of communist millennialism. He preached to crowds in Frankfurt and Hanover and Nuremberg. After creating a ruckus in Fulda, he spent time behind bars. If his disciples hadn’t begged him to come home, Müntzer might have stayed in southern Germany and picked up followers in Augsburg. He was fiery, emotional and so convincing that Luther’s protector, Frederick the Wise, refused to muzzle him. After hearing him, Frederick no longer knew whom to believe, Müntzer or Luther.

  Luther now had a rival, one with a competing and compelling vision of his own. Luther saw Müntzer as an enemy to his own agenda of reforming the church through a strict adherence to Scripture. He and Müntzer agreed that usury and indulgences were criminal, and that Germany needed to break from Rome. But while Luther argued that the Bible, not the pope, had the final word, Müntzer declared that God spoke directly to select individuals, including himself. Müntzer’s supporters jeered Luther, eyed him with menace and rang cowbells to drown out his sermons. With his reform movement threatened from below, Luther cast aside his preference for peaceful measures. He became an unwitting ally of Fugger by encouraging the lords to do whatever it took to obliterate the peasants. “Crush them, strangle them and skewer them, in secret places and in the sight of men, even as one would strike dead a mad dog,” Luther wrote. “Strike them all and God will know His own.” For his part, Müntzer egged on the peasants. “Attack, attack, while the iron is hot,” he said.