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

by Greg Steinmetz

  Truchsess was too busy in western Germany to pursue Müntzer in the east. The task fell to a group of princes that included Fugger’s client and pen pal, Duke George of Brandenburg. George joined the dukes of Hesse and Brunswick to attack Müntzer in Mühlhausen, a small city Müntzer had seized and sought to run as a communist utopia. Anticipating trouble, Müntzer cast a cannon and readied for battle. The dukes chased Müntzer and 8,000 followers to a hill above the town. The peasants circled their wagons. Aware of where events were heading, a priest in the peasant camp suggested Müntzer surrender. Müntzer ordered his beheading.

  Müntzer tried to keep up spirits. He delivered a rousing speech referencing Gideon, David and other biblical heroes who overcame the odds. He led his people in a hymn, “Now beseech we the Holy Ghost.” A rainbow appeared. Müntzer declared it a sign of divine favor. When the deadline passed, the dukes opened fire and destroyed the wagons. The peasants scattered and the dukes killed thousands as they fled. Müntzer disguised himself in a headdress and hid in a hay loft. A servant discovered him and turned him over after finding his knapsack stuffed with incriminating papers. The dukes shoved splinters under Müntzer’s fingernails and locked him in a tower as they pondered how to kill him. Müntzer wrote a letter in the tower admitting to having “seductively and rebelliously preached many opinions, delusions and errors . . . against the ordinances of the universal Christian church.” The next day, the dukes hauled Müntzer from the tower and Duke George, as committed a Catholic as Fugger, scolded Müntzer for having taken a wife. Priests, he reminded Müntzer, shouldn’t marry. After beheading Müntzer, the executioner put his head on a pole and impaled the body. Müntzer would bother Fugger no more.

  The rebels pursued bigger targets as more peasants joined the cause. Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Mainz and Strasbourg were less prepared than Weissenhorn and surrendered. It was only a matter of time before the peasants tried for Augsburg. The city was the biggest in Swabia and had everything the peasants needed: gold, weapons and booty. But Augsburg was ready. Any internal threat had disappeared with the execution of the two Barefoot rebels. The executions had robbed the movement of its will. And like Weissenhorn, Augsburg had hired reinforcements just in case. A peasant band arrived at the gates one day and demanded surrender. They stared up at the soldiers posted on the crenellated stonework. The soldiers told them to scram and that was that. Life in Augsburg went on. Matthaus Schwarz, Fugger’s dapper bookkeeper, adapted by making a nifty reversible cloak that let him travel during the Peasants’ War and perform his audits without fear. He wore red in town to look sharp and green in the country to blend in.

  Truchsess passed Augsburg enroute to a climactic showdown in Boblingen, outside Stuttgart, where he confronted the Memmingen peasants who had started it all. They had 12,000 men. Truchsess had 11,000. The combined figures were huge, similar to those at Pavia. The peasants had thirty-three cannons. Truchsess had even more cannons and vastly superior organization. He installed himself at Böblingen Castle as the peasants took a defensive position behind wet ground. The battle began in mid-morning and was soon a bloodbath. Truchsess chased the peasants into the plains, where he mowed them down by the score. It was all over in a few hours. As the peasants fled, Truchsess sent his cavalry in pursuit. The horsemen spared no one. One witness said peasant bodies lined the road for miles.

  Böblingen marked a turning point and the rest of the war was a mop-up. Two events are worth noting because they illuminate the savagery that Fugger sponsored. One was the capture of Rohrbach, the executioner of the emperor’s son-in-law. Truchsess chained him to an elm tree with a six-foot leash, surrounded the tree with dry branches and set them on fire. He and his men watched as Rohrbach hopped, squirmed and roasted to death. The other event was the final battle. The last and largest peasant army numbered 23,000 and had concentrated near the Swiss border in Kempten. Truchsess, who was in Ingolstadt, passed Augsburg on his way there. He arrived with inferior numbers and tilted the odds by bribing two of the peasant commanders. The traitors ordered the peasants to leave their safe zone behind a swamp and mass in an open field. Truchsess cut them down by the thousands. Like so many of his other investments, Fugger’s bet on Truchsess had paid off. Calm returned to southern Germany. As for the goods stranded after the Frankfurt trade fair in a warehouse, they made it to Augsburg without trouble.

  At this point, the drama shifted to Austria, where another of Engel’s powerful and tenacious figures emerges. Archduke Ferdinand called the peasant leader Michael Gaismair “the chief agitator, ringleader and commander” of the Austrian rebels. Gaismair called himself “neither a brigrand nor a murderer,” but a “pious and honest man who fought for the sake of the Gospel.”

  Gaismair was the son of a mine owner. He hated Fugger and the rest of the elite. He noted that Jesus preached a message of love and compassion but society’s leaders—men who should have been setting an example and living the Gospel—exploited the common man like the Caesars in ancient Rome. Gaismair combined a popular touch with organizational skills and years of practical, bureaucratic experience. Backed by a people’s army of peasants and miners, he forced Ferdinand to consider a new constitution for Tyrol. The constitution contained a special provision about Fugger. It stripped away his mining leases, gave the state his belongings and demanded that he be punished for enriching himself on the backs of the poor.

  Gaismair entered the fray at the urging of Fugger’s miners. The miners had been radicalized by two priests working the area. The first, Jacob Strauss, had fallen under Müntzer’s spell. The pope may have sanctioned lending, but to Strauss and his muse Müntzer, it remained a damnable offense. From the pulpit, Strauss declared Fugger the greatest offender. He didn’t mention his name, but there was no question about whom he spoke. “I know very well what I’m saying,” Strauss preached. “It is unfortunately the case that many great and mighty principalities are burdened right now to the point that, for each penny per year that the prince receives, an important archusurer gets ten. I don’t have to name that land destroyer because he is well known to the whole world.”

  The other priest, Urbanus Rhegius, was the one Fugger and his friends had chased from Augsburg only to invite back as an alternative to Schilling, the Barefoot monk who inspired the Augsburg uprising. Rhegius landed in Schwaz after leaving Augsburg. The miners were already angry at Fugger before Rhegius got there; they claimed Fugger owed them 40,000 florins in back pay and blamed him for inflation. Rhegius stirred the pot. In early 1525, the miners stopped work and blocked the roads out of Schwaz. When Fugger’s pit bosses ordered them back to work, they responded as if they had been asked to fetch snails. They sacked the Fugger offices in City Hall where Fugger’s men, on the ground floor of an ancient castle, ran the Tyrolean mint. The miners refused to pick up their tools unless Fugger raised wages and restored back pay.

  Innsbruck was less than a day’s walk from Schwaz. Archduke Ferdinand feared the miners would come for him. Instead, a mob went south to Brixen, the city where Fugger’s client, Melchior von Meckau, had served as bishop. They destroyed the abbey, mocked the old-school priests and chased them from the city. With the bishop on the run, the mob aimed their venom at his secretary, who happened to be Gaismair. Gaismair refused to open the iron doors of the bishop’s palace and the attackers rammed the door with such force that the marks remain visible. But the door held and, the next day, in a strange reversal, the peasants named Gaismair their leader.

  Gaismair and his supporters terrified the archduke. The duke agreed to their demand to convene a diet and discuss the grievances and Gaismair’s draft of a new constitution. At previous diets, only nobles, priests and rich merchants attended. A terrified Ferdinand now made an exception and not only let in the peasants but gave them the largest voice in the proceedings. Gaismair expanded the Memmingen Articles to sixty-two items, including one that blasted Fugger and other bankers for price gouging, diluting the currency and driving independent miners to ruin. Bankers used their mone
y “to spill human blood,” it declared. As a result, “the whole world is burdened with their unchristian usury, whereby they amass their princely fortunes.”

  Ferdinand successfully killed Gaismair’s most radical demands—those abolishing the nobility and political power of the clergy. But he stood by as the diet affirmed thirty of the articles outright and another nineteen with modifications. Some of the demands were uncontroversial, such as the introduction of “a good heavy coinage as in the days of Duke Sigmund.” Others—price controls, restrictions on moneylending and the redistribution of private property—tried to turn back the clock on economic development. As for the article aimed at Fugger, the diet affirmed and expanded it. The peasants had achieved what the Tyrolean Council had been unable to accomplish. They had gotten the archduke to agree to emasculate Fugger.

  But they only won the battle. The meeting was still in session when Ferdinand learned that Truchsess had defeated the German peasants and stood ready to fight in Austria. With that, Ferdinand recovered his roar. He broke up the diet, renounced the articles, chased Gaismair to Switzerland and put a bounty on his head. From encampments in the woods near Zurich, Gaismair pinned his hopes on the Schwaz miners, believing they were the most radical element of society and the most likely to fight to the last. Ferdinand bought them off with concessions. The miners picked up their tools and went back to work. Gaismair became a pawn in future wars between the Habsburgs and Venice. He mounted two armed attacks on Tyrol, but nothing came of them. He survived more than a hundred attempts on his life until, in 1532, two Spanish adventurers tracked him to an apartment in Padua. They snuck in and stabbed him in the heart. They cut off his head for evidence.

  Truchsess had an easy time in Austria and only dirtied his hands when he rescued a certain Count Dietrichstein. Fugger knew Dietrichstein from the Congress of Vienna where Fugger gave him a gift to win his favor. When the peasants of central Austria rebelled, Dietrichstein went on a savage killing spree. He sliced the breasts off peasant women and cut babies from their wombs. A peasant army in Tyrol surprised him in the town of Schlamding where Dietrichstein surrendered in return for his life. Truchsess liberated him from a peasant jail and avenged his capture by setting fire to the city. When the peasants, including women and children, tried to flee, soldiers tossed them back into the flames. That finished the peasant revolt in Austria. A satisfied Ferdinand named Truchsess governor of Württemburg and gave him several estates. Fugger, his Austrian mines again secure, turned to other concerns.

  In the eventful year of 1525, Fugger faced an even greater challenge than mutinous peasants. A growth had appeared on his body just under the navel. It caused him horrible pain. His doctor, the noted physician Dr. Adolph Occo, recommended an operation.

  Medicine was still in an age when physicians were more advisors than practitioners. Trained in the ideas of the ancient Greeks, they thought good health resulted from the right mix of black bile, yellow bile, phlegm and blood—the four humors. They might recommend leeches or vomiting, but they rarely touched patients and left surgery to the people most adept with sharp blades—barbers.

  It would be another three hundred years before anyone thought to sterilize surgical instruments. Operations often resulted in death from infections. Fugger’s brother Ulrich had died after an operation. Fugger was not going to risk the same fate. He refused surgery. By the time Hungary rebelled, Fugger could no longer get out of bed. A fever left him weak and unable to eat. He battled through the pain and proved himself as tough as ever.

  Fugger needed to be tough for what happened next. While the Peasants’ War bled itself to death in Germany and Austria, Hungary faced a fresh and vigorous rebellion. King Louis, the Habsburg puppet on the Hungarian throne, had committed the all-too-common error of watering down the currency to balance his budget. The ensuing inflation was more than the people could take. Employers, including Fugger, paid their workers in pennies. Before Louis, the pennies gleamed with silver. Now they were black with iron. Food and other essentials doubled in price while wages stayed put. The public blamed Fugger and Alexi Thurzo, one of the sons of Johannes Thurzo. Alexi was both Fugger’s partner and the treasurer of Hungary.

  Miners at Fugger’s mine in Neusohl demanded higher pay to keep up with their rising expenses. They downed their tools and threatened to flood the mines and loot the warehouses if Fugger refused them. Fugger’s agent at the mine, Hans Ploss, negotiated with the miners, but two weeks of talks failed to get them back to work. Copying a tactic of the Swabian League, Ploss softened up the rebels with promises. He brought in 500 soldiers a few weeks later, presumably with Fugger’s consent. The soldiers achieved their ends without firing a shot. By pounding on drums and parading around the town square with their guns, the soldiers intimidated the miners into giving up their demands.

  Outbreaks flared across Hungary. Zápolya, the rich landowner who had “enthroned” the peasant leader Dozsa, blamed the incompetence of Louis and the Habsburg loyalists who surrounded him. At a meeting of Hungarian nobility, Zapolya forced Bishop Zalkanus, one of the most powerful people in the country, to resign. Louis remained king, but Zapolya appointed the top councilors and personally replaced Archduke Ferdinand as the puppet master of King Louis.

  The crisis came to a head when mobs under Zapolya’s control swarmed an elite district in Buda and arrested Hans Alber, Fugger’s top lieutenant in Hungary. They hauled him to the city’s castle and made him sign an agreement handing over the Hungarian mines—the crown jewels of the Fugger enterprise—to the state. Fugger had spent a lifetime creating his Hungarian business. More than anything he ever did, it embodied his organizational, financial and political genius. It created his fortune. At the point of death, Alber gave it away.

  Alber’s deputy, a man named Hans Dernschwamm, didn’t know what had happened to his boss. All he knew is that the mob had busted into the bishop’s palace a few doors down from Fugger House and set it on fire and were now coming his way. He gathered gunpowder and muskets, hauled his arsenal to the roof, and took aim. Zápolya had been encouraging the mob to loot and destroy. When he saw the guns on the roof, he feared a slaughter and ordered the rebels home.

  Dernschwamm had won himself time. Knowing the mob would return, he took all the money in the safe—about 40,000 florins—and deposited it with the pope’s Hungarian office. That carried its own risks, but the cash was safer with the pope than with him. Next, Dernschwamm ordered his best horseman to ride to the Neusohl mine with instructions to haul Neusohl’s cash over the Polish border to Cracow. He ordered his people to leave and go to Cracow, too. They would be safe there.

  He was preparing his own getaway when he first learned that Alber had surrendered the mines to King Louis. He considered flooding the mines as a parting gift to the king, but decided to keep them dry in the belief Fugger would eventually get them back. Dernschwamm, as able and loyal an employee as a boss could want, left Buda after doing all he could. The mob took Fugger House unopposed. With Dernschwamm out of the way, Louis took over the mines and ordered the operators to send him the profits.

  In a letter to his Cracow agent, Fugger again blamed Luther. “The new priests are telling people to disobey the law. That’s what the peasants wanted, to ignore their lords.” He despaired. “I don’t know what is going to happen,” he wrote. In a letter to Duke George, Fugger compared King Louis to the peasants. He wrote that Louis only turned on him because he owed him money.

  Fugger may have been uncertain, but he wasn’t paralyzed. He immediately rallied his network. Pope Clement wrote Louis to praise Fugger and demand that Louis give Fugger his property back. The Swabian League threatened Hungary with invasion. Maximilian announced a boycott of Hungarian products. The duke of Bavaria followed suit, as did the duke of the Palatinate. Even Louis’s brother, King Sigismund of Poland, agreed to boycott Hungarian products until Louis returned Fugger’s mines.

  Economic sanctions as weapons of war go back at least 2,400 years, when Athens hit its neig
hbor Megara with a trade embargo. But the boycott against Hungary was on a scale rarely witnessed and was about as stark an example of crony capitalism as could be. All of those bringing pressure on Louis were Fugger customers. By doing favors for Fugger, the boycotters could look forward to getting the favors returned.

  The boycott wasn’t the only reason for Louis to consider surrender. States are often ill-suited to run businesses and Hungary was no exception. Without the expertise of Fugger’s mining engineers, the mines lost money. The men Louis sent to run the mines knew nothing about mining. They found the workers unmanageable and were at sea with the pumps and furnaces. It didn’t help that Dernschwamm issued sabotage directives to Fugger loyalists still at the mines. The sabotage, the boycott and the mismanagement overwhelmed Louis. Mines that made enormous profits for Fugger lost money under Louis.

  Still, Louis held on. To justify the seizure in the face of the international pressure to return the mines, he forced his captive, Alber, to sign a second document. This one denied that Louis owed Fugger anything and instead claimed that Fugger owed Louis the considerable sum of 200,000 florins. Louis nonetheless agreed to return some valuables to Fugger and asked to open discussions about more loans, but he insisted on keeping the mines and the equipment. He also demanded Fugger drop his claims. Louis’s proposal was a nonstarter; it offered Fugger almost nothing. As Fugger told Duke George, “The proposal is worthless and is completely dead.”