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

by Greg Steinmetz

  Epilogue

  Three hundred B-17 bombers took off from England for Augsburg on February 24, 1944. They targeted the Messerschmidt operation outside the city and faced little resistance as they dropped 4,300 bombs during a daylight raid on Europe’s largest aircraft factory. Twice as many bombers returned that night. This time, they had a different target: civilians. The mission belonged to a plan, realized a year later to its horrific extreme in the firebombing of Dresden, to bomb cities until Germany begged for mercy. Hitler had a soft spot for Augsburg. He dreamed of building on the city’s legacy by investing in its industry and creating a “City of German Businessmen.” He planned to convert the Fugger Palace into a museum of trade.

  If Hitler still had those hopes before the raid, he abandoned them afterwards. Bombers leveled the city. They knocked the top off the Perlach Tower and destroyed City Hall. The Fugger Palace, then a warehouse, went up in flames. The Fugger Chapel at St. Anne survived, but fires badly damaged the crypt and the Dürer designs. The Fuggerei fared worse. The settlement was occupied when the raid came. One resident died when he prematurely left the on-site shelter. Others survived but their homes were gone.

  The experience of the Fuggerei mirrored that of the entire city. Only 730 Augsburgers died in the raid but, like the residents of the Fuggerei, the bombs left survivors homeless. Fires set by phosphorus bombs burned through the night. When the flames finally died, Augsburg was in ruins. Augsburg native Bertolt Brecht captured the scene when he said the doors were closed, but the roofs were open.

  On the day after the bombing, three prominent Fugger descendants signed a pledge to rebuild the Fuggerei out of their own funds. They worried that if they didn’t, their name would be forgotten. These Fuggers, seventeen generations after Jacob Fugger, were nowhere near as rich as their ancestors, but they still enjoyed income on land Jacob acquired centuries earlier. In rebuilding the complex, they got materials from the American occupying forces and followed the original plans except with better plumbing. They increased the number of units from 106 to 140.

  One of the three, Josef Ernst Count Fugger von Glott, later took part in the Stauffenberg plot to kill Hitler. He agreed to lead the German state of Bavaria if the plotters succeeded. The Nazis easily identified him and the other conspirators after the attempt failed. The Gestapo found Fugger at his castle in Kirchheim. They hung Stauffenberg and most of the others, using piano wire to ensure slow strangulation. But they let Fugger live. After the war, the Americans released him from a Nazi prison and he served in Germany’s first postwar parliament.

  While the Fuggers rebuilt the Fuggerei, other Augsburgers rebuilt the city center as best they could. It now looks much like it did in Fugger’s time, but the similarity goes no deeper than the facades. At the Fugger Palace, only the entrance and the Damenhof courtyard, now a café where tourists jump into the fountain with bare feet for pictures, look like they did in Fugger’s day. Lawyers, dentists and accountants have offices in the rooms where the Fuggers dined with emperors and a Vatican emissary interrogated Luther. The house where Fugger’s brothers lived and worked is a department store. A bay window on the second floor sticks out from the shoe department. Done up in Renaissance style, it marks the spot of Fugger’s Golden Counting Room. Nearby, a Nuremberg insurance company operates the Prince Fugger Private Bank that its literature says “combines the principle and visionary energy” of its famous founder. The family owns a small stake for the sake of continuity. Augsburg goes by the nickname Fuggerstadt or Fugger City. There are references to Fugger everywhere. In the old town, there is a statue of Hans Fugger, one of Fugger’s grandnephews and a great patron of the arts. The Fuggerei has a bust of Jacob.

  Weissenhorn also calls itself Fuggerstadt. The stately Fugger headquarters, on the same square as the city hall, recently underwent a renovation. A mural above a gate to the old city shows Fugger’s administrator rebuffing the peasants who tried to take the city in 1525. A bookstore across the street brims with Fugger souvenirs and books, including a coffee-table version of Fugger’s last will and testament and fictionalized romances about Fugger’s life with Sybille. Jacob is a wedding night rapist in Thomas Mielke’s potboiler Jacob the Rich: “Jacob’s rage consumed him. With a cry, he threw the young woman to her side, ripped the night clothes off her young and beautifully freckled body and forced himself inside.” On a neighboring shelf is Hilary Mantel’s Man Booker Prize-winning Bring Up the Bodies. In a scene introducing Thomas Cromwell’s young assistants, Cromwell’s son Gregory wonders at their handbags, the same whimsical bags favored by Fugger’s bookkeeper Matthaus Schwarz. “This season young men carry their effects in soft pale leather bags, in imitation of the agents for the Fugger bank, who travel all over Europe and set the fashion. The bags are heart-shaped and so to him it always looks as they are going wooing, but they swear they are not.” In Arnoldstein, Austria, a local businessman built a tower over the ruins of the Fuggerau factory in 1864 to make lead pellets, the kind used in shotgun shells. It now stands empty. There are few traces of Fugger here. The city’s Fugger Street runs through an industrial park. A plaque by the monastery mentions that Fugger bought the site of the Fuggerau in 1495, but the nearby 1495 Café that blasts Deep Purple and Foreigner for the lunch crowd has nothing to do with him. The name honors the date when the local brewery made its first batch.

  The Fuggers themselves are a scattered bunch who preserve Jacob Fugger’s memory by financing the Fuggerei. Count Alexander Fugger-Babenhausen runs the foundation that oversees the housing project and other family projects. After graduating from Harvard, he worked for Morgan Stanley and the private equity firm Texas Pacific Group. He and the others are descended from Jacob’s brothers, not Jacob himself. Jacob’s only direct descendants come through his illegitimate daughter, Mechtild Belz. At the author’s request, genealogists looked for living direct descendants of Jacob and found six. They are members of a noble family, the Leutrum von Ertingens, from the Stuttgart area. One of them is a banker like his distant ancestor. Five centuries have passed since Mechtild. There could be dozens if not hundreds of others who are descended from her, but they are hard to find because records on most commoners don’t go back that far. The genealogists only found the Leutrum von Ertingens because bluebloods are fascinated by family records and keep good accounts.

  Another mystery is the fate of the Burgundian Treasure, the jewels the Swiss salesmen sold Fugger. Fugger is believed to have sold the Little Feather to Maximilian for 30,000 florins. It never surfaced again. In 1545, Anton Fugger sold Henry VIII the Three Brothers and some other pieces for 60,000 pounds. The Tudors had the Three Brothers until 1623 when James I sent it off to Spain for his son Charles to present as a wedding gift. It disappeared after that. The Burgundian pieces are believed to no longer exist in their original forms. More likely is the possibility that the owners removed the stones from their settings and sold them individually. The images of all four jewels are preserved. The sketches the salesmen brought Fugger are on display at the Historical Museum in Basel.

  In 1530, the pope gave Charles V the imperial crown, the crown that Maximilian repeatedly fought to attain. Charles was the last emperor to wear it. Future emperors saw no value in the crown itself and never bothered making the trek to Rome. Napoleon abolished the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, but the Habsburgs remained European power players for centuries. The eighteenth-century empress Maria Theresa was the only female to lead the Habsburgs. She had a forty-year reign and sixteen children, including Marie Antoinette. In 1864, a Habsburg archduke named Maximilian in honor of his illustrious ancestor left Austria for a tragic three-year run as king of Mexico. Republican rebels, led by Benito Juarez and aided by Washington, who objected to European meddling in the Americas, executed him in front of a firing squad. Archduke Franz Ferdinand became the best-known Habsburg when his assassination in Sarajevo in 1914 sparked World War I. More recently, Otto von Habsburg was crown prince of Austria until World War I brought an end to the monarchy. He ser
ved as a German representative to the European Parliament before dying in 2011 at age ninety-eight.

  Fugger hoped he had settled the usury controversy in his lifetime, but it came roaring back in 1560 when Jesuit reformers came to Augsburg and tried to abolish lending by refusing to absolve moneylenders. “Real usury is here openly committed . . . whatever objections are made by certain men skilled at law,” said Peter Canisius, a Jesuit priest whom Rome later canonized. Ursula Fugger, Fugger’s pious grandniece, asked the Jesuits “about the usurious contracts in which our family is not a little entangled.” They told her Rome was investigating. The Vatican was in a bind because Lutherans allowed lending and Augsburg might abandon Catholicism if Rome ruled against it. Twenty-one years after the Jesuits sought a ruling, Pope Gregory VIII affirmed Pope Leo’s approval of lending and the Jesuits agreed to let the matter go. Today, Christians have gotten over their qualms about moneylending, but Muslims still consider interest charges usurious and Islamic banks get around the restrictions with ruses similar to those used by lenders like Fugger during the Renaissance.

  This book began with the assertion that Fugger was the most powerful businessman of all time. It is an easy claim to make because the competition barely compares. Sure, others made a mark. Before Fugger, Cosimo de’ Medici, who was a banker first and a statesman second, ruled Florence and used his influence to keep France and the Holy Roman Empire out of Northern Italy. After Fugger, Samuel Oppenheimer served the Habsburgs under the official designation of “Court Jew,” raising money from other Jews to save Vienna from the Turks in 1683 and the Palatinate from Louis XIV in 1688. In more recent times, Francis Baring advised British prime ministers, and, in the United States, J. P. Morgan stopped the Panic of 1907.

  Of all the businessmen in history, Nathan Rothschild came closest to matching Fugger’s influence and his life and career echoed Fugger’s own. Like Fugger, Rothschild came from a family of ten children. He worked in partnership with his brothers and, although not the oldest, rose to lead the family business because of his intelligence and daring. Rothschild began in Germany as a wholesaler of textiles and, like Fugger, left the rag trade for banking. His customers, like Fugger’s, borrowed to fight the French. Rothschild financed Wellington at Waterloo and later arranged a 5-million-pound loan to Prussia. He loaned to the Habsburgs. They ennobled him with the title “baron.” Rothschild, like Fugger, never used the title but his heirs did. In another coincidence, Rothschild had the lease for the Maestrazgos mercury mines in Spain. The mines still dominated global mercury production in the eighteenth century. Rothschild, again like Fugger, exploited an informational edge. In the most famous episode of his life, he made a killing after his agents alerted him to Wellington’s victory at Waterloo an hour before other investors knew. Curiously, the two differed on a fundamental point. Fugger swore by double-entry bookkeeping. Rothschild never bothered with it until late in life and his sloppy approach to record keeping drove his brothers crazy. Rothschild might have made even more money if he had kept clean books like Fugger.

  To say Rothschild and history’s other great financiers lacked Fugger’s influence in no way diminishes their accomplishments. It’s just that Fugger lived at a unique moment where one man could make all the difference. Governments still live beyond their means. They need financing more than ever. But instead of raising money from individuals who risk personal fortunes, they borrow from insurance companies and pension funds that share the risk of government default with taxpayers. The world no longer needs a Fugger because we, as holders of whole life insurance policies and IRAs, have all in a sense become Fuggers.

  A writer for Rolling Stone memorably described Goldman Sachs in 2010 as a “giant vampire squid.” The founder of the German socialist party, Ferdinand Lassalle, used similar language to describe Fugger.

  Now everyone is in the bankers’ hands

  They are the true kings in these days!

  It looks as if a mammoth suction gear

  At Augsburg has been set at work, and

  Its tentacles around the land has strung

  And all the gold afloat pumps into its chest

  There is no question that Fugger was voracious and that he squeezed workers, bullied his family, fought Luther and funded wars against his own people in the name of social order. But Fugger also created jobs, satisfied consumer demands and spurred progress just like others engaged in the furiously creative give-and-take of capitalism. The spirit that drove him is the same spirit that moves people to develop drugs and vaccines, build skyscrapers and invent more powerful computers. In socialist East Germany, the land of Müntzer, people drove Trabants, plastic death traps barely updated over their thirty-year production run. In capitalist West Germany, in the land of Fugger, they drove Volkswagens, not to mention BMWs, Mercedes and Porsches. The cars not only went fast but competed with each other on fuel efficiency, safety, reliability and value. The lure of profits drove the competitive battle, and the creativity fostered by the battle made the cars better every year and put tens of thousands of people to work. The idea that money spurred initiative would have been obvious to Fugger. He was a champion of free enterprise and unfettered capital markets, a crusader for economic and personal freedom, and a warrior for capitalism at a make-or-break moment in its development. To condemn Fugger for his ambition is to deny the vital forces unlocked in the Renaissance and to dismiss what drives humanity forward.

  In the Bavarian city of Regensburg, on a hill overlooking the Danube, is a building that looks like the Parthenon. This is Walhalla, a German hall of fame named after the resting place of the Norse gods. The induction ceremonies are a mirror of German opinion. At the first ceremony in 1842, King Ludwig I filled Walhalla with kings and generals including Maximilian and peasant hunter George von Truchsess. Hitler set the tone for the Anschluss in 1937 by ordering the inclusion of Austrian composer Anton Bruckner. He watched as officials pulled a Nazi flag off a marble bust. Regensburg is fifty miles from the Czech border. In 1967, a year before the Prague Spring, Walhalla thumbed its nose at the nearby communists by welcoming its first and only businessman. Jacob Fugger proclaimed in his epitaph that he was “second to none in the acquisition of extraordinary wealth” and deserved to rank among the immortals. It took nearly five hundred years, but when officials pulled the sheet off his bust and welcomed Fugger into the hall of German gods, he had finally made it.

  Afterword

  I first heard the name Jacob Fugger in freshman history when the professor introduced us to the Diet of Worms, the epic and hilariously named confrontation between Emperor Charles V and Martin Luther. After becoming a regular visitor to Germany, I heard Fugger’s name so often that I became curious. Who was this guy Jacob the Rich, whom Germans praised as the greatest businessman who ever lived? Who was this “German Rockefeller?”

  After one of my visits, I decided to do some research but found nothing at my local library. A search on Amazon turned up only one title in English, a 1931 translation of historian Jacob Strieder’s Jacob Fugger the Rich. I later came to love this quirky and provocative book, but I initially found it challenging for its lack of context and absence of a story line. As I struggled with it, an idea hit me. Someone should write a book in English that makes Fugger’s story accessible to the general reader. Thinking back to an old editor who once reminded me that I was a reporter and shouldn’t suggest stories for others to do that I could do myself, I realized that someone was me.

  I thought it would be easy. One of my first journalism jobs was preparing entries for the Forbes Richest List. I saw my Fugger book as a Richest List entry only longer. I was dead wrong about that, but my naïveté served me well because I would have abandoned the project if not for that miscalculation. I submitted the final manuscript seven years after that first visit to the library. Much of the work was drudgery. I spent a crazy amount of time reading books in German with the help of a translation app, mostly wedged between fellow commuters on Metro North. But I also had a lot of fu
n. I scrambled up the steps of a knight’s castle near Saarbrücken, peered into the crypts of the Burgundian dukes in Dijon, handled antique torture instruments in Ghent and drank beer along riverbanks in the Carpathians. I got to know Augsburg almost like an insider. I met fascinating people, including several devoted academics and even a few ascot-wearing aristocrats.

  A major source for this book was the work of Götz Freiherr von Pölnitz, who once ran the Fugger archives, the family-sponsored research facility in Dillingen, near Augsburg. Pölnitz wrote sixteen books on Jacob Fugger and his nephews. He built on the works of Strieder, Max Jansen, Aloys Schulte and Richard Ehrenberg to create, among other books, the 662-page doorstop Jakob Fugger and its 669-page companion volume of notes. The work says just about everything that ever needs to be said about Fugger and is a masterpiece of research. Unfortunately, it has never been translated into English and even scholars find it wordy and difficult. Günter Ogger, a popular German writer of business books, wonderfully synthesized Pölnitz in the 1978 German bestseller about the Fugger clan, Kauf dir einen Kaiser. I relied on Ogger to make sense of Pölnitz. Another enormously helpful book was Mark Häberlein’s The Fuggers of Augsburg, which appeared in German in 2006 and in English in 2012. Häberlein, a professor at the University of Bamberg, graciously answered questions and helped develop my own thoughts about Fugger. University of Augsburg’s Rolf Kiessling and Johannes Burkhardt, University of Pennsylvania’s Thomas Max Safley and University of Zurich’s Bernd Roeck took time to educate me on Renaissance Augsburg. Columbia University’s Martha Howell and Innsbruck University’s Heinz Noflatscher illuminated other aspects of the period. Count Alexander Fugger-Babenhausen opened the Fugger Archives to me and Franz Karg, the director, showed me the city and pointed me to the right sources.