You know how one book leads to another? The Richest Man Who Ever Lived by Greg Steinmetz is one of those. I was reading The Medici: Power, Money, and Ambition in the Italian Renaissance and the name Jacob Fugger was mentioned. It was almost nothing; just a mention that one of the Medici might have met him in Germany. The name tickled a memory though; he was also an “off stage” character in a work of historical fiction, Q by Luther Blissett. Curiosity piqued, I tracked down Steinmetz.
Fugger was born into a well off cloth merchant family in the Swabian city of Augsburg in 1459. He expanded out from selling cloth by loaning money to cash strapped nobility in the Holy Roman Empire (what is today Germany, Austria and parts of Eastern Europe and Italy) in exchange for metal mining contracts. The money he made from the sale of these metals went to loan more money to more nobles. Eventually he was the major financier to both the Holy Roman Emperor and the Papacy. The Papacy paid for its loans by giving him the right to sell church offices and indulgences (get out of Purgatory free cards). He even became a massive wholesaler in eastern spices.
Because of the funds he controlled Fugger could manipulate current events to his own advantage. His willingness or lack of willingness to lend Emperor Maximilian money for armies started or stopped several wars. He even help orchestrate (and funded) the royal weddings that created the Austro-Hungerian empire. Not all events were deliberate. His sale of indulgences helped spark the protestant reformation. All of this done behind the scenes to a point that most history books of the time only note his presence in a off hand sort of way.
Steinmetz has a very engaging tongue-in-cheek writing style that anyone can get into. It also helps that Fugger is very easy for modern readers to relate to. The methods he used were very much of his time, but his ethos is very much of our own time. He unabashedly made the acquisition of more money his driving goal. He would only be out of place in a modern financial market in that he wouldn’t be able to fathom all the rules and regulations that control finance systems today.
