Fugger family

German mercantile and banking dynasty that dominated European business in the 15th–16th centuries.

The family business traces its origins to Hans (Johannes) Fugger (1348–1409), a weaver in Augsburg. Under his grandsons Ulrich (1441–1510), Georg (1453–1506), and especially Jakob (1459–1525), the company became established in international trade, including the lucrative spice and slave trades, and built a fortune in copper and silver mining. Their loans to various kings and emperors and involvement with the sale of papal indulgences made family members highly influential in European politics and earned them the criticism of Martin Luther. The family's influence declined after the 16th century, but three titled lines survived into the 20th century.

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▪ German family

Introduction

      German mercantile and banking dynasty that dominated European business during the 15th and 16th centuries, developed capitalistic economic concepts, and influenced continental politics.

The founding fathers.

      Hans Fugger, a weaver born in the village of Graben in Swabia, established the family in Augsburg in 1367. By twice marrying the daughters of masters of the weavers' guild, the industrious Fugger acquired civic rights and the freedom of the company. He also became a member of the guild's committee of 12 and of the city's great council and conducted a successful textile trade. After his death in 1408, his sons Andreas and Jakob I, both of whom had learned the goldsmith's trade, jointly carried on the family business until they dissolved their partnership in 1454. Although Andreas, the more enterprising of the two, and his descendants quickly attained great wealth, they went bankrupt in 1499, as a result of an overextension of business activity and the loss of a lawsuit. These Fugger vom Reh (Fuggers of the Doe, from their coat of arms) spread over southern, central, and eastern Germany; as late as 1944, there were Fukier (descendants of the Fuggers) residing in Warsaw.

      In 1441 Jakob had married the daughter of a mint master who went bankrupt three years later. Warned by this event, Jakob proceeded carefully in his business; yet by perseverance and industry he succeeded in substantially increasing his profits, and in 1463 he was made a member of the more highly respected merchants' guild. After his death in 1469, two of his seven sons, Ulrich and Georg, profitably expanded the firm's international trade. In 1473 they were granted a coat of arms with a lily, causing this branch of the family to be called Fugger von der Lilie. With the help of their brother Markus in Rome, they handled remittances to the papal court of monies for the sale of indulgences and the procuring of church benefices. From 1508 to 1515 they leased the Roman mint.

      Ulrich and Georg established an agency of their own in the German merchants' building in Venice, where their youngest brother, Jakob II the Rich, who had originally been destined for an ecclesiastical career, studied modern bookkeeping from 1478 on. Taking charge of the Fugger agency in Innsbruck in 1485, he showed sound business acumen in making the firm a partner in the Tirolean mines by granting permanent loans, secured by deliveries of copper and silver, to Archduke Sigismund and King (later Emperor) Maximilian. The large profits realized from this venture encouraged the Fuggers to participate also in mining operations in Silesia. There Jakob, a shrewd and sober yet enterprising merchant, met a mining expert with whom he leased the copper mines in Neusohl (modern Banská Bystrica, Slovakia) in 1495, eventually building them up into the greatest mining centre of the time.

      In 1494 the Fuggers established their first public company with a capital of 54,385 guilders, a sum that was to be doubled two years later when Jakob persuaded the Prince Bishop of Brixen to join the company as a silent partner. Jakob's aim was to establish a copper monopoly by opening foundries in Hohenkirchen and Fuggerau (named for the family, in Carinthia, now Austria) and by expanding the sales organization in Europe, especially the Antwerp agency. True to his motto, “I want to gain while I can,” Jakob, unhappily married since 1498 and without an heir, engaged in all manner of commerce, including the lucrative spice trade. The taciturn and hard-driving merchant had long ago assumed the direction of the firm. The death of his chief creditor, the Prince Bishop of Brixen, whose inheritance was claimed by the Pope, brought about a serious crisis that Jakob managed to solve through shrewd negotiations. Prudently, he divided the company's assets equally into cash holdings, production plants and merchandise, landed properties, and precious stones. In 1504 he thus secretly purchased from the city of Basel a portion of the captured crown jewels of Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy. Laying the foundation for the family's widely distributed landholdings, he acquired the countships of Kirchberg and Weissenhorn from Maximilian I in 1507. In 1514, the emperor made him a count.

      The chief financial supporter of Maximilian I's policies since 1490, Fugger was identified with these policies for better or for worse, even though he refused to support Maximilian's bid for the papacy. His greatest achievement was the financing of the election of Charles V, Maximilian's successor, as emperor. Of the total election expenses of 852,000 guilders, Jakob Fugger alone raised almost 544,000 in order to eliminate Francis I of France. By skillful negotiations he arranged to have this debt repaid out of the Maestrazgo—the lease of the revenues paid to the Spanish crown by the three great knightly orders. A part of the sum came from the mercury mines of Almadén and the silver mines of Guadalcanal. In 1516 he also made an ally of King Henry VIII of England by granting him various loans.

 At the height of his power Jakob Fugger was sharply criticized by his contemporaries, especially by the German humanist and reformer Ulrich von Hutten and by Martin Luther (Luther, Martin), for his stand on interest charges (the Fuggers were among the merchant dynasties that urged the Pope to rescind or amend the medieval prohibition on the levying of interest) and the sale of indulgences and benefices, as well as for his loan policies. The imperial fiscal and governmental authorities in Nürnberg brought action against him and other merchants to halt their monopolistic tendencies. Fugger's position was furthermore threatened by social unrest among the miners in the Tirol and at Neusohl in Hungary, by attempts of the Hungarian nobles to nationalize his mines, and by the Peasants' Revolt. At the Augsburg headquarters he was threatened by an uprising of artisans. Fugger mastered these crises through sheer tenacity and fixity of purpose. Albrecht Dürer has immortalized the severe, taciturn countenance of the master merchant. As head of the company, Fugger, who was himself a man of few wants, created monuments to his time that have survived for centuries—in the Fugger buildings and the splendid memorial chapel and above all in the Fuggerei, the world's oldest social settlement, which he endowed as a peaceful haven for his impoverished old servants and fellow citizens. In his last years, seeing his work and his church threatened by the Reformation, he fought the new movement.

Decline of the house.

      At his death in 1525, Jakob the Rich bequeathed to his nephew Anton Fugger, who had been destined for the succession since 1517, company assets totaling 2,032,652 guilders. The new chief, an ambitious and talented businessman, guided the company with a firm hand. In 1527 he married Anna Rehlinger, a patrician's daughter who bore him four sons. Most of Anton's time was taken up with the securing of permanent loans for the emperors Charles V and Ferdinand I and for King Philip II of Spain. In accordance with his credo that money is the sinews of war—pecunia nervus bellorum—Fugger, a strict Roman Catholic, granted the emperor credits that proved to be decisive in the struggle against the Protestants and particularly in the war against the Schmalkaldic League of Protestant princes and cities. While large sales of fustian cloth to England and loans extended to its kings proved to be profitable, the formerly rich yield of the Tirolean and Hungarian mines decreased until Anton gave up Neusohl altogether in 1547. With dogged resolution but little success, he tried to make up for these losses by establishing new trade ties with Peru and Chile and by engaging in mining ventures in Sweden and Norway, as well as in the slave trade from Africa to America. He was, however, more successful in the spice trade and the importation of Hungarian cattle. National resentments in Spain forced him to renounce the Maestrazgo lease after 1542 and to give up the silver mines of Guadalcanal. Nonetheless, Anton Fugger had, by 1546, amassed 5,100,000 guilders—the highest capital in the company's history.

      His health weakened in 1540, Anton Fugger reacted more acutely to the shifts in his fortunes; since his sons and nephews showed little interest in business, he even considered dissolving the firm. When that proved impossible, he stubbornly tried to carry on, although he could satisfy the demand for credit only by increased borrowing. An inventory taken after his death in 1560 showed assets of 5,600,000 and liabilities of 5,400,000 guilders (2,900,000 in Spain alone). Anton had, however, safeguarded part of his fortune through the timely purchase of Babenhausen and other landed estates. After the personal bankruptcy of his nephew Hans Jakob Fugger, who had become a partner in 1543 and who eventually became Bavarian chancellor, Anton's oldest son, Markus, carried on the business successfully, if on a reduced scale. During the period 1563–1641 the company, which was not completely dissolved until after the Thirty Years' War, earned some 50,000,000 ducats from the production of mercury at Almadén alone.

      While Jakob and Anton Fugger had hardly made use of their title as counts, their descendants, showing little mercantile inclination, acquired a humanistic education at European universities. Marrying within their class, they spent most of their lives on their estates, where they established valuable libraries and built magnificent residences. It is to Jakob and Anton Fugger's land purchases that the three surviving lines of the family (all dating from the mid-16th century)—the counts Fugger-Kirchberg of Oberkirchberg, the prince Fugger-Glött of Kirchheim, and the prince Fugger-Babenhausen of Babenhausen—owe the preservation of a part of the great wealth once held by the family firm.

      The Fugger family may be considered a prototype of the trading company of the early capitalistic era. In overcoming the economic concepts of the Middle Ages, they used methods that have evoked, both in their time and in the present, admiration as well as violent criticism.

Friedrich Blendinger

Additional Reading

A comprehensive presentation by Götz Freiherr von Pölnitz, Die Fugger, 3rd ed. (1970, reissued 1981), offers the best survey of the Fugger family and contains an extensive bibliography. The same author's biographies (in German) Jakob Fugger, 2 vol. (1941–51), and Anton Fugger, 3 vol. in 5 (1958–86), are instructive sourcebooks based on research in major European archives. Richard Ehrenberg, Capital & Finance in the Age of the Renaissance: A Study of the Fuggers and Their Connections (1928, reprinted 1985), is a pioneering study of money and credit circulation in the 16th century. Jacob Strieder, Jacob Fugger the Rich: Merchant and Banker of Augsburg, 1459–1525 (1931, reprinted 1984), is a biography.

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