Bacchus and Civic Order: The Culture of Drink in Early Modern Germany

Chapter 1: The City and Its Taverns

1 The City and Its Taverns T     Augsburg was at the height of its wealth and power as it moved into the sixteenth century. Home to the fabulously rich merchant houses of Fugger, Welser, and Baumgartner, Augsburg was renowned for its splendor.1 Its population of over thirty thousand meant it was one of the largest cities in Germany, and the far-reaching interests of its leading merchants made it one of the wealthiest. The Fugger family, under the leadership of Jacob, “the Rich,” as the sixteenth century began, had established a close relationship with Emperor Maximilian I, and the emperor and his entourage were regular visitors to the prosperous merchant city. Augsburg lay at the junction of two rivers, the Lech and the Wertach, directly on the ancient trade route leading to Venice. The proximity of the waterways allowed the construction of a complicated system of canals and fountains that provided the city with water power to turn its mills, carry away its refuse , and furnish private sources of water for individual homes, workshops, and breweries. A major center of printing, weaving, banking, and gold- and silversmithing, Augsburg was also home to an important circle of humanists led by Conrad Peutinger. One historian, noting the extent of the city’s financial connections, technological innovations, and cultural achievements, described Augsburg at the beginning of the sixteenth century as the most modern city in Germany; Michel de Montaigne in  called it “the most beautiful.”2 In spite of its international renown, however, the early modern city within its walls maintained an independent local identity. City leaders were concerned not only with their banking ties to Venice and Antwerp but also with sustaining stability and order among the local citizenry, on whose labor their trade interests depended. Throughout the early modern period, city councils in German towns invested much effort in building, upholding, and protecting an orderly community of responsible, taxpaying citizens. The architectural achievements of the century following the Reformation in 17 Tlusty FINAL 01 (17-34) 6/5/01 9:12 PM Page 17 Augsburg provide a visual articulation of this goal. The outer fortifications were raised and accented by impressive gates and towers, a bastion that would prove more effective against the increasing numbers of wandering poor and vagrants than against military attack. The Gothic courthouse and the Lords’ Drinking Room, centers of elite power, were torn down and rebuilt in the massive, mathematically rational style of the late Renaissance, facing each other in an imposing display of secular splendor.3 Augsburg’s Catholic poor were fortunate enough to be among the world’s earliest recipients of social housing, quartered in a settlement financed by Jacob Fugger and named in his honor the Fuggerei. Surrounded by its own walls, the Fuggerei consisted of  individual dwellings, neatly arranged in straight rows. The tiny planned community contrasted sharply with the less rational, medieval character of the city surrounding it. Jacob Fugger may have been motivated by the hope of winning salvation in return for his charity, yet the orderly little community served a calculated worldly interest as well. Impoverished people with a home were less likely to risk social protest than those with nothing to lose—and as an added precaution, the gates to the Fuggerei were locked, with its residents inside, during the hours of darkness. Lining the streets just inside the city’s gates, clustered in its center, and thinly scattered among its back quarters were Augsburg’s taverns and drinking rooms. These institutions ranged from the poorly lit rooms of backstreet wine sellers to the elaborate marble halls frequented by society’s most privileged members. Urban drinking rooms provided more than food, drink, and lodging for their guests. They also conferred on their visitors a sense of social identity commensurate with their status. Like all German cities, Augsburg ’s history during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was shaped by the political events attending the Reformation, the post-Reformation, and the Thirty Years’ War; it’s social and political character was also reflected and supported by its public and private drinking rooms. Augsburg and the Reformation By the time the Fuggerei was completed in , the Reformation had dawned in Germany. Despite the conservative influence of the Catholic Fuggers and the humanist civic secretary Conrad Peutinger, Augsburg’s guild-based gov18 The Culture of Drink in the Early Modern German City Tlusty FINAL 01 (17-34) 6/5/01 9:12 PM Page 18 [18.221.165.246] Project MUSE...