The Fuggers of Augsburg: Pursuing Wealth and Honor in Renaissance Germany

Introduction

1 The name Fugger (pronounced Fooger), at least in German, has a good ring to it. Travelers arriving at Augsburg’s main train station are welcomed in the “Fugger city,” and tourists visiting Augsburg can follow in the footsteps of the city’s most famous family in the Fuggerei, the world’s oldest social settlement still in existence; in the Fugger chapel in the church of St Anna; and in front of Albrecht Dürer’s impressive portrait of Jakob Fugger the Rich in Augsburg’s state gallery. The Fuggers show up as literary figures in popular historical novels, and they have even become the subject of a card game in which the players can distinguish themselves by clever speculation in commercial goods. For a long time the family’s history has also been the subject of historical research. The beginnings of Fugger historiography date back to the sixteenth century, when the Book of Honors and the “Fugger Chronicles” were composed for the purposes of establishing a family tradition and remembering earlier generations. Of decisive importance for further scholarly research, however, was the establishment of the Fugger family and foundation archives (Fürstlich und Gräflich Fugger’sches Familien- und Stiftungsarchiv) in 1877. By commissioning a scholarly director in 1902 as well as a full-time archivist in 1949 and by setting up a special book series, the Studies in Fugger History (Studien zur Fuggergeschichte), the house of Fugger made a substantial contribution to the scholarly investigation of its own family history. Founded in 1907, the Studies in Fugger History now includes forty-two volumes.1 Research on the Fuggers, which has been pursued intensively since the late nineteenth century, has gradually expanded factual knowledge about the family’s economic activities and social position, patronage, and charitable foundations. But beyond that, research always reflects the interests, worldviews , and prejudices of the researchers and their times. The scholars who examined the history of the Fuggers between the 1870s and the 1920s were primarily interested in the family’s phenomenal economic rise. “How attractive it is,” Max Jansen wrote in 1907, “to pursue the development of a family introduction g 2 | The Fuggers of Augsburg from a weavers’ workshop through the world-encompassing counting-house of two merchants up to the prince’s palace.”2 Richard Ehrenberg and Jakob Strieder characterized the sixteenth century as one of the great eras of German economic history and mainly saw the Fuggers as forerunners of the “great business leaders” and “captains of industry” of their own times. In the “age of early capitalism” at the end of the Middle Ages, they detected the roots of industrial capitalism. “During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the spirit of capitalism spread rapidly,” Jakob Strieder wrote in 1925, “the spirit of a persistent, restless, unbridled striving for profit, never satisfied with its success, among a broader, economically active elite stratum of the German people.”3 Jakob Fugger was seen as a protagonist of this “restless , unbridled” striving for gain; Strieder viewed him as the representative of a new, liberal-capitalist cast of mind which had first emerged in Italy. Fugger ’s remark that he “wished to make a profit as long as he could” was detached from its original historical context (the specific situation of the Fuggers ’ Hungarian trade at the beginning of the 1520s) and stylized as the life motto of a merchant for whom the earning of money had allegedly become an end in itself. Up to the present day, the image of the Fuggers, and especially of Jakob Fugger the Rich, is strongly shaped by this perspective of the Wilhelminic Age and the era of high industrialization.4 The view of the Fuggers as unscrupulous large-scale capitalists and political manipulators, which was popularized by the economic journalist Günter Ogger in the 1970s and is widely current, is basically nothing more than a negative inversion of this image of the great business leaders.5 From the 1930s to the 1960s, one man above all has shaped Fugger historiography : Baron Götz von Pölnitz, the long-term scholarly director of the Fugger Archives and later professor of economic and social history at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. Pölnitz’s merits in Fugger research can hardly be overestimated: Besides Jakob Fugger, who had been the main focus of historical interest until then, he also discovered his nephew and successor Anton Fugger as a subject worthy of study and exhaustively researched his life. Pölnitz based...