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  • The Fuggers of Augsburg: Wealth and Honor in Renaissance Germany by Mark Häberlein
  • Thomas Max Safley
The Fuggers of Augsburg: Wealth and Honor in Renaissance Germany. By Mark Häberlein. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012. Pp. ix + 286. Cloth $39.50. ISBN 978-0813932583.

The press release that accompanies Mark Häberlein's synthesis of historical scholarship on the Fugger family of Augsburg trumpets, "In contrast to the other famous merchant family of the period, the Medici of Florence . . . no English-language work on them has been available until now." The Medici have indeed attracted the attention of scholars, whose works have been published in several languages including English, while literature on the Fuggers remains almost exclusively a German-language phenomenon. Unfortunately, this volume does little to redress the balance. Whereas readily available studies of the Medici offer meticulous, original scholarship—Raymond de Roover's classic The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank, 1397-1494 (Cambridge, MA, 1963) comes to mind—Häberlein's work rehearses the findings of others, putting old wine in new skins, to turn a parable: a kind of bait and switch that is not satisfying, but rather, at points, deeply frustrating.

Häberlein's study opens most promisingly. After a concise discussion of the historiography on the Fuggers, he arrives at "several conclusions" that "a new history of the Fugger family" can draw (5). First, it should not focus too exclusively on great leaders, especially Jakob and Anton; second, it should avoid the teleology of a linear rise from common labors to aristocratic achievements; third, it should attend to "the social norms that were of fundamental importance to late medieval and early modern estate society" (6), among which he privileges notions of the common good and honor. Yet, the volume does not live up to its author's intentions. Because it is not "new," in the sense that the author has not engaged in original research or interrogated past scholarship, it remains captive to that scholarship: not only its insights, but also its errors.

The results are neither "meticulously researched" nor particularly "timely," all claims to the contrary notwithstanding. Häberlein's Table 1, for example, borrows figures on taxable wealth from the work of Peter Geffken ("Soziale Schichtung 1396 bis 1521. Beitrag zu einer Strukturanalyse Augsburgs im Spätmittelalter," unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Munich, 1995) to claim that Hans Fugger's widow, Elisabeth Gefatermann, "must have been a remarkably business-minded woman" (13). He thus argues from matter to mentality, going beyond the limits of the available evidence. Nor does he analyze the evidence he has: it shows, in fact, a simple growth rate of 3.5 percent annually, which is healthy but not remarkable. In chapter 4, Häberlein claims that "it is hardly justified to speak of a decline of the Fugger's trade" (120), a hypothesis that he borrows whole-cloth from an essay by Georg Lutz ("Marx Fugger [1529-1597] und die Annales Ecclesiastici des Baronius. Eine Verdeutschung aus dem Augsburg der Gegenreformation," in: Baronio Storico [End Page 679] e la Controriforma. Atti del Convegno internazionale di Studi, Sorra 6-10 Ottobre 1979 [Sora, 1982], 421-546) and then elevates into one of the volume's major findings (viii). Yet, Lutz based his analysis solely on the Generalrechnung of 1577, and neither his analysis of the account nor the author's pastische of scholarship actually addresses the question of decline. Marx Fugger managed a consolidation of the Fugger firm and extended its life far beyond the expectation of his father, yet the company became smaller under his leadership than it had been under Jakob and Anton, as well as smaller than companies then on the rise in Italy and the Netherlands. Its "decline" was thus both absolute and relative, and the issue requires more research than Lutz or Häberlein have given it.

Häberlein hopes to avoid teleologies through greater attention to context. Yet, as the discussion of decline suggests, he chooses selectively, privileging local economic and political circumstances while ignoring comparative or theoretical discussions. With regard to the growing difficulties that the Fuggers confronted in the late sixteenth century, Häberlein invokes...

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