In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

199 from urban bourgeoisie to landed nobility? In the history of the late medieval and early modern bourgeoisie, the frequency with which newly rich patrician and merchant families invested part of their wealth in rural property is well known. This process has been observed for the upper strata of the large southern German imperial cities, as well as for urban elites in Italy, England, France, and the Netherlands.1 Sometimes the acquisition of landed property went hand in hand with the conferring of noble titles, marriage alliances with the landed nobility, and a withdrawal from urban life. These phenomena often have been described as a “feudalization” of the bourgeoisie. It was not economic and social success in urban society but the ascent into the ranks of the nobility that supposedly formed the model for the bourgeoisie.2 At first glance, the history of the Fuggers looks like the ideal example of this process of “feudalization.” The weavers who had immigrated to Augsburg in the fourteenth century first became respected merchants and then international entrepreneurs and bankers. In the course of the sixteenth century, they invested ever larger sums in rural estates, and by the early seventeenth century, they owned more than one hundred villages in eastern Swabia alone. They were elevated to the rank of hereditary imperial counts in 1530 and were granted additional privileges, such as the right to exercise manorial jurisdiction and a partial exemption from Augsburg’s municipal jurisdiction. From this time on, the Fuggers formed marriage alliances with landed noble families almost exclusively. By the mid-seventeenth century, they eventually had given up merchant banking entirely, the activity that had once formed the very basis of their economic and social ascent, and now derived their income from land rents or served as high clergymen, officers, and princely bureaucrats.3 8 citizens and noblemen investment strategies, career patterns, and lifestyles g 200 | The Fuggers of Augsburg As the preceding chapters have shown, however, this schematic view of a linear rise from the bourgeoisie to the nobility is much too simple. Although the Fuggers invested considerable sums in landed property as early as 1507 and benefited from the conferment of imperial titles and privileges from 1511 on, they retained their trading company for almost a century and a half. Although they married into the landed nobility and turned their rural manors into splendid and ostentatious castles, the Fugger houses in Augsburg remained the centers of life for most family members until the Thirty Years’ War. Moreover, family members assumed high city offices and actively participated in urban life. The Fuggers’ patronage and collecting activities, their learning and educational trips, and their self-display and cultural consumption increased their prestige among fellow citizens, foreign scholars, landed noblemen, and central Europe’s princely courts alike and formed the basis of their elevated status in urban society, as well as the acceptance of their noble rank. Throughout the sixteenth century and early seventeenth century, the Fuggers were both merchants and landed noblemen, thus taking up a social position that defies overly simple classifications of rank. When family members referred to themselves as “citizens of Augsburg and estates of the Roman Empire” in 1592, they succinctly described their special status.4 Moreover, a comparison with other leading urban families shows that the combination of bourgeois and aristocratic values, behavioral patterns, and lifestyles was not confined to the Fuggers; it can also be observed in families such as the Vöhlins , Langenmantels, Imhofs, Rehlingers, and Stettens. What distinguishes the Fuggers’ rural estates most clearly from those of other Augsburg families was their size and stability. Whereas other families frequently resold their estates, landed property in the Fuggers’ case became “an inalienable element of family wealth.”5 Therefore the changing lifestyle and self-image of urban families in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries should not be viewed as “feudalization.” Rather, it indicates a pluralism of social norms and career options. Although commerce was the basis of these families’ wealth, prestige, and status, there were several ways to preserve and increase prestige and wealth: continuing involvement in trade and banking, the assumption of public office in the city, a lifestyle befitting the receivers of feudal rents, as well as ecclesiastical, military , courtly, and administrative careers in early modern territorial states.6 Members of the Fugger family pursued all of these career paths in the sixteenth century and early seventeenth century. Men like Marx and Octavian Secundus Fugger simultaneously were heads of a merchant company, highranking...

Share