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99 crises and their resolution For a long time, researchers held the generations that followed Anton Fugger in low esteem. Richard Ehrenberg characterized the history of the Fugger firm after 1560 as a “time of decay,” and in Baron Götz von Pölnitz’s view, the generations of the “founders” and “rulers” were followed by a generation of “epigons and Diadochi”—that is, unworthy successors who had neither the will nor the capability to master the challenges of their time. Allegedly, these “epigons” increasingly withdrew from active involvement in commercial affairs and used the wealth their ancestors had accumulated for other goals and interests—art collections, libraries, and personal hobbies.1 The view that the firm declined in the generation following Anton Fugger has not been without its critics, however, for an adequate assessment of its development in the late sixteenth century has to take into account both the course set by Anton Fugger and the changing economic circumstances. As was pointed out at the end of the preceding chapter, Anton Fugger planned to dissolve the family trading company, and this decision was very much present in the minds of his descendants. In 1580, Anton’s son Marx spoke of our “common trade, dissolved way back in the year of 1548, but not yet completely distributed so far,” and a year later he used the term “tacita continuatio societatis (the tacit continuation of the company).” Legally, Marx Fugger thus conceived of himself as the head of a firm that already had been dissolved but whose liquidation was not yet feasible.2 Anton and Raymund Fugger had provided a broad humanist and learned education to their sons and thereby had infused them with new social norms and values. In 1546, Anton Fugger declared that the schooling of the next generation should aim at educating “men of means, who excelled by their adherence to the old faith.” In the will he dictated in 1550, he commanded 4 decline or reorientation? the fugger firms, 1560–1650 g 100 | The Fuggers of Augsburg that his sons should “continue to study and travel with learned men as tutors as well as experience and learn foreign languages.” Afterward, they should be “placed at the courts of his Roman imperial and royal majesties, so that they might be promoted to and employed in offices and honorable services in due time.” Anton Fugger’s sons Marx (b. 1529), Hans (b. 1531), Hieronymus (b. 1533), and Jakob (b. 1542) were initially educated by private tutors who had received a humanist education themselves. In 1537, the jurist Dr. Johann Planta was employed as a tutor in the Fugger household; two years later, Dr. Georg Sigmund Seld, later the imperial vice-chancellor, probably held the same position; and in 1540, the Latinist Johannes Pinicianus and the philologist Dr. Laurentius Sifanus, who later became a university professor in Ingolstadt , taught Fugger’s sons. After a brief sojourn in Vienna, the three elder brothers came “in contact with almost all the countries of Catholic Europe” during the extended travels and visits to universities they undertook beginning in 1542. They spent four years in Italy, including an extended period in Padua, and in the late 1540s, Marx and Hans Fugger studied at the University of Leuven in the Low Countries, where Marx primarily occupied himself with ancient languages and philosophy. In addition, two trips to France are documented in the years 1546 and 1549–50. In 1552, the brothers, accompanied by their tutor Johannes Tonner, went on a journey to Spain. Apparently, this journey, which led them to Seville via Almagro and Cordoba, was not only meant to prepare them for future employment in the Fugger company but was primarily taken up with scholarly studies. After a sojourn at Genoa, Marx Fugger worked in the Fuggers’ Antwerp office in 1553 before returning to Augsburg the following year. His brother Hans seems to have remained at court in Vienna until 1557 before his father sent him to Antwerp, where a difficult situation for the firm’s business had ensued after the Spanish crown and the regency in the Netherlands had stopped making payments.3 Like Marx and Hans Fugger, Hans Jakob and Georg Fugger, their older cousins, had been prepared for future employment in the trading company but also enjoyed a broad learned and humanist education. They had studied at the universities of Bourges, Padua, and Bologna beginning in 1531 and had received a commercial education in the Antwerp trading office in 1536 and...

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