A financially powerful family in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
The Fugger family began accumulating its fortune during the lifetime of Hans Fugger, a master weaver, who settled in Augsburg in 1367. His descendants took advantage of Augsburg’s strategic trade location at the Brenner Pass to build a financial dynasty based on banking and offering loans, a situation made possible by the increasing willingness of the Catholic Church to ignore loopholes that allowed interest to be charged on moneylending.
Under Jacob Fugger II “the Rich,” the family achieved such influence on the Hapsburg family that Augsburg was made an imperial free city, independent of the control of regional aristocrats, and the Fuggers were given mining concessions that gave them control of large stores of mercury, copper, gold, and silver. The Hapsburgs, the ruling dynasty of Spain and the Holy Roman empire, desperately needed money to control the elections for the papacy, their own empire, and to finance explorations of the New World, so they looked to the Fuggers for support. In return, the family became the Vatican’s bankers for much of the sixteenth century and received noble titles (count, then prince) from the Hapsburgs. As the Spanish reaped huge quantities of precious metals from Mexico and South America, the Fuggers advanced them such enormous sums of money every year in anticipation of the arrival of the treasure fleet that, including high interest, much of the proceeds went directly into the Fugger coffers.
As patrons, the Fuggers sponsored palaces, a family chapel, and portraits and statuary of Renaissance princes, but they also used their wealth to address the increasing overcrowding of Augsburg, which, as a free city, attracted refugees from all over central Europe. The Fuggeri, a complex of living quarters for the workers of Augsburg, was available at reasonable rent through the wishes of Jacob Fugger II, who also specified that the residents offer prayers for the family daily, a tradition that continues in the surviving units today.
Fugger power, however, declined in tandem with that of its greatest debtor, the Spanish mon archy, which declared bankruptcy in 1557, 1575, and 1607, each time defaulting on its increasingly high-interest and high-risk loans. The subsequent Thirty Years’ War and its depredations to Germany further damaged the Fuggers’ business. The Fuggers were not crushed by this failure because of their diversity of other investments, but they ceased to act as the bankers of emperors and kings, instead concentrating on regional trade and manufacturing. Three branches of the Fugger family, bearing the titles “count” and “prince,” still exist today.
Margaret Sankey
See also: Renaissance.
Ehrenberg, Richard. Capital and Finance in the Age of the Renaissance: A Study of the Fuggers and Their Connections, trans. H.M. Lucas. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1963.
Mathews, George Tennyson, ed. The Fugger Newsletters. New York: Capricorn, 1970.
Streider, Jacob. Jacob Fugger the Rich: Merchant and Banker of Augsburg, 1459–1525, ed. Norman Scott Brien Gras, trans. Mildred S. Hartsough. New York: Adelphi, 1931.