I first heard the name Jacob Fugger in freshman history when the professor introduced us to the Diet of Worms, the epic and hilariously named confrontation between Emperor Charles V and Martin Luther. After becoming a regular visitor to Germany, I heard Fugger’s name so often that I became curious. Who was this guy Jacob the Rich, whom Germans praised as the greatest businessman who ever lived? Who was this “German Rockefeller?”
After one of my visits, I decided to do some research but found nothing at my local library. A search on Amazon turned up only one title in English, a 1931 translation of historian Jacob Strieder’s Jacob Fugger the Rich. I later came to love this quirky and provocative book, but I initially found it challenging for its lack of context and absence of a story line. As I struggled with it, an idea hit me. Someone should write a book in English that makes Fugger’s story accessible to the general reader. Thinking back to an old editor who once reminded me that I was a reporter and shouldn’t suggest stories for others to do that I could do myself, I realized that someone was me.
I thought it would be easy. One of my first journalism jobs was preparing entries for the Forbes Richest List. I saw my Fugger book as a Richest List entry only longer. I was dead wrong about that, but my naïveté served me well because I would have abandoned the project if not for that miscalculation. I submitted the final manuscript seven years after that first visit to the library. Much of the work was drudgery. I spent a crazy amount of time reading books in German with the help of a translation app, mostly wedged between fellow commuters on Metro North. But I also had a lot of fun. I scrambled up the steps of a knight’s castle near Saarbrücken, peered into the crypts of the Burgundian dukes in Dijon, handled antique torture instruments in Ghent and drank beer along riverbanks in the Carpathians. I got to know Augsburg almost like an insider. I met fascinating people, including several devoted academics and even a few ascot-wearing aristocrats.
A major source for this book was the work of Götz Freiherr von Pölnitz, who once ran the Fugger archives, the family-sponsored research facility in Dillingen, near Augsburg. Pölnitz wrote sixteen books on Jacob Fugger and his nephews. He built on the works of Strieder, Max Jansen, Aloys Schulte and Richard Ehrenberg to create, among other books, the 662-page doorstop Jakob Fugger and its 669-page companion volume of notes. The work says just about everything that ever needs to be said about Fugger and is a masterpiece of research. Unfortunately, it has never been translated into English and even scholars find it wordy and difficult. Günter Ogger, a popular German writer of business books, wonderfully synthesized Pölnitz in the 1978 German bestseller about the Fugger clan, Kauf dir einen Kaiser. I relied on Ogger to make sense of Pölnitz. Another enormously helpful book was Mark Häberlein’s The Fuggers of Augsburg, which appeared in German in 2006 and in English in 2012. Häberlein, a professor at the University of Bamberg, graciously answered questions and helped develop my own thoughts about Fugger. University of Augsburg’s Rolf Kiessling and Johannes Burkhardt, University of Pennsylvania’s Thomas Max Safley and University of Zurich’s Bernd Roeck took time to educate me on Renaissance Augsburg. Columbia University’s Martha Howell and Innsbruck University’s Heinz Noflatscher illuminated other aspects of the period. Count Alexander Fugger-Babenhausen opened the Fugger Archives to me and Franz Karg, the director, showed me the city and pointed me to the right sources.
The argument that Jacob was the most influential businessman in history is not my own. James Westfall Thompson, a University of Chicago professor for thirty-seven years and one-time president of the American Historical Association, made the assertion in his 1931 book Economic and Social History of Europe in the Later Middle Ages. After examining the facts, it became clear to me that Thompson was right and that his assertion, more than any other, explained why Fugger was worth getting to know. For the argument that Fugger was the richest person in history, I used methodology I came across in a 2007 front-page story in the New York Times. The piece, based on a 1996 book by Michael Klepper and Robert Gunther, compared a person’s net worth with the size of the economy in which he operated and named John D. Rockefeller as the richest American of all time. The method is flawed. As a friend cleverly pointed out, the richest man by this standard was the biblical Adam, who with his partner Eve possessed all global wealth. But I liked this method because it equalizes for differences in economic landscapes across time. To measure Fugger by his worth in gold, a method that has the virtue of adjusting for inflation, chops him down to a mere $50 million, making him no wealthier than, say, a successful real estate developer or a multilocation car dealer. That’s not right either.
Special thanks go to retired Colgate University professor Dirk Hoffmann. Dirk taught me German more than thirty years ago and, for this book, helped me decipher Pölnitz, Fugger’s letters to Duke George, and the significance of Ulrich von Hutten, among other things. Dirk also provided valuable feedback on the many drafts of this book. His fingerprints cover the pages. Maureen Manning, Jane Reed and the rest of the staff at the University Club library in New York tracked down as many as four books a day for me. I could never have finished the book without their heavy lifting. Priscilla Painton at Simon & Schuster immediately recognized why Fugger’s story was worth telling and understood what I was trying to say before I did. Her sharp pencil saved this book from being unreadable mush. David Kuhn was everything an agent should be. Bob Goldfarb and my colleagues at Ruane, Cunniff & Goldfarb provoked me with well-considered questions.
My reader circle of John Bensche, Robert Clymer, Bill Griffin, Doug Lavin, Terence Pare, Robin Rogers, Art Steinmetz, Julia Steinmetz and Martin Uhle read early drafts and provided terrific feedback. Tobias Dose, Regine Wosnitza and my cousin Robert Richter helped with the research. Catherine Minear and Claudia and Andre Castaybert helped with the French. All errors are all mine.