When a banker thinks he might lose a deal, he sometimes invokes a tactic known as “bid ’em up.” He gets his client to pay a price so high that no other bidder can afford to stay in the game. The bid might be so large that it puts the client at risk of bankruptcy. That doesn’t matter. What matters is that the banker wins the deal and gets his fee. Fugger didn’t invent the phrase “bid ’em up.” But the death of Maximilian offered him the opportunity to use it for what may have been the first time.
The moment Maximilian died, Fugger ordered a courier to race to Paris with the news. He wanted to ingratiate himself with King Francis by being the first to tell him about the death. It was Fugger’s way of signaling that he was open for business and ready to help the French king win the election. Of course, Fugger preferred Charles. Fugger had become the richest man in Europe by financing the Habsburgs in little Austria. The prospects of financing them in Spain and the New World dazzled him. But he had put too much faith in Maximilian and too little effort into wooing Charles directly. He had pushed too hard for good terms and stirred up too much mistrust among the Austrian nobility. And now with the election coming back up for grabs, he faced the real possibility of being shut out. No matter that the electors wanted Fugger in the deal because he was the only banker they trusted. The teenage king of Spain wanted to leave him on the sidelines.
Fugger couldn’t let that happen. He was the preeminent financier in Europe. A loss would not only embarrass him but, infinitely worse, endanger his empire. The Habsburgs might cancel his agreements if he backed France. Charles might rip up his silver contracts and give them to the Welsers or one of the others. That could trigger the nightmare scenario of anxious depositors demanding withdrawals. Like in the terrifying days after Meckau’s death, Fugger could not pay everyone at once. Debtor’s prison loomed again.
With everything on the line, Fugger fell back on his greatest advantage: scale. He could offer a candidate more money than anyone. By reminding the electors of his resources—a promotional campaign he began with Louis of Aragon’s garden party and continued until election day—he could push the price of victory so high that no one else could compete. His competitors would drop out and he would be the only banker left. He made a bet on the ambition of the rival kings, counting on them to keep bidding and send the price high enough to shove his banking competitors off the field.
To pull it off, he had to demonstrate to Charles that he held the cards. This is where Francis came in. Fugger wanted Charles to know one thing: that if Charles didn’t choose Fugger, Fugger would snub him right back and put his resources—the largest pool of uncommitted capital in Europe—behind France. It was that simple. He wanted Charles to understand that he, not the electors, would decide who became emperor, and that if he backed Francis, the Habsburgs would lose the Holy Roman Empire—the largest political jurisdiction in Europe—and their hopes of global domination. Fugger support of Francis would create its own problems. Fugger would still have to deal with the Habsburgs. But whether or not Fugger ever intended to actually back Francis didn’t matter. What mattered was whether the Habsburgs believed that he could, that they believed he might actually betray them for the French king. That’s why Fugger sent the courier to Paris. That’s why he continued to apprise Francis of the latest news in the following weeks. That’s why he directed his nephew Anton, who had replaced the aging Zink at the Vatican, to stay in touch with Francis’s people in Rome. Fugger couldn’t go so far as to give Francis a direct sales pitch without infuriating the Habsburgs. But there was nothing to prevent Francis from coming to him. With his innocent overtures, Fugger was trying to engineer an approach from Francis.
A situation now arose that gave Fugger another chance to prove his value to the Habsburgs. Württemburg was a German duchy near the French border. A number of cities within the duchy belonged not to the local ruler, Duke Ulrich, but to the empire and its Habsburg stewards. This infuriated Ulrich because the cities paid taxes to the empire and not to him. When Maximilian died, Ulrich seized the moment. He sent soldiers to the cities and claimed them. But he had misjudged the situation. Although Maximilian was dead, the Habsburg power structure remained in place. It would fight the duke if it could raise money to pay an army. Fugger used the opportunity to showboat. He gave the Habsburgs 113,000 florins to hire mercenaries.
Dürer sketched a scene in the war. It shows the overwhelming disparity between the Fugger-backed forces and those of the enemy. In the foreground, a line of cannons with impossibly long barrels aims at a castle. The Habsburg soldiers manning the cannons look confident about finishing the job in time for dinner. One pities the defenders. They have nowhere to go. The image leaves no doubt that the Habsburgs would triumph, which they did. This was a great victory for the Habsburgs because it gave them Stuttgart, a strategic holding given its proximity to France.
The episode proved again that Fugger was a friend worth having. In the aftermath, an exasperated Margaret, Charles’s aunt and campaign manager, asked Charles to quit fooling around and borrow from Fugger before it was too late. Leaving aside that Fugger had more resources than the other bankers, she cited an ethical obligation: “He accomplishes so many favors and services for us that you are duty-bound to acknowledge him.”
Time was running out for Charles. Realizing before Charles that whoever had Fugger would win, Francis reached out to Augsburg just as Fugger expected. The way Francis saw it, Charles and he were even in the battle for funds. Charles had the Welsers and the Italians. Francis had the bankers of Lyon and some Italians of his own, as well as money raised by selling royal lands and seizing, in the name of the state, the inheritance of his budget director. But Francis knew he had to do better than just match Charles’s offer. He needed to make the choice easy for the electors by not only outbidding Charles but by vastly outbidding him. With that as his aim, he asked Fugger for 300,000 ecus, the equivalent of 369,000 florins. Francis made the offer as enticing to Fugger as possible. He promised speedy repayment out of French tax revenues plus a 30,000-ecu commission. If Fugger agreed, Francis could double what Charles had offered. Francis couldn’t lose with that kind of money. No matter how many other bankers Charles added to his consortium, Charles could not match Francis and Fugger. Fugger’s strategy of bid ’em up had seen to that. With any luck, Francis would get all seven votes, not just a simple majority. He would have a mandate to unite France and Germany under the House of Valois.
Fugger leaked word of Francis’s offer to the Habsburg camp. Von Berghes, the Habsburg man in Augsburg, pleaded with Margaret to reason with Charles. He declared that Charles absolutely had to borrow from Fugger or all would be lost. “Regarding Fugger, Madam, the king will have to work more with him, whether he wants it or not,” Von Berghes wrote. “The electors want to have Fugger’s word and nobody else’s.” He added that Charles should have used Fugger from the start: “If we had done that from the beginning, it would have greatly been to the king’s profit and progress to his business.” Pressure came on Charles from all sides. The commissioners running the election wrote Charles to say the electors “have neither faith, letters nor seals from any merchants other than the Fuggers.”
Meanwhile, the electors became greedier. A year earlier in Augsburg, Joachim of Brandenberg had won a Habsburg bride and a 300,000 florins dowry for his pledge to Charles. Now, with the bidding war in full swing, he broke his promise. He told Fugger, whom he said “he particularly trusted,” that he would back whomever Fugger backed, and he specifically asked whether Fugger’s personal guarantee only applied to Charles or whether it applied to Francis, too.
Across the channel in England, Henry VIII was in his tenth year as king and, at age twenty-nine, still athletic and handsome. He divorced Catherine of Aragon fourteen years later and split with Rome. For now he was still friends with the Holy See. Pope Leo came to him with an idea. Henry should enter the race and try his luck at becoming the first Englishman since the earl of Cornwall in 1256 to win an imperial election.
Leo feared Charles and Francis as threats to the Vatican. Francis already occupied Milan. If he became emperor and no longer had to contend with the Habsburgs, he could easily sweep down the peninsula and snatch Rome. Charles was a bigger threat. With much of southern Italy already in his control, Charles could muster imperial troops in Naples and attack Rome from the south.
Leo needed a spoiler. It had to be someone strong and someone with sufficient credibility and cash to compete financially. Leo considered backing Frederick the Wise, the Saxon elector. The other electors liked Frederick and he had already been considering a run. But when ultimately forced to declare, he demurred. He said he “preferred to be a powerful duke rather than a weak king.” That left Henry. Leo could count on Henry, if elected, as a buffer between Rome and any continental power that tried to attack. But first he had to get him to run.
This was not the first time someone approached Henry with the idea of becoming emperor. Six years earlier, when Maximilian was still alive, Maximilian feared he himself might not live long enough to see Charles come of age and become emperor. He surprised Henry by offering to adopt him as his son and persuade the electors to name him emperor. Henry laughed it off, but he took the pope’s request seriously. From his island off the coast, he envied Charles and Francis. He longed to have their power. He could get that by becoming emperor. He believed if the German princes backed him with money and guns, he could become the most powerful sovereign in Europe. He warmed to the idea and agreed to run. Leo gave him a letter outlining his support.
This was a stunning development and could cut either way for Fugger. If the electors liked Henry, Henry could win the race and leave Fugger out of the deal. Conversely, more candidates meant more bidders for electoral votes. More bidders meant higher bids—bids that only Fugger could finance. A third candidate could make Fugger even more valuable.
Henry sent his councilor Richard Pace to Germany to work the electors. Pace knew Germany. He had negotiated with Fugger when Henry subsidized Maximilian on his final Italian campaign. The election mission was more delicate. Henry wanted to stay on good terms with the other candidates and told Pace to offer Henry as a candidate only if, in the course of conversation with an elector, the elector himself suggested it. If that happened, Pace should mention that Henry was of “German tongue,” even though he spoke no German. He should also promise bribes. Henry, without understanding the possible costs, assumed his Hansa friends in Lübeck would loan him all he needed.
Frankfurt suffered that year from an unusually hot summer and Pace became ill en route. Only his devotion to Henry drove him on. In Cologne, he met his first elector, the city’s bishop. He left the meeting encouraged and wrote Henry to say Cologne might come his way. In Mainz, he met Albrecht. Albrecht demanded secrecy but, in a cinema-worthy moment, he hid Francis’s campaign manager behind a curtain to eavesdrop. Next, Pace met the shrewd and greedy Joachim. Joachim gave Pace additional encouragement. The bishop of Trier, a fourth elector, offered even more. Pace was thrilled. Everything seemed to be coming together. He sent Henry another update. Get ready to come to Germany, he wrote. He had the votes.
As the electors descended on Frankfurt, the Habsburg camp became anxious and spread a rumor that Francis would invade Germany if he won. Although the rules allowed foreign emperors, the public, conditioned to hate France by centuries of war, would not tolerate a Frenchman. Mobs took to the streets and looked for Frenchmen to kill. Worried about being mistaken for French, Pace fled Frankfurt for Mainz. By stoking the mob with invasion rumors, the Habsburgs engaged in a Renaissance case of voter intimidation. They wanted the electors to think the mob would hang them if they voted the wrong way.
The voting took place in Frankfurt Cathedral. Made of red sandstone and home to the skull of St. Bartholomew, it sits close to the Main River. The location let the electors come by barge and avoid the mayhem on the streets. Once inside, they had to walk forty paces toward the altar, turn right, and head through an antechamber that led to a wooden door. The door was so small and hidden that the uninitiated would never find it. It opened to the election chapel. Only the electors could go in, ducking their heads and maneuvering their fat, game-fed bodies through a narrow frame. Then it was down a step to a chapel with a vaulted ceiling, a stone floor and a small window above a cross. The electors had the most power, the biggest egos and the grandest lifestyles in Germany. They lived in palaces the size of shopping malls. For the election, they huddled in a room the size of a donut shop and had to stay until they reached a verdict even if it took weeks. They had to sleep on straw mats, relieve themselves in buckets and live on whatever food and wine their servants brought. The rules cut rations to bread and water if they failed to decide after thirteen days.
When the tocsin rang, the electors, dressed in scarlet robes, took their places in the chapel to cast their votes. They held a mass and Albrecht administered an oath. As the electors thought about how to vote, they swore to make their decisions free of influence and corruption. “My voice and vote, on the said election, I will give without any pact, payment, price or promise or whatever such things may be called,” they said. “So help me God and all the saints.” Outside, the crowds grew. Just in case Francis attacked, Charles’s people hired an army led by the knight Franz von Sickingen for protection. Sickingen was the most powerful knight in Germany. He could raise an army as easily as Fugger could raise money. By putting him on the payroll before Francis did, the Habsburgs made sure he would cause no trouble.
The electors negotiated until the last. Although Albert had encouraged Pace, he followed his brother Joachim by refusing to accept promises from anyone but Fugger. Elector Louis of Palatinate asked Fugger to personally sign a pledge. With the electors insisting on Fugger, Charles was unable to resist any longer. He agreed to borrow from the Augsburg banker. This sealed the outcome. Anything could happen in the election chapel but if the electors wanted Fugger, they had to vote for the Spanish king. Two weeks after the electors came to Frankfurt, they emerged from the church, squinted in the daylight and announced the outcome. They gave the crown to Charles in a unanimous decision.
Charles’s supporters greeted the news in different ways. The mob in Frankfurt got drunk and rioted. Antwerp held a joust. In Augsburg, Fugger offered to host a multiday celebration. City officials refused him the permit. They wanted to control the show and treated the town to a modest fireworks display instead. Henry rejoiced despite his loss—anything was better than a victory for the French! He held a mass in London and, after hearing how much Charles spent on bribes, told the Duke of Suffolk he celebrated his defeat:
When the king’s highness had well perceived and pondered the great charges and profusion of money expent by the said king of the Romans for the obtent of that dignity, his grace did wonder therat and said that he was right glad that he obtained not the same.
When Fugger completed the final reckoning, he, too, might have wished someone else picked up the tab. The “profusion of money expent” on bribes came to 852,000 florins, including, curiously, 600 florins for Lamparter, the university rector who had married Fugger’s illegitimate daughter Mechtild. The Italians contributed a fifth of the total. The Welsers only a sixth. Fugger’s share came to 544,000 florins, an amount considerably more than requested by Francis. He had just made the biggest loan the world had ever seen. And this time, there were no mining rights standing behind the loan, only a promise to pay from Charles. The loan was unsecured.
Fugger had always made loans backed by solid collateral—a silver mine here or a city and its tax rolls there. It is what kept him solvent. He lowered his standard for the imperial election because he had to win. But he recognized that Charles, unlike his poverty-stricken grandfather, was rich beyond imagination. Twenty-seven years had passed since Columbus landed in America. Gold and silver from the New World—a Habsburg-controlled world—was already coming back to Europe. Closer to home, the Habsburg possessions in Spain and the Netherlands were two of the richest parts of Europe. Still, it was one thing to be rich on paper and another thing to have cash on hand. Whatever the case, Fugger was now at the mercy of a nineteen-year-old creditor 1,200 miles away from Augsburg in Spain.
Even worse, the imperial diet immediately demanded that he betray Fugger. The lawmakers feared that Charles would put his own interests before those of Germany and drafted a thirty-four-article contract to keep him in check. It demanded that Charles defend the empire and the church; enter no foreign wars without its consent; use only German and Latin for official business; hire only German speakers for imperial offices. Article 19 had a commercial agenda. It demanded Charles investigate Fugger and other rich bankers. “We should consider,” it read, “how to limit the big trading companies which have up to now governed with their money and acted in their own interest and caused damage, disadvantages and burden to the empire, its citizens and subjects through their rise in prices.”
Habsburg ambassadors signed the document on behalf of Charles a week after the vote. With that, Charles launched an investigation into the man who just put him in office.
Charles looked more like a footman than a king. He was slim, ungainly and cursed with an oversized lower jaw—the Habsburg jaw—that made it difficult to chew. Embarrassed to be seen when eating, he dined alone. He was quiet and sober. He cultivated carnations and took the imperial choir along when he traveled. He lacked the rakish flair of Francis and the robust energy of Henry. Maximilian thought his appearance repulsive but would have been impressed by his intellect if he had spent more time with him. “There is more at the back of his head than appears in the face,” said a papal official. Like Maximilian, Charles made the rookie mistake of believing the election gave him dictatorial power: “It is our view, that the empire of old had not many masters but one, and it is our intention to be that one.” After the election, he convened the Cortes, the Castilian parliament, and demanded tax increases to pay his election debts to Fugger. The Cortes resisted. It saw no reason to pay for Charles’s empire building and his debts to a German banker. There was nothing in it for Spain, the lawmakers argued. Germany wasn’t a promising new possession like Cuba or Mexico. It offered the people no riches, only entanglements in France and Italy. The body begrudgingly approved the tax hike but only after Charles made compromises. After the vote, Charles went to Germany for his coronation as king of the Germans and appointed his former tutor, the bookish Cardinal Adrian of Utrecht, to rule in his absence.
Wool workers in Segovia, incensed by the tax hike, seized the city hall ten days later and captured the town clerk. They cinched a rope around his neck, beat him with wooden bats and hung him by his feet to die. This was the first act in the Revolt of the Comuneros, a sixteenth-century Spanish civil war incited by Fugger’s demand for repayment. Toledo, Tordesillas and Valladolid followed Segovia’s lead. In Madrid, the militia joined the rebels. Most of Castile belonged to the insurgents after five months. Talk spread of overthrowing the king. Fugger agents in Spain sent updates to Augsburg. One was a monument of understatement. “Spain is not well,” it read.
Charles stayed in Germany and let Adrian cope with the uprising. Thirteen Castilian cities belonged to rebels when Charles bowed before the electors in Aachen Cathedral and swore to protect the church, the weak and the innocent. Fugger, now sixty-two, stayed home. His nephew Ulrich watched in his stead as Charles received the crown, orb and sword. We can assume Ulrich spoke to Charles or his counselors. We can also assume he outlined the consequences of a Habsburg default and argued how it would ruin the emperor’s reputation and make future borrowing impossible. We can assume this because Charles got busy for Fugger immediately after the diet. He wrote to Adrian from Germany, demanding that he find a way to collect the taxes and to forward the money to Augsburg.
The request floored Adrian. Had Charles forgotten Madrid and other cities belonged to the rebels? He told Charles to be realistic. “Your Highness is making a great error if you think that you will be able to collect and make use of this tax,” he wrote. “There is no one in the Kingdom, not in Seville or Valladolid or any other city who will ever pay anything of it.” Adrian questioned his former pupil for even asking: “All the grandees and members of the council are amazed that Your Highness has scheduled payments from these funds.”
Fugger may have been asking himself how this could be happening. He had always been careful. Now he risked the same end as his cousins, the Fuggers of the Roe, who had lost it all when the taxpayers of Leuven refused to pay Maximilian’s bills. Fugger now found himself in the same corner.
Brushing aside Adrian’s rebuke, Charles ordered him to mobilize the army and arrest and execute the rebel commanders. Adrian, who later became pope, dutifully attacked. The Habsburgs won back the rebellious cities one by one and, after taking Toledo, ended the war. The loser was Fugger. To ensure peace, Charles signed a treaty that cancelled the tax hikes. With that, Fugger could no longer count on the Spanish people to pay the election debts. If he hadn’t already, he might have now questioned himself for not demanding collateral. In what should have been his greatest moment, Fugger found himself in the most vulnerable position of his life.
At some point in the middle of the imperial election, workers nailed a plaque onto a high brick wall on Augsburg’s eastern edge. Latin words covered the plaque. They described what became Fugger’s most enduring legacy—more memorable even than putting Charles on Charlemagne’s throne. Fugger probably wrote the words himself. After acknowledging his brothers, he attempted modesty before lapsing into self-praise.
The brothers Ulrich, George and Jacob Fugger of Augsburg, who are convinced they were born to serve this city and feel obligated to return property received from the all mighty and just God, have out of piety and as a model of openhearted generosity, given, granted and dedicated 106 homes with all fixtures to the diligent and hardworking but poor fellow citizens.
The plaque described the Fuggerei, a housing project for Augsburg’s working poor. The settlement remains in service 500 years later, housing the poor just like always. The only difference is the tour buses. It is Augsburg’s top attraction. Visitors from as far away as Japan and Brazil come to see how people lived in the Age of Fugger. They peer inside the houses, stroll the neatly ordered grounds and take pictures to capture the achievement of Augsburg’s great banker and philanthropist.
Fugger started the project by buying four small houses at the bottom of Jew Hill on a creek that ran into the Lech. The Welsers sold him the houses, but it’s unlikely they ever spent much time in the area. The neighborhood was coarse, dirty and working class. If Augsburg had enemy territory for the bankers, this was it. Crews cleared the land for a set of two-story row houses with small gardens behind each. They built a hospital on the grounds to tend to the sick, a wall to keep out the riffraff and three gates to let in residents. The official papers called the development the Houses at Hood Point but no sooner did it open than it became known as the Fuggerei. Like Fugger’s similarly named factory in Austria, it translates to the Place of Fugger.
There was nothing on its scale in Europe. Leiden had its St. Anne almshouse and Bruges had its Godshuisen (God’s Houses) for the elderly. Augsburg had several homeless shelters. But none was more than twelve units. The Fuggerei smashed precedent with 106 units. At five people per unit, the Fuggerei could house more than 500 people or one in every 60 Augsburgers.
Thomas Krebs built the Fuggerei. It was his second job for Fugger. He had also built the sacristy at St. Moritz. At the Fuggerei, he gracefully combined form and function. The top floor of each house had a separate entrance so that a family living upstairs would not inconvenience the family below. Each unit had 450 square feet with four rooms—two bedrooms, a living room and a kitchen. The kitchen had a stove that doubled as a heater and a window to the living room that let a mother keep her eye on the kids. Tenants used chamber pots and emptied them into the creek that ran through the settlement. Recognizing the comforts of private life, Krebs, with Fugger’s approval, purposely omitted a central square from the complex. He and Fugger wanted the settlement to be a refuge from the bustle of public life, not an imitation of it.
Late in life, Dürer wrote books on artistic theory and, after being dazzled by a schematic of Tenochtitlan in Mexico, pronounced his views on city planning. He rejected the quaint randomness of medieval cities, with their twisting alleyways and mix of styles, in favor of symmetry, unity and proportion. Krebs felt the same. He made the rooflines at the Fuggerei even with the surrounding walls and the streets between the houses straight. The sameness of the homes created a sense of order and kept the costs down by eliminating the need for multiple designs, but made the houses hard to tell apart. Krebs solved the problem by painting a number on each house, giving each one its own address. Written in Gothic script, these were the first house numbers in Augsburg. Along the same lines, he gave each house a uniquely shaped doorbell pull—some curled, some square, some shaped like anchors—that allowed residents to identify their entrances in the dark. He livened up the place with gables that matched those on the homes of Augsburg’s rich. The simple elegance of the Fuggerei attracted imitators. Row houses with similar proportions popped up in Augsburg and other cities in the years following.
If Fugger had wanted a lasting monument to himself, there were flashier options than housing. He could have built another chapel or given a stipend to another priest like he gave Speiser at St. Moritz. If he wanted to help the poor, he could have given money to the church and its programs to feed the needy. These alternatives would have satisfied a common sixteenth century motive for charitable giving: guilt relief. In his last will and testament, the Cologne businessman Johann Rinck spoke for his class when he confessed, “Commerce is hard on the conscience and the soul.” Public relations also motivated givers and it no doubt motivated Fugger. With enemies gunning for him, he sought to project a generous image. He wanted people to think, as they walked past the gates and looked into the neatly maintained houses and gardens and saw children playing by the fountain, that he had a heart and that, despite his wealth, he cared.
Fugger never said what attracted him to housing. The bylaws of the Fuggerei spoke only of his desire “to honor and love God, to help day laborers and hand workers.” This was boilerplate. But the admission rules provide some clues and give an example of how rich people—then and now—believe themselves to know what’s best for the poor. For starters, Fugger refused to let people live in his houses for free. A tenant had to pay one florin a year to stay at the Fuggerei. That was a bargain; the price came to only a quarter of the market rate. But it was a sufficient burden for tenants, given that a weaver at his loom had to work six weeks to earn the required amount. If someone wanted to live in Fugger’s complex, he or she needed a job to afford the rent.
Another condition excluded beggars. Augsburg was full of them. Some Augsburgers liked having them around as an outlet for soul-saving largesse. But Fugger was suspicious. For him, the poor fell into two camps, the worthy and the unworthy. Day laborers working odd jobs might be poor, but they deserved sympathy and assistance. The beggars scurrying into Augsburg each morning when the gates opened were undeserving. By excluding them from the Fuggerei, he betrayed a core belief: Everyone had a duty to work. It was his way of saying, Get a job.
The town council felt the same. During Fugger’s lifetime, the council passed increasingly harsh laws against begging. The first outlawed door-to-door panhandling and sleeping on church stairs. The second required them to carry a license in the form of a lead medallion. The third prohibited begging entirely. Beggars slipped in every morning despite the laws. Better vigilance would have kept them out, but the city couldn’t screen everyone. The Fuggerei, a city within a city, could. Its guards kept beggars out.
Fugger insisted on a curfew. Like the gates of Augsburg itself, the gates of the Fuggerei were locked at night. Those who came late had to pay a penny. The penalty aimed at excluding drunks and prostitutes. A drunk, after a night at the tavern, couldn’t afford the fine and a prostitute, who might only earn a penny or two for an evening’s work, needed accommodations even more economical than the Fuggerei. Fugger led a temperate and disciplined life. He expected the same of his tenants.
One rule was particularly striking: Tenants had to say prayers for Fugger, his nephews and his late mother. Prayers, even those made by third parties, counted as points toward admission into heaven. Fugger wanted the points. But he asked for little compared to others. Residents of Augsburg’s St. Anton hospice had to attend church for an hour a day and recite two prayers—the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary—fifteen times every morning and evening. They had to say three other prayers before and after meals. If a mass took place in the house chapel, they had to say fifty Lord’s Prayers and fifty Hail Marys. Noncompliance meant expulsion. Fugger required only three prayers a day and, consistent with his appreciation of privacy, took it on faith that the residents prayed as asked. Maybe he thought that, with five hundred people praying for him, three prayers a day from each were enough.
Fugger created an endowment for the Fuggerei to last generations. In the letter that created the endowment, he commanded that it exist “as long as the name and male line of the Fuggers lives.” Over the years, weavers, distillers, toy makers and artists called the Fuggerei home. There was at least one butcher. He kept a slaughtering table out front. The most famous resident was Mozart’s great-grandfather Franz. He lived in the house at Mittelere Gasse 14, from 1681 to his death in 1694.
Eighteen generations later, the male line of Fuggers continues and so does the Fuggerei. It is now a residence for elderly Catholics. The Fugger family pays for the upkeep from timber sales on the land Maximilian sold to Jacob. It still charges the equivalent of one florin a year, or eighty-five euro cents. If the Fuggerei lifted Fugger’s image while he was alive, the improvement may have been limited to Augsburg. But in terms of a lasting legacy, Fugger could not have done better.