In 1891, the president of Stanford University needed a motto for his new school. He turned to the words of the sixteenth-century German writer Ulrich von Hutten. Hutten spent his life arguing for social justice and urging revolution. In Palo Alto, David Starr Jordan found parallels between Hutten’s struggles and his own fight for academic freedom. There was one phrase of Hutten’s that particularly resonated. Die Luft der Freiheit weht (The wind of freedom stirs). Since 1906, that obscure German phrase has encircled the Stanford Tree in the school emblem.
Before the imperial election, Fugger’s enemies were commercial rivals, assorted lawmakers and some humanists upset by the rapacious character of big business. After the election, the general public joined in the condemnation. Fugger became a target for workers fed up with the changes sweeping Europe. Like Jordan at Stanford, the people took inspiration from Hutten. Hutten wrote a series of pamphlets that targeted Fugger. Hutten was to Fugger what Ida Tarbell was to John D. Rockefeller. He was the one who made Fugger a public enemy.
Hutten wrote with passion, power and courage. While another social critic, Erasmus, used his pen like a classical pianist, reserving his brilliance and perfect Latin for the elite, Hutten blasted a trumpet for all to hear. He was born in 1488, at a castle outside Frankfurt, into a family of knights. His father recognized that young Ulrich would never be a warrior and sent him to school to learn Latin and read the classics. Constantly on the run from creditors, he bounced around different universities before taking to the road as a roaming intellectual. He won notice with a poem that turned a petty rent dispute into a struggle between barbarism and modernity. Maximilian liked his work and made Hutten his poet laureate in 1517. He crowned Hutten at an Augsburg ceremony within earshot of Fugger’s office. Hutten was a young man on the rise. Needing someone with a quick mind to send on a diplomatic mission, Albrecht of Mainz hired him as a counselor.
Hutten, like Maximilian, Erasmus and Cesare Borgia, suffered from syphilis and his illness sparked his first thrust against Fugger. It came in an essay, considered the first medical testimonial, in which Hutten described his boils as “acorns from whence issued filthy stinking matter.” The standard cure—mercury—killed as many as it saved. In Augsburg, Hutten learned that West Indian natives used a safe remedy made from the bark of the guaiacum tree. He proclaimed it a miracle cure and, in a digression praising oatmeal and denouncing the German craze for spiced food, he blamed Fugger for the spiraling price of pepper. Hutten would have been furious to know that Fugger later won the monopoly for guaiacum imports and used Hutten’s tract to boost sales. The pioneering physician Paracelsus, who had studied with Fuggerau alchemists, later debunked guaiacum. Fugger’s nephews fought back with papers attacking Paracelsus.
Hutten earned a good living as an elector’s counselor, but his sense of mission overwhelmed his desire for comfort. He joined Luther in attacking the papacy and pointed out Fugger’s complicity: “The Fuggers have earned the right to be called the princes of the prostitutes. They have set up their table and buy from the pope what they later sell for more . . . There is no easier way to become a priest than to be friends with the Fuggers. They are the only ones who can achieve anything in Rome.”
Hutten’s most exhaustive attack on Fugger came in a dialogue called The Robbers (1519). In keeping with the ancient Greek practice of putting imagined words in the mouths of real people, he cast Franz von Sickingen, the knight the Habsburgs hired for security during the imperial election, as his hero. Sickingen had charisma, leadership skills and the ability, based on a series of successful campaigns, to attract volunteers for profitable, mercenary adventures. As the owner of several castles and estates, he lived in luxury and, owing to his intellectual curiosity, kept his homes full of poets, musicians and artists. Hutten was his favorite. Rome wanted to arrest Hutten for calling the pope the antichrist. Needing a place to hide, Hutten found shelter with Sickingen.
Sickingen and Hutten, as knights, belonged to a dying order. The word “knight” was as much a social class as it was a job description. Knights were the lowest order of the nobility, but they were nobles nonetheless and had privileges that commoners lacked, such as the right to carry swords. Commoners had to step aside when a knight came through or risk being struck down for insolence. Although Sickingen was rich and powerful, the days of knights had passed. Guns were now widespread, reducing the importance of individual battlefield heroics. Monarchs increasingly valued infantry over talent with a horse and sword.
Out of work and needing to supplement meager feudal dues from their estates, knights took to highway robbery. They saw nothing immoral in it. They were noblemen and, as such, believed themselves entitled to grander lifestyles than commoners. If they had to cut throats to obtain the entitlements, so be it. The knights even tried to enshrine their often murderous activities in imperial law, although the attempt failed. Fugger hated the knights because highway robbery disrupted trade and made his staff afraid to travel. He had personally escaped their attacks, but his cousins, his son-in-law and other acquaintances had been victims.
In The Robbers, Hutten pits Sickingen in conversation with a Fugger manager. What has Fugger ever done for anybody, Sickingen asks. He never plowed a field nor built a wall. Nor, as a moneylender, did he even take risks. A trader could be stuck with unsalable merchandise and lose everything. But a banker, safe behind a desk, is always covered. If a borrower defaults, the banker takes the borrower’s property and sells it at a profit.
The Fugger man is outraged. “We? Thieves?” Knights are the real crooks, he says. They’re savage criminals. What else is a highway robber if not that? Sickingen responds with an argument that only a knight could accept. It’s one thing to take money with physical strength. That’s “honest theft.” What Fugger does—earning money with trickery—is truly criminal. “You do not steal by force but by underhanded practices,” Sickingen says. Sickingen’s anger turns to disgust when he considers how Fugger bought his way into the nobility. Knights earned noble status by risking their lives for their lords. They are truly noble. All Fugger ever did was swindle the innocent. Hutten condensed his feelings in a blistering generalization: “The great robbers are not those whom they hang on the gibbet. They are the priests and the monks, the chancellors, the doctors and the great merchants, especially the Fuggers.”
Hutten was relentless. He followed The Robbers with a tract that called on Emperor Charles to “abolish the mercantile monopolies” and “stop the drain of money to Rome by the Fuggers.” In another, he claimed Fugger once tried to still his pen with bribes: “Fugger money won’t silence me, not when it concerns freedom for Germany.” Hutten’s attacks hit a nerve with the public and printers pumped out copies of his works. Owing to Hutten, Fugger became a symbol of oppression in the popular imagination.
Hutten’s solution to Fugger and Germany’s other ills came down to a single word: revolution. He campaigned to throw out the old order in favor of a centralized power structure with the emperor on top and knights replacing the bishops and dukes as regional administrators. He called for a German church built on Lutheran principles. He demanded the liquidation of Jacob Fugger & Nephews and the other giant banking houses. Unwilling to stop there, he called for the execution of their leaders. The bankers, he said, deserved “the gibbet.” He vowed to make the revolution happen or die trying: “I’ll play the game and all the same, even though they seek my life.”
Luther wanted change as much as Hutten but disagreed with Hutten’s call to violence. He tried to steer Hutten to peaceful measures. “You see what Hutten wants,” wrote Luther to a friend, commenting on Hutten’s call to arms. “I do not wish that we should fight for the gospel with fire and sword. I have written the man to this effect.” In the same year as The Robbers, Luther offered his own attack on big business in his Treaty on Usury. While Hutten wanted to kill the rich merchants, Luther, a technocrat, suggested regulation in the form of price controls. Luther argued that a merchant should charge no more than his costs plus a trifle—the wages of a laborer—for his efforts. To enforce the rule, he advocated self-regulation because, as he sarcastically noted, government officials were useless. “We Germans have too many other things to do,” he wrote. “We are too busy drinking and dancing.” But Luther’s pacifism only went so far. If the government found a flagrant violator, it should hang him.
Luther’s prescriptions showed a hopeless misunderstanding of human motivation. No reasonable business person would build a factory or even buy a loom for no more than laborer wages. But Luther’s list of sharp practices—price fixing, monopolies, padding the scales—betrayed real-world knowledge. Merchants used these “dangerous and wicked devices” to “skin” their customers, he wrote. He mentioned no names, but he might have had Fugger in mind throughout. A merchant who drives down prices to put rivals out of business? Fugger. A merchant who strives to corner the market? Fugger again. A man “who cares nothing about his neighbor”? Fugger would deny this, but his poor neighbors, despite the Fuggerei, might have appreciated more charity from the man. Later that year, in his Open Letter to the German Nobility (1520), Luther pleads with the princes to crack down on big business. This time, he dispenses with the generalities and attacks Fugger directly: “We must put a bit in the mouths of the Fugger.”
Even without the direct assaults, Luther would have had Fugger’s attention by now because of his enthusiastic use of a fairly new technological device: the printing press. Gutenberg made his first press in 1450. Its use only took off in the 1520s. This was in large part due to Luther himself. His popularity, the sheer volume of his output, and the fact he wrote in German kept the printers busy. The presses in Germany produced just thirty-five works in the German language in 1513. In 1520, they printed 208, of which 133 were written by Luther. As Luther’s sermons, rants and musing found their way to the presses, he developed a huge following. All of Germany seemed to support him. As the papal envoy to Germany reported to Rome, “Nine of ten support Luther and the tenth hates the Pope.” Fugger almost had another chance to meet Luther in 1521. The diet that year was scheduled for Augsburg. But because of logistics, the electors moved it to the Rhineland city of Worms. A more experienced politician might have better gauged the public mood and made peace with the monk. But Emperor Charles, living in Spain and untroubled by indulgences and the sale of clerical offices, was naturally inclined to see him as a heretic. Besides, the pope wanted Luther’s head and Charles wanted the pope. He needed him as an ally against France. So Charles ordered Luther to appear before him and the electors. He would give Luther one more chance to recant.
Hutten was under a papal arrest warrant when he snuck into Worms to see Luther the night before the first hearing. He begged Luther to lead a revolution and promised to follow him until the end. Now was the time to attack. The people liked the emperor, Hutten told Luther. But they hated the princes. They hated Rome. And they hated the rich merchants. If the peasants joined with the knights—an unlikely coalition given the class barriers and snobbery of the knights—they could take over Germany and purge it of wickedness. Luther refused. He didn’t want to fight the princes. He wanted them to join him against Rome.
Luther’s appearance at the Diet of Worms defined the Reformation. Despite the risk of being arrested and burned as a heretic, he appeared before Charles, his prosecutors and a packed meeting hall. Just as in the Fugger Palace four years earlier when he sparred with the cardinal, he refused to recant. His conscience forbid him from doing otherwise. In declaring such, he uttered the phrase that made him immortal. “Here I stand,” he told the emperor. “I can do no other.”
A riotous crowd was gathered outside to support him. When he emerged from the hall, the crowd mobbed him. Frederick the Wise pushed his way through and greeted Luther with beer in a silver mug. Frederick enjoyed the moment. His boy had done well. The other princes and Fugger, however, had reason to fear. Rebels had scrawled a picture of a leather boot on the walls of Worms. This was the symbol of the Bundschuh, a peasant revolutionary movement. The graffiti was a blood-chilling warning to the elite. Luther endorsed nonviolence, but by facing down the establishment and winning, he showed that anything was possible. Luther had ignored Hutten when Hutten wanted Luther to lead an armed revolt. But to the followers of the Bundschuh, “Here I stand. I can do no other” wasn’t about a negotiated settlement. It was permission to attack.
Fugger’s nephew Ulrich represented Fugger at Worms. Compared to the drama of Luther, Ulrich’s activities at the diet seemed trivial. But they mattered greatly to Fugger. With little hope of Spanish tax revenue, Fugger had ordered Ulrich to find other forms of repayment. Ulrich struck a deal with the Habsburgs, but it offered less than Fugger hoped. Charles acknowledged his 600,000 florins of election and other debts; he didn’t deny that he owed the money. But rather than pay at once, he assigned 400,000 florins, or two-thirds of the obligation, to his nineteen-year-old brother Archduke Ferdinand. Ferdinand governed Austria and agreed to satisfy the obligation by extending the mining concessions a few more years. Charles said nothing about how he intended to pay the other 200,000 florins, only that he would somehow make good. The agreement left Fugger unsatisfied but solvent, and let him sidestep the disastrous end of his cousins.
Charles gave Fugger a job as part of the deal. Private individuals owned Augsburg’s printing presses. Recognizing the danger of free speech, Charles took them over and assigned Fugger to run them. The emperor hoped to censor Luther, Hutten and anyone else opposed to him or the pope by putting Fugger at the controls. But as he and Fugger discovered, control of the presses could not still the opposition.
Inspired by Worms, Hutten wanted to do more than criticize. He wanted action and after Luther turned him down, he concentrated his zealous energy on recruiting Sickingen, the powerful knight, to lead the revolution. Sickingen had a limited education but he enjoyed ideas. In the evenings, he and Hutten dined by candlelight and Hutten read to him from Luther or his own works. Sickingen initially laughed at Hutten’s rebellious chatter. But little by little, Hutten made him a revolutionary. Their evening conversations became not about whether to fight but how to fight. Sickingen invited other knights to the castle. Lacking Sickingen’s money and property, they felt even more aggrieved than their host and signed a pledge committing them to war. Hutten, Fugger’s enemy, finally had what he wanted. He had a chance to take the field.
Contemporaries called the coming conflict the Knights’ War. The knights didn’t fight for territory and the sake of Hausmachtpolitik but for ideas and systems. It was a class war that put the entire system at risk. An aide wrote to Duke George that it had been centuries since he and other German princes faced a greater threat. The Knights’ War heralded a new phase for Fugger. He had previously financed military campaigns for his clients. This time, he funded soldiers for himself as much as anyone. Fugger embodied the system Hutten sought to capsize. If the system went down, so would Fugger. He had to defend it.
The knights selected Trier as the first target. Near Luxembourg, Trier belonged to the elector—Bishop Richard von Greiffenklau. Fugger knew Greiffenklau from the imperial election. Greiffenklau was in the room with Fugger and Maximilian when Fugger guaranteed Maximilian’s lavish bribes for Charles. Fugger paid Greiffenklau 40,700 florins for his vote. By taking on a bishop who was also an elector, Sickingen could attack papal and secular oppression in one stroke. He considered Trier vulnerable. The other ecclesiastical electors—Albrecht of Mainz and Herman of Cologne—were Greiffenklau’s natural allies, but they were not inclined to fight. Sickingen assumed Greiffenklau would be on his own.
Sickingen also expected help from within the walls. He believed the people of Trier, inspired by Luther and Hutten, would side with the knights and he only had to light the spark. Full of confidence, he looked ahead and planned to take the war along the length of the Rhine once he took Trier. He would take his revolution across Germany from there. He needed resources to fund his ambition and sent Hutten to raise money in Switzerland where anti-Vatican sentiment ran high.
The knights numbered 10,000 and easily seized the towns on the way to Trier. Trier itself posed a greater challenge. As the attacker, Sickingen could choose the timing of the fight but not the terms. Knights preferred to engage the enemy on horse in an open field. The feast of Michaelmas was approaching. Nothing would suit Sickingen more than to play the role of the archangel Michael, who defeated Satan with sword and shield. He would ideally confront Greiffenklau, one on one, in a dramatic fight to the death. Then the world would see who deserved to live and who should die. But Trier would be siege warfare, not a fight in an open field. The outcome would not depend on the thrusts and parries of Sickingen’s sword but on the power of his guns and his stores of ammunition. Cannons had made knights obsolete. Now Sickingen depended on them.
When Sickingen reached the city, he shelled it like Almeida had shelled Mombasa, but with less success. Sickingen discovered he had underestimated Greiffenklau. Like Julius II, the warrior pope, Greiffenklau was more fighter than priest. In the days leading up to the siege, he inspected the towers, walls and weapons. He gave a rousing speech. He shed his bishop’s robes for armor. When the battle came, he told the soldiers when to fire. Sickingen shot letters over the wall exhorting the people of Trier to rebel. They ignored him and rallied around the bishop. Sickingen soon ran out of gunpowder and limped back to Ebernburg to wait out the winter and gather strength for another assault.
Fugger and his allies worked on a faster schedule. Fugger gave money to the Swabian League, a military organization that kept the peace in southern Germany, to fight the knights. The league hunted down the rebels one by one in their homes. With his friends either killed or in custody, Sickingen fled Ebernburg to a more formidable castle in Landstuhl. Greiffenklau followed him and pummeled the sandstone walls with his cannons. One of the shells sent Sickingen crashing into a shattered roof support and ripped open his side. Sickingen, poetically felled by a cannon, finally got his dramatic confrontation with Greiffenklau, but only as he lay dying and Greiffenklau climbed over the rubble to accept his surrender. “What has impelled thee,” the duke asked, “that thou hast so laid waste and harmed me and my poor people?” Sickingen was short of breath and struggled to talk. “Of that it were too long to speak,” he said, “but I have not done nought without cause. I go now to stand before a greater lord.”
He died the same day. His death enfeebled the knights as a political class and consigned to history this colorful vestige of the Middle Ages. The princes chased the knights from their castles and made sure they never returned. In Swabia and Bavaria alone, the lords seized twenty-six castles and destroyed the ones they didn’t want for themselves. They torched the castle in Absberg. They set gunpowder into the eight-foot walls of Krugelstein castle and blew off the top. The Augsburg guard captain took his men into the forest to blow up the old castle in Waldstein. For Fugger, the triumph in the Knight’s War removed an immediate threat by finishing Hutten’s days as an agitator. Hutten was still in Switzerland three months later when Fugger’s tree bark let him down. He died from syphilis with a pen as his only possession. But his dream of violent struggle survived in the hearts of a larger, less predictable force. This group hated Fugger and his friends as much as he did. They were Hutten’s would-be allies, the great mass at the lowest rung of society and the followers of the Bundschuh. They were the peasants. Their anger and resentment was coming to a boil.
The Renaissance gave rise to a new breed of professionals that instantly won the scorn of the general public. The people hated their haughty manners and fancy robes. They hated their use of Latin and their bewildering arguments. Hutten called them “empty windbags.” Another writer likened them to locusts: “They are increasing like grasshoppers year by year.” Another remarked on their ability to sow chaos: “In my home there is but one and yet his wiles bring the whole country around here into confusion. What a misery this horde brings upon us.”
Who were these windbags, locusts and misery bringers? They were, of course, lawyers. Arising from the swamps of canon law, they made their secular debut in Fugger’s lifetime. They arose because the emergence of capitalism and the growth of trade necessitated a new, modern body of law and practitioners to make sense of it. The old legal system, known as customary law, used common sense to settle disputes and torture to extract confessions. It worked well enough on feudal estates where everyone knew each other, but failed to keep pace as society transitioned from the medieval to the modern. Rather than develop a new system, society adapted an existing system that was robust enough for commerce and dovetailed with the Renaissance love of everything ancient. This was Roman law, a set of laws Emperor Justinian I codified in 529 to govern the empire and apply common rules from Egypt to England.
Roman and customary law took contrary views of property rights. Customary law, based on Christian values, saw property as communal. To the extent anyone owned anything, it came with a duty to share. The peasants who plowed a lord’s fields could hunt in those fields and fish in his streams. Everything belonged to everyone. Roman law, on the other hand, honored the individual over the communal and emphasized the privileges of property ownership instead of the duties. Under Roman rules, a lord paid the peasant for his work and, if the peasant wanted to hunt in his fields, the lord charged him a fee. The Roman system went hand in hand with capitalism because it acknowledged private ownership of property. The princes liked the Roman system because it put property in their hands and left them with more than they had before. The rich merchants liked it because they discovered that a good lawyer could use clever arguments to defeat common sense and win cases they should have lost. Ambitious parents liked it because a legal career could provide a path to riches for their sons. They dreamed their sons would one day work as imperial advisors, town councilors or as hired guns for rich men like Fugger. German universities filled with law students. But the common people hated the new system. The peasants, miners and the working people in the cities viewed Roman law as a system designed not for justice but for deprivation, and as a contrivance unsuitable for those who wanted to live free. They saw Roman law as a system made for slaves and masters.
When the imperial diet came together in Nuremberg in 1522, Luther was back in absentia as the main event. Frederick the Wise had refused to hand him over for trial. He had hidden the monk in Wartburg Castle in Thuringia under the alias Junker George (Junker Jörg) and made him grow a beard as a disguise. One year earlier, Charles had a chance to arrest Luther but honored his pledge to leave him alone if he attended.
With the emperor worrying about Luther, a special committee of the diet gathered to fulfill the emperor’s postelection pledge to investigate Fugger and other bankers. The committee went over the same ground as the Hansa-inspired effort from years earlier and planned legislation to straitjacket the plutocrats. Fugger was unsure of the emperor’s protection. Maximilian had been in his pocket, but Charles was his own man. Fugger had never even met Charles. Unable to predict what Charles would do, he fought the committee on its own terms—that is, with lawyers.
Lawyers staffed the antitrust committee at the Nuremberg diet. They knew what Rome said about monopolies. With irritating pedantry, the staff opened the hearing on the bankers by citing the Greek origins of the word monopoly—monos for one, pōlion for trade. Legal arguments gave way to venom. The committee said financiers hurt the economy more than “all the highway robbers and thieves combined.” It cited the example of Bartholomaus Rehm, an Augsburg banker who had hijacked a wagon train belonging to Fugger’s rival Hochstetter a few months earlier. After authorities arrested Rehm, he bribed his jailers and escaped. The committee declared that a textbook example of how financiers did business. First they broke the law. Then they bought their way out. Never mind that Hochstetter, himself one of the biggest bankers in Germany, was the victim in the story, or that the law already had ways to deal with crooks like Rehm. The bankers still had to be stopped.
Fugger hired Conrad Peutinger, the best lawyer he could find. Peutinger had a law degree from Bologna and served as the city manager for Augsburg. He had previously done legal work for Gossembrot and other members of the ill-fated copper syndicate. He had also performed odd jobs for Maximilian. Years earlier, before Hutten became an agitator, Peutinger was the one who nominated Hutten for poet laureate. Peutinger’s daughter had placed the laurels on Hutten’s head. In his spare time, Peutinger pottered around Augsburg looking for ancient Roman inscriptions to translate. His collection of artifacts included the Peutinger Map, a one-of-a-kind fifth-century diagram that showed the Roman-created, trans-European road system.
Peutinger told the diet that high pepper prices were regrettable but it was unfair to blame the bankers. The fault rested with the king of Portugal and his restriction of supply. He reminded them that there would be no pepper at all if the merchants failed to pass on their costs. As for high metal prices, they benefited society because they allowed mine operators to pay high wages. He advised them to leave the bankers alone because the market was complex and hard to regulate. Who knew what unintended consequences might arise from legislation? The committee was unmoved. With the words monos and pōlion in the forefront, they declared the bankers violated statute.
Politics played a role. Delegates from Augsburg, Frankfurt, Cologne and other beneficiaries of big business endorsed Peutinger’s views and fought for the status quo. But they lacked the votes in the committee, where the interests of small business dominated. The group drafted legislation that limited a commercial enterprise to no more than 50,000 florins of equity and no more than three locations. If enacted, Fugger—whose equity exceeded 2 million and whose operation had hundreds of offices—would be back to selling textiles out of a back room.
Fugger had tried to fight fair by hiring Peutinger. When that failed, he went back to the tried-and-true methods and bribed influential members of the diet to drop the proceedings. He hoped to settle the matter once and for all. He partly succeeded; the diet broke up before taking action. But to his disappointment, the chief imperial prosecutor, Caspar Marth, took up the fight. Citing Roman law, Marth ordered the bankers to appear in court and face trial. Marth lived in Nuremberg and was influenced by the Nuremberg circle who stirred the usury controversy. Marth nailed a summons for Fugger to the door of Augsburg City Hall. He wanted to embarrass the banker. It was trial by press release.
Marth’s attack so angered Fugger that it cracked his usual calm. He was in “very bad humor,” said an imperial official. The fact that Charles still owed him money made it even worse. His temper may have explained what he did next. As he was fighting Marth in the spring of 1523, he hit Charles with a sharply worded collection notice. Fugger could not force Charles to pay and the courts were no help because Charles was chief justice. All Fugger could do was appeal to Charles’s decency and need to maintain his reputation among creditors. Given the age and Charles’s position as the most powerful man on earth, the letter shocks for its bluntness. Fugger follows protocol, but missing from the letter is the look-upon-this-speck-of-dust sycophancy found in Luther’s letter to Archbishop Albrecht. Fugger’s tone suggests his confidence that Charles would realize he needed to keep Fugger happy. But first Fugger had to slap him in the face.
Most Serene, All-Powerful Roman Emperor and Most Gracious Lord!
Your Royal Majesty is undoubtedly well aware of the extent to which I and my nephews have always been inclined to serve the House of Austria, and in all submissiveness to promote its welfare and its rise. For that reason, we co-operated with the former Emperor Maximilian, Your Imperial Majesty’s forefather, and, in loyal subjection to His Majesty, to secure the imperial crown for your Imperial Majesty, pledged ourselves to several princes, who placed their confidence and trust in me as perhaps in no one else.
We also, when Your Imperial Majesty’s appointed delegates were treating for the completion of the above-mentioned undertaking, furnished a considerable sum of money which was secured, not from me and my nephews alone, but from some of my good friends at heavy cost, so that the excellent nobles achieved success to the great honor and well-being of Your Imperial Majesty.
It is also well known that Your Majesty without me might not have acquired the Imperial Crown, as I can attest with the written statement of all the delegates of Your Imperial Majesty. And in all this I have looked not to my own profit. For if I had withdrawn my support for the House of Austria, and transferred it to France, I should have won a large profit and much money, which were at that time offered to me. But what disadvantage would have risen thereby for the House of Austria, Your Majesty with your deep comprehension would understand.
Taking all this into consideration, my respectful request to Your Imperial Majesty is that you will graciously recognize my faithful, humble service, dedicated to the greater well-being of Your Imperial Majesty, and order that the money which I have paid out, together with the interest upon it, shall be reckoned up and paid, without further delay. I pledge myself to be faithful in all humility, and I hereby commend myself as faithful at all times to Your Imperial Majesty.
Your Imperial Majesty’s most humble servant. Jacob Fugger
The letter had an immediate effect. Charles wrote Prosecutor Marth and ordered him to drop his case against Fugger and the other bankers. Charles was direct: “In no way will I allow the merchants to be prosecuted.”
The protection Charles offered Fugger showed one thing. If a businessperson becomes so hated that reformers call for his scalp, he better have the ruler in his corner. It’s a fair bet that Marth and his supporters would have thrown Fugger in jail if Charles had not constrained them. Fugger’s indispensability saved him. Maximilian had needed Fugger so desperately that it was sometimes unclear who was in charge. Charles, too, had come to realize that Fugger was a good man to have on his side. But imperial protection couldn’t save Fugger from everything. He had to fight some battles on his own.
On August 6, 1524, less than a year after Charles called off the dogs in Nuremberg, the sun rose over Augsburg at five and the city came to life. At eight, Fugger was probably at the window watching a group of demonstrators outside city hall. They were workingmen who, in this city of splendor, struggled to feed themselves. Thirteen hundred came to the square that day—one of every twenty Augsburgers—and they were all angry at Fugger.
The protestors believed it unconscionable that Fugger had everything and they had nothing, that they lived on oats and he ate pheasant, that he wore furs and they wore rags. They agreed with Hutten and his accusation that Fugger became rich on the backs of the poor. But their immediate concern was something other than social equality. They were angry that Fugger sought to oust their priest, a populist reformer named Johannes Schilling. When word leaked of his attempt, they marched on city hall.
Schilling preached at the Church of the Barefoot Monks, the Franciscan church of the city’s poor. Of the many Augsburg priests who sympathized with Luther, Schilling was the most strident. He told the congregation to ignore Rome and seek truth in the Bible. This made sense to his listeners because it offered them a more credible path to salvation than the one of indulgences, relics and Hail Marys. Egged on by Schilling, they wanted to break with Rome and, while they were at it, crush the establishment. Alarmed, Fugger wanted to run Schilling out of town.
Schilling had numbers on his side. Nearly 90 percent of Augsburgers were either poor or close to it. But the town administrators answered to Fugger and the city’s other rich men. They stood firm and told the mob the priest had to go. The next day, the crowd returned with knives, swords and pitchforks. As tension built, Fugger faced a choice. He could stay in his palace and hope the demonstrators would leave him in peace, or he could flee to Biberbach Castle, the nearest of several fortresses that he owned in the countryside. Flight was risky because of highway robbers. Fugger could try to pay them off but, if the robbers were desperate, they might ambush Fugger’s coach, strip it of valuables and slit the banker’s throat. Another reason to stay home was the strain of the journey. By this time, Fugger, now sixty-five, was old and sick. He had outlived all six of his brothers and he was among the few in town old enough to remember a world before globes, pocket watches and syphilis. The journey might kill him. Still, the risk was worth it because, behind the thick walls of Biberbach, the protestors could not touch him. It would take cannons, which only the government had, to flush him out. As the noise in the streets grew, Fugger grabbed his cap, called for the horses and headed for his coach.
Peutinger, the city manager and Fugger’s lawyer, negotiated with the protestors. Peutinger had been in this situation before. Three years earlier, he and the town council exiled another Franciscan priest, Urbanus Rhegius, for preaching Luther. Now Peutinger looked for compromise and offered to bring back Rhegius if the mob abandoned Schilling. The protestors held firm because they preferred Schilling. Rhegius was an intellectual. Schilling spoke from the heart. They could connect with him and his passion in a way they never could relate to the cerebral Rhegius. At Schilling’s urging, they did things like throw salt on the holy water and tear apart sacred books. Peutinger could not sway them. He agreed to let Schilling stay.
Peutinger’s surrender was a trick. He only wanted to scatter the crowd. Three days later, the mayor reported to work in armor and the city council renounced the promise to the protestors. Like a dictator seizing the television networks to control the flow of information, the council sent guards to occupy Perlach Tower and make sure protestors sent no signals to confederates beyond the gates. It reinforced the armories and arrested some of the protest leaders. After a quick trial, it pronounced two weavers involved in the protest guilty of treason and sentenced them to death.
The city’s execution grounds were just outside the gates. Authorities usually invited the public to watch the hangings and beheadings. Public killings had a social function. They demonstrated the consequences of criminal behavior. Such events were well-attended. But in the case of the weavers, the council feared demonstrations and told no one. It quietly beheaded the men in front of city hall before dawn and cleaned up the blood before anyone knew what happened. Fugger returned home after things calmed down and wrote a letter to his client, George of Brandenburg, the duke he befriended at the Augsburg diet. He explained the events and how he and the council had defended the true teachings of Christ.
Historians love to study battles because they are turning points. Waterloo, Saratoga, Gettysburg, Stalingrad. Each changed the course of history. Fugger played a part in one such encounter. The Battle of Pavia in 1525 marked a shift in the Italian Wars that had been raging more than thirty years. The Habsburg victory at Pavia, financed by Fugger, cemented the family’s dominance in Europe.
No city had changed hands more in Fugger’s lifetime than Milan. At one time or another, the French, the Habsburgs, the Swiss and, at rare intervals, even the Milanese themselves controlled it. Milan was the largest city in northern Italy after Venice. It was the hub of the Italian textile trade and a gateway to the rest of the country. Its exposed location on the plains, spreading from the banks of the Po River, made it easy to attack. Maximilian had considered it of such strategic importance that he chose the daughter of a Milanese duke for his second wife.
Charles had taken Milan from France in 1521 and now, four years later, Francis personally took the field to win it back. He surprised the imperial mercenaries guarding the city and chased them to the walled city of Pavia. Winter was approaching and Francis thought that cold and hunger would flush them out. As supplies ran low and the mercenaries grew impatient about not receiving pay, they were about to give up when money—money from Fugger—arrived to pay and supply them. The cash kept the forces together just long enough for Charles’s commander, the marquis of Pescara, to storm out of Pavia for an all-or-nothing attack on the French.
On February 24, the day Charles turned twenty-five, Francis led a cavalry charge only to find himself well ahead of his artillery. A century earlier, King Charles VI suffered the worst military defeat in French history when the British and their longbows killed three dukes, eight counts, a viscount and a bishop at the Battle of Agincourt. Pavia claimed fewer lives but in a significant way was more devastating because the imperial forces captured Francis. In the game of Hausmachtpolitik, this was checkmate. Pescara’s daring, not Fugger cash, won the day. But there would have been no battle without Fugger to keep the troops in the field.
Fugger had given Charles the money after Charles brought him a new opportunity: He leased him the Almadén mercury mine in the Maestrazgo mountains of central Spain. Metallurgists used mercury to extract gold and silver from ore. The Maestrazgos, one of only two mercury sources in Europe and the largest source on earth, belonged to a religious order when Pope Leo died in 1521. The new pope happened to be Adrian of Utrecht, the former tutor of Charles V and his stand-in during the Revolt of the Comuneros. Adrian, now Hadrian VI, took the mines from the order after becoming pope and gave them to Charles. Charles, in turn, sold Fugger a three-year lease on the mines for the enormous sum of 560,000 florins. This was the deal that funded Pescara through the winter.
Once Fugger had the lease, he sent German mining engineers to Spain to increase output. The mine yielded only modest profits despite their efforts. Fugger would have made more money if not for competition. In addition to the Maestrazagos mines, Charles owned the continent’s other mercury mine, in Idrija, Slovenia. After leasing Maestrazagos to Fugger, he leased Idria to Hochstetter. Fugger and Hochstetter colluded on silver, but they competed on mercury.
Still, Fugger was satisfied because the Maestrazagos lease made him whole on the election loan. That’s because only half of the 560,000 florins loan total came out of Fugger’s pocket. The rest cancelled the remainder of the election debt. The financing of the imperial election had been a wild ride for Fugger. But it played out as he had hoped. With sources of income that encircled the globe and a citizenry that included 40 percent of Europe’s population, Charles, as Fugger had foreseen, turned out to be creditworthy.
The loan for the Milan campaign helped Fugger in another way. Charles was in his palace in Valladolid when he heard about the capture of Francis. On that same day, he signed a decree, probably drafted by Peutinger, that sanctioned the existence of monopolies in the metal industry. That wasn’t all. He also killed the investigation into big business that he had promised after becoming emperor. He notified the imperial diet that his investigators found “no unseemly nor criminal enhancement of prices in Germany or elsewhere.” He singled out Fugger and his family for leading “honest, upstanding, Christian and god-fearing lives” and praised Fugger for opposing the “Lutheran heretics.” With that, Fugger had nothing more to fear from the diet or the prosecutors.
Fugger, in his collection notice to Charles, had asked the emperor to consider what “disadvantage would have risen thereby for the House of Austria” if he had backed Francis in the election. If Charles hadn’t considered the disadvantages before Pavia, he might have considered them afterward. Francis, now a prisoner awaiting transport to Spain, may have been thinking the same thoughts.
In 1525, while King Francis languished in jail, Charles approached Fugger with a plan to break Portugal’s lock on the spice trade. The idea was to get to Asia, not by sailing around Africa like da Gama, but by going around South America like Ferdinand Magellan had done three years earlier when his fleet became the first to circumnavigate the globe. By approaching from the east, Spain could sail to the Spice Islands in what is now Indonesia and avoid the Portuguese controlled waters off India.
Fugger agreed to take part and loaded five ships with copper in Lübeck. He sent them to Spain, where they joined a fleet captained by García Jofre de Loaísa. Loaísa planned to trade the copper for nutmeg, cloves and whatever else he could find. Unfortunately for Fugger, storms scattered the fleet and only one ship reached the islands. The Portuguese knew the ship was coming and captured it. Fugger lost his entire investment.
The most interesting aspect of the episode is that Fugger’s involvement supports the idea that he funded Magellan’s voyage. Officially, Emperor Charles and the Flemish businessman Christopher de Haro paid for Magellan. But according to a lawsuit Fugger’s nephews later brought, Haro merely fronted for Fugger. The Fuggers claimed that Haro owed them 5,400 ducats, the exact amount Haro had invested in Magellan’s journey. Haro denied owing anything and claimed the money came from his own pocket. There is no question that Fugger and Haro worked with each other; Fugger employed him as his agent on the Loaísa venture. But there is no other record of Fugger backing Magellan, so Fugger’s participation is unclear. The lack of documents is easy to explain. Portugal, which hated Spain, was one of Fugger’s best customers, and Fugger had no interest in alienating it. That also explains why we have only German records and no Spanish ones of Fugger’s funding of Loaísa. Fugger wanted to keep his two-timing secret.