In this day and age, a title of almost anything boasting tales of 'The Richest Man Who Ever Lived' will catch a lot of eyes. I first noticed such a title of a book reviewed in an article in April 7, 2016 issue of The New York Review of Books a couple weeks ago. I turned around and purchased the book through a vendor on amazon.com, and read the first fifty pages when I got it, hopeful I might get a sense for the tenor of this recent bio. Already I see it's in one of today's popular formats but still gives a reasonably clear sense of the book's subtitle, 'The Life and Times of Jacob Fugger". It's a larger, easy font, double-spaced in 250 pages. The notes are presented in a breezy, straightforward way, and there is an abundance of personalizing details of the times and places in which people lived and worked. I wish there was far more detail.
There is also a substantial and useful bibliography, as well as a captivating introduction that shows a finance titan at the top of his game emerging from a simpler, but not humble, set of morals. One was in sales and self-advancement. As the last of seven sons, the family that Jacob Fugger was born into was highly competitive. He would use that through his life. Still it surprises me some that a person of his stature in his times has had such little acknowledgement or research lately seeing how American Capitalism insists on taking the rest of the world on its ride. I wonder if this is because much of the source material is in German or that the concepts explored tend to be economic requiring 'specialised' knowledge of business. There is just this new recent title by Greg Steinmetz and one fifteen years ago by Jacob Strieder (here available on google play). But, before then, I see a lack of availability of new works on this person since the time before and between the World Wars. This is interesting in itself but distracts and will have to be looked at later.
Fugger, Steinmetz tells us, was "headstrong, selfish, deceitful and sometimes cruel.... His boasts were good advertizing...". He could tell people how much he could provide as a loan or pay for a gem and thereby broadcast his abilities. [p. xv]
He grew up in Augsburg, born March 6, 1459 and lived on the corner where the old market met the Jewish community. [p.7] His family ran a thriving textile concern there and thru intermarriage were ensconced in the local merchant families. After an abortive trip for service at the Benedictine monastery in nearby Herrieden [p.2], Fugger was sent, still a teenager, as an apprentice to Venice. There he stayed at the Fondaco dei Tedeschi on the Rialto [p.8]. There he learned of the things that could be bought and also the value of double-entry bookkeeping [pp.9-10].
In 1478, when Fugger was nineteen, he had to travel to Rome to help settle the affairs of his brother who had died of the plague that year. [p. 16] Rome was very turbulent then. But then, after some time in Rome apparently helping the family textile business, Jacob was sent to Austria to pursue a mining interest there. In 1485 Fugger loaned Archduke Sigmund 3000 florins. Sigmund controlled the silver mines south of Munich, near Innsbruck at Schwaz. Then again when a trade dispute in the Tyrol between the Archduke and neighboring Venice erupted in 1489, troops were sent to take some towns held by Venice. [p.19] Venice said they would not invade only if Sigmund returned Revereto and paid them 100,000 florins. But this time Sigmund's regular bankers wouldn't pay. Fugger stepped forward and said they could make a deal.
Fugger, Steinmetz says, wanted all of the output of the Schwaz mine until the principle was paid back. He insisted the mine operators cosigned the loan and that the archduke accept installments of the initial loan. But Fugger also amazingly and crucially insisted he control the state treasury. Sigmund seemingly had no choice and gave in. It was the single biggest deal of his career and drastically expanded the family business. Fugger was thirty years old. [p.21] Getting a sovereign, a duke who could change his mind if he wanted to pay back this huge loan would need some coercion. Fugger knew his man and made him coins from the silver mined which became a standard for fineness and precisionin currency that would be emulated elsewhere. [p.22] At the fair in Frankfurt that year, Fugger may have first met Maximillian, 'King of the Romans'. When Sigmund was again in debt, it was Maximillian that stepped forward and asked for the duke's other holdings to be given up in exchange for still another loan.
Fugger rarely had partners in his endeavors outside of family members. And those could be contentious. One exception was Johannes Thurzo, a metallurgist and mining engineer with water excavation techniques that greatly improved the overall process [p.29] Thurzo also had contacts in the east and was married to the Jagiello's of the new Hungarian King Ladislaus.
A rich vein of copper in the Carpathian mountains, stretching to the east, had been mined traditionally but inefficiently by Hungarian miners and interests. [p.28] Fugger saw that this needed to be properly collected and smelted and also saw that this process needed to happen somewhere where the works wouldn't just be seized by any foreign power. [p.29] He also wanted the mines which were owned by private operators. Thurzo could help make much of this happen if Fugger supplied the money which his mines in Schwaz could amply do. With Fugger's money, Thurzo 'snapped up leases' and sealed deals with the Hungarian King. [p.30]
Meanwhile a huge complex of works was constructed in Arnoldstein where Austria, Italy and Slovenia meet. From here, Fugger's eastern expansion, what he later would call the Common Hungarian Trade, began. [p.27] Maximillian took Vienna and then marched to Hungary, who could not fight both him and the Turks at the same time. Hungary signed a treaty opening the vast holdings to German traders and bankers like Fugger. The Common Hungarian Trade would be a huge money-maker for Fugger until his death thirty years later. In 1498 Fugger would use his vast copper resources to flood the market in Venice, bust up the metal cartel there and drive his co-members and competitors out of business [p.45].Fugger would also make himself the indispensable lender to Maximillian and later Charles V. But this gives away the rest of the book. Interest in the achievements and capabilities of such a character in those times should be met with a close look at his flaws, difficulties and the sometimes brutal methods he used at resolving them.
____________________________________________
Greg Steinmetz: The Richest Man Who Ever Lived: The Life and Times of Jacob Fugger Simon & Schuster, NY, 2015
No comments:
Post a Comment