A late-medieval banker from Augsburg in southern Germany, Fugger has never been as celebrated as Cosimo de Medici and his Florentine sons and cousins, whose reputation as bankers was burnished by their excellent taste in Renaissance art. But Fugger was the better banker. Were he alive today, he would have cut a swathe through Wall Street and the City, and yet his remarkable history is still little known. Mr Steinmetz’s prose does not always sparkle and some arcane details of banking history are fuzzy, but the tale of Fugger’s aspiration, ruthlessness and greed is riveting. [...]
He flooded the market with so much metal that the price collapsed and his competitors were gravely weakened. Subsequently, he helped finance a Portuguese scheme to relocate the pepper and spice trade to Lisbon, a move so successful that it delivered a fatal blow to the commercial stature of Venice. He also had a thirst for information about trade and commerce that led him to create a network of couriers whose reports to Augsburg were printed and distributed to clients in the form of a primitive newspaper. Fugger had invented the world’s first news service. [...]
Fugger’s relationship with the Vatican was based on an extensive branch network through which he could transfer offertory collections from Germany to Rome (in return for a 3% commission). But his most astonishing and unexpected historical achievement, says Mr Steinmetz, was unwittingly lighting the fuse that started the Reformation. Fugger teamed up with another Habsburg client, for whom he had bought the archbishopric of Mainz, and the pair began to sell indulgences (a forgiveness of sins, which provided, for a fee, a short cut to heaven), splitting the proceeds with Pope Leo, who used the cash to build St Peter’s Basilica. In 1517 Martin Luther was sufficiently outraged by this scheme that he wrote the “95 Theses” that damned Rome, sparking the Protestant Reformation.
No comments:
Post a Comment