Fugger family biography interview

Greg Steinmetz is a journalist with a passion for the past, whose recent work The Richest Man Who Ever Lived, focuses on the influential and bold (but not particularly likeable) sixteenth-century German banker Jakob Fugger (1459-1525).

Fugger family biography interview

Although less well-known, Fugger’s impact on contemporary politics and business practices during the Renaissance was arguably as great as any shaped by members of the Medici, de Rothschild, or Rockefeller families. Steinmetz argues that Fugger “changed history because he lived in an age when, for the first time, money made all the difference in war and, hence, politics” (xiv).

Specifically, Fugger’s banking and mining prosperity, which Steinmetz calculates amounted to nearly 2 percent of European economic output by 1520s, empowered him to elevate the political fortunes of early Hapsburgs – raising their level of influence to that of French and English royalty.

For some time now, professional historians have been engaged in the challenge of trying t