Company
DissolvedThe Fugger company
Augsburg · 1485 – 1657
The great company was liquidated in 1657. The Fuggerei, the housing foundation Jakob built, still stands in Augsburg.
Jakob Fugger, called the Rich, took a family trading house in Augsburg and turned it into the creditor of the Habsburg emperors. The company dealt in textiles, then in silver and copper from Tyrol and Hungary, then in loans secured on those mines and on the right to collect taxes.
By the 1510s a Fugger cashier in Augsburg could move money to Rome, Antwerp, or Spain by letter. The firm was a partnership of the family, not a joint-stock company. Outsiders did not buy a share. They begged for a loan.
Mines, not only ledgers
The fortune was industrial as well as financial. Fugger factors ran mining districts, advanced wages to miners, and shipped copper north. The Augsburg office employed accountants who could follow a cargo and a debt in the same book. Jakob also built the Fuggerei, a housing foundation for Catholic laborers, in 1521. It is still inhabited, under the original rules, including a rent that was symbolic even then.
The Habsburg default
The Spanish crown's bankruptcies, beginning in 1557, landed on the people who had lent to Charles V. The Fugger company survived Jakob's death in 1525 and remained large for another generation, but it never recovered the position of being able to choose its debtors. The firm was liquidated in 1657. The name continued as a noble family and as the foundation, not as a bank that could shake a throne.
The work it organized
- Factor
- Mining clerk
- Cashier
- Courier
On the timeline
Related
- The Welser companyDissolved