Jakob Fugger

Jakob Fugger, known as Jakob Fugger the Rich and living from 6 March 1459 to 30 December 1525, was a major German merchant, mining entrepreneur and banker from the Fugger merchant family of the Free Imperial City of Augsburg, where he was born. Educated from age fourteen in Venice, which remained his main residence until 1487, he became de facto head of the family firm after that year and, together with his brothers Ulrich and Georg, expanded it into a business operating across all of Europe, built first on the textile trade with Italy and then on banking transactions with the House of Habsburg and the papal Curia. From 1493 the firm also moved into mining, developing an almost monopolistic hold on the European copper market through silver and copper extraction in Tyrol, Bohemia and Hungary, with Hungarian copper shipped through Antwerp to Lisbon and on to India. As banker to the Habsburgs, Fugger financed the rise of Emperor Maximilian I and made decisive financial contributions to securing the 1519 election of the Spanish king Charles I as Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, giving him major influence over European politics of his era; the American journalist Greg Steinmetz has estimated Fugger's peak wealth at roughly two percent of the entire economic output of Europe at the time. He secured his lasting legacy through his charitable foundations in Augsburg, including the Fuggerei, a walled settlement of low-cost housing he founded in 1521 that remains in use today as the world's oldest social housing complex still operating.