Jakob Fugger

Jakob Fugger (1459 to 1525), called Jakob Fugger the Rich, was a major German merchant, mining entrepreneur and banker from the Fugger family of Augsburg. Born the tenth of eleven children, he was sent to Venice at fourteen, where he learned banking and the metal trade at the house of German merchants, and after 1487 he became the de facto head of the family business. He expanded the firm, whose wealth began in the textile trade with Italy, into banking for the House of Habsburg and the Roman Curia and into silver and copper mining in Tyrol, Bohemia and Hungary, gaining an almost monopolistic hold on the European copper market. His loans financed the rise of Maximilian I and helped secure the election of Charles V as Holy Roman Emperor. He founded the Fuggerei in Augsburg in 1521, the oldest social housing complex still in use. At his death he left company assets of about 2 million guilders to his nephew Anton Fugger.