In June 1519, seven men were deciding who would receive the most resounding title in the Christian world. Behind their votes stood an Augsburg merchant whose ledger proved more persuasive than any dynastic legitimacy.
When Emperor Maximilian I died in Wels on January 12, 1519, his body had not yet been transported to Vienna, but in Jakob Fugger’s Augsburg office they were already calculating the losses. The dead monarch owed the banking house roughly 350,000 gulden—a sum that could have maintained a small army for several years. To Fugger, this was money invested in a very specific system of relationships: Habsburg loans were secured by mining rights to silver and copper in Tyrol and Hungary, and the emperor’s death put the entire structure at risk. The debt of a dead monarch is a piece of paper with no one to present it to if a stranger takes the throne. And the stranger was very real: Francis I, King of France—young, ambitious, and equipped with a treasury of his own—was pursuing the imperial crown with undisguised appetite.
The Holy Roman Empire was not a hereditary monarchy in the usual sense. The emperor was elected, and elected by particular men—seven prince-electors: three archbishops (Mainz, Cologne, Trier) and four secular rulers (the King of Bohemia, the Count Palatine of the Rhine, the Duke of Saxony, the Margrave of Brandenburg). Each possessed one vote and interests of his own. Each was open to negotiation—and to what, in modern language, is delicately called “incentivizing loyalty.” Fugger understood the mechanics of this process better than anyone, because he had financed the Habsburgs for decades and had seen how the levers of imperial politics worked from the inside—through payroll ledgers.
To grasp the scale of Fugger’s stature, we need to rewind. Jakob Fugger was born in 1459 into a family of Augsburg textile merchants, dealing in fustian—a dense cotton-linen cloth on which more than one Swabian fortune was built. But cloth was merely the launchpad. Young Jakob spent years in Venice studying double-entry bookkeeping and banking, then returned home with the tools that would turn the family firm into a financial empire. The crucial move was investing in mining: Fugger gained control of copper and silver mines in Tyrol, then expanded into Hungary, where copper extraction yielded colossal profits. In the early 16th century, copper was a strategic metal, essential for casting cannons, minting coin, and dozens of trades.
At the same time, Fugger built ties with the Holy See, becoming one of Rome’s key financial agents. Transfers of Church funds across Europe passed through his bank. This double alliance—the Habsburgs and the Vatican—made the Augsburg merchant a figure whom crowned heads had to reckon with. By the end of his life, his fortune was estimated at roughly 2% of all Europe’s GDP—around $400 billion in 2015 money—and the usual comparisons with modern billionaires look pale beside that figure. The nickname “the Rich” (der Reiche) attached itself to him in his own lifetime, and there was not a drop of irony in it.
What fascinates me is the bookkeeping precision with which this deal was recorded. The total cost of electing Charles I of Spain Holy Roman Emperor came to 851,585 gulden. Fugger put up 543,385—almost two-thirds. The Welser house, another major Augsburg mercantile dynasty, added around 150,000. The remainder was covered by three Italian companies. The money went toward what the sources call “securing votes”—direct payments to the electors, their advisers, their chanceries. Every vote had its price, and that price was negotiable.
Francis I paid too. The French king sent his agents to the electors, promising pensions and privileges, but his resources were limited by the capacities of the royal treasury, and the treasury depended on taxes and parliamentary procedures. Fugger had no such constraints: he commanded his own capital and lines of credit that he could mobilize within weeks. In a sense, it was a contest between two financial models—state budget versus private bank—and the private bank won. On June 28, 1519, the electors voted unanimously for Charles. Unanimously—though only a few months before the vote, the outcome had seemed far from obvious. That kind of unanimity has to be bought.
What did Fugger receive in return? First and foremost—protection for his investments. Maximilian’s old debt did not turn into worthless paper: the new emperor confirmed the obligations and began repaying them in the way the Habsburgs repaid best—mineral rights. Fugger received concessions for silver and copper mines in Tyrol, effectively cementing his control over the mining industry that was already the foundation of his power. This was not a gift—it was the conversion of political debt into productive assets, a mechanism familiar to anyone who has watched major privatizations in later eras.
But the story did not end there. In 1523, at the Imperial Diet in Nuremberg, deputies discussed limits on mercantile capital—essentially 16th-century antitrust legislation. Great trading houses like the Fuggers irritated the lesser nobility and urban guilds: too much power, too little oversight. It was at this moment that Jakob Fugger wrote Charles V a letter containing a phrase that would make its way into textbooks: “It is well known that Your Imperial Majesty could not have obtained the Roman crown without my help…” This is not a request, and not flattery—it is an invoice presented. The merchant reminds the emperor that their relationship is a contract, and that the contract binds both sides.
The result was predictable. Every proposed restriction was dropped. What is more, Fugger received additional concessions for mercury and cinnabar at Almadén—the Spanish deposit that would remain the world’s largest source of mercury for centuries to come.
What surprises me is the candor of this arrangement. Fugger did not hide his role—he flaunted it. And that says something important about the nature of power in the Holy Roman Empire of the early 16th century: it functioned as a complex system of mutual obligations, in which money served as lubricant, while everyone involved knew exactly who supplied that lubricant. The electors took the money and voted. The emperor received the title and paid in resources. The banker received the resources and accumulated influence. The gears were visible to the naked eye, and no one, it seems, was embarrassed by it.
Fugger died in 1525, two years after his famous letter. He was sixty-six years old. His nephew Anton Fugger inherited the business, but could not replicate his uncle’s trajectory—the scale of a personality and the scale of an era rarely align. The Habsburgs kept borrowing from the Fuggers, but their debts grew faster than their ability to service them, and by the middle of the 16th century Spanish state bankruptcies were beginning to erode the foundations of the Augsburg banking house. The family’s involvement in Spanish mining, meanwhile, continued until 1645.
The election of 1519 is one of those cases in which enough documents survive to reconstruct the financial anatomy of a political event with almost surgical precision. We know the sums, the shares, the names of those who paid. That is rare for the 16th century, and a gift to historians, because such deals usually dissolve into the fog of diplomatic correspondence. Here, though, there is bookkeeping—and merciless bookkeeping.
Charles V ruled the empire until 1556, when he abdicated, worn down by war and gout. His reign encompassed the Reformation, wars with France, the conquest of the New World, and endless conflicts with the German princes. All of it—the consequences of that June vote in Frankfurt, made possible by the credit line of one Augsburg merchant. Fugger did not choose the emperor himself—he had no vote in the college of electors. But he paid for each of the seven votes, and his promissory notes outlived both him and his debtor.