The volume was dedicated to the "illustrious signor Gioan
Fugger, Baron of Kirchberg and Weissenhorn" (All'ilustrissimo signor il signor Gioan
Fugger barone di Kirchberg et Weissenhorn).
Subsequent chapters describe the people who worked for the
Fugger companies, the family's patronage of art, and their participation in society.
In his camp outside, he borrowed a final six thousand florins from the
Fuggers in order to prolong the siege.
A name you will come across frequently while walking Augsburg's streets is the
Fugger family.
In 1515, at the instigation of Conrad Peutinger, the town clerk in Augsburg, Johann Eck wrote a treatise defending the so-called triple contract, a business agreement favored by banking houses such as the
Fuggers that was designed to insure a guaranteed rate of return (in this case 5 percent).
"Hans
Fuggers Sammlungskabinette." In Die
Fugger und die Musik, ed.
I choose this example not only for a coincidence of conspicuous new fortunes (like the
Fuggers', which laid the foundation of international banking capital) and superior artistic enterprise (like that of sculptor-entrepreneurs Tilman Riemenschneider and Veit Stoss).
Even while we may claim that some of the episodes he gives over to the Micomicona plot are actually forced to conform to it, we cannot but marvel at how David Quint shows the inversion of the two main threads of Part One in Part Two, for, in the famous episode of the Cave of Montesinos, it is Lady Belerma who stands for the feudal past, while the "enchanted" Dulcinea moves into the modern world "ruled by great capitalists like the
Fuggers" (94).
(32) Although their presence in Augsburg in the seventeenth century does not conclusively establish their origin, it is significant that, according to Vasari, Bordon worked for the Fuccheri (the
Fuggers), the Prineri and Cardinal Otto Truchsess von Waldburg in Augsburg.
In the next town, Augsburg, I discovered the Fuggerei - 167 houses and apartments donated to the city's poor in the 17th century by the
Fuggers, a family of cloth merchants, and believed to be the oldest subsidised housing development in the world.
These ventures required large injections of capital which he was able to secure through a business partnership with the
Fuggers. The Fugger-Thurzo Company came into existence in 1495 with the signing of a partnership contract.