A man of action – the good businessman – Bavaria

On August 23, 1521, Jakob Fugger, known as “the rich”, founded the Fuggerei. In the deed of foundation, he obliged his descendants to forever provide homes to needy people in the houses of Augsburg’s Jakobervorstadt. The oldest social settlement in the world was founded, but the questions still arise today: Why did Jakob Fugger, who is considered one of the richest people of all time, found the Fuggerei? And why did his descendants actually try again and again for 500 years to implement the foundation’s purpose as well as possible – even across wars and mediatization?

Dietmar Schiersner is familiar with the allegations that Jakob Fugger was solely concerned with the salvation of his soul and that he wanted to buy his way to heaven, so to speak. After all, the residents of the Fuggerei have to pray three prayers a day in memory of the founder of the foundation – at least that’s what the centuries-old admission regulations say. The idea of ​​indulgence, however, says the history professor at the Weingarten University of Education, is too short-sighted. Schiersner is the scientific director of the Fugger archive. You can of course read a religious drive from the deed of foundation and the memorial plaques at the entrances to the Fuggerei, he says. But this is in the late medieval tradition of piety. Secular, purely philanthropic foundations only exist today. “He wanted to do something godly,” says Schiersner. “But we have to understand him as a man who had a social view of the city and the common good in Augsburg in mind.”

As one of the largest cities in the Middle Ages, Augsburg had many people with low incomes. Back then, Schiersner says, it was the trend of the times to deal with poverty differently from what had been practiced up until then. Unworthy beggars should be marginalized. Jakob Fugger did not want to distribute alms either, the residents should make their contribution. When the Fuggerei was founded, the Rhenish guilder, the annual rent, was roughly equivalent to the weekly wage of a craftsman. From Schiersner’s point of view, the daily prayers should show gratitude and also keep up the memory of the founder. If Fugger had thought commercially, so to speak, and wanted to get as much out of it as possible for the salvation of his soul, he would have been able to oblige the residents to pray for fixed times. Instead, he wanted the residents to be able to stand on their own two feet again and go to work thanks to the low rent – for which they had to be flexible in terms of time.

The fact that the Fuggerei still exists after 500 years is partly due to coincidences, says Schiersner. In the Thirty Years’ War, for example, the finances collapsed because the Tyrolean estates, where the money is invested, no longer paid interest. The capital commitment of the foundation was converted into a property foundation, today the settlement is generated through forest yields and entrance fees. The form of the property foundation allowed the Fuggerei to get through the following wars, even through the Nazi era. During the mediatization, many foundations were centralized, the Fugger-Babenhausen princes had made their own agreement with the king that saved the Fuggerei.

Open detailed view

“The founding generation had a special bond with the Fuggerei,” says Schiersner. The Fuggerei ran for the next 300 years, the more distant descendants of Jakob Fugger withdrew. At the beginning of the 19th century, the family rediscovered the connection to the facility. After the Second World War, during which the Fuggers decided to rebuild the Fuggerei after a bomb attack while still on the rubble, the family really realized what an inheritance they had got there. “The Fuggerei is not a job,” says Alexander Fugger-Babenhausen, who runs the foundations together with representatives from the other branches of the company. “I’ve known her since I was a child. There’s a lot of emotion in there.”