Fugger, Jakob Graf – Austrian National Library, Austria
Meet Jakob ‘the Rich’ Fugger and his family, creators of kings, shapers of cities, and catalysts of the Church’s schism, in the blog recently published on Europeana.
The Fuggers, a family of bankers and merchants, had significant influence over much of Europe’s economy in the 15th and 16th centuries. Their immense wealth, ammassed particularly from trading metals from Hungarian and Tyrolean mines, allowed them to quietly influence the most crucial social changes of the era.