The Fugger family, now on the 19th generation since Jakob, is still responsible for maintaining the foundation and trust that Jakob established in 1520 when he opened the Fuggerei.

Fugger’s family were peasants who became wealthy as cloth merchants. Still, an early Fugger apprenticeship in Venice, then “the most commercially minded city on Earth,” found him sleeping ...

The man who conceived this successful compound was Augsburg native Jakob Fugger (known as “Jakob Fugger the Rich”), born into a wealthy weaving-merchant Roman Catholic family on March 6, 1459 ...

Jakob's son, known as Jakob Fugger II, was born in 1459. Although his father died when he was 10, the family's growing wealth allowed the younger Jakob Fugger to study in Venice as a teenager.

The Fuggerei is owned by the Fugger Foundation and supported by a fund managed by a senior council, which is composed of current members of the Fugger family elite.

Alexander Erbgraf Fugger-Babenhausen, a member of the family’s 16th generation, says that, despite the widespread interest, no one has so far precisely replicated the Fuggerei’s model for a ...

Copper plate with Fugger family stamp (Courtesy Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands) Wooden ship timbers (Courtesy Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands). A modern shipping accident ...

Long before Warren Buffett, Bill Gates or John D. Rockefeller, there was Jakob Fugger. Born in Augsburg, Germany in 1459 to a well-heeled merchant family, Fugger emerged as one of history's most ...