Hey dear Hive Community, first of all I would like to welcome you all to my contribution and hope you had a day full of positive experiences! In this post, I would like to talk about history and hope you can learn something new.
You can see here are some works of art that I have created with artificial intelligence and in addition I have taken some pictures of solid silver and copper and in addition I have photographed an interesting specimen of fahlore and in this post I would like to deal specifically with the history of a family that was strongly influenced by mining. The fugger family was considered very influential in the trade sector and the first traces can be found in the 14th century and Johann Fugger had started the trade of cotton and his descendants took over the business and expanded the trade more and more. One of his descendants Jakob fugger lived for some time in Italy in Venice where he had completed an apprenticeship as a merchant and together with his brothers he decided to expand the appreciation of the family in Augsburg more and more and they had many huge plans and wanted to create an empire which has influence on the whole world. They quickly recognized the importance of mining and decided to gain a foothold in this area and they invested a lot in the mining of silver, copper and other minerals such as fahlore and particularly important for the fuggers was the Schwaz mines in Austria and they constantly manage to buy more and more shares from other merchants in the mining area and with this strategy they already had much influence at the beginning of the 16th century and controlled the entire European market when it came to trading of silver and copper.
The fuggers always managed to be a big step ahead of the competition and they managed this by creating large networks to spy on the business of the competition and at the same time they were able to quickly spread information with this network and were thus always tactically one step ahead and extremely well networked and this is also considered the origins of the first intelligence service. The fuggers also built more and more banks and began to lend money and invest more and more of their income from mining in their own growth and in the coming years they acquired more and more shares of mining in other countries such as South America and in this way they quickly managed to expand their empire more and more and this was the time when more international trade was promoted by seafarers and the fuggers gained this niche at that time and they began to buy products from other countries such as spices cheaply and sell them expensively and so their empire grew even further because they have now also played a central role in the food trade and of course their network was also a great advantage here. The fuggers definitely had the talent to quickly recognize new branches of appreciation and saw the demand for certain products and so they also recognized with spices from other countries how easy it is to establish a new trade branch with their resources and also used it.
Everywhere where the fugger trade operated, they had their spies who quickly forwarded all information to their headquarter in Augsburg and with this network they had such a power and could also spread false information in the own favor in order to the competition and the fuggers also managed to rise to the most powerful bank and at the same time they started to gain a lot of influence on politics and they quickly realized that it is easily possible to control the mass with their large information network. The fuggers also supported imperials in warfare and began to lend a lot of money to influential people and so they also financed some royal houses as well as the European high nobility. Jakob fugger had no descendants and after his death the sons of his brothers continued the business in his interest and in the end of the 16th century, the fuggers have withdrawn more and more from mining and other branches of business and since the fuggers were strongly linked to royal houses at that time, this became also their doom when the Spanish royal house and other houses could not repay the debts at that time, the decline of the fugger empire began and the thirty-year war in Europe also ruined the empire more and more and over the years they withdrew more and more and in addition, there were other problems such as that the reputation deteriorated more and more for many reasons and they did not make themselves popular with everyone because of their business practices.
Many thanks for stopping by and I hope you could learn something new about history! I captured these pictures with my Camera Sony Alpha 6000 plus 55-210 mm lens and created the other with Artificial Intelligence!