A book out this summer, on Renaissance banker Jacob Fugger, is getting lots of attention. The Richest Man Who Ever Lived claims that Fugger, of whom pretty much no one has ever heard, was one of the most influential people in his age — and all of history, in fact. According to the author, journalist and securities analyst Greg Steinmetz, Fugger is indirectly responsible both for the end of the Catholic Church’s ban on the taking of interest and, in a roundabout way, the Protestant Reformation. From the Washington Post‘s review:

Fugger’s “greatest talent was an ability to borrow the money he needed to invest,” Steinmetz writes. “He convinced cardinals, bishops, dukes, and counts to loan him oceans of money. . . . Financial leverage catapulted him to the top.” But in order to charge and offer interest payments, he had to battle the church’s long-standing ban on usury. Here Fugger’s links to Rome, buttressed through bribes for high church officials, became useful. Through artful lobbying and the staging of a high-profile public debate, he helped persuade Pope Leo X to sign a papal bull acknowledging the legitimacy of interest, which became permissible as long as the loan involved labor, cost or risk on behalf of the lender. “And what loan didn’t involve one of the three?” Steinmetz asks. After this victory, “debt financing accelerated,” he writes. “The modern economy was underway.”

It was a system that soon prompted controversies and suffered attacks, whether peasant revolts or even the Protestant Reformation. Clerical offices were for sale then, and Fugger financed the purchase of an influential job — the archbishop of Mainz, one of the seven electors of the Holy Roman Emperor. In order to repay the loan, the new bishop and the pontiff concocted a scheme: the sale of sin-forgiving indulgences to the faithful, ostensibly to refurbish St. Peter’s Basilica but in large part to repay Fugger. A 33-year-old priest and theologian by the name of Martin Luther was outraged at the church cashing in on popular fears of damnation and posted his 95 Theses on the door of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg. You know what happened next.

I’m always suspicious of claims that an author has discovered a previously unknown person who changed the course of history. But who knows? Anyway, the book looks interesting, and it’s nice to see the history of law and religion getting some attention in the  media.