ian families of the great commercial cities of South
Germany, and amongst these more especially those of Nuremberg,
Augsburg, Ulm, Frankfort on the Maine, and Cologne, that exercised the
greatest influence on the luxury, industry, and learning of Germany.
Members of the old families had once governed the cities with
aristocratic rule; they were still the most influential citizens,
accustomed to conduct great affairs, and to represent the highest
interests; they were generally merchants or large landed proprietors.
Most of the Church benefices were possessed by their families; they
were the first who used to send their sons into Italy, the land of
their mercantile friends, to study law, thus making preparation in
Germany for the rising Humanitarian learning. Many of them were heads
of mercantile firms, councillors and confidants of German princes; they
were united together by family alliances, and not less by community of
commercial interests and had extended themselves everywhere; they
chiefly determined the German policy of the Imperial cities, and they
would have exercised a decisive influence on the newly formed German
life, had they been less conservative in their tendencies, and had they
not by their self-interest become sometimes un-German.

They represented the moneyed power of Germany; the Emperor and princes
obtained loans from them, and they were the medium of the greater; part
of the money and exchange transactions, when these were not in the
hands of the Jews. The great firms of Fugger and Welser and their
partners formed a great trading company, which carried on traffic not
only with Italy and the Levant, but also beyond Antwerp and the
Atlantic Ocean. Through them, German trade monopolized that of the East
and West Indies; they bought a whole year's harvest from the King of
Portugal, they united themselves with Spanish houses in unlimited
speculations, undertook journeys to Calcutta, and settled on their own
account the prices of the sugar and spices of the East, which were then
of greater importance in the German cookery than now.

This command over capital was regarded with great dislike by both
princes and people. Through these trading companies much ready money
passed out of the country, and all objects of luxury rose in price;
complaints were general, for the diminution in the worth of money,
occasioned by the introduction of the American gold, was mistaken for
the raising of prices by the merchants.