Germany has a vital banking tradition that dates back to the great Fugger money-lending empire in the 15th and 16th centuries, and before that, the limited banking practices required by the Hanseatic League (Hansa) of northern Germany in the 14th century. Germany's first commercial bank was established in Hamburg in 1619. The Giro bank lasted until its takeover by the state-run Reichsbank in 1875.
By the early 1800s Frankfurt am Main was a banking center under the House of Rothschild. The Rothschilds, in fact, took their name from the red (roth) shield (Schild) on the front of their Frankfurt home during the first years of the Jewish family's history. Their banking dynasty soon extended beyond Frankfurt to London, Naples, Paris, and Vienna. Between 1870 and 1872 several other important German banks evolved, some of which are still around in one form or another.
The five largest German banks are Deutsche Bank, Dresdner Bank, Westdeutsche Landesbank, Commerzbank, and the Bayerische Vereinsbank. The only German bank to rank among the top 10 world banks in size is Deutsche Bank (3rd). (Switzerland's USB is first and Credit Suisse ranks 7th.) Frankfurt's present-day skyline consists largely of the gleaming towers that serve as headquarters for Germany's banks, a sight that has led to one of the German financial capital's nicknames: "Bankfurt." In 1994 Frankfurt won the heated contest to house the European Monetary Institute (EMI), the precursor to the current European Central Bank which began operations in Frankfurt in January 1999 with the introduction of the euro. Now more than ever, Germany can rightfully bill itself as Finanzplatz Deutschland - Germany, the Financial Center. Until the European Central Bank began operation in 1999, Germany's Bundesbank, known as the Buba to the financially literate, was Europe's most influential central bank. For all practical purposes, the Bundesbank was to Europe what the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank is to the U.S. ...
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troubleinthetriangle.com
When the coffer rings
When Aquinas set out in January 1274 for the gathering he would not live to attend, the Council of Reconciliation at Lyons, the world was still only half way through the era of the Holy Roman Empire and the situation across Europe was generally very bleak and very unstable. For a couple of hundred years the design of the jigsaw puzzle which was Europe had changed repeatedly as principalities, kingdoms and khanates rose and fell and as popes and kings struggled for supremacy and for control of secular administration. The Mongols had made some strong exploratory sorties into Europe in 1221, crushing the Shahdom of Khwarizm in Persia and a number of Russian and Eastern European principalities along the way. They had then came back in force in 1236, staying north of the Caspian and Black Seas that time, and took only six years to sweep through Russia, Hungary and Poland, giving many principalities the temporary dual status of affiliates of the Holy Roman Empire and vassals of the Mongol Khan. The indicators all pointed to a continuation of instability.
The fringes of the continent had changed even more than its heartland, because the conflict between the church (together with the powers which it could coerce or beg to support it from time to time) and Islam complicated the situation. For the previous two hundred years the Muslims had continued to push east and south east through Afghanistan and into the Indian sub-continent and expansion in that direction did not seem to bother the church much at the time – as long as they stayed away from Europe. Of course the eastern Mediterranean and near east regions were subject to the same invasion pressures and instability as Europe. The result was that when Dar al-Islam began to decay also, with a lot of infighting and fragmentation, and the Mongols resumed their push westward in 1258 the Muslims were unable to resist and the Mongols crushed the Abbasid Caliphate at Baghdad. They appeared ready to sweep through Syria, Turkey and into southern Europe, and the fear of being swamped brought dramatic changes in the power structures of Dar al-Islam. The Muslim Turkish Mamluks regrouped very quickly and in 1260 their strength in the near east even brought a glimmer of hope for a bit of stability for the people of Europe when they blocked the westward thrust of the Mongols at the battle of Ayn Djalout, near Nazareth.
The turmoil and complexities of the second four hundred years of the Holy Roman Empire clearly make it impossible to deal with the period in detail so we must be content with a selection of highlights which helped to shape it and which illustrate the evolving relationships between the three partners in the triangle of faiths. Of course the power struggles for control of the church (or churches) continued. The Greeks had been flexing their muscles in an effort to topple the pope's puppet in Constantinople. They were fed up to the back teeth with 57 years of papal domination which followed the devious crusade of reunification in 1204. In 1261 they succeeded in re-establishing a rather weak Byzantine Empire by revolt, taking advantage of the breathing space which had been provided when the Seljuk Turks were removed from Anatolia by the Mongols a few years earlier. It was that new political situation, coupled with the fact that the Mongols in Syria had lost their belligerence as a result of the battle of Ayn Djalout and they, too, were showing a close interest in Islam, which made the Council of Reconciliation politically necessary. The Roman church’s rebuff to the delegation from the Persian Mongol Khan which attended that council is therefore all the harder to understand – until we learn that Pope Gregory X used the council as a forum in an unsuccessful bid to finalize a crusade planned by Charles of Anjou for a few years earlier but canceled. Charles had personal ambitions which got in the way of his religious zeal and his nephew, Philip III of France, would not cooperate either.
Diverse views of Jews and state
Other developments had brought another glimmer of hope for relief for some people in regions in Europe where the church of Rome had been unable to maintain its vice-like grip. Poland was such a place. It was Catholic but it was distinguished by real religious tolerance. Perhaps its tolerance had been influenced by the need to rebuild the country after the Mongol invasion of 1240-41 had left the Christian middle class cut to ribbons, the economy wrecked and the principal cities in ruins, but it was real. The Polish monarchy set about a deliberate policy of attracting merchants and craftsmen from Germany and the immigrants naturally included large numbers of Jews for whom Poland meant not only business opportunity but also escape from oppression in the Germany of the Holy Roman Empire. The first crusade could not be forgotten. There was the ever present prospect that it might happen again. What was good enough for the people of Beziers could surely be considered good enough for the Jews. But King Boleslav the Pious had other ideas.
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NOTES ON HUMANISM AND THE RENAISSANCE (1350-1600)
Political background
Decline of the feudal system and increase in upward social mobility
The rise of early capitalism
Usury-For how can you make money or create wealth without actually working for it, without earning it? It is immoral to take advantage of a friend in need in this way. Accordingly, usury -- the lending of money at interest -- was banned for Christians.
Plundering the Americas, Africa, and Asia became another great source of wealth after 1500. But Renaissance leaders had a rather mercantilist conception of wealth as the total gold reserves of the city-state; the modern, capitalistic linkage of wealth to productive capacity lay in the future. (In other words, they did not yet really understand the self-amplifying miracle of capitalism.) Plundering and even trade do not really create wealth but only transfer it from one place to another, from one pocket to another, in a static, barren fashion. (Compare people who try to get wealth by suing someone today, and nonproductive industries such as the Nevada entertainment industry.) In the absence of a corresponding increase in productive capacity and actual production, a huge inflation resulted from the importation of gold and silver into Europe.
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