Höchstetter

The family of Höchstetter (also rendered Hechstetter or Hochstetter) from Höchstädt in western Bavaria near the banks of the Danube were members of the fifteenth and sixteenth-century mercantile patriciate of Augsburg.

For a time, these international mercantile bankers and venture capitalists - whose most notorious member was Ambrosius Höchstetter (1463 - 1534) - were on a par with the Fugger and the Welser houses. Like other Augsburg bankers, they provided loans to Emperor Maximilian I (reigned 1508-1519).

The accumulating wealth of Augsburg relied on control of metal ores - the gold, silver and copper of Bohemia, Slovakia, Hungary and the Tyrol - and their refining and marketing. The Hochstetter company drew upon investments as small as a few florins, but the total invested with him required Ambrosius Höchstetter to pay out up to a million florins a year in interest. He successfully cornered for brief periods local markets in ash timber, grain and certain wines. Grain hoarding is never a popular practice, and Ambrosius was accused of adulterating the spices in which he traded. His son and son-in-law lost spectacular sums in gambling. Then in 1529 Ambrosius Höchstetter tried to engross the whole quicksilver stock in a cartel; this failed attempt to corner the market led to his bankruptcy (1529) for 800,000 gulden, for which he eventually died in prison. Rising prices bring out a hidden supply, and the size of the required investment had become too large for even the greatest merchant-banking house to monopolize, as the Fuggers discovered with their attempt on the copper market. Figures representing the enormous profits of the Hochstetter at their height became public after a certain Bartholomew Rem invested 900 gulden in the Hochstetter company in 1511; by 1517 he claimed a profit of 33,000 gulden. The company was willing to settle at 26,000, and the resulting litigation caused the figures to become public. A commission of the Reichstag held at Nuremberg in 1522-1523 found, in part, that

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