In his circa 1520 portrait by Albrecht Durer, Jacob Fugger’s lined face stares back with determination and confidence. He was about 60 at the time and was already one of the richest men in the world. A copy of this portrait, with its striking blue background, should hang on the office walls of every banker, financier and businessman or woman as a tribute to “the world’s first capitalist.”

When Fugger of Augsburg, then part of the Holy Roman Empire (now Germany), died on Dec. 30, 1525, he was the world’s first millionaire and controlled roughly 2 percent of the entire wealth of Europe, according to Greg Steinmetz’s book The Richest Man Who Ever Lived: The Life and Times of Jacob Fugger. America’s John D. Rockefeller, by comparison of wealth, was no where near Fugger, the author notes.

Fugger (rhymes with cougar) was the grandson of commoners. When he took control of his family’s modest fortune as textile merchants, he would take that company to dizzying heights. Eventually, Fugger would own or control vast tracts of land, castles, mines and would serve as banker to kings, emperors, popes and other princes of the Roman Catholic Church. He had enough political and economic clout to be awarded a royal title, which he never used. He also may have helped finance Magellan’s voyage that circumnavigated the Earth, Steinmetz wrote. According to the author, Fugger could be called  “the world’s first capitalist.”

Steinmetz spent 15 years as a journalist at newspapers, including New York Newsday and The Wall Street Journal, where he served as the Berlin bureau chief and later as London bureau chief. He currently works as a securities analyst for a New York money management firm.

Steinmetz’s colorful, fast-paced biography has 23 pages of notes, bibliography and index but offers also a fascinating glimpse into the times and challenges faced by business people in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. Those challenges included bankrupt businessmen finding themselves rotting in debtor’s prison; business cheats getting their hands cut off or a red-hot poker pushed through a cheek; and, bakers when caught adulterating bread, receiving a public dunking or dragging through the streets to face the gauntlet of an angry mob.

According to Steinmetz, however, it was moneylenders who faced the cruelest fate. Lenders, known as usurers, were reviled as confederates of Satan and damned by the church for the sin of charging interest on loans.

But, Fugger got that reversed and accomplished much more. For example, even today, modern businesses still use the double-entry bookkeeping method that Fugger introduced to northern Europe, a practice he learned from the Venetians early in his career.

However, changing the church’s view of charging interest on loans has been most lasting. During his day, the practice of charging interest on loans was considered a mortal sin. That was until Fugger asked Pope Leo X to legalize the practice after making a sizeable loan to a bishop. Giovanni de Medici was the second and smartest son of Lorenzo “the Magnificent,” and upon his elevation to papacy, took the name Leo X. But Leo wasn’t smart enough to see the results of that change.

Leo was “a corrupt pope in corrupt times,” wrote Steinmetz, and he emptied the papal treasury on the most expensive coronation Rome had ever seen and hosted parties where prostitutes looked after cardinals and everyone ate off of gold plates.

To pay off the debt to Fugger, Leo OK’d the restoration of buying “indulgences” that allowed people to pay the church for major sins. That was the final straw for a priest named Martin Luther who kicked off the Protestant Reformation.

Of course, Fugger enriched himself through practices that are illegal today: He created cartels in the mining of silver and copper; he was a major investor in a scheme to smash the Venetian spice trade monopoly. Fugger financed ships that brought back holds bursting with pepper (without refrigeration, pepper was an important cooking ingredient to disguise the taste of rotted meat). Fugger and his associates dumped pepper on the European markets, which caused prices to drop to the point where it wrecked the Venetian pepper monopoly. Venice never recovered, but Fugger and other investors made a killing despite the low prices. That was one of Fugger’s greatest talents, Steinmetz wrote, the ability to see an opportunity and embrace the inherent risks.

Fugger was also blessed that there were no Securities and Exchange Commissions or anti-trust laws to get in his way. He also benefited by insider trading information that came his way through his own business news service, a first for the world.

When he died in 1525, Fugger wanted his epitaph to read that he was “second to none in the acquisition of extraordinary wealth.”

The Richest Man Who Ever Lived: The life and Times of Jacob Fugger, by Greg Steinmetz, Simon & Schuster, Aug. 4, 2015, 284 pages.

William L. Haacker is an award-winning journalist and editor who has worked for various New Jersey newspapers including Gannett New Jersey.