In the first half of the sixteenth century, Christoph Fürer (1479–1537), a merchant born of an elite Nuremberg family, left a number of personal texts, memoirs of a kind. There he described his life in trade, but he also told his readers about his public service, about his family and other personal relationships, and about the social world he inhabited. He also frequently opined about the condition of what he referred to as the German “nation,” at one point listing the three chief evils that threatened to destroy it: the printing press; Martin Luther; and the (unnamed) prince’s alliance with guilds, which he argued would “upend the traditional sociopolitical order and leave us defenseless against our enemies.”Footnote ¹ At another point he complained that people were dressing way above their stations, wasting money on frivolous fashion.Footnote ² In sharp contrast to Fürer, another merchant from Nuremberg, though born a few decades later, Hieronymus Köler (1507–1573), repeatedly displayed his commitment to the Lutheranism Fürer condemned, and he regularly described the elaborate outfits he had worn at various stages of his life (his Gestalt), seeming to commit the very offense of which Fürer complained. Hans Ulrich Krafft (1550–1621) of nearby Ulm, like Fürer from an elite family, left an extraordinarily long narrative (about 400 printed pages) concentrating on the period when, as a young factor for a German firm, he traveled to what is now Syria and Lebanon, only to wind up spending three years in jail when his employer went bankrupt and failed to deliver the goods Krafft owed Ottoman and other traders.

These men’s stories belong to a collection of 243 quasi-autobiographical texts from German-speaking Europe written between 1400 and about 1600, which Gabriele Jancke has collected into a detailed database, along with extensive references to relevant secondary literature.Footnote ³ Scholars have labeled these and similar texts Selbstzeugnisse or “witnesses of the self.” About 15 percent of the authors in Jancke’s database were active merchants like the men introduced here; the rest were public officials, scholars, churchmen, teachers, artists, and a small handful of elite women, a great many from families with mercantile backgrounds, but others with only indirect ties to commerce. Joining them was a surprisingly large group of nobles (about 20 percent) whose relationship to commerce was more indirect still. The merchants’ texts are the focus here. They provide rare insight into what scholars have called their “self-perception,” mentalité, or Selbstbewusstsein, allowing us to see them as they understood themselves rather than as others understood them. Their narratives, I will argue, disturb many received notions about their view of their work in commerce, their roles in civic and territorial politics, their relations to the traditional aristocracy, their ties to kin and family, the practice of their faith, and the sociocultural world in which they circulated. In effect, they position these merchants not so much as the proto-capitalists they are often thought to be, but as men whose identity was being constructed, in a bricolage way, by drawing upon the diverse models of honorable manhood available in the society of their day in order to fashion a distinctive class identity.

No other region in the north of Europe produced meaningful amounts of similarly quasi-autobiographical narratives until the seventeenth century and beyond, and even then very few were written by merchants, fewer still that described their life in trade.Footnote ⁴ Along with the three merchants introduced above, another five of the twenty-five merchants in Jancke’s database provided significant detail about their experience in commerce. Together, these eight Selbstzeugnisse paint an exceptionally rich portrait of the honor code to which merchants like these aspired, and which they often claimed for themselves. Like the seventeen merchants in the database who provided little, if any, information about their role in commerce, however, these eight men also devoted considerable, if varying, amounts of space to other aspects of their lives, giving us a rounded portrait not only of how they lived, but also of how they wanted others to understand them.

The Tagebuch written by Lucas Rem (1481–1542) of Augsburg, for example, offers breathtaking accounts of his life on the road. An entry from 1512, for example, tells us that “on the 30th of December, I left Antwerp for Mechelen, Leuven, Namur, Mars Basstuan, Arles, Metz, Nancy, Schirmeck, Strasburg, Rastatt, Pforzheim, Esslingen, and Ulm; by January 18 I was again in Augsburg.”Footnote ⁵ This seems an impossible trip to have made in just about 20 days on horseback (Antwerp to Arles alone is about 650 miles as the crow flies), much less one that involved many exits from the direct route to visit suppliers, customers, and money changers or the equivalent, not to mention the need to rest and change horses.Footnote ⁶ In any case, Rem’s text is full of other descriptions of journeys almost as difficult. But that is not all. Like the other merchants who reported about their business, Rem also discussed his family, including his illegitimate children, and provided carefully itemized lists of the gifts given and received at weddings, his own included. Other merchants similarly imbedded their stories about trade in some mix of biographical detail, comments on politics and their role in civic government, social mores, occasional travelogues, professions of faith, and discussions of family matters. Burkhard Zink (1396–1474/5), whose career in trade had been spent in fifteenth-century Augsburg, for example, penned a long narrative about his early years of penury and failed efforts to establish himself, at one point being reduced, as he put it, to “begging his bread” by teaching Latin (ik betelt das prod).Footnote ⁷ Andreas Ryff (1550–1603), from Basel, admitted that he was so terrible a student in his early years that, when he was twelve years old, his father, having lost hope that his son would settle down to study, sent him to apprentice with a grocer in Geneva. There Ryff was regularly beaten for disobedience or errors, often even bloodied (mit ruoten gestrichen, so gwaltig, dass ich allamol het bluoten megen), but he also later expressed gratitude for having been schooled in the faith as a member of his Calvinist master’s household.Footnote ⁸

Pieter von Halle (c. 1510–1558/60), from Reval (now Tallinn), entered commerce around 1529 and traded leather and hides, Russian “butter,” cloth from Lübeck, and metal goods such as plows and lamps, in partnership with and on behalf of his master. In 1532, however, there came a “turning point” (Wendepunkt), and von Halle gave up trade to begin theological study in Wittenberg. Before departing, he left a meticulous account of the business he had done, as though to document both his success in commerce and his honesty. Heinrich Zobel (1539–1615), from Bremen, then as now a major commercial center in northern Germany, was in 1569 deputized by Count Palatine Wolfgang of Zweibrücken to obtain a bill of exchange from the English queen, payable in Hamburg, for funds needed to purchase arms for a war in support of French Huguenots, which the count was fighting on behalf of the English crown. Zobel himself guaranteed payment to the suppliers of the arms in advance of his trip and, once having obtained the bill in London (signed by none other than Thomas Gresham), went to Hamburg and collected the money. There he took the opportunity to buy English cloth at good prices on the local market and resell it at a nice profit.Footnote ⁹

The Selbstzeugnisse from which these anecdotes come do not only yield fascinating details about such men’s experiences in commerce; they also paint a portrait of merchants whose lives were richer and fuller than is usually attributed to them as “economic men.” I will argue that these texts, rather than simply filling out a narrative about early capitalism whose outline we already know, allow us to witness the making of a merchant class. Here I understand class as a sociocultural construction rather than simply as the product of an individual’s role in the economy (the relation to the means of production) or position in a socioeconomic hierarchy (a ranking by wealth or income). These men can, of course, be considered in those terms, for they then had significant control over the distributive sector of the economy, were developing much of the technology on which modern capitalism would depend (bookkeeping, sophisticated financial instruments, insurance, corporative organization, and so on), and already had their hands in parts of its productive sphere, all of which positions them as progenitors of modern capitalism. They also exhibited many of the traits that define the modern bourgeoisie – materialism, self-declared rationality, an emphasis on respectability, and so on – which firmly locates them in the history of Europe’s emergent middle classes. As we shall see, however, these men were constructing an identity that was more complex than a product of their place in commerce or some slippery socioeconomic hierarchy, even if it was rooted in their success in the market economy.

To understand that identity, we need to take into account Weber’s argument that identity is based as much on status hierarchies such as education, kinship, religion, political roles, and other facets of such men’s lives as it was on their economic activities.Footnote ¹⁰ These attributes were, however, not substitutional for these merchants, as though their roles in public affairs, their acquisition of landed estates, their status as patriarchs in a nuclear household. or even their university studies replaced their identity as merchants; rather, they were additive, enlarging, enriching, and powerfully fueling the class identity they were fashioning. To understand that identity and its construction, we need to observe these merchants, as Sherry Ortner once put it, as they talked about themselves, for it was in “the realm of discourse … and of the larger shape of the discursive field from which people draw their categories” that these men cobbled together a sturdy class identity.Footnote ¹¹ The field on which they drew had many such categories, all ideologically charged: not only “just/fair/honest” behavior in commerce, but also high political status, noble lifestyle, responsible patriarchy, distinguished lineage, and committed faith.

Understood as a class identity, the “self” presented in these men’s Selbstzeugnisse was not just a psychological portrait with significance only for their own sense of themselves and their honor. It was the motor that propelled them into Europe’s moral economy, certifying them as men fit to lead and assuring them that they were worthy of that respect. While merchants would never – not even in modern times – rid themselves of suspicion about their greed and duplicity or about commerce’s threat to the social whole, the class identity emerging from the texts under examination here provided them with a platform from which they could ignore, dismiss, or frontally challenge these longstanding attacks. And comfortably continue their search for profits. The portrait they created tells us a lot about their role in the history of capitalism, not so much as embodiments of its logic, but as individuals able to claim moral and social worth in a society that had for long centuries suspected their motives, criticized their practices, and lamented the social changes they wrought, even as it tolerated them and happily made use of their riches and the goods they provided.

What follows is a three-part study of these men and the texts they left. It begins, in Part I, with the historiographical and sociocultural context to which these Selbstzeugnisse belong. Part II turns to the texts, first describing the eight that included extensive information about the men’s life in commerce and then introducing others, also written by merchants, that either did not provide much detail about trade or are still in manuscript. I then examine the texts themselves, systematically mining them for their descriptions not just of the men’s life in trade, but also of their roles in civic or territorial politics, their relations to the traditional aristocracy, their lives as members of kin groups and nuclear families, and their faith and how they displayed it. The book ends, in Part III, with a discussion about their cultural and social life more generally, the model of masculinity they implicitly constructed, and the significance of the class identity these texts fashioned for our understanding both of the period and of the capitalist economy that was then developing.