See More NOTES

see family tree: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuggers http://www.history.com/topics/fugger-family

Ottheinrich Fugger (1592–1644) served as a general in the imperial armies during the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648). [which line he comes from is unknown to me]

The Thirty Years' War concluded the long dissolution of the family's association with Augsburg and their integration into the aristocracy. The connection to Augsburg never disappeared entirely. The family's foundations and their administration continued to be located inside the city's walls. Nonetheless its center shifted. The financial resources of the family were no longer drawn from urban enterprise in Augsburg but rather from rural estates in Swabia that, since the days of Anton, were operated on behalf of the entire family as a fideicommissum. Beginning in 1620 the family was allowed to bear the title "count." Through the late seventeenth century and the eighteenth century, its members filled high-ranking offices in the Habsburg and Wittelsbach courts and assumed the office of bishop, for example, in Regensburg and Constance. In this the Fuggers appeared to conform to the stereotype of early modern capitalistic entrepreneurs, who used their commercial success to fuel upward social mobility that, over generations, took them out of the daily trading of the marketplace and into the more refined occupations of the court.

In their long history the Fugger family differed but slightly from other highly successful merchant dynasties. Like the Welsers or the von Stettens of Augsburg, the Imhofs of Nuremberg, or the Vöhlins of Memmingen, to name but a few, their business success enabled them to serve princes and eventually elevated them to a higher social stratum. Yet the Fuggers remained singular in the degree of their success. Their fortune allowed them to climb higher and endure longer than any other merchant family of southern Germany.

Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/fugger-family#ixzz1GGBx1164

Wikipedia: "When the Fuggers made their first loan to the Archduke Sigismund in 1487, they took as security an interest in silver and copper mines in the Tirol. This was the beginning of an extensive family involvement in mining and precious metals.[2] The Fuggers also participated in mining operations in Silesia. The Fuggers also owned copper mines in Hungary and their trade in spices, wool and silk extended to almost all parts of Europe."