Jacob Fugger, pictured here in a 1518 portrait by Albrecht Dürer, was the moneyman behind the 1519 election of a new Holy Roman Emperor. PHOTOGRAPH BY LEEMAGE / UIG VIA GETTY

The outsider candidate in the Imperial election of 1519, which was meant to choose a Holy Roman Emperor, was Henry VIII of England. He had no particular dynastic claim to the title, and, though he had one of his representatives spread the word that he had some command of the “German tongue,” he did not have much of a connection to the people he would rule. He mostly got in the race because, then as now, both of the main candidates, despite their inherited positions and elaborate claims, seemed vulnerable, if not implausible. And people, including the Pope—this was when Henry was young, before the divorces and beheadings—kept telling him that what the field needed was an energetic, competent monarch like him. Who could resist?

This was, needless to say, not a particularly democratic election. The Emperor would be chosen by seven electors—various lesser rulers of Mitteleuropa, men like King Louis of Bohemia, Joachim of Brandenburg, and Saxony’s Frederick the Wise, who, two years later, would be hiding Martin Luther in a castle, under the pseudonym Junker Jörg. The two candidates were Charles, who was the Habsburg grandson of the recently deceased Emperor Maximilian but was an inexperienced teenager, and, awkwardly for the Germans, the King of Spain and the Netherlands; and Francis I of France, who had a strong interest in building an empire—and also another advantage. As Greg Steinmetz writes in his new book, “The Richest Man Who Ever Lived: The Life and Times of Jacob Fugger,” “the race would be an auction.” The electors were not all that interested in delving into the characters of the candidates. They were there to collect bribes in return for their votes. Have two wealthy contenders increased the pool of money on the table. With Henry factored in, 1519 became one of the few Imperial elections that was contested—it was not, as the saying goes, simply a coronation, though it ended in one. It also was a stark and depressing example of the importance of the campaign-finance process—not just the raw amount of money but the mechanism.

By the time Henry appeared, a problem had emerged for Charles and Francis. The amount they were willing to commit in bribes went far beyond the hard cash that they had in hand. The Empire would be worth it, but the problem for the bribees was that it can be very hard to get an emperor to give you the money he owes; they wanted to be paid in advance. So whoever wanted to win would have to arrange the financing. This is where Jacob Fugger, Steinmetz’s subject, comes in. He was Europe’s leading moneyman—an innovator in double-entry accounting and rapid multi-city money transfers—and had funded many of Maximilian’s campaigns, in return for the output of the Habsburgs’ Tyrolean silver mines. He could front the money.

This would be a profitable deal, though, and there were other syndicates—the Italians, the Welser family—who wanted to be the bankers for the bribes. The most striking part of Steinmetz’s account is how Charles almost lost the Empire by choosing a cut-rate banker who offered him better terms, rather than going with Fugger. The electors wouldn’t take notes from those they regarded as shady financiers. “The electors want to have Fugger’s word and nobody else’s,” a Habsburg operative wrote to Charles’s aunt, Margaret, urging her to tell her nephew to commit to him. Similarly, an election commissioner—whose job does not seem to have been to keep things clean—wrote to Charles that the electors “have neither faith, letters nor seals from any merchants other than the Fuggers.” They were voting for a bank, not for a prince.

In the end, the bribes added up to eight hundred and fifty-two thousand florins. The Italians and Welsers got some of the business, but Fugger financed five hundred and forty-four thousand of it—an astounding sum at the time, enough to fight a couple of wars. Fugger would, Steinmetz writes, get that money back in many forms, some hard to list on a balance sheet. There was a lease on mercury mines in the Maestrazgo mountains. The silver concessions were extended, too. And when, at the Diet of Nuremberg, there was an attempt to break Fugger’s hold on the pepper trade, he complained to Charles, in a letter that alluded to the loan. Charles sent a message to the Imperial prosecutor, Caspar Marth, saying, “In no way will I allow the merchants to be prosecuted.”

When is political power a matter of having the right financial backers, and managing your relations with them? Some of the records on Fugger and the princes exist because they and their contemporaries hardly bothered to hide the corruption. (Not that it was uncontroversial—Fugger also financed the purchase of Church offices, linking him to the sale of indulgences, practices that enraged, among others, his contemporary Martin Luther.) But there are times, then and now, when the money just gets to be too much. At a certain point, Henry VIII realized that, for all his charm and wiles, he had entered the wrong game. According to the Duke of Suffolk, when Henry realized “the great charges and profusion of money” that Charles V, as he now was, had spent “for the obtent of that dignity, his grace did wonder thereat and said he was right glad he obtained not the same.” And Henry was glad, anyway, that the French candidate hadn’t won.