the world of private banking

PROtEStANt bANKING 241
Protestant Banking During Early Modern Times in Some Other Catholic
Countries
In Germany 19 the most important merchant bankers like the Fuggers, Welsers,
Höchstetters and Imhoffs remained Catholic after the Reformation. We do not
have much information on Protestant firms doing their business in the sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries mainly in Catholic towns or countries, except for
the Lutheran Rehlinger merchant bank which acted in and out of Augsburg. The
Rehlingers were related to German and Italian firms at Venice and Antwerp in
the sixteenth century, and additionally in Piacenza and Lyons in the seventeenth
century. They made loans to the courts of Austria, Spain and England. In the
early seventeenth century they orientated their investments more to the Protestant
low countries with shares in the ‘East-India Company’ in Amsterdam and the
‘West-India Company’ in Rotterdam. During the Thirty Years War, Max Conrad
Rehlinger (1575–1642) got into difficulties because of his Protestant partisanship.
He fled in 1629 to Bern just before being outlawed by the Emperor. With the part
of his wealth he had saved from confiscation he continued to advance money to
the Protestant faction. He died in 1642 at Geneva, where he had become influential
in Protestant international banking. After his death, his son Ferdinand (1619–87)
lived and worked in Lyons in 1643–9 and then returned to Germany, but without
continuing his career as a merchant banker.
In the later eighteenth century we find more Protestant German merchant
bankers doing their business in Catholic countries, e.g. members of the Metzler
and Bethmann families from Frankfurt in Bordeaux and Vienna. 20 The banking
house of Johann Philipp Bethmann was also an innovator, using the technique of
the partial obligation to float more than fifty bond issues in Austria with a total sum
of 38 million Austrian florins by the last decades of the eighteenth century. One
may now ask the reasons for the offering of these lucrative activities to a Protestant
banking firm. One must admit that some tolerance was given to them under the
Leboyer, ‘Les banques européennes et l’industrialisation internationale dans la première
moitié du XIXe siècle’, in P. Léon (ed.), Histoire économique et sociale du monde, vol. III,
L’avènement de l’ère industrielle (1789-années 1850), vol. 1 (Paris, 1976); H. Großkreuz,
Privatkapital und Kanalbau in Frankreich 1814–1848: Eine Fallstudie zur Rolle der Banken
in der französischen Industrialisierung, Schriften zur Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte,
vol. 28 (Berlin, 1977); L. Bergeron, Banquiers, négociants et manufacturiers parisiens du
Directoire à l’Empire (Paris, 1978); M. Körner, ‘Banquiers et financiers suisses en France’,
in Marchés et Techniques Financières, vol. 12, 1989, p. 40; F. Baudequin, ‘Clavière’, in
Marchés et Techniques Financières, vol. 12, 1989, pp. 42–3.
19
For more information on banking in Germany, see E. Klein, Deutsche
Bankengeschichte, vol. 1, Von den Anfängen bis zum Ende des alten Reiches (1806)
(Frankfurt, 1992).
20
Klein, Bankengeschichte, pp. 246–56.