WEST GERMANY: Rent Bargain

In the late 15th century, the financial empire of the Fugger Brothers blanketed Europe as Fugger linen left to bleach in the sun once covered the meadows around the fortress city of Augsburg, where the family fortune began. Brother Jakob was the genius of the Fuggers, buying silver mines in the Tyrol, exporting textiles, metal and salt to lands beyond the seas, bringing back rare spices, furs and fruit. Almost one-third of Augsburg's 34,000 people were employed by the Fuggers, and kings and emperors knocked on Jakob's door for funds to wage a war or buy support in an election.

He was private banker to Maximilian I, and Charles V was so heavily in his debt that Jakob once wrote him a saucy note: "May I remind Your Majesty that without my financial assistance you would not be sitting on your throne." As lenders to hard-pressed popes, Jakob and his brother managed papal finances in all of Germany, Bohemia, Hungary and Scandinavia.

Before he died in 1525, Jakob erected a monument to his family in their native Augsburg. With an impressive endowment fund of 76,000 Rhenish guilders, he built a little walled city within the city: six streets containing, in all, 53 double-story houses in neat rows. It was the world's first privately subsidized housing project. Its tenants were limited to poor Roman Catholics who "must lead a decent, Christian life" and who agreed to say a prayer once a day for the Fuggers.

Fuggerei, as the walled district came to be known, was 80% destroyed in an Allied bombing raid in October 1944. But it has been rebuilt in the old style—a quiet place of little yellow-and-green medieval houses, where vehicular traffic and "noisy trades" are prohibited, and where the four gates are locked at 10 p.m. nightly, as they have been since 1521. Anyone who stays out too late must pay a fee to get in.

This Easter week, in a custom 438 years old, elderly men and women will trudge up the creaky staircase to the auditor's office to pay their annual rent. It is one of the world's real housing bargains. The annual rent is still what Jakob Fugger decreed it to be 400 years ago: the equivalent of one Rhenish guilder—42¢.