Hochstetter family

The Höchstetter family (also rendered Hechstetter or Hochstetter),[1] from Höchstädt in western Bavaria near the banks of the Danube, were members of the fifteenth and sixteenth-century mercantile patriciate of Augsburg.

Rising prices bring out a hidden supply, and the size of the required investment had become too large for even the greatest merchant-banking house to monopolize, as the Fuggers discovered with their attempt on the copper market.

[4] A commission of the Reichstag held at Nuremberg in 1522–1523 found, in part, that "These rich Companies, even one of them, do in the year compass much more undoing to the Commonweal than all other robbers and thieves in that they and their servants give public display of luxuriousness, pomp and prodigal wealth, of which there is no small proof in that Bartholomew Rhein did win, in so short a time and with so little stock of trade, such notable riches in the Hochstetter Company — as hath openly appeared in the justifying before the City Court at Augsburg and at the Reichstag but lately held at Worms.

[1] Richard Ehrenberg describes the sixteenth-century economic activities in which the Hochstetter participated in a classic work, Das Zeitalter der Fugger: Geldkapital und Kreditverkehr im 16.

In 1564 Elizabeth I granted Daniel Höchstetter and his English partner Thomas Thurland a patent to mine and refine gold, copper, silver, and mercury (quicksilver), in England and Wales.