seize new business opportunities. This included a contract to supply grain to the Austrian army, something they would previously not have been allowed to do.
By the end of the decade, Rothschild was one of the richest Jews in Frankfurt and already a well-established businessman. Full emancipation had to wait until 1811; it was finally implemented by Karl von Dalberg, who had been made Grand Duke of Frankfurt in Napoleon’ s 1806 reorganization of Germany. Mayer Amschel told his son,“[ Y ] ou are now a citizen.”
Such events did not end the struggle for Jewish emancipation, since there were subsequent reverses, particularly at the Congress of Vienna of 1815, which formed the post-Napoleonic political settlement. But there was no going back to the ghetto for the Rothschilds. Mayer Amschel and his sons would soon have the largest bank in nineteenth-century Europe, with branches in Frankfurt, London, Paris, Naples, and Vienna.
This was not an isolated event. First the French Revolutionary Armies and then Napoleon invaded large parts of continental Europe, and in almost all the areas they invaded, the existing institutions were remnants of medieval times, empowering kings, princes, and nobility and restricting trade both in cities and the countryside. Serfdom and feudalism were much more important in many of these areas than in France itself. In Eastern Europe, including Prussia and the Hungarian part of Austria-Hungary, serfs were tied to the land. In the West this strict form of serfdom had already vanished, but peasants owed to feudal lords various seigneurial fees, taxes, and labor obligations. For example, in the polity of Nassau-Usingen, peasants were subject to 230 different payments, dues, and services. Dues included one that had to be paid after an animal had been slaughtered, called the blood tithe; there was also a bee tithe and a wax tithe. If a piece of property was bought or sold, the lord was owed fees. The guilds regulating all kinds of economic activity in the cities were also typically stronger in these places than in France. In the western German cities of Cologne and Aachen, the adoption of spinning and weaving textile machines was blocked by guilds. Many cities, from Berne in Switzerland to Florence in Italy, were controlled by a few families.