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The Rothschilds' heritage of drive and power traces back 200 years to the Frankfurt ghetto. Merchant Meyer Amschel Rothschild, a small man with a large dream hidden behind his beard and caftan, built up such a lively trade in cloth, commodities and old coins that he was able to branch into the more promising pastime of moneychanging. As he prospered, Meyer moved to the ghetto's five-story "House with the Green Shield" (he had been born in the humbler "Red Shield House" that gave the family its name—Rot Schild) and sent his bumptious sons off to the financial strongholds of Europe to try their hands at business. Nathan settled in London, Jakob in Paris, Salomon in Vienna, Kalmann in Naples, and Amschel stayed home to help Father. The turning point in Meyer's career came when he ingratiated himself with Prince William of Hesse by selling him rare coins at a bargain. The prince reciprocated by giving Meyer the job of investing his vast cash reserves.
Prepared for just such an opening, the Rothschilds had created a communications system of fast coaches and a Yiddish-German cipher to link the family diaspora. Meyer sent Prince William's Hessian thalers to London, where Son Nathan's speculations multiplied them and won the family a small fortune and big reputation. When the British asked Nathan to smuggle gold to Wellington's troops trapped in Portugal during the Napoleonic wars, he shipped the gold straight to France, where Brother Jakob slipped it through the Pyrenees. Nathan found out about Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo before anyone else in Britain, thanks to a courier who sped a Dutch newspaper to him. He used the news to make a killing on the London stock market, where he customarily leaned in stoic solitude against a post that became known as "the Rothschild pillar."
With these triumphs, the Rothschilds earned wide acclaim for shrewdness, reliability and profitability, quickly became lenders to the great. Jakob's loans helped France conquer Algeria. From Vienna, Brother Salomon raised millions for the Habsburgs, who—after some hard prompting at a highly anti-Semitic court—in 1822 rewarded the Rothschilds and all their descendants with the title of baron and their noble coat of arms. From Naples, Brother Kalmann floated huge loans for the Papal States and the King of Naples by placing them with the other Rothschilds.
Supported by his indebted friend Metternich, Salomon won the right to sell lottery bonds to the public in order to build the Austrian Empire's first important railway. Brother Jakob, who had a lease on both the Bourbons and Napoleon III, laid down France's first railways (on which he made a great profit by artificially running up prices of the shares). The British Rothschilds ignored the country's industrial boom, but propped the young government of the U.S. with loans and, in combination with de Rothschild Frères, made loans to Brazil. "Money is the God of our times, and Rothschild is his prophet," sang Heinrich Heine, who marveled at seeing a French borrower tip his hat to the chamber pot of Baron Jakob.