Though most often applied to the plutocrats and monopolists of America’s Gilded Age, the phrase “Robber Baron” actually has a much earlier derivation. During the reign of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III in the mid-thirteenth century, feudal landowners in the Rhine Valley were awarded lucrative rights to a series of strategic toll points along the river, then one of Europe’s most critical highways for transport and trade. When the Emperor died without a successor in 1250, the ensuing power vacuum afforded landowners the latitude to gain even more from their monopoly.

The robber barons of thirteenth-century Germany lived under feudalism, but their operating ethic was identical to that of their capitalist equivalents hundreds of years later: to maximize profit with minimal expenditure while extracting rents from control of a vital piece of infrastructure. This was what Henry J. Raymond had in mind when he issued a salvo against Cornelius Vanderbilt in the February 9, 1859 edition of the New York Times comparing the shipping magnate to “those old German barons who . . . swooped down upon the commerce of the noble river and wrung tribute.” “Mr Vanderbilt,” wrote Raymond, “has devoted himself to the study of steam navigation of his country – not with the object of extending its development, but for the purpose of making every prosperous enterprise of the kind in turn his tributary or his victim.” Mark Twain would similarly write an open letter to Vanderbilt in 1869, denouncing among other things the public idolatry he inspired:

You seem to be the idol of only a crawling swarm of small souls, who love to glorify your most flagrant unworthiness in print or praise your vast possessions worshippingly; or sing of your unimportant private habits and sayings and doings, as if your millions gave them dignity.