Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

Chapter Te n
THE MIDDLE AGES
(600 -1450 AD)
Artificial wealth comprises the things
which of themselves satisfy no natural
need, fo r example money, which is a
human contrivance.
-St. Thomas Aquinas
IF THE AXIAL AGE saw the emergence of complementary ideals of
commodity markets and universal world religions, the Middle Ages
were the period in which those two institutions began to merge.
Everywhere, the age began with the collapse of empires. Eventually,
new states formed, but in these new states, the nexus between war,
bullion, and slavery was broken; conquest and acquisition for their
own sake were no longer celebrated as the end of all political life. At
the same time, economic life, from the conduct of international trade
to the organization of local markets, came to fall increasingly under
the regulation of religious authorities. One result was a widespread
movement to control, or even forbid, predatory lending. Another was
a return, across Eurasia, to various forms of virtual credit money.
Granted, this is not the way we're used to thinking of the Middle
Ages. For most of us, "Medieval" remains a synonym for superstition,
intolerance, and oppression. Yet for most of the earth's inhabitants, it
could only be seen as an extraordinary improvement over the terrors
of the Axial Age.
One reason for our skewed perception is that we're used to thinking
of the Middle Ages as something that happened primarily in Western
Europe, in territories that had been little more than border outposts
of the Roman Empire to begin with. According to the conventional
wisdom, with the collapse of the empire, the cities were largely