Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

278 DEBT
book-keeping along with secret codes and ciphers, giving alms to the
poor, supporting places of worship, perhaps, dedicating himself to the
writing of poetry, while still able to translate his general creditworthiness
into great capital reserves by appealing to family and partners.79
Lombard's picture is to some degree inspired by the famous Thousand
and One Nights description of Sindbad, who, having spent his youth
in perilous mercantile ventures to faraway lands, finally retired, rich
beyond dreams, to spend the rest of his life amidst gardens and dancing
girls, telling tall tales of his adventures. Here's a glimpse, from the eyes
of a humble porter (also named Sindbad) when first summoned to see
him by the master's page:
He found it to be a goodly mansion, radiant and full of majesty,
till he brought him to a grand sitting room wherein he saw
a company of nobles and great lords seated at tables garnished
with all manner of flowers and sweet-scented herbs, besides
great plenty of dainty viands and fruits dried and fresh and
confections and wines of the choicest vintages. There also were
instruments of music and mirth and lovely slave girls playing
and singing. All the company was ranged according to rank,
and in the highest place sat a man of worshipful and noble
aspect whose bearded sides hoariness had stricken, and he was
stately of stature and fair of favor, agreeable of aspect and
full of gravity and dignity and majesty. So Sindbad the Porter
was confounded at that which he beheld and said in himself,
"By Allah, this must be either some king's palace, or a piece
of Paradise! "80
It's worth quoting not only because it represents a certain ideal, a
picture of the perfect life, but because there's no real Christian parallel.
It would be impossible conceive of such an image appearing in, say, a
Medieval French romance.
The veneration of the merchant was matched by what can only be
called the world's first popular free-market ideology. True, one should
be careful not to confuse ideals with reality. Markets were ever entirely
independent from the government. Islamic regimes did employ all the
usual strategies of manipulating tax policy to encourage the growth of
markets, and they periodically tried to intervene in commercial law.81
Still, there was a very strong popular feeling that they shouldn't. Once
freed from its ancient scourges of debt and slavery, the local bazaar had
become, for most, not a place of moral danger, but the very opposite: