Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

THE MIDDLE AGES 289
One mustn't exaggerate the Jewish role in lending. Most Jews had
nothing to do with the business, and those who did were typically bit
players, making minor loans of grain or cloth for a return in kind.
Others weren't even really Jews. Already in the 1190s, preachers were
complaining about lords who would work hand in glove with Christian
moneylenders claiming they were "our Jews"-and thus under their
special protection.120 By the 11oos, most Jewish moneylenders had long
since been displaced by Lombards (from Northern Italy) and Cahorsins
(from the French town of Cahors)-who established themselves across
Western Europe, and became notorious rural usurers.121
The rise of rural usury was itself a sign of a growing free peasantry
(there had been no point in making loans to serfs, since they had nothing
to repossess). It accompanied the rise of commercial farming, urban
craft guilds, and the "commercial revolution" of the High Middle Ages,
all of which finally brought Western Europe to a level of economic
activity comparable to that long since considered normal in other parts
of the world. The Church quickly came under considerable popular
pressure to do something about the problem, and at first, it did try to
tighten the clamps. Existing loopholes in the usury laws were systematically
closed, particularly the use of mortgages. These latter began as
an expedient: as in Medieval Islam, those determined to dodge the law
could simply present the money, claim to be buying the debtor's house
or field, and then "rent" it back to the debtor until the principal was
repaid. In the case of a mortgage, the house was in theory not even
purchased but pledged as security, but any income from it accrued to
the lender. In the eleventh century this became a favorite trick of monasteries.
In 1148 it was made illegal: henceforth, all income was to be
subtracted from the principal. Similarly, in 1187 merchants were forbidden
to charge higher prices when selling on credit-the Church thereby
going much further than any school of Islamic law ever had. In 1179
usury was made a mortal sin and usurers were excommunicated and
denied Christian burial.122 Before long, new orders of itinerant friars
like the Franciscans and Dominicans organized preaching campaigns,
traveling town to town, village to village, threatening moneylenders
with the loss of their eternal souls if they did not make restitution to
their victims.
All this was echoed by a heady intellectual debate in the newly
founded universities, not so much as to whether usury was sinful and
illegal, but precisely why. Some argued that it was theft of another's
material possessions; others that it constituted a theft of time, charging
others for something that belonged only to God. Some held that it
embodied the sin of Sloth, since like the Confucians, Catholic thinkers