Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

AGE OF THE GREAT CAPITALIST EMPIRES 323
in some more profitable investment. Originally, this logic was just applied
to commercial loans. Increasingly, it was now applied to all loans.
Far from being unnatural, then, the growth of money was now treated
as completely expected. All money was assumed to be capitaJ.29 Second,
the assumption that usury is something that one properly practices on
one's enemies, and therefore, by extension, that all commerce partakes
something of the nature of war, never entirely disappears. Calvin, for
instance, denied that Deuteronomy only referred to the Amalekites;
clearly, he said, it meant that usury was acceptable when dealing with
Syrians or Egyptians; indeed with all nations with whom the Jews
traded.30 The result of opening the gates was, at least tacitly, to suggest
that one could now treat anyone, even a neighbor, as a foreignerY
One need only observe how European merchant adventurers of the day
actually were treating foreigners, in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, to
understand what this might mean in practice.
Or, one might look closer to home. Take the story of another
well-known debtor of the time, the Margrave Casimir of Brandenburg­
Ansbach (I48I-I527), of the famous Hohenzollern dynasty:
Casimir was the son of Margrave Friedrich the Elder of Brandenburg,
who has come to be known as one of the "mad princes" of the
German Renaissance. Sources differ on just how mad he actually was.
One contemporary chronicle describes him as "somewhat deranged in
his head from too much racing and jousting;" most agree that he was
given to fits of inexplicable rage, as well as to the sponsorship of wild,
extravagant festivals, said often to have degenerated into wild bacchanalian
orgies.32
All agree, however, that he was poor at managing his money.
At the beginning of ISIS, Friedrich was in such financial trouble-he
is said to have owed 2oo,ooo guilders-that he alerted his creditors,
mostly fellow nobles, that he might soon be forced to temporarily suspend
interest payments on his debts. This seems to have caused a crisis
of faith, and within a matter of weeks, his son Casimir staged a palace
coup-moving, in the early hours of February 26, ISIS, to seize control
of the castle of Plassenburg while his father was distracted with the
celebration of Carnival, then forcing him to sign papers abdicating for
reason of mental infirmity. Friedrich spent the rest of his life confined
in Plassenburg, denied all visitors and correspondence. When at one
point his guards requested that the new Margrave provide a couple
guilders so he could pass the time gambling with them, Casimir made
a great public show of refusal, stating (ridiculously, of course) that his
father had left his affairs in such disastrous shape that he could not
possibly afford toY