Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

NOTES 439
of wage-earners and those on any sort of
fixed income and so was often protested.
96. Langholm 1979, Wood 2002:73-76.
97· On the patristic literature on usury:
Maloney 1983; Gordon 1989; Moser 20oo;
Holman 2002:112-26; Jones 2004:25-30.
98. Matthew 5:42
99· St Basil of Caesarea, Homilia 11 in
Psalmum XIV (PG 29, 268-69).
100. op cit.
101. op cit.
102. Ambrose De Officiis 2.25.89.
103. Ambrose De Tobia 15:51. See Nelson
1949:3-5, Gordon 1989:114-118.
104. Though not entirely. It's worthy
to note that the main supply of slaves to
the empire at this time came from Germanic
barbarians outside the empire, who
were acquired either through war or debt.
105. "If each one," he wrote, "after
having taken from his personal wealth
whatever would satisfy his personal
needs, would leave what was superfluous
to those who lack every necessity, there
would be no rich or poor" (In llliud Lucae
49D)-Basil himself had been born an
aristocrat, but he had sold off his landed
estates and distributed the proceeds to the
poor.
106. Homilia 11 in Psalmum XIV (PG
29, 277C). The reference is to Proverbs
19.17.
107. Summa 8.3.1.3: "since grace is freely
given, it excludes the idea of debt . .. In
[no] sense does debt imply that God owes
anything to another creature."
108. Clavero (1986) sees this as a basic
conflict over the nature of the contract,
and hence the legal basis of human relations
in European history: usury, and by
extension profit, was denounced, but rent,
the basis of feudal relations, was never
challenged.
109. Gordon 1989:115. "What is commerce,"
wrote Cassiodorus (485-585), "except
to want to sell dear that which can be
bought cheap Therefore those merchants
are detestable who, with no consideration
of God's justice, burden their wares more
with perjury than value. Them the Lord
evicted them from the Temple saying, 'Do
not make my Father's house into a den of
thieves" (in Langholm 1996:454).
no. On the Jewish legal tradition
concerning usury, see Stein 1953, 1955;
Kirschenbaum 1985.
111. Poliakov 1977:21.
112. Nelson (1949) assumed that the
"Exception" was often held to apply to relations
between Christians and Jews, but
Noonan (195TIOI-2) insists that it was
mainly held to apply only to "heretics and
infidels, particularly the Saracens," and by
some, not even to them.
113. Up to 52 percent with security, up
to 120 percent without (Homer 1987:91).
114. Debtor's prisons, in the sense of
prisons exclusively for debtors, existed
in England only after 1263, but the imprisonment
of debtors has a much longer
history. Above all, Jewish lenders seem
to have been employed as the means of
transforming virtual, credit money into
coinage, collecting the family silver from
insolvent debtors, and turning it over to
royal mints. They also won title to a great
deal of land from defaulting debtors, most
of which ended up in the hands of barons
or monasteries (Singer 1964; Bowers 1983;
Schofield & Mayhew 2002) .
115. Roger of Wendower, Flowers of
History 252-53. Roger doesn't name the
victim; in some later versions his name is
Abraham, in others, Isaac.
116. Matthew Prior, in Bolles 1837:13.
117. Or even, for that matter, Nietzsche's
fantasies of the origins of justice
in mutilation. Where one was a projection
onto Jews of atrocities actually committed
against Jews, Nietzsche was writing in
an age where actual "savages" were often
punished by similar tortures and mutilations
for failure to pay their debts to the
colonial tax authorities, as later became a
most notorious scandal in Leopold's Belgian
Congo.
n8. Mundill (2002), Brand (2003).
119. Cohn 1972:80.
120. Peter Cantor, in Nelson 1949:1o-n.