Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

440 NOTES
121. It was a firm from Cahors, for instance,
who received the property of the
English Jews when the latter were finally
expelled in 1290. Though for a long time,
Lombards and Cahorsins were themselves
dependent on royal favor and hardly in
much better position than the Jews. In
France, the kings seemed to expropriate
and expel Jews and Lombards alternately
(Poliakov 1977:42).
122. Noonan 1957:18-19; Le Goff
1990:23-27.
123. There are two sorts of wealthgetting,
as I have said; one is a part of
household management, the other is retail
trade: the former necessary and honorable,
while that which consists in exchange is
justly censured; for it is unnatural, and a
mode by which men profit from one another.
The most hated sort, and with the
greatest reason, is usury, which makes a
profit out of money itself, and not from
the natural object of it. For money was
intended to be used in exchange, but not
to increase at interest. And this term "interest"
(takas), which means the birth
of money from money, is applied to the
breeding of money because the offspring
resembles the parent. "Wherefore of all
modes of getting wealth this is the most
unnatural" (Aristotle, Politics 1258b). The
Nicomachean Ethics (u21b) is equally
damning. For the best general analysis of
the Aristotelean tradition on usury: Langholm
1984.
124. Noonan 1957=!05-12; Langholm
1984=5o.
125. The technical term for the lost income
is lucrum cessans: see O'Brien 1920:
ro7-10, Noonan 1957=u4-28, Langholm
1992:6o-61; 1998:75; Spufford 1989:260.
126. As German merchants also did in
the Baltic cities of the Hanseatic alliance.
On the Medici bank as a case in point, see
de Roover 1946, 1963, Parks 2005.
127. The situation in Venice, a pioneer
in these matters, is telling: there was
no merchant guild, but only craft guilds,
since guilds were essentially created as
protection against the government, and
in Venice, the merchants were the government
(MacKenney 1987; Mauro
1993=259"-60).
128. They were accused of both heresy
and sodomy: see Barber 1978.
129. One cannot "prove" the Islamic
inspiration of European bills of exchange,
but considering the amount of trade between
the two sides of the Mediterranean,
denying it seems bizarre. Braude!
(1995:816-17) proposes that the idea must
have reached Europe through Jewish merchants,
who we know to have long been
using them in Egypt.
130. On bills of exchange: Usher 1914;
de Roover 1967; Boyer-Xambeu, Deleplace,
and Gillard 1994; Munro 2oo3b:542-46;
Denzel 2006. There were innumerable currencies,
any of which might at any time
be "cried up," "cried down," or otherwise
fluctuate in value. Bills of exchange also
allowed merchants to effectively engage
in currency speculation, and even get
around usury laws, once it became possible
to pay for one bill of exchange by
writing a different bill of exchange, due in
several months' time, for a slightly higher
sum. This was called "dry exchange" (de
Roover 1944), and over time the Church
became increasingly skeptical, causing yet
another round of financial creativity to get
around the laws. It's worthy of note that
the rates of interest on such commercial
loans were generally quite low: twelve
percent at the highest, in dramatic contrast
to consumer loans. This is a sign of
the increasingly lower risk of such transactions
(see Homer 1987 for a history of
interest rates).
131. Lane 1934·
132. "In very many respects, such as
the organization of slave labor, management
of colonies, imperial administration,
commercial institutions, maritime technology
and navigation, and naval gunnery,
the Italian city-states were the direct
forerunners of the Portuguese and Spanish
empires, to the shaping of which the
Italians contributed so heavily, and in the