Debt (52 page)

All this fit the broader Medieval pattern: actual gold and silver, such of it as was still around, was increasingly laid up in sacred places; as centralized states disappeared, the regulation of markets was increasingly in the hands of the Church.

At first, the Catholic attitudes toward usury were just as harsh as Muslim ones, and attitudes toward merchants, considerably harsher. In the first case, they had little choice, as many Biblical texts were quite explicit. Consider Exodus 22:25:

Both the Psalms (15:5, 54:12) and Prophets (Jeremiah 9.6, Nehemiah 5:11) were explicit in assigning usurers to death and hellfire. What’s more, the early Christian Fathers, who laid the foundation of Church teachings on social issues in the waning years of the Roman empire, were writing amidst the ancient world’s last great debt crisis, one that was effectively in the process of destroying the empire’s remaining free peasantry.
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While few were willing to condemn slavery, all condemned usury.

Usury was seen above all as an assault on Christian charity, on Jesus’s injunction to treat the poor as they would treat the Christ himself, giving without expectation of return and allowing the borrower to decide on recompense (Luke 6:34–35). In 365 ad, for instance, St. Basil delivered a sermon on usury in Cappadocia that set the standard for such issues:

That is, until the suppliant mentions “interest.”

Basil was particularly offended by the crass dishonesty by which moneylenders operated; their abuse of Christian fellowship. The man in need comes seeking a friend, the rich man pretends to be one. In fact he’s a secret enemy, and everything he says is a lie. Witness, St. Basil said, how the rich man will always at first swear mighty oaths that he has no money to his name:

The borrower, coming home with his newfound money, at first rejoices. But quickly, “the money slips away,” interest accumulates, and his possessions are sold off. Basil grows poetic in describing the debtor’s plight. It’s as if time itself has become his enemy. Every day and night conspires against him, as they are the parents of interest. His life becomes a “sleepless daze of anxious uncertainty,” as he is humiliated in public; while at home, he is constantly hiding under the couch at every unexpected knock on the door, and can barely sleep, startled awake by nightmare visions of his creditor standing over his pillow.
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Probably the most famous ancient homily on usury, though, was Saint Ambrose’s
De Tobia
, pronounced over several days in Milan in 380 bc. He reproduces the same vivid details as Basil: fathers forced to sell their children, debtors who hanged themselves out of shame. Usury, he observes, must be considered a form of violent robbery, even murder.
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Ambrose, though, added one small proviso that was later to have enormous influence. His sermon was the first to carefully examine
every Biblical reference to moneylending, which meant that he had to address the one problem later authors always had to struggle with—the fact that, in the Old Testament, usury is not quite forbidden to everyone. The key sticking point is always Deuteronomy 23:19–20:

So who then is this “stranger” or (a better translation of the Hebrew
nokri
, “foreigner”)? Presumably, one against whom robbery and murder would have been justified as well. After all, the ancient Jews lived amidst tribes like the Amalekites, on whom God had specifically instructed them to make war. If by extracting interest one is, as he puts it, fighting without a sword, then it is only legitimate to do so from those “whom it would not be a crime to kill.”
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For Ambrose, living in Milan, all this was something of a technicality. He included all Christians and all those subject to Roman law as “brothers”; there weren’t, then, lot of Amalekites around.
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Later, the “Exception of St. Ambrose,” as it came to be known, was to become extremely important.

All of these sermons—and there were many of them—left certain critical questions unanswered. What
should
the rich man do when receiving a visit from his troubled neighbor? True, Jesus had said to give without expectation of return, but it seemed unrealistic to expect most Christians to do that. And even if they did, what sort of ongoing relationships would that create? St. Basil took the radical position. God had given us all things in common, and he had specifically instructed the rich to give their possessions to the poor. The communism of the Apostles—who pooled all their wealth, and took freely what they needed—was thus the only proper model for a truly Christian society.
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Few of the other Christian Fathers were willing to take things this far. Communism was the ideal, but in this fallen and temporary world, they argued, it was simply unrealistic. The Church must accept existing property arrangements, but also come up with spiritual arguments to encourage the rich to nonetheless act with Christian charity. Many of these employed distinctly commercial metaphors. Even Basil was willing to indulge in this sort of thing:

Since Christ is in the poor, a gift of charity is a loan to Jesus, to be repaid with interest inconceivable on earth.

Charity, however, is a way of maintaining hierarchy, not undermining it. What Basil is talking about here really has nothing to do with debt, and playing with such metaphors seems ultimately to serve only to underline the fact that the rich man doesn’t
owe
the poor suppliant anything, any more than God is in any way legally bound to save the soul of anyone who feeds a beggar. “Debt” here dissolves into a pure hierarchy (hence, “the Lord”) where utterly different beings provide each other utterly different kinds of benefit. Later theologians were to explicitly confirm this: human beings live in time, noted St. Thomas Aquinas, so it makes sense to say that sin is a debt of punishment we owe to God. But God lives outside of time. By definition, he cannot owe anything to anyone. His grace can therefore only be a gift given with no obligation.
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This, in turn, provides an answer to the question: What are they really asking the rich man to do? The Church opposed usury, but it had little to say about relations of feudal dependency, where the rich man provides charity and the poor suppliant shows his gratitude in other ways. Neither, when these kinds of arrangements began to emerge across the Christian West, did the Church offer significant objections.
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Former debt peons were gradually transformed into serfs or vassals. In some ways, the relationship was not much different, since vassalage was, in theory, a voluntary, contractual relationship. Just as a Christian has to be able to freely choose to submit himself to “the Lord,” so did a vassal have to agree to make himself someone else’s man. All this proved perfectly consonant with Christianity.

Commerce, on the other hand, remained a problem. There was not much of a leap between condemning usury as the taking of “whatever exceeds the amount loaned” and condemning any form of profit-taking. Many—Saint Ambrose among them—were willing to take that leap. Where Mohammed declared that an honest merchant deserved a place by the seat of God in heaven, men like Ambrose wondered if an “honest merchant” could actually exist. Many held that one simply could not be both a merchant and a Christian.
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In the early Middle Ages, this was not a pressing issue—especially since so much commerce was conducted by foreigners. The conceptual problems, however, were
never resolved. What did it mean that one could only lend to “strangers”? Was it just usury, or was even commerce tantamount to war?

Probably the most notorious, and often catastrophic, way that this problem worked itself out in the High Middle Ages was in relations between Christians and Jews. In the years since Nehemiah, Jewish attitudes toward lending had themselves changed. In the time of Augustus, Rabbi Hillel had effectively rendered the sabbatical year a dead letter, by allowing two parties to place a rider on any particular loan contract agreeing that it would not apply. While both the Torah and the Talmud stand opposed to loans on interest, exceptions were made in dealing with Gentiles—particularly as, over the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, European Jews were excluded from almost any other line of work.
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This in turn made it harder to contain the practice, as witnessed in the common joke, current in twelfth-century ghettos to justify usury between Jews. It consisted, it is said, of reciting Deuteronomy 23:20 in interrogative tones to make it mean the opposite of its obvious sense: ‘Unto a foreigner thou mayest lend upon usury, but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury?’
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On the Christian side, in 1140 ad the “Exception of Saint Ambrose” found its way into Gratian’s
Decretum
, which came to be considered the definitive collection of canon law. At the time, economic life fell very much under the jurisdiction of the Church. While that might appear to leave Jews safely outside the system, in reality, matters were more complicated. For one thing, while both Jews and Gentiles would occasionally attempt to make recourse to the Exception, the prevailing opinion was that it only really applied to Saracens or others with whom Christendom was literally at war. After all, Jews and Christians lived in the same towns and villages. If one were to concede that the Exception allowed Jews and Christians the right to lend to each other at interest, it would also mean that they had the right to murder one another.
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No one really wanted to say that. On the other hand, real relations between Christians and Jews often did seem to skate perilously close to this unfortunate ideal—though obviously the actual murder (apart from mere economic aggression) was all on one side.

In part this was due to the habit of Christian princes of exploiting, for their own purposes, the fact that Jews did sit slightly outside the system. Many encouraged Jews to operate as moneylenders, under their protection, simply because they also knew that protection could be withdrawn at any time. The kings of England were notorious in
this regard. They insisted that Jews be excluded from merchant and craft guilds, but granted them the right to charge extravagant rates of interest, backing up the loans by the full force of law.
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Debtors in Medieval England were regularly thrown in prisons until their families settled with the creditor.
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Yet the same regularly happened to the Jews themselves. In 1210 ad, for example, King John ordered a tallage, or emergency levy, to pay for his wars in France and Ireland. According to one contemporary chronicler “all the Jews throughout England, of both sexes, were seized, imprisoned, and tortured severely, in order to do the king’s will with their money.” Most who where put to torture offered all they had and more—but on that occasion, one particularly wealthy merchant, a certain Abraham of Bristol, who the king decided owed him ten thousand marks of silver (a sum equivalent to about a sixth of John’s total annual revenue), became famous for holding out. The king therefore ordered that one of his molars be pulled out daily, until he paid. After seven had been extracted, Abraham finally gave in.
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