pictures painted by the clergy of the torments that awaited him in hell were an increasing source of worry. The prohibition on usury thus helped channel the wealth of the rich away from making usurious consumption loans and toward helping poorer unfortunates. Such help could be given informally, or formally through charitable donations to the Church. As in the Hebrew tribes, the prohibition on usury suppressed the market in favor of the community. Thus as the commercialization of agriculture created greater numbers of the poor, the Church took their side by restricting the debt market.
The Church’s actions were also not unrelated to the political battles it was fighting at that time with the secular authorities. The reforms initiated by Pope Gregory VII in 1075—the so-called Papal Revolution—attempted to separate the Church from the feudal hierarchy, especially the domination of the Holy Roman Emperor.15 The details of the conflict, which culminated in the victory of the Church, need not concern us but some aspects are important. In order to attract support for their cause, Church scholars systematized and rationalized the Church’s vast legal traditions. A comprehensive body of canon law emerged, which could now guide Church courts, and which helped reaffirm that all Catholic authorities, including the powerful emperor, were constrained by a higher, principle-based, law. Furthermore, in response to competition from the now-more-reliable Church courts governed by canon law, feudal rulers developed their own legal system.
Both the Church and the ruler competed to offer better justice to attract plaintiffs into their courts. Since the poor and the powerless benefited disproportionately from the law, courts consequently became more sympathetic to their problems. Better-enforced usury prohibitions became one element of that competition.
The Church’s actions thus had mixed effects on the poor peasants and their communities. The Church may have helped make property more salable in order to expand its own wealth.16 Easier salability allowed feudal lords to move unproductive peasants off their land, rendering them destitute. However, the Church was probably also motivated by the welfare of these very same peasants and concerned about the stability of the community when it banned usury and exploitative market transactions. And it did use some of the wealth it accumulated to provide charity to the destitute.
The Intellectual Support for the Ban on Usury
The Church could appeal to a long line of thinkers, past and present, for support for the ban on usury. The Greek philosopher Aristotle, who was being rediscovered in this period, was firmly against interest on loans. He saw the production of goods to satisfy physical wants such as food and clothing as useful economic activity. Farming, the raising of livestock, and manufacturing were all productive. In contrast, trade, which simply exchanged goods for one another; hire, which lent out goods for money; and usury, which lent out money for money, produced nothing that satisfied physical wants. Of the three, “The most hated sort, and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself, and not from its natural use of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest.”17
St. Augustine, a guiding light of the early Church, similarly warned about the three sins of fallen men: the lust for power, sexual lust, and the lust for money. Of these, he was most ambivalent about the lust for power, which if accompanied by a sense of civic duty and honor, could protect the community against external attack.18 He also discussed in his startlingly frank Confessions how his private desires such as sex—as a young man, he was sexually active, and later, he lived with a mistress who bore him a son—came in the way of his relationship with God. Here too he seemed to be ambiguous, if not understanding. About the lust for money, though, he was clear in his condemnation.
Drawing on such sources, Church scholars in the Middle Ages concluded that trade or enterprise was necessary but perilous to the soul. The businessman could always be tempted to hanker after excess profit by charging more than the just price—the price that provided adequate income for the seller to maintain his station in life. This constituted avarice, a deadly sin. Working hard to enhance profits was clearly not in accordance with medieval thinking. Worse still was finance, which “if not immoral, was at best sordid, at worst disreputable.”19 These strongly Aristotelian attitudes, which still dominate many societies today, reflected a suspicion of the middleman. They were thought to make money not by adding intrinsic value to the traded item, but by moving goods or money to areas of shortage, or even, many believed, by creating the shortage in the first place.
WHY THE CHURCH BECAME MORE TOLERANT OF USURY
Important developments eventually moderated Church hostility toward business and finance in Europe. The Black Death, a plague more deadly than any before in Europe’s recorded history, did much to shake the distribution of income and social structures. There were now relatively fewer poor to protect. Moreover, commercial activity also picked up; the development of new military technologies led to larger states, and therefore larger, safer, internal markets. There was consequently more opportunity to trade. Lending to merchants increased. With the state also demanding loans to finance its larger spending, lending did not seem so exploitative—it was no longer primarily consumption loans to the poor untutored peasant but rather loans to financially sophisticated borrowers (as the modern parlance goes). Furthermore, it was less important for the Church to protect the borrower as more of the wealthy competed to lend. Also, the Church itself became an important usurer as it lent out the enormous wealth it had accumulated following the Papal Revolution.
Eventually, the Church’s wealth made it a target for the state. As critics attacked the Church during the Protestant Reformation, monarchs seized an opportunity to cut the Church down to size, and it was rarely a factor in governance again.
The Black Death
In October 1347, twelve Genoese trading ships docked at the Sicilian port of Messina after a long journey through the Black Sea. Many of the sailors on board were dead, covered with black boils that gave the illness its name, the Black Death. The Sicilian authorities ordered the “death ships” out of the harbor, but it was too late. Over the next five years, and over the course of subsequent recurrences, the bubonic plague pandemic would wipe out an estimated third of Europe’s population.
The humanitarian catastrophe had a thin silver lining. The lucky peasantry that survived the Black Death now could farm much larger land holdings, could concentrate on better land, and were thus significantly richer. For instance, in 1341 in the English village of Stoughton, 52 percent of landholdings were eleven acres or less. By 1477, only 16 percent were that size, with 58 percent of holdings larger than thirty acres.20 With many in the community becoming more prosperous, life became less precarious, and the need for emergency consumption loans and Church charity diminished.
The poor were still around, albeit fewer in number. Fortunately, with more people possessing surplus resources, competition to lend to those in adversity increased. With vast tracts of now-untilled land as well as commercial opportunities in towns beckoning the poor, the extremes in bargaining power that might have led to debt bondage no longer prevailed. Indeed, across much of Western Europe, the Black Death precipitated the end of serfdom.21 Greater prosperity and competition to lend that prosperity now diminished the old rationales for prohibiting usury.
As we will see throughout the book, natural or economic catastrophes and technological progress are the big drivers of societal change. After the Black Death, technological progress took over. Francis Bacon, the seventeenth-century courtier and philosopher, thought gunpowder, printing, and the compass were the three greatest inventions known to man.22 Their arrival in the West played a part in the expansion of markets, and the further weakening of the feudal community as well as the Catholic Church. They also heralded the rise of the nation-state, a key player in our narrative.
Cannons and Internal Commerce
In feudal Europe around the turn of the first millennium, all that it seemed to take to create a self-sufficient political entity—it would be too much to call this a state—were fortified walls and a retinue
