Usury in Christian Middle Ages. A Reconsideration of the Historiographical Tradition (1949–2010)

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FONDAZIONE ISTITUTO INTERNAZIONALE DI STORIA ECONOMICA “F. DATINI” PRATO

RELIGIONE E ISTITUZIONI RELIGIOSE NELL’ECONOMIA EUROPEA. 1000-1800 RELIGION AND RELIGIOUS INSTITUTIONS IN THE EUROPEAN ECONOMY. 1000-1800 Atti della “Quarantatreesima Settimana di Studi” 8-12 maggio 2011 a cura di Francesco Ammannati

Firenze University Press 2012

INDICE Domenica 8 maggio – APERTURA DEI LAVORI ERIK AERTS, La religione nell’economia. L’economia nella religione. Europa 1000-1800 ........................................................................................................... pag.

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Lunedì 9 maggio – TRA DOTTRINA E PRATICA DELLA VITA QUOTIDIANA: FINANZA & CAPITALE / BETWEEN DOCTRINE AND PRACTICE OF EVERYDAY LIFE: FINANCE & CAPITAL Relazioni GIACOMO TODESCHINI, Usury in Christian Middle Ages. A Reconsideration of the Historiographical Tradition (1949-2010) .......................................................... pag. MARKUS A. DENZEL, The Curial Payments System of the Late Middle Ages and the Sixteenth Century: Between Doctrine and Practice of Everyday Life ....... » JOHN MUNRO, Usury, Calvinism and Credit in Protestant England: from the Sixteenth Century to the Industrial Revolution........................................... » JUAN M. CARRETERO ZAMORA, Les Collectories de la Monarchie Hispanique et la banque Italienne aux XVIe-XVIIe siècles (1506-1614) ........................................... » Comunicazioni JORDI MORELLÓ BAGET, Searching the “Veros Valores” of Some Religious Centres of Barcelona (About the Ecclesiastical Subsidy of 1443) ...........................pag. DAVID KUSMAN, Le rôle de l’Église comme institution dans la contractualisation des opérations de crédit en Brabant, XIIIe-XVe siècle................................................ »

119 131 155 185

207 227

Martedì 10 maggio – TRA DOTTRINA E PRATICA DELLA VITA QUOTIDIANA: FINANZA & CAPITALE / BETWEEN DOCTRINE AND PRACTICE OF EVERYDAY LIFE: FINANCE & CAPITAL Comunicazioni MAREK S�O�, Die Rolle der kirchlichen Institutionen im Geldumlauf zwischen Stadt und Umland. Das Herzogtum Breslau im Spätmittelalter .......................................... pag. ELISA SOLDANI, DANIEL DURAN I DUELT, Religion, Warfare and Business in Fifteenth-Century Rhodes.......................................................................................... » GIOVANNI CECCARELLI, Concezioni economiche dell’Occidente cristiano alla fine del medioevo: fonti e materiali inediti ............................................................ » MORITZ ISENMANN, The Administration of the Papal Funded Debt: Structural Deficiencies and Institutional Reforms ...................................................... » FABIENNE HENRYOT, La quête franciscaine aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles : théories et pratiques d’une économie de l’Evangile .................................................... » PRESTON PERLUSS, From Alms to Investments: Monastic Credit Structures in 17th and 18th Century Paris......................................................................................... »

249 257 271 281 293 307

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Martedì 10 maggio – RELIGIONE E SVILUPPO ECONOMICO / RELIGION AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Relazioni RICHARD D. ORAM, Breaking New Ground: the Monastic Orders and Economic Development along the Northern European Periphery c.1070 to c.1300 ...............pag. STEPHANE BOISSELLIER, Capitaux ecclésiastiques, croissance économique et circuits épiscopaux dans la formation du Portugal, XIe-XIIIe siècles................... » MURAT ÇIZAKÇA Long Term Causes of Decline of the Ottoman/Islamic Economies ........................................................................................ » CÁTIA ANTUNES, FILIPA RIBEIRO DA SILVA, In Nomine Domini et In Nomine Rex Regis: Inquisition, Persecution and Royal Finances in Portugal, 1580-1715 .... »

331 345 361 377

Mercoledì 11 maggio – RELIGIONE E SVILUPPO ECONOMICO / RELIGION AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Relazioni MONICA MARTINAT, Un modello cattolico di sviluppo economico? La riflessione teorica e la pratica degli scambi nell’Europa mediterranea (secc. XVI-XVIII) .......pag. THIJS LAMBRECHT, “Nine Protestants Are to Be Esteemed Worth Ten Catholics.” Representing Religion, Labour and Economic Performance in Pre-Industrial Europe c. 1650-c. 1800 .................................................................................................................. »

413 431

Comunicazioni HANNELORE PEPKE-DURIX, L’économie monastique bourguignonne en quête 451 d'organisation rationnelle (XIIe-XVe siècles) ................................................................pag. ANTONIO JOSÉ MIRA JÓDAR, La propiedad agraria eclesiástica en Valencia en la baja Edad Media. Rentas, gestión de la tierra y explotación campesina.......... » 465 GUIDO ALFANI, Reformation, “Counter-reformation” and Economic Development from the Point of View of Godparenthood: an Anomaly? 477 (Italy and Europe, 14th-19th Centuries).......................................................................... » LOREDANA PANARITI, “Non si acquista la scienza se non si studia”. La componente ebraica nel sistema assicurativo triestino .......................................... » 491 MARIA GRAZIA D’AMELIO, MANUEL VAQUERO PIÑEIRO, Devozione e risorse monetarie: aspetti del finanziamento degli edifici religiosi tra Medioevo e età Moderna .......... » 499 ROMINA TSAKIRI, L’istituzione della cessione dei monasteri ortodossi nella Creta dei secoli XVI e XVII ed il suo contributo alle attività economiche degli ambienti circostanti ................................................................................................ » 511 SAMIA CHERGUI, Institutions religieuses des habûs : nature, fonctionnement et impact sur les investissements immobiliers en Alger ottomane ............................................. » 529 MANON VAN DER HEIJDEN, ELISE VAN NEDERVEEN MEERKERK, ARIADNE SCHMIDT, Religion, Economic Development and Women’s Agency in the Dutch Republic .. » 543 MARIA CIE�LA, Between Religious Law and Practice. The Role of Jewish Communities in the Development of Town's Economy in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 563 the 17th and 18th Centuries.............................................................................................. » MARÍA DOLORES MUÑOZ DUEÑAS, La formación de un discurso secularizado sobre el sistema económico de la Iglesia: la cuestión del diezmo en Córdoba, 1750-1820 .. » 575 585 NICOLAS LYON-CAEN, Les jansénistes, le commerce et l’argent au 18e siècle ........ »

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Giovedì 12 maggio – RELIGIONE E CONSUMI / RELIGION AND CONSUMPTION Relazioni PHILIP SLAVIN, Church and Food Provisioning in Late-Medieval England, 1250-1450: Production Costs, Markets and the Decline of Direct Demesne Management...... pag. Comunicazioni TIMOTHY P. NEWFIELD, Epizootics and the Consumption of Diseased Meat in the Middle Ages..........................................................................................................pag. LAUREANO M. RUBIO PÉREZ, OSCAR FERNÁNDEZ ALVAREZ, Religion, Culture and Eating: Believes, Consumption Ways and Collective Practices in the Northwest of Spain from the 16th to the 18th Centuries ..................................................................... » ISABEL DRUMOND BRAGA, Les familles de chrétiens nouveaux et la possession d’objets religieux (XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles) ................................................................................. » BRECHT DEWILDE, JOHAN POUKENS, Confraternities, Jansenism and the Birth of a Consumer Society in 17th-18th-Century Leuven .................................................. »

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619 641 655 671

Giovedì 12 maggio – MOBILITÀ E MIGRAZIONE: PERSECUZIONE, PELLEGRINAGGI E TURISMO RELIGIOSO / MOBILITY AND MIGRATION: AGGRESSION, PILGRIMAGE AND RELIGIOUS TOURISM Relazioni DAVID JACOBY, The Economic Impact of Christian Pilgrimage on the Holy Land, Eighth-Sixteenth Century – a Long-Term Overview ................................................. pag. CHRISTOPHE DUHAMELLE, Pèlerinage et économie dans l’Empire au XVIIIe siècle ................................................................................................................ »

697 713

Comunicazioni JUDICAËL PETROWISTE, Pèlerinages et essor commercial dans les pays occitans 729 médiévaux (XIe-XIIIe siècle)........................................................................................... pag. FEDERICO PIGOZZO, I denari dei pellegrini. Oblazioni votive e istituzioni ecclesiastiche nell’Italia centrale alla fine del XIV secolo ................................................................... » 743 CLÉMENT LENOBLE, Investimenti religiosi, civici ed economici. Diritto e teologia in alcuni aspetti degli scambi tra mercanti italiani e frati minori (Avignone secc. XIV-XV) . » 755 MICHAEL A. PENMAN, The Economics of Faith: Approaches to Monastic Saints’ Cults in Medieval Scotland........................................................................................................ » 765 YVES JUNOT, Les migrants, un enjeu? Pacification religieuse et relance économique de part et d’autre de la frontière entre la France et les Pays-Bas espagnols (c. 1580-c. 1610) ............................................................................................................... » 779 MARIA MARTA LOBO DE ARAUJO, Les pèlerinages au Sanctuaire de Notre Dame de Porto de Ave en tant que moteurs de changement : la dynamisationde l’économie 793 locale (XVIIIe siècle) ........................................................................................................ » MARIA ENGRACIA LEANDRO, Quand la religion et l’économie se mêlent. Triomphe des croyances au tour du Sanctuaire de Notre Dame da Nazaré, triomphe de l’économie locale ....................................................................................... » 805

Abstracts ........................................................................................................................... »

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Giacomo Todeschini Usury in Christian Middle Ages. A Reconsideration of the Historiographical Tradition (1949-2010)*

“The Idea of Usury. From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood” by Benjamin Nelson, a well known American sociologist and historian, was published in 1949. It was an outline of the historical development of biblical (Dt 23)1 forbidding of lending on interest aiming at underlining, on the one hand, the central role of “usury” in the economic formation of western European society, and, on the other hand, the opposition between Christian religious ethics and economy that Nelson, on a weberian basis, supposed to be at the core of the difference between pre-modern and modern economy. The radical change of the notion described through the word “usury,” and the transition from a forbidding to the liberalization of lending on interest would have been the same, in this perspective, than the evolution from the “tribal brotherhood” to (capitalistic) “universal otherhood.” As Wim Decock2 puts it, the problem would be to discover when “the breakdown of the Scholastic paradigm” actually happened. The idea that “usury” and its forbidding were the heart of the medieval “economic doctrine,” and at the same time the idea that something like a coherent medieval “economic doctrine” had existed, are however two very typical interconnected and complementary historical assumptions widely represented by European economic historians since the beginning of the past century, and firmly recapitulated in the Fifties and Sixties by historians devoted to explain, on the whole, the transition from “feudal” to “capitalistic mode of production.”3 * This paper is strictly connected to my until today unpublished presentation in the Harvard Workshop Christian relation to Jewish Finance in Europe (12th-16th centuries ) (Harvard University, Centre of Middle Eastern Studies, February 18-19, 2011): “Judas and the Christian common people: Jewish “usury” and ordinary Christian economic behaviors in the perspective of the late-medieval building of an economy of the bonum commune (14th-15th C.).” 1 See J. NEUSNER, The Mishnah: social perspectives, Leiden-Boston 1999 (Brill), pp. 115 ff., 156 ff. 2 W. DECOCK, Lessius and the Breakdown of the Scholastic Paradigm, in “Journal of the History of Economic Thought”, 31, 2009, n. 1, pp. 57-78. 3 H. CONTZEN, Geschichte der volkswirtschaftlichen Literatur des Mittelalters Berlin 1869, 1872 2; F.X. FUNK, Geschichte des kirchlichen Zinsverbotes, Tübingen 1876; H. GARNIER, De l'idée du juste prix chez les théologiens et canonistes du moyen âge, Paris 1900; F. SCHAUB, Der Kampf gegen den Zinswucher, ungerechten Preis und unlauteren Handel im Mittelalter. Von Karl dem Grossen bis Papst Alexander III, Freiburg 1905; O. SCHILLING, Reichtum und Eigentum in der ethisch-rechtlichen Literatur, Freiburg 1908; H. BREY, Hochscholastik und 'Geist' des Kapitalismus, Leipzig 1927; A. FANFANI, Le origini dello spirito capitalistico in Italia, Milano 1933; J.T. NOONAN, The Scholastic Analysis of Usury, Cambridge Mass 1957; J.W. BALDWIN, The Medieval Theories of the Just Price: Romanists, Canonists and Theologians in the 12. and 13. Centuries, Philadelphia 1959; E. SALIN, Politische Ökonomie: Geschichte der wirtschaftspolitischen Ideen von

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The entire problem and its historiographical formalization, as well as the incongruities depending on an anachronistic economic sketch of medieval societies representing them in terms of obligatory opposition between “economic theory” and “economic practice,” basically depend on the misunderstanding of what, in fact, the word usura4 and the legal, theological and economic definitions connected to this word truly signify in the variegated medieval textual universe. Actually, a close analysis of Christian textual sources normally used to detect the medieval Christian “doctrinal” attitude on wealth, profit and fertility or sterility of money, as well as their contextualized reading and comparison, clearly indicates that a systematic and coherent economic Christian doctrine absolutely allowing or forbidding specific forms of economic interplay never existed. On the contrary, what historians between nineteenth and twentieth century have described as the beginning of an increasingly coherent Christian social philosophy is most likely a slow and progressive (and so not necessarily coherent) stratification of linguistic habits aimed, firstly, to describe the religious Christian notions of spiritual fructification and final salvation through economic and financial metaphors, and, secondly, to represent gain and profit, namely to shape Christian economic interplay, as inner phases of a more wide social and ecclesiological project founding the recognition of everyone's economic credibility on the authentication of a faith intended as factor of social identification and basis of each legitimate kinship. In this perspective, the medieval representation of the economic interplay is hardly reducible to a theoretical system shaping economic games as individual relations whose meaning is readable only in ethical terms.5 The western construction of economic lexica and the western economic representational strategies concerning economic objects and relations appear, in a perspective not opposing (in an anachronistic way) “personal” and “impersonal” economic games, as deeply depending on the political identity and administrative objectives of the literate minority both writing the economic metaphors or economic prescriptions we today read, and concretely governing the monasteries, abbeys, bishoprics, castles and cities geographically shaping what we today call the western medieval market space, namely the markets ruled by the multiple European powers.6 In other words, the representation of biblical and ancient Jewish economic space in terms of “brotherhood” contradicted by the commercial and anonymous namely impersonal (that is to say non-political) modern “otherhood,” on its turn Platon bis zur Gegenwart, Tübingen-Zürich 1967; J. GILCHRIST, The Church and economic Activity in the Middle Ages New York 1969 ; R. DE ROOVER, La pensée économique des Scolastiques Montréal-Paris 1971; R. DE ROOVER, Business, Banking and Economic Thought in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. J. KIRSHNER, Chicago-London 1974. On these authors and writings see G. TODESCHINI, Il prezzo della salvezza. Lessici medievali del pensiero economico, Roma 1994 (La Nuova Italia Scientifica). 4 See H. SIEMS, Handel und Wucher im Spiegel frühmittelalterlicher Rechtsquellen, Hannover 1992 (Hahn, MGH Schriften). 5 G. TODESCHINI, I mercanti e il tempio, Bologna 2002 (Il Mulino); IDEM, Theological Roots of the Medieval/Modern Merchants’ Self-Representation, in The Self-Perception of Early Modern Capitalists, M.J. J ACOB, C. SECRETAN eds., New York 2008 (Palgrave), pp. 17-46. 6 M. ARNOUX, Vérité et questions des marchés médiévaux, in L'activité marchande sans le marché?, A. HATCHUEL, O. FAVEREAU, F. AGGERI eds., Paris 2010 (Presses des Mines), pp. 27-40.

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gradually defined by the attenuation of the medieval Christian forbidding of usury, was and is rooted in an imprecise cognition of the different meanings the medieval condemnation of usura could assume in different political and historical contexts. At the same time, the widely diffused historiographical representation of Jewish medieval economic role as obviously identical everywhere, since the High Middle Ages, to the specialization of the “Jews” in lending activities7 (a representation already developed by Sombart’s Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben in 1911) matches with the historiographical representation of Christian condemnation of credit transactions as a condemnation of the “Jewish” notion of “brotherhood,” namely as condemnation of the distinction made by the Book of Deuteronomy between lending to brothers and lending to strangers that, in turn, was and is perceived by many historians as typically Jewish.8 The historiographical idea shaping “usury” as the medieval summary and synonym of “credit,” an idea depending on some common places very typical of 19th century historiography, is, in other words, based on a stereotyped representation of Jews and Christians as economic performers: the ones represented as the founders of an archaic economic “brotherhood,” the others described as the dramatic initiators of modern, universalistic kinship forms opening the way to the “market” after the crisis of the so-called ethical “Scholastic paradigm.” In this light the absolute historiographical conviction concerning the existence of a long-lasting and indisputable medieval Christian prohibition of lending on interest was and often is the outcome of an interpretation of western economic rationality as a linear process delayed by the (Christian) denial of money’s productivity. The inner meaning of this denial was however generally interpreted as directly functional to the crossing of the obstacle represented by a (Jewish) “brotherhood” defining the fruitfulness of money as a main consequence of the exclusion from “tribal” belonging. Through the refusal of the abstract notion of money’s fertility the Christian community would have shaped an idea of productive work activating the capital, an idea characterizing – in the historiographical perspective well represented by Sapori and de Roover – the western development of the Christian universalistic “market.” Actually, at the origin of Nelson’s depiction of Christian rejection of usury it is possible to see the simplified denotation of “usury” performed by historiography between nineteenth and the first half of the past century.9 Analogously, Nelson’s description of the Christian attenuation of this forbidding as a main consequence of 7 See the final counterarguments presented in Wirtschaftsleben der abendländischen Juden. Fragen und Einschätzungen, ed. M. TOCH, München 2008 (Oldenbourg,). See also IDEM, Jews and Commerce: Modern Fancies and Medieval Realities, in Il ruolo economico delle minoranze in Europa. Secc. XIII-XVIII. Atti della XXXI Settimana di Studi, ed. S. CAVACIOCCHI, Firenze 2000, pp.43-58; G. TODESCHINI, Les historiens juifs en Allemagne et le débat sur l’origine du capitalisme avant 1914, in Écriture de l’histoire et identité juive. L’Europe ashkénaze XIXe-XXe siècle, D. BECHTEL, E. PATLAGEAN, J.-C. SZUREK, P. ZAWADZKI eds., Paris 2003 (Les Belles Lettres), pp. 209-228 ; IDEM, Christian Perceptions of Jewish Economic Activity in the Middle Ages,” in Wirtschaftsgeschichte der mittelalterlichen Juden. Fragen und Einschätzungen, cit., pp. 1-16. 8 F. RAPHAEL, Judaïsme et capitalisme. Essai sur la controverse entre Max Weber et Werner Sombart, Paris 1982 (Presses Universitaires de France). 9 I discussed this historiographical line in a book published seventeen years ago: G. TODESCHINI, Il prezzo della salvezza, cit. See the excellent survey by H. SIEMS, Handel und Wucher im Spiegel fru�hmittelalterlicher Rechtsquellen, Hannover 1992 (Hahn, MGH Schriften).

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the wide medieval diffusion of a notion of holy war (exemplified, according to Nelson, by the circulation of a dictum of Ambrose translating the idea of “right war” in economic terms: it is licit to lend on interest to the enemies, ubi ius belli ibi ius usurae)10 appears today as an argument produced by a form of historical reasoning substantially unconcerned by the different linguistic structure of the sources. This simplifying logic is primarily rooted in a reading of the sources establishing the improbable continuity of the meaning of usura from Patristic Age until the thirteenth century, as well as the improbable semantic homogeneity of this concept in very different textual fields as those defined by the writings of theologians like Clemens of Alexandria and Ambrose and Augustine, or Robert de Courçon and Thomas Aquinas, ecclesiastical polemists as Hincmar of Reims and Humbert of Silvacandida, canonists and civil lawyers like Gratian and Etienne de Tournai, or Henry of Susa, Accursius and Bartolo of Sassoferrato, local jurists or penitential authorities as Thomas of Chobham and Raymond of Peñafort, each one of them representing, on the contrary, a different and specific namely discontinuous phase of the historical development of what we today tend to roughly imagine as the beginning of western economic thought. Actually, if we closely consider these different authors, or, to be more exact, these very different written sources and their own specific vocabulary, it becomes immediately clear, firstly, that the forbidding of “usury” had in different contexts very different meanings, secondly that “usury” never was intended as an automatic synonym of “credit,” and, thirdly, that the relation between debtors and creditors was changing its sense according to the social and institutional role of debtors and creditors. At the same time the abstract problem of the productivity or sterility of money, so frequently described by historiography, from Benjamin Nelson to Jacques Le Goff until the systematic description of the sources by Odd Langholm, as the theoretical fundament of the medieval forbidding of usury,11 played a minor role in the linguistic definitions and regulations of the real core of late medieval economic discourse: the political managing of the violence implicit in social exchange as it was mirrored in the economic games.12 Actually a clear understanding of what Scholastics intended to say through their reasoning on the fact that pecunia can not bear as the pecus does, should be connected to their variegated representation of money as sign of value, as symbol of power, as metallic coin. From the latemedieval point of view, as well as in other pre-modern economic perceptions of money,13 it was perfectly clear that the measure of value expressed through the abstract namely mathematical notion of money was neatly different both from money symbolizing the power of a ruler and from money reified by coins. Obviously this 10 AMBROSIUS, De Tobia 15, 51; Decretum Gratiani C. XIV q. 3 c. 12, ed. A. FRIEDBERG, Leipzig 1879 (Tauchnitz), 738. 11 The historiographical idea of a medieval “doctrine” (directly rooted in Aristotle’s writings) focussed on the “sterility of money” is a sort of historiographical dogma, already present in M AX WEBER’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-5), New York 2003 (Dover), p. 82. This assumption generally based on a simplified reading of some Thomas Aquinas’ passages, is finally repeated by O. LANGHOLM, Economics in Medieval Schools. Wealth, Exchange, Value, Money and Usury According to the Paris Theological Tradition, 1200-1350, Leiden 1992 (Brill.) 12 R. DUMOUCHEL-J.-P. DUPUY, L’enfer des choses. René Girard et la logique de l’économie, Paris 1979 (Seuil). 13 See M. GODELIER, L’enigme du don, Paris 1996 (Fayard), pp. 39 ff.

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third type of “money” could not be imagined as bearing a fruit (for the same reason than each artificial object); on the contrary money as an idealization of value possessed and used by specific economic performers could be activated and so become fertile through their competence: in other words when money was not perceived as an unanimated metallic thing but as a sign of possible value managed by well identifiable entrepreneurs, its nature could appear as full of potential fruits, a capitale and not simply a sors.14 It is possible indeed to distinguish in the textual and economic Christian history of usura, both as economic notion and linguistic definition of a practice hardly ever so clear as often historians believed, three approximate stages corresponding to the patristic age, to the age of formation of Canon Law, between seventh and twelfth century, and finally to the development of a legal definition of credit transactions, after the thirteenth century. A main problem in the study of these different perceptions and descriptions of what in any case is deceptively called usura is caused by the fact that historiography rarely has considered the relation between these phases of meaning. So, we can find some important studies on the economic language of the Fathers, Clemens of Alexandria or Ambrose of Milan or Augustine, and on the other side some clever analysis of the conflicting economic interplay between ecclesiastic and imperial powers summed up by the key-word simony (simonia).15 At the same time, the textual flow developed after 1140, namely the first codification of Canon law, about the illicitness of the activities performed by the so-called usurarius manifestus, the public seller of money, was considered by many scholars specialized in the study of Canon Law only for the period going from the first commentators of Gratian’s Decretum to the redaction of the second part of Canon Law, the Decretals of Gregory the Ninth and its first commentaries (as it is possible to see in the first essays by Giuseppe Salvioli and Franz Schaub as well as in the articles and books by Terence McLaughlin and John Baldwin and, more recently, Harald Siems.) Finally the so-called Scholastic doctrine on usury and just price was studied with subtlety by many well known scholars and synthesized in many huge books from the Studien by Wilhelm Endemann in the eighties of the nineteenth century to the Scholastic Analysis of Usury (1957) by John Thomas Noonan in the fifties of the last century, until Raymond De Roover’s La pensée èconomique des Scholastiques (1971), and lastly Odd Langholm’s Economics in Medieval Schools (1992).16 Especially this last kind of studies seems to be on the one hand totally founded on the presumption that Christian representations of the economic interplay after the beginning of the 13th century are definitely rooted in the forbidding of “usury.” On the other hand, these studies are absolutely pervaded by the idea that the last two centuries of the medieval era are the beginning of an ambiguous new way of economic thinking: 14 See J. KAYE, Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century: Money, Market Exchange, and the Emergence of Scientific Thought, Cambridge 1998 (Cambridge University Press); G. CECCARELLI, Risky Business: Theological and Canonical Thought on Insurance from the Thirteenth to the Seventeenth Century, in “Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies”, 31, 2001, n. 3, pp. 607-658; G. TODESCHINI, Franciscan Wealth. From Voluntary Poverty to Market Society, New York 2009 (St. Bonaventure University.) 15 See now J.-M. SALAMITO, Christianisme antique et économie: raisons et modalités d’une rencontre historique, in “Antiquité tardive”, 14, 2006, pp. 27-37. 16 A commented bibliography in G. TODESCHINI, Il prezzo della salvezza, cit., pp. 39-113.

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that, in fact, as Joseph Schumpeter wrote around fifty years ago, the fundament of each future economic science “is all in the Scholastics.”17 The absence of a scholarly attention for the relation between the different meanings assumed in different periods by the word-concept usura, as well as by the universe of economic practice it could indicate, is verisimilarly at the origin of a systematic misunderstanding of what credit relations could actually signify in different political contexts like, for example, the Carolingian empire, late medieval kingdoms or Italian cities between 12th and 13th centuries. The categorical assumption of the forbidding of usury as fil rouge connecting these and others institutional realities made impossible on the whole to see the evidence of a distinction, basic in Canon Law since twelfth century, between credit performed by ecclesiastic institution or other public subjects, and selling of money performed by “private” subjects, namely unauthorized individuals. With the end of the myth of modern free market as arrival point of the mythological history of the market written by neo-liberist economists in terms of progressive edification of a perfect independence of economy from politics and institutional powers and choices, the late-medieval and early modern economic discourse can finally be considered through a more limpid and less ideological lens.18 In fact, the idea that licit and socially useful forms of credit were linked to the institutional visibility of the entrepreneurs namely to their participation in the politic and social networks shaping the so-called bonum commune was widely circulated by highly authoritative textual tools like conciliar canons and Decretals. Licit forms of credit were at this point well separated from usurious contracts, and, although historiography rarely admits it, the system of exceptions gradually introduced by canonists to define legal types of credit contracts became a precise economic strategy aimed at facilitating the development of specific economic behaviors assumed as apriori honorable. From the middle of the 13th century this kind of exceptions composed a system of economic rules in itself more clear and understandable than the forbidding of a practice, “usury,” whose traditional ambiguous meaning appeared now, in the light of a credit life manifestly determining the fiscal revenues of Sacred powers such as the Holy See, even more blurred. Matrimonial credit deriving from the retarded payment of a dowry, commercial credit in the form of society or commenda, commerce of public and ecclesiastical rents, selling on credit when this business was formalized as connected to the politically significant economic activities of relevant merchant-bankers: these and others formalizations became typical representations of the lay credit forms recognized as an ordinary way of economic administration in consequence of the public importance of the subjects performing J. SCHUMPETER, History of Economic Analysis, London 1986 [1954] (Routledge), p. 294. D.C. NORTH, The rise of the western world: a new economic history, Cambridge 1973 (Cambridge University Press); IDEM, Structure and Change in Economic History, New York 1981 (Norton); IDEM, Institutions, institutional change, and economic performance, Cambridge 1990 (Cambridge University Press); D. C. NORTH, JOHN JOSEPH WALLIS, BARRY R. WEINGAST, Violence and Social Orders: a Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History, Cambridge 2009 (Cambridge University Press); M. GRANOVETTER, Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness, in “American Journal of Sociology”, 91, 1985, pp. 481-510; V. ZELIZER, The Social Meaning of Money: Pin Money, Paychecks, Poor Relief, and Other Currencies, New York 1994 (Basic Books). 17 18

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them.19 This conceptual elaboration integrated a complex notion of risk distinguishing the legitimacy namely the rationality of a profit derived from the investment performed by honest and trustworthy citizens (that is citizens belonging to important kinships and bound together by a system of friendships, “neighborhood” and “clientage”, also rooted in neighborhood20) from the small-scale and “vile” forms of business assumed in general as sterile commerce of money or disreputable speculations performed by those who are called by canonists and jurists viles personae and alienigenae or usurarii manifesti. The definition of commercial risk as the watershed separating honorable from deviant forms of credit, was then elaborated during the second half of the thirteenth century. The principal sense of this economic finding was to highlight the plainly administrative nature of credit practice when this economic practice was carried out by institutions or citizens whose aim was presupposed to be favorable to the growth of common good; the difference between the riskless activity of the usurer and the dangerous and risky achievement of the merchant/banker is not from this point of view a description of the heterogeneity of the market, but the consequence of a textual and ideological elaboration of the difference between two dissimilar economic ways: inner and outer in respect to what the theological/economic culture identified as of public interest. The ancient distinction between the wicked simoniac management of the sacred economy and the holy administration of the church patrimony21 (intended as typical form of a common wealth, namely as the “patrimony of the poor”) was then textually reshaped in a conflict between usury as economic manifestation of heretical perversity (thus typical of many categories of infidels, not citizens or semicitizens, outcasts and aliens) and credit as publicly useful administrative technique. The recontextualization of the late medieval theological and juridical discourse on usury into the writings system produced by Christian authorities on economy and exchange between 12th and 15th century, namely its recontextualization into the flow of the medieval metadiscourse on bonum commune22 and its boundaries, allows 19 I recently considered this system of “exceptions” and their meaning: G. TODESCHINI, Eccezioni e usura nel Duecento. Osservazioni sulla cultura economica medievale come realtà non dottrinaria, in “Quaderni Storici”, 114, 2009, n. 2, pp. 443-460. 20 See J. PADGETT, P. MCLEAN, Organizational Invention and Elite Transformation: The Birth of Partnership Systems in Renaissance Florence, in “American Journal of Sociology”, 111, 2006, n. 5, pp. 14631568, 1517 (http://networks.harrimaninstitute.org/padgett%20and%20mclean.pdf); J. P ADGETT, P. MCLEAN, Economic Credit in Renaissance Florence (2009), (http://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1007&context=pn_wp); G. ALFANI, Fathers and godfathers. Spiritual kinship in Early Modern Italy, Aldershot 2009 (Ashgate); P. NANNI, Ragionare tra mercanti. Per una rilettura della personalità di Francesco di Marco Datini (1335ca-1410), Pisa 2010 (Pacini), pp. 135 ff. On the whole problem, I. LAZZARINI, Amicizia e potere. Reti politiche e sociali nell'Italia medievale, Milano 2010 (Bruno Mondadori). 21 J. H. LYNCH, Simoniacal Entry into Religious Life from 1000 to 1260. A social, economic and legal Study, Columbus/Ohio 1976 (The Ohio State University Press); on simony and usury in Canon Law, see W. HARTMANN, K. PENNINGTON, The history of medieval canon law in the classical period, 1140-1234: from Gratian to the Decretals of Pope Gregory IX, Washington 2008 (The Catholic University of America Press), especially the essays by Peter Landau and Joseph Goering. The connection between simony and usury in medieval economic writings was emphasized by O. LANGHOLM, Economics in Medieval Schools, cit. 22 De Bono Communi: The Discourse and Practice of the Common Good in the European City (13th-16th c.), E. LECUPPRE-DESJARDIN, A.–L. VAN BRUAENE eds., Turnhout 2009 (Brepols).

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to clearly understand that the “forbidding of usury” by Christian theologians, jurists and confessors never was a general, abstract and unconditioned statement. On the contrary, a reading of the sources not reduced to an anthology of isolated quotations out of context, can reveal the political and at the same time symbolic meaning the condemnation of lending on interest assumed in a cultural world whose first religious and juridical aim was to separate fidelity from infidelity, reliability from untrustworthiness, citizens from foreigners, and public (that is institutional and sacred) wealth from private (that is pertaining to a family in the restrained sense of blood kinship) accounting. Let us consider, in this perspective, two main problems assumed by the historiography of the past century, Noonan, Le Goff and Langholm primarily, in terms of painful evolution from a pre-modern economy whose search for profit was affected by the condemnation of avarice and usury, to a modern, rational economy totally free to maximize profit and exploit the opportunities for growth: the transition from usurer to merchant or businessman, and the so-called usura palliata, that is, as Raymond de Roover puts it, the “loan concealed under the color of another contract.”23 The first case, normally presented by historiography, as a gradual transformation of the forbidden condition of usurer in the accepted profession of merchant, banker and businessman, namely as a progressive change produced by the attenuation of the ecclesiastic prohibition of profit gained through an investment of capital, appears, at a close reading of the sources, from Raymond of Peñafort to Henry of Susa, Thomas Aquinas, Olivi, Guiral Ot and the fifteenth century doctors, a sequence of sources whose context is the late-medieval interplay between Canon and Civil Law, more as the description of the strong and well defined difference existing between two opposite subjects than as the representation of the conversion of a sinner in a pious and socially useful Christian. From the first more specific canonical definition of what could indicate the usurer as a definite social figure, namely from the second Lateran Council in 1139, until the technical descriptions of usury proclaimed during the fourth Council of Lyon in 1274, and then at the Council of Vienne in 1312, the usurer is in any case a manifest usurer, an usurarius manifestus, and his obvious weirdness in the economic context shaped by the Christian market is designated through two very specific words: alienigena, “stranger” or “born abroad”, and hereticus, “heretic” and “dissident.”24 It is enough to read attentively 23 R. DE ROOVER, The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank. 1397-1494, Washington 1999 (1963) (BeardBooks), pp. 10 ff.: The Church’s Usury Doctrine and the Business World. 24 Corpus Iuris Canonici II, Sexti Decretalium, V, De usuris, 1 (FRIEDBERG ed., 1081): “Gregorius X in generali concìlio Lugdunensi. Usurarum voraginem, quae animas devorat et facultates exhaurit, compescere cupientes, constitutìonem Lateranensis concilii contra usurarios editam sub divìnae maledìctionis interminatione praecipimus inviolabiliter observari. Et quia, quo minor foeneratorìbus aderìt foenerandi commodìtas, eo magìs adimetur foenus exercendi libertas : hac generali constitutìone sancimus, ut nec collegium, nec alia universìtas vel singularis persona, cuiuscunque sit dignitatis, conditionis aut status, alienigenas et alios non oriundos de terris ipsorum, publìce foenebrem pecuniam exercentes aut exercere volentes, ad hoc domos in terris suis conducere vel conductas habere, aut alias habìtare permittant, sed huìusmodì usurarios manifestos omnes infra tres menses de terris suìs expellant, nunquam alìquos tales de cetero admissuri.”; Clementinarum, III, V De usuris (Friedberg ed., 1184): “Clemens V, ìn concìlio Viennensi. Ex gravi ad nos insinuatìone pervenit, quod quorundam communìtales locorurm ìn offensam Dei et

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the definition of the professional usurer offered by many authoritative texts between the end of 12th to the end of 15th century, to see that his or her public reputation as usurer is the main argument used to prove his/her belonging to the group of the spurious businesspeople.25 The importance of fame and reputation in matters of usury, namely a designation of the usurer based on the tautological assumption that the usurer is whom the common opinion indicates as usual usurer,26 make clear that this “infamous” profession had nothing to do with the social competence attributed by very different kinds of sources to the mercator industrius, the hero of an proximi, ac contra iura divina pariter et humana usurariam approbantes quodammodo pravitatem, per statuta sua iuraraento quandoque firmata, usuras exigi el solvi nedum concedunt, sed ad solvendas eas» debìtores scienter compellunt, ac iuxta ìpsorum continentiam stalulorum gravia imponendo, plerumque usuras repetentìbus onera,alììsque utendo super hìs diversis coloribus et fraudibus exquìsitìs, repetitìonem impediunt earundem. Nos ìgìtur, perniciosis bis ausibus obviare volentes, sacro approbante conciho statuimus, ut, quicunque communilatum ipsarum potestates, capitaneì, rectores, consules, iudìces, consiharii aut alii quivis officìales statuta huiusmodi de cetero facere, scribere vel dictare, aut quod solvantur usurae, vel quod solutae, quum repetuntur, non restituantur piene ac lìbere, scienter indicare praesumpserint, sententìam excommunicatìonis incurrant, eandem etìam sententìam ìncursuri, nìsi statuta huiusmodi hactenus edita de libris coraraunitatum ipsarum, (sì super hoc potestatem habuerint) infra tres menses deleverint, aui si ipsa statuta sìve consueiudìnes, effectum eorum habentes, quoquo modo praesumpserint observare. §. 1. Ceterum, quia foeneratores sic ut plurimum contractus usurarios occulte ineunt et dolose, quod vix convìnci possunt de usurarìa pravitale: ad exhibendum, quum de usuris agetur, suarum codìces rationum censura ipsos decerniraus»» ecclesiastica compeilendos. §. 2. Sane, si quis ìn illum errorem incìderit, ut pertinaciter affirmare praesumat, exercere usuras non esse peccatum: decernimus, eum velut haereticum punìendum, locorum nihiiomìnus ordinariis et haeretìcae pravitatìs Ìnquisitoribus districtius iniungentes, ut contra eos, quos de errore huiusmodi diffamatos invenerint aut suspectos, tanquam contra diffamatos vel suspectos de haeresi procedere non omittant.” See R.M. FREHER, Preventing Crime in the High Middle Ages: The Medieval Lawyers’ Search for Deterrence, in J.R. SWEENEY, S. CHODOROW eds., Popes, Teachers, and Canon Law in the Middle Ages, Ithaca-London 1989, pp. 212 ff. 25 PETER THE CHANTER, Verbum abbreviatum. Textus conflatus, I 48, ed. M. BOUTRY, Turnhout 2004 (Brepols), p. 325: “Et cum quereretur qui essent notorii, dictum est: ‘Qui publice fatentur se esse usurarios vel aliquot noto signo hoc indicant’, ut quasi capistra venalia in summitate haste vel virge fenerandam pecuniam circumferant…”; RAYMOND OF PEÑAFORT, Summa de poenitentia cum glossis Johannis de Friburgo, Avignon 1715 (F. Mallard), pp. 324 ss., p. 330: “Si autem ille qui talem penam apposuit consuevit esse usurarius, presumitur quod in fraudem usurarum adiecerit penam”; J OHN OF FREIBURG, Summa confessorum, (1297-98), s. l., 1476 (BODLEIAN LIBRARY, Bod. L. Auct. 5 Q inf. 1.15), q. XLVIII: “Sed qualiter intelligitur usurarius manifestus fore. Respondeo secundum Hostiensem ibidem [Summa aurea] V secundum quomodo. Manifestos voco notorios et hoc vel ex evidentia facti, puta quia usurariam mensam tenet paratam ad mutuandum pecuniam cuilibet sub usura.” 26 GUILLAUME DURAND, Speculum iuris, Pavia 1479, III, f. 24v ; ASTESANUS DE ASTI, Summa de casibus, IV 16, Strassburg, ante 1475: “…Aliud est notorium facti interpolati ut illud quod sic fit publice quod aliqua tergiversacione celari non potest et quod sepius iteratum non fit tamen continue. Huiusmodi est circa modum usurarii manifesti et de hoc habetur extra de usuris … In notorio vere facti transeuntis interpolati ut est receptio usurarum requiritur semiplena probacio extra de usuris cum in diocesi, tamen Raymundus dicit indistincte quia si forte iudex velit talem in notorie sive evidenter delinquentem secundum quid ius exigit corrigere idest punire et ille appellet, non est appellacioni huiusmodi deferendum”; ANGELUS CARLETTI DE CLAVASIO, Summa, Nürnberg 1498 (Anton Koberger), f. 173r : “Tertium est [notorium] facti interpolati, exemplum in eo qui paratus est mutuare sub usuris et de meretrice quia non semper mutuat vel peccat. Sed Bartolus post Jacobus de Butrio in l. cives, C. de appell. dicit quod notorium est quod habet actum permanentem ut edicta in albo pretorio et quod in platea est palacium dominorum. Illa autem que numquam habuerunt actum permanentem ut vox, preconia et huiusmodi non possunt transire in notorium, sed bene in manifestum.”

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economic rhetoric circulated by the texts written, especially after the beginning of the 14th century, by the main Canonists, Romanists and theologians. The rationalization of merchants’ profit expressed through a large variety of dicta underlining merchant’s right to gain both the stipendium laboris compensating his risk, and the interest derived from lending the money he “usually” invests in trade, focus in any case, from Thomas Aquinas to Conrad Summenhart, on the economic capacity of the mercator, namely on his economic skillfulness in estimating costs and revenues.27 This skill, however, is indicated by the same sources as something actual and authentic if it is publicly recognized as the shape of merchant’s political belonging to the group of the well-renowned, the real citizens, that is to say the maiores in the city. From this perspective, the ancient Roman legal principle, codified by Justinian and updated by Irnerius and Azo between twelfth and thirteenth century in Bologna, establishing the legitimacy of different amounts of interest (usurae) according to the different social contexts lenders belong to (“usurarum vero modus spectandus est ex personarum delectu”28), is not so far from the canonical definition of the legitimacy of interest as compensation of a loss (damnum emergens or lucrum cessans) basically depending on the belonging to a social kinship whose economic, political and religious reputation is beyond any doubt. To say it with the words of Raymond of Peñafort “if he who defines the amounting of interest as penalty in a contract is used to be [is usually known as] an usurer, therefore it is presumable that his contract is an usurious contract” (“Si autem ille qui talem penam apposuit consuevit esse usurarius, presumitur quod in fraudem usurarum adiecerit penam.” 29) In other words, usura and usurarius are the words shaping, more than an objective economic technique, a social condition. The history of expressions as usura palliata and palliare usuras, namely “disguised usury” and “to disguise usuries,” shows analogously and as corollary that these locutions had not an absolute and abstract meaning, but indirectly hinted to the status of the entrepreneur. The discovery of the usura palliata was not, in this light, a theoretical procedure aiming to detect every possible sort of hidden economic treachery, but a way of unmasking those who, among the “true merchants,” were not (or no more) identifiable as trustworthy and socially reliable. The solemn denunciation by the Sienese government in 1335 of usury as a crime secretly and hideously and also typically performed by a despicable crowd of servants, poor widows, small artisans and unknown foreigners, is a good example of the inner relation existing between the “doctrinal” and “legal” definitions of usura in an advanced phase of the medieval “economic revolution.”30 For the same O. LANGHOLM, Economics in Medieval Schools, cit.; G. TODESCHINI, Il prezzo della salvezza, cit., mercanti e il tempio, cit. 28 Die Summa Codicis des Irnerius, XXXIV, ed. H. FITTING, Berlin 1894. 29 RAYMOND OF PEÑAFORT, Summa de poenitentia cum glossis Johannis de Friburgo, Avignon 1715 (F. Mallard), p. 330. 30 G. PICCINNI, Il sistema senese del credito nella fase di smobilitazione dei suoi banchi internazionali, in Fedeltà ghibellina affari guelfi, ed. IDEM, Pisa 2008 (Pacini), pp. 209-289, 209 ff., 232 ff. See now G. TODESCHINI, Come Giuda. La gente comune e i giochi dell’economia all’inizio dell’epoca moderna, Bologna 2011 (Il Mulino). 27

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reasons, allowing Conrad Summenhart to state, at the end of fifteenth century, that multum differunt mutuare ad usuram et mutuantem recipere ultra sortem (“there is a huge difference between the lending on usury and the fact that a lender can receive something beyond the capital”31), in Siena a century and a half before Summenhart’s de contractibus an abyss was separating the shameful usury transactions achieved by the so-called vile people (viles et abiectae personae, the “little people”32) from credit transactions shaping the core of the economic and institutional life of the mercatores civitatis Senarum. Most likely, the wide circulated historiographical opinion connecting the idea of the theological refusal of each form of fruitfulness of money to the apriori existence of a “doctrine of the sterility of money”,33 was and is connected to the unknowing (or misunderstanding) of the deep ecclesiological roots of late medieval distinction between the notion of useful and institutionally correct credit implying a vision of the productivity of money, and, on the opposite, the well specific definition of the unfruitfulness of money administrated by those who were recognized as outside the city and the church. A clear distinction between these two very different concepts of money, actually a double representation of money connecting its possibility to bear a fruit to its social and institutional meaning, namely to its political sense, is already perfectly visible in the first codification of Canon Law, the Decretum Gratiani. This crucial text, the long second canon of the second quaestio in the tenth Causa, transmits an imperial Novella (formerly contained in the Corpus Iuris Civilis) stating indisputably that ecclesiastic institutions can pledge their immovable property in case of debt so that the creditor could recover the capital (sors) and the fruits produced by the pledged immobile good as interest valuable in monetary terms (res inmobiles speciali dentur pignori, cuius fructus creditor sibi reputet tam in sortem quam in usuras usque ad quartam centesimae34). The entire text emphasizes in many different ways that the good ecclesiastic administrator (yconomus) should evaluate not only the actual value of ecclesiastical namely institutional movable and immovable properties, but also their possible or virtual value, as for instance when, in case of emphyteosis, it 31 C. SUMMENHART, De contractibus licitis atque illecitis, II 46, Venice 1580 (apud Bernardum Iuntam), p. 208 32 See Gerarchie economiche e gerarchie sociali, secoli 12.-18., ed. A. G UARDUCCI, Firenze 1990 (Le Monnier); Le petit peuple dans l’Occident médiéval: terminologies, perceptions, réalités, P. BOGLIONI, R. DELORT, C. GAUVARD eds., Paris 2002 (Publications de la Sorbonne); G. TODESCHINI, Visibilmente crudeli. Malviventi, persone sospette e gente qualunque dal medioevo all’età moderna, Bologna 2007 (Il Mulino). 33 See, lately, D. WOOD, Medieval Economic Thought, Cambridge 2002 (Cambridge University Press), p. 178. 34 Decretum Gratiani, C. X, q. II, c. 2 (Friedberg ed., 618): “Si autem debitum ex mobilibus solui non ualet, primo res inmobiles speciali dentur pignori, cuius fructus creditor sibi reputet tam in sortem quam in usuras usque ad quartam centesimae. Quod si nolit, tunc ordinator domus apud eum, a quo ordinatur, habitis absque dispendio gestis iuret, maiore parte ibidem seruientium consentiente, et debitum urgere, nec ex mobilibus solui posse. Quo subsecuto, per uiginti dies rem ecclesiae esse uenalem sit publice notum, ut plus offerenti detur, precio modis omnibus pro debito dando. Aliter enim res emptori non conceditur, et hoc inscribatur nil esse factum in ea re ad dampnum diuinae domus. Emptore non inuento, res estimata districte creditori detur in solutum, addita in precio decima parte uniuersae estimationis et accedente consensu ordinatoris et maioris partis ibidem seruientium. Sit tamen ea res mediocris inter ceteras, inspecta ipsius qualitate, et quantitate, et onere. Et is creditor hic intelligatur, qui quod credidit probat in utilitates religiosae domus processisse.”

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becomes mandatory to know (to “estimate with subtlety”) the final possible yield of an immovable good apparently unproductive.35 This seminal text, mostly commented and summarized since the second half of 12th century, produced a flow of interpretations of what productivity of money could signify, and was at the core of the 13th century definitions of money as object whose economic life had to be linked to the public and institutional role of its owners. The importance assumed by the term-concept industria between 13th and 14th century, namely the underlining, by late medieval theologians and Romanists, of merchants’ work as factor generating the productivity of money and activating its capacity to bear a fruit, is readable in this textual perspective as the highlighting of the social and institutional nature of money owned by the most relevant merchantbankers. In this “economic narrative,” the strict relation between industria and the potentiality of pecunia to become fruitful36 is the consequence of its belonging to a professional group, the élite of the veri mercatores, whose public utility was by this time accepted and progressively assimilated to the civic utility traditionally characterizing the economic performance of Christian institutional sacred powers. It seems very probable that the late medieval vision of “usury” has been the linguistic elaboration of a way to represent from an institutional, namely dominant point of view, the difference existing between the economic games played by who was belonging to the centre of the sacred social Body, and the “vile” economy managed by who was entitled to be recognized as inhabitator of the Christian market space, that is to say as a stranger in that space, and not as a real civis of the Christian respublica including the market37. How this attitude influenced the shaping of modern economic rationality and politics is a problem to solve.38

35 Ibid., (Friedberg ed., 619): “Perpetua quoque emphiteosis in his rebus permittitur, si res in eorum geritur presentia, quibus hoc assignatur lege, iurantibus his, quorum interest, ex eo contractu nichil ad lesionem diuinae domus effici, solito redditu ipsius rei, qui fuit, cum diuino iuri dedicaretur, non inminuendo nisi in sextam partem, aut si ob cladem diminuta fuerit, tunc constante nunc pensione in emphiteosim detur. Quod si res preciosa quidem est, parum tamen aut nichil prestet pensionis res subtiliter estimanda est, ut ex hoc iusta pensio constituatur. Ea tamen sola dantur in emphiteosim, que ad hoc congrua uidentur yconomo et aliis gubernatoribus.” 36 G. TODESCHINI, Credito ed economia della civitas: Angelo da Chivasso e la dottrina della pubblica utilità fra Quattro e Cinquecento, in Ideologia del credito fra Tre e Quattrocento: dall’Astesano ad Angelo da Chivasso, B. MOLINA-G. SCARCIA eds., Asti 2001 (Centro Studi sui Lombardi e sul Credito nel Medioevo); G. CECCARELLI, Risky Business, cit. 37 THOMAS AQUINAS, Sententia libri politicorum, III, 4, 6: “Deinde cum dicit et quod dicitur maxime etc., ostendit, quid sit maxime civis. Et dicit quod maxime ille dicitur civis in qualibet politia, qui participat honoribus civitatis. Unde homerus dixit poetice de quodam quod post alios exsurrexit, puta ad loquendum, sicut quidam inhonoratus idest sicut quidam advena, qui non erat civis. Sed ubi ista ratio civis occultatur propter deceptionem, cohabitantium (est) esse civem, ut scilicet omnes inhabitantes civitatem cives dicantur; sed hoc non est conveniens quia ille qui non participat honoribus civitatis, est sicut advena in civitate .” See THOMAS AQUINAS, Summa Theologica, I IIae, Q. 105, a. III. P. BOGLIONI, Populus, vulgus et termes apparentés chez Thomas d'Aquin, in Le petit peuple dans l'Occident médiéval, pp. 67-82. 38 See F. TRIVELLATO, The Familiarity of Strangers: the Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period, Yale 2009 (Yale University Press).