Jews and Money 149
not be enough money available to subsidize the Fifth Crusade.87 Perhaps in response,
a royal edict, promulgated sometime between 1206 and 1219, tightened legisla-
tion against Jewish usury. no interest was to accrue after the first year had elapsed,
while a further edict in 1219 reasserted the limit on the rate of interest which could
be charged and prohibited it being compounded.88
As we have seen, one reason for innocent’s concern about Jewish money-lending
was his preoccupation with crusading. Hence at the very beginning of his pontifi-
cate in 1198 he addressed the specific issue of Jewish usury for the first time at
the end of ‘Post miserabile’, his general crusading letter on the Fourth Crusade
addressed to the Christian faithful.89 His remarks were set in the context of a gen-
eral prohibition on money-lending: those about to embark on crusade and bound
to pay usury should be absolved from their oath and creditors were to desist from
further exactions. if creditors compelled crusaders to pay, they were to be forced to
return the money:
if anyone of those about to depart thither be held bound to pay usury, you, brother
archbishops and bishops, shall force their creditors in your dioceses, by means of the
same measure with no obstacle of appeal, completely to absolve the crusaders from
their oath, and to desist from any further exaction of usury. But if any of the creditors
should compel them to pay usury, you shall, by similar punishment without appeal,
force him to return it.However, as noted earlier, there then followed the specific reference to Jews:
‘i ndeed we order that the Jews shall be forced by you, my sons the princes, and by
the secular powers, to remit the usury to them... ’. This ruling was repeated in fur-
ther general letters concerned with the Fourth Crusade—‘Graves orientalis terrae’
and ‘nisi nobis dictum’—as well as in the general letter ‘Quia maior’ calling for the
Fifth Crusade, and again in the decrees of Lateran iV and the First Council of
Lyons.90
Both the papal legate, Robert of Courçon, and the prelate and well-known
preacher, Fulk of neuilly, two disciples of the prominent Paris master Peter the
Chanter, were at innocent’s request active in preaching against usury.91 According
87 innocent iii, ‘Quanto melior est’ (14 May 1214), Grayzel, Vol. 1, pp.138–40.
88 innocent iii, ‘Quanto melior est’, Grayzel, Vol. 1, pp.138–40. see Church, State and Jew in the
Middle Ages, ed. Chazan, pp.207–10.
89 innocent iii, ‘Post miserabile(m) Hierusolymitanae’, Grayzel, Vol. 1, p.86; Simonsohn, p.71:
‘s i qui vero proficiscentium illuc ad prestandas usuras juramento tenentur astricti, vos, fratres archie-
piscopi et episcopi, per vestras dioeceses creditores eorum, sublato appellationis obstaculo, eadem
districtione cogatis ut eos a sacramento penitus absolventes, ab usurarum ulterius exactione desistant.’
Jordan, The French Monarchy and the Jews, p.73; Moore, ‘Pope innocent iii and Usury’, pp.66–7.
90 innocent iii, ‘Post miserabile(m) Hierusolymitanae’, Grayzel, Vol. 1, p.86; Simonsohn, p.71:
‘Judeos vero ad remittendas ipsis usuras per vos, filii principes, et secularem compelli precipimus
potestatem... ’. see also innocent iii, ‘Graves orientalis terrae’, Grayzel, Vol. 1, p.98; Simonsohn, p.78;
‘n isi nobis dictum’, Grayzel, Vol. 1, p.98; Simonsohn, pp.78–9; ‘Quia maior nunc’, Grayzel, Vol. 1,
p.136; Simonsohn, p.97; Tanner, Vol. 1, p.269; p.299.
91 John Baldwin, Masters, Princes and Merchants, Vol. 1 (Princeton, 1970), p.18; pp.20–2; p.36;
Jessalynn Bird, ‘Reform or Crusade? Anti-Usury and Crusade Preaching during the Pontificate of
innocent iii’, in Pope Innocent III and his World, ed. J. C. Moore (Aldershot, 1999), pp.165–85, passim;
Moore, ‘Pope innocent iii and Usury’, p.60.