370 brian a. catlos
apogee with the conquest of Constantinople and the partition of the Empire as a
consequence of the Fourth Crusade.
The European “commercial revolution,” which was also under way by the end of
the eleventh century, favored the Jewish minority as a consequence of the commercial
traditions Jews had developed, their near-monopoly over the Latin credit market (by
virtue of Christian prohibitions against usury), their region-wide family and commu-
nity networks, and linguistic skills and cultural stock they had accrued as a conse-
quence of Islamic dominion. However, the very characteristics that made them
valuable made them vulnerable, as when ordinary Christians came to see Jews in cari-
catured terms as usurers, and when, after 1250, Latin Christians began to compete
with Jews in the credit market, and the administrative and other niches that the latter
had previously dominated.
This shift coincided with the development of a formal ideology of exclusion
(Moore, 2007; Iogna-Prat, 2002), rooted in the elaboration and systematization of
canon law, the aggressive intellectual chauvinism of Cluny, and the development of
the crusade movement. The minority most affected by this were the Jews. The Council
of Lateran IV (1215) mandated the social segregation and administrative disempow-
erment of Jews, and in 1240 the University of Paris declared the Talmud heretical
and ordered its destruction. However, policies such as these were largely restricted in
practice to non-Mediterranean lands, where the Jewish population was small.
Expulsion and repression appealed to kings who could thereby appropriate, under the
guise of religious virtue, the profits Jews had accrued from lending (for example,
Chazan, 2006). The nobility and urban classes who were now competing with Jews
supported such initiatives. In the heavily-populated and more commercialized
Mediterranean lands, such chauvinistic impulses were not only ignored but often
defied, as rulers continued to allow their Jewish and Muslim subjects liberties forbid-
den by papal fiat, such as the construction of new places of worship. These two cul-
tures clashed when Languedoc was annexed by France in the later thirteenth century,
and the thriving Jewish communities of the region were expelled. Most went to the
Crown of Aragon, where their elites competed and clashed with those of the native
Arabophile Jews.
When the 1300s brought severe economic contraction to Europe, and Malthusian-
type corrections in the form of famine, warfare and plague, Jews (together with other
marginal groups, like lepers) were targeted both because they had become villainized
by a popular imagination in the grips of millenarian panic, and because their economic
cachet had been undermined by the development of a Christian commercial culture.
The most notable outcome of these trends was the pogroms of 1391, which killed
many Jews in Spain and induced others to convert to Christianity. But the fact that
some Jews remained unconverted, and that those who did convert continued to pose
a competitive threat to the interests of Christians, led Castilian, Aragonese and
Portuguese authorities to conclude in the late fifteenth century that the remaining
Jews should be expelled. This was not the case in Italy, where in some regions (includ-
ing those ruled by Aragon) and in the Venetian colonies, Jewish communities contin-
ued to be cultivated through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
By the 1300s the only remaining Muslim minorities (leaving aside the abundant
slave population, which did not constitute a community) were in Iberia. Here they
remained largely insulated from the chauvinistic impulses of the Church, thanks to the