Jews and Money 151
This letter of innocent iii was issued in 1214, a year before he presided over the
Fourth Lateran Council. As we would expect, both his pronouncements and those
of his predecessors on the subject of usury were summarized in the Council’s
decrees. Hence Quanto amplius, Constitution 67 (Lateran iV), was a lengthy docu-
ment revealing innocent’s concern about Jewish money-lending:99
The more the Christian religion is restrained from usurious practices, so much the
more does the perfidy of the Jews grow in these matters, so that within a short time
they are exhausting the resources of Christians. wishing therefore to see that Christians
are not savagely oppressed by Jews in this matter, we ordain by this synodal decree
that if Jews in future, on any pretext, extort oppressive and excessive interest from
Christians, then they are to be removed from contact with Christians until they have
made adequate satisfaction for the immoderate burden. Christians too, if need be,
shall be compelled by ecclesiastical censure, without the possibility of an appeal, to
abstain from commerce with them.100As we have already seen, that Jewish usury also continued to worry later popes is
suggested by the inclusion of Quanto amplius in the Liber extra.101 Yet the extent
to which Jews were actually involved in money-lending to Christians remains a
matter of debate, though the popes certainly believed that a growing number of
Christians were indebted to Jews and that if crusaders had too many debts they
would be unable to afford to set out.102
decrees of innocent iii about money-lending were not confined to crusades to
the near east. in March 1208 he wrote to the archbishops of Tours, Paris, and
nevers stating that moneylenders must not charge debtors interest while they cam-
paigned against heretics in the south of France, albeit implying that charges would
resume when crusaders returned home.103 Yet in October of the same year he
re-stated in a letter to all the clergy of France the pronouncement on money-
lending he had first made in ‘Post miserabile’ in 1198: namely that creditors must
be forced to absolve crusaders from any oaths to pay past usury and were to desist
from further exactions.104 if any creditor had forced crusaders to pay usury the
money was to be restored. innocent now also added that bishops should try as far
99 Robert Chazan, ‘Pope innocent iii and the Jews’, in Pope Innocent III and his World, ed.
J. C. Moore (Aldershot, 1999), p.193.
100 Tanner, Vol. 1, p.265: ‘Quanto amplius christiana religio ab exactione compescitur usurarum,
tanto gravius super his iudaeorum perfidia inolescit ita, quod brevi tempore christianorum exhauriunt
facultates. Volentes igitur in hac parte prospicere christianis, ne a iudaeis immaniter aggraventur, syno-
dali decreto statuimus ut si de caetero quocumque praetextu iudaei a christianis graves et immoderatas
usuras extorserint, christianorum eis participium subtrahatur, donec de immoderato gravamine
satisfecerint competenter. Christiani quoque, si opus fuerit, per censuram ecclesiasticam appellatione
postposita compellantur ab eorum commerciis abstinere.’ see also Grayzel, Vol. 1, p.306.
101 X.5.19.18, col. 816. see Gilbert dahan, Les Intéllectuels chrétiens et les juifs au moyen âge (Paris,
1990), p.116.
102 For recent discussions see, for example, Jordan, The French Monarchy and the Jews, pp.38–55;
Mundill, England’s Jewish Solution (Cambridge, 1998), pp.108–18; Chazan, ‘Pope innocent iii and
the Jews’, pp.192–3.
103 innocent iii, ‘inter caetera quae’ (4 March 1208), PL 215, col. 1348. see Moore, ‘Pope
innocent iii and Usury’, p.67.
104 innocent iii, ‘Ut contra crudelissimos’ (9 October 1208), PL 215, cols 1469–70.