Jews and Money 161
Council emphasized the papacy’s commitment to combating usury, a growing
practice in europe as trade and mercantile activity intensified.163 Yet by the thir-
teenth century popes had come to believe that a growing number of Christians
were indebted to Jews and that in particular this threatened to undermine their
calls for crusades. As we have seen, in 1198 innocent iii addressed the issue of
money-lending by Jews at the end of his general crusading letter ‘Post miserabile’
in the context of a general prohibition on money-lending but with a specific refer-
ence to Jews who, as well as Christians, were to remit usury to crusaders. This was
reiterated in the pope’s general letters ‘Graves orientalis terrae’, ‘nisi nobis dictum’,
and ‘Quia maior’, as well as in Ad liberandam, Constitution 71 of the Fourth
Lateran Council and in Constitution 5 of the First Council of Lyons.
so, as already noted, although innocent iii’s letters suggest an equal disapproval
by popes of both Christian and Jewish lending at interest, his definitive pronounce-
ment on the problem of usury, as expressed in the legislation of Lateran iV, was more
complex. Although Constitution 67 of Lateran iV decreed that Christian lenders
were completely forbidden to lend at interest, no such statement was made about
Jews. Rather, Jews were not to exact heavy and immoderate usury, that is, they were
allowed to expect a reasonable rate of interest from Christians. Furthermore, as we
have seen, Ad liberandam, concerned with the recovery of the Holy Land, decreed
that crusaders in particular were to be released from their oath to pay interest.
Hence Jews were to remit to crusaders not just any interest accrued once they had
taken the Cross, but all interest for all past debts.
so Christians were to be excommunicated if they made business deals with any
Jews who continued to exact usury from crusaders. significantly, crusaders’ debts
to Jews were not to be cancelled but rather postponed along with the interest until
their return home. The same decree also referred to vifgages, by which property
was held by the lender as security for repayment by the borrower. This decree
stated that if Jews held crusaders’ property as security for repayment of a debt, the
revenues which they were receiving from such property must be included, after
deduction of any necessary expenditure, in the principal which the crusaders were
to pay back. As already noted, this whole statement concerning crusading and
usury in Constitution 71 of Lateran iV was repeated in Constitution 5 of Lyons i.
There seems, therefore, to be a contradiction between innocent’s realization that
crusaders needed to raise cash to go on crusade and his statements both to Christian
and Jewish moneylenders calling for the remission of interest on specifically past
debts. Although it is possible that innocent counted on Christians being willing to
lend without interest because this would gain them a partial indulgence for as-
sisting a crusade, it is unlikely that he was so naive. And why should Jews have
hostile. see, for example, John Gilchrist, ‘The Perception of the Jews in the Canon Law of the Period
of the First Two Crusades’, Jewish History 3, Part 1 (1988), 9–24.
163 Parkes, The Jew in the Medieval Community, pp.282–3. For economic growth, see Cohen,
Under Crescent and Cross, pp.77–82; pp.87–8; Robert Chazan, Medieval Stereotypes and Modern Anti-
Semitism (Berkeley, 1997), p.305; stow, Alienated Minority, p.222. For the growth of usury as wit-
nessed by the number of sermons by, for example, James of Vitry and Thomas of Chobham, see
Jacques le Goff, Your Money or Your Life: Economy and Religion in the Middle Ages (new York, London,
1998), p.17 and passim.