Part 9 (2/2)

Both the Psalms (15:5, 54:12) and Prophets (Jeremiah 9.6, Nehemiah 5:11) were explicit in a.s.signing usurers to death and h.e.l.lfire. What's more, the early Christian Fathers, who laid the foundation of Church teachings on social issues in the waning years of the Roman empire, were writing amidst the ancient world's last great debt crisis, one that was effectively in the process of destroying the empire's remaining free peasantry.97 While few were willing to condemn slavery, all condemned usury.

Usury was seen above all as an a.s.sault on Christian charity, on Jesus's injunction to treat the poor as they would treat the Christ himself, giving without expectation of return and allowing the borrower to decide on recompense (Luke 6:3435). In 365 ad, for instance, St. Basil delivered a sermon on usury in Cappadocia that set the standard for such issues: The Lord gave His own injunction quite plainly in the words, ”from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away.”98 But what of the money lover? He sees before him a man under stress of necessity bent to the ground in supplication. He sees him hesitating at no act, no words, of humiliation. He sees him suffering undeserved misfortune, but he is merciless. He does not reckon that he is a fellow-creature. He does not give in to his entreaties. He stands stiff and sour. He is moved by no prayers; his resolution is broken by no tears. He persists in refusal ...99 That is, until the suppliant mentions ”interest.”

Basil was particularly offended by the cra.s.s dishonesty by which moneylenders operated; their abuse of Christian fellows.h.i.+p. The man in need comes seeking a friend, the rich man pretends to be one. In fact he's a secret enemy, and everything he says is a lie. Witness, St. Basil said, how the rich man will always at first swear mighty oaths that he has no money to his name: Then the suppliant mentions interest, and utters the word security. All is changed. The frown is relaxed; with a genial smile he recalls old family connection. Now it is ”my friend.”

”I will see,” says he, ”if I have any money by me. Yes, there is that sum which a man I know has left in my hands on deposit for profit. He stipulated a very heavy rate of interest. However, I shall certainly take something off, and give it to you on better terms.” With pretences of this kind and talk like this he fawns on the wretched victim, and induces him to swallow the bait. Then he binds him with a written security, adds loss of liberty to the trouble of his pressing poverty, and is off. The man who has made himself responsible for interest that he cannot pay has accepted voluntary slavery for life.100 The borrower, coming home with his newfound money, at first rejoices. But quickly, ”the money slips away,” interest acc.u.mulates, and his possessions are sold off. Basil grows poetic in describing the debtor's plight. It's as if time itself has become his enemy. Every day and night conspires against him, as they are the parents of interest. His life becomes a ”sleepless daze of anxious uncertainty,” as he is humiliated in public; while at home, he is constantly hiding under the couch at every unexpected knock on the door, and can barely sleep, startled awake by nightmare visions of his creditor standing over his pillow.101 Probably the most famous ancient homily on usury, though, was Saint Ambrose's De Tobia, p.r.o.nounced over several days in Milan in 380 bc. He reproduces the same vivid details as Basil: fathers forced to sell their children, debtors who hanged themselves out of shame. Usury, he observes, must be considered a form of violent robbery, even murder.102 Ambrose, though, added one small proviso that was later to have enormous influence. His sermon was the first to carefully examine every Biblical reference to moneylending, which meant that he had to address the one problem later authors always had to struggle with-the fact that, in the Old Testament, usury is not quite forbidden to everyone. The key sticking point is always Deuteronomy 23:1920: Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother; usury of money, usury of victuals, usury of any thing that is lent upon usury.

Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury; but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury.

So who then is this ”stranger” or (a better translation of the Hebrew nokri, ”foreigner”)? Presumably, one against whom robbery and murder would have been justified as well. After all, the ancient Jews lived amidst tribes like the Amalekites, on whom G.o.d had specifically instructed them to make war. If by extracting interest one is, as he puts it, fighting without a sword, then it is only legitimate to do so from those ”whom it would not be a crime to kill.”103 For Ambrose, living in Milan, all this was something of a technicality. He included all Christians and all those subject to Roman law as ”brothers”; there weren't, then, lot of Amalekites around.104 Later, the ”Exception of St. Ambrose,” as it came to be known, was to become extremely important.

All of these sermons-and there were many of them-left certain critical questions unanswered. What should the rich man do when receiving a visit from his troubled neighbor? True, Jesus had said to give without expectation of return, but it seemed unrealistic to expect most Christians to do that. And even if they did, what sort of ongoing relations.h.i.+ps would that create? St. Basil took the radical position. G.o.d had given us all things in common, and he had specifically instructed the rich to give their possessions to the poor. The communism of the Apostles-who pooled all their wealth, and took freely what they needed-was thus the only proper model for a truly Christian society.105 Few of the other Christian Fathers were willing to take things this far. Communism was the ideal, but in this fallen and temporary world, they argued, it was simply unrealistic. The Church must accept existing property arrangements, but also come up with spiritual arguments to encourage the rich to nonetheless act with Christian charity. Many of these employed distinctly commercial metaphors. Even Basil was willing to indulge in this sort of thing: Whenever you provide for the dest.i.tute on account of the Lord, it is both a gift and a loan. It is a gift because you entertain no hope in recovering it, a loan because of our Lord's munificence in paying you back on his behalf, when, having taken a small sum for the poor, he will give you back a vast sum in return. ”For he who takes pity on the poor, lends to G.o.d.”106 Since Christ is in the poor, a gift of charity is a loan to Jesus, to be repaid with interest inconceivable on earth.

Charity, however, is a way of maintaining hierarchy, not undermining it. What Basil is talking about here really has nothing to do with debt, and playing with such metaphors seems ultimately to serve only to underline the fact that the rich man doesn't owe the poor suppliant anything, any more than G.o.d is in any way legally bound to save the soul of anyone who feeds a beggar. ”Debt” here dissolves into a pure hierarchy (hence, ”the Lord”) where utterly different beings provide each other utterly different kinds of benefit. Later theologians were to explicitly confirm this: human beings live in time, noted St. Thomas Aquinas, so it makes sense to say that sin is a debt of punishment we owe to G.o.d. But G.o.d lives outside of time. By definition, he cannot owe anything to anyone. His grace can therefore only be a gift given with no obligation.107 This, in turn, provides an answer to the question: What are they really asking the rich man to do? The Church opposed usury, but it had little to say about relations of feudal dependency, where the rich man provides charity and the poor suppliant shows his grat.i.tude in other ways. Neither, when these kinds of arrangements began to emerge across the Christian West, did the Church offer significant objections.108 Former debt peons were gradually transformed into serfs or va.s.sals. In some ways, the relations.h.i.+p was not much different, since va.s.salage was, in theory, a voluntary, contractual relations.h.i.+p. Just as a Christian has to be able to freely choose to submit himself to ”the Lord,” so did a va.s.sal have to agree to make himself someone else's man. All this proved perfectly consonant with Christianity.

Commerce, on the other hand, remained a problem. There was not much of a leap between condemning usury as the taking of ”whatever exceeds the amount loaned” and condemning any form of profit-taking. Many-Saint Ambrose among them-were willing to take that leap. Where Mohammed declared that an honest merchant deserved a place by the seat of G.o.d in heaven, men like Ambrose wondered if an ”honest merchant” could actually exist. Many held that one simply could not be both a merchant and a Christian.109 In the early Middle Ages, this was not a pressing issue-especially since so much commerce was conducted by foreigners. The conceptual problems, however, were never resolved. What did it mean that one could only lend to ”strangers”? Was it just usury, or was even commerce tantamount to war?

Probably the most notorious, and often catastrophic, way that this problem worked itself out in the High Middle Ages was in relations between Christians and Jews. In the years since Nehemiah, Jewish att.i.tudes toward lending had themselves changed. In the time of Augustus, Rabbi Hillel had effectively rendered the sabbatical year a dead letter, by allowing two parties to place a rider on any particular loan contract agreeing that it would not apply. While both the Torah and the Talmud stand opposed to loans on interest, exceptions were made in dealing with Gentiles-particularly as, over the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, European Jews were excluded from almost any other line of work.110 This in turn made it harder to contain the practice, as witnessed in the common joke, current in twelfth-century ghettos to justify usury between Jews. It consisted, it is said, of reciting Deuteronomy 23:20 in interrogative tones to make it mean the opposite of its obvious sense: 'Unto a foreigner thou mayest lend upon usury, but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury?'111 On the Christian side, in 1140 ad the ”Exception of Saint Ambrose” found its way into Gratian's Decretum, which came to be considered the definitive collection of canon law. At the time, economic life fell very much under the jurisdiction of the Church. While that might appear to leave Jews safely outside the system, in reality, matters were more complicated. For one thing, while both Jews and Gentiles would occasionally attempt to make recourse to the Exception, the prevailing opinion was that it only really applied to Saracens or others with whom Christendom was literally at war. After all, Jews and Christians lived in the same towns and villages. If one were to concede that the Exception allowed Jews and Christians the right to lend to each other at interest, it would also mean that they had the right to murder one another.112 No one really wanted to say that. On the other hand, real relations between Christians and Jews often did seem to skate perilously close to this unfortunate ideal-though obviously the actual murder (apart from mere economic aggression) was all on one side.

In part this was due to the habit of Christian princes of exploiting, for their own purposes, the fact that Jews did sit slightly outside the system. Many encouraged Jews to operate as moneylenders, under their protection, simply because they also knew that protection could be withdrawn at any time. The kings of England were notorious in this regard. They insisted that Jews be excluded from merchant and craft guilds, but granted them the right to charge extravagant rates of interest, backing up the loans by the full force of law.113 Debtors in Medieval England were regularly thrown in prisons until their families settled with the creditor.114 Yet the same regularly happened to the Jews themselves. In 1210 ad, for example, King John ordered a tallage, or emergency levy, to pay for his wars in France and Ireland. According to one contemporary chronicler ”all the Jews throughout England, of both s.e.xes, were seized, imprisoned, and tortured severely, in order to do the king's will with their money.” Most who where put to torture offered all they had and more-but on that occasion, one particularly wealthy merchant, a certain Abraham of Bristol, who the king decided owed him ten thousand marks of silver (a sum equivalent to about a sixth of John's total annual revenue), became famous for holding out. The king therefore ordered that one of his molars be pulled out daily, until he paid. After seven had been extracted, Abraham finally gave in.115 John's successor, Henry III (12161272 ad), was in the habit of turning over Jewish victims to his brother the Earl of Cornwall, so that, as another chronicler put it, ”those whom one brother had flayed, the other might embowel.”116 Such stories about the extraction of Jewish teeth, skin, and intestines are, I think, important to bear in mind when thinking about Shakespeare's imaginary Merchant of Venice demanding his ”pound of flesh.”117 It all seems to have been a bit of a guilty projection of terrors that Jews had never really visited on Christians, but that had been directed the other way around.

The terror inflicted by kings carried in it a peculiar element of identification: the persecutions and appropriations were an extension of the logic whereby kings effectively treated debts owed to Jews as ultimately owed to themselves, even setting up a branch of the Treasury (”the Exchequer of the Jews”) to manage them.118 This was of course much in keeping with the popular English impression of their kings as themselves a group of rapacious Norman foreigners. But it also gave the kings the opportunity to periodically play the populist card, dramatically snubbing or humiliating their Jewish financiers, turning a blind eye or even encouraging pogroms by townsfolk who chose to take the Exception of Saint Ambrose literally, and treat moneylenders as enemies of Christ who could be murdered in cold blood. Particularly gruesome ma.s.sacres occurred in Norwich in 1144 ad, and in France, in Blois in 1171. Before long, as Norman Cohn put it, ”what had once been a flouris.h.i.+ng Jewish culture had turned into a terrorized society locked in perpetual warfare with the greater society around it.”119 One mustn't exaggerate the Jewish role in lending. Most Jews had nothing to do with the business, and those who did were typically bit players, making minor loans of grain or cloth for a return in kind. Others weren't even really Jews. Already in the 1190s, preachers were complaining about lords who would work hand in glove with Christian moneylenders claiming they were ”our Jews”-and thus under their special protection.120 By the 1100s, most Jewish moneylenders had long since been displaced by Lombards (from Northern Italy) and Cahorsins (from the French town of Cahors)-who established themselves across Western Europe, and became notorious rural usurers.121 The rise of rural usury was itself a sign of a growing free peasantry (there had been no point in making loans to serfs, since they had nothing to repossess). It accompanied the rise of commercial farming, urban craft guilds, and the ”commercial revolution” of the High Middle Ages, all of which finally brought Western Europe to a level of economic activity comparable to that long since considered normal in other parts of the world. The Church quickly came under considerable popular pressure to do something about the problem, and at first, it did try to tighten the clamps. Existing loopholes in the usury laws were systematically closed, particularly the use of mortgages. These latter began as an expedient: as in Medieval Islam, those determined to dodge the law could simply present the money, claim to be buying the debtor's house or field, and then ”rent” it back to the debtor until the princ.i.p.al was repaid. In the case of a mortgage, the house was in theory not even purchased but pledged as security, but any income from it accrued to the lender. In the eleventh century this became a favorite trick of monasteries. In 1148 it was made illegal: henceforth, all income was to be subtracted from the princ.i.p.al. Similarly, in 1187 merchants were forbidden to charge higher prices when selling on credit-the Church thereby going much further than any school of Islamic law ever had. In 1179 usury was made a mortal sin and usurers were excommunicated and denied Christian burial.122 Before long, new orders of itinerant friars like the Franciscans and Dominicans organized preaching campaigns, traveling town to town, village to village, threatening moneylenders with the loss of their eternal souls if they did not make rest.i.tution to their victims.

All this was echoed by a heady intellectual debate in the newly founded universities, not so much as to whether usury was sinful and illegal, but precisely why. Some argued that it was theft of another's material possessions; others that it const.i.tuted a theft of time, charging others for something that belonged only to G.o.d. Some held that it embodied the sin of Sloth, since like the Confucians, Catholic thinkers usually held that a merchant's profit could only be justified as payment for his labor (i.e., in transporting goods to wherever they were needed), whereas interest accrued even if the lender did nothing at all. Soon the rediscovery of Aristotle, who returned in Arabic translation (and the influence of Muslim sources like Ghazali and Ibn Sina), added new arguments: that treating money as an end in itself defied its true purpose; that charging interest was unnatural, in that it treated mere metal as if it were a living thing that could breed or bear fruit.123 But as the Church authorities soon discovered, when one starts something like this, it's very hard to keep a lid on it. Soon, new popular religious movements were appearing everywhere, and many took up the same direction so many had in late Antiquity, not only challenging commerce but questioning the very legitimacy of private property. Most were labeled heresies and violently suppressed, but many of the same arguments were taken up amongst the mendicant orders themselves. By the thirteenth century, the great intellectual debate was between the Franciscans and the Dominicans over ”apostolic poverty”-basically, over whether Christianity could be reconciled with property of any sort.

At the same time, the revival of Roman law-which, as we've seen, began from the a.s.sumption of absolute private property-put new intellectual weapons in the hands of those who wished to argue that, at least in the case of commercial loans, usury laws should be relaxed. The great discovery in this case was the notion of interesse, which is where our word ”interest” originally comes from: a compensation for loss suffered because of late payment.124 The argument soon became that if a merchant made a commercial loan even for some minimal period (say, a month), it was not usurious for him to charge a percentage for each month afterward, since this was a penalty, not rental for the money, and it was justified as compensation for the profit he would have made, had he placed it in some profitable investment, as any merchant would ordinarily be expected to do.125 The reader may be wondering how it could have been possible for usury laws to move in two opposite directions simultaneously. The answer would seem to be that politically, the situation in Western Europe was remarkably chaotic. Most kings were weak, their holdings fractured and uncertain; the Continent was a checkerboard of baronies, princ.i.p.alities, urban communes, manors, and church estates. Jurisdictions were constantly being renegotiated-usually by war. Merchant capitalism of the sort long familiar in the Muslim Near West only really managed to establish itself-quite late, compared with the situation in the rest of the Medieval world-when merchant capitalists managed to secure a political foothold in the independent city-states of northern Italy-most famously, Venice, Florence, Genoa, and Milan-followed by the German cities of the Hanseatic League.126 Italian bankers ultimately managed to free themselves from the threat of expropriation by themselves taking over governments, and by doing so, acquiring their own court systems (capable of enforcing contracts) and even more critically, their own armies.127 What jumps out, in comparison with the Muslim world, are these links of finance, trade, and violence. Whereas Persian and Arab thinkers a.s.sumed that the market emerged as an extension of mutual aid, Christians never completely overcame the suspicion that commerce was really an extension of usury, a form of fraud only truly legitimate when directed against one's mortal enemies. Debt was, indeed, sin-on the part of both parties to the transaction. Compet.i.tion was essential to the nature of the market, but compet.i.tion was (usually) nonviolent warfare. There was a reason why, as I've already observed, the words for ”truck and barter” in almost all European languages were derived from terms meaning ”swindle,” ”bamboozle,” or ”deceive.” Some disdained commerce for that reason. Others embraced it. Few would have denied that the connection was there.

One need only examine the way that Islamic credit instruments-or for that matter, the Islamic ideal of the merchant adventurer-were eventually adopted to see just how intimate this connection really was.

It is often held that the first pioneers of modern banking were the Military Order of the Knights of the Temple of Solomon, commonly known as the Knights Templar. A fighting order of monks, they played a key role in financing the Crusades. Through the Templars, a lord in southern France might take out a mortgage on one of his tenements and receive a ”draft” (a bill of exchange, modeled on the Muslim suftaja, but written in a secret code) redeemable for cash from the Temple in Jerusalem. In other words, Christians appear to have first adopted Islamic financial techniques to finance attacks against Islam.

The Templars lasted from 1118 to 1307, but they finally went the way of so many Medieval trading minorities: King Phillip IV, deep in debt to the order, turned on them, accusing them of unspeakable crimes; their leaders were tortured and ultimately killed, and their wealth was expropriated.128 Much of the problem was that they lacked a powerful home base. Italian banking houses such as the Bardi, Peruzzi, and Medici did much better. In banking history, the Italians are most famous for their complex joint-stock organization and for spearheading the use of Islamic-style bills of exchange.129 At first these were simple enough: basically just a form of long-distance money-changing. A merchant could present a certain amount in florins to a banker in Italy and receive a notarized bill registering the equivalent in the international money of account (Carolingian derniers), due in, say, three months' time, and then after it came due, either he or his agent could cash it for an equivalent amount of local currency in the Champagne fairs, which were both the great yearly commercial emporia, and great financial clearing houses, of the European High Middle Ages. But they quickly morphed into a plethora of new, creative forms, mainly a way of navigating-or even profiting from-the endlessly complicated European currency situation.130 Most of the capital for these banking enterprises derived from the Mediterranean trade in Indian Ocean spices and Eastern luxuries. Yet unlike the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean was a constant war zone. Venetian galleys doubled as both merchant vessels and wars.h.i.+ps, replete with cannon and marines, and the differences between trade, crusade, and piracy often depended on the balance of forces at any given moment.131 The same was true on land: where Asian empires tended to separate the sphere of warriors and merchants, in Europe they often overlapped: All up and down Central Europe, from Tuscany to Flanders, from Brabant to Livonia, merchants not only supplied warriors-as they did all over Europe-they sat in governments that made war and, sometimes, buckled on armor and went into battle themselves. Such places make a long list: not only Florence, Milan, Venice, and Genoa, but also Augsburg, Nuremberg, Strasbourg, and Zurich; not only Lubeck, Hamburg, Bremen, and Danzig, but also Bruges, Ghent, Leiden, and Cologne. Some of them-Florence, Nuremberg, Siena, Bern, and Ulm come to mind-built considerable territorial states.132 The Venetians were only the most famous in this regard. They created a veritable mercantile empire over the course of the eleventh century, seizing islands like Crete and Cyprus and establis.h.i.+ng sugar plantations that eventually-antic.i.p.ating a pattern eventually to become all too familiar in the New World-came to be staffed largely by African slaves.133 Genoa soon followed suit; one of their most lucrative businesses was raiding and trading along the Black Sea to acquire slaves to sell to the Mamluks in Egypt or to work mines leased from the Turks.134 The Genoese republic was also the inventor of a unique mode of military financing, which might be known as war by subscription, whereby those planning expeditions sold shares to investors in exchange for the rights to an equivalent percentage of the spoils. It was precisely the same galleys, with the same ”merchant adventurers” aboard, who would eventually pa.s.s through the pillars of Hercules to follow the Atlantic coast to Flanders or the Champagne fairs, carrying cargoes of nutmeg or cayenne, silks and woolen goods-along with the inevitable bills of exchange.135 It would be instructive, I think, to pause a moment to think about this term, ”merchant adventurer.” Originally it just meant a merchant who operated outside his own country. It was around this same time, however, at the height of the fairs of Champagne and the Italian merchant empires, between 1160 and 1172, that the term ”adventure” began to take on its contemporary meaning. The man most responsible for it was the French poet Chretien de Troyes, author of the famous Arthurian romances-most famous, perhaps, for being the first to tell the story of Sir Percival and the Holy Grail. The romances were a new sort of literature featuring a new sort of hero, the ”knight-errant,” a warrior who roamed the world in search of, precisely, ”adventure”-in the contemporary sense of the word: perilous challenges, love, treasure, and renown. Stories of knightly adventure quickly became enormously popular, Chretein was followed by innumerable imitators, and the central characters in the stories-Arthur and Guinevere, Lancelot, Gawain, Percival, and the rest-became known to everyone, as they are still. This courtly ideal of the gallant knight, the quest, the joust, romance and adventure, remains central to our image of the Middle Ages.136 The curious thing is that it bears almost no relation to reality. Nothing remotely like a real ”knight-errant” ever existed. ”Knights” had originally been a term for freelance warriors, drawn from the younger or, often, b.a.s.t.a.r.d sons of the minor n.o.bility. Unable to inherit, many were forced to band together to seek their fortunes. Many became little more than roving bands of thugs, in an endless pursuit of plunder-precisely the sort of people who made merchants' lives so dangerous. Culminating in the twelfth century, there was a concerted effort to bring this dangerous population under the control of the civil authorities: not only the code of chivalry, but the tournament, the joust-all these were more than anything else ways of keeping them out of trouble, as it were, in part by setting knights against each other, in part by turning their entire existence into a kind of stylized ritual.137 The ideal of the lone wandering knight, in search of some gallant adventure, on the other hand, seems to have come out of nowhere.

This is important, since it lies at the very heart of our image of the Middle Ages-and the explanation, I think, is revealing. We have to recall that merchants had begun to achieve unprecedented social and even political power around this time, but that, in dramatic contrast to Islam, where a figure like Sindbad-the successful merchant adventurer-could serve as a fictional exemplar of the perfect life, merchants, unlike warriors, were never seen as paragons of much of anything.

It's likely no coincidence that Chretien was living in Troyes, at the very heartland of the Champagne fairs that had become, in turn, the commercial hub of Western Europe.138 While he appears to have modeled his vision of Camelot on the elaborate court life under his patron Henri the Liberal (11521181), Count of Champagne, and his wife Marie, daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine, the real court was staffed by low-born commercants, who served as serjeants of the fairs-leaving most real knights in the role of onlookers, guards, or-at tournaments-entertainers.

This is not to say that tournaments did not become a kind of economic focus in their own right, according to one early twentieth-century Medievalist, Amy Kelly: The biographer of Guillaume le Marechal gives an idea of how this rabble of courtly routiers amused itself on the jousting fields of western Europe. To the tournaments, occurring in a brisk season about twice a month from Pentecost to the feast of St John, flocked the young bloods, sometimes three thousand strong, taking possession of the nearest town. Thither also flocked horse dealers from Lombardy and Spain, from Brittany and the Low Countries, as well as armorers, haberdashers for man and beast, usurers, mimes and story-tellers, acrobats, necromancers, and other gentlemen of the lists, the field, the road. Entertainers of every stripe found liberal patronage ... There were feasts in upper chambers, and forges rang in the smithies all night long. Brawls with grisly incidents-a cracked skull, a gouged eye-occurred as the betting progressed and the dice flew. To cry up their champions in the field came ladies of fair name and others of no name at all.

The hazards, the concourse, the prizes, keyed men to the pitch of war. The stakes were magnificent, for the victor held his prize, horse and man, for ransom. And for these ransoms fiefs went in gage or the hapless victim fell into the hands of usurers, giving his men, and in extremity, himself, as hostages. Fortunes were made and lost on the point of a lance and many a mother's son failed to ride home.139 So, it was not only that the merchants supplied the materials that made the fairs possible; Since vanquished knights technically owed their lives to the victors, merchants ended up, in their capacity as moneylenders, making good business out of liquidating their a.s.sets. Alternately, a knight might borrow vast sums to outfit himself in magnificence, hoping to impress some fair lady (with handsome dowry) with his victories; others, to take part in the continual whoring and gambling that always surrounded such events. Losers would end up having to sell their armor and horses, and this created the danger that they would go back to being highwaymen, foment pogroms (if their creditors were Jews) or, if they had lands, make new fiscal demands on those unfortunate enough to live on them.

Others turned to war, which itself tended to drive the creation of new markets.140 In one of the most dramatic of such incidents, in November 1199, a large number of knights at a tournament at the castle of ecry in Champagne, sponsored by Henry's son, Theobald, were seized by a great religious pa.s.sion, abandoned their games, and swore a vow to instead retake the Holy Land. The crusader army then proceeded to commission the Venetian fleet for transport in exchange for a promise of a 50-percent share in all resulting profits. In the end, rather than proceeding to the Holy Land, they ended up sacking the (much wealthier, Orthodox) Christian city of Constantinople after a prolonged and b.l.o.o.d.y siege. A Flemish count named Baldwin was installed as ”Latin Emperor of Constantinople,” but attempting to govern a city that had been largely destroyed and stripped of everything of value ensured that he and his barons soon ended up in great financial difficulties. In a gigantic version of what was happening on the small scale in so many tournaments, they were ultimately reduced to stripping the metal off the church roofs and auctioning holy relics to pay back their Venetian creditors. By 1259, Baldwin had sunk to the point of taking out a mortgage on his own son, who was taken back to Venice as security for a loan.141 All this does not really answer the question: Whence, then, this image of the solitary knight-errant, wandering the forests of a mythic Albion, challenging rivals, confronting ogres, fairies, wizards, and mysterious beasts? The answer should be clear by now. Really, this is just a sublimated, romanticized image of the traveling merchants themselves: men who did, after all, set off on lonely ventures through wilds and forests, whose outcome was anything but certain.142 And what of the Grail, that mysterious object that all the knights-errant were ultimately seeking? Oddly enough, Richard Wagner, composer of the opera Parzifal, first suggested that the Grail was a symbol inspired by the new forms of finance.143 Where earlier epic heroes sought after, and fought over, piles of real, concrete gold and silver-the Nibelung's h.o.a.rd-these new ones, born of the new commercial economy, pursued purely abstract forms of value. No one, after all, knew precisely what the Grail was. Even the epics disagree: sometimes it's a plate, sometimes a cup, sometimes a stone. (Wolfram von Eschenbach imagined it to be a jewel knocked from Lucifer's helmet in a battle at the dawn of time.) In a way it doesn't matter. The point is that it's invisible, intangible, but at the same time of infinite, inexhaustible value, containing everything, capable of making the wasteland flower, feeding the world, providing spiritual sustenance, and healing wounded bodies. Marc Sh.e.l.l even suggested that it would best be conceived as a blank check, the ultimate financial abstraction.144

What, Then, Were the Middle Ages?

Each of us is a mere symbolon of a man, the result of bisection, like the flat fish, two out of one, and each of us is constantly searching for his corresponding symbolon.

-Plato, The Symposium.

There is one way that Wagner got it wrong: the introduction of financial abstraction was not a sign that Europe was leaving the Middle Ages, but that it was finally, belatedly, entering it.

Wagner's not really to blame here. Almost everyone gets this wrong, because the most characteristic Medieval inst.i.tutions and ideas arrived so late in Europe that we tend to mistake them for the first stirrings of modernity. We've already seen this with bills of exchange, already in use in

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