All the poor people complain
For the Jews were more generous
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In the handling of their deals
Than the Christians do at present.
These ask for collaterals and deeds,
Pledges also, and grab everything
Until they have stripped them bare …
But if the Jews had remained
In the kingdom of France,
Christian souls would have had great relief
they have no longer.
A Norman chronicler of the fourteenth century was of like mind:
After the expulsion of the Jews [from France] they could not find any money except by borrowing it through agents from certain Christians, both clerics and laymen, who lent at such an enormous rate of interest that it was double what was charged by the Jews, and who did it in such a way that the debtors did not know the lenders who were in possession of their pledges. This was a dangerous situation, for if the agents died or gave up the business, they did not know where to recover them.
The Knights Templar fared the worst of all. One of the most powerful and wealthy military orders in Europe, the Templars, renounced personal wealth and pledged their permanent defence of Palestine and the holy places. In 1307, an order secretly prepared a month prior, directed the arrest of every French member of the Templars without warning and their property seized. Philippe’s attack on the Templars was helped by a schism in the Church. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, Philip’s showdown with the papacy resulted in the abduction of Pope Boniface VIII. In 1304, the archbishop of Bordeaux was selected by the conclave as the new pope, Clement V. His decision to remain in France rather than Rome—settling in Avignon in 1309—resulted in a move away from Italian dominance of the papacy, especially as the next six popes were also French.
Beholden to the French king, Clement V called for a council to discuss the Knights Templar arrest and usury in general. In 1311, the Council of Vienne dissolved the Templars. With the Pope’s approval, fifty-four Templars accused of apostasy, sodomy, idolatry, and obscenity were burned to death at the Saint-Antoine gate outside of Paris. In 1314, the master of the order, Jacques de Molay, along with Geoffrey de Charnay faced the same fate on a scaffold erected opposite the cathedral of Notre Dame.57
←52 | 53→
The Council also instructed the Inquisition to investigate monarchs who allowed usury. Because so many moneylenders hid interest payments, the Church decreed that lenders be forced to produce their record-keeping books for inspection. The Council further ruled that clergy be allowed to take their anti-usury preaching out onto the streets. This was a step too far for some rulers determined to exert their authority over an overweening pope. When the Inquisition attempted to go into various French towns to combat usury (including the southern towns of Carcassone, Limoux, and Pamiers), it was denied entrance. Philip made it clear that usury and its profits on French soil were solely the king’s affair, not the Church’s.58
In the same year that the Jews were exiled, Philip returned to currency manipulation to fill his coffers. He devalued the currency around 39 percent which led to a dramatic rise in prices. Creditors called in their debts at the higher rate, which had tripled as had rents. One satirist scorned the king as turning “twenty into sixty, then twenty into four; and ten into thirty … Gold and silver, all is lost/And none will be restored.” A riot ensued that was put down by force, with a number of craftsmen hanged as an example to other would-be rioters. Taxation and fluctuation of the currency continued with Philip’s reign and it was not long after their expulsion that Lombards and Jews began filtering back to France. They resettled in various towns between 1307 and 1311, even though the expulsion had not been formerly lifted. In November 1314, at the age of forty-six, Philip IV suffered a stroke while out on a hunt and died just over three weeks later at Fontainebleu. It was the new king, Louis X, who officially allowed Jews to return to France.59
* * *
The expulsion of Jews in England and France has long been a prime example of medieval antisemitism. Yet it is difficult to assess the actions of kings like Edward I and Philip IV as antisemitic. Their prime motivation did not stem from a personal animus towards Jews or their religion but from the demands for finance brought about by decades of costly wars, the expenditure for crusades, the building of defensive castles, upkeep of the royal household, maintenance of the kingdom, ransoms, bribes, and hospitality. No source of funding was sacred, as was clear from Edward’s raid on the clergy’s money and both kings attack on the Templars. Punishments for transgressions were harsh, and in some cases, obscenely brutal, with exile a convenient way to rid a monarch of a problem. Regardless of whether a few Jews were moneylenders, whether most had taken up other jobs, whether ←53 | 54→they were impoverished from years of taxation, or whether they were still active usurers, the perception and understanding in both England and France was that they were only settled in those countries for their capital. When usury became a political problem, and other sources of credit were found, it was expedient to expel them from their lands. Usury was an issue that had stoked violence and civil unrest in the past and would be a source of rebellion in the fourteenth century.
Notes
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1.Paul Rapin de Thoyras, An Abridgement of the History of England (London 1747), 217; Davis, “The Ethics of Arbitrage,” chap. 1; Vincent J. Cornell, “In the Shadow of Deuteronomy: Approaches to Interest in Judaism and Christianity,” in Interest in Islamic Economics: Understanding Riba, ed. Abdulkader Thomas (London and New York: Routledge, 2006).
2.John W. Baldwin, Masters, Princes, and Merchants: The Social Views of Peter the Chanter and His Circle (Princeton 1970); O’Carroll, A Thirteenth-Century Preacher’s Handbook, 5.
3.Britnell, The Commercialisation of English Society, 126; Ferguson, Ascent of Money, introduction.
4.Britnell, The Commercialisation of English Society, 102, 103, 121; Duby, The Early Growth of the European Economy, 231.
5.Cave and Coulson, A Source Book for Medieval Economic History, 73; Jones, The Plantagenets, “L’Espace Plantagenet.”
6.David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 222–23; Robert Chazan, The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom 1000–1500 (Cambridge: CUP, 2006), 159; Mundill, “Christian and Jewish Lending Patterns,” 45; Theodore Evergates, ed., Feudal Society in Medieval France: Documents from the County of Champagne (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 28–30; Mollat and Wolff, The Popular Revolutions of the Late Middle Ages, 26; Borer, The City of London, 55, 84; Robert C. Stacey, “Jewish Lending,” 89, 93–95 and “The English Jews under Henry III,” in The Jews in Medieval Britain: Historical, Literary, and Archeological Perspectives, ed. Patricia Skinner (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2003), 41; Materials for the History of Thomas Becket (Rolls Series, 67, 1875–85), vol. III, 19, quoted in Dobson, The Jewish Communities, 4. Following J. Jacobs in The Jews of Angevin England, Dobson believes the word creditores is an error and that debitores was intended. Graeme Donald Snooks, “The Dynamic Role of the Market in the Anglo-Norman Economy and Beyond 1086–1300,” in Commercialising Economy, 27; Kocka, Capitalism; C. Hollister, Robert Stacey, and Robin Chapman Stacey, The Making of England to 1399 (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing,