The Usurer and the Merchant Prince: Italian Businessmen and the Ecclesiastical Law of Restitution, 1100–1550

Abstract

Since the time of Ashley at least, it has not been possible to charge the Catholic church of the Middle Ages with having intended to throttle business enterprise by its doctrine of usury. Very few medieval writers, certainly after the early thirteenth century, wished to outlaw profit when it was a legitimate return on investment. To authoritative theologians and jurists there was a world of difference between usury, that is profit openly demanded or secretly hoped for in a contract of loan (mutuutn), and justifiable returns derived from partnerships, where there was a sharing of the risk and venture of the capital. The doctors operated with distinctions of Roman law by which the mutuum, explicitly referred to in the Vulgate at Luke 6:35, was clearly marked off from other transactions, such as the consensual contracts of partnership (societas), letting and hiring (locatio conductio), and purchase and sale (emptio venditio).