Jesus was still a young man when he was executed by the Romans. So we can only guess how different our world would be today if he had lived long enough to develop and spread his teachings. As it is, his warnings about money never took root in the new religion that sprung up after his death.
In 2011, as part of my history course, I had a chance to examine the reality of Christian life in a society dripping with money. This was the Italian city-state of Florence during the Renaissance. There, fifteen-hundred years after Jesus chased the money-lenders out of the temple in Jerusalem, Florentines were trying to keep both God and Mammon happy.
What guidance did the Catholic Church offer to those who aspired to spiritual salvation and great wealth? That was the question I set out to address in an essay I wrote more than a decade ago.
What follows is an edited version of that essay, now published for the first time.
The Church was an integral part of Renaissance Florence. The dozens of sacred buildings, from the mighty Basilica to the lowliest parish church, were a permanent reminder of Catholicism’s strong and visible presence in the city. Economically, the Church was strong too, with estimates of its property holdings ranging from a quarter to one-third of the available land.
The wealth of the medieval Church meant that it could not preach about earthly riches in the same direct fashion as Jesus had. To do so would have undermined its position due to the obvious contradiction between its behaviour and the principles set out in the gospels. Consequently, a more sophisticated and nuanced theology was required, particularly as the growth in trade and commerce from the eleventh century onwards made the acquisition of riches a reality for more and more people.
As the Church would not turn its face against wealth per se, it concentrated instead on the means by which its members acquired wealth. In line with its own position as a major landholder, the Church believed that the best way to riches was to acquire and farm arable land. Trade, however, was a different matter.
The Church believed that God did not like merchants, but it found a loophole that allowed Catholic clergy to at least tolerate the practice of commerce. If a trader or merchant was interested only in making a profit, his actions were sinful. If, however, he wanted simply to improve the lot of his family and his community, and he acted honestly, his activities were acceptable in the eyes of the Church.
That still left one major obstacle to a full rapprochement between religion and commerce, i.e. usury. The addition of any interest to a loan was regarded by clerical authorities as usury and the practice was condemned by the Church. The penalty was excommunication and anyone who argued against the Church’s teaching was to be treated as a heretic.
In a commercial hub like Renaissance Florence, the practical effect of the Church’s ban on usury could have had serious negative implications. Commercial loans and partnership arrangements were common, and potentially usurious, depending on how Church teaching was interpreted. The critical factor was the Florentine clergy and how they implemented the Church’s laws. In effect, as will become clear, the Church in Florence adopted what can be described only as a benign attitude towards the commercial life of the city. This included an elastic interpretation of the Church’s laws against usury.
Here are some examples.
In the early fourteenth century, a Dominican, Giordano da Pisa, preached in favour of commerce as a necessary antidote to the feudal vendettas that had plagued Florence for many years. A century later, another Dominican, Giovanni Dominici, was more explicit, describing Christ in one sermon as ‘the celestial merchant’, which was undoubtedly a boost to the businessmen in his congregation. Dominici was the son of a Florentine silk merchant and he demonstrated his feelings for the city in 1406 when he urged his listeners to ‘fight for the patria, not steal from the Commune (government)’.1
Antonino Pierozzi, a native of the city, was an Observantist Dominican, that is, he adhered to the stricter form of the order’s rule. He was a theologian who became archbishop of Florence in 1446. In his preaching and his writings, he expressed his strong opposition to usury, but he was also sensitive to the needs of the city’s merchants as he elucidated the Church’s laws on the matter. For instance, the government had instituted a funding mechanism called the Monte comune, which required citizens to make loans to the state in return for which they received interest repayments. This clearly contravened the ban on usury, yet Antonino not only approved the system but also the trade in Monte shares which could leave sellers with huge gains.
Antonino’s attitude to the Monte was not novel. The institution of the scheme in the mid-fourteenth century had led to considerable debate as to whether or not it would lead the city’s inhabitants into collective usury. It was a Franciscan, Francesco da Empoli, who, in his Determinatio de materia montis, concluded that participants in the Monte were innocent of usurious behaviour. It might seem odd that a member of the order founded by Francis of Assisi, who eschewed wealth and privilege, should be so accommodating to the financial needs of a secular government. But Francesco was not the only Franciscan to demonstrate flexibility when it came to interpreting the Church’s position on usury.
Bernardino of Siena was an Observant Franciscan, trained in law and theology. He preached throughout northern Italy, including Florence, during the first half of the fifteenth century. As a roving preacher, not tied to Florentine civic life as was Antonino, he could adopt a more objective approach to the Commune’s various financial initiatives. So, for instance, he aroused negative reaction from his hearers during a sermon in Florence’s cathedral when he condemned the dowry fund as usurious. Known as the Monte delle doti, this was a fund set up to assist fathers meet the considerable costs associated with their daughters’ marriage.
Bernardino regarded usury as evil, plain and simple, and it was a frequent theme of his sermons in Florence and elsewhere. Yet, even he could see ways in which the businessman could lend at interest, without committing usury. In the collection of his Lenten sermons which he compiled in 1425, Bernardino examined the concept of time as a justification for the charging of interest. That is, the lender could be said to have lost potential profits during the period of the loan, as he could have found an alternative investment opportunity for the money lent, with some expectation of a financial return. While Bernardino rejected this argument, he did acknowledge the legitimacy of time as a valuable resource that could be sold.
In a society where wealth grew through trade and banking, benefiting both Church and state, Bernardino, while zealous in his condemnation of usury, realised that the law needed to be interpreted in a way that allowed the developing commercial world to function. While giving a sermon in Siena he is reported to have said that ‘the rich are necessary to the State, and the poor to the rich’.2
But the law was the law and - no matter what an individual preacher might say - some merchants were confused and worried. They believed that breaking the law could lead to catastrophic implications for them in the afterlife. One Florentine, Angelo Corbinelli, noted in his will dated 1419 that his conscience was troubled by the possibility that he might have sinned through the loans he was compelled to make to the Commune. He was not helped by the fact that ‘highly judicious masters and theologians hold contrary opinions on this question’.3
Such doubts benefited the Church, as merchants sought to make restitution for possible transgressions of the usury laws by making big donations to the very clergy who had planted those doubts in the first place. An extreme example was Cosimo de Medici who, burdened by guilt over his usurious activities, gifted 36,000 florins in ‘conscience money’ to Florence’s Observant Dominicans.
Of course, the sacrament of confession was available to those who desired personal guidance and forgiveness. However, even the clergy needed help in determining whether or not a penitent was guilty of usury. Manuals were available to instruct confessors in the appropriate treatment of a variety of possible sins. Among the most popular of these manuals was the Confessionale pro instructione confessorum written by Girolamo Savonarola, later to become ruler of Florence. He was an Observant Dominican, who delivered fiery sermons to congregations of up to 15,000 at the church of San Marco in the city. In his sermons, he criticised Florentines for their conspicuous affluence, reflected in the increasingly grand homes which they had built for themselves. Yet, like Antonino, Bernardino and other mendicants mentioned above, he could be flexible in his judgement of what constituted usury. For instance, in the Confessionale he concurred with Bernardino’s definition of a time-based rationale for imposing interest, criticising only the levying of an excessive charge by the lender.
By the end of the fifteenth century the Church’s ban on usury was approaching a point where it was ‘more honor'd in the breach than the observance’. Prosecutions of suspected usurers at Florence’s ecclesiastical court declined significantly during the second half of the century. As I have outlined above, even Florence’s greatest clerics could not sustain a blanket condemnation of a practice that was endemic to the city’s social and commercial life. This became inescapably clear in 1495, when the Florentine government authorised the setting up of a new fund, known as the Monte di pietà, to lend to the city’s poor. The initiative was intended to curtail the activities of Jewish moneylenders who were charging high rates of interest on their loans. The new monte, to be funded by charitable donations, would offer loans at between five and ten per cent interest.
The city’s Dominicans objected to this blatant violation of the Church’s anti-usury stance, but the Franciscans supported the plan. In 1515, the Church rejected arguments that the Monti di pietà promoted usury and formally approved them in a decree of the Fifth Lateran Council. It would be wrong to say that this led to the immediate overturning of the Church’s traditional position on usury. However, as its overall authority waned in the face of a vigorous Reformation movement, the practical impact of its prohibition went into irreversible decline.
By the time Florence began to develop as an economic powerhouse, the Church had already watered down Jesus’ antipathy towards wealth. Its theologians turned instead to the manner in which wealth was acquired and the motives behind such acquisition. Even there, they had to face the realities of the new world of international commerce and accept that land was not the only means to riches. Insofar as any conflict remained between Christian principles and commercial life in Renaissance Florence, it came to centre on the issue of usury. It was the mendicants and their most eminent representatives who tried to bridge the ever-increasing gap between ecclesiastical theory and financial reality.
In the end, commercial interests won and the ban on usury, the final remnant of the Church’s erstwhile opposition to Mammon, faded into irrelevance.
Daniel R. Lesnick, ‘Civic preaching in the early Renaissance’, in Timothy Verdon and John Henderson (eds.), Christianity and the Renaissance: Image and Religious Imagination in the Quattrocento (Syracuse, N.Y., 1990), pp. 208-225.
John W. Oppel, ‘Poggio, San Bernardino of Siena, and the Dialogue On Avarice’, Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 30, No. 4, Studies in the Renaissance Issue (Winter, 1977), pp. 564-587.
Lawrin Armstrong, ‘Usury: Six Texts (1161-1419)’, in Katherine Ludwig Jansen, Joanna H. Drell, and Frances Andrews (eds), Medieval Italy: Texts in Translation (Pennsylvania, 2009).