Medieval and Renaissance Banking Or “How to Succeed in Business Without Getting Condemned for Usury”

 

Lord Richard Heyworth: https://wiki.eastkingdom.org/wiki/Richard_Heyworth 

 

The Moneylender and his Wife (1514)

Introduction

A few years back, a new historical drama appeared on Netflix: “Medici: Masters of Florence.” It rekindled my interest in and love of this dynamic and important Renaissance family. But it also renewed a question that had been bothering me for years: a major plot point of the show involves the Medici being accused of usury. They deny it, but I couldn’t help but wonder how any bank operated without running afoul of this law.  

I will go into much greater detail later, but for now, dlet’s define usury as offering a loan and expecting interest as part of the repayment for that loan. Everything I know about banking suggests that you cannot operate unless you do this. But those banks persisted for decades, even centuries. How? My subsequent research, and this paper, will answer that question.

Modern Banking

To understand why this seemed so impossible to my business-degree brain, we’ll go over some basics about modern banking (trust me, it’s really basic) to illustrate the problem.

There are roughly two types of banks: investment banks and commercial banks. Investment banks weren’t a big deal in period, so commercial banking is where we’ll want to dedicate our time. Commercial banks are the banks you see on the street corner – Bank of America, Santander, TD Bank, etc. They make money by borrowing money at low interest rates for short periods of time (this is your savings and checking accounts – you can imagine them as a very low or 0% interest rate loan to the bank, that you can recover instantly) and they use these funds to provide loans at higher interest rates for long periods of time (for example, a 30-year mortgage at the time I am writing this paper averages 7.8%). The difference between the two is where the bank gets its profits.

So interest is a pretty big deal. But how do banks determine a fair level of interest? The answer isn’t just “banks are greedy.” If that were the case, it would be pretty easy for a rival bank to charge less interest on the loans they provide and give more to savers, and that would be the end of the greedy bank. Instead, what banks do is they charge a rate of interest based on the borrower’s likelihood to repay (and other things, but we’re keeping it very very simple).

Brace yourself, there’s math. Let’s say you take out a $1000 loan from a bank, and you intend to repay them within a year. What interest rate should the bank charge you?

We can think of this as a weighted average, just like when we calculated our GPAs back in high school. There is a 10% chance the bank will get nothing. There is a 90% chance the bank will get whatever the payment they ask for is. The math looks like this:

10% Chance x $0 + 90% Chance x (payment)

Let’s see what the payment would have to be if they want to get their $1000 back at the end. If we ignore the 10% chance of $0, then we see there’s just a 90% chance of whatever the payment is. What number, times 90%, equals $1000? Some quick division says the bank needs to charge $1,111, or 11.1%

Important to note is: if they didn’t charge you interest at all, they’d have to ask for only $1000 back at the end of that year. And if 10% of the people didn’t pay, they’d lose, on average, $100 every time they made a loan. They wouldn’t be in business very long. And that’s what usury laws say! This is why the existence of medieval and Renaissance banks made no sense to me.

Usury Definitions

The first question you should be asking is: did usury laws say you couldn’t charge interest? Or is that just a simplification for television and drama? It’s a good question. So let’s go to the original medieval definition. John H. Munro, in “The Medieval Origins of the Financial Revolution: Usury, Rentes, and Negotiability,” tells us that the medieval definition of usury was, “the exaction of interest or of any specified return beyond the principal value of a loan.” So yes, they said you couldn’t charge any interest at all.

The principle Biblical justifications for these harsh laws came from two places. The first was Genesis 3:19: “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground,   since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.“ Early theologians read that first line – “by the sweat of your brow you will eat your food” – to suggest that work was the only allowable form of income. The second is Luke 6:35: “But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil.”

It wasn’t just the Bible. Aristotle (a favorite source for medieval and Renaissance theologians) had the following to say about usury in his great work, Politics, “The most hated sort [of money making], and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself, and not from the natural use of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term usury, which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Whereof of all modes of making money this is the most unnatural.“ His movement, the Scholastics, thought of money as “sterile,” which is to say that it could not give birth to more money solely by itself. Aristotle wrote in several places that money should be considered only a token for the purpose of exchange, of no value in and of itself.

The early church agreed. In the 4th century, St. Ambrose of Milan had this to say on the matter of usury: “if someone takes usury, he commits violent robbery, and he shall not live”

In the 6th century Justinian Code, loans were called mutuum (literally “what had been mine becomes thine”), a form of sale or exchange, and it was considered that this transferred ownership to the borrower. When the borrower repaid, any additional amount required was considered theft of the borrower’s industry. 

The response of the medieval church was similarly clear. The Third Lateran Council in 1179 excommunicated usurers and refused them unrepentant burial in consecrated ground. The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 condemned Jews for engaging in “cruel oppression” in extorting “oppressive and excessive interest.”  The Decretales of Pope Gregory IX, 1234, confirming the Third Lateran Council, required princes “to expel usurers from their territories and never to readmit them.” 

Thomas Aquinas, in his 13th century work Summa Theologiae stated that usury was a sin not only against charity but also against commutative justice and natural law; thus, a mortal sin. Even hoping for interest, Aquinas stated, was a mortal sin. By 1312, the Council of Vienne ruled in favor of excommunication for: “magistrates, rulers, consuls, judges, lawyers, and similar officials” who “draw up statutes” permitting usury or “knowingly decide that usury may be paid.” They further ruled that, “if anyone falls into the error of believing and affirming that it is not a sin to practise [sic] usury, we decree that he be punished as a heretic.’

Usury was clearly taken very seriously by the church. But not only by the church – culture was equally as opposed. Dante, in his 14th century poem Inferno, places usurers in the 8th Circle of Hell (Fraud) – lowerer than violent murderers, violent suicides, and blasphemers. Their eternal penalty was… grisly, to say the least.

As a medieval or Renaissance banker, these laws were therefore not just annoyances to try to weasel around; they were rules on how to conduct your life to save your immortal soul. Many of these bankers took these rules seriously and very much wanted to not be usurers – not in the public’s eyes, and not in God’s eyes. John Thomas Noonan, in “The Scholastic Analysis of Usury,” noted that “the real force of the usury law lay in its hold on men’s souls, and there no evasion was possible.” Munro notes that Genoese merchants and financiers sought to buy “fire insurance” or “passports to Heaven” by making bigger donations to the Church. This was a real concern in the minds of bankers, not merely adherence to the law.

Exceptions

According to Munro, both canon law and Scholastic treatises, influenced by civil law commentators on Roman law from the twelfth century, allowed a few exceptions. Let’s go over those exceptions before we get into the more creative ones.

The first exception, as you might be expecting if you’ve read any Shakespeare, are people of the Jewish religion. However, the Jewish rabbinate at the time held themselves to the standard of Deuteronomy 23, verses 19-20: “You shall not charge interest to your brother – interest on money or food or anything that is lent out at interest. To a foreigner you may charge interest, but to your brother you shall not charge interest, that the Lord your God may bless you in all to which you set your hand in the land which you are entering to possess.” 

According to Niall Ferguson in, “The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World,” Jewish theologians interpreted this passage as saying that interest could not be charged to other Jewish people but that you could charge interest to Christians.

The second exception was ownership, either partial or full. If, instead of asking for repayment of a loan, the bank took possession of your farm and all its income until you bought it back for the original bill of sale, the income from the farm wasn’t considered interest. This allowed for many exceptions we’ll see below, but also for the early development of pawn shops as providers of short-term loans.

The third exception was Poena Detentori, the right of the person loaning the money to charge a late fee if repayment was not made in a timely fashion. This is additional income made on the loan, yes, but it was considered to be a fee, not interest. Of course, if it was predetermined that the borrower would pay late and be charged this fee as a condition of the loan, that would be usury.

The fourth exception was Damnum Emergen. This was compensation made for damages caused by the absence of the loaned money. For example, if a merchant gave a loan and then his store burned down, he could ask for some of the lost income he would have received had he not made the loan and thus had the money to promptly rebuild his store. This was a rare exception that did not come up that often, mostly because it was so difficult to prove what was a loss caused by the granting of a loan, and what was a loss caused by mismanagement.

The fifth exception was Lucrum Cessan. This is complicated enough that it’s going to have its own section.

Before we leave the definition of usury, consider the following: imagine you are a Jewish bank and loan money to a Christian. Merely the existence of the usury laws (and your status as an unprivileged minority group compared to the borrower’s existence in a privileged majority one) means that your borrower could simply accuse you of usury, refuse to pay the loan, and perhaps have you subject to criminal penalties (this is, after all, the plot of Merchant of Venice)

Ask yourself: who would loan money under these circumstances? How risky would that be? And what rates of interest would they therefore be forced to charge for those loans? You can immediately imagine a world of questionable people who don’t care much for their immortal souls doing business at ruinous rates of interest. That’s not good for society. 

Lucrum Cessan

One of the early exceptions to usury laws, as Munro tells us, was the idea of lucrum cessan, literally “lost profits.” This concept refers to the idea that, by giving the borrower a loan, the lender has foregone the money they could have made by investing or purchasing a profit-producing asset. Let’s think of it this way. I’m a prosperous merchant with a lot of cash, and one day, two people in the village approach me:

The first tells me that he needs a loan of $1000 to purchase some supplies for his pottery business. A year from now, he’ll pay me back the $1000 with proceeds from selling pottery. The second tells me that he has the opportunity to rent the use of an olive grove, and a press to make the oil. It will cost him $1000 for the rental, and at the end of the year, he’ll be able to sell the olive oil for $1200. He proposes that I invest in this project and pay the $1000 for the rental fee. He will work the grove, and, at the end of the year, the proceeds from the olive oil will repay me back my $1000 investment. He’ll also split the extra profit with me, 50/50, so I’ll make an extra $100 on top of getting my investment back.

The second example is clearly an example of ownership. It’s not usury. The first is clearly a loan. Can I charge the first individual $100 extra, to convince me to choose their pottery loan instead of investing in the olive oil business? Lucrum cessan is a concept that says yes.

This plan, though, violates all sorts of precepts from our usury definitions, above. To start, it clearly violates the concept of sterility of money. In the second example, I’m a co-owner in an olive oil business. Sure, I’m not doing any work, but it’s a joint partnership. What if the olives don’t grow? I’ll lose the money. If I could ask the person in the first example for an extra $100 to “match” this offer, I’d be making $100 purely from the loan, not from the sweat of my brow. My money would be making new money, with no risk or exposure from me.

For this reason, Aquinas and other theologians completely rejected the idea of lucram cessan. Others suggested that the two situations were not so different. If the pottery business did poorly, just as the olive oil business, I also wouldn’t get my money back. They claimed it would be usury only if the repayment was predetermined and certain. Nevertheless, theologians struggled with that conclusion. If I could not charge the borrower that extra $100, after all, I would always go with the olive grove. No one could borrow money. Peter John Olivi, in the 13th century, argued that money could be “fruitful in itself,” rejecting the idea of the sterility of money as simply incorrect. 

St. Bernardino (1425) and St. Antonino (1449) continued to work on this idea, claiming that lucram cessan could be claimed by lenders who made loans charitably, but it was “never to be counselled [sic]” nor allowed to merchants who preferred to seek gains from “a usurious loan [rather] than in commerce.” In other words, the lender in our example could not ask the borrower for an extra $100, but the borrower could freely offer it as a counter-offer to get the loan. 

Ultimately, it would not be until 1642 that the church would recognize this exception. In the meantime, many would-be lenders were wary of the concept, uncertain of the risk to their immortal souls. As such, many just invested their money in ideas such as the olive grove and avoided lending entirely, reducing the overall pool of lenders, and bringing us back to our world of only questionable people making loans.

Forced Loans

At this point, we’re moving beyond the early formal exceptions and into exceptions that were created much later. To get there, it’s important to consider not only the lender but the borrowers. Who borrows money? Roughly, in order of the amounts borrowed, it looks like this: countries, then businesses, then individuals.

Why do countries borrow so much money? There’s a lot of reasons, but for medieval and Renaissance monarchs, the reason was primarily war. Wars are expensive. Wars are also extremely risky – it’s easy to lose everything and be unable to pay back the lender. And the usury laws made it so the only lenders were questionable people making loans at ruinous interest rates. This was a major problem for principalities who wanted to borrow to go to war.

The first solution was to use the ownership exception. In 1149, Genoa sold to its creditors the entire tax revenue of the city. In 1164, Venice sold the tax revenues from the Rialto market, and then in 1187, the revenues from the salt tax. But there’s a problem with this plan: you can only do it once. Once you’ve sold the tax revenue of the city, you don’t have it to sell again. The Italian city-states, who primarily fought with mercenaries, had to come up with something better.

This second solution was forced loans. The idea of a forced loan was simple: the state, through its monopoly on the use of force, would tell its citizens that they were going to provide a loan to the government, or else. This loan would provide interest and would be repaid, so it wasn’t a terrible deal for the citizens, but it was mandatory. Munro tells us that this gets around the usury problem in a very elegant way. The lender-citizen is not demanding interest, or even hoping for interest. On the contrary, they don’t even want to make the loan in the first place. The party demanding the loan and the interest is the borrower, and it’s clear the borrower can’t be a usurer.

This idea took off across Italy like wildfire. Venice embraced forced loans in 1207, followed by Siena in 1287, Genoa in 1340, Florence in 1343, and Lucca in 1370.  By the mid-14th century, the fiction that the loan would be paid back was abandoned, and the loans were now just for perpetual (forever) interest payments.

It’s unsurprising that this idea was popular with governments. What about with their citizens? Well, to make sure it wasn’t too unpopular, states would only force loans on their citizens with the greatest ability to provide money – in other words, the rich. Receiving interest from loans allows your money to no longer be sterile, it allows your money to make money on its own. So the situation became such where the rich were becoming richer, even relative to the rest of the population, without being accused of usury.  The happiest people were the richest people.

Additionally, it’s worth thinking about what the alternative was: taxation. For the rich, taxation would be a decrease in wealth to no benefit. For the state, they’d be angering their most powerful and wealthy citizens, the very people most able to raise an army of mercenaries to overthrow them in a rebellion. Forced loans made both sides happier.

Ok, so everyone’s happy with forced loans. Time passes. Here’s our new scenario. Your grandparents were forced to give the government a loan and received a stream of payments in return. Now, hard times have struck your family. You’re penniless except for this small bit of income from the government. Are you allowed to sell that stream of payments to someone else to get your original money back and save your family? What about if you sell that stream of payments to someone for less than your original money back (because you’re desperate for cash), leading them to receive more than the original interest rate? Is that usury?

Two main theories emerged. The first, championed in 1353 by Franciscan Francesco da Empoli in his work, Determinatio de materia monti, said these payments were not based on the original loan, but on a purchase-sale contract with the original lender, and therefore not usury. The second, articulated soon thereafter by Dominican Piero degli Strozzi said that such buyers were by definition doing so in the hopes of profiting from the interest on a loan and were usurers, and further argued that the payments by the State on the original loan were gifts only to the original payees and could not be sold or transferred.

Jurists tended to side with da Empoli. Theologians tended to side with degli Strozzi. The net effect of this controversy was that many people were left uncertain what to think. Was this usury? Would this condemn their eternal soul to hell? This uncertainty made people widely unwilling to purchase forced loans in such a secondary market; however, it also made people uncomfortable about the original forced loans their families had received centuries earlier. In the end, the entire concept of forced loans was discredited and became solely an Italian institution.

Rentes

Northern Europe largely avoided forced loans in favor of a system called rentes. Here’s how it worked: it had been common practice since the 9th century Carolingian Empire to engage in what were called census contracts. Someone would die, and they would leave all of their land and belongings to a local monastery. However, out of concern that this would leave their heirs to starve, an agreement was made that the monastery would take care of those heirs.  

At first, this care came from the “fruits of the land.” In other words, if a wheat field was given to the church, the heirs would receive wheat; if an olive grove, olives, etc. By the 12th century, however, it was easier for everyone involved for the monasteries to just pay in cash.

Munro, in describing the system of rentes, says that the main appeal for the northern states was that this system could be used to – usury-free – acquire loans.  Here’s how: a farmer, needing money, goes to a local bank. The bank offers to buy his farm from him and take complete ownership. Once they’ve done that, they’ll engage in a normal census contract. They’ll gift him the farm back, and he will owe the bank a stream of regular payments. At any point, the farmer could pay back the original amount and “buy back” the farm; if the farmer didn’t pay the stream of payments, the bank could declare the census contract as broken and take back ownership.

This type of rente was called a bail á rent. The state, which had a lot of real estate, could just sell it to a lender at the cost of a stream of payments every year thereafter. A second type was called rente á prix d’argent. This style did away with the bothersome transfer of real estate and just provided for a bank to give the government money today in exchange for a stream of annual income later. The first type is pretty clearly not usury, since the state could just otherwise sell the land for cash immediately. The second is more questionable. But we also come back to the same problem we had with forced loans: can I sell my rente payments to someone else?

Rentes produced a lot of judicial back-and-forth. In 1218, the Archbishop of Rheims, refused to approve a sale of a rente, because he suspected it was usurious. Geoffrey of Trani, in 1241-3, contended that rentes harbored “an immoral hope” of receiving payments above the original investment. William of Rennes, 1250, determined that the rente wasn’t usurious, but was still immoral and illegitimate. In 1251, Pope Innocent IV declared rentes were not usurious and were legitimate, if based on ‘real’ properties and not of the rente á prix d’argent variety. Despite this papal decree, Henry of Ghent, in his 1276 work Quodlibets, rejected all rente contracts as usurious, stating that it was clear that rentes promoted, “the sale of money, which is non vendible” and promoted immoral hopes of gain. Giles of Lessines immediately countered that “future things over a period are not estimated to be of such value as things collected [in the present]” and rentes were, therefore, not necessarily of greater value.

By the late 13th and 14th century, a consensus emerged that rentes were not usurious so long as they were a) based on real estate, and b) structured such that the purchaser of the rente (the bank) was denied the right to demand immediate repayment. In other words, if the bank provided money in exchange for a stream of income, but could not suddenly demand the original sum, then that left them in Giles of Lessines’s uncertainty about the future, which reduced the usurous intent.

Italian Banks

Our story thus far has brought us to the end of the 14th century, and a level of banking sophistication that could allow for the rise of large banks. In Florence, bankers plied their trade on large benches in the street, giving us the name of their profession from the Italian word for benches (banchieri). According to Raymond de Roover in, “The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank,” three main types emerged:

The first, and lowest, the banchi a penello, were essentially licensed usurers. They charged high rates of interest and were fined 2,000 florins from the city in fines for breaking the usury laws. They considered this a cost of doing business. The second were the banchi a minuto, the “small banks.” These operated by buying and selling family jewelry and operated largely as a high-end pawnshop.  The third, the banchi grossi, the great bankers, will consume the remainder of this paper.

Three great banks emerged in 14th century Florence: the Bardi, the Peruzzi, and the Acciaiuoli. They made their money on forced loans, rentes, and by investing their depositors’ wealth into industries, such as cloth making and dyeing. In the 1340s, all three banks were completely wiped out by loans they had made to monarchs – notably King Robert of Naples and King Edward III of England. 

Paul Gallagher, calls the collapse of the Bardi and Perucci families a financial crisis the likes of which the world had never seen (and has never seen since). Credit froze across Europe. Almost all trade ceased. With no financial institutions, states were helpless in the face of natural disasters and the sudden emergence of the Black Death. In the next hundred years, the population of Europe would fall by 35 to 50 percent due to famine and disease. 

Bills of Exchange

What the Bardi and Perucci needed was a form of repeatable loan they could offer not just to Kings, but to merchants. That loan was the bill of exchange, which those early banks developed, but which the Medici perfected: the bill of exchange.

Let’s say you’re a clothing merchant in 15th Florence. Your business involves buying cloth, turning it into clothing, and selling it to a local noble, who will ask to repay you slowly, because your products are expensive. Even working fast, and with a helpful noble, you might be looking at 90 days between the time you have to purchase the cloth and the time you are paid for your clothing. Today, you would just get a loan from a bank and pay some interest. But in the 15th century, that’s illegal because of usury laws. Where do you get that money?

You find the local bench in the market where the Medici representative sits, and he gives you this offer: they will provide you with the florins needed to buy the cloth today. You will repay them in 90 days, for the exact same sum that you borrowed (no usury!), except you will do so in London instead of Florence, and you will do so for English pounds, at an exchange rate specified in the contract you make today. This contract is known as a bill of exchange (or cambium per literas). You write your agent in London, who pays the Medici bank in London the agreed upon sum at the agreed upon exchange rate. The Medici bank in London sends the English pounds back to Florence, where they are converted into florins. To cover the risk of the transaction and the risk that the pound-to-florin exchange rate will change on the return trip, the originally agreed upon exchange rate is set largely in favor of the Medici bank.

Jurists and theologians ruled that bills of exchange were not usury, even though the exchange rate from florins to pounds was fixed, because the exchange rate from pounds back to florins was not fixed, and the Medici would therefore be taking the risk of a change in exchange rates during the 90-day period of the loan. To cover this risk, the initial exchange rate given to borrowers by the Medici was extremely high.

This system fixed the usury problem (it also, as a side benefit, allowed people to easily transfer wealth from Florence to London when they traveled without having to bring a bag of gold with them and risk banditry). However, it meant that borrowers were not only paying for credit risk, but also for foreign exchange risk. These were very expensive loans, and when things were going well, they were very profitable for the Medici, who, for a time, made themselves one of the most powerful families in Europe. Ferguson tells us that, between 1397 and 1420, with 20,000 florins in capital and 17 employees, the Medici bank made profits of around 6,300 florins/year, or a return of 32%.

In the end, the Medici bank would be brought down not by the anger of monarchs or by defeat in battle, but by the political distractions of the head of their family, Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici, during a time of increased political instability (making foreign exchange riskier). By that point, though, the transition of the Medici from bankers to nobles and Dukes was all but complete.

The End of Usury

Loaning to merchants and not to monarchs opened up a powerful new force acting against the old usury laws: the law courts. A monarch would never take their bank to court, they could instead just refuse payment. A bank could never take a monarch to court, who would they even begin to appeal to? But merchants and banks were equals.  As with forced loans and rentes, the point of contention was the secondary market. Could a bill of exchange be sold? 

The first of these usury cases was Burton v Davy, in London in 1436. Elias Davy borrowed £30 from John Burton. When Burton sold this loan to John Walden, Davy claimed he no longer had to pay – his contract was with Burton! The courts disagreed, and Davy was forced to pay.

In 1507 an Antwerp court ruled that, “the bearer of writings obligatory [has] the same rights as the original creditor [payee] with regard to the prosecution of an insolvent debtor.” In 1527, a Flanders court affirmed that “the bearer has all the rights of a principal.”

These decisions by jurists to allow the existence of a secondary market for bills of exchange, to allow negotiability, may have been one of the most important financial legal decisions of the entire Renaissance period. de Roover cautions us not to underestimate the consequences of just three court cases in changing the entire future of the financial system.  By 1537, the French States General had codified these rulings into law. Legislation enabled the bearer to sue not only the original debtor but also every prior assignor of the note for the full payment.

The ability for bills of exchange to contain a healthy secondary market created a windfall for greater financial sophistication, but also put tremendous pressure on usury laws, which would begin to quickly topple. In 1543, the French States General amended usury laws to make any loan of less than 12% interest permitted. In 1545, Henry VIII of England  enacted similar legislation, with the maximum interest set to 10% (this was later repealed by Edward VI’s Parliament in 1552 and restored by Elizabeth I’s Parliament in 1571).  Much of the rest of Europe followed this example, and today, the phrase “usurious interest” refers to loans with a high rate of interest, not any interest at all.

The end of usury restrictions across Europe led to an explosion of the finance industry, with innovations in banking, insurance, and trade exchanges to come after 1600.

Bibliography

• John H. Munro, “The Medieval Origins of the Financial Revolution: Usury, Rentes, and Negotiability,” The International History Review, 2003.
• Niall Ferguson, “The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World.” Penguin Books, 2008.
• Raymond de Roover, “The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank, 1397-1494.” Beard Books, 1963.
• Norbert Häring and Niall Douglas, “Economists and the Powerful: Convenient Theories, Distorted Facts, Ample Rewards.” Anthem Press, 2012.
• Paul Gallagher, “650 Years Ago: How Venice Rigged the First, and Worst, Global Financial Crash.” The American Almanac, 1995. 
• John Thomas Noonan. “The Scholastic Analysis of Usury.” Harvard University Press. 1957.

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