Where were the poor, on behalf of whom this particular monti racket was instituted by the Bull of Leo X?
The Renaissance Church of Rome incrementally extended ever greater latitude to usurers, knowing that once the Money Power was unleashed it would eventually gain dominion (omnia per pecuniam facta sunt), by choosing the personnel of what was supposed to be Christ’s Church, because the papacy would sometimes pay back what it owed to the banks by selling ecclesiastical offices to the highest bidder:
“The fact that the titles of more than 258 offices passed through the hands of Filippo Strozzi during his service as banker to the Medici popes in the early sixteenth century indicates something of the traffic in this kind of investment.” 12
“…the bankers organized themselves to handle their enormous collective business with the papacy…this can be illustrated by the career of Benvenuto di Paolo Olivieri… Olivieri held the post of depositary of the Apostolic Chamber from 1540 to 1543 and from 1545-1546. During these years his company was advancing loans to the papacy in about every possible way, usually jointly with other bankers…all the while he was buying and selling credits in several monti…This complex and variable web of Olivieri’s credit ties to the papal government also extended underground, so to speak…
“By Olivieri’s time the enormous increase in the number of fiscal offices in the Papal states, of monti, and of other investment opportunities attracted bankers from many places.”13
The American Right’s go-to villains, “greedy Calvinist bankers of Holland” and “Protestant predators behind the Bank of England” were not yet born when the maze-like labyrinth of usury operations were being established and enlarged among Renaissance popes and “Catholic banking houses” and dynasties. As we noted earlier, the House of Fugger, the fabulously wealthy German-Catholic usury dynasty who were the bankers behind one of religious history’s most notorious shakedowns—the sale of indulgences which sparked the Protestant Reformation—have formed barely a blip on the radar screen of economic reformers who have had the meme of “Calvinist usury” seared into their minds. Backed by the Hapsburg rulers of Catholic Spain and Austria, the Fuggers supervised the financial transfers from the German church to the papacy. Their loans to the pope gained for them the portfolio of revenue-collecting privileges.
“With his (Jacob Fugger’s) support, Augsburg schoolmaster Sebastian Illsung wrote a defense of lending by focusing on the narrow subject of the Augsburg Contract—the legal agreement Fugger signed with depositors that promised them 5 percent. Illsung argued the contract was valid if the lender, like the borrower, risked bankruptcy.
“Then a young theologian named Johannes Eck caught Fugger’s eye by echoing Illsung’s arguments in a university lecture. Fugger asked Eck to write a dissertation on the Augsburg Contract and enter a debate—a public showdown with scholars as judges—to validate it.
“Fugger was taking a risk…If Eck lost the debate and the judges declared the contract usurious, Fugger’s depositors would refuse to give him money. This would be lethal. It was one thing to operate in a gray area. It was another to engage in a practice specifically ruled heretical. Fugger must have felt extremely confident because he sought nothing short of a Scopes trial, a winner-take-all smackdown pitting dogma against modernity…He had at least one precedent on his side. After theologians squared off over the subject of annuities—the interest-earning pension schemes that cities sold to raise money—the pope had sanctioned them.
“Maybe Pope Leo, who had replaced the ‘Warrior Pope’ Julius II earlier that year, would do the same with the Augsburg Contract. There was also the fact that Leo was a member of the Medici banking family. Legalization would serve his personal interests. Even better was that Leo himself was a borrower of Fugger’s. It goes without saying that Leo would be favorably inclined towards someone who gave him money.
“…Fugger and Eck turned to Italy where, thanks to Venice and Florence, the universities were open-minded about lending. They found a willing (debate) participant in the University of Bologna, Europe’s oldest university and among its most prestigious. Thomas Becket, Erasmus, Copernicus and (Pico) Mirandola had studied there. On his way to Bologna, Eck passed through Augsburg. Fugger assigned him a translator and other assistants….(In the debate) Eck avoided scriptural references and focused on intent. Only evil intentions could make a transaction usurious, he declared. A lender committed usury if he aimed to harm the borrower. But he acted legally if he had a legitimate business interest…
“The judges…refused to call the Augsburg Contract heretical. Eck…had presented a cut-and-dried case of charging interest on loaned money, and had given the judges a perfect chance to confirm Luke 6:35. But the judges refused to make a call, a call that could have put Fugger out of business. That was tacit approval. What’s more, Fugger’s letter to Pope Leo had gotten through and made an impact.
“Leo ignored the question about debate venues but, in a decree issued that same year, Leo went to the heart of the matter and signed a papal bull that…acknowledged the legitimacy of charging interest…
“According to the new doctrine of the church, usury was no longer strictly about what Jesus said about charging interest. It was about charging interest without labor, cost or risk. And what loan didn’t involve one of the three? As long as a loan passed that easy test, the lender was off the hook.
“Fugger’s lobbying had paid off in spectacular fashion. He and others were now free to charge borrowers and pay depositors interest with the full blessing of the church. Leo’s decree, issued in conjunction with the Fifth Lateran Council, was a breakthrough for capitalism. Debt financing accelerated. The modern economy was under way…Eck earned a spot in history by going to Rome and successfully persuading the pope to excommunicate Luther…” 14
In 1514 Eck would have another debate concerning his advocacy of a five percent rate of interest. His opponent was Martin Luther.
“The Fugger Company, one of the biggest financial corporations of the age, headed by Jakob Fugger, and after his death in 1525, Anton Fugger (his nephew), acted as bankers for the Curia in the same way they did for the (Holy Roman) emperor. They were the main agents remitting indulgence money collected in the German lands to Rome. Such payments came to the tune of several hundreds of thousands of florin or gulden per year—at conservative estimates. The general indulgence collector for the German lands, Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg (1490-1545) allegedly used half of the sums collected in Germany to repay his debts to the Fuggers, because in a not unusual manner he had accumulated a number of high-ranking church positions as Archbishop of Magdeburg, Halberstadt and Mainz, which made him elector and a powerful ruler in sixteenth century Germany. For this he had to pay dearly, in cash. Thus the circle closed. Only half of the indulgence money collected under Albrecht actually made it to Rome.
“The other half went into the coffers of some of the richest and biggest private business corporations of the age…Jakob and Anton Fugger shuffled millions of florins across Europe within weeks…the indulgence campaign headed by Albrecht would have represented a minor branch of their financial business in the early 1500s and 1510s.
“…Indulgences, as practiced around 1500, represented the perversion of an originally much more innocent idea, which had put the task of repentance at the center of the exercise, and the monetary donation accompanying the indulgence only as a secondary…requirement, underlining—but never replacing it for—one’s good intentions to repent.” 15
Until circa 1550, the Catholic Fugger bank was wealthier than any Italian financial institution. They were eventually eclipsed by Catholic usury establishments in Genoa, such as the House of Cattaneo, and the usury firm of Alessandro Strozzi and Zanobi Carnesecchi. Toward the end of the century (circa 1589), Florentine-Catholic usurers such as Luigi Capponi were back in the papal saddle, helping to form the large Catholic banking consortium of Doria-Velluti-Amatto.
Martin Luther’s opposition to profit on loans was fierce a
nd sincere. Nonetheless, as an innovator who had launched into Christendom the concept of “justification by faith alone,” he did not uphold the early and medieval Church dogma against usury seamlessly, or with the same absolutism as Catholics had done from Apostolic times to the eve of the Renaissance.
The distinction here is between the kind of Renaissance Catholic casuistry and equivocation that Pascal excoriated in The Provincial Letters, and Luther’s attempt to destroy usury banking with a new approach. The defense of the Renaissance and post-Renaissance Church’s morally reprehensible novelties rests chiefly in Talmudic-type quibbles and dissimulation which negate Christ’s test of the nature of a thing: by its fruits we will know it. Renaissance Church apologists assert the contrary: they say that modernist Catholic canonists, theologians and popes only made way for a new type of contract, while preserving the basic law and theology of the anti-usury dogma. They assert this in nearly every case where it can be shown that the highway to total usury legalization was paved with furtive innovations imposed incrementally in the name of necessity, or lofty motives, such as relieving the plight of the impoverished. Post-Renaissance Catholic casuists have a psychological disposition to deny what the revolution has wrought. They see its ravages, but can’t account for its roots, except as a mist-enshrouded act of the devil; a ghostly ectoplasm that arose spontaneously out of erewhon. The fact is, the devil leaves hoof prints and these can be detected, beginning with the concealment of interest devices by means of evasive glosses.
Blaise Pascal wrote concerning the mentality which empowers this process: “Accordingly…our casuist has suggested a general method for all sorts of persons…and a very simple process it is…consisting only in the use of certain words to be pronounced by the person in the act of lending his money; after which he may take his interest for it without fear of being a usurer…” 16
For the words, “fear of being a usurer” substitute “fear of being a Judaizer” and one can spot the same process in the casuist reinterpretation of Judaism, or any other deceptive revolution that has infiltrated the Church on the heels of clever wordplay and the infinite human capacity for self-deception.
Luther breathed fire on usurers in sermons of power and conviction, such as his Long Sermon on Usury (1520), Preface to an Ordinance of the Common Chest (1523), and Trade and Usury, which was published in 1524. In these writings he pits the German nation against the Money Power of the Renaissance Church, as it was promoting profit on loans both covert and overt, in Church and State. Luther’s argument was consonant with classic medieval Catholicism:
“…the greatest misfortune of the German nation is certainly the traffic in annuities. If that did not exist, many a man would have to leave unbought his silk, velvet, golden ornaments, spices, and luxuries of every sort. The system has not existed much over a hundred years, and has already brought almost all the princes, foundations, cities, nobles, and heirs to poverty, misery, and destruction. If it shall continue for another hundred years, Germany cannot possibly have a pfennig left and we shall certainly have to devour one another. The devil invented this system, and the pope by confirming it has injured the whole world. Therefore, I ask and pray that everyone open his eyes to see the ruin of himself, his children, and his heirs, which not only stands before the door but already haunts the house; and that emperor, princes, lords, and cities arrange that this trade be condemned as speedily as possible and henceforth prevented, without considering the opposition of the pope and all his justice and injustice, nor whether benefices or endowments depend upon it. Better a single benefice in a city based on an honest freehold revenue, than a hundred based on an annuity; yea, a single endowment based on an annuity is worse and more grievous than twenty based on freeholds.”
Addressing himself in 1523 to a “community chest” project which had been expropriated from Roman ecclesiastical foundations that had been the beneficiaries of usury, Luther declaimed, “Part of the possessions of monasteries and foundations, and a great part of the prebends are based upon usury, which now calls itself everywhere ‘interest’ (widderkauf), and which has in but a few years swallowed up the whole world. Such possessions would have to be separated first of all, like leprosy from those possessions which consist of simple bequests…
“Interest bearing foundations…may rightly be regarded as usury; for I have never yet seen or heard of an ethical annuity that bears interest. It would be necessary, therefore, in such a case, to make restitution of the usury, by returning to each one his interest payments, before allowing such a possession to go into a common chest; for God says, ‘I hate robbery for burnt offering’ (Isaiah 61:8). If it prove impossible to find the persons who sustained loss by paying interest, the common chest might then receive the possession…This matter is altogether one of the most urgent to which emperors and kings, princes and lords, and everyone else should give attention…”
In Luther’s time the German concept of zinskauf (“interest purchase”) represented both scripturally-permissible income on rents and redeemable security in lands, as well as usurious financial instruments. “Rente” was a specified annual return (in the form of produce, livestock etc.) from a tenant for the use of land. A landlord could sell to a third party the contract with his tenant. The contract, which did not entail usury, was called “rentenkauf,” and was later grouped under the general heading of zinskauf, even though other contracts under the heading of zinskauf were usurious. Luther denounced the usurious variety of zinskauf (wuchrische zinskauf), which was permitted by the Renaissance papacy.
Luther channeled the classic Catholic teaching in his commentary on Luke 6:34-35: “If we look the word of Christ squarely in the eye, it does not teach that we are to lend without charge, for there is no need for such teaching, since there is no lending except lending without charge, and if a charge is made, it is not a loan. He wills that we lend not only to friends, the rich, and those to whom we are well disposed, who can repay us again, by returning this loan, or with another loan, or by some other benefit; but also that we lend to those who cannot or will not repay us, such as the needy and our enemies…”
Inspired by Luther, Jakob Strauss, a native of Basel and a preacher at Berchtesgaden, and later pastor of Eisenach, advocated the implementation of Mosaic Law according to the light of Christ, in the struggle to abolish interest on debt in the name of Christian love. Strauss’s Fifty-One Theses Against Usury banned the taking of even a penny of interest. 17 He believed that the Protestant faith made a mockery of Christ’s injunction to love one another if it permitted the charging of interest on a debt. 18
Eventually, Luther would soften — though not do away with — his anti-usury campaign. He did so for the same reason that he would eventually make slavish obedience to the ruler of a Lutheran state a pre-requisite of his church — his trepidation at the prospect that the peasant revolutionaries in Germany would cite him as the inspiration for their violence and uproar. He was horrified by the demands of the armed anti-usury insurgents in Erfurt in 1525, who sought to pay their creditors only the principal and not the interest on their loans, and enforce their will at the point of a lance.
Concerning Pastor Strauss, Luther appreciated his efforts in honoring the Biblical “Sabbatical Year of Release from Debt” (Deut. 15:1-5), which Luther termed a “most beautiful and equitable law…Were it to be adopted today, the governors of the world would be saved endless legal business and disturbance…debts…would all be terminated at one time and not be allowed to plague people forever. Moreover, men would be careful not to lend a greater sum of money than they could hope to have restored before the seventh year.”
Luther’s sentimental regard for the Sabbatical Year was derogated however, by his famous “Law and Gospel” dichotomy. If he were emperor he said he would choose to reenact the Sabbatical Year, but he also stated that heads of state were under no obligation to do so. This law-as-option element he imparted to the portions of the Old Testament that are not ceremonial, and which are in fact, ete
rnal divine law (Matthew 5:17), thereby undercutting the ability of German Christians to fulfill God’s will on earth.
Luther parted ways with Strauss in the matter of the latter’s declaration that the debtor was guilty for having paid interest to a creditor, which set up a revolutionary situation in which German peasants felt justified in violently revolting against lenders; a revolt Luther feared as part of his general revulsion against social disorder in Protestant lands. Luther informed Strauss that the Bible did not teach that debtors were complicit in usury by paying interest. Christ had said that His followers were to surrender even their cloaks and tunics to oppressors.
The German reformer detested usury but he did not maintain the medieval standard of complete abolition. In his conceptualization of divine grace and Christian liberty, he made the individual conscience the supreme guide to economic relations and affairs, until such time as the state, in the form of an emperor or prince, would abolish usury by edict.
In Trade and Usury, he set the bar at the very top of New Testament ethics, allowing oneself to be robbed of one’s material possessions and goods by unregenerate men (Matthew 5:40), if necessary.
According to Luther, the Christian was to give money freely to whoever was in need of such a gift (Matthew 5:42 and Luke 6:30),19 or at the very least to lend money rather than to give it away, while expecting no return on what had been loaned.
His private opinion, in his last days, was that Protestant ministers should urge their people not to engage in usury. He sincerely believed that the best way to overcome the curse of profit on loans was to teach the Gospel in such a way that the German nation would voluntarily resist profit on loans, until such time as a Lutheran ruler would ban it outright. Lutheran ministers were to proclaim the Gospel prohibition on interest on money in no uncertain terms, leaving legislation and enforcement to the princes.
The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome Page 69
