Casimir dutifully doled out governorships and other prize offices to his father’s creditors. He tried to get his house in order, but this proved surprisingly difficult. His enthusiastic embrace of Luther’s reforms in 1521 clearly had as much to do with the prospect of getting his hands on Church lands and monastic assets than with any particular religious fervor. Yet at first, the disposition of Church property remained moot, and Casimir himself compounded his problems by running up gambling debts of his own said to have amounted to nearly 50,000 guilders.34
Placing his creditors in charge of the civil administration had predictable effects: increasing exactions on his subjects, many of whom became hopelessly indebted themselves. Unsurprisingly, Casimir’s lands in the Tauber Valley in Franconia became one of the epicenters of the revolt of 1525. Bands of armed villagers assembled, declaring they would obey no law that did not accord with “the holy word of God.” At first, the nobles, isolated in their scattered castles, offered little resistance. The rebel leaders—many of them local shopkeepers, butchers, and other prominent men from nearby towns—began with a largely orderly campaign of tearing down castle fortifications, their knightly occupants being offered guarantees of safety if they cooperated, agreed to abandon their feudal privileges, and swore oaths to abide by the rebels’ Twelve Articles. Many complied. The real venom of the rebels was reserved for cathedrals and monasteries, dozens of which were sacked, pillaged, and destroyed.
Casimir’s reaction was to hedge his bets. At first he bided his time, assembling an armed force of about two thousand experienced soldiers, but refusing to intervene as rebels pillaged several nearby monasteries; in fact, negotiating with the various rebel bands in such apparent good faith that many believed he was preparing to join them “as a Christian brother.”35 In May, however, after the knights of the Swabian League defeated the rebels of the Christian Union to the south, Casimir swung into action, his forces brushing aside poorly disciplined rebel bands to sweep through his own territories like a conquering army, burning and pillaging villages and towns, slaughtering women and children. In every town he set up punitive tribunals, and seized all looted property, which he kept, even as his men also expropriated any wealth still to be found in the region’s cathedrals, ostensibly as emergency loans to pay his troops.
It seems significant that Casimir was, of all the German princes, both the longest to waver before intervening, and the most savagely vengeful once he did. His forces became notorious not only for executing accused rebels, but systematically chopping off the fingers of accused collaborators, his executioner keeping a grim ledger of amputated body parts for later reimbursement—a kind of carnal inversion of the account ledgers that had caused him so much trouble in his life. At one point, in the town of Kitzingen, Casimir ordered the gouging out of the eyes of fifty-eight burghers who had, he declared, “refused to look at him as their lord.” Afterward he received the following bill:36
80 beheaded
69 eyes put out or fingers cut off 114½ fl.
from this to deduct
Received from the Rothenburgers 10 fl.
Received from Ludwig von Hutten 2 fl.
Remainder
Plus 2 months’ pay at 8 fl. per month 16 fl.
Total 118½ fl.
[Signed] Augustin, the executioner, who the Kitzingers call “Master Ouch.”
The repression eventually inspired Casimir’s brother Georg (later known as “the Pious”) to write a letter asking him if Casimir was intending to take up a trade—since, as Georg gently reminded him, he could not very well continue to be a feudal overlord if his peasants were all dead.37
With such things happening, it is hardly surprising that men like Thomas Hobbes came to imagine the basic nature of society as a war of all against all, from which only the absolute power of monarchs could save us. At the same time, Casimir’s behavior—combining as it does a general attitude of unprincipled, cold-blooded calculation with outbursts of almost inexplicably vindictive cruelty—seems, like that of Cortés’s angry foot soldiers when unleashed on the Aztec provinces, to embody something essential about the psychology of debt. Or, more precisely, perhaps, about the debtor who feels he has done nothing to deserve being placed in his position: the frantic urgency of having to convert everything around oneself into money, and rage and indignation at having been reduced to the sort of person who would do so.
Part II:
The World of Credit and the World of Interest
Of all the beings that have existence only in the minds of men, nothing is more fantastical and nice than Credit; it is never to be forced; it hangs upon opinion; it depends upon our passions of hope and fear; it comes many times unsought-for, and often goes away without reason; and once lost, it is hardly to be quite recovered.
—Charles Davenant, 1696
He that has lost his credit is dead to the world.
—English and German Proverb
The peasants’ visions of communistic brotherhood did not come out of nowhere. They were rooted in real daily experience: of the maintenance of common fields and forests, of everyday cooperation and neighborly solidarity. It is out of such homely experience of everyday communism that grand mythic visions are always built.38 Obviously, rural communities were also divided, squabbling places, since communities always are—but insofar as they are communities at all, they are necessarily founded on a ground of mutual aid. The same, incidentally, can be said of members of the aristocracy, who might have fought endlessly over love, land, honor, and religion, but nonetheless still cooperated remarkably well with one another when it really mattered (most of all, when their position as aristocrats was threatened); just as the merchants and bankers, much as they competed with one another, managed to close ranks when it really mattered. This is what I refer to as the “communism of the rich,” and it is a powerful force in human history.39
The same, as we’ve seen repeatedly, applies to credit. There are always different standards for those one considers friends or neighbors. The inexorable nature of interest-bearing debt, and the alternately savage and calculating behavior of those enslaved to it, are typical above all of dealings between strangers: it’s unlikely that Casimir felt much more kinship with his peasants than Cortés did with the Aztecs (in fact, most likely less, since Aztec warriors were at least aristocrats). Inside the small towns and rural hamlets, where the state was mostly far away, Medieval standards survived intact, and “credit” was just as much a matter of honor and reputation as it had ever been. The great untold story of our current age is of how these ancient credit systems were ultimately destroyed.
Recent historical research, notably that of Craig Muldrew, who has sifted through thousands of inventories and court cases from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, has caused us to revise almost all our old assumptions about what everyday economic life at that time was like. Of course, very little of the American gold and silver that reached Europe actually ended up in the pockets of ordinary farmers, mercers, or haberdashers.40 The lion’s share stayed in the coffers of either the aristocracy or the great London merchants, or else in the royal treasury.41 Small change was almost nonexistent. As I’ve already pointed out, in the poorer neighborhoods of cities or large towns, shopkeepers would issue their own lead, leather, or wooden token money; in the sixteenth century this became something of a fad, with artisans and even poor widows producing their own currency as a way to make ends meet.42 Elsewhere, those frequenting the local butcher, baker, or shoemaker would simply put things on the tab. The same was true of those attending weekly markets, or selling neighbors milk or cheese or candle-wax. In a typical village, the only people likely to pay cash were passing travelers, and those considered riff-raff: paupers and ne’er-do-wells so notoriously down on their luck that no one would extend credit to them. Since everyone was involved in selling something, however just about everyone was both creditor and debtor; most family income took the form of promises from other families; everyone knew and kept coun
t of what their neighbors owed one another; and every six months or year or so, communities would held a general public “reckoning,” cancelling debts out against each other in a great circle, with only those differences then remaining when all was done being settled by use of coin or goods.43
The reason that this upends our assumptions is that we’re used to blaming the rise of capitalism on something vaguely called “the market”—the breakup of older systems of mutual aid and solidarity, and the creation of a world of cold calculation, where everything had its price. Really, English villagers appear to have seen no contradiction between the two. On the one hand, they believed strongly in the collective stewardship of fields, streams, and forests, and the need to help neighbors in difficulty. On the other hand, markets were seen as a kind of attenuated version of the same principle, since they were entirely founded on trust. Much like the Tiv women with their gifts of yams and okra, neighbors assumed they ought to be constantly slightly in debt to one another. At the same time, most seem to have been quite comfortable with the idea of buying and selling, or even with market fluctuations, provided it didn’t get to the point of threatening honest families’ livelihoods.44 Even when loans at interest began to be legalized in 1545, that did not ruffle too many feathers, as long as it took place within that same larger moral framework: lending was considered an appropriate vocation, for example, for widows with no other source of income, or as a way for neighbors to share in the profits from some minor commercial venture. William Stout, a Quaker merchant from Lancashire, spoke glowingly of Henry Coward, the tradesman in whose shop he first apprenticed:
My master then had a full trade of groceries, ironmongerware, and several other goods, and very much respected and trusted, not only by the people of his own religious profession, but by all others of all professions and circumstances … His credit was so much, that any who had money to dispose of lodged it with him to put out to interest or to make use of it.45
In this world, trust was everything. Most money literally was trust, since most credit arrangements were handshake deals. When people used the word “credit,” they referred above all to a reputation for honesty and integrity; and a man or woman’s honor, virtue, and respectability, but also, reputation for generosity, decency, and good-natured sociability, were at least as important considerations when deciding whether to make a loan as were assessments of net income.46 As a result, financial terms became indistinguishable from moral ones. One could speak of others as “worthies,” as “a woman of high estimation” or “a man of no account,” and equally of “giving credit” to someone’s words when one believes what they say (“credit” is from the same root as “creed” or “credibility”), or of “extending credit” to them, when one takes them at their word that they will pay one back.
One should not idealize the situation. This was a highly patriarchal world: a man’s wife or daughter’s reputation for chastity was as much a part of his “credit” as his own reputation for kindness or piety. What’s more, almost all people below the age of 30, male or female, were employed as servants in someone else’s household—as farmhands, milkmaids, apprentices—and as such, were of “no account” at all.47 Finally, those who lost credibility in the eyes of the community became, effectively, pariahs, and descended into the criminal or semi-criminal classes of rootless laborers, beggars, harlots, cutpurses, hawkers, pedlars, fortune-tellers, minstrels, and other such “masterless men” or “women of ill repute.”48
Cold cash was employed largely between strangers, or when paying rents, tithes, and taxes to landlords, bailiffs, priests, and other superiors. The landed gentry and wealthy merchants, who eschewed handshake deals, would often use cash with one another, especially to pay off bills of exchange drawn on London markets.49 Above all, gold and silver were used by the government to purchase arms and pay soldiers, and amongst the criminal classes themselves. This meant that coins were most likely to be used both by the sort of people who ran the legal system—the magistrates, constables, and justices of the peace—and by those violent elements of society they saw it as their business to control.
Over time, this led to an increasing disjuncture of moral universes. For most, who tried to avoid entanglement in the legal system just as much as they tried to avoid the affairs of soldiers and criminals, debt remained the very fabric of sociability. But those who spent their working lives within the halls of government and great commercial houses gradually began to develop a very different perspective, whereby cash exchange was normal and it was debt that came to be seen as tinged with criminality.
Each perspective turned on a certain tacit theory of the nature of society. For most English villagers, the real font and focus of social and moral life was not so much the church as the local ale-house—and community was embodied above all in the conviviality of popular festivals like Christmas or May Day, with everything that such celebrations entailed: the sharing of pleasures, the communion of the senses, all the physical embodiment of what was called “good neighborhood.” Society was rooted above in the “love and amity” of friends and kin, and it found expression in all those forms of everyday communism (helping neighbors with chores, providing milk or cheese for old widows) that were seen to flow from it. Markets were not seen as contradicting this ethos of mutual aid. It was, much as it was for Tusi, an extension of mutual aid—and for much the same reason: because it operated entirely through trust and credit.50
England might not have produced a great theorist like Tusi, but one can find the same assumptions echoed in most of the Scholastic writers, as for instance in Jean Bodin’s De Republica, widely circulated in English translation after 1605. “Amity and friendship,” Bodin wrote, “are the foundation of all human and civil society”—they constitute that “true, natural justice” on which the whole legal structure of contracts, courts, and even government must necessarily be built.51 Similarly, when economic thinkers reflected on the origins of the money, they spoke of “trusting, exchanging, and trading.”52 It was simply assumed that human relations came first.
As a result, all moral relations came to be conceived as debts. “Forgive us our debts”—this was the period, the very end of the Middle Ages, that this translation of the Lord’s Prayer gained such universal popularity. Sins are debts to God: unavoidable, but perhaps manageable, since at the end of time our moral debts and credits will be all canceled out against each other in God’s final Reckoning. The notion of debt inserted itself into even the most intimate of human relations. Like the Tiv, Medieval villagers would sometimes refer to “flesh debts,” but the notion was completely different: it referred to the right of either partner in a marriage to demand sex from the other, which in principle either could do whenever he or she desired. The phrase “paying one’s debts” thus developed connotations, much as the Roman phrase “doing one’s duty” had, centuries before. Geoffrey Chaucer even makes a pun out of “tally” (French: taille) and “tail” in the Shipman’s Tale, a story about a woman who pays her husband’s debts with sexual favors: “and if so I be faille, I am youre wyf, score it upon my taille.”53
Even London merchants would occasionally appeal to the language of sociability, insisting that in the final analysis, all trade is built on credit, and credit is really just an extension of mutual aid. In 1696, for instance, Charles Davenant wrote that even if there were a general collapse of confidence in the credit system, it could not last long, because eventually, when people reflected on the matter and realized that credit is simply an extension of human society,
They will find, that no trading nation ever did subsist, and carry on its business by real stock [that is, just coin and merchandise]; that trust and confidence in each other, are as necessary to link and hold a people together, as obedience, love, friendship, or the intercourse of speech. And when experience has taught man how weak he is, depending only on himself, he will be willing to help others, and call upon the assistance of his neighbors, which of course, by degrees, must set credit again afl
oat.54
Davenant was an unusual merchant (his father was a poet). More typical of his class were men like Thomas Hobbes, whose Leviathan, published in 1651, was in many ways an extended attack on the very idea that society is built on any sort of prior ties of communal solidarity.
Hobbes might be considered the opening salvo of the new moral perspective, and it was a devastating one. When Leviathan came out, it’s not clear what scandalized its readers more: its relentless materialism (Hobbes insisted that humans were basically machines whose actions could be understood by one single principle: that they tended to move toward the prospect of pleasure and away from the prospect of pain), or its resultant cynicism (if love, amity, and trust are such powerful forces, Hobbes asked, why is it that even within our families, we lock our most valuable possessions in strongboxes?) Still, Hobbes’ ultimate argument—that humans, being driven by self-interest, cannot be trusted to treat each other justly of their own accord, and therefore that society only emerges when they come to realize that it is to their long-term advantage to give up a portion of their liberties and accept the absolute power of the King—differed little from arguments that theologians like Martin Luther had been making a century earlier. Hobbes simply substituted scientific language for biblical references.55
I want to draw particular attention to the underlying notion of “self-interest.”56 It is in a real sense the key to the new philosophy. The term first appears in English right around Hobbes’ time, and it is, indeed, directly borrowed from interesse, the Roman law term for interest payments. When it was first introduced, most English authors seemed to view the idea that all human life can be explained as the pursuit of self-interest as a cynical, foreign, Machiavellian idea, one that sat uncomfortably with traditional English mores. By the eighteenth century, most in educated society accepted it as simple common sense.
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