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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kigmatzomat" data-source="post: 1952167" data-attributes="member: 9254">Money lending was illegal in medieval times to those who obeyed catholic law while being a borrower was just fine.  Jews, when allowed to publicly *be* jewish, generally suffered a lot of additional limitations but were not restricted by the Catholic usury laws and to the best of my knowledge had no laws against internal usury.  Matter of fact, they were often tolerated by the royalty simply because they *could* perform usury and when allowed to live openly (if still opressed) they did a lot of internal business with each other so there were always a number of wealthy jews to hit up for loans.  And what are they going to say?  If they refuse the king outlaws their religion and they have to try to outrun the looters.  The Muslim world was far more accepting of the jewish faith and generally did little more than tax them heavier, much as they did to all non-Muslims.  For most of the middle ages, the Muslims were very progressive and simply saw the other judeo-christian religions as distant but unenlightened cousins.  Barbarians, in other words which they quite honestly were.  The muslims had superior medicine, mathematics, sciences, and were a more tolerant people.  Of course, they started stagnating in the 17th century and have been trapped there to a large extent ever since.  Let's hear it for tradition.  Going farther back in time, the Romans had solid laws on usury that controlled interest rates, lending periods, and provided a sound foundation for an interpersonal lending schema.  They didn't have as much covering banks or banking houses I'm guessing because the Romans were a bit more egotistical in some regards and didn't pool resources for long periods of time.  As far as taxes being higher, they were and they weren't.  It all depends on the time frame in question.  Some eras of Rome had high taxes to support the military, some eras had low taxes (for Rome itself) as it supported itself on the spoils of its military conquests.  Additionally,  Separating taxes from rents were very hard to do, at least for me. Since the nobility owned the mills, most of the draft animals, the ovens, etc they were charging a usage fee.  Much like the black sharecroppers after the US civil war, they paid a lot of fees to a rich(er), landowner class for all kinds of basic services and had contracts that restricted their movements and actions.  Not much different from medieval peasants, really.</blockquote>

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