So far as we can learn, no real opposition was made in either
century to this theory, as a theory; as to _practice_, it was
different. The Italian traders did not answer theological argument;
they simply overrode it. In spite of theology, great banks were
established, and especially that of Venice at the end of the
twelfth century, and those of Barcelona and Genoa at the beginning
of the fifteenth. Nowhere was commerce carried on in more complete
defiance of this and other theological theories hampering trade
than in the very city where these great treatises were published.
The sin of usury, like the sin of commerce with the Mohammedans,
seems to have been settled for by the Venetian merchants on their
deathbeds; and greatly to the advantage of the magnificent churches
and ecclesiastical adornments of the city.
By the seventeenth century the clearest thinkers in the Roman
Church saw that her theology must be readjusted to political
economy: so began a series of amazing attempts to reconcile a view
permitting usury with the long series of decrees of popes and
councils forbidding it.
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