Medieval Mass Expulsions with Rowan Dorin

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:02]Hi everyone and welcome to episode 343 of the Medieval Podcast. I'm your host Danielle Sabolski.

[00:00:19]The medieval period is well known for several largecale and horrific persecutions, especially ones based on religious grounds. One of these is a succession of expulsions of the Jews from one kingdom after another.

[00:00:33]Persecutions like these don't just come out of the blue. So, if we're going to understand them and hopefully prevent them, we have to dig deep into the cultural ideas and purported justifications that they spring from.

[00:00:46]And that's where my next guest comes in.

[00:00:49]This week, I spoke with Dr. Rowan Doran about mass expulsions in the Middle Ages. Rowan is an associate professor of history and the director of the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Stanford University. His book won awards from the Medieval Academy of America, the American Academy for Jewish Research, the Canadian Historical Association, the Canadian Society of Medievalists, the American Historical Association, Pacific Coast Branch, as well as being a finalist at the Association of Jewish Studies is called No Return: Jews, Christian Usurers, and the Spread of Mass Expulsion in Medieval Europe. Our conversation on what usery is, how changing ideas of sin and foreignness shaped Europe, and how mass expulsion went from unthinkable to acceptable in the late Middle Ages is coming up right after this.

[00:01:42]Well, welcome Rowan to the podcast. I really enjoyed your book and I have wanted to have you on the podcast for a while, so I'm glad we're making it happen. Welcome.

[00:01:51]>> Thank you for having me. It's really exciting to be here and to get to talk about the Middle Ages with someone who does so much to share knowledge of the Middle Ages with so many people. So, this is really exciting for me. Thank you.

[00:02:01]>> Oh, thank you. This is such an important book and I think it's one that is going to be really important for a lot of people who are studying not only this particular period that you're studying, but also the relationship between politics and religion and all of that stuff. So you're looking at expulsion and I think we really need to start kind of at the beginning because it seems like what you found was that people were getting threatened with expulsion and actually being expelled over usery. What is that? What is usery? So that's a good question. It was uncertain in the middle ages. It's unfamiliar now. Basically usery is then and now any sort of illicit interest on a loan. But what counts as a list depends on who you're talking to in the middle ages and now and who's doing the lending in the middle ages like now. So in the modern day for instance payday lenders can charge different rates than people who are doing sort of private contracts with each other who have different sort of limits often than banks. In the Middle Ages, depending on whether you were speaking to a churchman, a municipal official, an ordinary person sort of on the street, they all had different definitions of what usery was and might be. So, it's a hard question to answer, but that ambiguity is one of the things I think is important in my book of showing sort of how people can manipulate different understandings of usery to target different people that they don't like.

[00:03:27]>> Yes. Exactly. So, it's loaning stuff out at interest. Who's doing this? because it seems like pretty much anybody could do this. Who's lending out money at interest in the Middle Ages, especially at the beginning of your book?

[00:03:40]>> So, there's a widespread assumption and a misconception that in the Middle Ages only Jews could lend at interest because the Catholic Church forbade lending at interest. But as with most things, the fact that the Catholic Church forbade it again and again and again and again suggests as we know that repeated condemnations are a sign of persistent practices. So there were lots of Christian money lenders in the middle ages. Some of them doing it sort of lowcale informally, others doing it professionally and they come from northern Italy. They come from southern France. They come from the low countries in terms of those who are doing it professionally and actually sort of work as professional money lenders.

[00:04:23]Particularly we see them in the 11th and 12th and early 13th centuries getting going, which is a period of considerable economic expansion. So there's lots of demand for credit and some people decide to turn this into their professional activity. And of course alongside this we see a number of Jews and Jewish communities who also begin to get involved in money lending although it takes a long time for that to become a dominant part of their economic livelihoods as well.

[00:04:51]>> So when it comes to usri it seems to be a problem that the church has and it seems to be something that the church is trying to suppress. So what does the church have to do with this at all? It's a financial thing. What's their involvement? So, of course, in the Middle Ages, the church governs all sorts of areas of life that we might be surprised by. You know, there's things like marriage like, of course, it says something about marriage or burials, right? You get to get buried. Of course, it does that. But the church regulates all sorts of aspects of life or at least tries to in its legislation and then also in its let's say the whole normative world of things that saying you should do this, you shouldn't do this and if you want to be a good Christian, you do this, you don't do this. So usery falls into the broader range of economic practices that medieval churchmen particularly from the 11th century onward begin to sort of think about and argue about and figure out well what is the appropriate sort of economic behavior for Christians if if it's not just a matter of being a sort of a you know a peasant farmer or being a knight or being a monk or a priest and there's these people who are engaged in commerce what should they be doing? How should they be doing it? What are the limits on that? And lending becomes a pretty fraught area within that.

[00:06:07]>> So when it comes to the interest part of it, my understanding is that the church is upset in part because this is creating something out of nothing and only God can do that. Do I have that right?

[00:06:17]>> Yeah. There's a couple arguments that the churchmen come up with because they have a tradition that comes out of part of the Old Testament, a little bit the New Testament, and then a lot of early Christian writings that generally says usery is bad and and thinks about how to define usery, but comes with various definitions. And they're trying to grapple with well, why is this the case?

[00:06:34]So, one of them that I like is so the one you talked about actually comes from Aristotle, and it's an Aristotilian claim that money is sterile and things that are sterile shouldn't be able to reproduce. And so to have money beget money, to have money produce money on its own is seen as against nature.

[00:06:52]Another argument that I love is that time belongs to God and that interest is basically selling time. You're charging for time and that to sell time is to sell something that belongs to God. And so that's another argument against it.

[00:07:08]And then there were just other general arguments whether that this is ungenerous. It's uncchristian. It's not you should lend sort of you're expecting nothing in return. The classic gospel phrase. So there's a number of other arguments they come up with. But I like the one that you you started with.

[00:07:23]>> Well, that one goes really back. It goes all the way back to the Greeks. That one established one.

[00:07:28]>> Yeah. This is the one that I've heard most often when it comes to this because it does lead to such horrific events later, which we're going to get to. And so, you know, you want to understand why why is this a problem in the first place, you know, >> but I'll I'll admit though, I've been thinking about medieval usery for I don't know 20 years now, really since I was an undergraduate. I wrote one of my undergraduate papers on I think maybe my very first undergraduate paper on the topic of medieval usery. And I never thought I would still be thinking about it now. And you know, for all that I've thought about it, I still can't really pin down why it is that people get so concerned about it. I think about it sort of in the vein of a lot of like moral panics now where a particular issue just sort of takes hold in a particular community and they decide like this is the thing we really need to be worried about but you know for all that I've thought about it for all that I've read about it it's still never clear to me why people get so exercised but they do they get really re really churchmen and and eventually secular writers as well get really really concerned that userie is you know the root of many many evils and all that is destroying society >> you got to wonder if it's the people who are holding the pen and who are elite and then they get upset about it because they're the people that borrow the most money. I don't know. It's one of those things, right?

[00:08:40]>> And it definitely is interesting that, you know, we don't see these complaints being articulated nearly as viciferously from the lower classes who are in fact indebted. There seems to be a major distinction between sort of people who think about this as a necessary part of life and people who think about it in the abstract. Which again fits with what we know of modern moral panics that there can be a big distinction between how people who are living with their neighbors encountering the daily realities think about issues versus people who are very distant writing about these things or podcasting about these things or appearing on radio station about these things or appearing on television about these things talk about them and they're not sort of directly affected by them. So I think usery might be a similar case in how it relates to actually ordinary credit and debt.

[00:09:22]>> Well then as you say it gets to be everybody's problem. So again, if we were starting at the beginning, sort of when people are thinking about this, we're starting to think about it more in the 11th century. We're saying that it's a bad thing. How do people deal with it when they come across usery? How is it dealt with?

[00:09:38]>> You get excommunicated. Maybe the the church starts to work on various tools and develops new punishments. It's always a thing you're not supposed to do when you're supposed to apologize for it and make confession and be contrite and do penance if you're a Christian who is engaging in usery. And then the penalties start getting stiffer. So if you are a cleric, then you face particularly harsh penalties starting in the early 12th century. And then when we get to the later 12th century, if you are a layman engaging in usery, according to canon law, you should be deprived of burial. Your alms, your oblations as they're called, the gifts that you give to the church should not be accepted. And of course, you excommunicated.

[00:10:16]And some of this certainly deters a lot of ordinary people from lending, but it certainly doesn't stop a lot of professional Christian money lenders from going about their business. And they figure out how to navigate the church of prohibitions in the way that lots of people figure out how to navigate things the church tells them not to do and they keep on doing it anyways.

[00:10:37]Well, one of the things I don't remember if I came across in your book or not, so I'm going to ask you now is that usually when it comes to a church crime or a church sin, there is escalation as to if you do this once, you get this punishment, if you do this again, you get this punishment. Did you find that this is sort of escalating as well for like the number of times you're caught doing it or do you find that there's like sort of a sweeping generalization like if you get caught doing this, you get in trouble. It's the big punishment right away. The big distinction is that sort of theology just says like usery is bad.

[00:11:11]>> Yeah.

[00:11:11]>> So if you're talking to theologian, their view is like all usery is bad and it's all terrible and they don't begin making distinctions between like little usery and big usery at this point. But for the lawyers, the canon lawyers who are thinking through the legal architecture of the medieval church, they come up with a distinction between just ordinary user or people who engage in usery and manifest or notorious or public users. So the people who are doing it really openly, repeatedly, publicly, professionally. And there's a lot of debate about what makes you a manifest user, what makes you a notorious user, but certainly if you have a shop and you have an open table in front of you and people can show up there and you're doing it publicly, that normally seems to fall firmly on the side of you are a manifest user. And so all of the church's legal penalties, the deprival of burial, the refusal of alms, even formal excommunication, all of that falls on those who are considered manifest user. and they're the ones who can be in fact theoretically taken to court and tried in a court as falling a foul of these legal restrictions.

[00:12:19]>> Well, one of the things I thought was really important that you mentioned in the book is that the church handles it as a crime, as a sin, but the king gets the money after a user dies. The king gets the money. So, there's a there's a certain point at which the king might not want to crack down on it too hard because the more money they make, the more he gets at the end of life.

[00:12:38]>> Yeah. In England, if you are found to be a user and you die, basically a good part of your estate goes to the monarchy. So theoretically, it's meant to deter people from becoming user because their children will be disinherited as it were. But from the point of view of the secular rulers, as you just said, there's no reason for them to be that enthusiastic about stamping it out because they can profit pretty considerably from this.

[00:13:01]>> Yes, absolutely. And when it comes to profit, this is getting into sort of the the territory where it gets dicey because we're talking about for the most part we've been talking about Christian user, Christian lenders. When it comes to Jewish people, the jurisdiction is completely different for them, right? So tell us a little bit about how the Jewish community functions under kingship and especially you were studying mostly England and France.

[00:13:25]>> Sure. So in England this develops over time but by the middle of the 13th century the end point is that Jewish communities are firmly under royal control. They are regulated by royal authorities. Their lending practices are monitored by royal authorities. Much of their lives is under the purview of royal authorities and often that becomes a point of tension with local authorities. That takes some time to develop. There's a long process over the course of the 12th century and into the 13th where certain local lords have what they think of as their Jews or their Jewish communities and they exercise lordship that the increasing control of the crown over Jews as one of the things that sort of really maps on to the increasing power of the crown in general in the 12th and 13th centuries in England. And the same is more or less true in France that for a long time Jews will be under the control of a particular baron and when the king happens to be that baron he has control of Jews. But a series of French kings starting really in the early 13th century begin to make increasingly strong affirmations of royal authority over Jews as a whole.

[00:14:36]So much of the earliest legislation that we have from the French kingdom, legislation of the sort of sort of the king saying this is a law that applies to the whole of the kingdom, not just to my little part that I control directly.

[00:14:48]Much of that actually concerns Jews. So as a lot of wonderful scholarship has shown over the last half century, royal claims first and then the actual exercise of royal power over Jews is really a constitutive element in the formation of the French monarchy as well as to a slightly lesser extent the English monarchy in the 12th 13th centuries as we imagine them >> which is such an important point because it means that the Jewish communities are under the protection of the king. So if you mess with them you are reporting to the king. So they are supposed to be protected, which is going to be relevant in a minute.

[00:15:26]>> Alarming, right? Because the flip side of protection is that if you're subject to the protection of someone, they can also withdraw their protection and remove you. So it is both advantageous to be under the direct protection of someone, but it also makes you vulnerable if they have a change of heart.

[00:15:42]>> Right. Exactly. What we're just reading here is that later people have probably already heard there is mass expulsions of the Jewish population in both England and France. And we're not quite there yet. But what you started with your your whole study starts with is expulsion. It doesn't just start with these Jewish communities doesn't just come out of nowhere. You trace expulsion as sort of a punishment as something that's being played with as a punishment early on. So how does this start to happen? And we do know about like banishment and stuff in terms of some crimes. How does expulsion fit into this picture?

[00:16:16]>> Sure. So, as you just point out, when most people think of mass expulsion in the Middle Ages, they immediately think Jews and Jewish communities. And there's good reason for that because the most spectacular examples of sort of mass expulsion in the Middle Ages do end up affecting Jews and Jewish communities.

[00:16:33]But there's lots of other groups who end up being expelled. And I think, you know, it's a fuzzy borderline, but I tend to think of banishment essentially as being about one person and then sort of expulsion, whether you think about as sort of collective expulsion or mass expulsion or various other terms that modern scholars use to think about the phenomenon. It involves a whole class of people, a whole group of people. So it's not just you three over there. It's all of the such and such, all of the heretics, all of the prostitutes, all of the Jews, all of the userers, all of the foreigners, all of the which you know, name your group that gets expelled in the Middle Ages. And so there is in fact even before we begin getting sort of large- scale expulsions of Jewish communities in both England and in France, there is a tradition an established political practice of expelling other groups. So in England in the mid-12th century, we have expulsions of foreign mercenaries. We then have expulsions of Flemish merchants. We have expulsions of certain Italian communities heading into the 13th century. So there's already a tradition that we can see of this is a group we don't like. We'll expel them from the realm. And in France, there's a similar dynamic. A lot of it is about moral purity. Louis the 9th, St. Louis, the famous St. Louis who builds the St. Chappelle and goes on crusade twice and dies on the second one. He gets really concerned about the moral health of his kingdom. We can talk more about Louisie, but in his reign, you see, for instance, prostitutes being ordered to be expelled from cities. And at one point, it's sort of from the cities and the country. Then it's clear that it's kind of well just the cities into the countryides. But there are other groups and the heretics as well. He orders that all heretics be banished from the realm or driven from the realm. And it's not entirely clear with his language whether he's thinking of just expelling them or exterminating them. There's some ambiguity between that, but he's certainly trying to rid that from his realm. So, there is a tradition that we don't tend to think about of other groups being expelled and then eventually obviously that will come to target Jews as well.

[00:18:34]>> Yes. And so you start to see this happening when it comes to foreigners and again this becomes part of that formula that people are going to be using a bit later. So tell us about the Lombards. What's going on with this?

[00:18:47]>> Sure. So Lombards, there's a lot of different meanings. If you're an early medievalist, Lombard refers to sort of a invading community that takes over large sws of Italy. And that is why part of northern Italy is still called Lombardi.

[00:19:01]And the Lombards that we then know of from the high and late middle ages can mean either just somebody from northern Italy or it can also be a technical term that means a professional Christian money lender, usually a foreigner who's doing this. And it sometimes gets fuzzy because if someone's called a Lombard, we don't actually know like are they talking about Italians? Are they talking about professional Christian money lenders? Where are they coming from? But in general, many many Lombards or people who are called Lombards in the 13th to 14th centuries are professional Christian money lenders who are coming from Northern Italy, places like Piedmont, certain places near Milan, in some cases even around Tuskanyany. and they are crossing the Alps and they are setting up shop in France in the low countries in England as money lenders and they're also engaging in trade as well but much of what they're doing is built around money lending and some also called coercins after the French town of Ka in southern France and sometimes texts will say Lombard's uncoren somes it goes back and forth the German vernacular till now is cavalshin but interestingly the yiddish word for pawn broker remains Lombard so the the word persists and then Of course, we have the all the other influences of the word Lombard like Lombard Street in San Francisco and Lombard Street in London and Lombard Street in I think Philadelphia. And that refers to kind of a mix of the Italians who are money lending and the Italians who just happen to be in England doing other merkantil stuff. It gets fuzzy, it gets confusing, but you know, the ones I'm mostly interested are the ones who are money lending. Well, it's interesting how human society likes to conflate things so that they can just, you know, use a term in a derogatory fashion whenever they feel like it. It's just like common to humanity. And I think this is what's coming up here. So, we have a lot of professional money lenders are arriving in places like England. I'm thinking especially Henry III's reign ends up being important in your book and then they start to get expelled on mass. It's kind of like a practice. Let's see.

[00:21:00]Let's see what happens. Can we manage this? Is it useful? Tell us what's happening in Henry's reign.

[00:21:06]>> Sure. So Henry III rules for a very long time. He takes over just after his father, Bad King John, dies, and that's right in the wake of Magna Carta. So he begins his reign in tumultuous moment.

[00:21:18]He ends it almost 60 years later having had sort of two beronial rebellions. So it's a tumultuous reign. He's a very pious figure. He's also consistently broke and that ends up being important to the story because he's always desperate for money, but he's also known for being pious. So, what we see in his case is that he begins to squeeze these Italian money lenders who are active in London and elsewhere.

[00:21:45]And sometimes he'll say, "You need to give me a gift. And if you don't give me a gift, you need to give me a loan. And if you don't give me a loan, I'm going to kick you out of my kingdom." And then sometimes they pay up and sometimes they don't. And then he'll basically kick them out and say, you know, on the grounds of usurious lending, I'm kicking you out of my kingdom. This is terrible.

[00:22:05]It kind of has that wonderful sort of atmosphere of the Casablanca movie when it's like, you know, he inspectctor comes out. He's like, I'm shocked shocked to discover that gambling is happening here. And it's like, you're winning, sir. It's kind of that exact same moment here where the king is like, I'm shocked shocked to discover that usery is happening here after I've just been trying to squeeze squeeze you all for money and then you didn't give it to me. So on a couple of instances throughout his reign, he threatens Italian communities and in some cases actually enforces expulsion against these Lombardo Corson or Italian money lenders and in some cases they pay up.

[00:22:35]In many cases they leave and then he welcomes them back a little bit later because in fact England is profitable to them and they have been profitable to him. But usually coming back involves the payment of a fairly substantial fine to the crown to be able to be active once again in lending markets.

[00:22:52]Well, it seems like when they're building this case against squeezing these people for money and then kicking them out, there's two strikes against them. One, they're foreign and two, they're users. So, this ends up being an important part of building the case against other people. And it's important because Henry also starts to see what he can get from his Jewish community, something that his dad did as well. How is this sort of similar? How's it different? So with the case of the foreigners because to be a foreigner in England, the definition of foreigners gets really confusing. You can be a foreigner if you're just from a different town and not from London than you're a foreigner when you're in London. But for these sort of, you know, Italians who are coming to the kingdom, they're definitely operating under royal protection in order them to have certain privileges to be able to trade safely, be sort of safeguarding their persons and their property. They all depend on royal protection. So for them, if the king threatens to withdraw that, they basically it'd be very hard for them to stay in the realm. So he can exercise control over these foreign merchant communities in a fairly direct way in ways that go far beyond what he could do to let's say ordinary English merchants.

[00:24:01]And in a similar fashion for Jewish communities, when the king who is their official protector sort of threatens them and says, you know, you need to pay up or else I'm going to imprison you or worse, you don't have a lot of recourse.

[00:24:13]There's no one else you can appeal to.

[00:24:15]The king is sort of the sole point of reference. So what we find under John, for instance, is threats to Jews that if they don't pay a certain amount, they might be expelled from the realm. And then this continues under Henry and persists afterwards. But then in cases where Jews do in fact try to leave the realm voluntarily, the king says, "No, you're not going." Because his ultimate goal is to in fact extract wealth from them. So expulsion is used as a threat, but then if you want to leave voluntarily, you can't do that. And that's certainly true for the Jewish communities in a way that least isn't true for the foreigners who have the freedom if they want to leave the realm.

[00:24:48]So they have an exit strategy, an exit option, the foreign Christians, that the Jewish community really doesn't have in this period. But in both cases, Henry is looking, he's desperate for funds, and he's just arbitrarily imposing taxes and fines on these communities to kind of cover his debts. Well, it's interesting because for me this seems like the genesis of starting to really not quite legalize the idea that Jewish people are foreign sort of in quotation marks even though they've been there forever.

[00:25:18]They've been born there. That's like established their families there for generations. There's a foreignness that starts to be colored sort of on top of this. It seems seems to me like it's around this moment because if John can expel you like a foreigner, are you part of the community or not? Then then on the other hand you have Henry who's saying you're not going because you belong to me and you you are one of mine and so it feels like this is the sort of an important point in that argument that maybe Jewish people are foreign in that sort of quotation way.

[00:25:47]>> Absolutely. I think the question of you know whom can you expel definitely aligns with who do we think is being separate from us and you know the king very very rarely for instance tries to go after ordinary secular users except occasionally you know on their deathbed he'll do inquest to find out you know whose property should be mine but he's not launching large-scale efforts to kind of crack down on local Christian money lending but he is using this discourse of concern around user other things to attack both the Italians in his realm and also Jewish communities. Although the king is always dicey around condemning Jewish usery and in fact refuses to ever condemn it in the way that a lot of popular pressure is pushing him to do precisely because he depends on it for a great deal of his revenue. So the king is regulating Jewish lending rather than trying to criminalize it even though there are calls already from the church in this period saying that the king should be doing more to crack down on this.

[00:26:43]>> Yes. And this is exactly where I was going because I think this is such an important part that you bring up in the book as well is that theologically it starts to shift as well between this person is a user that is bad and then it starts to take on a narrative kind of like heresy does around the same time that this is contagious and that this is going to spread. And so one of the things that you point out I think is so valuable is that if the king is in charge of the Jewish population and they are believed to be all money lending all money lending then it's his responsibility to sort of contain the contagion and so this to me seems a little bit different seems to be sort of something that is really speaking to King Louie the 9th as we're talking about here. Is that something that you you saw as well? I'm so glad you picked up on this because this is one of the things that I I really tried to bring out in the book is that ideas about usery are changing in this period and that ends up really mattering. So you know in the 12th century and 11th century even before that usery is something that's bad for you as a sinner. So you know the user is doing a bad thing. They should suffer and it's maybe we decide that lending is bad for communities but it's not really contagious the sinfulness. But starting in the late 12th century thinkers the University of Paris begin to argue that in fact the sin is somewhat contagious in that whoever profits from userie even if you aren't lending directly is in fact guilty of the sin. So if I make money off of money lending and then you tax me, then you are also guilty. You are also engaging in sin because you are profiting from my money lending. And to a certain extent, a number of secular rulers ignore this for a time. This is kind of, you know, new academic vogue.

[00:28:30]They're like, okay, we're hearing this.

[00:28:31]We're ignoring this. We're going to keep on doing things we've already done. But certainly it seems that for Louis the 9inth in France, you know, again who become sainted for his piety, he's definitely picking up on this new vibe and is definitely concerned about it.

[00:28:45]And so launches in his kingdom systematic efforts to account for all the usery that is being supposedly extracted. So there are inquests into Jewish lending in which he then says, you know, all of this user's revenues should in fact be paid back to the people who paid the loan. So he doesn't want to keep the money for himself. He's like, I'm not going to be tempted by this. This goes back to the people. And the case of the Lombards, he basically says, "Leave my kingdom.

[00:29:11]You need to get out of here." Because again, he's worried that the taxation that he's getting from these, as he imagined it, usurious money lenders is in fact going to be tainting his own soul. So it's clear that he's concerned very much about this. But again, this is these are all new thinking. It's all new ideas that's coming out of academic context and seeping into broader consciousness.

[00:29:30]>> Yeah. I don't see this affecting Henry's conscience to the same extent. Do you think so? No.

[00:29:36]>> No. Henry doesn't seem I think Henry's just so broke that he's just willing to find any way he can and and find some way to make it better. But he doesn't seem to be nearly as affected by these new ideas coming out of Paris. There certainly are people in his kingdom who have been studying in Paris who are making the case to him that he should be caring about this. But right until the end of his reign, he continues basically finding ways to extract money from these Italian money lenders. And there's no sign that he is giving all of it to pious purposes somehow. I mean, he gives a lot of money to pious purposes, but he doesn't seem to be earmarking this particular money for that. It's like, no, he he's got debts to pay, and their money is good to pay it with.

[00:30:15]>> Priorities, >> priorities, priorities here. I mean, exactly. I've got I've got bills to pay this moral purity stuff. So, I I feel badly for Henry III because he's probably just as pious as St. Louisie, but he doesn't go on crusade twice, so that counts against him. And his reign is kind of a mess, so that counts against him. So even though his personal life, he's so pious. He does all these wonderful pious things like rebuilding Westminster Abbey, he doesn't become a saint. And Louie does. So I always feel it badly for poor Henry.

[00:30:46]>> Yeah, he really tried hard with the whole >> He tried so hard. He tried so hard. He just he just wasn't all that good at being a king.

[00:30:53]>> He wasn't I mean, let's be real. Well, and it is under his reign that you see Simon de Manfort who has all the audacity kicking Jewish people out of his region for being foreign. Again, using this word foreign when he's not even from England.

[00:31:10]Yeah, exactly. So, you Simon's one of the first to expel the Jewish community.

[00:31:14]Basically, he takes over as as the Earl of Leester or he sort of comes to claim the Earl of Leester in England. He crosses over from France and one of the first things he does is basically banish Jews from his town and he doesn't give the specific grounds for which he's doing that but we have letters from the period from an important bishop Robert Gross Test who is clearly saying this is about usery and this is a noble deed and you should essentially telling the the countest who had just welcomed all of these Jews into her lands that oh no you shouldn't be doing that you should in fact be trying to suppress money lending so it seems certainly that whether whether Simon wasirect ly motivated by this or not, it's certainly in the air sort of framing his expulsion.

[00:31:53]Absolutely.

[00:31:54]>> Yes.

[00:31:55]>> And then the queen mother also later on, you know, when she goes into a convent towards the end of her life, she also decides, you know, I'm going to expel all the Jews from my towns as well. And again, there seems to probably be some cases as well that she doesn't want to be tainted by the revenues from their money lending.

[00:32:12]>> Yes. And as you say, this is all sort of like working together and sort of mixing up during this century. It's not something that happens immediately. And then it's little pieces that it seems from your argument that if these pieces didn't line up, we wouldn't have had the big expulsions that we have. Like it's sort of a watershed moment that comes from ideas of foreignness, ideas of usery, ideas of contagion that are happening sort of in this specific context.

[00:32:38]>> Absolutely. You know in the case of for Jewish communities, you know, there was a strong strong presumption from really Augustine onwards and even some other important early church thinkers that you know Jews should be protected. They should live under the protection of Christian rulers. They had to be sort of humiliated. They had to be subjugated.

[00:32:57]They had to be producing a service to Christendom. That they should be protected. And that ran in general, you know, against any idea of expelling them. And one of the things that I was really interested in when I was doing the research for the book was trying to understand well how does that presumption get overcome and one of the arguments that people end up making to justify breaking with this millennium old tradition of protecting Jewish communities and usery ends up being a really useful argument here because the church's campaign even though it begins against Christian usery you know the church is first of all concerned about Christians so they're saying you know don't do is they gradually begin to concerned about Jewish usery precisely because of this contagion question. And as they ramp that up and begin sort of attacking Jews as money lenders, it never gets spelled out to what extent the traditional protection for Jews that the church has been insisting on. What precedence does that have visav this increasing insistence you need to be repress Jewish money lending? How do we actually sort of reconcile these things and and where does expulsion fall into that? Can you expel Jews because they're engaging in usery and that's damaging?

[00:34:06]Does that override the protections? And the church, you know, has different feelings on this and there's different voices on this. But one of the things I try to do in the book is figure out, well, how does that logic become so powerful that people can use this regardless of why you actually want to expel Jews from your kingdom? This at least becomes an acceptable, a legitimate logic that you can use to justify publicly the choice to expel them. Well, this is one of the things I'm wondering as well is you have these theologians, these church thinkers that are coming up with this argument that are saying, "If this is true, then this is true, then this is true." And if they're extending the argument to Jewish money lending, is there a sense that maybe they shouldn't approach the king about this because this is how the king is making a lot of revenue? Like, does anyone have any hesitancy or they just like tell the king straight up this is bad thing?

[00:34:56]>> There's a lot who are quite happy to tell the king this is a bad thing. Much of the evidence that we have for denunciations of Jewish lending consists of clerics complaining to the king that they should be doing more about this or the queen or the queen mother or other sort of figures who have authority over Jews. And it's it's quite clear that in some cases secular rulers are concerned about this. There's a famous set of letters from some preian theologians addressed to an unnamed noble woman who's probably the countest of Flanders.

[00:35:25]And it's good that she's writing to them saying, "I'm concerned about Jewish money lending. How should I in fact behave here?" And Thomas Aquinus writes back and John Peekham who becomes Archbishop of Canterbury, he writes back and another canonist writes back. So it's clear that there is dialogue happening between secular rulers and ecclesiastical thinkers. So there's there's definite movement of church ideas into secular decision spaces for sure. Well, and I think that's interesting as well because there had to have been something that would alert the countest to thinking that she has to ask this question. Like it doesn't come from nowhere. She just didn't come up with it while she was just sitting alone twiddling her thumbs. Like somebody must have put this idea in her mind or, you know, she must have come up with it by interacting with different theological ideas.

[00:36:09]>> Mhm. And I always think, you know, somebody must have told her this was, you know, risky or bad to be potentially welcoming Jewish money lenders into her realm. But she at least didn't take whoever that was their word for it.

[00:36:19]She's like, I'm writing to the top scholars in Paris to ask their opinion.

[00:36:22]So again, I always wonder what the backstory here is. It's some confessor and she's like that that may be true, but like I'm not making a decision based on you. I am definitely going to the top. I want the best minds to tell me.

[00:36:32]So I kind of at least admire I don't know maybe I'm an academic. I like the idea that someone's like, let's at least ask the best. Of course I don't like the responses necessarily that Aquinus and Pekkim end up giving, but I I applaud her impulse that don't listen to everything you hear. go find an expert and ask their opinion. But that of course is wildly self- serving because I am an academic and of course I would think this is a wonderful thing to do.

[00:36:53]And again the result ends up being probably bad for Jewish community. So maybe you know but maybe it wouldn't have been any better if she just listened to the first person that she spoke to.

[00:37:01]>> Well I think it would have come up anyway but it's good to have these letters sort of several letters addressing the same question questions very directly. So it's good to have the evidence. We don't have to be happy with the outcome. And indeed, we are not happy with the outcome. Which brings us to what changed so drastically that Edward I in England, he's getting money.

[00:37:23]He's getting revenue from the Jewish community that's under his protection.

[00:37:26]What changes to the point at which he's just like, I'm going to expel these people who are making me money. Just expel them from my kingdom no matter the fact that they've been here for several hundred years.

[00:37:37]So you know certainly attitudes are hardening in the later 13th century. The amount of anti-Jewish rhetoric is escalating across Western Europe in England and in France. So everything that happens is against a backdrop where Jews are just being demonized ever more.

[00:37:53]It's also true that they have been so impoverished because of repeated government extractions that that makes them less economically useful to the crown and less economically powerful.

[00:38:05]And then in 1275, the king passes what's called the statute of the jury that basically forbids Jews from lending an interest at all. So unlike Edward's father who had tolerated it and indeed sort of, you know, encouraged it throughout his his reign, Edward takes a very different tack and decides that he wants to repress it. But in that same moment, he's also cracking down on Lombard money lending in the kingdom. So this isn't a case where he's only going after the Jewish communities. It's part of a systematic effort where he is going against Italian money lending practices as well. And there's even evidence that he's going against secular let's say let's say ordinary subjects of his Christian subjects who are also engaging in money lending and and he's going after them for usery. So this is part of a broader campaign that seems to signal that he really is concerned about this.

[00:38:55]And unlike his father who really sort of uses useries of fig leaf to just squeeze money of the Italians, Edward actually launches really thorough investigations.

[00:39:03]He seizes the account books. He imprisons the merchants in the tower.

[00:39:06]And so he's really pursuing this quite thoroughly in an effort to stamp it out.

[00:39:10]So although 1275 is often seen as just a story as part of sort of the history of Jews in England, it is also a moment when the king is launched in a really severe broader usery crackdown. Now, 15 years later, when he ends up expelling the Jews from England, he blames it on the fact that the Jewish community is continuing to violate the statute of jewelry and they're engaging in clandestine money lending. And scholars continue to argue whether they actually were doing this or not, whether that's a fig leaf or not. What's clear is that there was a lot of popular pressure to expel Jews and and famously he accepts a very large grant of taxation from the House of Commons in return for expelling Jews.

[00:39:50]So he's profiting somehow from the expulsion in a pretty significant way.

[00:39:55]And what's interesting there, one piece of evidence that no one had noticed in all the studies of expulsions of Jews is that in the same spring of 1290 when the House of Commons and when Parliament basically is pressuring the king to expel Jews, they also in fact have petitions to the king to expel foreign merchants and foreign money lenders from the kingdom as well. And that one he decides to refuse. So he says no these the magnates have advised me that these are useful and therefore I should keep them. So there's an interesting logic there that at that particular moment he's decided okay we may not have liked their their economic practices but we've decided that these in this moment are useful and the Jews by implication are not.

[00:40:38]>> Yes. And if you're listening at home and you think this is really hypocritical welcome to medieval kingship. Right.

[00:40:47]>> Yes. It's so transparent in so many ways to see this happening where it's based on not everything that he's actually saying. It's based on, you know, like reading between the lines. People, I think, at the time are reading between the lines as well. People are not stupid back then and they're reading between the lines. But this is a huge moment in English history and Jewish history.

[00:41:10]>> Absolutely. What's interesting though even here is that there's no sign that Edward profits a great deal from Jews when he expels them. And in fact, 3 years before this, he's already expelled Jews from his lands in Gasaskinany. And there he gives, as far as we can tell, he gives all the money that he confiscates from the expelled Jews to the Dominican orders, the Franciscans and the Dominicans, so to the church. So he does seem to have been quite concerned whether because he really pious was concerned about optics. He does seem to have been concerned about profiting from wealth that he himself thought was tainted. So that's his his actions with with with wealth. In the same way that Louis the 9th across the channel, Louis 9th is really concerned not to be seen about this. That's not the case with Philip the Fair who's going to expel his Jewish communities in 1306. He seizes all their wealth and keeps it. But notably does not talk about usery when he expels the Jews. So it definitely you can sort of get a sense of how pious are they, what are they up to partly in what do they actually do with the money that they're seizing. And Philip when he tells Jews in 1906, he definitely wants that all.

[00:42:15]>> Yes. And that's exactly where I was going because Philip the Fair, well I mean he is one of my favorite people to investigate because he is >> you know a lot about Philip the fair.

[00:42:23]>> He is just so into >> more than I do. more than I do.

[00:42:26]>> And again, one of those people you love to study and are not happy with the result, you know, with the historical result, but Philip is completely different. And one of the things that is so interesting about the case of Philip the Fair and 1306 is that he really seems to have drunk the Kool-Aid and that he thinks that he's going to get a lot of money, a lot more than he actually got from the expulsion. And so this to me seems like all of that anti-semitic propaganda that we're talking about that's been increasing over the course of the 13th century, he seems to have really sort of fallen for his own propaganda and that he was expecting he was going to get a lot and he really didn't.

[00:43:05]Yeah. You he certainly makes money but it definitely falls short of what he was imagining. Absolutely. But one thing that it does do is it establishes his authority throughout the kingdom because all the locals who claim to have rights over Jews like he runs roughshot over all of that sort of ignores their jurisdictional privileges and seizes their Jews and banishes from the kingdom. So what he doesn't make up in revenue he at least establishes in terms of demonstrating royal authority in that particular moment. So maybe gets something from that but still imagines he must have been somewhat disappointed from the money hall.

[00:43:37]>> Yes, absolutely. And I think we also can't divorce us from the optics as well where he really idolized Louis the 9th and he wants to look pious but I think as you say you have to look at the actions afterwards and he certainly does not give that money back to mandneicans for sure >> and it is interesting because by the time we're in the reign of Philip the fair people are thinking back and thinking that Louis the 9th expelled Jews from the realm and then reversed himself but he actually didn't. He had an order that said any Jews who refuse to give up money lending must leave the realm. But that's very different and it's been conflated in a lot of modern scholarship to think that Louis the 9th expels Jews. But again, he's not. He's saying Jews can be in the realm, they just can't be engaging in money lending.

[00:44:18]But even in the Middle Ages, the conflation of Jew and money lender gets so tight by the end of the 13th century, by the beginning of the 14th century, that he's memorialized as having banished Jews from the realm, even though he didn't. Now, it's true that many Jews end up leaving the realm because of that threat, but it's, you know, it's a specific subset of Jews.

[00:44:37]It's Jews who refuse to abandon money lending, not the Jewish community as a whole. There's no evidence that Louis the 9th ever wanted to banish Jews, the Jewish community. That's something that only happens under his grandson.

[00:44:48]>> Yes. Exactly. And I think that this probably has to do with what we you were talking about before where they were his responsibility and Louis the 9th was very concerned with his kingdom, his citizens and he was he had the protection of these people in his hands and so I think that that had something to do with or a lot to do with it where Philip >> and he's hoping and he's hoping for their conversion too much like Henry III who was really invested in converting Jews. Louis the 9th is as well. The great act of piety, you know, to be really pious is to succeed in converting your Jewish population, not to get rid of them. That doesn't, you know, redound the glory of Christendom. So both Henry the third and Louis are much more invested in converting Jews than they are in in trying to sort of suppress the community from their realm.

[00:45:30]>> Yes. And I think that again is a really interesting important contrast with the later expulsion under Philip the Fair.

[00:45:36]He doesn't try to convert them. He also doesn't try to convert the Templars who he uses the exact same playbook for. And so I think this is what really makes your work so valuable throughout the book is that you've managed to trace the steps that it takes to get to these points where it just doesn't come out of nowhere. And in fact, it doesn't seem to come out of just direct anti-semitism right away. It's built on all of these other prior expulsions or thinking about usery, about foreignness, about religion, all of these things.

[00:46:07]>> Absolutely. I think one of the things that I tried to do in the book and you know it goes on to talk about all these other expulsions that happen as well of Christian money lenders because there's lots and lots of expulsions of Christian money lenders. One of the things that I tried to start the book by saying is every place in Western Europe that expels Jews before the Black Death also expels foreign professional Christian money lenders. And the history of the Jewish expulsions is often told as kind of a chain sort of with one each one leading to the next. But I actually think it's much more of kind of a snakes and ladders case. Sort of as winding around where expulsion against one group inspires techniques that are used against another group. And rather than just sort of looking at how expulsion is used against Jews, what I really want to encourage people into the Middle Ages to do is to think about well who are all the people who are getting expelled and how are all these different instances of expulsion serving as testing grounds, experiments, precedents for expulsions of other groups. So thinking about how do expulsions of Jews inspire inspions of prostitutes or heretics and vice versa and then where do people we don't usually think about professional Christian money lenders where do their expulsions fit into this story?

[00:47:16]>> Yes. And I think that's so valuable as well because I think that you must have been a little bit concerned stepping into this that people are going to be like this is what about ism like what about the other guys right like minimizing Jewish expulsion when that's not what you're doing. You're trying to understand what could have led to it and all of those steps that made these things possible because they don't come out of nowhere.

[00:47:37]>> Absolutely indeed. When I started this project, I didn't even actually touch Jewish history at all. The project was just about the expulsions of, as my Jewish husband likes to put it, everybody but the Jews. And then I had colleagues who said, "But you know, your work is actually really useful here in contextualizing these Jewish expulsions.

[00:47:54]And you've noted all these parallels and connections and influences and overlaps.

[00:47:58]you've really got to take the time to spell these out. So the book that I end up writing compared to the dissertation I had written ended up trying to be really first comparative and then connected to basically make the point that we can't see these in a vacuum.

[00:48:11]These are part of a broader set of medieval practices in which people are paying attention and listening and copying and learning and reimagining and reworking. And so my hope really there is that it continues a really a broader effort among recent scholarship to make sure that we see Jewish history as absolutely embedded. It's a necessary it's a vital it's an integral part of the story of Western European society in general in this period and not something that exists somehow as its own separate isolated story that we can say isolation that we have to understand what's happening to Jewish people along what's happening to everybody else in the societies around them.

[00:48:46]>> Yes, absolutely. And I hope that people will read your book and be inspired by this because there's so much else in this book that we didn't get a chance to get to and it's very very >> it's a long book and I it's a long book >> but as I was telling you before we turned on the microphones it's so readable. You have a really great style.

[00:49:02]I don't think people will get lost when they're reading it and I do think that this is a fundamental book for people to read and understand like I said legal cases, religion and sin and all of these things at the time. So thank you so much Rowan for being here. This has been a treat.

[00:49:18]>> Thank you, Danielle. Thanks so much.

[00:49:21]>> To find out more about Rowan's work, you can visit his faculty page at Stanford University. His award-winning book is No Return: Jews, Christian User, and the Spread of Mass Expulsion in Medieval Europe.

[00:49:35]It's the last week of May, so our last medieval motivational quote for the month is a big one to cover all the bases. It comes from John of Garland's 13th century moral scalarium, a guide meant to teach students on their way to becoming clerks and clergy how to behave. It's absolutely chalk full of advice on everything from how you should mount your horse from the left syrup if you want to know to taking walks after meals to aid digestion. But he summarizes seven as he calls them rules of polite behavior from the ancient Greek Thales of Mitus for which he says we should be grateful. These are regulate your household soberly. Do your civic duties cheerfully. Have a word of greeting for strangers as for friends.

[00:50:20]Do your utmost to avoid altercations with iate associates. With a smile and a witicism, cover up the faults of others.

[00:50:28]Be faultless at table, glad even to entertain your enemies. Bear your misfortunes with fortitude. And do not let your head be turned by good fortune.

[00:50:38]Make an effort to follow the seven rules of courtliness.

[00:50:43]What I love about this advice is whether we call it Greek wisdom or medieval courtliness, these basic rules of human courtesy are still good reminders today.

[00:50:52]This comes from the translation by LJ Pato. And speaking of courtesy, allow me to thank you for being here every week, listening, sharing, letting the ads play, and especially joining me on Patreon. And if you'd like to join me live on Patreon, this is your week because on Friday, May 29th at 1 p.m.

[00:51:11]Eastern time, it's time for the monthly Ask Me Anything live stream where I talk about history and books and answer all your burning questions. And I'm looking forward to seeing you there. For more information, check out patreon.com/themedieval podcast.

[00:51:27]For the show notes on this episode, a transcript, and a collection of the books featured on the Medieval Podcast, please visit medievalpodcast.com.

[00:51:35]You can find me, Danielle Sabilski on social media at 5minut medievalist or 5minute medievalist.

[00:51:46]Our music is by Christian Overton.

[00:51:49]Thanks for listening and have yourself an awesome day.