Two German Monti di Pietà—Microcredit in Early Modern Augsburg and Nuremberg

Structures of institutionalisation of credit operations and even less so banks for the poor did not exist in the Romanian Principalities in the pre-modern times. As a result, all types of informal loans were in use: simple loans, loans against land and interest-bearing loans, where the accepted interest rate was 20% per annum. The present study is structured around the profile of creditors. First I review the activity of the Church, which remained a marginal player on the credit market and but was still responsible for assisting the destitute poor. Secondly, there were the solidarity groups which, even when they practiced pawnbroking, were perceived as aid providers. Finally, I examine the “professional” usurers who, as a rule, were Ottoman subjects (Christians and Muslims), enjoying the protection of the Sultan and, as a result, the reinforced protection of the public authorities of the tributary countries of Wallachia and Moldavia. Unlike local creditors, who were seen as benefactors, foreign usurers did not have a good reputation. The issue at stake in this antinomy—credit as charity, practised by local players, versus credit as a source of misfortune, involving foreign usurers—was, in the eyes of society, to keep the land pledged within solidarity groups. Public authorities, for their part, were interested in safeguarding the integrity of the princely land, on which the political, administrative and judicial autonomy of the Romanian Principality itself was rooted in relation to the Ottoman Porte.