The Making of a Legend
The Making of a Legend
This chapter discusses Étienne Cleirac's commentary on the first article of the Guidon de la mer (The Standard of the Sea). In brief, he says that the Jews expelled from France invented marine insurance policies and bills of exchange in order to salvage their assets when fleeing to “Lombardy,” that is, to northern and central Italy. From there, Italian refugees exported the newly invented financial instruments north of the Alps, where bankers and moneylenders were called “Lombards,” a name eventually given to a public square in Amsterdam. Cleirac's merging of these spaces has the effect of tracing a direct line between fourteenth-century Lombards and seventeenth-century Amsterdam and makes pawnbroking appear contiguous with the most sophisticated forms of financial credit developed during the sixteenth century. This chronological compression is crucial to Cleirac's rhetorical strategy of making medieval Jewish moneylenders, the object of scorn and prejudice, interchangeable with the international merchant-bankers of the seventeenth century.
Keywords: Étienne Cleirac, Jews, marine insurance policies, bills of exchange, Lombardy, Italian refugees, pawnbroking, financial credit, Jewish moneylenders, merchant-bankers
Princeton Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
