![]() In one instance, Stokes found, he beat an old woman when he discovered her taking water from his meadow. As Stokes found by sifting through the archives of the city of Basel, "He insisted on a kind of individualistic perspective on his own life."Īlthough his impressive property holdings might be admired in today's culture, he was seen as downright despicable by his medieval peers for the way he threw his financial weight around. He was a property owner who insisted he had the power and the right to do what he wanted with his property. In another, more dramatic, example of the community rejection of selfish business practices, murder was seen as the only response severe enough to deal with a pompous businessman, Uly Mörnach. "Not only farmers, but also the rich men in the city understood that land belonged to families in ways that debt could not erase," Stokes said. ![]() As Stokes explained, "Hans Fisher visits the land and takes the excess harvest for himself, along with some farming equipment, leaving his sons with no rent to pay Lord Badmer."īut Badmer does not exercise his legal right to repossess the land that would have been unacceptable behavior. The records indicate that Fisher visited the land at harvest time and took the "rent" payment due to Lord Badmer. Rather than seize the land from Fisher, the businessman, who was also the Lord Mayor Badmer, gave it to Fisher's sons and worked out a rental agreement with them so they would keep the land in the family. Some time later, Fisher fell behind on his payments. The story of Klein Hans Fisher, a Swiss man who owed a massive debt on his mortgage, highlights the difference between our modern financial mindset and the medieval one.Īs the court records show, a wealthy businessman in Lucerne had issued Fisher the mortgage in the late 16th century. In a 16th-century quarrel between cousins, "one man criticized another's greedy behavior, saying, 'Cousin, cousin, you've acted poorly and committed injustice,' " Stokes said. In examples of court depositions, she found that people emphasized the collective damage done to the community over their own losses. It was compelling, she explained, because even when people were relating financial experiences that happened 20 years prior, "They were offering quoted speech as if the events had happened the day before."Įxcited by this detail, Stokes delved more deeply into the records to look for a pattern in the language people used to describe their financial disputes. While poring through the documents at the Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt (an important archive of the city of Basel), she was intrigued by the amount of text dedicated to preserving every detail of these interactions down to specific "he said, she said" conversations. Stokes, a historian of early modern Europe, began her research when she came across unusually extensive documentation on financial disputes from the medieval era. In describing the contradiction between present-day business attitudes and a medieval mindset, Stokes said, "A medieval businessman would surely be impressed by the successes of his modern descendants, but he would also despise them as men without honor or virtue." In short, blatantly selfish economic behavior was simply unacceptable. The question that perplexes Stokes, an assistant professor of history, is how such men could be admired by their peers, when greed was frowned upon. Men of business successfully built financial empires based on trade and credit, even though unbridled greed was universally condemned. One might even have been murdered for using wealth as a justification for circumventing societal norms.Ĭapitalism, Stokes has found, managed to flourish in the intensely community-conscious culture of medieval times. Self-serving behavior deemed necessary on Wall Street today might have been despised in medieval Europe. ![]() Stanford historian Laura Stokes is uncovering how attitudes toward "acceptable greed" have done a turnaround in the past 500 years. But greed hasn't always been popular in Western societies. ![]()
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