Cahorsins

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Place de la Liberation, formerly known as place au Change in Cahors, in the Middle Ages a hub of activity of the Cahorsins Cahors Liberation.jpg
Place de la Libération, formerly known as place au Change in Cahors, in the Middle Ages a hub of activity of the Cahorsins

The Cahorsins were merchants and financiers from the French city of Cahors and the surrounding region of Quercy during the High Middle Ages. During their 13th-century heyday, they were among the most prominent communities of Christian long-distance traders outside of Italy, and were particularly prominent in commerce between England and its continental lands of the Duchy of Aquitaine. They declined rapidly from around 1300 CE, but their name long remained synonymous with usury in much of Western Europe. [2] [3]

Contents

Name

The names of Cahors and the Quercy both derive from the Cadurci people who inhabited the region during the Iron Age and Roman period.

In medieval parlance, Cahorsins, alternatively spelled Caorcins, Caorsins, Caoursins or Cahursins, [4] included merchants from Cahors but also Cajarc, Capdenac, Cardaillac, Castelnau-Montratier, Figeac, Gourdon, Rocamadour, and Souillac [5] [6] They were referred to as Caorsini in Italian, Cahorsijnen in Dutch, and Kawertschen in German. In English, Caursines was occasionally used in the past [7] but not in recent historical literature.

In the modern period, possibly because of the negative connotations associated with the Cahorsins' lending practices, people from Cahors have been instead referred to as Cadurciens.

Overview

13th-century house of the Beral family at 43, rue du Chateau-du-Roi in Cahors Cahors - rue du Chateau-du-Roi 43 -730.jpg
13th-century house of the Béral family at 43, rue du Château-du-Roi in Cahors

Cahors lies on the land road between Montpellier on the Mediterranean Sea and La Rochelle on the Atlantic Ocean, and the emergence of the Cahorsins as a significant trading community has been related to the emergence of these two new port cities in the 11th and early 12th centuries. [3] :46 Despite major lapses in documentation, evidence for the long-distance merchant activity of Cahorsins goes back to the late 12th century, with their attested presence in Marseille and Saint-Gilles in 1178 and in La Rochelle in 1194. [5] Using the Lot and Garonne rivers, Cahorsins exported their local wine to England and imported wool from there, but transported more valuable goods and spices imported from the Levant to La Rochelle by road. [3] :54 Their presence at the Champagne fairs is documented from 1216, [3] :59 and in Flanders from 1230. [3] :60 In 1240, Henry III exiled from England some Cahorsins, mainly of Sens, for usury with extortion. [8] [7] :239

By the middle of the 13th century, Cahors played a larger rôle in long-distance trade than most other cities of southwestern France, including Toulouse. [2] :237 In the third quarter of the 13th century, the Cahorsins were major financial system participants in London and England, on a par with Italian merchants from Florence, Lucca and Siena, [3] :57 and some of them took over the former properties of English Jews following the Edict of Expulsion in 1290. [9]

The causes of the Cahorsins' decline in the late 13th and early 14th centuries have not been identified with certainty. They may have been related with the 1294–1303 Gascon War which put an end to their prior balancing act as subjects of the King of France in and around Cahors, but active in English lands in Aquitaine and Great Britain. That period also saw the decline of the Champagne fairs and increased competition from Italian merchants. [3] :64

The legacy of Cahorsin opulence has been related to the rise of Jacques Duèse from Cahors up to his election in 1316 as Pope John XXII. Duèse's father had probably been a merchant and moneychanger. [10] :162

Reputation and historiography

The Brunnenturm [de] in Zurich, also known as Kawertschenturm
(lit. 'Cahorsins' Tower') for its use by moneylenders in the late 14th and early 15th centuries BrunnenturmTuriciI.jpg
The Brunnenturm  [ de ] in Zürich, also known as Kawertschenturm (lit.'Cahorsins' Tower') for its use by moneylenders in the late 14th and early 15th centuries

The Cahorsins' name was often used to refer to Christian (i.e. non-Jewish) usurers, together with that of Lombards, both during the 13th century and in the later period following their decline. Their usury activity was prohibited by rulers such as Henry III, Duke of Brabant in 1261 [11] and successive kings of France, Louis IX in 1269 and Philip III in 1274. [3] :63

Dante Alighieri referred to Cahors and Cahorsins twice in the Divine Comedy , in part out of his aversion for contemporary Pope John XXII. In Canto XI of Inferno , he paired Cahors with Sodom (Soddoma e Caorsa) as sinful places, respectively associated with sodomy and usury; [7] :239 and in Canto XXVII of Paradiso , he portrayed Saint Peter referring to Cahorsins and Gascons (Caorsini e Guaschi) in an allusion to the rapacity of John XXII and of his predecessor Clement V, who was from Villandraut in Gascony. [12] :250 Giovanni Boccaccio later echoed Dante's disparaging references to Cahorsins in commentary of his own. [2] :230

References to usurers as Cahorsins were widespread in late medieval Germany, [13] where their name was spelled Kawertschen. [14] As late as the mid-17th century, they were still lambasted as "worse than Jews" by a legal scholar in Bordeaux, echoing similarly stereotypical language formulated in the mid-1230s by Matthew Paris. [15] [16] :52

A stream of early French historiography, initiated in the 17th century by Du Cange and partly perpetuated in the 19th century by Maurice Prou among others, has portrayed the medieval Cahorsins as Italian merchants from Tuscany and/or Piedmont. [17] This was, however, disproved in studies by Edmond Albe  [ fr ] and Philippe Wolff in the second quarter of the 20th century. [2] :230 Yves Renouard contributed further research on the Cahorsins in the early 1960s. [3]

Notable Cahorsins

13th-century house of the De Jean family at 112, rue Saint-Andre in Cahors Cahors - Maison, 112 rue Saint-Andre -02.jpg
13th-century house of the De Jean family at 112, rue Saint-André in Cahors

See also

Notes

  1. 1 2 3 Le Patrimoine (PDF), Département du Lot
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 Philippe Wolff (1950), "Le problème des Cahorsins", Annales du Midi, 62 (11): 229–238, doi:10.3406/anami.1950.5796
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 Yves Renouard (1961), "Les Cahorsins, hommes d'affaires Français du XIIIe siècle", Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 11: 43–67, doi:10.2307/3678750, JSTOR   3678750, S2CID   162412818
  4. Dominique Ancelet-Netter (2010), "Chapitre IV. Le vocabulaire de la dette", La dette, la dîme et le denier : Une analyse sémantique du vocabulaire économique et financier au Moyen Âge, Histoire et civilisations, Villeneuve d'Ascq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, pp. 227–267, ISBN   9782757421499
  5. 1 2 3 Gérard Sivery (1984), L'Économie du Royaume de France au siècle de Saint Louis, Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, pp. 262–263
  6. Jean Lartigaut (1993), Histoire du Quercy, Toulouse: Privat, p. 115
  7. 1 2 3 B. Lionel Abrahams (January 1895), "The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290 (Continued)", The Jewish Quarterly Review, 7 (2), University of Pennsylvania Press: 236–258, doi:10.2307/1450232, JSTOR   1450232
  8. Paris, Matthew (1877). Luard, Henry Richards (ed.). Chronica Majora IV (in Latin). London: Longman. p. 8. Retrieved 3 March 2024.
  9. David Graeber (2011). Debt: The First 5000 Years. Melville House. p. 440.
  10. 1 2 John E. Weakland (1972), "John XXII before his Pontificate, 1244-1316: Jacques Duèse and his Family", Archivum Historiae Pontificiae, 10: 161–185, JSTOR   23564073
  11. Alfred Haverkamp (2015), Jews in the Medieval German Kingdom (PDF), translated by Christoph Cluse, Universität Trier, Arye Maimon-Institut für Geschichte der Juden, p. 52
  12. Charles T. Davis (2000), "Dante's Vision of History", Dante Studies, CXVIII (118): 243–259, JSTOR   40166561
  13. Karl F. Helleiner (1950), "Review: Medieval Money Dealers", The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, 16 (2), JSTOR   137991
  14. "Kawertschen". Zeno.org.
  15. "Medieval Sourcebook: Matthew of Paris: The Usury of the Cahorsins, 1235". Fordham University.
  16. Francesca Trivellato (2014), "La naissance d'une légende : Juifs et finance dans l'imaginaire bordelais du XVIIe siècle", Archives Juives, 47 (2): 47–76, doi:10.3917/aj.472.0047
  17. Maurice Prou (1885), "Cahorsins", La grande encyclopédie: inventaire raisonné des sciences, des lettres et des arts, vol. 8, H. Lamirault & Cie, p. 770
  18. Henri Lot (1875), "Essai d'intervention de Charles le Bel en faveur des chrétiens d'Orient tenté avec le concours du pape Jean XXII", Bibliothèque de l'École des chartes, 36, Paris: 588–600


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