h may not have exactly corresponded to the average annual interest
of money, was ten per cent. at Barcelona in 1435. Capmany t. i. p. 209.

[628] Du Cange, v. Usura.

[629] Muratori, Diss. 16.

[630] Greg. Turon. I. iv.

[631] Hist. de Languedoc, t. ii. p. 517; t. iii. p. 531.

[632] Id. t. iii. p. 121.

[633] Id. p. 163.

[634] Marina, Ensayo Historico-Critico, p. 143.

[635] Martenne Thesaurus Anecdotorum, t. i. p. 984.

[636] Velly, t. iv. p. 136.

[637] The city of Cahors, in Quercy, the modern department of the Lot,
produced a tribe of money-dealers. The Caursini are almost as often
noticed as the Lombards. See the article in Du Cange. In Lombardy, Asti,
a city of no great note in other respects, was famous for the same
department of commerce.

[638] There were three species of paper credit in the dealings of
merchants: 1. General letters of credit, not directed to any one, which
are not uncommon in the Levant: 2. Orders to pay money to a particular
person: 3. Bills of exchange regularly negotiable. Boucher, t. ii. p.
621. Instances of the first are mentioned by Macpherson about 1200, p.
367. The second species was introduced by the Jews, about 1183 (Capmany,
t. i. p. 297); but it may be doubtful whether the last stage of the
progress was reached nearly so soon. An instrument in Rymer, however, of
the year 1364 (t. vi. p. 495), mentions literae cambitoriae, which seem to
have been negotiable bills; and by 1400 they were drawn in sets, and
worded exactly as at present. Macpherson, p. 614, and Beckman, History
of Inventions, vol. iii. p. 430, give from Capmany an actual precedent
of a bill dated in 1404.

[639] Usury was looked upon with horror by our English divines long
after the Reformation. Fleury, in his Institutions au Droit
Ecclesiastique, t. ii. p. 129, has shown the subterfuges to which men
had recourse in order to evade this prohibition. It is an unhappy truth,
that great part of the attention devoted to the best of sciences, ethics
and jurisprudence, has been employed to weaken principles that ought
never to have been acknowledged.

One species of usury, and that of the highest importance to commerce,
was always permitted, on account of the risk that attended it This was
marine insurance, which could not have existed, until money was
considered, in itself, as a source of profit. The earliest regulations
on the subject of insurance are those of Barcelona in 1433; but the
practice was, of co