Moneylending Maggots: Foreign Usurers and the Rhetoric of Expulsion in the Late Middle Ages

Beginning in the early thirteenth century, Italian moneylenders began to establish themselves in towns and cities throughout northern Europe, prompting the vocal opposition of a Church hierarchy that was increasingly concerned about usury. Ecclesiastical calls for the suppression of their moneylending were soon followed by secular orders for the expulsion of the moneylenders themselves. Fueled by a potent cocktail of piety, protectionism, and pecuniary self-interest, these expulsions would persist until the end of the Middle Ages. This paper will examine how authorities and interested observers normalized these expulsions; some developed new rhetorical strategies, while others drew on the existing arsenal of exclusionary logics and language. In addition, the paper will show how the arguments and imagery that underpinned such expulsions were disseminated across different genres, jurisdictions, and institutional contexts over the course of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries.