Abstract:For centuries, the legal rate of interest in the Roman Empire was “one-hundredth”: 1 percent of the principal of the loan was added to it each month. Although Christian leaders and writers in the Greek and Latin west did not approve of this practice, Syriac-speaking Christian communities in the eastern Roman Empire incorporated the rate of “one-hundredth” into canon law, and some grounded it in a novel interpretation of the Syriac Bible. In this paper, I describe the incorporation of Roman lending norms into t… Show more
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