I find however that those banks employed in Italy, during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, to borrow money in the name of States, for which the public revenues were mortgaged and interest paid, were also called _montes_[44]. In this sense the word is used by Italian historians of much later times; and those are greatly mistaken, who, with Ascian and many others, consider all these _montes_ as real lending-houses. These loan-banks or _montes_ received various names, sometimes from the princes who established them, sometimes from the use to which the money borrowed was applied, and sometimes from the objects which were mortgaged. Of this kind were the _mons fidei_, or loan opened by Pope Clement VII. in the year 1526, for defending his capital[45]; the _mons aluminarius_, under Pope Pius IV., for which the pontifical alum-works were pledged; the _mons religionis_, under Pius V., for carrying on the war against the Turks; and the _montes farinæ_, _carnium_, _vini_, &c., when the duties upon these articles were pledged as a security. To facilitate these loans, every condition that could induce people to advance money was thought of. Sometimes high interest was given, if the subscribers agreed that it should cease, and the capital fall to the bank after their death; and sometimes low interest was given, but the security was heritable and could be transferred at pleasure. The former were called _montes vacabiles_, and the latter _montes non vacabiles_. Sometimes the State engaged to pay back the capital at the end of a certain period, such for example as nine years, as was the case in regard to the _mons novennalis_, under Paul IV.; or it reserved to itself the option of returning the money at such a period as it might think proper, and sometimes the capital was sunk and the interest made perpetual. The first kind were called _montes redimibiles_, and the second _irredimibiles_[46]. One can here clearly discover the origin of life-rents, annuities, tontines, and government securities; but the further illustration of this subject I shall leave to those who may wish to employ their talents on a history of national debts. I have introduced these remarks, merely to rectify a mistake which has become almost general, and which occasioned some difficulties to me in this research; and I shall only observe further, that the popes gave to their loans, in order to raise their sinking credit, many of those spiritual advantages which they conferred on the _montes pietatis_. This error therefore was more easily propagated, as both were called _montes_; and hence it has happened that Ascianus and others assert that many lending-houses were misapplied by the popes in order to raise public loans.