In Poland alone, which had long been a haven of refuge to the hunted Jews, these abominable calumnies found a very limited market as yet. It was there enacted that a charge of ritual murder brought by a Christian against a Jew, unless the accuser succeeded in substantiating it, should be punished with death. This generous treatment of the Polish Jews, it is said, was partly due to King Casimir IV.’s love for a Jewish mistress. Through her influence the children of Israel obtained many privileges which placed them on a footing of social equality with the Christians. At a time when they were oppressed, reviled and butchered in almost every Western country, in Poland their lives and liberties were as safe as those of the nobility itself. Whilst the native peasants were still treated as serfs, the Jews were allowed the aristocratic privilege of wearing rapiers. Any Jew might, by simply renouncing his religion, become a nobleman. As stewards of the estates belonging to the Polish magnates, the Jews possessed even the power of inflicting capital punishment on the Christian slaves of the soil: so much so that during the terrible pestilence not more than ten thousand Jews were massacred in Poland. CHAPTER VIII USURY AND THE JEWS ANOTHER cause of the hatred inspired by the mediaeval Jew was usury, a term which was then synonymous with money-lending generally. For an age accustomed to regard lending money at interest as a purely economic transaction, the rate of interest as an economic phenomenon obeying the law of demand and supply, and the whole thing as a question of commerce rather than of ethics, it is not easy to understand the theological wrath vented on money-lenders in old times. Yet in the Middle Ages trade in money was treated as a heinous sin, and those engaged in this occupation, to us perfectly legitimate, as criminals of the deepest dye. Dante, in whom “ten silent centuries found a voice,” expresses the mediaeval feeling on the subject by placing Cahors, a city of Provence, notorious in the thirteenth century as a nest of usurers, beside Sodom in Hell: “E pero lo minor giron suggella, Del segno suo e Sodomma e Caorsa.”[56]