Yet another set of cultural responses to inflation created disparities of a different kind: fiscal imbalances between public income and expenditures. Governments fell deep in debt during the middle and later years of the thirteenth century. As spending outran revenues, monarchs borrowed heavily from domestic and foreign merchants. In Constantinople, the last Latin Emperor Baldwin II (1217–1273), was so hard pressed for ready cash between 1237 and 1261 that he surrendered the Crown of Thorns as collateral for loans by Venetian bankers. Public deficits began to grow out of control—another
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