While already by the sixteenth century, merchants were using bills of exchange to settle debts, government debt bonds—rentes, juros, annuities—were the real credit money of the new age. It’s here that we have to look for the real origins of the “price revolution” that hammered once-independent townsfolk and villagers into the ground and opened the way for most of them to ultimately be reduced to wage laborers, working for those who had access to these higher forms of credit.
