The Church opposed usury, but it had little to say about relations of feudal dependency, where the rich man provides charity and the poor suppliant shows his gratitude in other ways. Neither, when these kinds of arrangements began to emerge across the Christian West, did the Church offer any significant objections.108 Former debt peons were gradually transformed into serfs or vassals. In some ways, the relationship was not much different, since vassalage was, in theory, a voluntary, contractual relationship. Just as a Christian has to be able to freely choose to submit himself to “the Lord,”
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