In order to finance their voyages, the merchants of Venice needed to borrow large sums of money that they could only hope to pay back once their silks and spices had, with any luck, been safely landed and sold many months later. Due to the hazardous nature of seafaring, merchants paid lenders interest on their loans to compensate them for the risk they were taking. This created a further problem, however, since lending money at interest (usury) was banned by the Church. It therefore fell to the Jewish members of the community to act as moneylenders, a role that made them enviably wealthy. A
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