Джеймс Миченер - The Source

“For that you could have sent your bailiff. What really brings you here?”

“I need to know whether a rabble like the one that passed Gretz this morning has any chance of reaching Jerusalem?” The Jew made no reply, and Volkmar asked, “Did you see them?”

“Of course,” Hagarzi said, implying that it was his business to see whatever passed Gretz at dawn. Then he added slowly, like a general reviewing his ancient battles, “I’ve never been all the way to Jerusalem. To Antioch, yes.”

“You went to Constantinople?”

“Several times. While the Hungarians and Bulgarians were still pagan I used to captain companies of traders on their way from Gretz to Constantinople, and we got there with only a few battles.” He leaned back and traced signs in the air, reconstructing the travel routes to the east. “It can be done. If you don’t arouse the Hungarians … or the Bulgarians.”

“Then you think there’s a chance the foolish priest on the gray donkey may succeed?”

“All the way to Jerusalem?” The cautious trader pondered this. “I saw no knights to protect them,” he said. “They carried few provisions.”

“What road will they take?” Volkmar asked.

“When we went,” the former captain replied, closing his eyes and holding his beard with both hands, “we followed the Danube to the point where the road turns north to Novgorod.” He began to reminisce about the vigorous days of his youth, when he had led his caravans to Smolensk, Kiev … “We traded with them all.”

“Suppose the rabble reaches Constantinople,” Volkmar interrupted, and the trader opened his eyes. “Could they possibly continue to Jerusalem?”

“They could start,” the moneylender replied. Obviously he did not care to discuss this aspect of the problem, so he launched a diversion: “I remember one year when we tried to go from Kiev to Constantinople …”

“You don’t think they’ll reach Jerusalem?” the count persisted.

“Volkmar,” Hagarzi said, laughing brusquely as he used the count’s familiar name, “this is a venture summoned by the Christian church. Would it be proper for a Jew to comment on its progress?”

“You and I are the oldest of friends, Simon,” and he also used the familiar name.

“They won’t get there,” the banker said. “When I was last in the east the Turks were becoming very strong. I wanted to revisit Antioch. Goods from Cyprus and Egypt. Impossible.” Quickly he added, “However, if I’d had a thousand well-armed men … knights … like you.”

Volkmar did not want Hagarzi to think that he was contemplating any crusade to Jerusalem, so he changed the discussion abruptly: “Which Pope will prevail?”

Again the Jew closed his eyes. “Only a close friend would deem it proper,” he reflected, “to ask a Jew’s opinion on that problem.”

“Only an old friend would know that you’ve been trading with Rome and probably have the answer.”

“From what the merchants in Rome tell us, our German emperor has backed the wrong man. His German Pope Clement is not going to gain acceptance. The French Pope Urban will.”

This was not what Volkmar had wanted to hear. For some time he had assumed that his emperor would get his headstrong way and that of the two contenders Pope Clement would be declared the rightful pontiff; but Volkmar had much respect for the opinions of the well-informed Jew and had rarely found him to be in error, and what Hagarzi was saying disturbed him.

“How can the French Pope win,” he argued, “if England, Germany and much of Italy are against him and if our Pope Clement holds Rome?”

“This idea of a crusade, which Pope Urban proposed …”

“You saw the mob, Hagarzi. What could it accomplish?”

“That mob, nothing. But my news from Normandy and Toulouse is quite different. Real leaders are sewing the cross to their tunics.”

Before the men could discuss the matter Hagarzi looked to his door, where his daughter appeared with a salver of spiced drinks and German cakes. Volkmar pointed to her belly and asked, “When?”

“In four weeks.”

“Am I supposed to give the little wretch a present?”

“As always,” Hagarzi laughed, and the men drank their wine of friendship.

In those years the Jews in cities like Gretz lived pretty much as they wished. Fanatic Christians sometimes howled against the commingling of Jew and Catholic, but no restrictive measures had yet been promulgated, so that a distinguished banker like Hagarzi could be accepted as one of the city’s important citizens. His sturdy house had become a center of city life to which many Germans like Count Volkmar came not only to borrow, but also to talk.

They came to borrow because of contrasting interpretations which had been placed by Christianity and Judaism upon two critical verses from the Old Testament. Catholics held that the stern commandment in Exodus meant exactly what it said: “If thou lend money to any of my people that is poor by thee, thou shalt not be to him as an usurer, neither shalt thou lay upon him usury.” This was interpreted as meaning that no Christian—on pain of excommunication or death—was allowed to let money at interest, and this ruling came at the precise time when trade was beginning to be international and when borrowing substantial sums to finance such trade was essential. What to do? It was then discovered that Jews, looking not to Exodus but to Deuteronomy, took their instructions from Moses, who had commanded them: “Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother; usury of money, usury of victuals, usury of any thing that is lent upon usury: Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury.” So at the instigation of the Christians a curious agreement had been worked out: Christians would rule the world, but Jews would finance it—so to them was handed responsibility for all banking transactions, and it became customary for even cardinals and bishops to borrow openly from Jews at commonly understood rates of interest, while foreign traders had to do so in order to stay in business. In this manner Jews like Simon Hagarzi of Gretz prospered, but it was ironic that many did so against their own better judgment. Hagarzi, for example, sprang from a family which had wandered into Germany from Babylonia, settling themselves along the Rhine centuries before the present Germans had straggled down from the north. Like his predecessors in the little Palestinian town of Makor, Simon Hagarzi had begun life as a groats maker and he would have been happy to remain so; but in pursuit of grain he had come to know many distant cities, so that he was logically pushed into the business of banking. Now his transformation was complete; what Canaanites, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans and Byzantines had been unable to accomplish—taking Jews from the land and making merchants of them—Europe had achieved. Jews were now the money-manipulators, and without their services the new Europe could not have matured.

But even if Hagarzi had not controlled the credit of Gretz, Germans would still have come to talk with him, for in an age when few could read and when news traveled slowly, Hagarzi was perhaps the best-informed man in the city. Yet he was humble in his knowledge, and if he knew much of the Talmud by heart, he kept it to himself and his family, for he knew that the Christians had their own Book, and he never intruded his religion upon them. Even so, he was known to Christian and Jew alike throughout the city as a man who united in his person not only sagacity but also a radiant personal charity which had confirmed him in the title God’s Man, a name by which the men of his family had been known through many generations in Makor and Babylonia; even devout Christians found spiritual profit in knowing this particular Jew.