Quite funny and symbolic. Francis does not know the European history to show the Hungarian Calvinist clown his place. Innocent IV was the great pope and Bela IV was the great debtor of the Jews (cf. H. Graetz *) for example). After his death his son and the Hungarian nobility decided enough was enough and the usury paradise ended.
P.S. The Mongols were not Muslims when Bela IV reigned.
*) "The …More
Quite funny and symbolic. Francis does not know the European history to show the Hungarian Calvinist clown his place. Innocent IV was the great pope and Bela IV was the great debtor of the Jews (cf. H. Graetz *) for example). After his death his son and the Hungarian nobility decided enough was enough and the usury paradise ended.
P.S. The Mongols were not Muslims when Bela IV reigned.
*) "The people of Hungary and Poland, who had not yet laid aside their primitive state of barbarity and their warlike ferocity, were in greater need of the services of the Jews than the nations and states of Central and Western Europe. The Jews, with their commercial habits and their practical skill, had perceived the abundance of produce in the districts lying on the Lower Danube, the Vistula, and on both sides of the Carpathian mountains, had utilized, and thus first conferred value on, this source of wealth. Despite the zeal with which the papacy strove to deprive Jews of public offices, despite its efforts to restrain them from obtaining leases for working the salt mines and from farming the coinage and the taxes in Hungary, it could not expel them from positions in which they were indispensable in preventing the wealth of the country from running to waste. The Hungarian king, Bela IV, the successor of Andrew II, driven by stern necessity, the ravages of the Mongols having impoverished the country, invited Jewish agents. For the benefit of the Jews under his dominion, Bela introduced the law of Frederick the Valiant, of Austria, which protected them from the violence of the mob and the clergy, conceded to them their own jurisdiction, and allowed them the control over their domestic affairs. The papacy, however, turned its attention to the Carpathian districts, partly for the purpose of kindling a new crusade against the Mongols, and partly in order to bring back to the Roman see, by means of trickery and force, the schismatic adherents of the Greek Church. Its spiritual armies, the Dominicans and Franciscans, were despatched thither, and they instilled into the hitherto tolerant Magyars their own spirit of fanatical intolerance. A large church assembly, consisting of prelates from Hungary and the south of Poland, met at Buda (September, 1279). This convocation was under the presidency of Philip, who was the papal legate for Hungary, Poland, Dalmatia, Croatia, Slavonia, Lodomeria, and Galicia, and decreed a proscription of the Jews of these countries, which the Church executed with logical severity. Jews and other inhabitants of the country not belonging to the Roman Catholic Church were to be debarred from the right of farming the taxes [;-(((( ], or from holding any public post. Bishops and other ecclesiastics of higher or lower degree who had entrusted the farming of the revenues of their sees to the hands of Jews were
to be suspended from their holy offices. Laymen, of whatsoever rank, were to be placed under a ban of excommunication till they dismissed the Jewish contractors and employes, and had given security that henceforward they would not accept or retain such men, "because it is very dangerous to permit Jews to dwell together with Christian families, and to have intimacy with them at courts and in private houses." (...) The last king of the family of Arpad, Ladislaus IV, ratified and confirmed the statutes of the synod in Hungary." (Graetz: History of the Jews)