Medieval Christendom had few figures more thoroughly damned in the popular imagination than the usurer. While theologians debated the finer points of interest and just price in scholastic treatises, the preachers who actually spoke to ordinary Catholics reached for something more visceral: stories about the horrific deaths of the usurer. These stories—filled with miracles and manifestations of the supernatural—not only entertained Catholic congregations but dramatized the theological conviction that the usurer’s exile from the Christian community would be enforced by God Himself if men proved too weak or too greedy to enforce it themselves. What follows is a collection of some of these stories, drawn from the sermon collections of the thirteenth century.
A Usurer’s Corpse Becomes Miraculously Immovable
Many of the tales about the deaths of usurers come from medieval stories known as exempla, short illustrative stories, fables, and anecdotes used in medieval sermons. The French theologian Jacques de Vitry (1160-1240) compiled a famous collection of exempla called the Sermones vulgares (“Everyday Sermons”). The usurer is a common figure in de Vitry’s exempla. One tale from Jacques de Vitry’s Sermones vulgares tells the following story:
I have heard tell of a usurer whom his masters wished to honor, at his death, by a farce. His neighbors tried to lift up his cadaver to bury it, but they did not succeed. One after another they tried and failed. As they all stood there astonished, a very wise old man said to them, “So you don’t know that there is a custom in this town? When a man dies, those who carry on the same trade as he, take him to the place of burial. Priests and clerics bear dead priests and clerics to the cemetery, merchants carry the merchant, butchers carry the butcher. and so forth. Let us call upon men of the same trade or status as this man.” They called for four usurers, who immediately lifted the body with ease and bore it to the place of burial. For the demons would not permit their slave to be carried by others than his companions in bondage. (1)
This story exemplifies how the usurer was considered a social outcast even in death. When the ostracism due to the usurer was not being observed by man, God intervened to ensure the strict segregation of the usurer with men of his own class, even in death.
A Usurer Killed on His Wedding Day
Stephen of Bourbon (1180–1261) was a 13th-century French Dominican friar, preacher, and inquisitor best known for writing a massive handbook of sermon stories called De septem donis Spiritus Sancti. A modern edition of this was published in 1877 in Paris by the medieval historian Albert Lecoy de La Marche under the title Anecdotes historiques, légendes et apologues (“Historical Anecdotes, Legends, and Apologues”). Stephen’s work is packed with stories of usurers and their unfortunate ends. For example, this tale of a usurer killed on the day of his wedding:
It happened that, in Dijon, toward the year of our Lord 1240, a usurer wanted to celebrate his wedding with great pomp. Led by musicians, he proceeded to the parish church of the Blessed Virgin. He stood beneath the church porch so that his fiance could state her consent, and so that the marriage would be ratified, as was customary, by the words of those present [verba de presenta], before the marriage was crowned by the celebration of the Mass and by the other rituals inside the church. When the bride and groom, full of joy, were about to enter the church, a statue over the porch, the statue of a usurer being carried off to Hell by the devil, fell, with his money pouch, upon the head of the living usurer, who was about to be wed, and struck and killed him. The wedding was changed into mourning, joy was changed into sorrow. The stone usurer excluded the living usurer from church and from the sacraments, although the local priests, instead of excluding him from the church, were on the contrary willing to admit him. The other usurers of the city gave money to tear down the other sculptures outside and at the back of the porch, so that another accident of this sort could not happen to them. I have seen these destroyed statues. (2)
Notice again the theme of God ratifying the judgment of the usurer even when men refused. The story implies that the priests should have excluded the usurer from the church. Since they refused, however, God Himself intervened by striking the usurer dead before he could enter the holy place, thus accomplishing directly what ought to have been done by the authority of the Church.
A Usurer’s Tomb is Miraculously Moved
Stephen of Bourbon also recounts another event which he witnessed personally when an attempt to bury a usurer within the church was frustrated by divine intervention, again demonstrating God enforcing the social ostracism of the impenitent usurer:
At Besançon I saw a great usurer suddenly stricken dead at the table, in the midst of a joyous feast. Seeing this, his sons by his two marriages pulled out their swords, and, completely forgetting their father, fought over his chests [full of money], which they wanted to keep and to lay hold of, caring little for their father’s soul or body. He was buried in a tomb adjacent to the parish church of St. John’s Cathedral. A fine tomb was constructed and inserted into the side wall of the church. In the morning it was discovered pushed far away from the church, as if to show, in this way, that he had not been in communion with the Church. (3)
An Impenitent Usurer Consumed by Ergotism
Many medieval usurers consoled themselves with the thought that they would repent on their deathbed and eke into heaven. Moralists like Jacques de Vitry and Stephen of Bourbon were fond of pointing out that such was a risky venture, as the usurers were often unable to obtain the grace of penitence on their deathbed. Stephen of Bourbon witnessed a usurer in the throes of death seemingly unable to repent despite being brought to the church on the cusp of death:
Here is what I saw with my own eyes: When I was a young student in Paris, I went to the church of the Holy Virgin one Saturday to attend vespers. I saw a man being carried on a stretcher, suffering from a limb burned with the evil that is called the ‘sacred fire’ or the ‘infernal evil’ [i.e., ergotism]. He was surrounded by a crowd. People close to him acknowledged that he was a usurer. And so the priests and clerics exhorted him to give up that trade and to promise that he would return his usurious gains, so that the holy virgin would deliver him from his illness. But he did not want to listen to them, paying no attention either to criticisms or to flattery. At the end of vespers, he persisted in his obstinacy, although this fire had spread all over his body, which had become black and swollen up, and although his eyes were bulging. He was thrown out of the church like a dog, and he died on the spot, that very evening, of that fire, still stubbornly obstinate. (4)
The Demon Ship Comes for a Usurer
Death was indeed a frightening prospect for the usurer. One particularly frightening anecdote comes from the sermons of Nicholas of Flavigny, Archbishop of Besançon (c. 1230). Nicholas describes a spectral ship manned by demons literally abducting a usurer while he returned from church after being unable to repent:
A rich usurer who was not worried about God’s judgment, and who was asleep one night beside his wife after a hearty meal, suddenly rose, trembling. “What is the matter with you?” asked his wife. [He replied], “I have just been present at the Last Judgment, and I heard countless complains and accusations being made about me. Stupefied, I was unable to speak and request penance. Finally, the Supreme Judge sentenced me to be handed over to the demons, who are supposed to come today and carry me off.” He put on a jacket that was hanging on a hook, an item of little value that had been hocked by a debtor, and went out, disregarding his wife. His family followed him and found him nearly insane in a monastery church. The monks, who were chanting matins, kept him until the noon-hour service but could not get him to confess his sins, or promise restitution, or show any sign of penitence. After the mass he went out of the church and headed for home. They were walking along a river and saw a ship appear, moving upriver with great speed, but apparently with no one on board. But the usurer said that the ship was loaded with demons who were coming to carry him off and take him away. As he uttered these words, they grabbed him and put him into the ship, which immediately turned around and disappeared with its prey. (5)
A Usurer Devoured by Snakes
In order to be forgiven, a usurer needed not only to be sincerely penitent, but he had to demonstrate his penitence by making restitution to those he had defrauded. He could not diffuse this obligation by giving to the poor in general; he was required to restore specifically to those whom he had robbed, which could be complicated, especially in the hour of death. In the following story from De septem donis Spiritus Sancti, a usurer tries to donate to charity but finds something more substantial will be required:
I have heard tell of a gravely ill usurer who did not want to make restitution but who nonetheless ordered that the contents of his storehouse of grain be distributed to the poor. When his servants wanted to collect the wheat, they found that it had changed into snakes. Upon learning this, the contrite usurer made full restitution and ordered that his cadaver be thrown naked into the midst of these snakes here below, and thus avoid having his soul devoured by those in the beyond. The snakes devoured his body and left nothing but whitened bones on the spot. Some people add that, once they had done their work, the snakes disappeared and that nothing remained but bare, whitened bones, shining in the light. (6)
The Usurer’s Cadaver and the Donkey
Many of these stories depict supernatural interventions in order to enforce the segregation of the usurer, even in death. We gather from these tales that priests and custodians of sacred places must have faced considerable social pressure from friends and family of usurers—probably wealthy—to ignore the prevalent social mores and grant the deceased usurer all of the usual obsequies due to the Christian dead. This probably put priests in delicate situations. Jacques de Vitry tells of one parish priest asking for God’s intervention to help him respond to the pressure of a dead usurer’s friends demanding a church burial:
A good priest who refused to bury a parishioner who had been a usurer and who had not made restitution before his death serves as an inspired example. Indeed, this sort of plague upon mankind should not receive Christian burial, and usurers are worthy of no tomb other than the sort given to donkeys… But since the dead usurer’s friends were very insistent, the priest yielded to their pressure and said, “Let us put his body on a donkey and see God’s will, and what He will do with the body. Wherever the donkey takes it, be it a church, a cemetery, or elsewhere, there I will bury it.” The body was placed upon the donkey, which, without deviating either to the right or to the left, took it straight out of town to the place where thieves are hanged from the gibbet, and with a hearty buck, the donkey sent the cadaver flying into the dung beneath the gallows. The priest left it there, with the thieves. (7)
The Monks and the Vengeful Ghost
Monks and clergy could be complicit in giving false assurances to the usurer, especially when they stood to profit thereby. De Vitry’s exempla relate a story of corrupt monks haunted by the vengeful ghost of a usurer who was given false promises of salvation by the deceitful monks in exchange for mammon:
I have heard tell that a usurer from whom some monks had accepted a great deal of money in return for burial in their church, came out of his tomb one night, while the monks were saying matins, and grabbed a candelabrum and threw himself upon them like a madman. Amazed and terrified, the monks fled; but the ghost hit some of them on the head and broke the arms and legs of others, and, with a sort of howl, cried out, “Here are God’s enemies and the traitors who took my money and promised me salvation, but who deceived me, for I found eternal death.”(8)
Gottschalk of Utrecht and the Flaming Chair
Let us conclude with the tale of the peasant usurer Gottschalk of Utrecht, as told by the Cistercian Caesarius of Heisterbach, Abbot of Heisterbach Abbey in Oberdollendorf, in the region of Rhine-Westphalia. Caesarius tells us that this peasant-usurer experienced a frightful vision preceding his death:
The Crusade was being preached in his region and he gave only five marks when he could have donated forty without disinheriting his children. Seated in the tavern, [Gottschalk] scoffed at the crusaders: “You are going to cross the sea, and waste your substance, and expose your lives to all kinds of dangers, while I, for the five marks with which I redeemed my vow, shall stay home with my wife and children, and get as good a reward as you.” One night, he heard a sound like that of a grindstone in a mill adjacent to his house. He sent a young servant to see what was happening.
The servant returned terrified and said that he had been frozen in his tracks by terror at the threshold of the mill. The usurer then rose, opened the mill door, and saw a terrible vision: there were two coal-black horses and, beside them, a horrible man who was black, like them. He said to the peasant: “Quick! Mount this horse; it has been brought for you.” Incapable of resisting, the usurer obeyed. With the Devil astride the other horse, he sped through the regions of Hell. There he met his father and his mother, and many acquaintances whom he did not know would be in these regions. He was particularly struck by the sight of a burgrave, whom people had thought to be an honest knight, sitting on an enraged heifer, his back exposed to the horns, which tore his flesh with each uncontrolled bounce. This fine knight had stolen his cow from a widow.
At last the peasant saw a fiery seat in which there could be no rest, but only endless punishment for he who sat in it. The Devil said to him, “After three days you will put off your body, and your soul will return to your own place, and seated in that chair you will receive your reward.” His family found the usurer in the mill, unconscious, and carried him to bed. Sure that he would undergo the fate he had witnessed, he refused confession and contrition. Without confession, without the viaticum, without extreme unction, he was buried in Hell. (9)
These stories and more like them have been collected in Chapter IV of the late Jacques le Goff’s excellent little book Your Money or Your Life: Economy and Religion in the Middle Ages (Zone Books, 1990).
(1) Jacques de Vitry, Sermones vulgares, “Ad status” (Sermon 59, 17). As found in the edition edited by T.F. Crane, London, 1890, reprinted 1967.
(2) Stephen of Bourbon, Anecdotes historiques, pp. 365-366. Edited by A. Lecoy de la Marche, Paris, 1877.
(3) Ibid, 365-365
(4) Ibid, 263-264
(5) Ibid, 367-368
(6) Ibid, 368
(7) Jacques de Vitry, Exempla, p. 75
(8) Jacques de Vitry, “Ad status” (Sermon 59, 15)
(9) Jacques le Goff, Your Money or Your Life: Economy and Religion in the Middle Ages (Zone Books: New York, 1990), pp. 61-62
Phillip Campbell, “On the Deaths of Usurers,” Unam Sanctam Catholicam, July 31, 2026. Available online at https://unamsanctamcatholicam.com/2026/08/on-the-deaths-of-usurers