Property and credit: the Misericórdia and Carmelites of Aveiro (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries)

Abstract

Credit, to our way of seeing things, is a way of managing and organizing property, despite the apparent contradictions surrounding the concept of interest/usury in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. This article looks at two major institutions in the city of Aveiro, the importance of which went much further than the city itself, and describes credit relations and strategies by looking at the approaches of lenders and borrowers. The image which emerges is one of private credit operations which were not restricted to the state or the city, but extended to rural areas as a result of the opportunities created by those mortmain institutions.