Famously, they couldn’t. While civil and criminal courts did exist, the justices represented the king’s authority, and lenders were often not in a powerful enough position to challenge the monarch. The most common examples of this imbalance of power are the expulsions of Jews from England and France (corresponding closely in each case to the crown’s inability to repay its debts) and the failure of the Bardi and Peruzzi banks in Florence.

Following his coronation in 1181 King Philip II of France ordered the arrest of French Jews in their synagogues and (more tellingly) ordered that their goods and investments be seized. He issued a formal order of expulsion in 1182 that prohibited all Jews from living in royal lands, but offered a delay of several months to allow expelled Jews to sell their estates and businesses to French Christians. However, Philip recalled the Jews in 1198 when he realized the crown could profit from taxing all commercial transactions undertaken by Jews. Similar attempts to profit off of Jewish businesses (and expulsions when the king needed to default on his loans) recurred over the next several centuries. In each case, Jews were permitted to remain as long as they provided a steady revenue source for the crown, but the kings of France increasingly labeled them as the “king’s serfs,” rendering them almost entirely powerless to pursue a legal case against him.

Likewise, King Edward I of England issued a decree expelling all Jews from his kingdom in 1290. Edward famously fought wars on multiple fronts, including Scotland and France. Throughout the thirteenth century, the kings of England issued increasingly harsh taxes on Jewish moneylending and imposed increasingly strict segregation measures. In 1275 the Statute of the Jewry forbade collecting interest on loans. By 1287, Edward ordered the Jews expelled from Gascony and seized all their property in an attempt to pay for his wars. By 1289, however, he was deeply in debt. He issued an enormous tax increase and, in an attempt to appease his subjects, offered to expel England’s Jews, cancelling his subjects’—and his own—debts.

Finally, leading up to and during the vast spending spree of the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453), the Kings of England and France borrowed money from anyone they could find to lend it to them. As the King of England prepared for war in the 1330s he borrowed from the wealthy and powerful Bardi and Peruzzi family banks of Florence. Both lent vast amounts of money to King Edward III of England in the 1330s, only to have him repudiate and default on those loans in 1343. The Bardi were suddenly out 900,000 gold florins; the Peruzzi, 600,000. The king’s refusal to pay his debts (and their inability to do anything about it) not only destroyed these two families, but also ruined numerous smaller banks and investors throughout Italy. The collapse of Florence’s elite was so complete that it made way for an entirely new set of ruling families, including the Medici.