Eric Christiansen, The Northern Crusades (second edition, 1997): The Russian princes insisted that, if a Russian borrower went bankrupt, his foreign creditors were to get satisfaction first, and that rates of interest for long-term loans should be low, to suit the long-distance trader, who would have to travel far before he got a return on the money he had borrowed.
I wonder what he means by “low”.
Somewhere in Steven Pinker’s “The better angels of our nature” is English data showing that land rents relative to purchase costs have declined over the centuries.
