ABSTRACT
In the aftermath of the fall of the Roman Empire, Visigoths, Vandals, Franks, and many other peoples swarming across the old imperial frontiers, overran Western Europe. Although the Roman Empire lived on in the east in the form of the Byzantine Empire until it was extinguished in 1453 by the Ottoman Turks, most of the Roman Empire in the West had crumbled a thousand years earlier. By now the basis for a Christian Western Europe had been established, as had been an Islamic Middle East and North Africa, as well as an Orthodox Christian Europe under the Byzantine Empire in the Balkans and Asia Minor. However, the history of credit in Western Europe entered a bleak period, leaving the continuity of credit systems in the hands of Byzantine Christians and Muslims. Although there were no great advances in the practice of credit, the essential thing is that trade continued and the need for formal arrangements of commerce remained.
