Why did bankers lend money to king and nobles?

[Abdul Goatherd]

I know that when edward I expelled the jews from england he took control over their possessions and thus also the loans they had given which would now be owed directly to the crown

if philip did the same then it would have brought in a semi-long term source of revenue without necesarily being heavily in debt

Possibly. Not sure debts could be transferred to third parties at the time. At any rate, 1300 was a jubilee year in Christendom, so debts would have been canceled.

The stolen property (well, one third of it anyway) was restored to Jews by Philip's successor.

Not saying Philip wasn't deep in debt to a myriad of people. He was. But his money-grabbing schemes were very widespread, far beyond his creditors.

P.S. - Given it is tax time here in the US, be sure to reserve some curses for Philip IV the Fair. The greedy sonofabitch can be assigned blame as the inventor of permanent taxation.

 

[Klausewitz]

I mean in the end you can not even enforce them to pay you back with the interest so why would your risk lending money to kings and nobles if you where an banker?

(Almost) every banker was subject to one king or noble or another (even the famous Florentine bankers since Florence was an Oligarchic Republic). This meant on the one hand that
1. Your ruler might very well force you to lend him money (depending on the setup, 'your' money might actually be his money legally)
2. Your ruler might very well help you enforce your claims against other nobles.

Also, to who else would you lend?
Unfree serfs did not have the legal standing to make that even feasible. You could do some business with traders and rich burghers (huge overlap there) but that would be equivalent to small loans today.
The huge money was in lending huge sums... and the only people who would consistently need that kind of loans were nobles and kings.

Finally Nobles could do all kind of nice things for you even or especially if they could not pay their debt.
Actually purchasing land was pretty hard in the middle ages (again, because all land, theoretically, belonged to the king who lend it out) so an indebted noble might be much more useful than one paying his bills.

The bankers were primarily Jews, the Jews needed protection to operate protected from the masses, road gangs, and other nefarious lords of this sort or that.

Jews were small fries (small cash loans in the cities) or the direct piggy bank of kings (basically a Jew under the protection of a king might work with capital and make more and more from it, but in the eyes of the law, all that was his, was the king's).