> The institution originated in Italy in the fifteenth century, where it gave poor people access to loans with reasonable interest rates. It used funds from charitable donors as capital, and made loans to the poor so they could avoid going to exploitative lenders. Borrowers offered valuables as collateral, making the mount of piety more like a pawn shop than a bank.

So the Belgian one is still running. Acceptable collateral [1]:

Jewellery, precious stones, and gold

Luxury watches, gold pocket watches, and antique clocks

Luxury leather goods (handbags, belts, etc. - certain brands only)

Comics and collected editions, and derived objects

Paintings

Objets d'art, sculptures, ivories, bronzes, and porcelain

Silverware

Glassware and crystal bearing a recognised mark

Coins of numismatic value

Wines and spirits of exceptional quality

High-end bicycles in excellent condition

Musical instruments

Now, i didn't grow up poor in Belgium, but these don't immediately strike me as the kind of things that the credit-hungry poor are likely to have lying around the place in any great quantity.

Incidentally, this was an interesting list to translate (with machine help!), because there are some expressions that don't have really good equivalents. The French version distinguishes "montres de poche" from those "à goussets", but i think a gousset is just a particular kind of pocket. I'm not entirely sure what "livres de collections" are, but in context it seems to mean fancy hardback editions of works, like those put out by the Folio Society [2]. Tableaux are paintings, not tables, Google. Cristaux signés seems to mean glass crystal items marked by their manufacturer - apparently British crystal is marked like that [3], but i've never heard anyone be concerned about it - and it seems to be a metonym for high quality. Similarly, for bicycles, "de marque" literally means "branded", but here i think it has a connotation of being made by a fancy manufacturer (Rolls-Royce is a marque, Vauxhall is a make!).

[1] https://www.montdepiete.be/gages-lots

[2] Anyone want an 80 quid Heinlein? https://www.foliosociety.com/uk/stranger-in-a-strange-land.h...

[3] http://www.great-glass.co.uk/glass%20notes/markd-h.htm