In Castile they never went beyond begging or extorting grants of the crown lands, or pensions charged on the royal revenue.
Matthias, as the next-door neighbour of the Turks, claimed the custody of so valuable a hostage, and would have used him as a means of extorting concessions from Bayezid.
The invention of that ingenious dilemma for extorting contributions from poor and rich alike is ascribed as a tradition to Morton by Bacon; but the story is told in greater detail of Fox by Erasmus, who says he had it from Sir Thomas More, a well-informed contemporary authority.
In accordance with the principle of Renovation (see above), the root-idea of the application of religion to economics is not the extorting of boons from an unwilling nature, but rather the stimulation of the sources of life, so that all beings alike may increase and multiply.
It was to no purpose that he appealed to the emperor and empress for restitution or redress; and it was perhaps the hope of extorting his reappointment to Bobbio, as a reward for his services to the imperial cause, that changed the studious scholar of Reims into the wily secretary of Adalbero.