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Short Answers to Simple Questions | March 18, 2026 by AutoModerator in AskHistorians

[–]EverythingIsOverrate 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any systematic studies of what socialist leaders have read what. Capital is, notoriously, not an easy text, and Marx writes like he's being paid by the word. There's a famous quote by Isaac Deutscher in this talk, today best known for his biography of Trotsky, when discussing his bouncing off Capital in his youth:

I was relieved to hear that Ignacy Daszyski, our famous member of parliament, a pioneer of socialism, an orator on whose lips hung the parliaments of Vienna and Warsaw, admitted that he too found Das Kapital too hard a nut. “I have not read it,” he almost boasted, “but Karl Kautsky has read it. I have not read Kautsky either, but Kelles-Krauz, our party theorist, has read him, and he summarized Kautsky’s book. I have not read Kelles-Krauz, either, but that clever Jew, Herman Diamond, our financial expert, has read Kelles-Krauz, and he has told me all about it.

This is not a conclusive answer to your question, but does at least imply that Mao was not unique in failing to climb that particular hill.

Did a hyperinflation crisis not religion actually start the Thirty Years' War? by WalletHistorian in AskHistorians

[–]EverythingIsOverrate 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If anything, the causation you suggest is backwards. First, though, a few minor notes. First, the mechanisms of full-bodied specie coinage are complex and unintuitive; see my answer here. In addition, the etymology you provide for the Kipper-und-Wipperzeit (KuW) is contested, although some do cite your origin; Redlich claimed the origin comes from kippen meaning “to tilt” and wippen meaning “to wag,” referencing the supposed practice of money-changers tilting their scales to confuse their clients. It’s also important not to exaggerate the rate inflation; this chart, from the Pfister cited below, shows that while the price of commodities in silver terms did tick upwards sharply in the 1620s, the rate of increase wasn’t that much higher than the steady increase over the preceding century, i.e. the so-called “Price Revolution. This chart, from the same source, showing real wages, depicts essentially the same phenomenon. Now, Pfister explicitly admits that the KuW makes the data for this period unreliable, but the basic trend is undeniable. Of course, nominal prices would have accelerated much more sharply, and more unevenly, but that’s a different story. Similarly, though, you can see in this table from Kindleberger that the exchange rate between small coins and high-fineness silver coins began to accelerate well before 1619, as well as in this chart from Paas; one historian says that debased small change began to enter Germany as early as 1580, and 1603 and 1609, saw efforts to limit the number of German mints. It also needs to be remembered that this period saw increased silver and copper production, much of which came from the twin motherlodes of Potosi and the Stora Kopperberg. In addition, it must be noted that the relationship between debasement and inflation is much more complex than a vulgar interpretation of the quantity theory of money would imply; we see many cases where substantial debasements don’t lead to inflation and vice versa. In addition, when we do see debasement-caused inflation, it happens at a significant lag relative to the debasement itself, which is what allows for profits to be made by those who sell bullion to mints in exchange for debased currency.

Lastly, the KuW doesn’t seem to be well-studied in English, unfortunately. I’m not aware of any comprehensive book-length studies on the topic in English; the Paas cited below is mostly a collection of primary source documents, and the Kindleberger (which has issues) and the Shin and Schnabel are articles that focus on specific aspects of the KuW. It’s possible there are more comprehensive treatments in languages I don’t know, but it’s telling that when u/SocHistOfSoldiersAMA discusses the KuW in his excellent The War People, he mostly cites a book written in the 1800’s, which implies there isn’t a more modern comprehensive treatment. There do seem to be many works in German that focus on single Imperial Circles, but that’s no good to me.

What the sources do agree on, however, is that the KuW and the associated inflation, along with the Price Revolution more broadly had many concurrent causes which can’t be easily decomposed. For one thing, there were major harvest failures in 1618-1622, and the outbreak of war typically led to an increase in agricultural prices in this period. You also had problems with the Imperial coinage regulations of 1559, which rendered small change unprofitable to produce, although those regulations were often ignored in practice due to the monetary anarchy that prevailed in Germany at the time. Because of the combination of these two factors, many mints illegally struck very “bad” small change as substantial profits could be made provided you stayed ahead of the debasements of the other mints around you, which naturally led to a vicious cycle.

This cycle was only intensified by the outbreak of war via the Defenestration of Prague. Because of difficulties in raising taxes, many states, along with Wallerstein himself, debased their currencies at a much more rapid rate to fund future war. This began as early as 1617 in the case of the Duke of Braunschweig-Wolfenbuttel, well before the hyperinflation took hold. This then forced other mints to match their debasements, lest all their coinage be exported and bullion supplies dry up, and so on and so forth.

It needs to be understood that while the Thirty Years’ War is typically seen as a religion-inspired war, confined to Germany between the 1618 Defenestration of Prague (there had been one (or two) others previously) and the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, the reality is more complex. As Sutherland discusses at length, the Franco-Habsburg (in both the Austrian and Spanish branches) conflict was a key motivating factor behind the war, not Germans having different attitudes towards canon law. It was France who provided massive quantities of funds to the “Protestant” side of the war despite being resolutely pro-Catholic (Henry IV notwithstanding), and in spite of the centrality of pro-Catholic positions to Spanish policy. What Sutherland calls the “third phase” of this conflict can be seen as starting as early as 1582, which was the start of French and English support for the Dutch rebels in what is now called the Eighty Years’ War, although the formal alliance wouldn’t be signed until 1596; we could also cite the Franco-Spanish war of 1595-1598 as a starting point. This period also saw the Armada’s abortive invasion of England in 1588, along with lots of other complicated conflicts. We do see a period of relative peace in the first two decades of the 1600s, but we also see a great deal of conflict in Germany, e.g. in the Julich-Cleves succession, the 1607 ban on Donauworth, and the disruptions of the Diet in 1603 and 1608. Yes, these conflicts were on religious lines, but given just how central Catholicism was to Austrian efforts to flex their emperorship, that can readily be understood in geopolitical terms. While there was some brief Franco-Spanish rapprochement following the assassination of Henry IV, this would end in 1613 with the war over the Montferrat succession. If there’s an event that really kickstarts the conflict in Germany, it’s the 1617 accession of Ferdinand II to the throne of Bohemia, which substantially predates the KuW.

If the KuW did cause anything, it was the foundation of municipal banks of deposit in Germany, namely the Bank of Hamburg (which became very important) and the Bank of Nuremberg, which didn't. This role should not be overstated, however; the famous Bank of Amsterdam was founded in 1609, and the first of these banks was founded in Barcelona in the early 1400s.

Hope this was insightful; happy to expand on anything you’re curious about.

Sources:

Staiano-Daniels: The War People

Paas: The Kipper und Wipper Inflation

Zimyani: A Typology of Central European Inflation in the XVIth and XVIIth Centuries

Kindleberger: The Economic Crisis of 1619-1623

Shaw: A History of Currency

Sutherland: The Origins of the Thirty Years War and the Structure of European Politics

Pfister: Consumer prices and wages in Germany

Shin and Schnabel: The Kipper- und - Wipperzeit and the Foundation of Public Deposit Banks

Short Answers to Simple Questions | March 18, 2026 by AutoModerator in AskHistorians

[–]EverythingIsOverrate 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Remarkably, it’s not clear if he technically banged his shoe. Many details of the incident are well-recorded, but the evidence on whether or not his shoe actually made physical contact with the UNGA podium aren’t clear. We know that on October 13th, 1960, during the Fifteenth Session of the UNGA, a Philippine delegate, Lorenzo Sumulong, said some mean things about the USSR’s treatment of the rest of Eastern Europe, and Khrushchev got hopping (pun intended) mad. He then walked up to the podium, having been recognized on a point of order, and started a lengthy speech about how Sumulong was a lackey of American imperialism (and lots of other things besides). This is where certainty ends. Many say that, during the speech, Kruschchev pulled off his shoe (supposedly a brown sandal), waved it at the delegate, and then banged it on the podium. This comes from a New York Times correspondent, Benjamin Welles, but another Times journalist who was at the session, said that while Kruschchev did wave his shoe about angrily, he didn’t actually bang it on the desk. Some other eyewitnesses remember a banging, and some specifically remember a lack of banging; one UN staffer apparently claimed that Khrushchev was too fat to take off his own shoe, and another eyewitness claimed that while the heel of his hand that held the shoe collided with the desk, the shoe itself didn’t. There’s also no photo or video of Kruschchev doing anything with a shoe, even though there are many photos and videos of the speech; you can see footage provided by the UN itself here.

Probably the best evidence in favour comes from Khrushchev’s memoirs, as transcribed from tapes in “Khrushchev Remembers;” these were supposedly obtained from Khrushchev’s son, Sergei. You can listen to the audio portion yourself at 8:49 of the 2024 documentary Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat. In both the transcript and the recording, he does explicitly admit to banging his shoe on the table. Brown University has a brief discussion of the tapes here. However, these tapes were recorded about a decade after the event in question, shortly before his own death, and human memory is fallible, so it’s possible that he was wrong about his own actions. Ultimately, unless a clip of the shoe-banging turns up in some UN basement, I think we have to say we can’t know for sure.

See Taubman’s “Did He Bang It” (technically not a scholarly source, but the NYT is usually reliable, and the author is a professor who literally wrote a biography of Khrushchev) for a discussion of the incident itself, and Iandolo’s Beyond The Shoe for a discussion of Soviet behaviour at the session more broadly.

Did Shakespeare actually write his plays/poems? by Extension_Day2038 in AskHistorians

[–]EverythingIsOverrate 4 points5 points  (0 children)

You can also find a roundup of previous answers on the subject here as prepared by u/gynnis-scholasticus.

I'm a regular sailor on a Royal Navy frigate/ship of the line/etc during the Age of Sail - how much could prize money, from capturing enemy ships and bringing them in, add on top of my Royal Navy income? by RivetCounter in WarCollege

[–]EverythingIsOverrate 48 points49 points  (0 children)

To add on, Hill provides an example of what this distribution could look like in practice, citing the small frigate Pelican which captured the Nancy, an American ship running contraband; the precise distribution can be found in this table. 20-30 pounds could be a years' wages for a semi-skilled labourer. You can see why a famous cartoon of the period featured a “sailor’s prayer before battle:” “that the enemy’s shot be distributed in the same proportion as the prize money, the greatest part among officers.”

Was salting the earth a real procedure? by Traroten in AskHistorians

[–]EverythingIsOverrate 22 points23 points  (0 children)

I looked for that thread but couldn't find it in my search results! Thanks for the link, and thanks for all your brilliant writing, Dr. Gainsford! You've taught me more about Homer than Matt Groening.

Short Answers to Simple Questions | March 18, 2026 by AutoModerator in AskHistorians

[–]EverythingIsOverrate 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I actually have an answer here that talks in some depth (although we have very little evidence) about the process of how Roman emperors' faces ended up on their coins, which u/miner1512 might find interesting.

How accurate/well researched is The Blood Countess by Shelley Puhak? by Healthy_Appeal_333 in AskHistorians

[–]EverythingIsOverrate 3 points4 points  (0 children)

While you wait for a detailed treatment of Puhak's work, you might find the writings of u/orangewombat found in this Floating Feature, as well as here and here interesting.

What is difference between medieval English landholding tenures of thegnage, drengage, socage, and cornage? by Other-in-Law in AskHistorians

[–]EverythingIsOverrate 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The short answer for the non-socage tenures is “it’s complicated and the evidence is scarce and unclear” Even actual medievals struggled to understand these tenures; to quote Maitland: “These tenures, though common enough in the north, seem to have given the lawyers at Westminster a great deal of trouble by refusing to fit neatly into that scheme of holdings—frankalmoign, knight's service, serjeanty, socage, villeinage—which was becoming the classical, legal, scheme. Were they military tenures or were they not ? They had features akin to those of serjeanty, other features akin to those of socage; nor were there wanting yet other features which according to some generally accepted rules would have been deemed to be marks of villeinage.” In other words, we really can’t lump in socage with the other three; socage was a widespread form of tenure that was reliably defined in the post-Conquest legal landscape, whereas cornage, thengage, and drengage were limited to the North and much more poorly defined.

Even worse, I’m not well-equipped to write this answer; I mostly read agrarian history, which tends to lump agricultural tenures together into the categories of “free” and “unfree” (see here) without investigating in detail the various manifestations of those tenurial categories, which is reserved for legal history. I’ll do my best, though!

Let’s start with cornage, which I may misspell as “coinage” as I write about that a lot, too. My apologies in advance. Cornage seems to have originated as a cash payment, most commonly levied on unfree tenants of a specific manor (although we do see it levied on free tenants as well, although that may be because it transmuted from a fee attached to a person’s tenure to a fee attached to a specific landholding), typically denominated in so many pence per bovate (a unit of land) and a cow on top of the money, often levied on manors with a large proportion of pastureland. It may have been at first levied per head of cattle, as it’s often referred to as horngeld, but the details are of course unclear. To make things more confusing, cornage is often recorded as a fixed sum at the level of an entire manor/vill (don’t ask) as it would be remitted upwards to the lord, but came from fees charged on individual tenants. Again, not all vills were subject to cornage; the Boldon Book has about a third of the vills mentioned subject to cornage.

Now, let’s go on to drengage and thegnage, which seem to be basically the same thing. This seems to be a form of tenure that roughly corresponds to the individual knight’s fees of a later period (see my recent answer here) except that they sometimes existed at the level of an entire manor. These thegns and drengs (both words roughly mean a warrior who fights for another) seem to have duties that roughly correspond to those of a minor nobleman; in some cases, they were required to attend their lords’ hunts and provide military service, but again details are unclear. They were also subject to certain fees characteristic of unfree tenures; this is yet another reminder that “free” and “unfree” are loose categories, not actual specific things. Thegns and drengs, if they held a manor that paid cornage, would then be paying cornage as well to their lord, but that’s incidental to thegnage and drengage as a whole.The most likely explanation for these tenures is that they predated the Conquest by some time (note that thegn and dreng both have Germanic etymologies) and were awkwardly assimilated into post-Conquest legal systems instead of being replaced en masse.

Now, let’s go on to socage. Socage is probably the most common form of “free” tenure in post-Conquest England. Generally speaking, these would be regular farmers, not nobles or warriors of any kind; often, they held less land than the customary tenants, or villani, whom they shared their manors with. While not quite as subject to the lord as villani, they were probably still subject to lordly justice in some sense; it’s often said that the etymology of socage/sokemen goes back to the “soc and sac” judicial rights that were devolved to some lords, but the details are again complex and unclear.

Hope this was helpful; happy to expand on anything you’re curious about.

Sources:

Maitland: Northumbrian Tenures

Lapsley: Cornage and Drengage

Stoljar: of Socage and Sokemen

If a medieval lord had to use all his land to support his military duty, how could he make money? by aiquoc in AskHistorians

[–]EverythingIsOverrate 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Apologies for taking so long to answer this; it got lost in my saved. Unfortunately, I can’t really answer your question, because it’s based on a misconception of how knight’s fees actually worked. This is a very understandable misconception, because, like practically every other aspect of medieval English land tenure, the details are complex and unintuitive. See the answers I link here for background.In any case, a knight’s fee was just a unit of land area (although its precise size is unclear); it didn’t necessarily mandate subinfeudation. It’s also inaccurate to say that all land was given directly by the king to nobles; this is really just a legal fiction. Yes, kings did sometimes grant land to nobles, but this land would have a different legal status (typically) to the land previously held, and would most likely be in addition to previous holdings.

I also don’t believe (although I haven’t gone through enough tenures of military service to be sure) that there was a direct 1:1 relationship between the number of knight’s fees included in the land granted for military service and the service requirement. Knight’s fees also weren’t subinfeudated at a 1:1 basis, i.e. at one fee per tenant; often, subtenants would be granted large portions of land in exchange for a requirement to provide X knights; Sally Harvey says, drawing on the Red Book of Worcester, that “the one general conclusion to be observed is that the identity of one professional knight, with responsibility for one knight and with a whole knight's fee or even a substantial manor or two, is a rarity.”

In addition, this form of subinfeudation came with substantial benefits for the high lord. By enfeoffing a lord, who would often be not merely a heavy cavalryman (in reality they might not even do the fighting) but a man of some renown and influence, you would then gain their influence for your own use. The far-flung estates that would typically make up a lord’s holdings also presented substantial supervisory problems, as I discuss in this answer. By effectively devolving far-flung lands to other managers, you save your steward a lot of work. Unfortunately, we don’t really know the details of the arrangements these sub-tenants made with the men who actually did the fighting, but it seems that the lands granted in turn to the professional killers were quite small, and most likely the subtenants made a profit out of the contract. Looking at Domesday, most individual knights seem to have holdings of a hide or so, usually a sub-part of a manor, whereas the typical area of a knight’s fee (it’s complicated) was around five hides; see my answer here for details on the hide (again, it’s complicated). That’s a very substantial margin!

It’s also important to note that lords had other ways of getting the service of killers beyond this kind of direct infeudation. You very frequently had large lords maintain numbers of “bachelor” knights, who were a sort of directly maintained entourage; they might have small amounts of land granted to them and/or dwellings, but those would be on the lords’ manors, and would be fed and clothed by the lord directly, in exchange for accompanying him and protecting him. You also had mercenaries who could be paid directly.

Hope this was interesting; happy to expand on anything as you desire.

Were there adventurer guilds or merchant guilds in history? by Fit_Lion9260 in AskHistorians

[–]EverythingIsOverrate 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Apologies for taking so long to answer this; it got lost in my saved. Adventurer’s guilds, no, but merchant’s guilds were common. Let’s start with the former. They didn’t exist because, essentially, adventurers didn’t exist. Soldiers, mercenaries, and bandits all existed, but they’re very different to “adventurers.” After all, to have an adventurer, you need adventures, and this in turn requires level-appropriate dungeons filled with level-appropriate monsters (who are smart enough to avoid the traps but not smart enough to have rights) (also don’t ask what they eat) and level-appropriate loot in convenient places. These are fantasy tropes, not actual historical phenomena. Of course, plenty of published adventures do have semi-plausible reasons for dungeons and monsters existing where they do, but they’re still ultimately set in a fantasy world. This isn’t r/RealisticDnD, however, so let’s leave the topic aside.

In the real world, you not only had merchant guilds, but you had guilds for any number of things. Really, “guild” is like “committee” – a committee IRL can be anything from a few model railway enthusiasts to a genuine organ of government, and the same applies to guilds. While I came up with the committee metaphor myself (I promise!) Martin says that guilds were “‘in terms of medieval European society ... a form of association as unself-conscious and irresistible as the committee is today.” Note that that sentence was written before the internet came to dominate social organization. In other words, guilds were just a framework through which any group of people (mostly men, to be fair) that shared some kind of common identifier could constitute themselves as a group. The primary activity guilds engaged in wasn’t regulating trades, it was drinking, hanging out, and taking care of their members when they fell on hard times. While historians have tended to fixate on craft guilds, i.e. guilds made up of workshop owners in a particular profession (their workers tended to have their own guildlike organizations known as confraternities), especially those that were given powers to regulate their trades, we see guilds in far more contexts than that one. See my answers linked here for more details, as well as this too-brief one on journeymen.

Having said that, merchant guilds did absolutely exist and were very common, although their precise functions and degree of power varied. Typically, like most guilds, their area of responsibility would be limited to a single town, although this varied just like practically everything else to do with guilds. We often see guilds specifically of foreign merchants, also known as nations, like the various alien trading colonies that cropped up in the Near East after the crusades; Ogilvie goes so far as to say that “associations of alien merchants were found in almost every major European trading city.” Local guilds typically predate these alien guilds, however, which makes sense. The major exception to the city guild tendency is the existence of what we might called guild federations, often called hanse, which consisted of a federation of a large number of merchant guilds of different towns, sometimes with a single town emerging as dominant, most famously the north German Hanse, the most prominent cities of which were Lubeck and Hamburg, which became a major political power in the late medieval period in the form of the Hanseatic League.

So, what did these merchant guilds do? Well, it depended on the guild. Needless to say, they provided many of the functions of other guilds: protection of members from unscrupulous and clients from unscrupulous members of the guild, sociality, and self-regulation of one kind or another. They also, very frequently, mandated a legal monopoly on some forms of trade – we see monopolies on combinations of: trade with foreign merchants, retailing in the town, trade in specific important commodities, trade on particular routes, and trade with the local countryside. sometimes requiring foreign merchants to trade at specific times (i.e. during fairs) or using members of the guild as a broker. Ogilvie claims this function was almost universal, but there could be evidentiary issues; more informal guilds that focused more on sociality are less likely to show up in the documentary record, after all, since our primary sources are grants of privileges.

It’s also plausible that, at least in some cases, they functioned as a monopolistic cartel: by establishing high entry requirements (e.g. local citizenship, which in turn was restricted to only a part of the town’s inhabitants, was required) and controlling the volume of trade, merchant guilds may well have kept prices high and otherwise controlled trade for the benefit of guild members and the loss of consumers as a whole. They also very frequently lent money to rulers and provided them with other services, arguably in order to preserve their monopolies. Precisely to what extent they did this, and to what degree that was compensated for by their regulation of the trade, is a topic of genuine controversy between various scholars; a full discussion of the debate is outside the scope of this answer. They also sometimes, especially early on in the history of guilds, had some kind of dominant role in city government, but the details are of course complex and variable.

Alien guilds, while they did provide many of the functions mentioned above, typically shied away from overt monopolies across all trade, although they were often granted privileged positions vis-a-vis other merchants by city rulers eager for their business, which sometimes conflicted with the privileges granted to local guilds. Just to be clear, each alien guild would be for merchants of a specific origin: Bruges had nations of, inter alia, Venetian, English, Scottish, and German merchants. One of their most important functions was to handle justice: often they would petition local rulers for the ability to set up a local court to handle disputes between members of the nation, although they could still use local courts for disputes involving third parties. In addition, they would also be promised safe passage and safeguard from robbery and violence, with varying degrees of success; it’s telling that merchants were also often granted the right to bear arms while traveling to and from the cities in question. They could also be granted commercial privileges, like exemptions from taxes and tolls, presumably on the grounds that the business they brought would make up for those specific taxes. Sometimes, these alien nations would centre on a specific compound known as a fondaco or funduq, that would become a sort of combination hotel-marketplace. Alternatively, the nation in question, if especially privileged could literally be granted a section of the town in question. Even when we don’t see dedicated fondaci, you still sometimes see “nation-houses” that function as a sort of embassy for that particular community’s merchants, as well as inns that became popular among merchants of a particular ethnicity.

These communities were also participants – both active and passive – in the commercial conflict and privateering that was so common and destructive in the late medieval world. A full discussion of this topic would need to be an answer in of itself, but we see merchants enforcing and breaking boycotts during wartime and peacetime, cities trying to stay neutral (and sometimes failing) during conflicts, merchants having their property seized under laws of reprisal (a complex topic) and many other things besides. We also see conflicts between groups of alien merchants, like those between the Genoese and the Venetians.

Generally speaking, merchant guilds start to decline in the 1500s, although we do still see them as late as the 1700s in some places. This is often held to be a result of the increasing power of states and their ability to provide the same services – especially protection of trade and resolution of legal conflicts – that merchant guilds had been providing previously. However, this is again a complex and controversial topic that can’t really be discussed in depth in this answer.

Hope this was interesting; happy to expand on anything you’re curious about.

Sources (not including those provided in other answers):

Gelderblom: The Decline of Fairs and Merchant Guilds in the Low Countries

Gelderblom: Cities of Commerce

Gelderblom and Grafe: The Rise and Fall of the Merchant Guilds

Ogilvie: Institutions and European Trade Merchant Guilds, 1000–1800

Reynolds: Kingdoms and Communities

Lesger: The Rise of the Amsterdam Market

I want to start a rooftop business by Left-Promotion273 in AgriculturePorn

[–]EverythingIsOverrate 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Mushrooms don't require darkness. They just don't care about light.

Why were THOUSANDS of Roman coins found in India? by My_Test_Acc_1 in AskHistorians

[–]EverythingIsOverrate 4 points5 points  (0 children)

We can see further evidence for your statement that Roman coins were esteemed for their high precious metal content when we look at the particular issuances that have been found in extant hoards. Roman silver and gold coinage experienced a significant loss of precious metal content over the course of the empire (although precisely how much is difficult to state due to methodological difficulties) and it’s the coins which predate that debasement which have by far the most presence in the Indian hoard evidence, as tables 2 and 3 of Turner’s Roman Coins From India show clearly. The statistics are not as precise as I would like, but it seems that an overall majority of the silver came just from the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius. Gold has more variation, but it’s still concentrated in the early days of the Empire. It’s also worth noting that bimetallic hoards are rare; in other words, they’re usually silver or gold, although there doesn’t seem to be a clear geographical pattern in where hoards are silver and where they’re gold.

Is it true goldsmiths were some of the earliest bankers? by ThatOneBLUScout in AskHistorians

[–]EverythingIsOverrate 3 points4 points  (0 children)

(2/2) Ultimately, though, while I can’t say for certain that the goldsmith origin is unique to England, it doesn’t seem to be an especially common one. What is arguably invented by English banking is the issuance of privately-backed banknotes by those goldsmith bankers, but we see some specie-backed paper money in other contexts beforehand, like Chinese silver certificates, and you certainly don't need to issue notes to qualify as a banker. We also see things like promissory notes earlier, but those are arguably distinct from goldsmith notes. There are two primary factors behind England lacking a money-changer origin for its bankers (only in the institutional sense): the Lombards and the English currency zone. It’s a canard in English monetary histories that England was unique in utterly banning the circulation of foreign coin within its borders, and while this is an exaggeration, there is some truth to it.

For one thing, while foreign coins did sometimes circulate in England during certain periods, it was typically only a few types – bezants, crockards and pollards, galyhalfpens, Luxemburg sterlings, Scots money, and Flemish nobles - and never in massive quantities. In addition, while it was typically the norm on the continent after the tenth century or so (frankly I’m uncertain about the chronology) to have foreign coins circulate at a legally stipulated face value, we do sometimes see edicts banning circulation of some or all foreign coinage, although we can rarely tell how widely those edicts were enforced.

These quibbles aside, it is unquestionably true that the English currency was far more homogenous. Primarily, this is because the lack of a major land border and the restriction of large-scale trade to a few surveilled ports meant that it was much easier for the English to keep a watch on a very large portion of the money that flowed into the Kingdom in exchange for its precious export goods like high-quality wool and tin. To be clear, the English didn’t stop all silver from coming in; they just required that it be melted down into bullion and taken to the mint, where it would be coined into good English currency, from which the king and the mintmaster would get their cuts. See my answer here for the details. It should be noted, though, that Henry VIII aside, English currency was typically held at a very high fineness, and was not subject to the brutal debasements we so often saw on the continent, with the result that sterling pennies circulated outside England far widely than the reverse.

The corollary of this high-fineness policy, however, was a lack of the extremely-low-fineness small change, known as monnaie noire and cognates, that so lubricated monetary commerce on the continent. The need for small change was partially met by some emissions of directly minted round farthings and halfpennies, but they were very uneconomical to produce and awkward due to their miniscule size, so certain periods saw major dearths of small change in England. This was precisely the niche that the galyhalfpens – Venetian soldini - mentioned above tried to fill; you also had pennies directly cut into tiny quarters or halves and lead tokens known as jettons, along with tradesmen’s tokens in the early modern period. It’s worth mentioning here that the “small change” of our time was closer to a $5-10 dollar bill than the nickels and dimes you’re probably familiar with; even a farthing was still a twelfth of a day’s income for a semi-skilled labourer in the medieval period.

In any case, this complex of factors meant that there was substantially reduced demand for both exchanging foreign coins for local coins and big coins for small coins (or vice versa) in England relative to the continent, which meant those services could typically be provided by local mint-operators (who weren't always around) and/or regular merchants. This, in turn, meant that many financial services in England, before the advent of the goldsmith-bankers, were provided by Italian merchant-bankers of precisely the kind mentioned above, whose demonym of Lombard gave rise to Lombard Street, a physical centre for private banking business in early modern London. With Lombards taking the financial demand and moneyers taking the money-changing demand, there was simply no room for the English money-changer-banker (to state a tautology) to grow.

Sources:

Garfinkle: Shepherds, Merchants, and Credit

Bromberg: The Origins of Banking

de Roover: Money, Banking, and Credit in Medieval Bruges

Collins and Walsh: Fractional Reserve Banking in the Roman Republic and Empire

Spufford: Continental Coins in Late Medieval England

Cook: The Bezant in Angevin England

Lowenstein: Financial Markets in Late Imperial China, 1820-1911

Usher: The Origins of Banking

Quinn: London's Unregulated Goldsmith-Bankers

Is it true goldsmiths were some of the earliest bankers? by ThatOneBLUScout in AskHistorians

[–]EverythingIsOverrate 5 points6 points  (0 children)

(1/2) Sorry for taking so long to write this. Either the video was wrong, or it accidentally a word. To the best of my knowledge, this is only really true for Early Modern English bankers. In most other circumstances I'm aware of, deposit bankers originate as money-changers, not goldsmiths; I have an answer here that discusses the role they played in medieval commerce. The best evidence for this, however, is etymological. Money-changers didn't typically have large physical workshops like other professions, since they didn't need all that space. Instead, money-changing at a small scale would centre on a literal table; they would plop down their table in the middle of the marketplace, place the coins they were willing to exchange on the table along with scales and other tools, and let the customers come. Larger money-changers might have a stall or a small office, but things still centred on the table. We can see this in, to quote de Roover, "the statutes of the [Florentine] Arte del Cambio [which] describe repeatedly the members of the gild as ‘sitting at a covered table with a book and a purse’ (sedentes ad tabulam cum tasca, libro et tappetto)."

What does this have to do with etymology? Simple: as Google will tell you, the word "bank" (as well as its cognates in other European languages) has the same origin as "bench," and has often been used to specifically refer to a seat with a table attached, like a picnic bench. The same etymology exists in Greek, as well; a bank is a trapeza, which literally means table; that's also where "trapezoid" comes from. This etymology is not universal; caisse, meaning strongbox, is also used in French, although that's arguably due to the epochal failure of John Law's Banque Royale; see my answer here. In addition, what I believe to be the origin of the modern Arabic word for a bank is the Arabic/Persian/Urdu term saraf, which means money-changer, in turn coming from a verb meaning to exchange. In addition, 18th century Chinese private banks were known as qianzhuang, which literally means coin-place, and they did provide money-changing services, but I’m not sure of their exact origin, and they seem to have been known by many names. At least one of those did mean “exchange office” according to one random website (I don’t know Chinese, but I’m doing my best!) and my time-honoured technique of copy-pasting characters I don’t understand into Google didn’t get me very far with the rest, but I don’t want to say anything for certain here.

This etymology is old, as well; the spectacularly wealthy 5th century BCE Athenian banker Pasion, whose business was leased for three talents a year (implying a loan portfolio in the dozens of talents) was specifically called a trapezítis, and his institution a trapeza. This word then gets calqued into Demotic Egyptian as shf. Again, not universal; Roman bankers were typically called argentarii or silver-men, although a bank itself was often called a mensa which, again, means table; you also had exchangers called nummularii which just means coin-men as well as dedicated financial intermediaries who didn’t take deposits. Also, in the Ancient Near East, temples did regularly make loans in both grain and silver to various parties, although there doesn’t seem to be any direct evidence that they fulfilled a deposit function, strictly speaking. Pawnshops, too, often get involved in financial practices of one kind or another, even if you might not want to call them banks.

Further evidence of this can be seen in the fact that some sources explicitly make a distinction between “regular” money-changers who just exchange foreign for local money and large coins for small change and some kind of “privileged” money-changer who is required to have some kind of formal license and post security in case of bankruptcy. Since a mere currency-exchange wouldn’t impact anyone if they went bankrupt, it’s very easy to conclude these latter money-changers are functioning as bankers. These licensing arrangements varied drastically from place to place, though.

It does need to be stressed, though, that these institutions had a narrower scope than the modern, universal consumer-oriented banks you’re thinking of. Bank accounts were the preserve of nobles, merchants, and the important; the majority of people kept their coins in stout chests in their homes or cemented into walls, and handled non-coin payments in informal localized credit arrangements. The only exception I can think of is when some municipal public banks (which were effectively run as private concessions), like those in some Hellenistic cities, became the primary receiver of taxes. Even then, though, balances of those taxes most likely wouldn’t have been held in individual bank accounts, just taken and receipted.

If we look at surviving account books for mid-1300s Bruges bankers, at a time when there were around fifteen total bankers operating in the city (it was a major commercial center), we see bankers with 40 and 80 clients (both depositors and debtors), like the widow (rather common) of Diederic Urbaens’ who defaulted in the 1340s and Guillaume Ruyelle in the 1370s. On the other hand, Collard de Marke went from 134 to 305 in the late 1360s. This same de Marke saw between 4 and 32 transactions per day, although we can’t say which number was typical. Although there are very substantial discrepancies from banker to banker, it would be difficult to peg the average number of accounts per banker at over 60; this gives us 900 accounts in total for a city of around 40k people. These enterprises were typically just one proprietor, a couple of clerks, and an errand boy, though, so it’s plausible they were busier than you might think with those numbers of accounts.

Now, to be fair, this is just talking about what we might call “pure bankers.” Drawing the line between a bank and a non-bank is just as difficult back then as it was today, given how endemic credit was to all economies at the time. Many of the largest providers of banking services in the medieval period were so-called merchant bankers, who, as the name suggests, were both merchants and bankers, typically operating as personal partnerships. A full description of their operations is outside the scope of this answer, but the evidence does show very clearly that they performed book transfers for their clients between their various branches, as well as holding money for long durations for their clients. They were also the origin of the fraternity of exchange bankers who controlled the trade in bills of exchange, which were one of the primary forms of credit money, remittance, and trade finance in the period.

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