Читать книгу Money in History - Karl Walker - Страница 7

THE BARBARIANS AND MONEY

At the river Rhine and Danube the legions of the Roman Empire came to a standstill. To the North and to the East there were immeasurable lands rich with forest that semi-nomadic people inhabited. Beginnings of town-like settlements existed nearly only close to the border with the Roman Empire.

Coming from East, thrusting over the Volga River the Mongolian people of the Huns came to Europe who plundered and pillaged while carrying along or driving before them the assaulted people. The protective ramparts that the Roman Empire erected at its borders could not curb the flood. The Roman Empire perished and other people and kingdoms filled the space while changing themselves and others in wars that went on over hundreds of years.

Mainstream history has never particularly considered the connection between monetary economy and the course of history. But economic history knows the so-called long economic waves as time spans with a strong increase of money supply. “I do not know of any period of economic blossom that was not based on the extraordinary influx of gold”, says Sombart. The other side is that economic stagnation, decay of social organisms and cultures set in as soon as money supply is diminished, money flows out or siphons away in another way.

Such a period came over the culture of antiquity with the permanent passivity of the trade balance of the Roman Empire and this left its mark on the times of the peoples’ migration. For hundreds of years predatory wars and raids gained momentum with the migration of the Huns and Goths and it was a daily experience for the people. Rome did not develop her division of labor and extended it but with the waste of the money she wasted at the same time her economic blood and her power. Agriculture, workmanship and trade crippled. He who still had money guarded it as a treasure. Even the barbarians knew to tell the difference between the old Roman money and reddish silver coinage of late Rome and they treasured the better money. The old Germanics drilled a hole through the popular Roman Gold Solidus and wore the coin with a cord around the neck. The meaning of money was nearly forgotten. But the greed for blinding treasures of gold and silver was lying like an old curse over everyone. The whole story of the peoples’ migration is a never-ending report about the struggle for immense treasures that were once money and who had a public economic function – but now they were swallowed by the predating greed and love for splendor of the fat cats. Gustav Freytag describes in his ‘Pictures from German History’ the treasures of the princes of armbands, brooches, diadems, mugs, coops, bowls and drinking horns together with whole tables and horse gear. The centerpieces for the tables, the silver coops for food and fruit were sometimes of such boastful measurement that they had to be placed with auxiliary devices, as a man’s power did not suffice anymore.

The Frankish King Chilperic (561–584 A.D.) had a centerpiece made of gold and precious stones, which weighed 50 pounds (25 kg); and King Gunthram said at a festivity: 15 bowls like the biggest over there I have already smashed and I have just kept this one here and another one, weighing 470 pounds (235 kg). The gold and silver coins from loot and tribute from the respectively defeated was used to make such showpieces. When the Franks under Clovis defeated the Romans (meaning the Dominion of Syagrius, George Reiff) and expelled them from Gallia they obtained massive amounts of Roman gold. But before something useful could happen with it, new foes came instead of the old slain ones. A somber picture is depicted by Gustav Freytag according to his dramatic report “When the King’s son Cloderic had killed his father upon instigation of Clovis, he showed the bad cousin’s messenger the large trunk in which the deceased used to put his gold coins, when the messenger said: measure the depth with your arms in order to let us know the size and when the sinner bowed down, the Frank smashed his head with his axe” (see G. Freytag: “Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit”, page 155).

Reliable historical evidence about this event has not been found by historical science and so it may be that the story here – similar to the Song of the Nibelungs – blends poetry and truth. A lot of truth, however, may have sunk into the darkness of previous times. Human desire for gold is insatiable and so was the fighting princes’ and kings’ greed, and their passion for ownership made them hoard the stocks of precious metal more and more as useless treasures. When Rigunthe, the daughter of the Frankish King, was sent in 584 A.D. to the Visigoths in Spain, her treasure filled 50 freight wagons. There are also numerous reports about buried and sunk treasures. We think about Goth King Aleric’s tomb in Busento, we think about the Hun King Attila’s mysterious burial in golden, silver and iron coffin, we think about the Hoard of the Nibelungs and the eternal strive for all the treasures. To date, murmurs regarding those treasures are still audible. Even in 1895 a Roman war chest with 750 kg Roman coins was found – a treasure that was buried because of an approaching enemy, which later could never be retrieved after a lost battle.

In those centuries of peoples’ migration there are only a few approaches that soon died down in order to restart a monetary economy. Celts and Germans minted copies of Roman and Greek coins during their first trials. The picture on the coins of such coinage is accordingly rough and the inexperience of the minter is sometimes even indicated by a reverse rendering of the coin’s picture which served as template. We can only talk about a development of monetary economy at the end of the first millennium; the wealth of antiquity, which was once minted into coins and had rendered an economic service and had made possible the division of labor and a cultural blossoming, had simply been transformed for centuries and had been removed from its duties: as subject of hoards, as subject of accumulation of power, as subject of splendor, as subject of permanent fight and robbery. And the reverse of it has been sketched in its considerations regarding the down fall of antiquity by writing: “through unstoppable disappearance of cash money the economic life dried out as well and slid back into a long time surmounted state – the state of natural economic (subsistence economy)” (see Hugo Rachel: “Kulturen, Völker und Staaten”, page 99).

Storms of war, plundering and pillaging are a very unfriendly weather for the blossoming of a new culture: the teaching of Christianity, which could bring essentials for the design of a new world, fell still onto stony soil, while it was a recognized Roman state religion in 313 A.D. In many of the Germanic tribes who converted to Christianity, the new teaching connected in a peculiar way to the traditional ideas of the fathers, and even after centuries were many actions still more dictated by the blood of the original fathers’ beliefs than by the spirit of real Christendom. So we must consider a little when we talk about a “Christian Occident” that this idea can hardly have any validity before the 8th Century. When Boniface fell the oak of Donar at Geismar, we were already writing the year 724 A.D., and when the tribe of the Saxons as the last large German tribe yielded to Christianity after long and bitter resistance, Widukind (the Saxon prince) was baptized in the year 785 A.D., and this century was already coming to its end.

For the first time since the fall of the West Roman Empire in the 8th Century, a man surfaced as Frankish King Charles, who should become “the great” by unifying the heirs of the Roman world power, who had already established quite fixed German Empires on the historical territory and even by going far over it in order to create a new wholesome empire. For the first time sprang from the bosom of barbaric conquerors some other political aspect than war and plunder. The farsighted could determine a new world design, which was not lesser magnificent than the bygone Roman Empire. Traditional rests of Greco-Roman Culture, arts, legislation and humanities started anew under Charlemagne on the basis of a very blossoming Christianity to change the people immensely. It is known that Charlemagne did not always process the introduction of Christianity with Christian patience and forgiveness; however, when considering his deeds it is clear that he has seen the unification of the Germanic tribes under teaching of Christianity as necessary. If we consider it this way, it was less the Christian Charles but more the German King and Creator of the “Holy Roman Empire of German Nation”, for whom it would have been intolerable to have a gape inside his empire or even an epicenter of hostility, which would be inhabited at the same time by people of the same blood.

However one may think about this – with later evaluations we do not change implemented works and posterity has to continue building upon the facts – unnoticed went on a relocation of life streams of traffic from the Mediterranean to the Rhine affecting people. For unnoticed the inner order of the emerging empire, the good administration, the careful application of the laws, the promotion of lessons that were even attended by the adult Emperor, started to bear fruit. Also economic promotion, mainly determined through the order of real estate law, the order of life, the market law and the coinage, had effect.

The Germanic tribes, especially those who had lived outside the former rule of the Romans, i.e. northeast of the rivers Rhine and Danube, had lived to the last century before the change of the millennium from old traditional subsistence economy. In as much as they could obtain through barter foreign gadgets, jewelry, coins etc. and gave tin, amber, honey, wax or furs, these obtained goods served only personal need and at best a continuous hoarding of treasure. The Greco-Roman coinage that came by contact with the Romans and by peoples’ migration into the hands of the Germans were – similar to natural people – just considered as jewelry and treasure. Therefore, a large part of the coinage stocks of the Roman Empire syphoned away into the vast forests of Germany without being able to initiate an economic recovery that comes to live in more developed cultures in case of such active trade balance.

At this time it would have been simply too early for an extended money based economy. Firstly, it was important to go over from subsistence economy to division of labor; and in this line of necessity, the Roman talent for colonization had found a yielding field of activity – despite the barbarians were masters and Romans the subjugated. What was coming now from Rome were not clanking weapons that were previously accompanying Roman culture but it came with the habit of the new religion – Christianity. The merger between Frankish rule and Roman Church that found its apex with the coronation of Charlemagne was certainly one of the most important events in the European history. And if it may not be primarily important in this context, it was certainly no disadvantage that the whole heritage of monetary experience of the Romans was planted onto the people of the Frankish zone of rule in the course of this development.

When the Church brought these people at the same time, a new worldview through Christianity together with economic abilities and economic arts of accounting in connection with units of measurement, weight and money, it was also profitable for the Church insofar as she needed the young power for her protection. The decay of the old Roman World Power into a West Roman and an East Roman Empire – in the year 395 A.D. Rome and Byzantium were finally separated – this had brought for Christianity a widening gap of conflict between Arian and Roman Catholic ideas about Jesus Christ although it was not the original cause. As the Vandals, Goths, Lombards and other Germanic tribes were firstly inclined towards the Arian teaching according to which Christ is not the Son of God, the victory of the Frankish King Clovis and his conversion towards Catholic Christianity (496 A.D.) was at the same time a victory of the Roman Catholic Church over the Arian Byzantine Church. According to the lore Clovis swore before battle to become a Catholic believer if Christ gave him victory. That something like this could be negotiated with an alien God was according to the worldview of a Frankish king thoroughly natural. Well, the dice were cast and so the development would follow for centuries in its new way.

At the same time the Byzantine Empire experienced a changeful history until it was finally defeated in 1453 by the Muslims (Mohammed II). During its heydays the Byzantine coins depicted primarily Christ and Mary. Justinian II (658–711) was the first to put a Christ depiction onto his solidus coin and he did this according to Robert Eisler’s opinion certainly not out of piety but much more in order to prevent the Muslims by religious means to produce copy coinage (see Robert Eisler: “ Das Geld”, page 160). The economic ties with Byzantium were at the beginning of the people migration still weak; only the centuries of the crusades brought the Frankish-Aleman people into closer contact with the Orient and with this came the Byzantine influence on their coinage. The latter were especially visible during the Stauffer Emperor Era with her Bracteates coinage.