Book Review

Such Was the Enterprise of the New Masters

by
William Krehm

Money and Civilization, or a History of the Monetary Laws and Systems of Various States Since the Dark Ages, and their Influence Upon Civilization by Alexander Del Mar, published by Burt Franklin, 235 East 44th St., New York, NY. Originally published: 1867; Reprinted 1969.

There are many good reasons why this great work on monetary history, and practice, long forgotten, should have been reprinted 38 years ago, a century after its original publication.

Del Mar sets the social stage for the existence of a money economy (page 2): "After the fall of Roman liberty, the empire split into two, and afterwards into many fragments, each of which became a separate kingdom; these kingdoms subsequently became divided into numerous countships or dukedoms, and the latter into still more numerous realms. Every institution, composed of a plurality of men or things, fell apart in a similar way. The senate perished; the tablets of the law were obliterated the tribunals of justice disappeared; the books were either consigned to the flames or their lessons erased to make room for idle monkish legends; schools were destroyed; posts and inns were discontinued, banks colleges, guilds, and other corporations vanished ;life, fire. and marine insurance became disused; the census fell into oblivion; even the organization of armies ceased and counts and king decided their quarrels by single combat. Everything of a joint ownership, as a public road, an aqueduct, or a water-ditch — everything of a composite structure, from a sailing ship to a piece of paper — every art which depended upon the association of labour, from the representation of a drama down to the blowing of glass, was lost."

Rarely, if ever, did a single paragraph sum up such boundless and timeless destruction. And it all, Del Mar shows convincingly, flowed from social conjunctions that blocked money from performing its black magic. He goes on to lay out a scenario that has escaped his occasional contemporary popularizer: "The same course of disintegration attended the history of institutions, of ideas, of thoughts, the world, the commonwealth, the republic, the nation, the social state, the people, the public opinion, commerce, money, credit — all these were conceptions of the mind and societary regulations known to the Greeks and Romans in their widest sense."¹

And a couple of pages further, he proceeds to some further startling but obligatory conclusions: "As money is a societary institution, and one of the widest extent and most general operation, it follows from the foregoing view of society during the Dark Ages that during that period money could have had no existence; and such was indeed the fact. Without tribunals of justice, without laws, without association of labour, without commerce, without even organized society, money is not only useless, it is almost inconceivable."

The Original Mental Roads, Canals and Bridges of Del Mar’s Own Making

I would urge my reader to pause for a full appreciation of the original mental roads, canals and bridges of Del Mar’s own making by which he tracks the utter breakdown and disappearance even from human memory of some of the greatest achievements of social cooperation in the Dark ages. And from that breakdown he reaches the conclusion supported by numismatic data that has come down to us — money itself disappeared and what remained of the precious metals handed from Roman times, went largely to adorn churches and convents — this replaced and excluded its original purpose. All of which will have perked up our ears to hear what he has to say about the social origins and the social purposes of money.

However, let me continue this remarkable passage: "By the fourth century of our era money had fallen to the position of ponderata when it was customary to assay and weigh each piece. Before the seventh century those events took place that led to the Renaissance, the weights themselves had been so frequently degraded that it was no longer possible to make a specific bargain for money. There was no law to define the weight of a pound or an ounce, and no power to enforce the law if one existed. Under these circumstances money became extinct. Nor was it the only institution that perished: all institutions had perished. There was no government except the sword; there was no law. Exchanges were made in kind, or for slaves or bags of corn which men could count to one another, but chiefly in kind, holding the thing to be sold in one hand, and the purchased commodity in another.

"In the dwindling Byzantine Empire, where civil law still prevailed and money yet lingered, the circulation consisted chiefly of bronze and silver coins, the few and oft-paraded gold bezants of the numismantists belong chiefly to a subsequent era. The bronze coins were from the wrecks of the old Roman monetary systems, and they passed as some approximation to the value of the copper metal they contained. In France, money, after becoming extinct, made its reappearance under the Merovingian dynasty, and towards the beginning of the seventh century the French system was adopted in England; but in both countries most payments, and in many parts of Europe all payments, between the fifth and seventh centuries, were made either with personal services, provisions, domestic animals, or slaves. In some countries this condition of affairs lasted until the twelfth or thirteenth century.

The Age of Dead or Living Money

"Henry in his History of Britain thus alluded to what in the Dark Ages was called living money. This consisted of slaves and cattle of all kinds, which had a value set upon them by law, at which they passed [as currency] for the payment of debts and the purchase of commodities of all kinds, and supplied the deficiencies of money so-called…. All kinds of mulcts imposed by the state, or penances by the Church, might have been paid in dead or living money, as was convenient, with this single exception, that the Church, to discourage slavery, refused to accept slaves in payment as money of penances. In Scotland and Wales it is much doubted that any coins were struck in the Saxon period. The price of a man was the same as that of a hawk or a greyhound.

"When after this condition of profound misery, European civilization began to revive, and money, among other institutions of the past, began to evolve itself anew out of the fading gloom of the Dark Ages, it seems to have been reinstated in the same tentative manner that it fell. The order of falling was from numerata to moneta, from moneta to ponderata, and from ponderata — until the weights themselves were degraded and exchange was conducted by means of services and commodities — to barter. The order of revival was much the same. It began with the fixation of weights and money was weighed ad scalam, and assayed or tried by combustion. Following this came pieces or sums with the names of weights — to wit, pounds, shillings, and pennies, dennies, or denarii, which passed by tale."

Rather than a fixed amount of gold or silver, a fiction that montarists are so addicted to, the metal content of metal money, even in centuries when the pretence of it that existed, was an enduring fiction. That is one of the great conclusions of the Del Mar book.

"Laws prohibiting the export of the precious methods or coins made from them were common to all countries during the Dark and Medieval Ages, and these laws by creating an artificial and temporary superfluity of metal in a few of the strongest or richest of countries caused a corresponding scarcity in the others, and raised the purchasing power or value of these coins, until a change of the commercial current or a degradation of the coinage in the last-named countries lowered the value of their coins once more.

"Very little copper was produced during the Dark Ages, this metal requiring more metallurgical skill and greater division and cooperation of labour than were then attainable. Many silver mines were reopened by Charlemagne about the beginning of the 9th century. Gold was always to be obtained by washing the Tiber, the Po, the Rhine, the Rhone, the Garonne, and the numerous auriferous streams of Spain and Portugal.

"As to the right of coinage, it had fallen from the hands of the senate to the emperors, from the latter to the barbarian kings, and thence to innumerable feudal lords, both lay and ecclesiastic. As commerce developed and Europe revived, this right had been sold by the feudatories to the municipalities who had purchased their liberties from them. In most cases, however, it passed to the latter, and became vested in the crown as a royal prerogative.

"To persons who entertained the shallow belief that money coined from the precious metals conformed in value to the economical cost of the materials of which it was composed, it has ever been a favorite pursuit to deduce from the obscure annals of the feudal period some system of money founded on this imaginary principle, and to advocate the adoption of a system of money founded on this imaginary principle at the present time. But to say nothing of the folly of copying from the institutions of an ignorant age, it can safely be affirmed that no such system ever existed during that era, and that whenever tried in modern times, they almost immediately failed.

"Whilst the civilization of the Roman Empire was being slowly dissolved into its original elements, and its diminishing population seemed threatened with extinction, events were occurring in Asia destined to reverse this tendency and turn the decay of Europe into a condition of growth.

"In Arabia, near the coasts of the Red Sea the Romans had long mined for gold. Their method, the usual one, had been to reduce the natives to slavery, and force them into the exterminating labour of their own mines. In the days of Pliny, silver from Europe and gold from Arabia were shipped to India and China, to the aggregate value of one hundred million of sesterces, whatever that might have been."

The Miracle of the Bedouins

"These toilers in the desert, these victims to Roman cupidity and misgovernment, were not savages. They were essentially a trading people, probably descendants of those ancient Phoenicians whose venturesome barques had voyaged to distant India for spices, and perhaps rounded the mysterious Cape of Good Hope in quest of gold. The Bedouin had not become a vagrant by choice, but necessity, and when opportunity served, he showed himself capable not only of equalling the state of civilization to which Europe had now fallen, but of going far beyond it. To such a race, the slavery of the mines must have been as galling as it afterwards proved to the proud Mexicans whom Cortes subjected to a similar servitude. From the midst of this enslaved population, there arose in the seventh century a deliverer, who, armed with an ‘inspired’ work, and proclaiming himself the prophet of God, led his countrymen not only to overthrow the Roman Empire in Arabia, but also to effect the conquest not only of all the surrounding countries, and the establishment of a new empire.

"The flight from Mecca, or the Hegira, occurred in 622. In 633-9 the whole of Syria was subdued; in 637 Jerusalem was taken; in 638 Aleppo and Antioch fell; in 638-9 Egypt was conquered; in 637-51 Persia was overrun; between 647 and 709 every organized state of Africa westward, to Carthage, was reduced; in 692-8 Carthage was occupied; between 608 and 709 the remainder of Northern Africa, including Mauritania, to the Atlantic, was subdued, and in 711 the Arabians entered Spain. So within a century from the beginning of Mahomet’s conquering career, their power was firmly established from India to the Western Ocean.

"During the Roman domination, the trade with the Orient had been conducted, at first by the Persian Gulf, and afterwards by the isthmus of Suez, through a canal that was cut some time during the reign of Trajan or Hadrian. With the decay of the empire, the canal was allowed to become filled with drifting sand, and what little remained of the oriental trade sought the precarious and expensive overland route via the Euxine and Caspian Seas and Tartary. The remnant of trade centered on Byzantium."

"Such was the enterprise of the new masters who had arisen to lead and instruct the world that in the same year in which they conquered Egypt they commenced the work of clearing the long-neglected Suez Canal. The work seems to have been completed within a comparatively brief time, for we hear soon afterwards of the reopening of the old Roman route to the Orient via Alexandria, Suez, Berenice, and Muscat. This being an all-sea route, offered immense advantages over any other.

"The Oriental trade was now centred at Alexandria, and at first was monopolized entirely by the Arabians. The inhabitants of Europe regarded with horror any traffic with heretics, it was confined entirely to exchanges with the Arabian dominions in Asia Minor and Africa. Towards the close of the seventh century, the Venetians so far conquered their aversion to the Mahommedans as to purchase Indian products in the markets of Alexandria, and these being carried to Venice, reopened to Europe the great channel of international commerce whose beneficial influences soon communicated themselves from profit to wealth and from wealth to social advancement.

"Everywhere throughout the Continent were now seen signs of an awakening. Isolated communities drew closer to one another, and merged into larger and stronger organizations; kingdoms appeared where formerly existed only a multitude of warring feuds and benefices; roads were built. canals were planned, and once more a promise of life instead of the shadow of death, was extended over the populations of Europe. The exports from the West consisted, for the most part, of woolens, linens, glass vessels, wine and the precious metals chiefly silver. There was none of that exchange of European silver for Indian gold which afterwards arose; the adoption by the far-seeing Arabians of an Oriental ratio of value between the two metals had prevented this. From India the exports were chiefly cottons, spices, silk, precious stones, sugar, ivory and tortoise shell."

1. "The sphericity of the earth had been proved by Thales, 636 BC; Parmenides of Elis taught it in 503 BC; Eratosthenes computed the circumference of the earth at 252,000 stadia, and Hipparchus at 277,000 stadia; Strabo alludes to the sphericity as a well-known fact; and Pliny says: I do not suppose that the land is actually wanting nor the earth has not the form of a globe, but that on each side the uninhabitable parts have not yet been discovered."