Yes, as I am wont to do, I’ve been reading Roman history. You’ll often hear about transactions of huge sums of money, such as taxes or tribute paid to the state or between nations, to the tune of bazillions of sestertii. Or, on a somewhat more mundane level, there’s the real estate market. Those villas don’t come cheap.
Still, the Romans had no such thing as electronic transfer, or even, as far as I know, banks (although feel free to correct me on that). How did the transfer of large sums of money work? If Cicero wanted to buy a house, surely he wouldn’t send a servant over with a wheelbarrow of cash? That doesn’t seem practical, or, for that matter, safe on the crime-ridden streets of Rome. Could he do something like writing an ancient cheque?
Also, how would rich people store their savings? Did they stuff their mattresses with gold, or was there something more sophisticated going on?
BTW, don’t necessarily limit replies to the Romans. I guess the question applies to most of history, to some extent.
The ancient Romans definitely had banks, mostly as a function of local temples. They had a sophisticated system of currency exchanges and lenders, with debts enforced by law. However, credit was largely a tool of the emperors and most routine financial transactions were done with coins.
Did those temples/banks keep detailed written records of all those financial transactions and account balances, etc.? Did they have to keep it all using Roman numerals? That must have been awkward.
How would they even write “one (or more) bazillion” in Roman numerals?
It’s one of a series or mystery stories in ancient Rome, featuring a detective named Gordius the Finder. This one is a prequel, where he a a teenaged young man making the grand tour of the 7 wonders of the world. He carried only a limited amount of cash, but his father is funding this educational tour via something like letters of credit sent to merchants in various towns; he goes to them and they will give him cash, which his father back in Rome will pay or has already paid to a corresponding merchant in Rome.
This book will give you a fair idea of how it worked in practice. (And IMHO it’s a pretty interesting read.)
The author is a University Professor, and has extensively researched such details in his books. (It’s the only fictional mystery books that I can recall with pages of footnotes at the end citing various ancient texts.)
They did and they did. There was big business in teaching the more intelligent slaves to do arithmetic with Roman numerals. It’s not easy.
I don’t think the Romans kept detailed ledgers the way we think of them (IIRC that was invented during the middle ages) but things like loan contracts and letters of credit were definitely used.
Remember that even outside of banking, the government was employing lots of recordkeepers and accountants in order to collect taxes and pay the army and such.
Well I question that… While a number may be quoted, is it literally coin, or more of a promissory note for that amount ? Actually the legions spent a lot of time going around taking hostages from and threatening city states that were behind in their tributes… They’d leave with hostages and a promise that the tributes would be paid.
And the legions were filled with men from the tribute states, presumably a soldier would be paid with a promissory note. The ledger was carried out to his state once a year and the state was informed that the amount due to the soldiers was a form of tribute, the total amount came off their tribute due !
So then the state owed the soldier his pay.
While the states could not borrow and lend between each other, they would borrow from their own citizens,and in fact making compulsory loans… like a tax, but “I take this amount now and I give back with interest next year !”
So the soldiers salaries, and earnings from exports, would be paid to settle debts, with entities that would otherwise have a large hoard of coin to sit on getting paid with a renewed promissory note…
What this means is that a state that was protesting about something they didnt like, and wasn’t sending soldiers to join the legions, nor selling goods to the rest of the empire, would rapidly find they had not paid enough tribute/tax (there being no difference …) … The solution was to start selling and supplying… thus paying their tax and tribute.
By that way, the city state had to ensure production and productivity.
Have children, export goods, export soldiers to the legions…
Consider what happens when the city state that was in trouble … They’d look at the ledgers and see “Hey, the ports are not earning much from grain, look, they sold a lot, but they reported receiving a low price, and there’s no tax paid !.. Really they sold it cheap to the port down the river, and they’ve all been having a holiday in the hotel district for the last few months,since the sold all the grain so fast” Heads would roll, and they’d fix the problem with the sales of grain… When the grain was sold at the proper price to the proper buyer , tax and tribute would be paid.
And the city-state would pay up.
Because the soldier was right there to collect. And he (and his buddies) have just returned from a year or more of training & experience with the most effective military force in the ancient world. If they got annoyed enough, on their own they could probably cause ‘regime change’ in that city state. And Rome would have no problem having deadbeat city-state leaders replaced by a group of retired soldiers.
But also, the city-state would pay because the returning soldier is likely to spend that money locally – that is a years’ salary being injected into the local economy, rather than sent off to Rome.
I guess I could have done some research before starting this thread. Looking into it now, I’m starting to find interesting stuff right away.
Here’s something for the etymology fans, concerning the association of money with temples: In the time of the Republic and the Empire until Domitian, coins were minted at the temple of Juno Moneta. This epithet means “memory”, and comes from the Greek personification of memory, Mnemosyne. Yes, that’s where “mnemonic” comes from. The Latin “moneta”, though, came to be connected to the minting of coins, and, apparently, is the root of “mint”, “monetary” and “money”.
So … did the Romans have letters of credit, and bank ledgers, but no banknotes? I’m glad no one hijacked into specie debasement, e.g. “The denarius continued to decline slowly in purity, with a notable reduction instituted by Septimius Severus.” :eek:
[Off-topic] I’ve been intrigued that Babylon had compound interest tables before Hammarubi, whose law imposed rules on interest. The great lawgiver Solon also imposed a money redress, since farmers bought seed when the silver/grain ratio was low and harvested when that ratio was high.
There’s not much of a difference between a letter of credit and a banknote, when it comes down to it. The Roman Empire issued all kinds of metal coins over its lengthy existence, but common banknotes really require printing presses and cheap sources of paper.
Keep in mind, too, that coins are a lot more durable than papers of any sort, so we’re going to find a lot more of them just for that reason, no matter how common paper financial instruments were. Or papyrus, or parchment, or whatever they were using.
The Romans used a system of notching willow (?) sticks, (tallies, stocks) which were split lengthwise to make two identical copies: a system still in use in the British Treasury in the 19th (??) century. The grain of the wood makes it very difficult to forge a matching tally stick.
As an officer in the infantry in the early 20th century, Winston Churchill recorded being paid in gold coins in a mesh bag.
That kind of thing did happen, as did nipping bits off coins. One of the reasons to mark the sides of coins was to make the nipping more difficult than if they were only stamped on the faces.
Yes. The UK Exchequer didn’t entirely abandon the use of tallies until 1826.
And it’s a trivial fact of history that fire whjch destroyed most of the Palace of Westminister in 1834 was started when a stove in which old tallies were being burned (to get rid of them - they were taking up space) started a chimney fire. The neo-Gothic palace that is now so famous - Big Ben, and all that - was built to replace it.
Locals would be extorted by a Roman governor (in case of provinces) or by legions proper (in case of barbarians). Retired soldiers getting in on the racket was very much frowned upon. For most of Rome’s history, retired soldiers got a plot of land and were scattered as widely as possible.
The banking system we take for granted today is very new; where everyone keeps their cash in banks, pays their bills with cheques. Most transactions except for the upper class were done with cash.
As t-Bonham relates, the typical method of financing minor items was letters of credit. Merchant of Venice is instructive in that regard too. Money-lenders were essentially banks. Even today, across the middle east, and to the annoyance of the intelligence groups, there is a network of money-lenders who trust each other and exchange promises; the average citizen does not have to involve government banks and their reporting requirements, or carry very large sums of money. This system works well in every place and time, provided two things - trust, and balance of payments.
Otherwise, there were major shipments of cash - gold and silver were valuable, so we hear of the gold of South America being shipped back to Spain; similarly, the opium wars with China started when they insisted on silver payments for tea; the Europeans thought being allowed to deal opiates to China would help recoup some of that silver, which presumably for the first while was shipped by the chest full to China from Europe.
Looking into it now, I’m starting to find interesting stuff right away.