rural  - 2021-08-13
Scholarship on the First Crusade has observed that departing knights would not only have lacked enough currency to purchase food for anything except the first stages of the journey, they would also have required dedicated pack animals to carry even that much currency. Gold would have been nearly useless. It was (first of all) incredibly rare in northwestern Europe where nearly all currency was silver, and too valuable to buy basic staples. Nobody with whom a knight was bartering would have had available cash to provide the necessary change for a gold coin. But this meant carrying vast quantities of silver coins. And then what happens when you get beyond Latin Europe and arrive in, say, Hungary, southern Italy, or Byzantium, where the currencies change dramatically (and in some places back to gold?) Who could establish actual exchange rates? Nobody. So neither solution is workable. What did knights do? We're not 100% sure, but one interesting solution that's been proposed is that they brought silk, which was relatively light and could be cut into pieces that were still worth something and could be exchanged for quantities of local currency.
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cognitivedissonance - 2021-08-13 This is where the Knights Templar came in, actually. They used a special cipher, which only they knew, and if you carried a letter ot the next Knights Templar encampment, you could draw from your account like an ATM. They weren't dumb.
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ashtar. - 2021-08-14 Just pillage your way to the holy land.
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rural - 2021-08-14 Templars were founded a two decades later, and only started this practice a few decades after that. Yes, that helped resolve this problem to some degree, but what they were supplying was assistance with transit (to some degree) and support once you arrived in theatre. Even then, you sometimes had to negotiate with them for the release of funds and it could get tricky, because it relied upon them being liquid enough to support an unknown number of knights at once. Rudolph of Pfullendorf (1180) and John of Joinville (1250) both encountered difficulties with their "withdrawals". So not quite an ATM.
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rural - 2021-08-14 Don't get me started!
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yogarfield - 2021-08-15 For what it's worth, I did enjoy your comment more than the video. For that, I render unto you 5 ghost bolts of silk.
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The Mothership - 2021-08-16 Rural, will I see you at Leeds or at Kalamazoo next year?
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rural - 2021-08-21 Sorry, saw these comments too late. I can't deal with the online Leeds and K'zoo. When we are back to solid in-person conferences, I'm at both on the regular.
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yogarfield - 2021-08-13
This comment smacks of "I studied medieval history and all I got was these lousy 3 stars".
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rural - 2021-08-14 Medieval history is worth all the stars in the galaxy, because it allows you to bore at Olympic levels in the discussion of YouTube clips. But I find videos like this so awesome and weird because they are discussing something as if it should obey the laws of physics (weight) and logistics, but it belongs entirely to the realm of fantasy. This is like arguing about how often you need to recharge a light saber.
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The Mothership - 2021-08-16
Any adventurer that wealthy would have a baggage train and attendants. Only peasants carry their own money.
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