Brendan Greeley

Because he had a lot of silver, his money became global money.

None of that is true.

I mean, it's all true, but that's not how any of it worked.

So Stefan Schlich was a count.

The problem is he didn't actually hold any of the territory that he claimed in Bohemia.

He sort of held it in entirety with all of his cousins and all of his brothers.

Somebody discovered silver in this valley in Bohemia.

The problem with silver in the ground is that you need a lot of money and a lot of expertise.

It takes a lot of capital, even in the 1520s.

to mine silver, very complex machines already, getting silver out of the ground, draining water out of the mines.

And so he realized that just having the silver didn't mean anything.

So first thing he did was he said, this is mine, breathtakingly illegal.

Then he went over the border to Saxon and he got Saxon mining investors and Saxon miners, and they started pulling silver out of the ground.

so this is already outside of a long established process of what you do with silver and how it becomes money in the rest of europe and in the rest of bohemia if you found silver first of all you had to pay a tax to the king after that it had to go to a centralized mint that mint had an understanding that they had to create money for everybody so not just big coins for merchants but the whole range of big and little coins that worked for uh wholesale purchases

and retail purchases.

This is really crucial.

I think this distinction still exists today, but it definitely existed in early modern Europe, which is that Carlo Cipolla, as an Italian historian, wrote this beautiful book where he drew a distinction between big money and little money.

Big money are large, high-value coins, and they're for international trade and merchants and the wealthy.

Little money is for low-value trade, and it's for purchases of meat and bread and labor.

The challenge of big money and little money, I think we still have it today with banks, is that you're going to love this, Joe.