Brendan Greeley

Yeah, yeah.

Thal is German for valley, right?

So then you get Thaler all over Northern Europe.

So this then becomes an English dollar.

The first, there's a mention of dollar in Shakespeare, in The Tempest, and again in the Scottish play.

They talk about dollars.

It's not in the domestic British currency system of pounds, shilling, pence.

To them, they know exactly what it is.

The big silver coin that comes from the low countries in exchange for British wool and British cloth.

So,

Already, this story of sovereignty and this story of the fungibility of money starts to break apart.

You've got this coin that's copied again and again.

Okay, so the Spanish have silver in what is now Bolivia and Mexico.

They figure out this unbelievable, brutal regime, the mitad, using forced labor to actually get the silver out of the ground.

They've got the mercury from somewhere else to do the amalgamation process that actually then turns the silver, turns ore into silver.

The thing is, Charles V of Castile, Holy Roman Emperor,

Lord of all, he surveys.

Has to follow the pattern of silver production that already exists in northern Germany.

He's selling his silver into the same silver markets in Antwerp as everybody else, which means that he does not have the sovereign right or the sovereign ability to create his own silver.

So they sort of hack an existing coin in the Spanish currency system, the real.