The cultures in Paksenarrion’s world are all advanced enough to use metallic coinage, though barter still exists (and still exists today, of course) and “paper” in the form of letters of credit and other non-coin exchange exists in some places.<\/p>\n
Where you have coins, you have counterfeiters.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Paks, being a trusting soul, paid little attention to the coins she carried, though moneychangers were attentive to the possibilities.\u00a0\u00a0 In the new books,\u00a0 with viewpoint characters who are older, more worldly, and having to deal with financial matters, I found myself facing the certainty of counterfeiters.<\/p>\n
Only problem…I knew very little about how it was done.<\/p>\n
Fernand Braudel’s massive work, Civilization and Capitalism<\/em>,\u00a0 which I’ve been reading for the past several years, well-reviewed here<\/a>,\u00a0 mentioned–among many other useful facts about monetary systems–that merchants in the late Middle Ages\/early Renaissance often carried sets of dies with them to restrike coins into the local coinage for better acceptance.<\/p>\n No need to pay the moneychanger to change your foreign “winks” into local “plonks”–or pay the tax collector because you were importing foreign currency….if your self-stamped coins passed, you were home free.\u00a0\u00a0 If not, you might be found swinging freely from a gallows.<\/p>\n Passing counterfeit money is a way of making an individual counterfeiter rich…or a way of helping one political entity to overthrow another by undermining its currency.\u00a0\u00a0 And I already had competing political entities in Aarenis, one of them determined to undermine the power of the Guild League.\u00a0\u00a0 Aha!\u00a0 Counterfeiting!<\/p>\n But…how is it done exactly<\/em>? \u00a0 If you find some roughly cone-shaped metal objects, would you know they were coin dies of that period? \u00a0 Surely counterfeiters’ tools do not come with a handy label “Property of Counterfeiters: Do not disturb!”<\/p>\n For a research enthusiast like me, this led to reading up on coins, dies, anvils, metallurgy, and (shortly before I wrote this) reading a tribute to a former blacksmith<\/a> who, among his other jobs, repaired damaged destroyers of the 7th Fleet right after WWII.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 (I now know why wrought iron was rivetted and mild steel was welded and why you can’t weld wrought iron to steel on a ship and have it hold.\u00a0 This has nothing to do with Paksnarrion’s world, but it’s fascinating anyway.\u00a0 Likewise the difference between working with a Little Giant steam hammer and an air hammer…)<\/p>\n