111–120 of 124 posts
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It's where the term "salary" came from, if I'm not mistaken. Roman thing?
Also, the phrase "worth their salt". It's funny how sometimes these things are hidden in plain sight. I bet the average person would expect a more complex etymology for that phrase.
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Banks are a massively significant cultural innovation. I can pay someone in a different country by pressing a button and it's a reliable, robust system. In those days, it was a huge deal to be able to pay a merchant in France by giving gold, or even a paper representing ownership of gold, to a bank in England. Before, you had to send the money on a ship and hope for the best. International banks led to a massive expl…
Or is it advancements in communication technology that enables what you describe? What makes a bank an international bank?
Think of it as shipping-gold-as-a-service.
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International banks have spearheaded an absolute explosion in global economic growth. Looking at your story above, Philip was the bad actor and the Templars should've played politics better (maybe lending money to the pope as well?)
The pope and the Catholic church lost its power a few centuries later. Eventually in Europe everything was subsumed by the government creating all powerful nation states.
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It looks like the Catholics don't consider any interest to be usurious, only excessive interest (which leaves a lot of wiggle room).
That's directly contradicting the Pope: > One cannot condone the sin of usury by arguing that the gain is not great or excessive from the parent comment
[0] http://www.ior.va/content/ior/en/media/annual-report/annual-...
Too bad so few popular and reliable records exist, as I would be really interested in what their leverage ratio was for loans to deposits, what calendar they used to synchronize everywhere in the world (presumably astronomical), whether the Templars picked it up by learning and adapting Islamic Hawala during the crusades, what the Medicis did differently (covered a bit in Fergusson's The Ascent of Money). The necessa…
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usury#Christianity It sure looks like direct words from Jesus to me, not to expect anything in return for a loan. It’s just that Christian culture chose to ignore this rule in exchange for capitalism and colonialism.
That doesn't at all read as being forbidden. It reads like Jesus giving advice to people to give freely and not expect anything return. Not seeing any Thou Shalt Not's or other sternly worded proclamations. Which is probably why all of their early church councils were split on the subject. As opposed to stealing, killing, adultery etc. which everyone was in agreement on based on the scripture. Contrast that with the…
Jesus's positive commands ("do this") are consistently aimed at the heart rather than specific outward behaviors. What matters is not the specifics of the good things you do, but the degree to which you're loving God and loving your neighbor from your heart in those actions.
Hence when he saw a poor widow giving only 2 copper coins to the temple treasury (about 1/64 of a day's wages), he said she had given more than all the others, because she had given all she had to live on. My interpretation is that he said this because she was showing a heart that was fully given to God and trusting him completely to provide.
Too bad so few popular and reliable records exist, as I would be really interested in what their leverage ratio was for loans to deposits, what calendar they used to synchronize everywhere in the world (presumably astronomical), whether the Templars picked it up by learning and adapting Islamic Hawala during the crusades, what the Medicis did differently (covered a bit in Fergusson's The Ascent of Money). The necessa…
> If you are ever in Portugal, I recommend seeing the last Templar castle in Tomar. I found its scale and engineering quite spectacular, as well as how well it appears to have been preserved. The Templar castle in Tomar was probably my best sightseeing experience, maybe because I wasn't expecting anything (her: "there's a templar castle let's go", me: "ok"). It was quite large and there were surprisingly few tourists…
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Christianity forbids usury as well, hence why hawala seemed like a plausible candidate system for how the Templar banking system may have scaled. Interest calculations are complicated, where something simple like a commission scales easily. Given what we know now about economics and how systems scale, it seems like there is a systems view of the necessary conditions that might shed some new light on some history that…
> Christianity forbids usury as well I don't believe this is correct. Admittedly I'm agnostic though, so I may be mistaken. But I've studied the subject quite a bit as an outsider.
The turning point was probably around the same time the Church came around on Liberal republics replacing kings and queens.
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That's directly contradicting the Pope: > One cannot condone the sin of usury by arguing that the gain is not great or excessive from the parent comment
Well not quite. On page 32 of their Annual Report you can see in the income statement where they are earning millions in interest[0]. [0] http://www.ior.va/content/ior/en/media/annual-report/annual-...