like the stock of metal available in those days. And through that very fact the need of slaves grew and grew indefinitely and led, not only to wars that were undertaken simply for slave-getting, but to slave-hunting by private entrepreneurs all along the Mediterranean coasts (which Rome winked at) and to a new way of making the proconsuls' fortunes, which consisted in bleeding the population of a region and then selling it into slavery for debt. The market of Delos must have dealt with ten thousand slaves a day. When Cæsar went to Britain, the disappointment caused in Rome by the money-poverty of the Britons was compensated by the prospect of rich booty in slaves. When, for example, Corinth was destroyed, the melting-down of the statues for coinage and the auctioning of the inhabitants at the slave-mart were, for Classical minds, one and the same operation — the transformation of corporeal objects into money.
In extremest contrast to this stands the symbol of Faustian money — money as Function, the value of which lies in its effect and not its mere existence. The specific style of this economic thinking appears already in the way in which the Normans of A.D. 1000 organized their spoils of men and land into an economic force.[1] Compare the pure book-valuation of these ducal officials (commemorated in our words "cheque," "account," and "checking")[2] with the "contemporary" gold talent of the Iliad, one meets at the very outset of the Culture the rudiments of its modern credit-system, which is the outcome of confidence in the force and durability of its economic mode, and with which the idea of money in our sense is almost identical. These financial methods, transplanted to the Roman Kingdom of Sicily by Roger II, were developed by the Hohenstaufen Emperor Frederick II (about 1230) into a powerful system far surpassing the original in dynamism and making him the "first capitalist power of the world";[3] and while this fraternization of mathematical thinking-power and royal will-to-power made its way from Normandy into France and was applied on the grand scale to the exploitation of conquered England (to this day English soil is nominally royal demesne) its Sicilian side was imitated by the Italian city-republics, and (as their ruling patricians soon took the methods of the civic economy into use for their private book-keeping,) spread over the commercial thought and practice of the whole Western world. Little later, the Sicilian methods were adopted by the Order of the Teutonic Knights and by the dynasty of Aragon, and it is probably to these origins that we should assign the model accountancy of Spain in the days of Philip II, and of Prussia in those of Frederick William I.
- ↑ Pp. 371 et seq. The resemblance with the Egyptian administration under the Old Kingdom and the Chinese in the earliest Chóu period is unmistakable.
- ↑ The clerici of these exchequer offices were the archetype of the modern bank-clerk. Cf. p. 371.
- ↑ Hampe, Deutsche Kaisergeschichte, p. 246. Leonardo Pisano, whose Liber Abaci (1202) was authoritative in accountancy till well beyond the Renaissance, and who introduced, besides the Arabian system of numerals, negative numbers to indicate debit, was promoted by the great Hohenstaufen.
