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[Miles_Umbrae]

Minting coins out of alloys making them less valuable than their face value was mostly NOT done by the issuer of official currency, but rather by thieving jewellers/bankers/goldsmiths as a way of expanding their wealth.
This gave rise to practices such as imprinting the face of the ruler onto the coins, store owners weighing or biting coins to test their purity, and such.
Rulers tended to have a wasted interest in their lands currency not being exchanged with forgeries as their wealth was in one way or another tied to the actual wealth of their subjects through taxation or racketeering .. if the money they got out of their subjects was an alloy rather than pure gold it meant they actually had less wealth compared to neighbouring rulers who managed to keep forgeries away.

[FantasticDorf]

Is it fair to say that not adding a minting profession would also debase the difficulty of the game? People say its more convenient to have metalworkers iron out coins for you but that's kind of against the spirit of DF in a sense to take the most direct route there when the core skill regarding coin-making can be removed from metalworking and moved into its own.

Right now it has no purpose as coins are cosmetic value boosters or reserved for adventurers to pick up and steal from player fortress sites, fair enough that metalworkers with nothing else to do other than craft metal can currently fufill this function.

At some point you may actually need to be paying mercenaries & bards for their time if they're not forthcoming to offer their services upfront or you need them in the fortress Now at a given time buying out every mercenary that comes through the door in anticipation of a goblin siege.

Or other things like just pumping up the bartering value artificially on trading wagons without exchanging so many goods, or paying off your friends & enemies with a fat stash of coins in chests that are easier to transport being hauled off site.

[GoblinCookie]

What does your first paragraph mean? First you disagree that minters might have used an alloy to mimic the proper make-up of coins so that they can make more money from the same stock , then you tell an anecdote about a king reversing his predecessors’ adulteration of currency?

It means that if the value of coins in internal circulation actually *was* their metal content there is no point is devaluing the currency for a king, because there are plenty of people with the know-how to detect your devaluation.  I am arguing that the metal content was used in the exchanging of currency, not the actual value of the money in the internal market. 

The value of money in the internal market is *not* the same thing as the money's exchange value with foreign currencies. 

[Iapetus]

The coin was worth the metal it was made from, and the point of stamping it was basically the king's seal of approval that it was a specific amount of gold so you didn't have to weigh it for every transaction. 

Better to think of it as a guarantee of the purity of the metal.  Weighing is still a useful way of measuring the value when you have a lot of money.  That's why many countries have or had a unit of currency called a Pound (or the equivilent in their language), because it originally meant a pound of silver. 

[therahedwig]

Is it fair to say that not adding a minting profession would also debase the difficulty of the game? People say its more convenient to have metalworkers iron out coins for you but that's kind of against the spirit of DF in a sense to take the most direct route there when the core skill regarding coin-making can be removed from metalworking and moved into its own.

Right now it has no purpose as coins are cosmetic value boosters or reserved for adventurers to pick up and steal from player fortress sites, fair enough that metalworkers with nothing else to do other than craft metal can currently fufill this function.

At some point you may actually need to be paying mercenaries & bards for their time if they're not forthcoming to offer their services upfront or you need them in the fortress Now at a given time buying out every mercenary that comes through the door in anticipation of a goblin siege.

Or other things like just pumping up the bartering value artificially on trading wagons without exchanging so many goods, or paying off your friends & enemies with a fat stash of coins in chests that are easier to transport being hauled off site.

Wouldn't that kind of difficulty be added quite easily with well, a fortress needing the right to mint? Because it seems a bit odd any given fortress can mint and in real life medieval Europe it was something a given town or village needed to get permission for.

[Cathar]

If my memory is correct, that is not exact. Minting money was a privilege of the noble of the fief, to be used almost exclusively in his holdings (people didn't travelled that much anyway) and in the case money was used in trade between the holdings of different nobles, it was usually melted and reminted.

It is also worth noting that in medieval era, coins didn't had "face value". They were worth their weight in metal and that's it ; they would be weighted before transactions. "Loading" your coins with heavier alloys was as close as you'd get to business malpractices

[GoblinCookie]

If my memory is correct, that is not exact. Minting money was a privilege of the noble of the fief, to be used almost exclusively in his holdings (people didn't travelled that much anyway) and in the case money was used in trade between the holdings of different nobles, it was usually melted and reminted.

It is also worth noting that in medieval era, coins didn't had "face value". They were worth their weight in metal and that's it ; they would be weighted before transactions. "Loading" your coins with heavier alloys was as close as you'd get to business malpractices

I think only kings had the right to mint money, not regular non-independent nobles.  It is also the case that coins definitely had a face value, because they were frequently adulterated by kings, the metal value was only used for the relative value of difference currencies not the purchasing power of the coins themselves. 

[Dorsidwarf]

I've heard both versions claimed, and strongly suspect that it matters where you were and when. The middle ages spanned about 700 years and the disparate and many parts of the world changed culturally almost beyond recognition in that time.

[GoblinCookie]

I've heard both versions claimed, and strongly suspect that it matters where you were and when. The middle ages spanned about 700 years and the disparate and many parts of the world changed culturally almost beyond recognition in that time.

Well in the very early middle ages most of the large kingdoms that we know and love did not actually exist yet.  Instead in lot we have a lot of petty kingdoms which presumably have the ability to mint their own coins.  But at that point people don't really use money much anyway and the money they did use was mostly Byzantine money (so to most places foreign money) rather than their own. 

The level of autonomy held by nobles tended to vary between places.  In Germany they had the most autonomy, in England (post-conquest) they had the least autonomy and France is somewhere in the middle; also in France it depends where in France you are as well.  Nowhere however did the nobles have enough autonomy to actually mint their own currencies and it is doubtful that many of them would have the resources to actually make us of that right had it been theirs.

[Azerty]

I've heard both versions claimed, and strongly suspect that it matters where you were and when. The middle ages spanned about 700 years and the disparate and many parts of the world changed culturally almost beyond recognition in that time.

Well in the very early middle ages most of the large kingdoms that we know and love did not actually exist yet.  Instead in lot we have a lot of petty kingdoms which presumably have the ability to mint their own coins.  But at that point people don't really use money much anyway and the money they did use was mostly Byzantine money (so to most places foreign money) rather than their own. 

The level of autonomy held by nobles tended to vary between places.  In Germany they had the most autonomy, in England (post-conquest) they had the least autonomy and France is somewhere in the middle; also in France it depends where in France you are as well.  Nowhere however did the nobles have enough autonomy to actually mint their own currencies and it is doubtful that many of them would have the resources to actually make us of that right had it been theirs.

The last French lord to have his own currency was in 1723.

[GoblinCookie]

The last French lord to have his own currency was in 1723.

Which lord was it?  It actually matters because a lot of medieval kingdoms are very complicated because there is a division between the legislative area and the executive area.  That is to say the French King (and vassals) control areas which legally speaking have their own Estates General and hence their own laws. 

[therahedwig]

No, it is trivial to the discussion, which is 'should we have a seperate coin minter profession'.

The reason I brought up the right to do so being rare is because it would indicate that coin minting might be more likely to be a privilege that a fort gains as it grows into a barony or county. Who gives that privilege, whether it is the baron, count, king or a particularly authoritative fruit tree, doesn't matter. DF could proly randomly generate the rule, maybe even during the law and customs arc.

What is important is that it probably means there's no point to having a separate coin minter profession as your blacksmiths would not be able to mint proper coins until the fort is an official location for a mint. Coins don't even need more than a face value for this, traders can just deny the coins on the basis that they're afraid that the coins are not following the kingdom standards for coins.

Now what would be interesting to discuss is to introduce false money, but that'd be a seperate suggestion thread

[FantasticDorf]

I can reasonably accept per the OP the existance of coin printing 'rights' or being held accountable for illegally printing coins (which in DF do have faces on them) with warnings from the mountainhome not to do it until you have least a barony in place.

Dwarves do do everything and craft everything over forges though, up to a point where the equipment and workshop layout starts to differentiate (in the long awaited dissolution of workshop buildings for instead zones) then either a noble or a nobility accessed worker could work out.

I mean you could technically do it right now if you had the controls to define workers like you do nobles.

Code: [Select]

[COIN_PRINTER]
[name:coin printer]
[MARKET_ONLY]
[PROFESSION_COMMON]
[RESTRICTED_WORKER] //disables migration except from requesting from holdings.
[NUMBER: 5]
[REQUIRES: 50]

[Azerty]

The last French lord to have his own currency was in 1723.

Which lord was it?  It actually matters because a lot of medieval kingdoms are very complicated because there is a division between the legislative area and the executive area.  That is to say the French King (and vassals) control areas which legally speaking have their own Estates General and hence their own laws.

In fact, it was the Principalty of Dombes, in Trévoux, until 1729; this territory used to be "land of Empire."

[GoblinCookie]

No, it is trivial to the discussion, which is 'should we have a seperate coin minter profession'.

The reason I brought up the right to do so being rare is because it would indicate that coin minting might be more likely to be a privilege that a fort gains as it grows into a barony or county. Who gives that privilege, whether it is the baron, count, king or a particularly authoritative fruit tree, doesn't matter. DF could proly randomly generate the rule, maybe even during the law and customs arc.

What is important is that it probably means there's no point to having a separate coin minter profession as your blacksmiths would not be able to mint proper coins until the fort is an official location for a mint. Coins don't even need more than a face value for this, traders can just deny the coins on the basis that they're afraid that the coins are not following the kingdom standards for coins.

Now what would be interesting to discuss is to introduce false money, but that'd be a seperate suggestion thread

I don't think false money is a separate suggestion thread at all.

I don't think anything ever got granted the right to mind money by a higher authority.  Either money-minting is unrestricted overall for everybody or you already had the right to mind a currency from before you were subject to said higher authority.  The reason why nobody will grant subordinates the right to print their own money is that doing so is going to reduce the value of your *own* money isn't it?  If minting is restricted, this in effect a monopoly but what monopolist is going to deliberately create competition to themselves.

This being said, being able to mint money should be restricted to the capital.  When we become the capital we should be able to mint money, but with the economy there should be a demand from the existing AI capital for metal in order to mint coins, a demand we could meet. 

In fact, it was the Principalty of Dombes, in Trévoux, until 1729; this territory used to be "land of Empire."

Dombes

The location makes sense.  It is very much outside of the core French territory (the north minus Brittany and Alsace-Lorraine) so it probably had the right to it's own currency owing to being legally speaking outside of France.  The confusing thing about France is that many of it's regions (Lorraine, Burgundy, Arles, Aquitaine) were actually independent kingdoms but were then conquered or inherited by France.  But France did not actually have legal authority over those places even though they have executive authority, in effect the French king was allowed to rule provided he did so according to local rather than core French laws. 

The origins of this situation I am a bit hazy about.  That is because originally we had Charlemagne and his Holy-Roman-Empire, which was originally based in what became or maybe even was France but we ended up with the German HRE in the end rather than a French one.  It all hinges of course on the Pope, who had to loan the title of HRE to the would-be emperor who was otherwise referred to as King of Germany technically, that being because the pope *is* the Roman Emperor.  In any case having that title empowered the ruler to pass laws either directly or by calling an Imperial Diet (parliament) to do so, which is why the title is so valued. 

I'm guessing that the French situation came about because originally those were essentially local by-laws and Charlemagne could pass laws for the whole of 'what we now think of as' France on the basis of his HRE status.  Once France becomes separated from the HRE, the French king ceases to be able to pass laws for the whole of 'what we now think of' as France because legally speaking France is much smaller and the other kingdoms while held by the same king are technically equal.