r/todayilearned • u/Scipion8Aveyron • 14h ago
TIL that in the 1600s, Sweden's largest coin was a 10-daler copper plate weighing nearly 20 kg (44 lb) — the heaviest coin ever circulated — which is why Sweden became the first European country to issue paper banknotes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copper_currency_in_Sweden?wprov=sfti1121
u/Thin-Rip-3686 14h ago
Peoples of the South Pacific often traded in carved boulders which are too heavy to lift, let alone move. So although they don’t count as coins, you Swedes aren’t impressing me with your barbell plates.
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u/QuantumPairOfSoczk 13h ago
One got lost in like the ocean. They know it still exists. Its weighs ten tons. So they just exchange it even tho no one has lied eyes on it in ages.
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u/TheBanishedBard 13h ago
Hmph. The Xynq'ian-ur Empire uses terrestrial planets as currency. Earth was once part of a dowry for a wealthy princess, fun fact.
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u/QuantumPairOfSoczk 13h ago
What is this from. Can't find anything on it. Sounds cool.
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u/TheBanishedBard 13h ago
My ass.
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u/monsieurkaizer 9h ago
Could your ass spit out, say a 3 part epic about the Xynq'ian-ur empire, because we really need some new high-medieval-sci-fi
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u/Vinyl-addict 12h ago
They worked through more of a ledger situation though, ownership was recorded in an oral tradition rather than physical trading.
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u/bitchcoin5000 12h ago
Heehee, the last line....
In an effort to shore up the economy, the government minister Baron von Görtz stepped up to the challenge and became the country's central banker.... Soon these coins were so abundant that they too depreciated rapidly towards their raw metal value. This was caused by a belief spreading rapidly, saying that the copper coins would soon be unacceptable as a form of payment of taxes. Görtz was blamed for the failure, and was beheaded in March of 1719, a punishment which greatly pleased the Swedish people....
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u/-Nimroth 11h ago
That is really oversimplifying it all, those coins he had minted was specifically meant as part of a war economy as a way to quickly get the money needed for Charles XII to rebuild another army late in his reign, since he kept refusing to sue for peace when Sweden was already exhausted from war and isolated with more enemies than it had started with.
A lot of people redirected their unhappiness with Charles XII to von Görtz, and once the king had died people were quick to get rid of von Görtz as well.
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u/Distressed_Ocelot 13h ago
Ancient Sparta used heavy, unwieldy iron bars or rods called pelanoi or obeloi as domestic currency instead of gold and silver coins.
These bars were quenched in vinegar to make them brittle and useless as a base material for tools and scrap value.
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u/Laowaii87 13h ago
Quenching in vinegar doesn’t change any property of iron beyond possibly a few microns.
A 0.68kg bar of steel becoming brittle enough to be hard to transport sounds more like an alloy with high phosphorous (or possibly aluminium) content
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u/rubber_pinball 12h ago
why is it in the British Museum?
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u/Strong-Copy-1738 12h ago
That just happens to be the picture in wikipedia. They aren’t super rare so having one there too isn’t strange.
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u/BSpino 11h ago
That was a fun rabbit-hole.
They acquired it from a german collector in 1870.
Why would you find them outside of Sweden?
AI, so take with a grain of salt: but dug up from shipwrecks (used as ballast, lol), heirlooms in families with Swedish connections around the baltic.
Thing is we dug out a lot of ores (still do).
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u/Durahl 12h ago
"Key kid, here's a 10-daler... Go fetsch me a pack of Cigs and don't forget to bring back the change!"
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u/Randomswedishdude 8h ago
A farmhand around 1650 could have 10-30 daler copper coins as a yearly wage, besides meals and housing.
A skilled worker with their own bussiness could make up to 1-2 daler per day.
As a point of reference, around 10 daler could buy you a whole cow.
A house for living could cost around 100 daler or way less, maybe just a few tens, though rising sharply to several hundred or into the thousands for central dwellings in the few larger cites of the time.There were silver coins in circulation too, much more portable, but most coins used in daily transactions were of much smaller denomination coins.
1 daler = 4 mark = 32 öre = 768 penningar.
In reality, it was even more complicated than that throughout the 1600s, and there were several different coins in parallell circulation, with different intricant values, even with the same stamped denominations, depending on type of metal.
A silver daler was often worth more than a copper daler, etc... and exchange values fluctuated over time.And on the other end there were also gold dukats, worth around 6 daler silver, and also other types of foreign gold/silver/copper coins in circulation but traded for their metal value and weight rather than their stamped denomination or origin.
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u/DiligentWhereas9443 8h ago
A swedish "piga"(housemaid) made about 40 copper daler a month in the 1700th. 20kg of copper would be about €200-240 in today's value. So a salary of about €8-900 if the value kept about the same. But keeping 80kg in your purse seems like a solid way to keep you from going out and spending it all at once.
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u/twinnotatwin 13h ago
I keep picturing some poor medieval thief trying to rob a merchant... he gets away with three plates thinking he's rich, then realizes he can barely lift his sack. He's dragging this 60kg mess through the mud, sweating bullets, probably dropping it every ten feet. Meanwhile the merchant is just walking home with a piece of paper in his pocket. It really puts inflation into perspective... at least you don't need a wheelbarrow to carry your losses anymore. lol.
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u/allofthealphabet 10h ago
I thought you were going to say "meanwhile, the merchant is just walking behind the thief waiting for him to get tired so he can drag his coinplates back."
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u/Klasssik 12h ago
It´s also where the name dollar came from.
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u/Baud_Olofsson 8h ago
No, but the daler and dollar are both etymologically derived from the same source: Thaler.
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u/Ok_Mention_9865 4h ago
Fun fact, in the 4th harry potter book a galleon was described as "as big as a hub cap" making it weight 247 pounds and worth somewhere around 14 million dollars.
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11h ago
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u/Scipion8Aveyron 11h ago
Check out the Riksbank's (the Swedish central bank) article about "Stockholms Banco", mentioned in the Wikipedia article, it provides much more detail: https://www.riksbank.se/globalassets/media/riksbanken-350-ar/tidslinjen/stockholm-banco/24-45-stockholms-banco_eng.pdf
(see page 38 for the issuance of banknotes)
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u/TobermoryDIY 14h ago
Sweden was pretty much the only major producer of copper in europe at the time thanks to the Falun mine, so it makes sense why they would make coins out of copper rather than smaller amounts of more precious metals, to allow them to keep control of their own currency.