Chapter 244 Salted Fish is Cash

In the Middle Ages in Europe, population growth was always a reflection of the environment, or conversely, the environment always determined population growth. There are a number of obvious V-shaped valleys on the charts of the statistical yearbooks of the European population, which are caused by large-scale wars and plagues, and in France, for example, after the fall of Rome before the Renaissance, there were several small wave declines, and the frenzied destruction of the Vandals in the 6th century caused great destruction, burning and looting, and the population of 6 million was suddenly reduced by 2 million. In the 9th century, the Viking invasions also wreaked havoc. The Hundred Years' War between England and France made population growth difficult, and by the beginning of the 15th century, the total population of France was over 10 million. Such a pitiful growth rate is simply weak compared to China. After the Wuhu Rebellion, the remnants of the Han population in East Asia were less than one-tenth of the last years of the Eastern Han Dynasty, less than 8 million. In just 200 years, the Sui Dynasty increased to more than 45 million during the Great Cause, which was at least ten times faster than that of France.

A large part of the reason for this is due to China's advanced agricultural technology and the excellent agricultural hydrothermal and climatic resources brought by low latitudes. In China, the main constraints to population growth are land scarcity and war casualties, while in Europe, it is backward agricultural and medical technology. There are good records in the history books that show the differences between the East and the West. Using the canonical histories of the East and the ecclesiastical literature of the West as a reference standard, the conclusions can be drawn by counting the number and frequency of words. The nightmare of the East is the wars of dynastic change caused by land annexation and declining arable land per capita to eliminate the surplus population, and the nightmare of the West is the elimination of the surplus population by famine and plague caused by natural disasters.

Europe has far more problems than the East, including the Near and Middle East. To what extent is the technology lagging behind? Even the basic technique of crop rotation can be immortalized as a major innovation that has been recorded in the history books as a milestone. By the 15th century, the technology of accumulation had not yet been used. Paris is surrounded by walls of excrement, and cities with a population of more than 10,000 people are full of sewage and urine. It is said that high-heeled shoes were invented to prevent a noble lady from stepping on the feces and drowning the instep of the foot when she went out.

The yield of grain per mu is so low that Chinese in any era will vomit blood, and the grain planting ratio (planting seeds than harvested grains) was once less than one to five. At its lowest, it was one to two lower than the native wild grains. This is the standard for any dynasty in China.

In ancient Europe, even before the Industrial Revolution, the staple food was bake a bake with a hardness that could be used as a murder weapon, and this kind of poor flour mixed with a lot of wheat bran and chaff and even sand was the daily food of the vast majority of people, not to mention whether this kind of bread was nutritious or not, and the miserable warehouse and mill equipment obviously would not eliminate sand and mildew. Even the great nobles of the land, who were large in land, could not have eaten fluffy white bread baked with fine white flour that had been sifted through a sieve more than ten times a day. Not to mention meat, few ordinary people have eaten three consecutive meals of big fish and meat. Who can eat meat that has been processed without any condiments such as salt, vinegar, soy sauce, butter, pepper, Sichuan pepper, green onion, ginger and garlic? The shortage of salt in Europe led to the popularity of air-dried and smoked meats, and bacon and cured meats were luxury items that the elite could afford. As for condiments such as sugar and honey, which are equivalent to silver, they are legendary delicacies that I have only heard of and have never seen.

There is a disease that comes from the mouth, and every day eats the hard stick 'bread' that modern people regard as non-food. How could the frail tenant farmers, who only ate protein on lord's birthdays and religious holidays every year, not suffer from disease. The large amount of wheat bran and sand particles in the murder weapon 'bread' obviously damaged the mouth and digestive tract, and a large number of deaths can be caused by a rotten tooth and a large number of diseases such as inflammation, vitamin deficiencies, stones, ergobacterium poisoning and night blindness.

As for nutritional balance? Food and clothing are luxuries, let alone balanced nutrition in Europe. Crude fiber and minerals are definitely enough, carbohydrates and grains are certainly not enough. Protein is a gift from God in dreams, not to mention higher animal and vegetable fats and fat-soluble vitamins. Why are dairy and seafood the staple of meat in European cuisine? And not because of the tragedy of the breeding industry? The vast majority of Europeans live in chronic malnutrition and chronic diseases, Christians with low immunity do not like baths and steam baths like Jews and Muslims, and they die of old age such as organ failure that has reached the end of their natural lifespan every day. More than 90% of people die from various parasitic diseases and the complications of hypoglycemia caused by starvation. Sugar and honey in Europe are more than just condiments. It is also a life-saving miracle drug for hypoglycemia.

The intake of vegetable protein is not like the magic crop of soybeans in the East, it is best to make tofu, it is dried tofu if it is hard, it is tofu brain when it is thin, it is tofu skin when it is thin, and it can also be made of stinky tofu and bean curd if it can't be sold. Europe's main plant-based protein comes from poor peas and chickpeas, which are produced in low yields, and this is a fantasy at high latitudes.

Hunger was the main theme of the European Middle Ages, and war has always been behind the devil who tormented the minds and bodies of the people of Europa. When the massive amount of local grain exported from China poured into Europe, countless nobles and merchants fell into madness. Fine white flour is still available at one-tenth of the price in the past, and a large amount of snow-white salt and cheap spicy ingredients such as onions, ginger and garlic have entered the people's kitchens. Even pepper, which was once equivalent to the same volume of gold, became a necessity for the ordinary rich to entertain their guests. The wealth of Europe flowed rapidly into the families of the many nobles and compradors who represented the trade in the East. When the constant loss of gold coins inevitably leads to deflation.

In order to keep trade stable and sustainable, there was a boom in primitive bill trading, and import substitution was also key, namely the development of the maritime industry in the Netherlands, and the development of mining and forestry in Italy, Germany and France. It doesn't matter if you don't have enough gold or silver, you can use salted fish instead, and a barrel of herring, mackerel, and cod from the Netherlands can be used instead of a gold coin to buy goods from the East from coastal Dutch merchants. This barter trade was accepted by all nations faster than the gold florin, due to the abundant amount of salt and precious meat used in the pickled fish. People can do without gold coins. But you can't go without salt.

Every subsistence feudal estate needed this kind of goods imported from the Netherlands, and it was needed in large quantities on an ongoing basis. Chinese merchants soon saw the opportunity and transported large quantities of salt to various ports along the coast of the Netherlands to buy a variety of European specialties that could radiate inland. For a time, thousands of merchants gathered in Rotterdam, a large port of sea-river intermodal transport. It takes a lot of sailors to go out to sea to fish, and it takes a lot of workers to process salted fish. Porters were required to load and unload imports and exports, and many servants and middlemen were needed to take care of their daily lives, and at one time even prostitutes in the Netherlands collected salted fish for prostitution. The Netherlands soon developed as a serious contender to overtake Tuscany.

In order to grasp this emerging source of wealth, Lothair II and Louis VI almost misstarted the Franco-Prussian War version 0.1. Since both Germany and France want to eat it, then let the two families not be able to eat it, and finally under the interference of the traversal. The Netherlands became the first independent federation of cities of the Holy Roman Empire, and the Dutch urban agglomeration led by Rotterdam became the fourth unified European nation-state established under the guidance of the Crossing Nations.

This move made many feudal lords in Germany and France stare helplessly. The day after the Dutch Cities League declared independence from the Holy Roman Empire and Germany, it received recognition and diplomatic support from the Chinese Empire, and diplomatic relations were established with each other's ambassadors. Larger cities such as Rotterdam and Amsterdam also received free aid ranging from 100,000 to 500,000 dragon dollars and 10 times the amount of low-interest loans. As a suppression of Viking pirates and the maintenance of the Chinese Empire's trade position in the Mediterranean and the North Sea, the Fourth Detachment of the Western Fleet, the Aowang (Qinglong-class thousand-ton cruiser), and the 500-strong navy and its affiliated ships and marines were concentrated in The Hague to establish the first military base on the North Sea coast.

Although the salted fish in the Netherlands has a high yield, good quality and long shelf life, it is eaten when it is produced. It is difficult to survive as a medium of exchange in the market. The fact that there was a serious shortage of stocks to meet the growing demand for money, and that Europe did not produce precious metals and copper as much as the Americas did, only forced them to cope with the lack of currency.

Of course, the important role played by the pre-arranged chess pieces is no joke in the Tuscany Spice Futures Exchange and the Bank of Tuscany. But after visiting the newly opened seafood auction house in Rotterdam, the son of a Dutch merchant invented a fish stamp, a strange thing that is equivalent to a banknote, and the holder of the fish ticket can exchange the corresponding grade and quantity of salted fish at any time at the Antwerp Northern Fishing Firm, which sells salted fish. The unprecedented salted fish standard has thus come to the stage of history, although it is a variant of the commodity standard. But his invention was epoch-making. Let Europe skip the era of the precious metal standard and leap from the era of credit money directly from the era of precious metal coinage. This is because salted fish is not available in abundance every season, and there are far more fish tickets in circulation than the Antwerp Northern Fishery Company, which issues them. Most of the people who need fish tickets and those who have fish tickets are not here to get salted fish. It's just to be able to get a better liquid currency than promissory notes and expedited bills of lading, which are much more expensive to realize. This flow of fish stamps was somewhere between the gold and silver coins that everyone loved and the promissory notes issued by the big merchants, who everyone was tired of and reluctantly accepted. As long as no one runs on it, the issuer can use several times or even dozens of times of its own capital to adjust the power within its ability.

This innovation shocked Europa, and it also shocked the Travelers, who were originally going to implement the Dragon Dollar Bill to Europa, and had to postpone their plans.

"I can accept salt and salt tickets, salted fish and fish tickets I can never accept, although there is no problem logically, but there are too many problems in this, the quality of salt is very good unified and regulated, its value is also very stable, it can be conveniently divided and stored like gold and silver, and cross-border settlement and trading can also be carried out, but what about salted fish? The size is different, the quality is different, the shelf life is different, it is difficult to divide evenly, and it is difficult to settle outside Europe. The ambassador to the Netherlands complained to the European consul general, Bai Long.

"This is also an expedient measure, when our country's dragon dollar and florin gold coins unify the European currency market, the salted fish, a temporary medium and a substitute for transitional coins, will naturally withdraw from the currency market, and you don't need to worry."

"How long is that time expedient? , three years? Five years? Or is it hundreds of years like Shudi? ”

"According to domestic calculations, as long as we maintain the current scale and growth rate of imports and control exports at the current level, we will be able to complete the task of importing currency in three years, and we can end the monetary function of salted fish."

"So fast?"

"After all, salted fish only circulates in the northern part of France and Germany and the coast of the North Sea, and on the Mediterranean coast, it is still dominated by florin gold coins! The scale of trade in these regions is much larger than that of the emerging North Sea Trade Zone, and it is more important for the Empire, so you need to balance it. ”

"Then I have the right to be a fish ticket is a salt ticket, should we participate in it and become the controller of the circulation field of salted fish? After all, the standards for this new thing are still very vague, haven't we always been the standard-setters and executors of all commodities? As long as we control the standard and grade credit of this emerging thing, it is also very beneficial for us to promote the Dragon Yuan banknote! ”

Bai Long smiled happily, "It is worthy of being from the Foreign Affairs Academy, and the initiative and the ability to turn the passive into the active are still very strong, so I will separate the commercial counselor of the Netherlands from the financial business of the Beihai Company to form the Bank of the Netherlands!" I'd also love to see how far this salted fish standard goes. ”

It didn't take long for the Dutch Beihai Bank Company, which had the background of the Chinese Empire, to issue the first Dutch bank bill, which was accepted by all Dutch merchant banks that had trading business with China, referred to as the Dutch guilder, which was pegged to the dragon dollar on a one-to-one basis.

The merchant's son who issued the fish ticket was naturally 'invited' by the intelligence officer to the Imperial Institute of Financial Research in the empire itself, and it is said that Li Kei personally wanted to train this European who was the first to discover credit currency. (To be continued......)