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MMMDCLXXIX - MMDXXXVII = MXCLII (www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2m3t2Yr8Vg) If you think math homework is hard now, just imagine having to calculate in Roman numerals. About the time of the Fourth Crusade (1202), the Italian Mathematician Fibonacci published Liber Abaci , introducing Europe to the benefits of Hindu-Arabic numbers 0-9, thus liberating bookkeepers, bankers, merchants (and 21st century students) from having to calculate in onerous, old school Roman numerals. This made banking, currency conversion, trade, investing (and homework) easier and more efficient. Commerce and The Unpleasant Peasants (1381) If you paid attention in history class, you'd know that for much of time, the main form of wealth was ownership of land . In England, land was held in estates called manors , most of which had been acquired through battle during the Middle Ages (c. 700 - 1450) and handed down generation after generation within the same family. That meant that wealth and power of the society tended to be concentrated in and stay within a small segment of the population. The vast majority of people were peasants who owned no land and lived a subsistence, day-to-day life with relatively little political, economic, or social power. About the only thing they had of value to trade was their physical labor . In exchange for their labor and a percentage of the crops they produced, the Lord of the Manor allowed the peasants to live on his manor land, and share in the crops and livestock. On rare occasion, some tenant-farmers were paid a money wage, but the economy was overwhelmingly based on labor as a commodity. (Recall that a commodity is any marketable item.) Peasants labored away as tenant-farmers , working in the fields, cultivating crops, caring for livestock, and producing goods for consumption within the manorial community. It was a bleak, impoverished life with little opportunity for achieving prosperity. That’s a simple description of the manorial system. In 1381, something happened in England that, over time, would have a big impact on commerce. It’s called The Peasants Revolt . Basically, a lot of peasants were fed up with their Lord of the Manors’ constant “raising of the rent” in the form of greater and more frequent demands for labor and crops. Some of these peasants had managed to make a little money here and there by selling goods or labor outside of the manor. In any event, by then even peasants had come to appreciate the importance of money as a means of accumulating wealth – not a great deal of wealth, but enough to make their lives a little brighter, and help lift them out of poverty. Long story short – the peasants revolted, plundering and burning villages. One of their many demands was that they wanted to be paid for their labor in money . In the end, the peasants prevailed on that particular demand, and the result was the collapse of the manorial system. England went from a labor economy to a money economy . Many other European countries soon followed suit. Over time, money changed everything . Now even peasants could accumulate a little wealth, and as they say, get some skin in the game: A money economy redistributes power. Once the ability to accumulate wealth expanded beyond the landed aristocracy, peasants began pursuing it in different ways, such as through the sale of services, labor, and goods. This began to alter and SLIDE 6I PRODUCT PREVIEW
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Lesson 6 | Crusaders, Unpleasant Peasants & Mobsters
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