Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wombat" data-source="post: 2603459" data-attributes="member: 8447">Several merchants houses had these as well, especially once the big fairs of the 12th and 13th century got into operation; some of these merchant houses later on became early banks.The point was that carrying a lot of gold is heavy and impractical.  If you were a merchant who had family in, say, Bruges and Verona, you could just take a letter of credit with you for the amount you would need.  Equally you could issue letters of credit to others.  Many of the more important families had branches of their family in multiple cities scattered throughout Europe, working for the betterment of the family as a whole.  Each home/office (pretty much interchangeable) would have cash, goods, and workers on hand for a variety of tasks.Another interesting aspect of these letters is when the letters themselves were traded.  The letters of credit came in two general varieties -- bearer and personal.  A personal letter would say something like "Luigi of Verona may be given the sum of 300 pounds of silver by Verona weight when this bond is presented"; a bearer letter would say nearly the same thing, but there would be no name, only "the bearer".  The use of this second type was that it could be traded between people, often a some discount, and thus act like an open letter of credit; of course there was always the danger that a bearer letter might be stolen, at which point the thief could get the money, but many were willing to take that risk.By buying and selling these letters back and forth an early form of banking was developed.  It is quite a fascinating topic in general.  Have fun with this!  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

Verification