[Neil44]

I did a walking tour of Bruges the other week and heard an interesting story about salt. Salt was a valuable commodity and could function as currency, carrying it around was risky and impractical. So there was a guild house that became a place where you could store your salt and get given a little note about how much salt they owed you. Later on if you wanted to exchange the value of your salt with someone else it became more practical to swap the little notes directly rather than trek down to the salt house and swap physical salt so people started doing that. Boom, paper money. I find all these kind of stories fascinating.

[luxpir]

It's where the term "salary" came from, if I'm not mistaken. Roman thing?

[eyko]

You're correct. Funny enough, this is also obscure knowledge even in e.g Spanish. We use the word salario (from latin salarium) which has the same meaning as in latin: words ending in -ario (lat: -arium) is used to denote association, like in templario (templar) or revolucionario (revolutionary). For some reason, however, nobody thinks of "salario" as something associated with salt (sal). I guess it's so strange in today's world that money would be used for the specific purpose of buying salt, that it simply doesn't click.

[mudita]

This blog by a classicist claims that the word salary is indeed coming from the latin words salarium and sal, but that it is not clear what the connection is, that there is neither evidence for the explanation that Roman soldiers were paid in salt nor that it was an allowance for the specific purpose of buying salt:

http://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2017/01/salt-and-salary.ht...

Regarding the latter he writes:

"As I said above, ‘salt allowance’ isn’t a terrible guess. But I strongly suspect it’s much more metaphorical than that. Compare how the Greek word for a salary was opsōnion, literally ‘(money) for buying opson’, where opson means ‘fish, relish, sauce’. That doesn’t mean Greek workers were given a ‘fish allowance’: it means that there was a generalised idea that wages went on traded goods like fish, and not on things like barley which land-owners would grow for themselves. Similarly, in Rome, grain allowances were a common thing; it could easily make sense to interpret salarium as ‘everything-else-money’."

[prox]

In the book on the history of Rome, Livy states : “Again, the monopoly of salt, the price of which was very high, was taken out of the hands of individuals and wholly assumed by the government. Imposts and taxes were removed from the plebs that they might be borne by the well-to-do, who were equal to the burden: the poor paid dues enough if they reared children.”

[VBprogrammer]

Also, the phrase "worth their salt".

It's funny how sometimes these things are hidden in plain sight. I bet the average person would expect a more complex etymology for that phrase.

[didericis]

I wonder how difficult it would be to extract this kind of evolutionary history from LLMs.

[agurk]

Looking at the wikipedia page for bank notes[0] there is no mention of salt or Bruges on the page. It suggests that bank notes first originated in China during the 7th century the knowledge of which European explorers introduced to Europe in the 13th Century. There is mention of cloth being used in Prague in 960 and the Knights Templar, as in the original article here, in 1150.

It goes on to add more details about the introduction of banknotes to solve practical problems that would be hard to summarise, but I found an interesting read.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banknote