You can do the same trick with today's stuff. This gives a good perspective on something value. To give this values a meaning, you should try to determine how much a single, simple meal would cost at the same time, so you can see how many days (dividing that by 2, assuming 2 meals a day) a man could live with the same money. But a horse, even if quite expensive, is not at all that expensive,e specially when in 1550 the bourgeois had many of the privileges of nobility and having a horse wasn't as a privilege as it was in, say, 1200. Therefore probably 48 silver pounds were not all that much.Īs a comparison, a horse would cost about 144 silver pounds, which in the XII century was enought o buy a large farm and all its land. But in 1550 the overflow of silver from the spanish colonies was invading Europe, so the value of the silver pound was already plummeting. I have no idea of quality or what the prices would be compared to modern prices, but it seems expensive to be a knight A mark would be 4/7 of a fleurin, if I remember correctly, that is about 4 silver pounds at the end of 1492. So, the same sword could cost perhaps 4-5 silver pounds in britain, and be considered very expensive, and cost 30 fleurins (210 silver pounds) in Florence and be considered quite cheap.ġ550 - 1 bastard sword (longsword?) cost 12 mark, a horse 36 mark 70 times the yearly income of the british cron or the ownings of a Florence courtesan). The Medici Bank in Bruges went bust and was sold at a bankrupt price of again around 20.000 fleurins (i.e. Then, just to state how the region is important, let's just say that the possession of a courtesan from Florence in XV century were sold at those times for over 20.000 fleurins, that would be about 140.000 silver pounds: about 70 times the yearly income of the English Crown in the same period. It's not until the XVI century or at least the end of the XV that economy starts to be more comparable with modern economy. You can't even apply the modern principles of economy on economies which were usually based on barter rather than currency: a peasant from XII century provence could go all his life without seeing a single coin, and that was a very populated and wealthy region, before the crusade against the heretics of Albi (which was launched precisely for that reason ). The value of a "silver pound" could be in XV century as low as 1/7 of the same currency in the X century. It depends from sword to sword, from region to region, from period to period.Ī most money in the XVI century were worth much less than in the X century, for example, what with inflation and so on. We tend to bunch it all up in a single bundle, but asking such a question is much as asking "what a car would cost in the 20th Century?"
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