>>24242308
>>24242418
Now you may be asking what the hell does rome has to do with the renaissance or gold.
Well gold is a natural currency due to it's high stock to flow ratio(the mined stock per year is too small relative to the existing stock) this gives gold a yearly inflation of around 1.50%.
The problem with gold is that as a currency it's horrible and hard to transport and protect , in fact the byzantines adopted gold as the official currency due to what i mentioned above but the public still had a fiat currency for everything except paying taxes.
So to pay taxes people needed to exchange fiat for gold and then pay the taxes in gold , this gave the government in the eastern roman empire the ability to balance budgets on a currency with 1.50% yearly inflation.
So europe ends up getting out of the dark ages and gold is once again a currency, then spain discovers the americas and brings lot's of gold to europe destroying it's economy since this sudden intro of gold caused massive inflation ironically
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_treasure_fleet