The Ottoman empire did as the Romans do and debased it's currency as it ran into trouble.
The golden age was gone and due to rapid inflation so was the age of silver.
Similar patterns exists in many empires.
Roman debasement of its currency accelerated after the end of the "five good emperors" and the start of the thirty Merda emperors.
Byzantine debasement of it's currency when they faced the Arab conquests in the 7th century.
The financial position of the Byzantine empire was already not stellar in the early 7th century.
More Byzantine debasement to fight the Turks in the 11th century.
By 1250s Byzantine coins had a bad reputation
More.
By 1453 everything must go.
After a series of civil wars Ptolemy X left Egypt to Rome in his will in 88 BC and the kingdom was under threat of Roman annexation.
The financial state of the latter Ptolemaics
Parthian debasement during the empire, also noticeably in the middle of the first century BC when they tangled with Rome. This is part of the conflict in which Crassus squared off against the Parthians.
The Sasanian were more responsible, only seriously debasing the coinage early on during the wars against Rome. In 283 the Roman emperor Carus even sacked the capital of Ctesiphon yet his campaign ended after he was struck by lightning.
Also some debasement during Yazdegerd II war against both the Huns and Romans and toward the end of empire under Yazdegerd III.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Under the Qing dynasty, China experienced a massive expansion in population, growing from 50-150 million persons in the Ming Era to around 400 million by the mid 19th century.
The main reasons for this extraordinary expansion🧵
Was first its military expansion, by 1760, the Qing, under the "Ten Great Campaigns of conquest," had incorporated a massive amount of new land.
In the following decades, a mass movement of Han people into this new farmland significantly expanded agricultural production.
Between the late medieval era and 1800, literacy rates in Britain increased from 5% to over 60%.
This happened despite virtually no state investment in Education in a bottom-up process motivated by individual interest in acquiring literacy and Protestant religious zeal in spreading it.
Before the mass establishment of a public education system, the average male during the early industrial revolution had, on average, 1 year of schooling.
As far as higher learning, there were more men with a university degree in late medieval England than in early industrial-era England.
Mining first started in the 4th millennium BC and suffered major disruptions toward the end of Old Europe around 3000 BC and in the late Bronze Age with the collapse of Mycenaean civilization.
Unable to defend itself from Umayyad incursions, the independent Duchy of Aquitaine surrendered to Charles Martel, who turned back the Umayyad at the Battle of Tours.
Aquitaine was worth to the Franks much more than the sum of its people; it contained valuable silver mines, in particular the Melle mines, which became the most productive source of silver in the Carolingian empire.
Isotope analysis of Carolingian coins shows that before the 750s, most of the silver in coinage came from recycled Byzantine silver, while afterwards most came from Frankish mines, with Melle supplying the largest share.
The mining work has created a network of over twenty kilometers of tunnels.
Melle silver is characterized by low gold content, while the opposite is true for Byzantine silver. Isotope analysis of north-west European coinage shows a decline of gold content in silver coinage, indicating a transition from Byzantine to Melle silver.
"A single mass killing of more than 140 children and over 200 camelids directed by the Chimú state, c. AD 1450."
Cuts transecting the child's sternum and displaced ribs suggests that "the chest had been cut open, perhaps to extract the heart." For most skeletons "No other evidence of perimortem trauma was observed" indicating the extraction of the heart was done on live victims.
As Spanish chronicler Cristóbal de Molina described "children had their live hearts taken out, and so the priests offered the beating hearts to the huacas to which the sacrifice was made."
Children were brought from across the region to be sacrificed next to the Chimú capital.
"Variability in forms of cranial modification and stable isotope analysis of carbon and nitrogen suggest that the children were a heterogeneous sample drawn from multiple regions and ethnic groups throughout the Chimú state."
The sacrifice coincided with a major weather event, heavy rains and flooding carried a layer of mud on top of the burials in their aftermate, "it is tempting to hypothesize that the two wventa are associated"
There is a notion that largely peaceful hunter-gatherers are pressed into violent conflict due to population pressure and resource scarcity, but if you check with HGs, 'why are they fighting?' They would often respond It's about Women and Vengeance.
In a sample of 111 conflicts between Australian aborigines whose proximate reason can be discerned, 58% were about Women, 28% were about revenge, and a minority were about territory or material plunder; "Territorial conflicts, if not totally absent, remain negligible: this motivation appears only in three occasions...The two main causes of conflicts are retaliation and, above all, rights over women."
When Napoleon Chagnon told the Yanomamo, a relatively war-like Amazon tribe, that American academics think that they fight over "game animals and meat," they laughed and responded: "We do like meat, we like women a whole lot more!"
"It is often believed that because they lacked wealth, economically egalitarian societies possessed none of the motivations which, for millennia, prompt human beings to kill each other, and therefore lethal collective confrontations were unknown in these societies."