Herald of Steel

Lady Nanazin was perhaps exaggerating a bit when she claimed millions of ropals were lost every year due to unscrupulous folks taking bits out of the coins.

But the practice was indeed widely spread, especially for the coins that were made of solid silver or gold like the intas.

These 'clippers' would use shears and now scissors to cut tiny parts from around the edge of the precious metal coin, so small that at a glance the missing bit might simply be mistaken for the coin being bent or simply eroded through use.

They would also use a tool similar to a nail file to slowly shave away the coin edges, achieving the same effect. The coin might get a bit smaller, but it would be mostly kept to a range that the common eye could not easily tell unless properly examined.

These unscrupulous men would then sell the silver and gold cut pieces and shavings to second hand gold merchants and jewelers for raw cash, thus basically printing money.

Now, given these men were putting their hands into the government's coffer, of course, it was something the authorities tried very hard to crack down.

It was considred a very heavy crime to tamper with a coin in any way, and there were very severe punishments in place for anyone caught in this trade.

Beatings, canings, and enslavement were actually the milder of the punishments with even the usual hanging or decapitation- two penalties typically used for grave offenses, sometimes being thought of as being too 'soft'.

Instead these 'thieves of the treasury' would be most often quartered i.e.- have their limbs torn around by four pulling oxen each moving in their own direction or crucified- i.e.- have their hands and feet nailed to a cross and then left to die out of bleeding, infection, or thirst.

Many times these 'counterfeiters' were even made a public spectacle, in order to warn the public, making it clear that with regards to this particular offense, the various nobles and the royal court were very serious, implementing the laws wherever and whenever they thought it fit even in the slightest.

There was even a report of a man being hanged because a noble saw him bite on the coin.

The man was simply trying to see if the piece the nearby merchants handed him was legit but the noble accused him of trying to damage the coin and sent him directly to the gallows within just a few hours.

Even that nearby merchant was implicated for using 'such damaged' coin and was turned into a slave, in perhaps one of the greatest examples of the power nobles held in this country.

However such harsh punishments were more the exception, not the norm.

In reality, despite the law having such sharp teeth, this 'second hand' gold trade continued to flourish every day, with no signs of slowing down. Read exclusive content at empire

This was mainly because it was quite hard to enforce.

As one can easily imagine, the crime was too easy to commit- anyone with a pair of scissors or a knife could do this right under the nose of the authorities and none would be any wiser.

As for the potential payoffs… well just by chipping off, say two percent from each coin, you could get a whole new coin in just fifty times.

What is two percent? Nothing to the naked eye.

And how long did it take to make those 50 cuts? Maybe half an hour? Probably less than that if you used scissors.

This meant that if one was using Intas for the trick, which was 10 times as valuable as a ropals, they could make double what a regular worker made in a whole day in just half an hour or less.

Who wouldn't want such an easy job?

And if you thought just 2 percent was too small and all the effort of cutting, shaving, and reselling the gold to a middleman was very costly, well just look at all the modern currency exchange trades, where people made perhaps 1% return on a good commission (10 dollars for every 1,000).

Many times it was 1 dollar for every 1,000.

Yet, forex trading is considered one of the most lucrative investments.

So in a society as poor as Adhania, was it really that surprising for a few to be unscrupulous?

Especially since the chance of getting caught was so rare.

Even if they were somehow caught, unless it was red handed with the shavings still on them, they could simply claim to be innocent by insisting that these damaged coins were all given as change from some traveling merchant.

Some were known to slap the fine flakes of gold into the air if they were about to be caught, making them disappear among the dust.

While the true desperadoes were even known to simply swallow them rather than face the music.

It was a calculated gamble, but given these bits would be really small, the metals hardly ever caused any internal cuts or tears with their pointy ends.

Add to that gold and silver are inert metals, and there were in fact very few risks to swallowing them.

Or at least it was a trillion times less risky than what would happen if they were caught.

As for how the men retrieved the 'digested' metals afterward… well let's not go into the 'browny' details.

But there were also a few reverse examples of this, where some magistrates had grown clever of this trick.

So suspecting the men of being guilty, such as finding most if not all the coins on them to be clipped, but unable to find that last definitive proof, they might keep them in jail until they relieved themselves and then check the residue.

If they found what they were looking for there… well let's just say those men would soon have their asses filled, now with something much harder and thicker, because those magistrates would certainly not be in a good mood after what they had to do to get the evidence.

But once again, such convictions were rare.

Rather, the reality was the practice of clipping coins had become so common by now that it made it very hard for the authorities to effectively apprehend even a single one.

Through trade, travel, and businesses, all the people had at least a few of these 'counterfeit' coins in their pockets.

So if the guards wanted to accuse anyone carrying these 'counterfeit' coins as criminals, the list would be literally in the tens of millions.

And the authorities understood this, which was why they, like most regular people, at some point simply stopped caring unless the chip went beyond a certain point.

Within that limit, they treated all of the coins the same.

But as one can imagine this type of wide acceptance of defective coins made this business all that more lucrative to any and all counterfeiters.

Now it was easier than ever to hide their illicit activities, and every coin the treasuries minted turned into a small commission for these men.

As for who 'these' men were you might ask… well you would be surprised to know it ranged from literally the top of the food chain down to the very bottom.

Now the lower steps of course made sense- some poor beggar who had nothing to eat for three days might choose to chip out a few shavings of his coin as his last 'life saving', hoping for his last meager possession to go just a bit more.

However nobles did this too, because in this way, they could make more coins out of the same amount of gold or silver.

For instance, the standard price of 1 kilo of gold was 50,000 ropals.

But if you could chip out tiny bits from each coin and then recast the metal, you might be able to make say… 51,000 ropals.

That 1,000 ropal was basically free money printed out of thin air because the people still treated each ropal with the same value.

And who was the largest noble and minted the most amount of money- of course the king himself. In fact, it was a favored technique of the royal mints to chip out some worn out ropals before recasting them, thus miraculously producing more coins than they were given.

Now this little coin trick was nothing new or sophisticated, neither to Alexander nor any of the nobles in Adhania or Tibias.

It was even done widely throughout the known world, and even in Alexander's previous world. Wherever the economy tended to slump or emperors were in need of some urgent cash to fund a war, they did this kind of devaluing, producing new coins and driving up inflation.

While in modern times, faced with the same situation, the government skipped the tedious 'duping the public phase' and went straight to the money printer- producing money literally out of thin air.

So you could even say in some ways modern countries suffered worse from this practice than their ancient counterparts.

Alexander was of course well aware of these practices as well as the interests involved, which was also why he wanted to show these coins to the queens, hoping to hear their thoughts on how the other powers would react.

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