Gold Read Online Free PDF Page A

ribbon. The tape weighed a tenth of an ounce. What can it possibly have been good for but delight?
    The Thracian objects had no practical use. They were only pretty. We can imagine what attracted those who made them—the brightness of the metal, the ease of shaping it, its resistance to corrosion. In a mortal world, it was eternally bright and beautiful.Today our asset menu is immeasurably longer than the Thracians’ was, yet gold is still high on it, locked into place by a revolutionary act in Lydia in Asia Minor in 635 BC—the invention of gold money.
    Lydian coinage spread through the whole Mediterranean world. The effect on the place of gold in public life was profound. For states, gold became a necessity.Yet by the fourteenth century, 2,000 yearslater, the entire world supply would have fit into a six-foot cube. Countries were famished for gold; in Europe, mints were closing. The financial historian Peter Bernstein called this period “the sacred thirst” for gold. It was a thirst that powered the first gold rush—a murderous, cruel, intoxicating, brutal adventure that swallowed an entire civilization and spat it out as coins.

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RIVER OF GOLD
    So began one of the strangest motions of enemy forces in history. On one side a god-king with 80,000 battle-hardened troops; on the other, a handful of aliens, some of them sick, thousands of miles from any support.
    S PANIARDS CAME WELL EQUIPPED FOR the larceny of the sixteenth century. They reduced two empires, almost with a blow. They had the cavalier’s weapon of mass destruction—Toledo steel. The swords were strong and flexible and the blades could take a razor edge. One good stroke took off a head. A horse and rider in full armor weighed three quarters of a ton. This massive equipage thundered along at twenty miles an hour, concentrating the whole weight on a sharpened steel point at the tip of a ten-foot lance. The Spanish could project such power through advanced technologies in sailing and navigation. And they had a pretext for the conquests they would make: winning souls for God.When he set out, Christopher Columbus wrote his royal backers that he would accomplish “the conversion to our holy faith of a great number of peoples.” But hedid not forget to mention gold.He mentioned it 114 times, versus twenty-six for God.
    Hernán Cortés arrived on the Yucatan coast early in 1519, and on Holy Thursday landed near the present-day city of Veracruz. The Aztec ruler Montezuma thought the Spanish adventurer was the god Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent, and sent messengers to meet him. Cortés fired on them.“A thing like a ball of stone comes out of its entrails,” was how the Aztecs saw the harquebus. “It comes out shooting sparks and raining fire.” By November the Spaniards had arrived at the dazzling island city of Mexico—Tenochtitlán.
    â€œGazing on such wonderful sights,” wrote the soldier Bernal Díaz, “we did not know what to say, or whether what appeared before us was real, for on one side, on the land, there were great cities, and in the lake ever so many more, and the lake itself was crowded with canoes, and in the Causeway were many bridges at intervals, and in front of us stood the great City of Mexico, and we—we did not even number four hundred soldiers!”
    By the following June, Montezuma was dead. The Spaniards claimed he died in a hail of stones thrown by his own people, but perhaps they killed him themselves. They were besotted with his treasure.The Florentine Codex, a twelve-volume history from the sixteenth century that contains native Mexican accounts of the conquest, describes Cortés and his Nahua lover, La Malinche, entering the royal treasury.
    [W]hen they entered the house of treasures, it was as if they had arrived in Paradise. They searched everywhere and coveted everything, for, yes, they were dominated by their greed. Then they took out all of the goods