Marco Polo, Two Ideas, and the Seven Pairs of Clean Animals

Two Things

Banks: They Pissed People Off Then, Too

Think about it. There weren't any $24.95 per month burglar alarm systems with free installation if you call now. If you wanted to keep thieves away, you either arranged to kill them (guards), or made the money fiendishly difficult to get at (hide it under the floorboards in an iron box), or, better yet, both. But these cost. But there's no other way of doing business, 'cos cash is it, baby. But you never thought being rich would be so damned expensive. But even the banks you have now meaning then, the ones that aren't much like the ones we have now meaning now, charge you (well, maybe they are like the ones we have now...bad example) an arm and a leg, or maybe just your daughter, to keep your money in a big iron box under their floor and a few guards around it just to make sure. But you still need to get at your money all the time to pay your suppliers.

And this is where the good people of China came in, via good old Marco. See, they invented the cheque. And then Marco found out about it. And then he told folks at home about it. And then Europe went crazy insane.

The Cheque: A Study in Usefulness

The Catch, Of Course

So the question is: how the hell do you carry large amounts of money around safely from city to city, country to country, continent to continent?

Introducing The Aardvark

Aardvarks, of course. To be more accurate, seven breeding pairs of Aardvarks.

Europe had never seen the likes of these things before. Even the Greeks and Romans hadn't handed down badly-distorted rumours about long-nosed men sixty feet tall who ate ants from the ground and tunneled under the ground and talked.

Very quickly, though, they became the single most valuable thing you could possibly possess.

A Commodity

Think about it, Part Three: People decided a cheque was money, so hey presto, it's money. And then people decided an Aardvark was money...so hey presto, it's money.

But what good can an Aardvark be as money?

It's complicated, but it boils down to this: they're fabulously smart, smarter than any person ever. (More on that later.) They travel well, as long as you keep 'em fed. And they breed very very very slowly, so there will only be a small number at any time, making them very very very rare and therefore very very very valuable. No one knows what the hell they are, 'cos only the well-educated and rich (vanishingly rare in that combination at the time) even know of their existance.

Put it all together:

• you can cart 'em all around Europe;
• no one's gonna think to steal one, or know how to feed them if they do (ants? who the hell eats ants?);
• and they're rare enough to be worth, oh, say a whole bank.

And Then, Disaster Struck

"And In Each Generation, The Plague Shall Fall Among Them"

It's generally accepted now, though, that the population of Aardvarks, which eat only ants and termites, fell from approximately two hundred and fifty to less than a dozen. This is probably due in equal parts to the (assumed) collapse in ant and termite populations, and to the death of their "keepers." This gives us our only real clue to the (undeniably secondary-in-importance) effect on Aardvark food.

More importantly, though, the collapse in Aardvark supply resulted in incredible hyper-deflation -- at least as far as Aardvark currency went; the supply of gold and silver was more or less unaffected -- that would not be seen again until the last half of the 19th Century. Again, it's complicated, but it went something like this: since there were so few Aardvarks around, there was a real loss of (Aardvark) money available to buy stuff with, which in turn meant that you couldn't very well ask for, say, two Aardvarks in payment for whatever when your debtor, or anyone for six hundred miles around, didn't have even one Aardvark to start with. That means less money for you to pay your debts with. Add to that the fact that Aardvarks became even more valuable because of that rarity, and you had a perfect vicous circle. An Aardvark went from being something you could carry across an ocean to pay for, say, a shipment of valuable spieces from the Orient, to something that could buy you, say, six or seven entire kingdoms and their accompanying populations.

It's hard to overestimate the effect this had on Europe, and indeed the history of all humanity, since then.

A Present-Day Example

One was the hotline. In an emergency, pick up the red phone. Wait. Talk it out. Simple but brilliant.

The second was the continual exchange, negotiation about exchange, agreements about exchange, and, again, actual exchange of Aardvarks.

It went like this. The Soviets, say, would tell the US that four dissident ballerinas and a writer would be allowed to "escape" to the West in exchange for three Aardvarks. There would be some negotiations, and maybe the price would be beat down a bit, and then the exchange would be made. A few months later, the US would tell the Soviets that the frequencies for Radio Free Europe would be changed to ones more easily jammed by the KGB or whoever in exchange for one Aardvark. There'd be some dickering, maybe the US'd have to throw in a draft-dodger or something, and then, again, the exchange would be made.

The brilliance in this is that because of the stupendously high value of even one of these creatures -- currently, according to the best estimates available, enough to buy, say, Microsoft -- and because both the superpowers held high but almost perfectly equal breeding populations, there were very few situations that couldn't be resolved with the exchange of a sufficient number of Aardvarks. Regardless of what you may think of Kennedy's character, for example, he was smart enough to give the Kruschev two Aardvarks to mollify the humiliation of the Cuban missile crisis. Of course, that may well have pissed off the CIA enough to make them assasinate him. But he meant well, or at least he meant something.

And So, With Wings