Cities as Currency
Early in El Cid (directed Anthony Mann, 1961) — a film we happened to watch the other day , as it goes — the King of Aragon comes to the court of Castile (ruled by King Ferdinand) demanding that the Castilean city of Calahorra be ceded to Aragon. Castile refuses, and when King Ramírez proposes the two nations go to war over this matter, King Ferdinand objects that it makes no sense for two Christian nations to weaken one another with such large-scale fighting, what with the huge Moorish army in North Africa (led, oddly enough, by Chief Inspector Charles Dreyfus of the Paris Sûreté) being poised to invade Spain, and everything. So instead a single combat is proposed: the Aragonian royal champion, Don Martin, will fight the Castilean royal champion, Don Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, El Cid (Charlton Heston in his pomp), the winner claiming the city for their respective nations. The single combat is fought: first jousting, then sword clashing with sword. It’s very exciting. El Cid wins, and Calahorra remains with Castile.
The film goes on to other things than this, but I was struck by the notion of cities as, in effect, fungible quantities — that is, as money. You could transfer the ‘funds’ represented by a whole city from one nation to another, and even use cities as fiduciary tokens. A whole city would be, as it were, a high denomination banknote, which could perhaps be ‘changed’ for a number of smaller suburbs, townlets and satellite villages. A whole economy could be based on such a medium of exchange.
Of course the real business, the high-stakes financial business of this new system, would involve Madrid, Paris, London, Berlin and so on. This would be called ‘Capitalism’.
