Salt in the ancient and medieval worlds was far more important and more prominent in people's minds than it is today
They used it for an awful lot of things. They didn't just put it in their food, they used it for preserving food,
they used it for
dyeing cloth, and for cleaning and so forth. It was one of their more common chemicals. It had lots and lots of uses and people used
quite a lot of it.
And you may have heard that certain expressions in the English language come from salt, for instance to be 'beneath the salt',
meaning to dine on the lower tables, where the upper tables were given salt cellars
So they could sprinkle any amount of salt on their food as they wished,
in the modern fashion. The people beneath the salt didn't have that luxury and just had to accept the amount of salt that had been put
in their food by the chefs. To be 'worth your salt' is to be worth, if you like, your salt ration - to have earned
the the
the resources that you're being given - your pay and so forth, to be any good at your job, to be worth your salt, and
the modern word 'salary' in English comes from the Latin 'salarium'. A salarium was your your ration of salt,
so soldiers might regularly queue up for their salarium, their regular... you may call it payment,
but it was their salt ration.
It wasn't exactly their wages
but one of the perks of doing the job that you did might be that you'd get a salarium -
a regular dose of salt. So that's where we get the word 'salary' from, so there are a lot of reasons to associate
The word salt with money. Now, there's something that I have heard
so many times.
If you've been interested in history for any length of time you will probably have heard someone say this at some point to you.
"Did you know in the olden days salt was more valuable than gold?"
Well, I'm here to say...
No it wasn't. It was never more valuable than gold. Let's think about it for a moment.
Gold. Gold is extremely rare.
It's used for coinage.
It exists usually in minuscule quantities, and by and large you have to go to a hell of a lot of
effort to dig it up, to pan out of a river, to find it.
It's really difficult to get hold of, whereas salt in the ancient and medieval world, well...
Have you ever heard of a sea called the 'Mediterranean'? It has a very long coastline and
there's loads and loads of salt just in the water. All you have to do is
evaporate the water and hey, presto!
You've got a load of salt. Now, when I was in Malta
recently, actually I was on the isle of Gozo, when I saw these pools of seawater that had collected quite naturally on the beach and
they dried out, and you can see yes - there's loads of salt in them. In order to get salt in Gozo
all you have to do is go down to the
beach or the rocky areas on the coast and just scoop some of it up.
Nature's done all the work for you. Getting a hold of gold is not
anything like as easy as that, and people had ships so they can move stuff around.
How is it possible that anyone could say that salt was more val-...
Really dude you're talking about salt?
Do you have any idea what kind of salty comments, you're gonna get for this trivial nonsense?
You're wasting people's time. They could be curing cancer right now. You could be talking about something interesting!
Yes, it's true, it's true.
If I were to make a video about swords or spears or axes or something I would get at least
three times, perhaps five times as many viewers as I get
doing some other sort of historical video
But I want to talk about things other, sometimes, than weapons and warfare
But they won't let you! It's YouTube, so you have talk about something more engaging.
Something that people actually give a crap about.
Salt? Who discusses salt in detail?
Well you want me to say about it? Yeah, okay, so...
... it's not actually the weapon itself. It's the ammunition for a bit of weaponry...
So you would need a bow and I do
make the occasional video about bows, and will be making more.
But on its own it's not really a weapon. You're not going to fence with it or stab someone with it-
Oh, well that depends.
It depends on if you're doing it right. You have to use proper technique. If you want to stab with this, you have to make it more
rigid by grabbing it in the centre. Basically it becomes half-arrowing.
Yes, I suppose I use could some 'half-arrowing'.
But people carried knives. People carried knives pretty much as a standard
Why don't they just draw a knife and stab the guy? It would be a quicker and easier,
and you would have to invent a term for it.
Why am I not surprised that you don't want to talk about arrows?
What was the fire arrow video again that you were supposed to make?
Yes! all right it's true. It's true. Okay?
I haven't made that video and I will soon. I will make that video soon. Honest!
That's what he says!
But if you want to talk about stabbing then...
How about a proper tool for that?
What? You are threatening me now, are you?
All right, well I can threaten you with a sword, only I think
you'll find that my sword is a little bit more formidable than yours.
Are we gonna do this yeah? Okay, well if you want it that way...
I'd say that my money is on me. Oh, right?
Well, I can play this game too, you know?
Yeah, very mature yeah a greatsword. Yeah a 'great sword' yeah. Well, actually in duelling
I'm not so sure that a greatsword is so great.
Okay, it's bigger than a longsword, but bigger doesn't necessary mean better in dueling.
What you're forgetting is the huge reach advantage. In order to get into my measure, I...
Oh, I missed a bit
Oh yes: salt, so...
No, salt was not worth more than gold. In fact figures are readily available. For instance for Venice
1590
33 ducats would buy you a ton of salt.
But how it breaks down...
is quite interesting. You see, 33 ducats is an amount of gold that you could hold in your hand quite easily and a ton of
Salt is well, it's a ton of salt. You couldn't get that in your hand.
In fact
gold was worth, based on that valuation, about eleven thousand times more than salt, but
one ducat bought the merchant the salt. Three ducats he paid to have it shipped to Venice, and
the rest was profit and tax.
You see, people really needed salt, so they were prepared to pay quite a lot to get it.
A typical person went through about a hundred pounds of salt per year. It's not just eating the salt
but using the various things that salt was used for.
About a hundred pounds per person -most of it was used for food preservation.
Now, when
salt was taken inland, the mark-up was about 81%
Yeah, so you could see how the salt trade...
might have been worth more than the gold trade
But no way was salt ever more expensive than gold. I did get another figure for A.D. 200
Egypt, and there,
salt was only worth about two hundred and eighty three and a half times as much as gold, but it's still hundreds of times more
cheap than gold, so next time someone says to you, "And did you know that in the olden days?
salt used to be more valuable than gold?"
Say to them
"No."
"Think about that for a moment will you?"
"No."