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Comment by robterrell | Hacker News Reader

This has me hoping the Vesuvius prize finds an ancient Roman bond that needs to get paid out.

Pity that the Holy Roman Empire dissolved a while ago.

Given that several states claim to be Rom's successor, it shouldn't be that hard to find someone to take the responsibility.

No state does. The Russian state started in 1917 and disclaimed all debts of the Czar. The Ottoman empire ended and was replaced with the Republic of Turkey. Modern Germany doesn't inherit from any of the predecessor states after WWI and the Nazi era.

I'm currently reading a book about a war in the 17th century. One thing that is entirely different from today is how kings and governments could just stop paying back their lenders and there was nothing you could do about it but send angry letters...

Ofcourse it worked the other way too. Entire armies of paid mercenaries could just take the money and run into the night.

Not to say that Kings just completely stopping payment to lenders never happened, but this paper argues (at least for the case of Philip II, who defaulted 4 times) that lenders had sufficient leverage to ensure that while kings might miss payments, that kings would eventually continue to pay. And of course, this makes some sense - why would people lend money to someone they had absolutely no leverage over?

The paper argues that lenders (or at least Genoese lenders who provided at least 2/3 of short terms loans) were able to work as a bloc with sufficient power to compel the King to eventually resume payments. As you pointed out, the King is mainly lending money to pay for armies. Being cut-off from credit is the same thing as being cut off from his army.

An interesting point that this paper makes at the end is that in a pre-modern context, lenders would have understood that sometimes... shit happens. They understood what the mechanisms a King would have for generating revenue, and that these revenue streams were not stable (taxation and silver shipments from the New World in Philippe's case), and that a King could in deep default "in good faith" and still be a "good enough" financial situation in subsequent years. That is in fact why the King even needed to borrow money from them to begin with.

https://www.bde.es/f/webpi/SES/seminars/2009/files/sie0927.p...

Just ask lenders to Argentina about how getting paid back is going.

Modern Germany doesn't inherit from any of the predecessor states after WWI and the Nazi era.

Not quite. Its criminal code inherits directly from that of the 1871 Reich (including quite notoriously Paragraphs 175 and 218).

But it is correct to say that its constitution inherits only back to 1919, and it never maintained any pretense of connection to the Holy Roman Empire.

It was neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.

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