In Pirates of the Caribbean 1: The Curse of the Black Pearl, the captain Barbosa and the crew of the Black Pearl are cursed by Aztec gold coins, and all those who take Aztec gold coins out of the box and squander them lose all feelings, and although they have endless desires, they can no longer enjoy a little pleasure. Every night of the full moon, they turn into skeletons and cannot die, becoming the living dead who can never escape the torment of desire. Until all the Aztec gold coins are collected again, plus the blood of Bill Sr., the curse will not be lifted.
Pirates of the Caribbean
The Aztec gold coins in the play were gifts used by the Aztecs to bribe the Spanish colonist Cortés to avoid the slaughter. Cortez accepted the gift but broke his promise, and insatiably destroyed the Aztec Empire. The greed and meanness of the Spanish colonists angered the gods, so the gold coins were cursed, and anyone who took the gold coins would be punished for eternity. Although the plot of the movie is fake, the art is based on real life. Historically, Spanish colonization plundered vast amounts of gold and silver from the Americas through brutal means. But like Captain Barbosa, after a period of squandering, Spain was cursed by the wealth from the Americas, and fell from an empire that never set to a third-rate country.
On August 3, 1492, the Italian navigator Columbus, with the support of Queen Isabella of Spain, led 87 sailors and sailed west from the Spanish port of Baros in three sailing ships. Earlier, the Portuguese navigator Dias sailed south along the African coastline to the Cape of Good Hope, the southernmost point of Africa, and initially opened a new route to the East. Columbus believed that the Earth was a sphere and that sailing west could also reach the east. But he miscalculated the size of the Earth and was convinced that India could be reached by traveling three or four thousand miles west. With this plan, Columbus successively requested funding from the kings of Portugal, England, France and other countries, but to no avail. It wasn't until Queen Isabella saw the pearl that Columbus had the opportunity to show his talents.
Before setting out, Columbus promised to reach the East, bring back wealth to Spain, and even confidently carried credentials to the Indian monarch and the Chinese emperor. On October 12, Columbus' fleet finally saw land, but it was a new continent, not India, and it did not have the wealth he dreamed of. After returning to Spain, Columbus brought back only a few local natives, convinced that he had arrived in India, and Columbus called these lands Indians. Over the next eight years, Columbus made three more voyages west, but none of them brought back wealth. People say he was a liar, who was stripped of his property by the state and eventually died of poverty.
Columbus discovers the New World
Misled by Columbus, Spain once again lagged behind Portugal in opening new shipping routes. On 20 May 1498, the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama reached India around the Cape of Good Hope, and in September da Gama returned to Portugal. Although the losses were enormous, losing more than half of his crew and two of the four sailing ships, the spices he brought back from India were worth 60 times the total cost of his expedition. The triumphant return of da Gama caused a sensation throughout Portugal, and they reached the true East, the place of gold in Marco Polo's travels, rather than the desolate "India" discovered by Columbus.
After that, spices, silk and tea from the East were continuously transported to Europe through the Portuguese fleet, and the Portuguese made a lot of money from it. The huge profits attracted the Spaniards, Dutch, and English to trade in the East. However, Europe was in short supply, and there was no way to find goods that attracted Orientals. The Orient's abundant and mostly self-sufficient small-scale peasant economy created an obstacle to the importation of European commodities.
In order to buy oriental goods, Europeans can only exchange real money for silver. Gold and silver mining is far less than commodity production, and reserves are limited. The huge international trade deficit has led to a large amount of gold and silver flowing into Asia in Europe, and there has been a serious "silver shortage" throughout Europe. The "silver famine" led to the primitive trade in barter in some parts of Europe, and the salt of western Europe, pepper in the East Indies, and the dye "carmine" became physical currency, and a pound of "carmine" was worth a pound at that time, and pepper was almost equivalent to currency, so much so that the German princes called their bankers "peppermen". Just when the big guy was short of money, there was good news from the New World.
pepper
The New World discovered by Columbus, although it did not bring wealth, Spain did not abandon its colonization of the New World. On the one hand, fervent Catholic missionaries wanted to spread the gospel of God throughout the New World, and on the other hand, if Spain abandoned its colonization of the New World, it was likely to be replaced by other competitors. Legends of gold revealed by local natives also inspired Spanish adventurers to go deep inland.
In 1519, Cortés led only more than 600 people to destroy the Aztec Empire with the cooperation of local indigenous tribes, and seized a lot of wealth. In 1532, Pizarro, another colonist, replicated Cortés' success, leading 62 cavalry and 106 infantry to defeat the Inca Empire, which had a population of more than six million! He plundered much more wealth and more despicable means than Cortés. However, whether it was Cortés or Pizarro, the wealth they seized was insignificant in terms of the volume of trade between East and West, and it was the silver mines buried under the lands they conquered that were the key to the West's cracking of the "silver famine".
The Aztec Empire and the Inca Empire
The discovery of the Potosí silver mine in Peru in 1545, the silver mine in Sactecas in Mexico in 1548, and the silver mine in Guanajuato in 1558 made the Spaniards ecstatic. In particular, the Potosí Silver Mine, the world's largest silver mine at the time, was mined by the Spaniards for more than a century. At its peak, it accounted for half of the world's silver production. Together with other silver mines, the Americas accounted for 75% of the world's silver production, and by the 17th century it accounted for 87%, and as much as 500,000 pounds of silver flowed into Europe from the Americas each year. After these gold and silver were transported to Europe, most of them were minted into currency and entered the circulation field, and the European "silver shortage" was swept away.
Behind the huge wealth is the endless blood and tears of the local natives, many natives are forcibly conscripted into the silver mines every year, and the poor working conditions and the brutal oppression of the Spaniards have caused a large number of deaths among the miners. In 1638, the Augustinian friar Frei Antoni Karancha wrote: "For every peso minted in Potosi, a corresponding 10 Indians died deep in the mines. "The silver mine is located in the Andes at an altitude of 4,000 meters, and it is not easy to transport silver to the port, and there are no large animals on the American continent, only alpacas. Alpacas can carry things, but they are not much better than sheep. The natives were used as coolies to transport silver, and died in large numbers on the way. Throughout the colonial period, up to 8 million Indians died in the mines. The high mortality rate has plunged indigenous people into despair, so much so that when someone answers, relatives and friends often hold funerals for him beforehand. Some indigenous women even die once they give birth to a boy, lest he grow up in the mines.
Shipping silver
The wealth of the natives in exchange for their blood, sweat and lives quickly made Spain strong, and Charles V used the endless flow of gold and silver in the Americas to defeat a group of opponents and establish the first empire in human history. However, by the reign of his son Philip II, Spain was not able to do so, declaring the state bankrupt three times (1557, 1575 and 1596). Part of this was due to Charles V's father-son militarism, which led Spain to make numerous enemies, fought almost all European countries, and a long war dragged down the empire's finances. Another part was due to the rise of Britain, the Netherlands and France, which cost Spain its hegemonic status. However, the most important reason was that within the Spanish Empire, the empire failed to make good use of the wealth of the Americas, but was "cursed" by wealth.
In the eyes of the Spaniards, wealth equals money, money equals gold and silver, and the more gold and silver monopolized, the stronger the country, which was also the view of most people at that time. The Spanish royal family, which was heavily golden, believed that if it controlled gold and silver, it controlled everything, turned gold and silver into luxury goods and wars, and did not use wealth for investment and reproduction for the benefit of the country and the people. The problem is that the core of the economy is productivity, not money.
During the Spring and Autumn Period, Qi Xiang Guan Zhong sent people to Hengshan State to deliberately raise the price to purchase ordnance in order to obtain Hengshan State. Seeing that it was profitable, the monarch of Hengshan encouraged the people to give up agricultural production and make every effort to build armaments and sell them to the State of Qi. Guan Zhong saw that Hengshan State had taken the bait, so he bought grain from countries around Hengshan Country at a high price, and then sent troops to Hengshan Country. Hengshan State was almost sold out of arms, and could not buy food, so he had to surrender. Although Spain is not as poor as the small country of Hengshan, only money remains, but its emphasis on money and contempt for productivity has had a disastrous effect.
Spain's American colonies
Inflation was the first curse brought to Spain by gold and silver in the Americas, and money, like ordinary goods, naturally depreciated if supply exceeded demand. After a large amount of gold and silver flowed into Europe to solve the "silver shortage", a "price revolution" that lasted for more than a century followed. From 1500 to 1620, prices in Spain increased fourfold in more than a century. Unlike the price increase caused by the indiscriminate issuance of bad money and paper money since then, the 4-fold increase here is the depreciation of the currency. From the royal family down to the common people, they all suffered heavy losses in this "price revolution". The Spanish crown's gold and silver shrank in the devaluation of the currency, and it was unable to cope with the protracted war. Feudal lords received fixed monetary rent on long-term contracts, which shrank as the currency depreciated, and many lords were on the verge of bankruptcy. The people at the bottom are the biggest victims, their incomes are rising far from keeping up with prices, and their purchasing power and living standards are falling sharply.
Inflation was followed by a second curse—the bankruptcy of industry and commerce. On the one hand, the purchasing power of the people has declined, resulting in an increasingly narrow domestic market, and local goods cannot expand production and spread costs. On the other hand, inflation caused high production costs, and raw materials or labor that could be obtained for one gold coin in England could cost ten gold coins in Spain. As a result, Spanish goods are not competitive internationally, and even foreign goods are beaten in the domestic market. Under the internal and external attack, Spain's native industry and commerce were completely defeated and became a backward agricultural country.
In 1776, Adam Smith, the "father of economics" in Britain, published the magnum opus "The Wealth of Nations" on liberal economics, in which Adam Smith used Spain as a negative example and attacked the idea that "money is strong in many countries". It is argued that a country's wealth ultimately depends on the products of labor that a country can use to exchange with other countries, and therefore productivity is the most important source of a country's wealth. To become a rich country, it is necessary to develop its own productive forces, and then vigorously develop foreign trade on the basis of expanding productive forces and earn economic benefits in trade. However, when "The Wealth of Nations" was born, Spain was already terminally ill and unable to return from the "curse" of American gold and silver. When the gold and silver of the Americas were exhausted and colonial rule collapsed, the last rays of the afterglow of Spain were setting.