#monetary policy nerdery

[jawanaka]

Expanding on this because I wrote the above in a hurry on my phone while half asleep.

One of the first things Ciri does after taking the throne (in my headcannon) is to recall enormous amounts of coinage. Nilfgaard has just fought three long bloody and hideously expensive wars. How do goverments fund wars? Well they either raise taxes, take out loans or get more money some other way. Now in our modern day and age a goverment can simply digitally print more money, even if this risks inflation making it dangerous unless you happen to control the worlds reserve currency (which is why the US goverment debts can balloon to hideous size).

But in a premodern society the value of currency is primarily its inherit value in rare metals (gold or silver). So unless you literally struck gold or silver (which did happen: the spanish conquest of the new world is one example, the silver mines of Laurion who funded the athenian fleet that fought at Salamis another) the only way to print (mint) more money was to recall as much currency as possible and remint it, having diluted its contents with other metals such as tin or bronze (note: for practical purposes coins could never really be pure silver or gold, the metals are too fragile.)

Sidenote: ever wonder why coins have groves in the sides? Its so people can't file off the edges to get at the rare metals inside. In the Suns and Swallows series someone has figured out how to do this:

The coin was heavy, certainly feeling far purer then anything Yennefer had handled in a long time. Its sides were edged with long groves, one side showing the Nilfgaardian sun and the other Ciri's head in profile, scar promptly shown and imperial diadem seemingly leaping off her head.

Now Nilfgaard has during little more then a decade fought three long, bloody expensive wars. As a result, both they and the northern kingdoms have been forced to debase their curencies, leading to that kind of run-off inflation we all know and love. When combined with its existing debts this makes the government float dangerously close to insolvency, especially when the loans needed to finance post-war reconstruction come up for discussion. In The Swallow of Novigrad the viceregal goverment of the north has to put up its infrasture tolls for privatization to afford a loan:

“Infrastructure spending will bring benefits, not just costs.” Said Triss, who was sitting on Morvran’s left side. “Just the reconstruction of the Hindhold bridge together with the new southbound highway will help revitalize Velen and bring more gods to market in Novigrad. Shipping insurance rates have already gone down what with the peace with Skellige and with dredging along the Ismena your factories will be feed with all the mineral bounties of Mahakam. You all have a diverse set of business interests, surely you have taken that into your accounts?”  Master Vivaldi held up a hand “All well and good enchantress. It is not the utility of your projects that worries me, it is us being out with millions of oren and we need a better surety than the uncertain promise of a future economic boom.”  [...] Triss interjected. “A possibility master banker. What if we pledged the road tolls on the Hindhold bridge as surety? Say for a period of five years.”

(This is the bridge they are talking about btw)

So one of the first priorities of Ciri's new goverment is to get ahold of inflation. The way you do this is that you try and recall as much currency as possible, preferably not all of them at the same time, and remint them with a higher content in valuable metal to stabilize the currency. Because people will be suspicious of the old coins you might as well rebrand it, and of course with a new empress on the throne you need to smack her picture on it in a nice profile. Which is when Ciri insisted to show her scared side:

"It’s called a Solidus," Ciri explained. "It will form the basis for a revamp of the entire coinage system, Emhyr and Radovid having devalued the last ones to worthlessness to fund their wars," she shook her head, "took us half a year to agree on a design for that and I had to possibly lean on them to include the scar. 'Monarchs have to seem perfect', the things they tell you."

Since in premodern socoety the main way citizens would know what their monarch looks like is through the coins, this is how the peoples of Nilfgaard found out about her scar, leasing to both rumours based of the very sanitized version fo Ciri's life story Nilfgaards been putting out since been before she took the throne, as well as a short trend of faking scars.

So anyway, this is how it suddenly became a trend among young Nilfgaardian ladies to paint scars on their cheeks!

(I'm always taking worldbuilding questions btw!)

what's your favorite bit of worldbuilding nerdery for your empress ciri stories?

That Ciri distributes coins with the scared part of her face shown in the relief, to show she has nothing to hide and because the Nilfgaardian florin has been debased to oblivion and back and the imperial crown doesn’t actually have any money, having given monopolies and taxation privileges away for loans to fund the war effort. This spark both a rumour that Witchers practice ritual scarification and a short lived trend in very bad taste to paint a scar on your cheeks