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Canemacar posted:So if we open the list of Historical Rich Persons to include heads of state, at least in monarchical governments, who would be the richest? I think it becomes even less well-defined than it currently is, because even absolute monarchs don't own the stuff they notionally have in the same way that a regular rich person owns their fortune. Mansa Munsa may have "owned" a ton of stuff but there were also political constraints on what he could do with it that wouldn't apply to a bank account. This can be an issue for regular rich people too (if they have a bunch of money in illiquid assets, for instance) but it's even more of a problem here CommonShore posted:Probably Victoria. This is a particularly extreme case of how you could go wrong doing this!
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Feb 24, 2017 21:31
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Jeb Bush 2012 posted:I think it becomes even less well-defined than it currently is, because even absolute monarchs don't own the stuff they notionally have in the same way that a regular rich person owns their fortune. Mansa Munsa may have "owned" a ton of stuff but there were also political constraints on what he could do with it that wouldn't apply to a bank account. Well yeah. I just picked the monarch nominally atop the empire which controlled the greatest share of the world's economy. I'm not wrong within the constraints of the question, but she's certainly not in any practical sense the richest person in history
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Feb 24, 2017 22:00
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Hands up if you vote for Leopold II
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Feb 24, 2017 22:14
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King Abdullah?
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Feb 24, 2017 22:18
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Molentik posted:Hands up if you vote for Leopold II I didn't meet quota, so I'm out.
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Feb 24, 2017 22:19
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If by rich we mean 'endowed of vast resources and the means to deploy those resources', Vladdy Putin's gotta be in the top five unless we're not counting our contemporaries
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Feb 24, 2017 22:38
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heads of state are chumps, put richelieu on the list
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Feb 24, 2017 22:46
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I suppose it stops looking like wealth if it's the state that owns the assets and the individual just has control of the entire state.
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Feb 24, 2017 22:51
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SlothfulCobra posted:I suppose it stops looking like wealth if it's the state that owns the assets and the individual just has control of the entire state. There are points in time where this becomes blurry. For example, Augustus and Egypt. Or Russian tsars such as Peter.
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Feb 24, 2017 23:03
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So we need to pick a metric to account for these variables. On one hand we could index the GDP, national debt, and non-liquid assets, vs a percentage of government control and individual autonomy in the head of state to produce an adjusted wealth score. Or we could ignore all of that and do it via swagger score, in which case it goes to Charles II of England: 
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Feb 24, 2017 23:12
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CommonShore posted:So we need to pick a metric to account for these variables. I'll counter that with the pimp of Versailles himself, Louis the XIV. 
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Feb 25, 2017 01:38
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HEY GAIL posted:heads of state are chumps, put richelieu on the list Or Popes! Technically heads of state though
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Feb 25, 2017 01:46
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Canemacar posted:I'll counter that with the pimp of Versailles himself, Louis the XIV. Louis had the swag, but not the swagger.
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Feb 25, 2017 02:44
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bean_shadow posted:I didn't meet quota, so I'm out. Very clever.
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Feb 25, 2017 02:57
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I find it interesting both those portraits seem to deemphasize symbols of royal power, with crowns and thrones shunted into the shadows. On an unrelated subject I was skimming a book full of tidbits about various cultures around the world and I found an odd little founding myth for the Sumatran Kingdom of MInangkabau: quote:In the beginning there was only the Light of Mohammad, through which God created the universe. From the Light came angels and Adam, and from Adam descended Alexander the Great, whose wife was a nymph from Paradise. Upon his death, the three sons of Alexander the Great, Diraja, Alif, and Depang, set sail around the world, taking with them their late father's crown. Some say the princes argued rightful owership; some say their ship ran aground. But the crown was lost in the sea. A follower of Diraja, a trickster and master gold-smith, fashioned a replica of the crown and urged Diraja to tell his brothers he had found the original. Diraja did so, claiming the crown as his own. At this, the brothers parted. Prince Depang sailed off to the Land of Sunrise, becoming Emperor of Japan; Prince Alif traveled to the Land of Sunset, where he proclaimed himself Sultan of Turkey. Prince Diraja found the Land between Sunrise and Sunset, finding himself at the top of a mountain. It was there that the Minangkabau world began, with Maharajah Diraja as its first king.
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Feb 25, 2017 03:36
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Squalid posted:I find it interesting both those portraits seem to deemphasize symbols of royal power, with crowns and thrones shunted into the shadows. I like how both portraits of Charles II feature him with the baton. And that's a fun story.
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Feb 25, 2017 04:00
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Yo ancient thread, looks like I'm going back to Rome for work in the next 6 months. Any specific photography requests?
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Feb 25, 2017 04:56
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Immanentized posted:Yo ancient thread, looks like I'm going back to Rome for work in the next 6 months. Any specific photography requests? Cats among Roman ruins.
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Feb 25, 2017 05:43
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bean_shadow posted:I was looking at a list of the wealthiest historical figures and Marcus Licinius Crassus often tops the list at, according to Pliny the Elder, 200 million sesterces or $169.8 billion in today's money ("This would place Crassus's net worth equal to the total annual budget of the Roman treasury."). But underneath is listed Augustus at, supposedly, $4.6 trillion because he personally owned all of Egypt. So if Augustus was actually that rich, why is Crassus considered the richest (besides Musa I of Mali in the 14th century at $400 billion)? "After several years of exile, Crassus was able to rebuild his family fortune by seizing the property of executed convicts for himself." That is one way of putting it, I guess
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Feb 25, 2017 08:28
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Squalid posted:I find it interesting both those portraits seem to deemphasize symbols of royal power, with crowns and thrones shunted into the shadows. There's a national myth somewhere in SE Asia based on Rome, although I forgot the details. Not really ancient history, but since we're already speaking of personal wealth, how much would 20 million 16th century ducats be in today's cash and how far it is from being on the stupid rich list?
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Feb 25, 2017 10:03
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According to some quick wikipedia, a Venetian ducat (standard for 500 years) was 0.12oz of gold. Ignoring the issue of purity of the metal and doing some napkin math, that's around $150.87 per ducat, so 20 million of them is worth around 3 billion dollars. The owner wouldn't get listed on the Forbes 500, but pretty close -- #500, a co-founder of AirBnB, has $3.3 billion.
fantastic in plastic fucked around with this message at 10:15 on Feb 25, 2017 |
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Feb 25, 2017 10:12
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Thanks. 
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Feb 25, 2017 10:16
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Can you readily compare the economic value of someone's fortune like that, just by calculating the melt value of the gold? Are there other values that need to be taken into account, like the increased value of fiat currency in an agrarian society?
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Feb 25, 2017 10:18
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yeah it seems like a better measure than US$(2017) would be in order like how many jeroboams of wine/hogsheads of apples/chains of land/some more complex multiple index of those and other valuables would it be
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Feb 25, 2017 10:24
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my dad posted:There's a national myth somewhere in SE Asia based on Rome, although I forgot the details. It's this story about an ancient Malaysian kingdom. The founder was a Roman descended from Alexander the Great. He was shipwrecked in Malaysia when a phoenix attacked his fleet while on the way to China.
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Feb 25, 2017 10:27
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bedpan posted:"After several years of exile, Crassus was able to rebuild his family fortune by seizing the property of executed convicts for himself." I thought one of the ways he made money was not only buying the property of burning buildings at low prices but also controlling the fire brigade and making people fork over money in order for them to put out the fire.
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Feb 25, 2017 13:08
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bean_shadow posted:I thought one of the ways he made money was not only buying the property of burning buildings at low prices but also controlling the fire brigade and making people fork over money in order for them to put out the fire. civil asset forfeiture seems easier and more boring, though yeah that's the tale I first knew him from
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Feb 25, 2017 13:18
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bean_shadow posted:I thought one of the ways he made money was not only buying the property of burning buildings at low prices but also controlling the fire brigade and making people fork over money in order for them to put out the fire. Not exactly. There wasn't a public fire brigade in Rome at the time, so he would wait until the building was about to catch fire, negotiate to buy it from the owner for extremely cheap, and then have his slaves and hirelings move in to put it out. If you didn't like his price, tough poo poo, Crassus will gladly buy the smoking rubble for an appropriately low price and redevelop it himself. However it is slightly disingenuous for that page to say that he made money by seizing the property of convicts. The "convicts" were the many, many people proscribed by Sulla for the chief purpose of grabbing their wealth for himself and his supporters. A number of them were proscribed at Crassus' actual instigation and he made a fortune on the proscriptions, having not been born into an especially rich family. It's like saying that Leopold II became rich by employing cheap labor in the rubber industry. Like yeah technically it is true, but kind of leaves out an important bit.
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Feb 25, 2017 13:34
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Tasteful Dickpic posted:Can you readily compare the economic value of someone's fortune like that, just by calculating the melt value of the gold? I'd say it's very comparable, since most modern billionaires have the majority of their wealth tied up in things like stock and real estate, which like melted down gold or even vast stocks of gold coin, isn't particularly liquid for day to day purchases. Peanut Butler posted:yeah it seems like a better measure than US$(2017) would be in order Frankly, that's a thing to measure that more applies to comparing wealth of middle class sorts of people. When you have real piles of wealth, you're beyond the point where what you can actually buy matters. Bill Gates could hypothetically buy 17 billion large boxes of Crispix cereal, but no one could eat that many and there's never been that many available to buy at one time, you know?
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Feb 25, 2017 16:26
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skasion posted:Not exactly. There wasn't a public fire brigade in Rome at the time, so he would wait until the building was about to catch fire, negotiate to buy it from the owner for extremely cheap, and then have his slaves and hirelings move in to put it out. If you didn't like his price, tough poo poo, Crassus will gladly buy the smoking rubble for an appropriately low price and redevelop it himself. I think one of the most amazing thing about Cra$$us and his money, is that he was rich for a long time, had most of his fortune taken by the state, and re-made his fortune and became even wealthier. Or at least that's how I remember it.
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Feb 25, 2017 17:54
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Tell me about Militum Flavius Stilicho! Gibbon seems to credit him with 'celestial gift', and a (otherwise uninteresting) history light show on TV says he basically fought back two barbarian invasions on his own 
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Feb 25, 2017 20:27
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Tias posted:Tell me about Militum Flavius Stilicho! Gibbon seems to credit him with 'celestial gift', and a (otherwise uninteresting) history light show on TV says he basically fought back two barbarian invasions on his own Well Stilicho was (sort of) half "barbarian" himself. The guy was basically the nemesis of Alaric the Goth and the two spent a lot of time opposing each other despite being fairly similar in a number of ways. For starters Alaric was looking to become more Roman than the current crop of Romans and find a place for the Goths to settle, whilst Stilicho was appointed Magister Militum by first the eastern and then the Western Emperors to prevent that, or any other barbarian attacks, from happening. The thing was Alaric was sometimes employed by the Romans too to do similar things. I think he was even put in charge of Iliriya for a few years. The difference was, in the book that I read anyway, that Stilicho was working inside the Empire. His mother and father had been given special dispensation by the emperor to marry because his father was a Visigoth. However he had, essentially, abandoned any claim to "gothness" during his rise through the Roman ranks. Alaric on the other hand was both a Gothic king and a Roman functionary. The problem was that the Roman political establishment would not trust Alaric with anything and so kept giving him territory and then declaring that he was an outlaw. Stilicho was usually the guy to go and beat the crap out of Alaric when that happened. Unfortunately it didn't end particularly well for Stilicho, a rumour started in the Western part of the Empire that he was planning on removing the emperor and appointing his own son. This lead to his troops mutinying, and handing him over to the Emperor before a progrom was launched against the "barbarians" living in Italy. The majority of whom then went to join Alaric and got to join him when he sacked Rome.
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Feb 25, 2017 20:57
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Here's a cool finding in Ethiopia.
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Feb 25, 2017 21:13
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fishmech posted:some drat good points Thanks, that was really insightful! I feel wiser now.
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Feb 25, 2017 21:16
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Stilicho's barbarian ancestry was Vandal rather than Gothic, but yeah he was extremely similar to Gothic leaders of the period.
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Feb 25, 2017 21:21
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Josef bugman posted:Well Stilicho was (sort of) half "barbarian" himself. The guy was basically the nemesis of Alaric the Goth and the two spent a lot of time opposing each other despite being fairly similar in a number of ways. For starters Alaric was looking to become more Roman than the current crop of Romans and find a place for the Goths to settle, whilst Stilicho was appointed Magister Militum by first the eastern and then the Western Emperors to prevent that, or any other barbarian attacks, from happening. The thing was Alaric was sometimes employed by the Romans too to do similar things. I think he was even put in charge of Iliriya for a few years. A rare case where the troops being loyal to the emperor and not their general resulted in Rome falling.
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Feb 25, 2017 21:33
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Canemacar posted:I'll counter that with the pimp of Versailles himself, Louis the XIV. Charles II and Louis XIV were first cousins, and it's really obvious looking at them side-by-side.
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Feb 26, 2017 00:06
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Tias posted:Tell me about Militum Flavius Stilicho! Gibbon seems to credit him with 'celestial gift', and a (otherwise uninteresting) history light show on TV says he basically fought back two barbarian invasions on his own I heard he had, like, thirty goddamn dicks.
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Feb 26, 2017 01:21
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Well, Flavius Aetius fought Attila the Hun. Top that.
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Feb 26, 2017 01:53
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Aetius was a chump. He's like the anti-Crassus, dude saw that the building was on fire so he went around selling the burning bits off a bunch of random bystanders so it wouldn't be his problem anymore. Also his failure to do anything about Gaiseric's seizure of Africa directly caused the collapse of central Roman power.
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Feb 26, 2017 03:12
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