POTOSI, THE ANDEAN MOUNTAIN OF SILVER

  

As early as the 1530s, Mexico exported silver too, and considerable amounts of it. Yet Mexico's many mining camps – Zacatecas, Guanajuato, Taxco, Pachuca, Real del Monte and the namesake San Luis Potosí – peaked only after 1690. In the 18th century, the Mexican peso or 'pillar dollar' took the world by storm. Even in the Andes of South America there were other silver cities (or towns) besides Potosí, including Oruro and Castrovirreyna in Peru. But no silver deposit in the world matched the Cerro Rico, and no other mining-refining conglomeration grew so large. Potosí was unique: a mining metropolis.

Thus Don Elias, like others, made the pilgrimage to the silver mountain. It was a divine prodigy, a hierophany. In 1580, Ottoman artists depicted Potosí as a slice of earthly paradise, the Cerro Rico lush and green, the city surrounded by crenellated walls. Potosí, as Don Quixote proclaimed, was the stuff of dreams. Another alms seeker, in 1600, declared the Cerro Rico the Eighth Wonder of the World. An indigenous visitor in 1615 gushed: 'Thanks to its mines, Castile is Castile, Rome is Rome, the pope is the pope, and the king is monarch of the world.' A 1602 Chinese world map identified the Cerro Rico as Bei Du Xi Shan, or 'Pei-tu-hsi mountain'.

For all its glory, Potosí was also the stuff of nightmares, a diorama of brutality, pollution and crime. What Don Elias might not have known in 1678 was that Potosí's reputation – and with it the Spanish Empire's – had a generation earlier suffered mightily. In 1647, amid royal bankruptcy, King Philip IV dispatched a former inquisitor to unravel a massive debasement scheme that had metastasised inside Potosí's royal mint. The plot corrupted nearly every official within 1,000 miles. Even Peru's viceroy was suspected of complicity. Potosí's debased coins, mostly pieces of eight, hit world markets after 1638, and before long merchants from Boston to Beijing were rejecting Potosí coins. The fountain of fortune had become a poisoned well.

It took more than a decade to hunt down and punish the great Potosí mint fraud's culprits and to restore the coinage to proper weight and purity. A new design debuted to signal the new coins, but winning back global trust in Potosí silver took decades. Into the 1670s, even as Don Elias took donations in exchange for sermons in Syriac, Sumatran pepper-growers balked at coins stamped with a 'P'.

Like the Bernard Madoff scandal of the 2000s, the Potosí mint fraud of the 1640s tells an interesting if not universal story. Nobody wanted to admit that they had been deceived. For Spain's King Philip IV, the mint fraud – an inside job – was a world-class embarrassment and a sign of the decline of his empire's fortunes. The global flood of bad coins hurt everyone, rich and poor. Genoese, Gujarati and Chinese bankers suffered 'haircuts', merchants worldwide forfeited precious ties of crosscultural trust, and soldiers throughout Eurasia saw their pay halved or worse.

Almost a century before Don Elias visited Potosí, Viceroy Francisco de Toledo revolutionised world silver production. Toledo was a hard-driving bureaucrat of the Spanish empire – and he more than any single man transformed Potosí from a hardscrabble mining camp into a bona fide city. It was a colossal undertaking, but one suited to the ambitions of King Philip II, the first European monarch to rule an empire upon which the sun never set. Toledo reached Potosí in 1572, anxious to flip it into the empire's motor of commerce and war.

By 1575, the viceroy had organised a sweeping labour draft, launched a 'high-tech' mill-building campaign, and overseen construction of a web of dams and canals to supply the Imperial Villa with year-round hydraulic power, all in the high Andes at the nadir of the Little Ice Age. Toledo also oversaw construction of the Potosí mint, staffed full-time with enslaved Africans. Its first coins were hoarded, higher in silver content than they were supposed to be, and overweight.

To read the complete article, see:
The first global city (https://aeon.co/essays/potosi-the-mountain-of-silver-that-was-the-first-global-city)

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