FLOWERS
Conservative people use to laugh at "crypto" and advise to buy gold, forgetting that latter is just another "hype". The actual valuable metal of ancient times was bronze, I wonder if gold was kind of "paper money", introduced to keep the bronze for practical needs. Cannons were cast from bronze up to Napoleon's times, before that bronze was used for the mechanisms and tools, before that for axes, spears, arrowheads and swords. Gold was never used for anything but shiny/fancy stuff. Extreme value of gold is result of organized promotion, which couldn't have happened without assistance of religion, given that there was not much marketing and show business in those times.
We're used to money and it seems like an old invention but in the times of natural economy people didn't trade much and when they did they used pieces of metals, cattle, furs, wool, cloth, and what not. It seems inconvenient to us, but they didn't trade often/much. People were sold into slavery (or marriages) for metal tools/weapons and cattle. Every craft/trade had a particular supply chain and customer base and typical "exchange rates" were known. In Russian Empire of 1800+ many peasants never used money since the only stuff they ever bought (from a local blacksmith) was axe, horseshoes and nails which they paid for with whatever they produced. They paid taxes to their lord the same way. This was a normal mode of operation for any rural economy. Were there other economies 1000 years ago?
TAX
Persian word for money is pool (پول). In Hindi pool (फूल) means flower. Why such a drastic shift of meaning for such basic words in relative languages? In India there is an old tradition of donating flowers to temples. People buy flowers and bring them to temple as an offering. Flowers are used to decorate the temple. Old Persian word for god is baga 𐏎, Persian word for tax is baj (باژ).
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Warlord or chieftain wouldn't invent money: just go and take, or demand. Idea of money is very abstract and yet necessary for those who dealt with people of many different trades/crafts, and dealt a lot. Two very old professions come to mind: priests and prostitutes. Given popularity of temple prostitution we don't have to think twice. This is enough customers and public trust to introduce useless gold metal coins into circulation. The old times aren't so old, BTW, this temple business was still on in India when British arrived. The statue on the left is from Belur, India, given the quality, probably 1400+. Iran and Mesopotamiah must have had similar stuff all over them not so long ago, unfortunately wiped out by Islam. Vatican still has some on display as "antique art" (right). The fact that it's "goddess" means the same as it meant in India or Babylon, why would Europe be any different?
LILY
Another hint is that Sumerian (and later Akkadian) word for god was dingir 𒀭 which looks like a star or ... a flower and sounds very much like tengrian god tengri which might be the true origin of Central Asian currency tenge which is the acknowledged origin of Russian dengi (деньги). Given the Persian roots of tengrian mythology this is unlikely a coincidence. Origins of tenge were probably "forgotten" with the islamization of Central Asia in late medieval.
Given Persian traditional woman/garden/god(Bacchus) metaphor the flower interpretation of 𒀭 is very likely. Similar "herbal" parallel is Chinese rice 米 character. We also know this character as asterisk *. The name hints it's a star, but it's used for multiplication of people. There is actually no contradiction between star and flower meanings: night sky is a celestial woman "garden of stars", thus star is a "heavenly flower". Yet another version of this is British octopus flag aka "Union Jack".
Since we know that Europe was barely inhabited in year 1000 this fact from wiki reads very different now: first minting of the florin occurred in 1252 ... in the 14th century, about 150 European states and local coin-issuing authorities made their own copies of the florin. They forgot to mention that the name of the coin meant flower, what a coincidence, it even had lily on it (below), for those who didn't speak Italian. Florin got so popular because it was probably the first European gold coin. If gold had any objective value at that time, nobody would care about copying the name. The "brand" was so important because the value of the coin was "imaginary".
The flower/female sexual metaphor is an old one. The choice of flower is also not accidental. We see lily all over Europe as heraldic fleur-de-lis symbol: ⚜. It, coincidentally, matches the name of Persian Sassanid Empire derived from legendary Sasan who's name sounds like lily in Persian: sosan (سوسن). Note that official etymology intentionally lies about Hellenistic/Egyptian origins of the word, despite of the well known ancient Persian city of Susa aka Shush, called after lily.
WAR
We know that people didn't trade much back then and there weren't many churches in 1300 or even 1400, there were barely any people anywhere to begin with - Western Europe was just being colonized. How did gold coins get so popular so fast, given 0 worth? My theory is that florins were paid to soldiers, who immediately spent them on women, who, usually, followed the armies. Each King had a court and an army: courtesan first meant a court lady, later high class prostitute. The armies grew and so did the numbers of courtesans. Here is a piece of French satire from 1500+:
This number is exaggeration, of course, but in medieval those women, paid in gold, constituted significant part of the army, and thus, economy. They spent shiny yellow coins on necessities, and people happily accepted them, knowing that coins are backed by services that are always in high demand.
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