Greenbacks”, “bucks”, “moola”, “dough”, “bacon” are slang words for money that are so common in today’s life that it doesn’t matter that there are more than twenty countries in the world. call their currency “dollar”. But few people know the origin of the name “dollar” is the birth name of Mary, the grandfather of Jesus: Saint Joachim.
To understand why the dollar is named after St. Gioakim , it is necessary to know the context of the European economy at the end of the fifteenth century. Most of the European currency was depreciated because of the constant wars that broke out across the continent and also because of the trade that kept precious metals flowing to the Far East in exchange for spices and silk. And so the European currency was poor, with very few precious metals.
The story begins in the city of Joachimsthal , named after Saint Gioakim , in the Kingdom of Bohemia, today the Czech Republic. At a time when most European countries were short of precious metals, rich silver deposits were discovered in this city. The count of the city, Hieronymus Schlick, ordered new coins to be minted with silver from the mines. These coins have Saint Gioakim on one side and a lion on the other, first minted in 1518.
The bronze “Joachimsthaler” was minted in 1525.
William Lyman Fawcett recounted in his book, published in 1879, titled “ Gold and Debt; an American Handbook of Finance “, he wrote that these new coins “had uniform weight and metal age, as merchants of the day wanted something of international standard, and soon the This coin was known throughout Europe as the silver of Schlicken (Schlicken thalers) or the silver of Saint Gioakim (Joachim’s thalers).
Eventually, the name Joachimsthaler was gradually reduced to taler in German, and from there the word daler for silver coins. By the mid-sixteenth century, English had adopted the German word into its language as “dollar” : a word for various forms of money across Europe, derived from the name of St. Gioakim.