On 2004-05-17, jacob navia wrote:

[Copied and redirected to ssh, since this possibly seems appropriate
there, being as it is a little historical diversion which might be
useful at an indefinite later point]

Trips to America were risky and extremely expensive
in 1492. The technology of that epoch required that
the Queen Isabel of Spain sold most of her jewel treasury
to finance it. It was a good investment of course, but trips

[Warning - rambling by someone with no grounding in economics bar
enthusiasm and knowing some words is to follow; please treat it as the
bored-evening digression it is g]

I've heard this a lot, pawning her jewels; how accurate is it, really? I
mean, we're talking three fairly common merchant ships and provisioning,
plus appropriate crews; not pocket change, but not exactly something you
would expect to tax the resources of even the monarch of a backwater
nation - especially when you consider that a year or so later, he sailed
with seventeen ships and fifteen hundred colonists, and funding doesn't
seem to have been a problem. 'Course, then he was talking gold g

(I wonder if an appropriate modern analogy would be asking somewhere
like .es or .nl to provide you some 747s... not unattainable, but not
something they'd do off the cuff)

[digs for a while]

Hmm. It seems that Isabella may have offer to pawn her jewels, but it
doesn't seem that she actually did; either or both parts of this may be
apocryphal - and probably no more than a demonstration of her intent to
carry through.

Two of the ships were provided by the town of Palos, which was
apparently owing the service of two caravels to the Crown (or Crowns?);
crew and tack quite likely included. Some cites seem to indicate that
the crown paid for the third (the Santa Maria), some that the town was
strongarmed into providing it, some that it came with Pinzon when he
joined the expedition. (the 1911 Britannica seems to suggest it just
appeared one night, which is probably unlikely g) Lot of variety in
the details between apparently authoritative accounts, which is only to
be expected (given the wide disparity on, eg, how much Apollo cost...)

All this aside...

http://worldebooklibrary.com/eBooks/...03/cc02v10.htm

(among others)

The cost to the crown appears to have been on the order of a million
maravedis, plus another couple of hundred thou from Columbus.

http://dinsdoc.com/sumner-1.htm

"The real was, therefore, 3.433 grams gross and 3.194 grams fine. It
consisted of 34 maravedis." [apparently talking of silver]

.... 93941.176470588235294117647058824 g.Ag to a million mar, sayeth my
calculator with delightfully spurious accuracy!

So, we're looking at a shade under 100kg of silver as the cost to the
crown. That's not astoundingly much, really, even by contemporary
standards...

"The excelente was rated at eleven reals and one maravedi, the intention
evidently being to rate the metals at 10 to 1"

So in gold a shade under 10kg, three hundred-odd troy ounces. I don't
seem to be able to find a contemporary context for that, but feel free
to play; there should be a contemportary European figure or two in
either gold or silver ounces.

But I think we can all agree they got a pretty good return on their
investment :-)

--
-Andrew Gray