Quote:
Originally Posted by whswhs
I don't know the details of financial transactions in the Middle Ages. Did they have anything like letters of credit? Was there a network of merchants who discounted each other's notes? I'm not focusing this particular campaign on mercantile dealings, so I've been assuming that payments are largely handled off camera—magically, as it were.
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Credit transfers are fairly doable in "your" period. Jewish money lenders and the Knights Templar can help with that, and there are Italian bankers too although they may not have a strong presence in England. Then again, they might. I think it's reasonable to assume that they sent out agents whereever the money are, and the English coinage system was much more stable, because of a royally controlled mint that did not debase the coins, than that of other European nations of that period.
All of those use letters of credit, but rarely or never transferable
between groups, that is if you deposit money with a Jewish money lender/banker/whatever, the letter of credit he writes for you will be recognized by other Jews (at least a lot of other Jews, maybe not all), but not by the Templars or the Italians. And so forth.
In terms of reach, size and consistency, the Templars are probably your best bet, since they function as a Europe-wide corporation, with a presence in most Catholic lands (including a strong presence in England), and in the Middle East, especially the Holy Land. They get
destroyed by the King of France in 1307 AD or so (I'm pretty sure the actual crackdown happened on a Friday the 13th), IIRC, so if your campaign is set after that, there'll be a niche for the Jews and Italians to exploit.
Some characters may have prejudices that makes them disinclined, perhaps even strongly so, to do business with Jews (look up "blood libel", and so forth). Other characters may believe some of the rumours about the Templars (devil worship, ritualistic homosexuality, strongly heretical or even downright pagan practices) and refuse to do business with those, but character who do either are probably people disinclined to rational thought and/or actively looking for reasons to hate their fellow men.
The Jews are exempt from the Christian law against usury, the charging of interest of any kind (even 0.01% interest per decade would be a grave sin!) making them more flexible than the alternatives, in theory, but the Templars and the Italian bankers found all sorts of loopholes against the usury laws, so there's probably no difference there in practice.
Assuming the university is in a decently sized town to attract a banking agent of one of the available flavours (which would probably be the case if there are a couple of hundred students per year, year after year, all needing to have money "wired" to them from home), it's perfectly sensible to sweep everything under the carpet and just assume it works smoothly. Unless of course the campaign starts in 1305 or 06 and the banking agent is a Templar...