Grabbing for Gold

In 2011, while Michelle Obama was encouraging Americans to grow gardens to improve their health and finances, another first lady, Leila Trabelsi of Tunisia, was taking a healthy chunk out of Tunisia’s financial reserves. When she and hubby President Ben Ali fled the country, the first lady stopped at the Central Bank, where she carted off, with the help of her private militia, gold barsworth $50-$75 million. The newly appointed bank president denied the incident as he tried to assure the global community that Tunisia remained financially sound. However, Ben Ali and Trabelsi were subsequently tried – in absentia – and found guilty of that and other crimes. If Trabelsi did escape with the gold (and she probably did as she and hubby are living luxurious lives in Saudi Arabia) she joins a long, historical parade of gold grabbers.

Let’s start with the Scythians (8^th-1^st century BC), skilled nomadic horsemen who repeatedly raided Assyria, eastern Asia, and Greek cities for gold. Although Herodotus characterized the Scythians as barbarians who drank from skulls and readied females for combat by removing a breast, their gold craftsmanship remains esteemed to this day. But, as much as the Scythians prized gold, they freely parted with their plunder to honor their dead. In Siberia, one excavated Scythian gravesite containing a man and a woman yielded no less than 44 pounds of gold ornament. But the Scythians may have been small-time thieves compared to the Crusaders. 

The Byzantine Greek historian Nicetas Chroniates describes the Crusaders’ sack of Constantinople: ”Nor can the violation of the Great Church {Santa Sophia} be listened to with equanimity. For the sacred altar, formed of all kinds of precious materials and admired by the whole world, was broken into bits and distributed among the soldiers, as was all the other sacred wealth of so great and infinite splendor.” Approximately 150 churches in Constantinople met a similar fate. Looters took gold altars, chalices, and crosiers. Venice and the Vatican itself received cartloads of gold and silver. Regrettably, the plundering also included rape, arson, and murder, although the emperor Alexius escaped with his favorite child and 10,000 pieces of gold.

When the Europeans sailed to the new world, they brought their plundering ways with them. Conquistador Hernando Cortez’s looting of the Aztec empire resulted in three galleons full of gold bars, jewelry, and exotic animals. This convoy, however, was intercepted off the coast of Portugal by Jean Fleury, a French privateer, who divested two of Cortez’s of their treasure. 

Likewise, in Peru, Francisco Pizarro accumulated Incan gold for the Spanish crown. Pizarro’s tactics included throwing Atahualpa, the Inca emperor, in a prison cell and not releasing him until the cell was full of gold. Unfortunately, after Atahualpa was released, Pizarro executed him. (After Atahualpa’s death, the Inca Empire fell into decline. Was the decline a result of the Inca’s losing their “unique Inca,” or because they lost their gold?)

But Pizarro got his comeuppance when Sir Francis Drake attacked and acquired one of his laden ships. Thus began the “golden age” of piracy (which presently is enjoying a revival in Somalia.)