Aftermath of a Midas-weapon war - what to do with all that gold?

Question

After reading the question Are “Midas” swords useless for warfare? it really tricked my mind of finding ways on what to do will all that gold.

So I was wondering: assume a war broke out and you used your Midas weapons to instantly kill soldiers (being wounded with it will turn you to gold) and you also used Midas arrow tips for your archers. Now your land is full of gold.

What is the most practical way of "cleaning" your Kingdom?

If you actually displayed your gold in your castle, or throughout your kingdom, I think it would invite other kingdoms to try and conquer you, since defeating you will grant them riches beyond imagination. You can't use gold for all of your metallurgy since pure gold is soft. And having to haul dead gold corpses inside your castle is a pain. Moreover I think it would be more chaotic internally because of all those lootings and robberies that would happen in your kingdom.

While the original question asks for the usefulness of the weapons in war, I am asking about the aftermath, with all the gold lying around the battlefield. Let's say that the enemy sieged your kingdom and some 5,000 men from the invading armies are killed, while at your side, 2000 men have died. All of the men from the invading armies are turned into gold, while on your side, some 500 men where turned into gold, because the invading forces somehow manage to use you soldiers arrows and swords against your defenders.

EDIT: WRONG NUMBERS (50,000 to 500)

Answer 1

All that gold makes gold virtually worthless so people would put it to practical use like construction.

The Pantheon is held together with iron bars coated in lead to slow down corrosion. You could get better protection coating iron in gold. You can coat roofs in gold leaf for excellent waterproofing.

The ancient Romans used lead pipes for water. Gold pipes is far safer and cheaper.

Gold doesn't corrode so there many uses which people don't use only because it's rare. If it wasn't rare people would find plenty of uses.

Answer 2

The primary reason why gold is so valuable is because of scarcity. Once you eliminate scarcity there are many uses that gold can be put to.

Chemically it is highly nonreactive making it a good fit for containing reactive materials and foodstuffs, and anywhere that you want a durable cladding that doesn't require much strength.

It conducts heat well making it possible to build quite efficient heat-sinks for cooling your house or keeping your icebox chilly... with a suitable source of lower temperatures like a nearby river for instance.

Physically gold is malleable and ductile, so covering things with gold is both simple and useful in many of the ways that Lead was in early plumbing.

Depending on your tech level gold might replace lead in any number of uses. It would make quite good movable type for your printing presses, a handy modelling material when making casts for your forges and so on.

A few steps further along the tech path and gold makes an excellent conductor of electricity, if a little prone to melting under very high loads.

And don't forget how pretty it is.

The economic impact would of course be large, but not as catastrophic as you might think. Any nearby country operating on the gold standard would of course lose much of its wealth if you flooded the market with cheap gold. It's hard to have faith in a currency backed by something that your neighbours are using to plumb their toilets so within a short period of time they would have to transition to a different foundation for their money, like a platinum or silver standard.

There's a bit of commentary on outsiders attacking you for your gold but since you have a virtually limitless supply - especially once your people start turning their Midas Swords into Midas Ploughshares - you can simply dump waste gold on the borders for anyone to take. No point fighting over it, any more than people living next to a desert fight over sand. When they come and threaten you, you just hand over the gold and look puzzled at why they want such a worthless item. Give them as much as they like. Eventually they'll find that they can buy it by the ton for less than it costs to raid you for a few hundred pounds.

FYI: the sciencey part of my mind wants to complain about a few side effects like destabilization of the continental plates, but you didn't ask so... :P

Answer 3

All these answers assume that the midas-gold is something people would be willing to melt down and sell.
I think they miss a fundamental and vital point.

These are the last remains of people.

They belong with their families, for burial and disposal in as traditional and respectful a fashion as possible.

I would expect that any nation using Midas weaponry would have one of two policies. Either that the bodies of those killed belong to the state, or to their families. Either way, anyone caught trying to sell them is likely to get punished massively.

Some might well be stolen or sold off and melted, but I think most would be treated as corpses. Really really valuable corpses.
With that in mind, I'd expect most of them to be returned home, buried, placed in locations of honour and generally treated with the respect their nature deserves.

So to answer the actual question, the most practical way to dispose of the solid-gold statuary is to use carts to deliver them home.

Dealing with the bodies of enemies slain in your territory is another matter, either store them somewhere (creepy gold-statue warehouses?) or present them to the enemy leadership as a peace-offering.

I'd expect most of the grave-gold robbery would be done to enemy midas-corpses rather than your own side. After all, why respect the enemy?

Answer 4

If there are other countries that are still working on the gold standard, all that gold has another use: Economic warfare. There's very little stopping you from keeping a pile of your defeated enemies' golden corpses locked in vaults with the promise that if anyone is ever dumb enough to attack you again, you'll just spend all that gold and crash their economy faster than they can marshal their armies. It's remarkably hard to mobilize an army when a single loaf of bread costs a golden arm and a leg.

And so long as you can keep a fairly tight control over the several metric tons of gold you've now acquired, you can use it for rebuilding while subtle harming your enemies' economy. Once they catch on to the fact that you've basically got an infinite supply, you'll already have gotten back on your economic feet. Just make sure to use something else for currency for your own nation, lest you'll be hoisted by your own petard.

Answer 5

The other answers are (mostly) focused on what the glut of gold would do to the price of gold. However, I think what's missing here is a consideration of the quantity of gold, which can be calculated from the question. The typical modern human body is around 66 liters in volume (according to this source). Medieval era humans might be smaller, armor ect. might make them larger, but this should work for a ballpark. The specific gravity of gold is 19.32 grams per cubic centimeter. Since there are 1000 cubic centimeters in a liter, 1 liter of gold weights 19.32 kg. So the average gold statue will weight about ~1275 kg. Assuming that, as Ruadhan2300's answer points out, you treat the bodies of your own dead with respect and bury them or something, you have as much as 1,275*5,000=6,375,000 kg of gold to work with. This is a lot of gold, but at the same time, it's not that much gold. It's about 40% more gold than is currently in Fort Knox (4,582 metric tons per Wikipedia).

This is on the order of the amount of precious metals that Spain extracted from the New World in the 1500's. I haven't been able to track down a reliable source for the amount of gold, but I've seen estimates of the amount of silver as high as 41,000 metric tons. Mind you, the influx of treasure from the New World seriously disrupted Western Europe's economy, but it didn't make gold and silver worthless either.

First, realize that you're not putting all that gold into circulation as coinage in one fell swoop, even if you wanted to. With medieval technology, hauling statues weighing one and a quarter metric tons to somewhere they can be melted down will be very time consuming and challenging. Not least because with that much weight pressing on a small area, the statues probably instantly sunk into the mud of the battlefield when they were transformed. So now you have to dig them up again. Six thousand metric tons of gold hitting the market at once will cause rapid devaluation--the same amount dribbling out over years, less so.

Second, you can use gold to make lots of beautiful things. Candelabra, plates, murals, jewelry statues of religious icons (if the irony of melting down your enemies to make a statue of your god isn't too much). Hell, melt it and pour it in sheets over the outside of your castle walls as a warning to future invaders. While in some sense all this gold decoration it won't be as valuable as if gold were scarce, it will still be awesome. After all, you're not trying to sell all this decoration, just enjoy it yourself. You may lower the price of gold jewelry and decorations, but it won't immediately affect the value of the currency and make it useless for trade with other kingdoms.

Finally, even after you're done using gold for any conceivable practical purpose, you need not turn it all into coinage (or bullion) right away. Generals of the opposing army you might ransom back to their home country. Or, conversely, put them on display somewhere as a reminder of your victory. Stick a bunch more in a vault against a rainy day.

Also, obviously you can tweak the numbers if necessary to make things work for your story. Besides reducing the number of enemies who were "midased", you could always declare that they are converted into 10 carat gold, rather than pure, cutting the amount of gold you need to deal with in less than half.

Answer 6

It strikes me that in this world the gold would already be worthless even before the war.

If the state possesses magic weapons that turn living things into gold then why would they wait for an enemy nation to attack before using them?

It strikes me as most likely that the farming sector of this state would be very active in farming animals especially for turning into gold.

This accomplished we then come to the answers about gold's worth being based on scarcity and the practical applications of gold if it was common. I particularly like the gold lined pipes idea.

The question is then one of the religion and customs of this world and whether they will show respect for enemy dead.

Given that they already have plentiful cow-gold, they don't particularly need to use this human gold...Thus either honorable burials or dumping them all in a pit seems the most likely outcome.

Answer 7

Leave the golden corpses be. Or bury them. They have no value.

Even if someone would want to use gold for lets say construction project, it would be cheaper to buy and transport a cattle and jab it with midas needle in place, as gold is pretty heavy.

Even if there were foreign market with gold as a currency, it would collapse instantly with the first rumor about midas 'technology' and traders would swith to other standard. Maybe seashells?

Even if other kingdom also wanted some extra gold, all they would need is a single midas sword. The only reason for a full scale invasion would be to steal the midas technology itself as a war weapon, not the gold.

Answer 8

Forget the gold, the weapon is the real value, especially if you can equip your archers with it (is the weapon 'one time use' or can you collect the arrows and use them again?).

Suddenly you can conquer anyone with lower resources.

The real aftermath of such a war would be a desire from other countries to possess such a powerful weapon. Hired assassins, espionage, arms race like never seen before.

Answer 9

Keep what you want for usage and turn the rest into bodies that are either dead or held as prisoners.

In the original story of Midas the curse didn't just turn people to gold and leave them that way. It was reversible. Taking the bodies and washing them in the water of a river would turn them back. Different versions of the story are of course going to have different interpretations but with these being "Midas" weapons this could be an effective way of cleaning up the bodies. With a slight alteration that the gold-ification is irreversibly fatal the gold can be turned back. A slight alteration as well could be that putting the gold into a forge or melting it makes the change permanent. Then at that point the gold can be collected as fast as people can carry it back before rain starts to fall. Of course that will still be a lot of gold but if you have midas tech then the bodies are irrelevant. Midas could turn anything to gold, including food. So really the bodies are just a matter of cleanup and could be left to turn back as a matter of respect as one answer points out. So really the gold itself can be any random object. However, if literally anything can be turned to gold then gold is worthless. It can be made on demand and any country looking for gold could just ask for it. The bodies are not needed for supply unless you have actually ran out of Midas weapons and it's the last of the gold supply.

If you do allow the people to be turned back into the same state as before being turned to gold (i.e. alive) then the result will be a large amount of prisoners of war. That's not a problem though. They can be executed or simply held as slaves or whatever. This can all be tweaked as you see fit but I think if played right it would work well in making the country with Midas weaponry look less violent and aggressive. Any warfare they engage in is essentially just mass imprisonment. Unless the people turned to gold simply die of the actual weapon stab or slice wounds before turning to gold there isn't any reason to not be able to treat them over time. After all, they can be kept as gold indefinitely so they are effectively immortal until turned back and if done slowly there can be a near 5% death rate from gold weaponry. I say 5% because some serious wounds are just not treatable such as a knife to the head or an arrow to the knee. All in all I think the end result will be that any invasion attempt will simply result in a metric ton of prisoners that have to be held at ransom. However, it would probably be more likely for slavery since gold is worthless in your country. Perhaps you can ask your neighboring countries to send general resources. It is likely that Midas tech will to some extent damage the land. After all, if you drop a sword into the ground then the ground around it will turn to super slick sterile gold. It would be a great way to throw off enemy troops. Make them start sliding as if it were ice, but if it weren't obvious that will kill whatever was growing there. I suspect that your country will need reparations in the form of crops and cattle. Some will survive but a good chunk will die out. This would also be a good technique for oppressing as well. Just light fires on the ground after stabbing it into gold. It will quickly become a massive almost irreversible famine for that country. Far more effective imo. However, I know that was a past question and I won't dwell on that. It was just a passing thought.