Struggle to do business with seven different forms of coinage in circulation,
even the simplest transaction could be a headache, requiring the use of an abacus.
By comparison, economic life in the eastern world in the Muslim caliphate or the Song Chinese Empire was far more advanced
To discover modern finance, backward Europe needed to import it
Enter a young mathematician called Leonardo of Pisa or Fibonacci
The son of a Pisan Customs Official based in what is now Algeria
Fibonacci is best remembered today for his sequence of numbers that mimic the properties of nature
But the famous sequence was only one of many Eastern mathematical ideas
that Fibonacci introduced to Europe with his path-breaking book the Liber Abaci - The Book of Calculation.
Even more important was his demonstration of the superiority of Arabic numerals over Roman numerals
And crucially, nearly all Fibonacci's examples related to business