9. The Aztecs literally had chocolate currency
In knocking back 50 gold cups of chocolate a day, Montezuma was doing the Aztec equivalent of lighting a cigar on a burning dollar bill. For cacao beans were so valuable that they also functioned as currency in the Aztec Civilisation. With a few of the treasured beans, one could buy everything from meat to sex. A rabbit would set you back 10 cacao beans, a slave or a female turkey about 100, and a prostitute between 8 and 10 with some skilful bartering. These rates of exchange are not conjecture, but preserved in a 16th-century Aztec document.
At the time of the Spanish conquest (early 16th century), cacao beans were reckoned more valuable than gold. An advantage of using the beans as currency was that they encouraged desire for wealth but not miserliness, with possessors being tempted either to make a lovely drink or to plant them. This was not a fact lost on early Christian observers, such as Peter Martyr in the 16th century: ‘Oh, blessed money which yieldeth sweete and profitable drinke for mankinde, and preserveth the possessors thereof free from the hellish pestilence of avarice because it cannot be long kept hid underground’.