Is that not exactly the same? The feudal lords took 100 coins, made 120 coins out of them (while both keeping the same value and claiming that they can make more coins because they have different value), which is basically exactly printing money.
It's an interesting hack where the value of a coin and the cost of a coin (the amount of silver in it) were decoupled, and they pretended that the amount of silver in it is what mattered (hence they kept the same total amount of silver) but actually the value of the coin mattered (because they created value out of thin air by giving you 20 extra coins that were each still worth one pound (or whatever) each).
I don't understand why they didn't just mint a bunch of silver coins of the lower content and spent them themselves, effectively buying coins for 20% less than they were worth. Maybe they didn't have enough silver, or didn't want to create two kinds of the same coin with different silver content each.
It's an interesting hack where the value of a coin and the cost of a coin (the amount of silver in it) were decoupled, and they pretended that the amount of silver in it is what mattered (hence they kept the same total amount of silver) but actually the value of the coin mattered (because they created value out of thin air by giving you 20 extra coins that were each still worth one pound (or whatever) each).
I don't understand why they didn't just mint a bunch of silver coins of the lower content and spent them themselves, effectively buying coins for 20% less than they were worth. Maybe they didn't have enough silver, or didn't want to create two kinds of the same coin with different silver content each.