At a certain point in which the movement of resources and the repetition of daily labors and accounting reached a certain threshold, money emerged somewhere from the center of that mass of activity and so the circulation of things, materials, and labor was able to disperse and widen and quicken.
There was a corrosive effect only in the way that money could loosen those bonds which held between products of labor and the land and life that birthed them, until finally it had undermined the land itself beneath the landed aristocracy and its inherited wealth, corroding their power over the regional modulation of resources and labor particular to the land.
First it was that land yielded rent in the form of expected income for desirable surplus product, but then the land itself could fetch a price and be alienated from its owner much like a common object, to be spirited to a new owner who could produce the desired sum, which would precipitate the rise of capital as the dominant social power.
Money appears as something complex and civil, as the lifeblood of civilization itself, yet at its heart is something terrible and desperate, as seen in the harbingers of its early rise. It was the interlopers, the conquistadors, the traveling merchants, the far flung colonists that gained the earliest money power, those individuals who could access what was far flung, exotic, and exciting, and trade those things with steady accumulation, as the society they came from shed them in the course of its violent expansion and self-exploitation, sending them careening out into strange lands and far mysterious places, propelling them out and away as it voraciously pulled in whatever was outside and alien to it.
It was in the accounts of these individuals one could find simmering resentment, the desire to be perceived as high on the already towering social ladder, which nevertheless was hermetically sealed and frozen over through the will of its incumbents, excluding and pushing down those perceived as lower. And money and gold, conquest and adventure and fame were a way to pry loose those upper footholds to the top of the collective prestige, a way to move outward and spread one's wings and get out from underneath that suffocating field of exploitation, not necessarily to live free and clear - there were plenty of individuals that did want this - but to resituate at the top of the heap, to exploit and dominate in their own way.
The old adage, money is at the root of all evil, does indeed focus one's concerned perception on an important point of pain, but it was not money that started the thing. Money allowed for the movement, expansion, and circulation for new blood to challenge older structures of power which themselves were afflicting evil, and perhaps some good as well, depending on who was looking.
