This is all true but only to a certain extent.
Precious metals and gemstones will only have value if a society believes they are valuable, (society being defined here as a more advanced organization than simply a community of like-minded souls banding together for survival).
But for that to happen, a society has to actually exist. Your historical example is flawed by the simple fact that those societies were not devastated by an apocalypse (to the point were all forms of government were reduced to mere shells)
Gemstones, platinum ingots and so on may be acceptable in the Free City of Krakow but for people outside of such an organized society, carrying around a few kilos of platinum in the hope that you can trade it at the next independent farm is a fruitless exercise because at the end of the day, the most important aspect of using such items is that there are people who can tell real from fake.
How many people do you know who can tell if a gold ingot is pure, how many do you know who can tell the difference between a raw platinum ingot and an aluminium ingot? Who is going to underwrite the value of these items? Money, gems, gold etc. are basically useless until a community has become organized enough to agree to their value, to agree that they are a suitable substitute for the goods that are being traded and has become skilled enough to recognize real from fake.
Within a cantonment it can work perfectly, within the territory of some warlord who controls everything in his domain it can work perfectly, between merchants it can work perfectly but outside of an organized community, it is nothing more than scrap paper, shiny metal and pretty stones.
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