was no protection against suspicion of riches. Yet it was supposed to lessen the risk of being kidnapped into slavery at Algiers on the road to Montserrat if one carried the white pilgrim's staff.
Crossing the Alps, for a northerner who did not wish to be conspicuously alien, meant a complete change into black silk; for the brilliant attire which we see in productions of "Romeo and Juliet" reflects Elizabethan England, not Italy. Italy manufactured those multi-coloured materials, it is true, but for export or official use only, except for the ash colour that betokened a vow not perfected.
Typical minor incidents were the purchasing of a new handkerchief in Germany, of light-coloured silk, and, as to size, somewhat resembling a saddle-cloth, with initials of some motto worked in a corner thereof, say D. H. I. M. T. ("Der Herr ist Mein Trost") or W.H.I.B. ("Wie heilig ist Bruderschaft"), and secondly, the story of a sugar-loaf hat. An Italian priest wore it in Italy—but not in France. Before leaving Lyons he had grown tired of a crowd of children following him about. So far from being able to sell it, it was impossible to find any one who would take it as a gift until he met a man whose business was partly selling a powder which killed mice. The rest of his business was the profession of town-fool. That being so, he could accept the hat; he cut it into the shape of an imperial crown and gave himself out as the Emperor of the Moluccas.
A complete change into French clothes cost this priest two pistoles [£8], and he adds the detail that nowhere was waterproof material to be bought. The waxed cloth which was sold as such cracked wherever it had been folded.
On occasion, too, changes of clothes might be a legal obligation. The sumptuary laws might step in and forbid the new-comer to wear what was perhaps his one respectable garment. Or again, in Muscovy, foreigners used to dress as natives to avoid the jeers of the crowd; but at some date early in the seventeenth century the Patriarch noticed Germans behaving irreverently at a festival and complained that foreigners ought not to seem included in the benediction that was given to the faithful. Foreigners were therefore ordered to revert to their national dress, which produced most ludicrous results until the tailors could finish new garments; inasmuch as the merchants had to fall back on those that had belonged to their predecessors, leaving sometimes a whole generation between the fashions of their upper and nether garments.
All these things might fall on the tourist: each one cost money; some one, at least, of them he would hardly escape. One more source of possible loss existed, one that he was certain to have to face—the money itself. The variety of coins was just as great as the variety of clothes, though with this difference that the clothes were as local as the coins were international—just the opposite of the case to-day. This is not equally true, of course, of all denominations, and the majority may not have circulated so freely as in preceding centuries, but the higher ones seem to have passed about from hand to hand with little more hesitation than Australian sovereigns do in England. When exceptions occurred, they generally had political causes: French gold, for example, being more willingly taken by the Swiss than other foreign gold because they had become so used to it in the course of serving as French mercenaries.
Of the uncertainties of the tourist, however, in relation to coins, that caused by their international character would be the first to disappear. There remained a trinity of diversities to bewilder him permanently and to deliver him over, defenceless, to the dishonest: diversity of value, diversity of kind, diversity of inscription.
To take the last first; it might seem that absence was a more appropriate term than diversity, seeing that the nominal value of a coin in circulation about 1600 was only in the smallest percentage of cases stated on its face; and when one comes to think of it, it is only the tourist who ever reads a coin for business purposes. Where the diversity comes in lies in the fact of certain names becoming popular, such as "paolo" in Italy, which meant that many different types would be struck, all "paoli" but none alike. As to variations in value these may be illustrated from the Venetian zecchino, the Hungarian ducat, the sultanon of Constantinople and the sheriff of Cairo. All of these are reckoned as equal in one year or other between 1592 and 1620 by one or other trustworthy traveller, yet the differences of value of one coin or other of the four vary from 6s. 8d. to 9s.; and this was not a steady rise. In fact, the difference between the 1592 and 1620 valuations is but fourpence. Moreover, the settlement of values was far less a commercial affair merely than it has become; governments were forever tinkering at it by means of proclamations, all telling against the tourist, since their object was to attract, or to retain, bullion, which either depreciated the value of the coin he wished to change or appreciated that of the coin he had to acquire. Lady Fanshawe mentions a proclamation of October 14, 1664, at Madrid which cost her husband, ambassador there, eight hundred pounds. Since then, paper money has come to absorb all the political dishonesty that used to be exercised on coins, and the far less abrupt modern methods minimise the loss to the tourist. The French government went bankrupt fifty-six times during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.[157]
As to the other diversity, that of kind, Lauder saw a proclamation which assessed the values of five hundred coins then current in France.
The whole of the above refers mainly to gold and the higher denominations of silver. Yet these more important coins were a simple matter compared with small change, especially in Italy; for when the tourist had been confronted with soldi, grossi, giuli, paoli, reali, quattrini, susine, denari, cavallotti, cavallucci, carlini, bagatini, bolignei, baocchi, baelli, etc., he could not but feel relieved when, crossing the Alps, he had only to face Swiss plapparts and finfers and the German batz, kreutzer, stiver, copstück, sesling, pfennig, and not many more. The grosch perhaps ought to be mentioned as well if only for the fact that Taylor, the "water-poet," when at Hamburg, noticed that among twenty-three groschen he had in his pocket there were thirteen varieties, owing to the number of local mints. He valued all these at twopence each, but as a matter of fact groschen varied so greatly that to give one away might be either extravagance or an insult. There were, of course, many multiples of these denominations, and besides coins, tokens innumerable, all having but this in common that when one had gone a few miles further they would not be taken in payment. They might be made of base metal, like that of the famous "Mermaid" tavern which is preserved at the "birthplace" at Stratford-on-Avon, or of leather, or almost anything else solid.