THE HISTORY OF CURRENCY
CHAPTER I
From the Commencement of Gold Coinages to the Discovery of America, 1252-1492
The monetary history of Europe begins in the thirteenth century, and in the Italian peninsula. Its starting-point is the era of the reintroduction of gold into the coinages of the Western nations, and is definitely marked for us by the minting of the gold florin of Florence in 1252. For all practical purposes gold had gone out of use since the seventh century, and after the submersion of the Roman Empire; and the currencies of the nations of mediæval Europe rested on a silver basis entirely. There are limitations to the truth of this statement, but they are of such a nature as not materially to affect it. In Spain, for instance, the Moors kept up a tradition of gold coinage similar to that of Rome, from the eighth to the middle of the thirteenth century. But its influence on the monetary system of Christian Spain is
not even a matter of question. At the other extremity of the Mediterranean, at Byzantium, seat of the Eastern Empire, the best traditions of the coinage system of Rome were preserved for centuries after the imperial city had fallen before the invasions of the northern barbarians. Indeed, the monetary system of the Eastern empire, by becoming, as it did, the model which Charlemagne copied in his currency enactments, became the basis of all the modern European systems. Further than this, the presence of gold Byzants can be traced here and there, at isolated points and dates, all over the darkness of those early centuries of the Middle Ages, when all coining art seemed forgotten among the races of Central Europe.
Notwithstanding such limitations, however, it still remains true that the monetary history of the modern world dates from the thirteenth and not the seventh century, and from the little commercial states of Italy rather than from Byzantium. Previous to the minting of the gold florin of Florence there is no trace of any independent minting of gold coins on a commercial scale by any state of mediæval central Europe. The currency system of England, for instance, from the time of the Saxons to the days of Henry III. was based entirely on silver. In endless variety and under a diversity of names the silver penny was the unit coin current of the realm. Its equivalent in the Frankish Empire was the silver denarius, which Charlemagne had made the unit of his system, and which so con
tinued for both the kingdom of France and the Holy Roman Empire till the fourteenth century. Finally, among the numerous states of Italy, with each their little independent Mint, there is no trace of the coinage of gold until the days of the commercial greatness of Florence and Venice. For eight centuries or more those races of Europe, which were to turn the course of the modern world and build its civilisation anew, were ignorant of the commercial use of what has been through all history the most potent factor in civilisation—gold.