THE GOLD FLORIN OF FLORENCE
The explanation of the reintroduction and recoinage of gold is to be found in the history of the Crusades and of the commercial growth of the petty independent states which sprang from the political confusion of Italy. No sooner had they achieved each their little autonomous existence than they threw themselves with feverish energy into the development of the trade with the East. Florence and Venice, Pisa and Genoa, led the way and reaped the fruits; and it was in her most flourishing time, when she had conquered her rivals, Pisa and Siena, and was enjoying a prosperous peace and active trade, that Florence, at the instance of the chief of her merchants, resolved on the coining of the gold florin (1252).[1]
The mere idea of such a gold coinage could only
be derived from the East—from Byzantium. But it is a curious fact that the importation of it should be due in the first place to the Crusades. Frederick II. of Sicily was elected Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire in 1212. Sixteen years later he headed the Fifth Crusade, and the gold coin (Augustale) which he issued some time between his return from that crusade and his death, probably commemorates his wish to rival the appearance of opulence of the Eastern court. This Sicilian coin is the direct ancestor of the florin of Florence, and to it would fitly belong the honour of leading in a new era, were it not that the superior beauty of the Florentine coin gave it universal currency and reputation, and extinguished the memory of its predecessor.
The gold coin of Genoa (Genoviva) is supposed to have issued in the same year as the florin (1252). Five years later (1257) Henry III. of England imitated the florin in his gold pennies, and more than thirty years (31st October 1284) later Venice followed the lead of Florence and instituted a coinage of gold zecchinos, under the dogeship of Giovanni Dandolo.
Two conditions were essential to the bringing about so momentous a revolution as this, however little the mind of contemporaries may have known it as such. In the first place, the foreign trade of the Italian republics must have become so extensive as to demand a currency medium of higher denomination than silver; and, secondly, that trade must have developed in such directions as to tap gold-using or
gold-bearing regions in order to supply the Italian mints. It is a curious fact that both these conditions were realised through the instrumentality of the Crusades. The quickening effect of these vast movements on the trade of the Mediterranean is well known, but their influence in the second direction has not hitherto been pointed out. In the Fourth Crusade Venice lent the force which captured Byzantium (1203), and when, by her arms, Baldwin, Count of Flanders, had been seated on the Eastern throne, Venice reaped her reward in three-eighths of the territories of the Eastern Empire. She received Peloponnesus and a chain of islands in the Ægean, and by the hold she had on Constantinople secured the virtual control of the Black Sea. In its turn the control of the Black Sea brought with it the monopoly of the overland trade with India.
THE TRADE OF VENICE
At one and the same moment, therefore, Venice acquired possession of a huge treasure of gold wrested from the conquered city, and of the then only gold-yielding districts—the Crimea—and of an intercolonial trade, demanding a more enhanced currency medium. The result of such a combination of circumstances was irresistible. During the continuance of the "Latin Empire" at Byzantium, Venice and her sister state were practically the only merchants of Europe.
The institution of a gold coinage among the Italian republics, therefore, marks for us an era of commercial expansion which is only fitly to be