[8] By prices here, and subsequently throughout this volume, is meant the price or tariff and Mint rate of the coins. There is no reference whatever to general prices.
CHAPTER II
From the Discovery of America to the end of the First Cycle of the Influence of the Metals of the New World on European Currencies, 1493-1660
The last decade of the fifteenth century witnessed the discovery of America, and therein the monetary salvation and resurrection of the Old World. The end of the second quarter of the seventeenth century in its turn witnessed the end of the first phase, and the most important, of the New World upon the destinies of Europe. Practically and historically the century and a half intervening between 1493 and 1660 may be treated as a single cycle with a single aspect. It was a time of unexampled increase in the imports of the precious metals, of equally unexampled rise of prices, and at the same time of feverish instability and want of equilibrium in the monetary systems of Europe. Two general statements may be premised.
1. Broadly speaking—of prices, i.e.—no movement of any note is perceptible, or records itself in legislative enactment until about 1520, so gradual
and at first unimportant was the flow of metal from America. What did come at first was not silver so much as gold, and represents the puny and blood-stained plunder of ornaments from the natives. If this import tended to turn the balance in any way, it was in the direction of depreciation of gold as compared with silver. But during this first quarter of the sixteenth century, possibly more influence on the maintaining of equilibrium is to be attributed to the largely increased home production of silver. The silver mining in the Saxon Harz, in Bohemia, and the Tyrol, had received a strong impulse towards the close of the fifteenth century, while gold was obtained during the same period in appreciably greater quantities in the archbishopric of Salzburg, and in Hungary, as well as from Africa.
GENERAL STATEMENT
2. In this second period of European bimetallic history, the centre of European monetary exchanges passes from Italy to the Netherlands. Antwerp takes the place of Venice and Florence. There is a double and deep significance in the fact. It is not merely that the trade route had changed in such a way as to lay the foundation for that development of European commerce, of which England is the highest expression in our own days; it is that by the change was provided a more effective safeguard against precipitate and overwhelming depreciation. The centre of European exchanges—Antwerp in the sixteenth, as London to-day—has always performed one supremest function—that of regulating the flow