In matter of fact, the Mint edict of 1559 remained a dead letter; nominally, however, it continued in force up to 1600, although no less than seven attempts were made at succeeding diets, from 1566 to 1596, to enforce it and bring it up to date. In the Reichstag of Speyer, 1570, complaints were made of the universal loss arising from the non-observance of the edict. In place of an imperial coinage, nothing circulated but foreign and counterfeit coins, and the necessaries of life had risen to a prohibitive height. Similar were the complaints at the succeeding diets at Frankfort, 1571, and at Regensburg, 12th October 1576, at which last Ferdinand's edict was again re-enacted, with a command that the Burgundian circle and the Swiss should conform themselves to it. Bitter complaints were made of the bad state of the gold and silver coinage, and of the enrichment of the exchangers on the Rhine. The circulation of Dutch and Swiss thalers was forbidden because of the loss by exchange, and the export of all gold and silver again forbidden. As an instance of the depreciation prevalent in the coinage, it was noted that the silver albus had lost one-third of its
weight, so that thirty-six were needed to purchase one gold gulden, whereas formerly twenty-six were equivalent.
GERMANY: DISORDERS OF 1580
Four years later, 1580, Ferdinand, as Archduke of Austria, issued a fresh tariff, with the object of checking exports, and in 1582 the states, having consulted as to the condition of the coinage, strongly advised a renewal of the prohibition of the export of coin, especially by the Italians. This advice was adopted in the Reichstag of Augsburg, which met seventeen days later, 20th September 1582. The preamble of the Act then and there passed speaks of the export of a good portion of the native currency, and of the unmeasured rise of prices, coupled with the circulation of forbidden foreign specie, large and small.
This resolution of the Reichstag was followed by the enacting of the Mint edict of 10th December 1582. It proved as futile as any of the others; and two years later, July 1584, the deputies of the three circles of Franconia, Swabia, and Bavaria complained that within the four years immediately preceding several millions had left the country by way of the Rhine provinces for the Netherlands, very little going to Italy by comparison.
On this representation another useless edict was issued by the Emperor Rudolph II., and in the following year the merchants at Frankfort Fair found themselves obliged to agree upon a tariff of ducats and Reichs-thalers. The Philipps-thaler was put at eighty-two kreutzers, and the Reichs-thaler, which, by
the Imperial Mint edict still nominally in force, should have been at sixty-eight kreutzers, was put at seventy-four. This arrangement of the merchants established a ratio between gold and silver of 11.4.
Certain of these same merchants, examined as to their opinion of the method of the export in January 1586, explained that it went by way of Nürnberg, and that the arbitrage was attended with 9 or 10 per cent. profit.
GERMANY: THE KIPPER UND WIPPER ZEIT
Nominally, however—or in theory—the arrangement of 1559 continued the unenforced law of the land up to 1600, underneath all these attempts at revision and underneath the different regulations of the various monetary unions of contiguous circles or states. With the latter date commences that extraordinary movement of monetary depreciation and panic which is known as the "Kipper und Wipper" period. In great part the extraordinary acuteness of the panic which ensued was due to internal monetary confusion of Germany, but that internal confusion simply ministered to the export of all good specie and metal, and in the end it became simply a money corner. The movement began by a coining of the lower denominations of monies on a different and depreciated footing or basis. The specie thaler began to part company from the current thaler, and to rise to more than the 24 silver groschen or 36 Marien groschen, to which by the Mint edict of 1559 it was declared equivalent. By 1618 it had risen to 1 thaler 6 silver groschen (= 48 Marien groschen), by 1620 to 2 current thaler, by