Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1937 edition. Excerpt: ... P. Lehugeur, Histoire de Philippe le Long, p. 368 (Paris. alive deter counterfeiters from the temptation of exploiting, a state of affairs so favourable to them. From the end of the twelfth century the disorder of th& currency had reached such a point that a reform became absolutely necessary. It is significant that the initiative came from the greatest commercial centre of the age, Venice. In 1192 the doge, Henry Dandolo, caused an entirely new land of coin to be struck there, the groat, or gros or matapan, weighing a little over 2 grammes of silver and of the value of 12 of the old deniers. This groat was thus equivalent to the Carolingian sou, with the difference that the sou, originally a money of account, now became a real coin. Charlemagne's system was not abandoned and the innovation maintained his scale of coinage. All it did was to take advantage of the continual fall of the denier, to substitute for it a new denier, of twelve times the value (whence its name of grossus), which in fact corresponded exactly to the old sou, which from a mere figure now became an integral part of the currency. In other words, the new system remained faithful to the old, except that it gave it a metallic value which was twelve times higher. The old denier was not suppressed; the groat took its place beside it as the money of commerce, reducing the denier in practice to the rank of small change. The Venetian groat answered the needs of the merchants so well that it was immediately imitated in all the towns of Lombardy and Tuscany. But north of the Alps, too, attempts were made to remedy the debasement of the coinage, which was by now intolerable. In Germany, where it seems to have been worst of all, the Heller (so called from the town of Halle in Swabia...