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...
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