By Alan M. Stahl

Within a number of months of assuming the placement of curator of medieval cash on the American Numismatic Society in 1980, Alan M. Stahl was once provided with a plastic bag containing a hoard of 5,000 lately found cash, such a lot of which became out to be from medieval Venice. The process learn of that hoard (and a later one containing greater than 14,000 cash) led him to the Venetian records, the place he tested hundreds of thousands of unpublished manuscripts. to supply a good extra actual account of ways the Zecca mint operated in Venice within the 13th via 15th centuries, Stahl commissioned medical analyses of the cash utilizing numerous sleek strategies, uncovering information regarding their content material and the way that they had been synthetic. The ensuing ebook, Zecca: The Mint of Venice within the heart Ages, is the 1st to ascertain the workings of a premodern mint utilizing huge study in unique files in addition to distinct research of the cash themselves.

the 1st of the book's 3 sections strains the coinage of Venice from its origins within the 9th century as a minor, and unofficial, neighborhood Italian coinage to its place on the sunrise of the Renaissance because the dominant forex of Mediterranean exchange. the second one part, entitled "The Mint within the lifetime of Medieval Venice," illustrates the mechanisms of the keep an eye on of bullion and the recommendations for mint revenue and explores the mint's function in Venetian exchange and the emergence of a bureaucratized executive. The 3rd part, "Within the Mint," examines the actual operations that remodeled uncooked bullion into cash and identifies the team of workers of the mint, situating the holders of every place within the context in their social backgrounds.

Illustrated with images of Venetian coinage from the world's significant collections, Zecca additionally encompasses a directory of all holders of places of work concerning the medieval Venetian mint and summaries of all significant unearths of medieval Venetian cash.

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Francesco Carabellese, Carol d’Angiò nei rapporti politici e commerciali con Venezia e l’Oriente, Commissione Provinciale di Archeologia e Storia Patria, Documenti e monografie,  (Bari, ), ‒. ¹⁰ Oct. : DMC, :; PMV, , #. ¹¹ The precedent for the Venetian minting of gold coins came from the west of Italy rather than directly from the south. ¹⁴ Nor is it clear that even the genovino and the florin were immediate successes. ¹⁵ Even for the florin, there is little evidence that it was widely used in its first few decades of minting.

The fact that pennies in the name of Malipiero and Dandolo greatly outnumber those of Ziani in this and other finds is suggestive ⁵⁵The only documentation for the standard of this penny of Venice is a provision of , which says that the pennies minted then were  pennies per mark worse than the first ones: DMC, :‒, #; Papadopoli, :.  grams of alloy.  for the issues of Ziani, Malipiero, and E. Dandolo: CNI, :‒. The  document does not compare the fineness of the later pennies with that of the original ones, and the few tests done on specimens of both periods are ambiguous as to whether there was a debasement between the twelfth-century pennies and the later ones, which were prescribed at a fineness of about  percent.

Vom Beginn der Prägung bis , Die Münzen und Medaillen von Köln,  (Cologne, ), ‒; Nicholas J. Mayhew, “From Regional to Central Minting, ‒,” in A New History of the Royal Mint, ed. C. E. Challis (Cambridge, ),  and  n. . ²⁴See above, nn.  and . ²⁷These sources, then, put the value of the grosso in terms of the penny of Venice in the range of  to  pennies, figures that do not correspond easily to the basic system of account, in which even multiples of  or subdivisions of  would be the logical choice for a new coin.

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