W. C a r e w H a z l i t t Coinage of the European Continent

14 The Coins of Europe
it built up an organisation in which, by the light
of available
records, we at this moment are enabled to realise a picture,
impressive and captivating
if
only by contrast. For it is
precisely
in this narrow localisation that we have to seek
peculiar types of thought and production ;
and in the
absence of such a system of tenure and service we should
have lost nearly all that is most precious to us in mediaeval
costume, symbolism, portraiture, dramatic incident, and, by
no means least of all, monetary examples.
VI
The determination of the order in which the several
countries of Europe should be treated, naturally introduced
to the mind of the writer the apposite and relevant question
as to the centre and cradle of numismatic renaissance in the
Western hemisphere. In the first place, the almost universal
circulation of the ancient Greek and Roman currencies
offered to the primitive European moneyer a rich choice of
prototypes, and led, as we know, to feeble imitations of the
Macedonian stater in Britain, and of the small brass coinage
of Rome and the Phocaean silver in Gaul, if indeed, which is
still a dubious point, the Briton was not directly indebted
for the idea of the Greek model to his immediate
neighbour across the Channel. Secondly, the vastly
influential result to civilisation of the successive settlements
of the Arabs and Moors in Spain, and of the Greeks,
Northmen, Arabs, French, and Spaniards in Southern Italy
and Sicily, embraced the modification of the currency in
vogue in all these regions ;
and the Crusaders had their
share in bringing under notice, and recommending to
adoption, the characters and designs on Eastern money,
sometimes, as in the case of the French gros tournois,
following, without signal fitness or felicity, the lines of the
Arabic dirliem, supposed to have been brought by Louis IX.
from the Holy Land, yet more probably
introduced into