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

Introduction 1
7
certain resemblance in fabric and design between the Lombard
denaro, of which so many varieties existed in the Peninsula,
and the mediaeval currency of regions so far apart as France
and Armenia. But with both the Venetians became familiar
in the Middle Ages. A Venetian settlement was formed at
Limoges in l
977 and in the ;
beginning of the fourteenth
century the republic contracted a mercantile treaty with Leo
I., King of Armenia. The coinages of feudal France and
many of the small pieces struck under Leo II. and his successors
appear to shew the ascendency of the same Italo-
Teutonic genius.
There is a striking general resemblance among the entire
family of ancient European coins, always excepting those
which we owe to temporary Byzantine or Oriental inspiration
;
and the reason may be, that the Continent was principally
indebted for its primitive currency to a Teutonic
germ, undoubtedly traceable to Roman or Greek prototypes,
and gradually developed by the revival of art and mechanical
knowledge. Many of the coins of the Medici, Gonzaga, and
Farnese families in Italy, for instance, are beyond question
very fine specimens of the moneyer's skill ;
and nothing can
be bolder, freer, and more characteristic than some of those
of the fifteenth century,
or even of the first half of the
sixteenth, which appeared at Milan and Ferrara under
Visconti and D'Este rule ;
but we must recollect that the
Germans have it in their power to point to such superb
productions as the Maximilian thaler of 1479, the Klappemiinze
or gulden groschen of Frederic the Wise of Saxony,
and the two later Maximilian thalers.
The great initiative, in short, is, so far as we can see or
judge, ascribable to Northern Germany, whose skilled operatives
had before them, perhaps, the same patterns as those
employed by the so-called Merovingian moneyers, and
already in the former moiety of the ninth century had
learned to execute pieces of a distinctly improved character
at Durstede and other Merovingian mints, as we are able to
infer from a large number of extant monuments in the shape
1
See Hazlitt's Venetian Republic, 1860, iv. 234-238.
C