While the bezant and dinar maintained gold currency along the Mediterranean, northern Europe from the 8th century suffered a shortage of gold and turned its almost exclusive attention to silver, inherently more convenient as a unit of exchange. A previous Merovingian tendency to introduce silver alongside gold was carried much further when the Carolingian ruler Pippin III the Short (751–768) replaced gold by silver, introducing the denier, which was to be the basis of all medieval coinage in the north. His new coin was wider and thinner than previous silver pieces. The normal types were simple—obverse R P (for Rex Pepinus), reverse R F (for Rex Francorum).
Charlemagne (768–814) reorganized northern currency in a way that affected it permanently. Coining at first simply as Carolus R F, he defeated the Lombards in 774 and entered Rome, becoming king of Lombardy as well. His deniers were later made wider and still heavier (about 25 grains), and he introduced the smaller and subsidiary obole, or half-denier. The main types of his deniers were threefold: the monogram of his Latinized name, Carolus; a temple (sometimes a gateway); and, more rarely, a portrait. Monogram deniers were coined in France, Germany, northern Italy, and northeastern Spain; temple deniers were also widely struck, often inscribed XRISTIANA RELIGIO, though this legend was sometimes replaced by the name of a major French mint city. On Christmas Day 800, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne as Roman emperor, and, thenceforth, his deniers, either with the temple type and “Christian” legend or with a mint name alone, styled him Kar(o)lus Imp. Aug., sometimes adding Rex F(rancorum) et L(angobardorum). His mints lay mainly in France, the Rhineland, and the Low Countries.
Louis I (814–840) continued his father’s monetary system with little essential change. But the infringement of his minting rights emphasized the economic importance of northern ports, especially the Frisian Duurstede, from the neighbourhood of which emanated large numbers of copies of his gold sous and half-sous. These portrait coins originally were designed presumably for presentation to the Holy See, since the reverse bore the inscription MVNVS DIVINVM around a cross. They were struck sparingly, and no Carolingian gold thereafter appeared. Charlemagne’s pattern of coinage, sometimes varied, was extended to Lotharingia, with such powerful mints as Cologne, Metz, Trier, and Strasbourg. From the time of the French kings Louis II and III (877–882) the Carolingian currency pattern weakened, and feudal coinages made their first appearances. Louis IV d’Outremer granted coinage rights to the archbishop of Reims as early as 850, and the system was swiftly developed in the 10th century, concessions being made to a large number of ecclesiastical foundations and even in a few cases to lay lords as well. In Spain, Carolingian mints were established only in the extreme northeast, at Barcelona, Ampurias, and Gerona. The kingdom of Aquitaine, under Charlemagne, was reserved to the Frankish king’s son, and its coins were modeled on the Carolingian pattern. Northern Italy was an integral part of the territories controlled by the earlier Carolingians, but from the mid-9th century changes began to show: the deniers of Pavia and Milan, though retaining Carolingian types, became broader and thinner, with wide rims like those of the later German bracteates (see below Italy and Sicily). Venice, a republic from the late 7th century, ruled by a doge under Byzantine protection, did not coin until the 9th, when it struck deniers for the Carolingians; but after Lothar I it omitted mention of the imperial name. At Rome papal coinage began with Adrian I (772–795), Byzantine in style and types, but after Charlemagne’s visit in 774 all deniers (except during an imperial interregnum) were struck jointly with the pope’s monogram and the emperor’s name, until 904; thenceforth, the papal name appeared in full and alone. The principalities of Beneventum and Salerno and the duchies of Naples and Amalfi fell within the Byzantine–Arab orbit, and their gold, silver, and bronze showed these beside Carolingian influences; bronze coins in particular followed Byzantine models, while the gold tari of Salerno were curious fractional copies of Arab dinars. In central Europe, Carolingian coinage was not reflected east of the Rhineland, but in the north the imitation of Carolingian money in or around Duurstede bred more distantly derivative issues elsewhere, possibly even in Scandinavia; these were, in effect, silver deniers, but their types, with their emphasis on ships and animal designs, show them to belong to the Nordic, as opposed to the Teutonic, stream of monetary design.
The later medieval and modern coinages of continental Europe
The change of power from Frankish to German emperors in the 10th century saw the silver denier extended into central and northern Europe. In the East the decay of the Byzantine Empire was reflected in the debasement of its gold coinage to electrum; after the temporary fall of Constantinople to Western crusaders in 1204, Byzantine tradition was carried on in the silver coinages of the derivative empires of Trebizond, Nicaea, and elsewhere. The revival of gold coinage in Italy in the 13th and 14th centuries, promptly copied elsewhere, led to the need for a silver denomination larger than the denier, and the grosso and its equivalents soon spread widely. From the 14th century coinage began to lose its Gothic stiffness: the Italian Renaissance pointed the way to naturalism in portraiture and to greater fluency of ornament. In the 15th century the first experiments were made with mechanical methods of coining, and by the 16th the new techniques were being generally adopted (see below Techniques of production). The traditionally privileged nonregal mints were incapable of producing the mechanical power needed for the intensive coinage not only of the large gold denominations resulting from the influx of Spanish-American treasure after 1493 but also with the equally large silver thalers, or dollars, beginning to be produced with silver from the German Joachimsthal mines. Multiplication of gold and silver coinages, and their larger denominational values, emphasized the need for token coinages, which were produced from the 17th century. Britain was effectively on the gold standard from the end of the 18th century, together with Portugal, but it was not until the second half of the 19th that continental Europe followed suit. Paper currencies of this period were fully redeemable in gold coin, but the gold standard was abandoned during World War I; since then, paper has been redeemable effectively only in base-metal alloys.
The coin types of the later medieval period were relatively crude. Portraiture, schematically stiff on later Byzantine money, was revived with striking realism most notably in Renaissance Italy and thereafter flourished. Reverses revealed feudal influence in shields of arms and civic emblems. These developments set the general pattern of modern coinage, usually with an obverse portrait and some form of national badge or arms on the reverse. From about 1800 onward this pattern was standardized to a large degree.
