Grosso (coin)
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The Grosso was a silver coin , which in the late Middle Ages in Northern Italy was in circulation. Its weight in Venice , where it was launched in the mid-12th century, was around 2.1 grams. The grosso (the fat or fat) was next to the Italian gold coins introduced in the second half of the 13th century, the most circulating means of payment for larger transactions. Everyday use was served by a coin, the piccolo (the little one), which initially had a value ratio of 1 to 26 and accordingly contained less than 0.1 g of silver.
Since the demand for larger denominations in Italy, the most economically advanced region of Europe, grew rapidly (e.g. for wage payments) and the coins in circulation in northeast Italy had too little silver for larger purchases, the Republic of Venice began to issue its own coins. The Doge Enrico Dandolo went over to the minting of the heavy silver or dandologrossos in 1193/94, which began its rise with the beginning of the 4th Crusade and the associated work on the arsenal and fleet.
From around 1200 to 1285 the grosso was the most important coin. From 1285 onwards , ducats , gold coins, were also produced in the Zecca , which were the most important coins for foreign trade and for wholesale trade until around 1330. From 1330 to 1379 the most important coin was the Soldino . Thereafter, reforms that extended until 1423 led to a stabilization of the coin system.
The grosso with its silver content of approx. 2.1 g and high purity (965/1000) was used as a medium for more extensive market relations. But soon it was felt to be so inadequate that solidus and libra were issued as arithmetic units (not as coins). One libra grossorum (lira di grossi) corresponded to 20 solidi grossorum, this in turn 240 denari grossorum (= grossi) with 504.72 g of silver. These ratios are shown as 1:20:12. The arithmetic units served for a long time as a pure reference value (also for other "currencies") and at the same time as protection against devaluation. In addition to the grosso, the piccolo existed as a small coin for everyday business, for which there were also units of account, with a libra parvorum (lira di piccoli) containing only 19.33 g of silver. A piccolo accordingly contained the 240th part of this amount of gold.
Taking the silver content as a basis, the result is a ratio of 504.72 to 19.33 g or, more simply, 1: 26.1 between grosso and piccolo. From 1268, more than 25 of the small denarii were no longer allowed to be brought abroad. A continuous decline in the value of the Piccolo did not set in until after 1330, but even before that there were some short-term price drops that were initiated by the state itself. In order to increase its income for the beginning fight against Frederick II in the short term, Venice suddenly set the value ratio between Piccolo and Grosso at 1: 38 in 1236. This resulted in a significantly increased amount of silver flowing into the municipality's cash register.
In order to curb the long-term decline in value of the Piccolo, which was largely beyond government control, it was made rare at times by not being minted until 1269. In that year the weight was also reduced to 0.289 g. Business under 50 libra was basically only allowed with Piccoli, which means that the coin was only permitted in domestic trade and at the same time only for everyday transactions. But from 1341 to 1344, its value fell by 28%.
In 1379, after a 25-year break, the minting of the grosso was resumed in order to reduce its value compared to the piccolo, but the timing could hardly have been less favorable. The need to raise funds during the Chioggia War (1378 to 1381) grew by leaps and bounds, so that the Piccolo continued to deteriorate. In this way the war costs could be partially passed on to the local market. While in 1379 32 piccoli corresponded to a grosso, in 1380 there were already 43.
But not only the piccolo came under pressure, but the entire silver coin system, and this has been since the middle of the 13th century. In the east, Venetians paid with silver and took back the gold that was circulating there. In the 12th century, only the Kingdom of Jerusalem , the Norman Kingdom of Sicily, and the Almohad Empire put gold coins into circulation, while Byzantine coins fell in value. So while the silver lost value in the west, the artificially expensive silver of Venice flowed to the east at the same time. Venice was threatened with integration into the Arab-Byzantine world and with it the loss of its vital function as a trading hub between Western Europe and the Levant due to the depletion of its silver reserves.
The trading cities of Florence and Genoa were the first to break through the separation between the silver area and the Islamic-Byzantine gold area by allowing both precious metals, which now reached the cities to a sufficient extent, to circulate to an increasing extent from 1252 onwards. Venice hesitated longer because the gold influx was initially even lower than that of its trading competitors. Here the African gold was soon replaced by the Hungarian gold, which German merchants brought with them via the Fondaco dei Tedeschi . In 1284 the minting of the Venetian gold ducat began to a small extent, without renouncing the tried and tested silver currency.
For long-distance trading, silver coarse and gold ducats were available at the same time. One ducat initially corresponded to 39 solidi ad grossos. A few months later, in June 1285, the solidus fell to 1 to 40. This corresponded to a ratio of 1 ducat to 18 or 18.5 grossi. The Senate was able to artificially maintain this ratio until 1328, when the rate had to be lowered from 1 to 18.5 to 1 to 24, whereby one lira di grossi, i.e. 240 grossi, was exactly 10 ducats.
Now the gold mines in the area of the Hungarian Kremnitz delivered large amounts of gold from around 1320, which allowed the minting of a Hungarian gold coin from 1324/25. In 1327, Hungary and Bohemia also agreed to ban the export of silver to Italy. Within a few years, Venice largely switched to gold, becoming the leading gold exporter where it had previously been the leading silver exporter. For the time being, the exchange rate between silver and gold money was artificially kept high in favor of silver money by minting new coins that represented fractions of its value ( mezzanino and soldino ) - with a lower silver content than the respective face value. Venice first began minting a soldo effettivo with a value of 16 to 18 instead of 20 piccoli in 1330 .
The value ratio of gold to silver caused major difficulties throughout the entire epoch, because with the growing gold production it was not easy to support the gold ducat, which had become the most important prerequisite for trade with Syria and the Mamluks of Egypt. In 1331–32 the gold price had already fallen from 1: 14.2 to 1: 13.1, in 1346/49 even to 1: 10.5 compared to the silver price, and finally in 1350 it reached its lowest point of 1: 9.4. Silver was getting more and more expensive, gold getting cheaper.
Accordingly, the Rogadia (later the Senate) tried to increase the supply of the inadequately received precious metal by exemptions from customs duties. The Zecca even stopped minting the grosso in 1354 in order to keep its value at the level it had reached through an artificially created shortage, which it largely succeeded in until 1379, especially as the flow of gold subsided. The decisive factor was that Venice made its Middle Eastern spice purchases, which it practically expanded into a monopoly, almost exclusively with gold ducats. Venice became the biggest “gold leak” in Europe.
It is believed that the silver shortage, or rather the relative gold surplus for the following decades, prompted the Senate to replace the grosso as the standard currency with another currency.
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Remarks
- ↑ "S. Marco a destra ritto in piedi, cinto il capo di aureola, col libro dei Vangeli nella mano sinistra, consegna colla destra al Doge un vessillo con asta lunghissima, che divide la moneta in due parti pressoché uguali. A sinistra il Doge, vestito di ricco manto ornato di gemme, tiene colla sinistra un volume, rotolo, che rappresenta la promissione ducale, e colla destra regge il vessillo, la cui banderuola colla croce è volta a sinistra. Entrambe le figure sono di faccia, le teste colla barba sono scoperte; quella del Doge ha i capelli lunghi che si arricciano al basso ”( Nicolò Papadopoli : Enrico Dandolo e le sue monete , in: Rivista Italiana di Numismatica e Scienze Affini 3 (1890) 507-519, here: p. 515 ( digitized version ). )