Mint owner

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A mint owner is the owner of the mint sovereignty within a certain territory and used to be a person or city equipped with a coin shelf that had coins minted . As a rule, this was the king or emperor himself, but also nobles or clergy who had received the coin rack from the king, e.g. B. as part of the fiefdom . In the late Middle Ages , cities also entered the circle of those entitled to mint, who had emancipated themselves from their sovereigns mostly by buying the coin rack once.

Having the right to mint was a very lucrative privilege , as the treasure trove that the mint masters had to provide brought with it considerable profit, especially with the cutting coins . For many princes of the Middle Ages and modern times, this was the greatest source of income alongside taxes . As they lived a lavish lifestyle and often fought military conflicts , it could even happen that they had to borrow money from the mint masters they employed, but also from wholesalers such as the Fuggers and the Welsers .

literature

  • Wilhelm Rentzmann: Numismatic Lexicon of the Middle Ages and Modern Times . Transpress-Reprint, Berlin 1980 (unchanged reprint of the Berlin 1865 edition)

See also

Individual evidence

  1. Helmut Kahnt, Bernd Knorr: Old dimensions, coins and weights. A lexicon. Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig 1986, licensed edition Mannheim / Vienna / Zurich 1987, ISBN 3-411-02148-9 , p. 389.