NEW MONEY
Workers were paid in silver pennies; the burgeoning economy demanded a lot of
coins. Silver mines were discovered and exploited to provide them. At Freiburg, in
northern Germany, such mines meant a jump in the number of mints from nine (in
1130) to twenty-five in 1197. Small workshop mints, typical before the thirteenth
century, gave way to mint factories run by profit-minded entrepreneurs. Princes
added to their power by making sure that the coins of one mint under their control
would prevail in their region. Thus the bishops of Maguelonne, who also were the
counts of Melgueil, issued coins that supplanted most of the others in southern
France.
But large-scale transactions required larger coins than pennies. Between the early
thirteenth and mid-fourteenth centuries, new, heavier silver coins were struck. Under
Doge Enrico Dandolo (r.1192–1205), Venice began to strike great silver coins, grossi
(“big ones” in Italian), in order to make convenient payments for the Fourth Crusade.
(To be sure, Venice’s little silver coins, the piccoli, continued to be minted.) Soon
Venice’s commercial rival Genoa produced similarly large coins, and the practice
quickly spread to other cities in northern Italy, Tuscany, and southern France. In
1253, Rome doubled the size of the grossi, a coinage model that was followed in
Naples and Sicily. The practice of minting these heavy silver coins spread northward.
Heavy silver was one answer to the problem of paying for large transactions.
Gold coins were another. They were certainly common in the Islamic and
Mediterranean worlds. In Europe before the mid-thirteenth century, though, they
were limited to the regions that bordered on those worlds, like Sicily and Spain. Gold
panned on the upper Niger River in Africa and wrested from mines in Hungary
helped infuse Europe with the precious metal. In 1252 Genoa and Florence struck
gold coins for the first time. The practice spread, profiting above all Italy and East
Central Europe. In fact, the kings of Hungary and Bohemia formed an alliance to
control the flow of gold, enhance their purchasing power, and increase trade.
NEW INTER-CITY CONFLICTS
The most commercialized regions were the most restive. This was certainly true in
Flanders, where the urban population had grown enormously since the twelfth
century. Flemish cities depended on England for wool to supply their looms and on
the rest of Europe to buy their finished textiles. But Flemish workers were unhappy
with their town governments, run by wealthy merchants, the “patricians,” whose
