Reichsmunzwesen im spaten Mittelalter, Vol. 1

This is the first volume of a two-part study, originally the author’s doctoral thesis, which aims to reassess the history of the German imperial coinage in the late middle ages. The explicit aim of the project is to bring numismatic evidence into contact with the documentary record; to ‘rescue’, in a sense, numismatics from antiquarian status, and illuminate the history of the imperial coinage in so doing. The product is nothing if not thorough. The reign of the emperor Ludwig (1314–47), with which Mäkeler’s study begins, witnessed a remarkable development in the structure of the imperial coinage. The colossal subsidies remitted by Edward III in his search for allies against the French after 1337 enabled the systematic introduction of a gold coinage across Germany for the first time since the Carolingian era. The combination of documentary evidence and data provided by archaeological finds provides a solid foundation on which Mäkeler constructs a detailed description of its production and circulation. The transition from Ludwig to Karl IV (1346–1378), fraught in political terms, was not so on the numismatic front; the minting of this new gold coinage, chiefly in Antwerp, was carried forward by the new emperor using a near-identical design intended to stress the continuity of imperial rule. Mäkeler firmly and sensibly integrates Bohemia into his purview of the imperial context in handling the reigns of Karl IV and Wenzel (1376–1400). This enables an assessment of the production and export into the Empire of Bohemian silver coinage—and of the remarkable reaction of the German towns to this influx of debased Bohemian silver, in the form of systematic regimes of evaluation and counter-stamping. Similarly, it becomes clear that the failure of Karl IV to implement a relatively ambitious project to reform the imperial coinage as part of the Golden Bull rested on his apparent treatment of coinage as a Bohemian issue, coupling the less contentious monetary reform to the much more contentious issue of the extension of the Bohemian crown territories. And it was the concession by the Bohemian King Johann (‘John the Blind’, who died in battle at Crécy in 1346) of the right to mint gold coins with the imperial device to the archbishops of Cologne and Trier, in order to secure their support in the election of his son, the future emperor Karl IV, which established the pattern by which the imperial coinage became a political tool to secure the election and consolidate the rule of the Luxemburg dynasty. It was out of this concession, too, that the influential Rhine Currency Union (Rheinischer Münzverein) was established, initially as a compact between the archbishops of Cologne and Trier in 1357. Subsequently forming a town league constituted to regulate the money supply, it served as the model for the creation of several influential Münzvereine across the Empire in the final decades of the fourteenth century, the multilateral characters of which guaranteed the success of policies intended to regulate the composition and supply of the coinage where attempts at the imposition of such policies by royal and/or imperial authority had failed.

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