THE COIN COLLECTOR - World eBook Library

THE COLLECTOR SERIES
and travel, so largely promoted by religious fanaticism,
and the unforeseen outcome of the successive expedi-
tions to the Holy Land for the recovery of the
Sepulchre, the increased call for the means of exchange
on a better footing; and the purity and undeviating
weight of the mediaeval Italian gold was primarily due
to its competition with the high Oriental standard.
The text which follows, with the matter occupy-
ing the latter part of the volume, and the very full
information collected in our previous work, should
altogether suffice to afford inquirers a tolerably clear
and complete view of what, so far as English readers
were concerned, remained till recently a very imper-
fectly known department of numismatic history. Eng-
lish scholars are obviously competent to study, through
publications in various languages, the progress and
particulars of the coinages of each locality and region
within the European frontier ; but the present under-
taking is more especially calculated for the service of
the majority, who possess neither the leisure nor the in-
clination to make themselves masters of the facts, here
broadly and methodically stated, by the laborious per-
usal of a polyglot library of monographs and other
treatises.
The marvellous number and extent of the persons
and places formerly entitled to issue their own money,
and the disappearance or obscurity of the clues to
identification in many cases, have combined with im-
perfect lines of succession and broken or fragmentary
records of numismatic policy and enterprise to em-
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