THE COIN COLLECTOR - World eBook Library

CONTINENT OF EUROPE
Liegnitz, in Prussian Silesia, for Prussia. Of coins in
that metal for Prussia proper, we have seen nothing
prior to the reign of Sigismund II. Augustus. The
earliest thaler ( = 30 Polish groschen) was struck in
1564 for Livonia. The smaller silver denominations
in this group of currency are the most abundant; the
older thalers in fine state, and well-preserved copper,
are of extreme rarity, and the ducat and its multiples
are not common. Those of John III. Sobieski pre-
sent, like his thalers, a life-like portrait of that cele-
brated personage. The latest autonomous Polish piece
which we have is a six-zlotv of 1794.
Russia was of course far behind the Poles in every
respect, and down to the reign of Peter the Great had
no coinage worthy of a great nation. The cradles of
metallic currency, when the system of bartering skins
was gradually abandoned, had been Kiev and Nov-
gorod. An effort was made by one of the dukes of
Muscovy at the end of the fifteenth century to intro-
duce Hungarian gold types, but nothing was then
accomplished, nor was the alleged mission of Walter
Basbee, assay-master of the Goldsmiths 1
Company, in
1608, to the court of the Czar, on the part of James
I. of Great Britain, in order to assist in the reform
of the coinage, more successful ; and so far as we are
aware, the coinage of Peter, 1704, was the first essay
toward a general reform of the system, that of
Alexie or Alexis Michailovitch, 1654, amounting to
scarcely more than an isolated experiment. But Russia
used to a very considerable extent in the seventeenth
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