THE COIN COLLECTOR - World eBook Library

THE COLLECTOR SERIES
only, are of considerable extent, and embrace certain
examples in gold of extreme rarity and commercial
value. The most usual pieces are the Gothic copper
nummi and the Lombard silica and half-silica in poor
silver ; but the latter people also established their rule
in Sicily and Naples, where they retained their ground
longer than in the north. A fair account of the Italian
numismatic annals of this period of transition is to be
found in our former volume, as well as in the exten-
sive additions to it in course of publication in Messrs.
monthly Numismatic Circular.
We have elsewhere shown how the aggrandisement
Spinks 1
of the Frankish power under Pepin of Herstal and
his son Charles or Charlemagne prepared the way,
through the decentralising and enfeebling action of a
political growth or structure too heavy for its base, for
the rise and consolidation of the Holy See on the one
hand, and of the republics, especially that of Venice, on
the other. Already in the fifth century the Venetians
had laid the first stone of that wondrous constitutional
edifice which was to witness the rise and evanescence
of so manv other states; and in the ninth we may say
that the Republic and the Papacy were the two powers
in the peninsula most independent of the imperial
authority.
Many other communities, as we learn from Sismondi,
formed themselves by degrees into virtually autonomous
governments resting on a federal basis, and preserved
this freedom for a longer or shorter period according
to local or other circumstances ; but those which had
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