THE COIN COLLECTOR - World eBook Library

THE COLLECTOR SERIES
with the fewest possible variations of legend and design.
Even the Florentines, who were greatly indebted to
trade as a source of wealth and strength, did not study
this principle prior to the Medici period ;
but in Milan,
Naples, Mantua, Ferrara, Monteferrato, Saluzzo, Savoy,
and other coin-striking centres, the desire seems long to
have been to outvie one another in the splendour and
variety of the money, which remains in our hands to-day
a precious inheritance for all lovers of what is beautiful.
In Sicily and Naples the gold Merovingian types
for some time prevailed, and were superseded under
the Normans by gold money, often with bilingual
(Arabic and Latin) legends, and a bronze currency
which followed the lines of the heavy Greek coinage
in that metal for Syracuse and other localities, just as
we have observed that the Ostrogothic bronze nummi
were modelled on the old Roman system. Of all the
productions of this region down to the Renaissance,
those in the lowest metal strike us as the most curious
and, indeed, the two Sicilies formed a region where, to
the last, special attention seems to have been paid to
this class of medium, and where we meet with a sur-
prising number of coins in unbroken sequence from
Hellenic times, but unhappily not too often in an
irreproachable state. It strikes us as more probable
that Sicily borrowed the idea of the heavier bronze
(ten grain or tonus}) from the long anterior Russian
five-kopek pieces than from England. Alike at Bene-
ventum and Salerno, under the Lombards, the Arch-
angel Michael appears as a tutelary symbol.
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