THE COIN COLLECTOR - World eBook Library

THE COLLECTOR SERIES
raised almost every grand monument which we see or
of which we hear ; and the famous Alhambra was at
one time, like the mediaeval palace both in Eastern and
Western Europe and in Asia, the royal residence, the
seat of government, the prison, and the mint. Coins
have descended to us bearing in their legends that
they were struck in the Alhambra of Granada. In
some other ways the Gothic element in Spain was
influential for good, but not numismatic-ally so, for the
money of the Visigothic princes is merely a degraded
form of the Merovingian or of the Byzantine patterns,
and the first marked impulse toward an improvement
in the fabric and execution of the currency of any part
of the Peninsula seems to have come from Arragon,
where, in the twelfth century, we meet with dinheri and
grossi, exhibiting a long advance in the art of por-
traiture, and of good silver, chiefly from the mint at
Barcelona. At the same time, Castile and Leon pre-
served the old billon money, slightly modified from
Visigothic prototypes, and the Moorish gold pieces, on
which, as we perceive from one engraved here, Alfonso
VIII. about 1190 inserted in the field the letters
A L F as a first step toward the establishment of
a Castilian medium in that metal. In this, as in other
parts of Europe, it was the middle of the fourteenth
century which witnessed a general revival of art and
taste, and Castile then took the lead under Pedro the
Cruel (1350-68) in numismatic activity, so far as the
institution of a gold coinage, including certain sump-
tuous pieces of high value, was concerned. The ordinary
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