W. C a r e w H a z l i t t Coinage of the European Continent

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The Coins of Europe
far more limited population of Europe, even down to the
close of the eighteenth century, the large area of forest and
other waste lands, and the difficulty of intercourse, favoured
the growth and consolidation of a feudal system under
which an almost innumerable body of chieftains, secular
and ecclesiastic, exercised within local precincts an authority
dependent only on the imperial or royal prerogative.
Where communication was so slow and precarious, and
all appliances, military and mechanical, so defective, the
control of the emperor or king was practically restricted to
services in peace or war there was no central or direct
;
power in the modern sense and the head of the state
;
was virtually little more than a suzerain, who did not
interfere in the relations between his tenants-in-chief and
their vassals even in the performance
of some acts of
sovereignty. Of these acts the coinage of money for
circulation within a specified radius was the most important,
most cherished, and most decisive ;
and while in certain
instances the legends acknowledged the jurisdiction of a
superior lord, in some there was no symptom of qualified
autonomy. 1
It is to be apprehended that, in the case of the minor
townships on the Continent, the right of coinage was not
only limited to a definite area, but to the base metal and
low denominations. The money was in fact a local token.
On the other hand, we have to remember the vast or stealthy
changes which have affected the prosperity, if not the very
existence, of a large number of seats of government and
centres of industry, insomuch that instances might be produced
of places which were formerly prominent royal or
seigniorial mints, and are at present obscure and lifeless
hamlets, while there are a few, proved to have been licensed
seats of coinage, of which no examples have been recovered
or identified.
1
The ancient system of partition of authority, on a similar principle, among
a number of petty princes, and the parallel assertion of suzerainty by some individual
potentate, may explain the grandiloquent terms found on the coinage of
Parthia and Bactria, and retained at the present time by more than one Eastern
sovereign.