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

338 The Coins of Europe
profusion of civic and local money proceeding,
like that of
Northern Germany, from feudal or municipal sources.
Some of these special monetary rights were exercised down
to the eighteenth or even nineteenth century, as at Auersperg,
Khevenhiiller, Kinsky, Rosenberg, Olmlitz, and Salzburg
but the majority disappeared within the seventeenth.
;
All those which enjoy numismatic associations are enumerated
in the Catalogue of Mints. In the Salzburg archiepiscopal
series, extending from the tenth to the eighteenth century,
there is an almost unique maintenance of artistic treatment
and careful attention to detail ;
and the thalers and double
thalers of the Cardinal-Archbishop Mattheus (1521-22)
strongly remind us of Holbein. The latest thaler in our
hands belongs to 1786.
The Bohemian numismatic records, furnished by a
succession of coins
of the bracteate or the denarius module,
open with the tenth century, when the dukedom
remained singularly unsettled in its tenure, and
the list of rulers consists of a roll of obscure names, of whose
personality we gain very slight knowledge, until the crown
passed to the house of Luxemburgh in 1309. But the
surviving types of the mediaeval era deserve and repay
study by reason of their great variety of character and the
illustration which they seem to convey to us of the ideas
and development of a primitive people. It is evident that
the earliest moneyers had before them Byzantine types,
which they unskilfully copied, and that in course of time a
change of feeling led to the introduction of Christian and
Popish symbols, as the Temple, the Cross, the Hand, the
Bible, and the figure holding a globe, or with conjoined
hands adjuring an angel, as well as episodes borrowed from
local life, as in a piece where the duke is
depicted in conflict
with a bear. Prague was even in such remote days the
leading mint. The bracteates, which are of varying dimensions,
and generally uninscribed, are supposed to be posterior
to the denarii, and to belong to the later part of the
archaic period. The reign of Wenceslas II. (1278-1305)
marked a very notable advance in the coinage, for this king