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

34 The Coins of Europe
the Two Sicilies notably the current money was a tolerably
faithful reflex of the successive races which obtained a footing
on that soil.
All sorts of obscure and accidental circumstances contributed
to govern the countless varieties or modifications of
fabric and character which now represent the European
family of current coins, and favoured the tendency to borrow
what was evidently treated as public property the happiest
experiments in numismatic art. On the innumerable independent
townships and seigniorial fiefs which swell the proportions
of our Catalogue of Mints, the neighbourhood of a powerful
and permanent central authority, with affinity of language
and religion, naturally operated toward the spread of certain
favourite and familiar coins over a region, and even from
one region to others ;
and this incidence has sometimes
created a difficulty in assigning pieces to their true patria.
The trading caravans by land, and the annual fleets of
the Italian republics and other maritime commercial states
of Europe, with the great periodical fairs and the constant
movements of troops, were the distributing agents in times
when modern travelling was almost unknown, and was chiefly
undertaken with a military or a diplomatic object.
Denominations, as well as types, were freely appropriated
under the ancient system of monetary economy ;
and it
strikes us as a personal trait on the part of an imperious and
irascible pontiff, rather than a gauge or test of the average
sentiment of the period, when Sixtus V. excommunicated the
Marquis of Castiglione for copying a small papal coin known
as a picciolo.
XI
A good deal of perplexity and inconvenience has been
occasioned, in regard .to the older continental money, by
the want of some authority for determining the actual
nomenclature. The circumstances under which appellations
were bestowed by accident or design were so remote and
even so obscure, that it has only been by a gradual process