lver coin, known as the peso fuerte
or "piece of eight" because each contained eight reals, was minted in
America. Its value was about $1.06 of our money, it being the
predecessor of our dollar.

The great difficulty with the coinage of Germany and Italy is not so
much in its fluctuation as in the number of mints. The name gulden
[Sidenote: Gulden a general term] was given to almost any coin,
originally, as its etymology signifies, a gold piece, but later also to
a silver piece. Among gold guldens there was the Rhenish gulden
intrinsically worth $1.34; the Philip's gulden in the Netherlands of 96
cents and the Carolus gulden coined after 1520 and worth $1.14. But
the coin commonly used in reckoning was the silver gulden, worth
intrinsically 56 cents. This was divided into 20 groschen. Other
coins quite ordinarily met with in the literature of the times are
pounds (7.5 cents), pfennigs (various values), stivers, crowns, nobles,
angels ($2), and Hungarians ducats ($1.75). Since 1518 the chief
silver coin was the thaler, at first considered the equal of a silver
gulden. The law of 1559, however, made them two different coins,
restoring the thaler to what had probably been its former value of 72
cents, and leaving the imperial gulden in law, what it had commonly
become in fact, a lesser amount of silver.

The coinage of Italy was dominated by the gold gulden or florin of
Florence and the ducat of Venice, {464} each worth not far from $2.25
of our money. Both these coins, partly on account of their beauty,
partly because of the simple honesty with which they were kept at the
nominal standard, attained just fame throughout the Middle Ages and
thereafter, and became widely used in other lands.

[Sidenote: Wheat]

The standard of value determined, it is now possible to compare the
prices of some staple articles. First in importance comes wheat, which
fluctuated enormously within short periods at the same place and in
terms of the same amounts of silver. From Luther's letters we learn
that wheat sold at Wittenberg for one gulden a scheffel in 1539 and for
three groschen a scheffel in 1542, the latter price being considered
"so cheap as never before," the former reached in a time almost of
famine and calling for intervention on the part of the government.
However we interpret these figures (and I believe them to mean that
wheat sold at from twelve cents to eighty cents a bushel) they
certainly indicate a tremendou