Grosso of Venice

The Venetian grosso (plural Grossi) is a silver coin first introduced in Venice in 1193 under doge Enrico Dandolo. It originally weighed 2.18 grams, was composed of 98.5% pure silver, and was valued at 26 dinarii. Its name is from the same root as groschen and the English groat, all deriving ultimately from the denaro grosso ("large penny").

Its value was allowed to float relative to other Venetian coins until it was pegged to 4 soldini in 1332, incidentally the year the soldino was introduced.

In 1332, 1 grosso was the equivalent of 4 soldini, or 48 dinarii.

The Renaissance of the 12th century brought wealth and economic sophistication, but Venetians continued to use the badly debased remnants of the coinage system introduced by Charlemagne. Venice struck silver pennies (called denari in Italian) based on the coinage of Verona, which contained less than half a gram of 25% fine silver. Domestic transactions predominantly used these coins or their Veronese counterparts. About 1180, however, Verona modified its coinage, upsetting this practice. For foreign trade, Venetian merchants favored Byzantine coinage or coins of the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem. Saladin’s conquest of Jerusalem in 1187 and the progressing debasement of the Byzantine aspron trachy, however, made this less viable.

Elsewhere in Western Europe the situation was similar. A few efforts were made to reverse the decline of the Carolingian penny which had been their currency for four hundred years. In Lombardy, Frederick Barbarossa struck denari imperiali at double the weight of the pennies of Milan. The consistent fineness of the English sterling, or short cross penny, which Henry II introduced in 1180 made it a popular trading currency in Northern Europe. But it remained for Doge Enrico Dandolo of Venice to make the decisive breakthrough with a higher denomination coin of fine silver called a grosso. These coins had two advantages over the old pennies. First, minting and handling costs were reduced by substituting one large coin for tens of smaller ones. Second, the purity of their silver made them acceptable outside of Venice.

The earliest surviving account of Enrico Dandolo’s introduction of the Venetian grosso associates it with the outfitting of the Fourth Crusade in 1202 and tradition makes the need to pay for the ships which transported the crusaders the cause of the grosso’s introduction. Even though coinage of the grosso might have begun a few years earlier, the influx of silver used to pay for the crusaders’ ships led to its first large scale mintage. The coin had 2.2 grams of 98.5% fine silver, the purest medieval metallurgy could make. It was initially called a ducatus argenti since Venice was a duchy, but is more widely known as a grosso or matapano, a Muslim term referring to the seated figure on its reverse.

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