Joachimsthaler

The thaler was a silver coin used throughout Europe for almost four hundred years. Its name lives on in the many currencies called dollar and, until recently, also in the Slovenian tolar.

To begin with, the name "thaler" was used as an abbreviation of "Joachimsthaler", a coin type from the town of Joachimsthal in the Kingdom of Bohemia (now the Czech Republic), where there were silver mines and the first such coins were minted in 1518. This original Bohemian thaler carried a lion, from the coat of arms of the Kingdom of Bohemia, on its reverse side.

Etymologically, Thal is German for "valley" - a "thaler" is a person or a thing "from the valley". The Czech spelling was tolar; many varieties of the term are used in different languages. In the 1902 spelling reform, the German spelling was changed from Thal and Thaler to Tal and Taler, which however did not affect the spelling of "thaler" in English.

The later Dutch daalders also carried the picture of a lion, which gave them the name leeuwendaalder ("lion thaler"). From an abbreviation of leeuwendaalder come the names of three present-day Balkan currencies, the Romanian and Moldovan Leu and the Bulgarian Lev.

The roots and development of the thaler-sized silver coin date back to the mid-15th century. As the 15th century drew to a close the state of much of Europe's coinage was quite poor because of repeated debasement induced by the costs of continual warfare, and by the incessant centuries-long loss of silver and gold in indirect one-sided trades importing spices, porcelain, silk and other fine cloths and exotic goods from India, Indonesia and the Far East. This continual debasement had reached a point that silver content in Groschen-type coins had dropped, in some cases, to less than five percent, making the coins of much less individual value than they had in the beginning.

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