Just as Fernand Braudel wrote of a ‘long sixteenth century’, there seems also to have been a ‘long thirteenth century’, stretching from the 1160s to the 1330s. It is within this ‘long thirteenth century’ that fundamental changes took place in the methods of doing business that have been dignified with the title ‘the commercial revolution’. Dramatic changes certainly also took place in the physical form of the coinages of western Europe during this long century of the commercial revolution and it is these that have generally attracted the attention of historians and numismatists alike.

Although these changes in the physical forms of the currency were so dramatic, and can be seen so vividly by handling the surviving coins, they were not in my opinion fundamental, nor were they directly linked, as is so frequently repeated, simply to the increasing scale of international trade. The purpose of this chapter is to suggest that these changes were only the visible counterpart of a range of complex and important developments that represent the true role of money in the commercial revolution of the thirteenth century.

The quantity of money in circulation, the use to which it was put, and the attitudes to it, seem to me to be more important than the forms in which it circulated. From the 1160s there was a continuous sequence of large-scale producers of silver within Europe until the Villa di Chiesa mines went into a sharp decline in the 1330s and 1340s and those of Kutná Hora a little later.