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The Ducat: Once an Important Coin in European Business

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 July 2012

Shepard Pond
Shepard Pond
Affiliation:
Harvard '10, Ex-President, Boston Numismatic Society.
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Extract

How many of those who listen to Shylock's famous lament, “My daughter!—O my ducats!” realize that the ducat was for centuries the world's best-known gold coin? For ducats had been in wide circulation as many years before Shakespeare's time as the great dramatist antedates our present era.

Type
Other
Information
Business History Review , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , April 1940 , pp. 17 - 19
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1940

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References

page 17 note 1 The first gold coins issued in Italy after Roman days appear to have been struck in Genoa almost exactly one hundred years earlier. They left no mark in numismatic history.

page 18 note 2 A silver, concaved Byzantine type of coin, struck about a century earlier by the Norman king, Roger II of Sicily, and sometimes called ducat, should not be confused with the gold ducat.

page 19 note 3 In Maryland at 108 pounds of tobacco; in Virginia at two pieces of eight, or Spanish dollars, the latter a clear evidence of the lower value of the Barbary ducats.