Reichsmünzfuß
Open-knowledge reference entry
The Reichsmünzfuß ("Imperial Minting Standard") was a coinage standard or Münzfuß officially adopted for general use in the Holy Roman Empire. Different imperial coin standards were defined for different types of coins.
History
After Charlemagne had introduced his successful Carolingian monetary reform, the high medieval Interregnum led to the collapse of imperial coin sovereignty. At the Reichstag or Imperial Diet in Eger in 1437, an early form of the imperial coinage system was discussed and the first determinations were made in the direction of an imperial coin standard. It was determined that gold coins valid throughout the Reich should only be minted with a fineness of 19 carats (771.6⁄1000). At that time, no quantitative determinations were made for silver coins.
The imperial diets of 1438 and 1442 under Emperor Frederick III confirmed the provisions of Eger. At the Diet of Worms in 1495, a formal imperial coin standard for gold coins was specified, but not finally decided. Following the earlier example of the gold guilders of the Rhenish Minting Union (Rheinische Münzverein), 107 coins were to be minted from 1 ½ Cologne Marks rauh, i.e. already alloyed.
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This entry incorporates text from “Reichsmünzfuß” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.