The gold coin of Genoa (_Genoviva_) is supposed to have issued in the same year as the florin (1252). Five years later (1257) Henry III. of England imitated the florin in his gold _pennies_, and more than thirty years (31st October 1284) later Venice followed the lead of Florence and instituted a coinage of gold _zecchinos_, under the dogeship of Giovanni Dandolo. Two conditions were essential to the bringing about so momentous a revolution as this, however little the mind of contemporaries may have known it as such. In the first place, the foreign trade of the Italian republics must have become so extensive as to demand a currency medium of higher denomination than silver; and, secondly, that trade must have developed in such directions as to tap gold-using or gold-bearing regions in order to supply the Italian mints. It is a curious fact that both these conditions were realised through the instrumentality of the Crusades. The quickening effect of these vast movements on the trade of the Mediterranean is well known, but their influence in the second direction has not hitherto been pointed out. In the Fourth Crusade Venice lent the force which captured Byzantium (1203), and when, by her arms, Baldwin, Count of Flanders, had been seated on the Eastern throne, Venice reaped her reward in three-eighths of the territories of the Eastern Empire. She received Peloponnesus and a chain of islands in the Ægean, and by the hold she had on Constantinople secured the virtual control of the Black Sea. In its turn the control of the Black Sea brought with it the monopoly of the overland trade with India. [Sidenote: THE TRADE OF VENICE] At one and the same moment, therefore, Venice acquired possession of a huge treasure of gold wrested from the conquered city, and of the then only gold-yielding districts--the Crimea--and of an intercolonial trade, demanding a more enhanced currency medium. The result of such a combination of circumstances was irresistible. During the continuance of the "Latin Empire" at Byzantium, Venice and her sister state were practically the only merchants of Europe. The institution of a gold coinage among the Italian republics, therefore, marks for us an era of commercial expansion which is only fitly to be compared with that of Holland in the seventeenth century, or of our own country in modern times. We are not concerned with tracing the effects of this extraordinary movement further than as they bore in their train the dower of a currency of gold.