The natural result of such a state of chaos, if it had been permitted to work itself out unhindered, would have been arbitrage transactions of such a nature--a flux and reflux of the European currencies so perpetual--as would have induced a yearly and universal bankruptcy. In spite of frantic efforts on the part of ruler after ruler, such results did partially come about, and they sufficiently account both for the distraction of Governments and the hatred universally visited upon the Jew in the Middle Ages. The measures which were adopted by the various States to counteract this invisible, insidious, and wasting process, partake of the roughness and unscientific character of the age. The export of gold and silver was forbidden on pain of death; and it was no mere paper threat, for prominent London merchants were drawn and quartered for the offence. The rates of exchange of foreign coins were fixed by proclamation, and the office of exchanger limited to a particular place. When all this proved ineffectual, the coins were cried down, and violent and sudden changes in the ratio enacted. What made the jerk and friction of such a process worse was that such measures were not merely defensive, but intentionally offensive. The wish of the fourteenth and fifteenth century ruler was not merely to defend his own stock of precious metals from depletion, but--having gained the conviction of the insufficiency of the production of those metals for the needs of Europe--to attract to himself the stock of his neighbours by whatever craft. There was a general struggle for the coverlid of gold, and the methods of that struggle were almost barbaric in their rudeness, violence, craft, and dishonourableness. Italy. On account of their knowledge and practice of the science of exchanges and finance, the metallic history of the Italian states is of chief importance for this earliest period. At a time when the northern nations show signs of an infancy of commerce merely, Italy was advanced in the art and practice of a most highly developed commercial and financial state. It is to her that we owe our system of book-keeping and the use of bills of exchange, not to speak of the pawnbroking and funding systems; and it is permissible to conjecture that Italy, keeping her finger as she did on the monetary pulsations of Europe, reaped her harvest, and far the largest harvest, from the bimetallic fluctuations of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In their turn those fluctuations acted on herself, and occasionally disastrously. On account of their pre-eminence as the commercial states of the peninsula, Florence and Venice are chosen to illustrate in brief the monetary history of Italy. The account of the general course of depreciation in both these states, and of the fluctuations of Mint rates is given in the Appendix (Nos. I. and II.). As regards the bimetallic influence of these changes of rates, there is one telling record in the history of Florence.