To take the last first; it might seem that absence was a more appropriate term than diversity, seeing that the nominal value of a coin in circulation about 1600 was only in the smallest percentage of cases stated on its face; and when one comes to think of it, it is only the tourist who ever reads a coin for business purposes. Where the diversity comes in lies in the fact of certain names becoming popular, such as "paolo" in Italy, which meant that many different types would be struck, all "paoli" but none alike. As to variations in value these may be illustrated from the Venetian zecchino, the Hungarian ducat, the sultanon of Constantinople and the sheriff of Cairo. All of these are reckoned as equal in one year or other between 1592 and 1620 by one or other trustworthy traveller, yet the differences of value of one coin or other of the four vary from 6s. 8d. to 9s.; and this was not a steady rise. In fact, the difference between the 1592 and 1620 valuations is but fourpence. Moreover, the settlement of values was far less a commercial affair merely than it has become; governments were forever tinkering at it by means of proclamations, all telling against the tourist, since their object was to attract, or to retain, bullion, which either depreciated the value of the coin he wished to change or appreciated that of the coin he had to acquire. Lady Fanshawe mentions a proclamation of October 14, 1664, at Madrid which cost her husband, ambassador there, eight hundred pounds. Since then, paper money has come to absorb all the political dishonesty that used to be exercised on coins, and the far less abrupt modern methods minimise the loss to the tourist. The French government went bankrupt fifty-six times during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.[157] As to the other diversity, that of kind, Lauder saw a proclamation which assessed the values of five hundred coins then current in France.