Trade in coinage, Gresham's Law, and the drive to monetary unification: the Holy Roman Empire, 1519-59

Research on premodern monetary unions has so far started out from the idea that such unions were designed to promote trade and economic integration. The present paper demonstrates that this in an anachronistic misconception. Premodern monetary unions were the answer to political and fiscal problems caused by Gresham’s Law in a monetary environment characterised permeable borders and by the increasing integration of currency markets. As integration advanced significantly in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the regional monetary unions that had been formed in the late medieval Holy Roman Empire were increasingly insufficient to address these problems. This is why the imperial estates were interested in creating and Empire-wide common currency – an aim they reached at the end of the 1550s.