years later he headed the Fifth Crusade, and the gold coin (Augustale) which he issued some time between his return from that crusade and his death, probably commemorates his wish to rival the appearance of opulence of the Eastern court. This Sicilian coin is the direct ancestor of the florin of Florence, and to it would fitly belong the honour of leading in a new era, were it not that the superior beauty of the Florentine coin gave it universal currency and reputation, and extinguished the memory of its predecessor.
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 Page 5 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.