Coinage in the 1600s

Looking over the money displayed in this cabinet you will notice something missing. There is no paper money. That didn’t catch on in Europe until the late 17th Century. Trade in those days was carried out with an exchange of goods of an agreed value or bullion. As there was no regulated market, a coin was worth whatever the metal it was made of was valued at. Silver was the bullion preferred by traders in the East, and that is why Dutch East Indiamen were almost all carrying a consignment of silver coin when they sailed for the Spice Islands.  Each of these big silver coins weighed in at 1 ounce. On one side of the coin is the mintmark from the place where it was struck. A mint had to have the approval of the monarch to operate, so on the other side of the coin, was the profile of the head-of-state, showing that the coin came from a reputable source. Naturally, there was the risk of criminals scraping the edge off coins to accumulate enough silver to strike a forgery. You could always weigh a coin to check, but that took time. The eventual answer was to put a milled edge on coins. That way, you could tell immediately if a coin had been tampered with.