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Chapter  Coin and Punishment in Medieval Venice Alan M. Stahl On  November , a Venetian mint worker named Giovanni Plaxentio, who went by the nickname Mazorana, was brought before doge Antonio Venier and confessed to making Venetian torneselli of pure copper in his home.1 Though it may seem inconceivable to anyone who has visited the crowded island city, Mazorana had set up his own mint in his home, where he and two associates beat out ingots of copper with hammers, cut them into circular blanks, and stamped them with dies he stole from the mint. By the time the Signori di Notte (Officers of the Night Watch) entered his home and caught him with an ingot of copper and a leather bag filled with unstruck blanks, he had manufactured between , and , of the coins, most of which he sold to Greeks to take to their homeland , where the colonial coinage circulated. His confession was elicited after extensive torture and with the testimony of the copper merchant who had sold him the bullion. In January, Mazorana was brought before the Giudici di Proprio (Judges of Property), who condemned him to death by fire and supervised the carrying out of the sentence. One of his accomplices suffered the loss of his left eye and right hand. Two decades later, the two noble masters of the silver mint, Fantino Morosini and Daniele da Canal, were charged with violating the honor of the state by allowing silver coins to be struck in the mint below the prescribed standard of . fineness.2 They were indicted by the Avogadori di Comun (State Attorneys) and sentenced by their noble peers in the Senate to a perpetual loss of mint and related offices and a fine of  lire di moneta (about  ducats).3 Though their crime created a serious threat to the stability and reputation of Venetian coinage, their punishment was extremely mild, especially in comparison to that meted out to Mazorana and his accomplices. One aspect in the leniency in the treatment of Morosini and da Canal might seem to have been their noble status, but at least when Coin and Punishment in Medieval Venice  it came to more violent crimes, nobles were generally subject to the same levels of prosecution and punishment as non-nobles, or even more rigorous ones.4 In an age when most transactions were covered with physical payments of coins of precious metal, the reputation of the issues of Venice’s mint was vital to its prosperity.5 While the integrity of the Venetian coinage could suffer from a change in the standards of the coins as they left the mint, either through planned debasement or cheating by mint employees, the state preferred to cast the blame for such problems on activity outside its mint. A case in point is the Venetian tornesello, a purposely overvalued coin produced in enormous quantities for payments in Venice’s overseas colonies but prohibited from circulation at home. As these coins sank on the money market to their true intrinsic value, the Venetian authorities blamed the decline on the influx of imitations made in Greece and lands under Turkish rule.6 In fact, the number of such imitations seems to have been relatively modest, and the responsibility for the coin’s fall can be traced to the great quantities put into production to benefit the state coffers . Within Venice, the state made a distinction in criminal prosecutions between those threats to the coinage that could be charged to outsiders and those that arose out of the actions of its own officials and employees. There were many prosecutions of counterfeiters and others who threatened the soundness of the Venetian monetary circulation, and some of these resulted in public, theatrical punishments. Crimes by mint officials and employees, in contrast, were less frequent, were subject to endless appeals and arguments of jurisdiction, and often resulted in fines, deprivation of office, or other minor and nonpublic penalties. Crimes Against the Coinage in Circulation Three classes of acts by individuals outside the mint could disturb the value of the circulating coinage and threaten its reputation. Counterfeiting was the most serious, as counterfeit coins could be of significantly lower alloy than the products of the mint, and few individuals had the equipment or expertise to distinguish true Venetian coins from their imitations.7 Clipping , the shearing of metal off the edge of coins, and culling, the removal of high weight coins from circulation, lowered...

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