Thaler
A thaler, or taler, is one of the large silver coins minted in the states and territories of the Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburg monarchy during the Early Modern period. A thaler size silver coin has a diameter of about and a weight of about 25 to 30 grams. The word is shortened from Joachimsthaler, the original thaler coin minted in Joachimsthal, Bohemia, from 1520.
While the first standard coin of the Holy Roman Empire was the Guldengroschen of 1524, its longest-lived coin was the Reichsthaler, which contained Cologne Mark of fine silver, and which was issued in various versions from 1566 to 1875. From the 17th century a lesser-valued North German thaler currency unit emerged, which by the 19th century became par with the Vereinsthaler.
The thaler silver coin type continued to be minted until the 20th century in the form of the Mexican peso until 1914, the five Swiss franc coin until 1928, the US silver dollar until 1935, and the Austrian Maria Theresa thaler. These days thaler-sized silver coins are not in active circulation anymore, but are minted by various government mints as bullion or numismatic items for collectors. The current derivative of the name, dollar, also survives as the name of several modern currencies.
Etymology
German taler is recorded from the 1530s, as an abbreviation of Joachimstaler. The silver mines at Joachimstal had opened in 1516, and the first such coins were minted there in 1518.The original spelling was taler.
German -taler means "of the valley" -- cognate with English "dale", which also means "valley".
By the late 16th century, the word was variously spelled as German taler, toler, thaler, thaller; Low German daler, dahler.
In 18th to 19th-century German orthography, Thaler became standard, changed to Taler in the 1902 spelling reform.
The name taler, thaler was soon used in compounds denoting various types of silver coins of thaler size, thus Reichstaler, Silbertaler, Albertustaler, Laubthaler, Kronenthaler, Ortsthaler, Schützentaler, Bankthaler, Speciethaler, etc.
Units used in the Netherlands include the daalder, the rijksdaalder and the leeuwendaalder. From 1754, many German states used the Conventionsthaler as well as a lower-valued North German thaler, or Reichsthaler, worth Conventionsthaler. From 1840 the various North German thalers converged to the value of the Prussian thaler and afterwards the Vereinsthaler.
The corresponding English silver coin of the period was the crown. The Low German word was adopted in English as daler by 1550, modified to dollar by about 1600.
English thaler was introduced in the first half of the 19th century to refer to the coins of the German states, as the word dollar was increasingly understood to refer to the United States dollar.
Predecessors
The development of large silver coins is an innovation of the beginning Early Modern period.The largest medieval silver coins were known as groats, from denarius grossus, "thick penny". These rarely exceeded a weight of six grams.
Even these coins were increasingly debased due to the Great Bullion Famine of the 15th century, which occurred for several reasons, including continued warfare and the centuries-long loss of silver and gold in indirect one-sided trades importing spices, porcelain, silk and other fine cloths and exotic goods from India, Indonesia and the Far East. This continual debasement had reached a point that silver content in Groschen-type coins had dropped, in some cases, to less than five percent, making the coins of much less individual value than they had in the beginning.
This trend was inverted with the discovery of new and substantial silver deposits in Europe beginning in about the 1470s. Italy began the first tentative steps toward a large silver coinage with the introduction in 1472 of the Venetian lira tron, in excess of six grams, a substantial increase over the four-gram gros tournois of France. However, it was only in 1484 that Archduke Sigismund of Tirol issued the first truly revolutionary silver coin, the half Guldengroschen, of roughly 15 g. This was a very rare coin, almost a trial piece, but it did circulate so successfully that demand could not be met.
Finally, with the silver deposits—being mined at Schwaz—to work with and his mint at Hall, Sigismund issued, in 1486, large numbers of the first true thaler-sized coin, the Guldengroschen. It was an instant and unqualified success. Soon it was being copied widely by many states who had the necessary silver. The engravers, no less affected by the Renaissance than were other artists, began creating intricate and elaborate designs featuring the heraldic arms and standards of the minting state as well as brutally realistic, sometimes unflattering, depictions of the ruler.
Joachimsthaler
By 1518, guldiners of similar weight to guldengroschen were popping up everywhere in central Europe. In the Kingdom of Bohemia, then ruled together with Hungary by Louis II of the Jagiellonian dynasty, a guldiner was minted— of similar physical size but slightly less fineness—that was named in German the Joachimsthaler, from the silver mined by the Counts of Schlick at a rich source near Joachimsthal where Thal means "valley" in German. Saint Joachim, the father of the Virgin Mary, was portrayed on the coin along with the Bohemian lion.Similar coins began to be minted in neighbouring valleys rich in silver deposits, each named after the particular thal, or valley, from which the silver was extracted. There were soon so many of them that these silver coins began to be known more widely as 'thaler' in German and 'tolar' in Czech.
In the 17th century, some Joachimsthalers were in circulation in the Tsardom of Russia, where they were called yefimok – a distortion of the name Joachim.
Holy Roman Empire
The new large silver coins that became ubiquitous as the 16th century went on were named Thaler in German, while in England and France, they were named crown and écu, respectively, both names taken from what had originally been gold coins. The thaler-size silver coin minted in Habsburg Spain was the eight-real coin, later also known as peso and, in English, as the Spanish dollar.The first large silver coin standardized by the Holy Roman Empire was the Guldengroschen in 1524. Under the new Imperial Minting Standard it contained th a Cologne Mark of silver, or 29.232 g, and had a fineness 0.9375. However, its longest-lasting standard coin was the Reichsthaler, defined in 1566 as containing th a Cologne Mark of fine silver, or 25.984 g. It was widely adopted and produced for the next 300 years at rates varying from 9 to 9 Reichsthalers to the Mark.
See the chronology of thaler development for the development of the Reichsthaler and related currency units from 1566 to 1875. Confusingly, there also was defined a North German thaler currency of less value to the standard Reichsthaler specie coin; this thaler was worth 12 to a Mark after 1690, 13 to a Mark after 1754, and 14 to a Mark by the 1840s. Furthermore, in 1754 a Conventionsthaler was developed by the Austrian Empire minted at 10 to a Mark of fine silver. While it was adopted by most German states, Scandinavia and a few North German states retained the original Reichsthaler specie of 9 to a Mark as their standard coin until 1875.
City view thalers and lösers
The "city view" thalers of the 17th and 18th century have predecessors in stylised representations of cities on the obverse of thaler coins in the late 16th century, such as the Lüneburg thaler of Rudolf II made in 1584. More elaborate city views become current in the first half of the 17th century.The type continues to be popular throughout the 18th century, culminating in detailed city panoramas rendered in one-point perspective.
In the late 16th and 17th centuries, there was a fashion of oversized thaler coins, the so-called "multiple thalers", often called Löser in Germany. The first were minted in the Duchy of Brunswick-Luneburg, and indeed the majority were struck there. Some of these coins reached colossal size, as much as sixteen normal thalers, exceeding a full pound of silver and being over in diameter. The name Löser most likely was derived from a large gold coin minted in Hamburg called the portugalöser, worth 10 ducats, which were based on Portuguese 10-ducat coins. Eventually the term was applied to numerous similar coins worth more than a single thaler. These coins are very rare and highly sought after by collectors. As few of them were circulated in any real sense, they are often well-preserved.
Dutch Republic
The Spanish Netherlands and the independent Dutch Republic has had a history of minting large silver coins separately from the rest of the Holy Roman Empire. It issued the kruisdaalder in 1567, and then the leeuwendaalder in 1575, the latter of weight 27.68 g and 0.743 fineness. With the growing popularity of the German reichsthaler, however, the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands had to follow up with their own Dutch rijksdaalder in 1583, of weight 29.03 g and 0.885 fineness, and featuring an armored half bust of William the Silent. Friesland, Gelderland, Holland, Kampen, Overijssel, Utrecht, West Friesland, Zeeland, and Zwolle minted armored half bust rijksdaalders until the end of the 17th century.The pace of depreciation of the small-denomination stuiver quickened from the 1570s, with the leeuwendaalder rising from 32 to 40 stuivers by 1619, and the rijksdaalder from 42 to 50 stuivers. The Amsterdam Wisselbank was then founded in 1608 to establish a stable bank currency with the rijksdaalder of 29.03 g, 0.875 fine fixed at 50 stuivers, or 2 gulden.
The bank's success helped the Dutch Republic become Europe's financial center in the 17th century and maintain the reichsthaler as its banking currency unit despite Germany's descent into the chaos of the Thirty Years' War. As a bullion entrepôt of the period, the Netherlands produced reichsthalers for Germany and Scandinavia, and exported leeuwendaalders to the Levant and the Ottoman Empire. The latter survives to this day in the form of the Romanian and Moldovan leu.
Lion daalders were in common use in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and in what is now known as the United States. The city of New Amsterdam, currently New York, was founded by the Dutch in the early 17th century. "The Lion Daalder holds an important place in American history as America’s first dollar and the root of the word from where the current currency, the US Dollar, found its name."
By the 18th century, the Spanish-controlled Dutch territories eventually became the Austrian Netherlands. In 1754, it issued the kronenthaler of 29.45 g weight and 0.873 fineness, or 25.71 g fine silver. This coin was adopted by many South German states by the early 19th century.
The term daalder continued to refer to 1 gulden in currency even after the discontinuation of the 1 gulden, or 30 stuiver, piece in the 19th century.
The rijksdaalder was also known as the silver ducat, which is still minted for collectors in the Netherlands today.