The mint of Maccagno Inferiore and its coins

· The book

The book

La zecca di Maccagno Inferiore e le sue monete, Comune di Maccagno - Magazzeno Storico Verbanese - Libraio Alberti Editore, Intra 2003, 344 pages, 8 plates, hardcover, 21x30 cm

"Solone Ambrosoli" award 2004

"Fondazione Banca Agricola Mantovana" award 2004

Contents (21 kB)

General index (51 kB)

Model of fews pages (319 kB)

A small mint, a good deal: that's what it certainly was for Giacomo III Mandelli who - as soon as he got from the emperor Ferdinand II of Habsburg in 1622 the privilege to mint coins in his little fief on the Maggiore Lake - immediately started (but maybe he had already started in 1621) to mint counterfeit coins of all kinds from Holland, Coira, Germany, and many more, including sesini of Milan. Notes about these counterfeit coins can be found in the edicts printed in Holland back in 1627 and 1630 in order to warn the monetary market.

Funnily enough, the imperial privilege allowed in 1622 clearly ordered that only "good, unadulterated and sincere coins" (bonam tamen sinceram et iustam, quae non sit adulterata) could be minted: maybe the emperor already had suspicions?

The results of the activity of the mint become even clearer when reading other documents; in fact, not only in Holland or in the State of Milan, but even in Bologna in 1638 the order was not to spend or change the adulterated doble d'oro of Maccagno.

The State of Milan was under a lot of pressure because of the small mints that made counterfeit coins of all kinds: the mints of the lords of Bozzolo, Sabbioneta, Mirandola, Guastalla, Correggio were just as busy as that of Maccagno, and all of them were listed in a letter of an official of the Regie Ducali Entrate of the State of Milan dated 1636, as reported in this book along with many other documents. The main problem for the State of Milan was to maintain control on the source of the materials and prevent the mint of Maccagno from using the gold and silver that the mint of the State needed to make its own coins.

The study of both small and large mints helps to shed light on many aspects of history: legal transactions and the history of technology, organization of work and businesses, movements of workers and businessmen, the relationship between metals and the Gresham law, profits and losses, law enforcers and thieves. A peculiar guy is particularly conspicuous in the history of the mint of Maccagno: Gusmino. In a report on counterfeit Dutch coins that circulated in the State of Milan there is also mention of the trial of Gusmino, considered the main manufacturer of counterfeit coins, who after working in the mints of Maccagno and Masserano had finally found a job in the mint of Tassarolo. Not a bad job. So, somebody like him who had drawn the attention of the authorities could simply abandon a suspicious mint and continue his activity in some other place, bringing another source of income to his new lords by offering his expertise to them. Just like today, it wasn't easy at that time to find real professionals.

However, forgers didn't content themselves with working for noble lords who had a regular permission to mint: they occasionally worked independently, maybe with the help of some curate, as can be read in the record of a trial of 1645 involving two forgers of Maccagno caught in the act of minting fake genovine in the Castle of Vitaliana.

Forgers didn't only produce gold and silver coins, but also low-value coins that circulated mainly among poor people; an edict of 1645 by the State of Milan warned against a huge number of sesini minted by forgers in Mantova and Maccagno, so very well made that it was almost impossible to tell the good coins from the counterfeit ones, especially - as the edict said - for "ignorant people" who made most of these coins circulate.

It would be interesting to know for sure whether or not the "ignorant people" couldn't really tell the difference between an adulterated coin and a good one; maybe they just didn't have any choice: for instance, could a beggar refuse charity in the shape of counterfeit coins? The question regarding the ability of common people to recognize fake coins interests all numismatists and economy historians; whatever the answer, it is evident that such a widespread and deeply rooted illegal activity was not easy to stop. The mint of Maccagno kept on working till 1668, even if other sovereigns in the following years confirmed to the fief the privilege to mint.

Most of the coins we know today are of Giacomo III Mandelli, who set up the mint.

The period of decadence is described - probably with some exaggeration - in a document sent by Giovanni Battista Mandelli and the people of Maccagno begging to be exempted from the payment of taxes; in the letter they claimed that the closure of the mint and the market had also made the traffic and trading in the fief stop, and therefore their only source of income had disappeared.
This book is a great tribute to a small place with an ancient history and much more.

A small mint, a great job; it is certainly a very accurate and passionate job what Luca Gianazza has done.

He collected all the documentation available about the fief of Maccagno Inferiore and searched for coins minted in Maccagno in all museums and auction catalogs. He also accurately examined all the coins in his files in order to recognize which minting die was used to make them; all this has allowed the author to present a totally new picture of the way the mint operated.

The work he did examining the archives was equally remarkable, and proved that he is a real researcher full of passion and tenacity. The aspect of the small mint, too, is clearly shown, from the eighteenth-century plan of the building that hosted the mint (which even shows the course of the water that was used in the mint) to the inventory of the tools given to the new minters in 1632: bellows, presses, stoves, pincers, hammers, scales, tables, and desks.

The 1623 lease of the mint gives us more information: the minter could only hire catholic workers; the owner and the workers had the right to carry weapons - even the forbidden ones - day and night (an ancient privilege granted to the minters of the Sacro Romano Impero and others); the name and the weapons of the count and countess had to appear on all the coins, arranged in whatever design the minter thought was best in order to make the coins beautiful. Therefore, the beauty of the coins was part of the contract. But were these coins really beautiful? All the counterfeit foreign coins don't tell much about counts and countesses - actually, they only tell us how big was the profit forgers made out of these fakes. Some portraits of the counts, however, were very nice indeed, especially those on the ducatoni that showed the coat of arms and fully written title of the noble men. But these coins were intended to boost the count's image, not his finances!

It wasn't easy to find a good minter, and it's not easy to find a real expert in mints. Luca Gianazza has proven, thru his tenacity, how much history and how many stories, from the Maggiore Lake to Bologna, and all the way to Holland - a small mint can reveal.

Lucia Travaini
Università degli Studi di Milano

(taken from the preface of the book)