Gold and silver coinage in Malta, 1530-1798 : the Order's stand against falsification of money

Abstract

As soon as the Order of St. John set float on Maltese soil it had to contend not solely with problems of a financial nature ,which every constituted Government has faced before or since, but with :peculiar'!" problems of a monetary nature which, happily, are alien to most nations today. Hardly had the first hurdle, that of being granted the sovereign privilege of minting coins as had been the case in Rhodes, been successfully overcome, than the Order was faced with other monetary problems. There was the very thorny question resulting from the over-circulation of fiduciary ,copper coins which the Order, at least for some decades, attempted in vain to redeem, and which brought much economic and social harm in its wake. There were complex problems resulting from the debasing of the standard coinage in the 18th Century and there were almost endemic problems due to the surfeit or scarcity of fractional and other currencies in the Island. Nor were these and other problems simply just of local concern; it sometimes happened that echoes of these problems reverberated beyond Maltese shores and, at least temporarily, strained relations between the Order and !Other powers, usually Sicily, the Vatican and, on some occasions, Venice. One problem which the Order of St. John attempted to solve was the frequent circulation of false coinage in the Maltese Islands. This included foreign as well as local currencies; gold and silver pieces as well as copper.