ABSTRACT
The history of objects currently is a thriving discipline in the historical sciences, even though one of the most obvious, and yet often neglected historical object – coins – has often evaded historians’ attention. This is odd, inasmuch as coins represent a very obvious starting point for writing history. Since nearly three millennia most societies across Eurasia have used coins (or coin-like objects) as money, usually made from precious metal; the near-complete ‘virtualisation’ of money (by the use of credit cards and IT technology etc.) has been a fairly recent phenomenon. The chapter is divided into five parts. The first section discusses what money was and what shapes it took in the historical or capitalist process. The second section looks at coined money as an historical source or container of information, before section three goes into more detail explaining the political economy of ‘making’ money in the Middle Ages and early modern era. Section four then studies, based on the groundwork laid in the first two sections, the interpretation of coins and coin hoards as historical evidence. Section five concludes.
