Description:

Isabella I of Spain Queen 1451 - 1504 Columbus' Patrons Ferdinand and Isabella both sign a document calling for a council to "state their opinions and views on the quality and purity, standard and weight and value of the coins that are found and circulate...both of gold and silver and vellon..."Amazing and unique documentation of the first coins that made it to the New World

Following their Edict of Medina which lowered the ratio of the value of Spain's gold coins to silver coins at 1:10.755 just six months earlier, resulting in "difficulties and complaints from many towns ," Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand have called for a council of qualified experts "who know about this craft from learning and from experience, and that they state their opinions and views on the quality and purity, standard and weight and value of the coins that are found and circulate" resulting in a "remedy that should be made in order to put an end to the said difficulties and complaints that there are at present regarding the said coins that circulate now..."

Manuscript Document Signed "Yo el Rey" ["I the King"] by Ferdinand and "Yo la Reyna" ["I the Queen"] by Isabela, 1p, 8.25" x 12". Alcalíç de Henares, Spain, December 21, 1497. In Spanish with full English translation. On watermarked laid paper. To the "Council, justiciar [administrator of justice], regidores [members of the council of municipalities], knights, squires, officials, and good men of the town of Valladolid." Docket in unknown hand on verso. In exceptionally fine condition.

In part, "Because it is our intention and will that good coins circulate and are used in these our kingdoms, at just prices in accordance with the true value of the gold and silver and with respect to the prices at which they are valued in the neighboring kingdoms, so that gold and silver and coins made from them are not taken out of our kingdoms; and because some difficulties and complaints from many towns have resulted from the provisions that we ordered to be made in this regard in past days; we have resolved, so that better provision may be made in remedying the said coins in the future, to order that there be called before us in council some persons from the chief cities and towns of our kingdoms who know about this craft from learning and from experience, and that they state their opinions and views on the quality and purity, standard and weight and value of the coins that are found and circulate and should be found and circulate in these kingdoms, both of gold and silver and vellon [a silver-copper alloy also used in Spanish coins] and the remedy that should be made in order to put an end to the said difficulties and complaints that there are at present regarding the said coins that circulate now..."

In 1492, the average ratio of the value of gold to silver throughout Europe stood at about 1:11 (1 ounce of gold equaled 11 ounces of silver). The Edict of Medina (la Pragmíçtica de Medina del Campo) issued by Ferdinand and Isabela on June 13, 1497, fixed the ratio in the gold and silver coins of Spain at 1:10.755. Donald McCrory, in No Ordinary Man: The Life and Times of Miguel de Cervantes (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2002), writes, "In 1497 Ferdinand and Isabela, the Catholic Monarchs, passed a decree, 'La Ordenanza de Medina del Campo,' in an attempt to put the rather chaotic Castilian monetary system into some semblance of order ... The ordinance defined coins of gold, silver and of an alloy of silver and copper called vellon (billon). These were measured in a unit of currency called a maravedo. This coin is often mentioned by Cervantes in his writings..."

Columbus took four voyages to the Americas: 1492, 1493, 1498, and 1502.

In Uncovered: The Lost Coins of Early Americans (Xulon Press: 2006), Todd Cook writes, "In the early 1990s, old coins were uncovered on an island in the Dominican Republic ... excavated at the former site of La Isabela, the colony founded by Christopher Columbus in 1494, to which he made subsequent visits in 1496 and again in 1498. Scholars theorize that the coins were brought over in these later voyages..."

The coins discovered at Columbus's settlement are itemized by Alan M. Stahl in "Coins from the Excavations at La Isabela, D.R., the First European Colony in the New World," published in the American Journal of Numismatics in 1992. Stahl notes that "in the early years of Henry's reign, a wide range of billon [gold, silver] coins had been minted of widely varying weights and produced at poorly-regulated mints. Finally, in 1471, he introduced this relatively controlled issue, which appears to have driven all of the earlier bullon coins out of circulation. This issue was so successful that Ferdinand and Isabela issued no bullon coins in their own names for the first two decades of their reign. The only low-denomination coins circulating in Spain at the time of Columbus's departures in 1492 and 1493 would have been these old issues of Henry IV... the predominance of coins of Henry IV confirms the early habitation of this site..."

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