Colonial real

[KennyisaG]

Hi everyone, did the individual colonies (ex Nueva Granada, Mexico, etc.) have their own respective currencies at the time, or were they issued by different mints under one single currency?

[Figleaf]

It's mostly, but not altogether, one currency: the silver real of 34 copper maravedis (the official unit of account) and multiples. As of 13th June 1497, its weight should be 3,35 grams, the multiples in proportion (in practice, the peso would be 27.07 grams.) For the sake of completeness: the standard gold coin was the escudo of 3.4 grams, worth 350 maravedis, implying an official gold/silver ratio of 1:10.

These standards were applied in the whole Spanish empire, including the home country, so that a coin struck anywhere in the empire could be spent anywhere else for the same amount (except that in practice, copper was generally not accepted in the South American colonies). In other words, Spanish and Spanish colonial coins are of one currency system. The distinction by country, based on mint marks in KM is to a large extent inappropriate. Moreover, the official standard was the real, not the peso.

There are two "buts" to the above. The first concerns the official fineness. While the weight standard was untouched, in time, fineness was lowered from time to time, starting at 930.5 and arriving at 902.7 in 1772. It was necessary to maintain the weight, because the real was an international trading coin, trusted for its "constant" weight and fineness. Weight was easy to check, fineness was not. Still, all mints lowered fineness at the same time.

The other "but" is corruption. Mints were run by masters of different alloy with different degrees of supervision. A royal ordinance of 1650 already mentions "a scandalous falsification in the fineness of the silver moneys coined in our Peruvian mints". At least two colonial mint masters were garrotted (strangled) for playing with fineness. This had no enormous impact in the Spanish empire, but it did affect the real as a trading coin.

Outside Spain, a tendency existed to treat Spanish money as four types, depending on their perceived fineness: Sevilla (machine-struck, perfectly round pieces), Mexico (so-so struck, but good fineness), pillar (badly struck and below official fineness) and Peru (badly struck and significantly below official fineness). These categories are just names, they do not refer to mint marks, so the coins of a mint could be in several categories, e.g. badly struck lumps of silver, now indiscriminately called "cobs" were all called "Peruvians", regardless of mintmark.

Peter