Miliarenses and silver grossi in the Western Mediterranean: new documents and perspectives

Miliarenses have been studied from quite a number of scholars. They are often mentioned in various type of documents of Western Mediterranean from the end of the XII to the XIV century, thus they have an important place in the definition of the monetary history of the late Middle Age. Like for other mentions of money in medieval texts, it is not easy to give a simple meaning to the term in the different contexts of use, as well as to know to which real coins it could refer. This led to different interpretations, as we are going briefly to see. During my research in the Pisa and Genoa archives I found documents that can shed light on the topic. These new data, analyzed together with the recent studies on the coinage of the north Tyrrhenian mints, allow to look at the miliarenses and their relationship with the silver grossi according to a novel perspective.