Exchange house

Medieval print of a coin house.

A mint is an industrial facility where coins are manufactured and minted. The term mint is an outdated word according to the Spanish Royal Academy and used to refer to an official establishment where currency was made or issued. It is also known as casa de la moneda in Spain.

Etymology and description

The famous numismatist Basilio Sebastián Castellanos de Losada offers the following definition:

ZECA. In Spain, in particular in Catalonia, he called the currency houses. The word zeca is derived from an Arabic word, which in Spanish means Purification House. Coin houses have also been called Ingenio.

The word mint comes from the Arabic word sikka (in Arabic سكّة), which means coin and die. The Arabic word is also part of the phrase dar al-sikka (in Arabic دار السكّة), whose meaning is literally "mint". A die is a frequently cylindrical piece made of hard metal with the same details and shape that will appear on the coin, but in the die they are incised or negative. The die is used in the minting of the coin, being struck by a hammer and striking, in turn, the blank, which is the metallic piece, generally cylindrical, that has two faces and both are different. To mint means to beat, stamp, print by means of a stamp or die, that is, to give shape and relief, by means of a blow or pressure, to the piece of metal that is placed between the dolly and the die.

Coinage and evolution

German Medieval Relieve depicting a beech by martilleo.

The manufacture of currency, from the beginning of its appearance as a means of payment, was an artisanal process, in appropriate means at each time and place. With the Greeks and Romans it evolved in some way, but until the 16th century, the so-called coinage was made without more remarkable changes than those of previous times.

The minting of coins throughout the Middle Ages was a special power of the acting monarch. The Royal House had its own mint, which consisted of small workshops for blacksmiths and engravers, itinerant workshops, which traveled with the court.

The Muslims of the Iberian Peninsula were more advanced than the Spanish kingdoms in matters of the monetary system and mints, therefore these monarchs learned from them and knew how to update themselves on such an important issue.

The Spanish monarch Alfonso VI took the first step in modernizing the minting process as he was the first to mint his own currency and created two stable mints in the Spanish cities of Toledo and León. The coins that came out of these establishments were called moneda regis or denarios regis and were made from an alloy of silver and copper called fleece, which is a French word billion which means, ingot. Over the years, silver was replaced by steel or brass.

The mints were few, and while stable, they still looked more like a small artisan workshop than a major money-making factory. Until in 1553, a German engineer named Brücher designed two machines that revolutionized the minting process. One of them was the Rolling Mill, a machine powered by a mill that obtained sheets of metal of a constant thickness by repeatedly passing the ingot between two hard metal cylinders or rollers. The other was the Flywheel Press that achieved the necessary force for stamping thanks to the inertia of a large flywheel.

French flyer press used in Spain in the centuryXIX.

These machines, of considerable dimensions, had to be installed in larger premises than the traditional workshops. From these inventions, improvements in the process began to follow. In 1830, the Swiss engineer Jean Pierre Droz invented the split bolster system, with which it was possible to mint both sides of the coin at the same time and also the edge or edge of the coin.

The coinage of the song was of great importance. The old coins had the stamp on both sides, with which the king guaranteed the metal weight of the coin, but some more or less large and irregular edges remained. One way of stealing was to cut money, so that with several cuts you had metal to make another.

From mint to mecca

The expression From the mint to the mecca is a very common saying among Spanish-speakers and means to go from here to there, something crazy. /i> means in this case “mint”, nor does mecca refer to Mecca, the holy city of Muslims. Moreover, it is a saying that has always been reflected without the article "la", which is something recently added. It was said “walk from mint to mecca”. In Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes puts into the mouth of Sancho Panza:

And what would be better and more successful... was to return to our place... leaving us to walk in mecca and zoca in collodra, as they say.. (Part 1.a, chapter 18).

These are simply two words used as adverbs of place, words that sound good and are used for emphasis like so many others, for example, oxte ni moxte, el oro y el moro, tiquis-miquis, weave-drive or troche and moche. Linguists make the observation that the second word almost always begins with the letter m.

Some people maintain that the saying does have to do with its meanings, since with it they want to indicate that they move from the mundane and from what is attached to the material (mint) towards the spiritual and religious (the sacred city for Muslims). Therefore, it has a sense of criticism of those who want to make others see that they have moral values, without having them, since their only morality is to accumulate money and property.