Segovia Mint

A Numismatic Revolution

At the beginning of the early modern period, European trade multiplied, resulting in an increased demand for heavy silver coins, i.e., talers. Traditional hand striking reached its limits. An innovative mind in Zurich therefore developed a method that would become the new standard in the industry.

Let us go back to 1554. During the Reformation, Zurich had confiscated church property that generated a surplus. And the Council of Zurich wanted to turn that surplus into coins. This required the minting of an average of 10,000 pounds of account per year. The 984,772 talers, 60 million groschen and 2.6 million fractional coins produced over six years by the St. Gallen mint master Hans Gutenson, who had been specifically hired for this task, and his 58 journeymen were not nearly enough. Council member and goldsmith Jakob Stampfer therefore developed a completely new minting machine: the roller press.

A roller press is basically a water-driven roller that can be used to roll a sheet of metal to any desired thickness. Jakob Stampfer had the idea of transforming the previously smooth rollers into coining rollers by engraving them so that they became the equivalent of upper and lower die. The rollers pressed the motif onto a sheet of metal that was fed through them. Traditionally, planchets were punched from these metal sheets after the rolling process. The innovation was that instead of punching planchets out of the metal that would later be struck into coins, the roller press produced a sheet of metal from which ready-made coins could be punched. If the metal was too short to produce a completely circular coin, this resulted in a phenomenon that is described as “clipped planchet” or “edge clip” in catalogs.

Jakob Vogler brought the roller press from Zurich to Hall. He was the last member of a group that had to tried to make money with this new minting technique. But neither the inventor of the roller press nor Jakob Vogler became rich as a result. It was the Tyrolean archdukes who became rich thanks to the invention of the roller press because they saved a lot of money as the new way of minting required much less skilled labor than hammer coining. However, roller press minting was only profitable in cases of mass production. This was the case in Hall, as silver from the Schwaz mine was minted into coins there, resulting in a mass production of talers.

When the Spanish Habsburgs were looking for a way to mint the silver from the New World in a cheap, quick and precise way, they asked their Austrian counterparts in Hall. The result was a transfer of technology. Six journeymen from Hall traveled to Spain to set up the new mint. For this purpose, they first had to find a suitable location. After all, roller presses depended on water power. And while Tyrol had plenty of fast-flowing streams, water was in short supply in Spain. 

In 1583 Segovia was chosen as the site for the new mint. There was already an old paper mill that used the water of the Rio Eresma. It was here that the royal architect, Juan de Herrera, built the mint. Juan de Herrera is better known for El Escorial, which was built according to his plans and under his supervision. The fact that this important artist was commissioned to design the mint shows how much importance King Felipe II attached to the project.

In 1585, two roller presses arrived from Tyrol packed in boxes. They had to be reassembled before regular minting could begin in 1586. By the way, the first 100 coins created with the new roller presses were distributed to the city’s poor by royal decree.