There's a lot of stuff in that article that I don't quite believe, such as: "When the Roman Empire fell apart, there were no coins in circulation, just gold. Bu

There's a lot of stuff in that article that I don't quite believe, such as: "When the Roman Empire fell apart, there were no coins in circulation, just gold. But you didn’t pay taxes with gold. What the Frisians did was reinvent cash. Not just coins, but cash—money you carried with you in order to do business. They were trading between different kingdoms and territories, so they had to have something that made sense to everybody. Outside Friesland, there’s very little evidence of the minting of silver coins until much later. " A little bit of googling turns up evidence that lots of people were minting silver, here's some 6th century Goths doing it: http://www.romancoins.info/Ostrogoths.html http://www.romancoins.info/Ostrogoths.html and Charlemagne too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aachen_penny_of_Charlemagne https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aachen_penny_of_Charlemagne