Note that long before governments had fiat currency in the “we will print as many dollar bills as we want to” sense, devaluation of specie-based currency was no

Note that long before governments had fiat currency in the “we will print as many dollar bills as we want to” sense, devaluation of specie-based currency was not uncommon. According to Wikipedia, the Roman denarius had about 4.9g of silver when it was introduced under the Republic, 3.9g under Augustus (about 200 years later), and 3g in the later eras of the empire (a few centuries after that). The Byzantine histamenon coin was high-quality gold when it was introduced in the late 10th century, and had almost no gold by the late 11th. The English penny started out in the late 8th century as 1.5g of fine silver, then went to sterling (92.5%) silver in the 12th, reduced its weight to 0.97g in the early 15th, to 0.78g in the mid-15th, and so on.