The development of the economy in the territories of modern Germany, the peninsulas of Jutland and Scandinavia, inhabited since ancient times by tribes that spoke Germanic languages, required the use of various measures, the units of which must be related to each other. Since primitive times, the Germans, like other peoples of the world, used the so-called primitive natural measures, the standards of which were borrowed from nature itself. The political disunity of the Germanic tribes led to their lack of a single system of measures. However, a generally accepted standard of weight measures appeared with them. It was a mass of wheat or barley grain. When using units of measure in production and trade, the calculation was based on the numbers of ten and twenty adopted by the Indo-European peoples. In the II–I century B.C., the Romans conquered the territory of modern Germany to the west bank of the Rhine River. Roman colonies were founded there; the Roman system of measures and the monetary system were put into use. The Germanic lands to the east of the Rhine were not part of the Roman Empire. However, due to political ties and trade exchange with the Roman Empire, Roman monetary and weight measures gradually came into use in these lands. In the first centuries A.D., Germanic tribes attacked the Romans. In the 5th century, the Western Roman Empire fell. The territory of its provinces was conquered by Germanic tribes who created independent kingdoms here. In the 8th century, Charlemagne, the ruler of one of them, namely Frankish, united the former territories of the Western Roman Empire under his authority. In the empire of Charlemagne, a single system of measures was created, in which Roman and German measures were combined. In particular, instead of the Roman siliqua, which is a carob bean, the mass of a barley grain was adopted as the standard of weight. The calculation of units according to this system was conducted not only with the help of Roman numerals for 6 and 12, but also by dividing by the two system and using the decimal system. Charlemagne’s weight measures included units of coin and trade weight. Subsequently, as the analysis of the sources shows, it was on the basis of the Carolingian units of trade weight that systems of weight measures were created in the territories of Germany, Austria and the Scandinavian countries during the Middle Ages. In the 9th century, the Carolingian empire fell apart. In the 10th century, Otto I, the king of Germany, having united under his authority certain territories of Western Europe, announced the foundation of the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation. Later, this state gradually fell apart into separate possessions, the rulers of which introduced their own monetary and weight measures. They were based on the division into marks. Initially, this monetary weight unit was equal to 2/3 of a Roman pound. Subsequently, various stamp weight standards appeared in German lands. From the 15th century, the gold and silver mass standards of the Cologne mark are being distributed in Western Europe. In the second half of the XIX century, the political unification of Germany took place, which coincided with the introduction of the international metric system in the territories of Germany, Austria and the Scandinavian countries.
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Nov 1, 2024
Olivier Richard 
Just Published
Open Access