Münzfuß

'coin foot' or 'mint foot') is an historical term, used especially in the Holy Roman Empire, for an official minting or coinage standard that determines how many coins of a given type were to be struck from a specified unit of weight of precious metal (the Münzgrundgewicht or coin base weight).

The Münzfuß, or Fuß ("foot") for short in numismatics, determined a coin's fineness, i.e. how much of a precious metal it would contain.

Mintmaster Julian Eberhard Volckmar Claus defined the standard in his 1753 work, Kurzgefaßte Anleitung zum Probieren und Münzen ("Brief Guide to Proving and Coining"), as follows: "The appropriate proportion of metals and the weight of the coin, measured according to their internal and external worth, or determined according to their quality, additives and fineness, number and weight, is called the Münzfuß.

[4] From the 5th century BC, due to the importance of Athens in Greek trade, the Attic standard prevailed,[4] with a tetradrachm weight of approx.

After further debasements, Diocletian's coin reform of 294 AD replaced the denarius with the argenteus with a target weight of 3.41g.

In the early modern era, the Mark replaced the pound as a unit of weight in the Roman-German Empire.