Much has been written about the flow of income from California and Australia in the nineteenth century, and even a certain amount of attention has been paid to the way in which specie flowed from Potosi after 1545. At first historians concentrated on the royal ‘fifth’ of the silver mined. A large part of this could clearly be seen returning to Spain, after the considerable expenses of South American administration had been deducted. It could then be seen passing on from Spain through royal expenditure to other parts of Europe, for example to the army in Flanders or to the royal bankers in Genoa. More recently greater attention has been paid to the much greater proportion of the new silver that remained in private hands. How the silver was taken out of the hands of the miners themselves may be judged by the estimates that about 1600 there were not only 14 dance-halls and a theatre in Potosi, but also 36 gambling-houses, where the miners might be fleeced by between 700 and 800 professional gamblers, besides the 120 licensed and the innumerable unlicensed prostitutes. Gold-rush San Francisco was much the same, and it is not hard to believe that Freiberg, and Montieri, Friesach and Jihlava, Iglesias and Kutná Hora had, in their time, had the same free-spending carnival atmosphere. Was it as true there as in nineteenth-century California that ‘the great profits went to the merchant, the hotel keeper, the transportation company and the gambling house proprietor’ or at least to their medieval equivalents?