Editing Commercial revolution (section)

===Monetary factors===
The need for silver coinage also affected the desire for expanded exploration as silver and gold were spent for trade to the Middle and Far East. The Europeans had a constant deficit in that silver and gold coin only went one way: out of Europe, spent on the very type of trade that they were now cut off from by the Ottomans.

Another issue was that European mines were exhausted of silver ore and gold. What ore remained was too deep to recover, as water would fill the mine, and technology was not sufficiently advanced enough to successfully remove the water to get to the ore or gold.<ref>{{cite web | url=http://www-geology.ucdavis.edu/~cowen/~GEL115/115CH7.html | title=Exploiting the Earth | access-date=2007-10-17 | author=Cowen, Richard | url-status=dead | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071009180929/http://www-geology.ucdavis.edu/~cowen/~GEL115/115CH7.html | archive-date=2007-10-09 }}</ref>

A second argument is that trade during the youth of the commercial revolution blossomed not due to explorations for bullion (gold and silver coinings) but due to a newfound faith in gold coinage. Italian city-states such as Genoa and Florence (where the first gold coins began to be minted in 1252) and kingdoms such as the Kingdom of Sicily routinely received gold through such trading partners as Tunisia and Senegal.<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Lopez|first1=Robert S.|title=Back to Gold, 1252|journal=The Economic History Review|date=1956|volume=9|issue=2|pages=219–240|doi=10.2307/2591743|jstor=2591743 }}<!--|access-date=6 November 2014--></ref> A new, stable and universally accepted coinage that was both compatible with traditional European coinage systems and serviced the increased demand for currency to facilitate trade made it even more lucrative to carry out trade with the rest of the world.