Last week Tom Wetter asked:

First to respond was Ron Guth, who writes:

Tom DeLorey writes:

Ken Spindler of San Diego, CA writes:

Eric Vanhove writes:

To access the Google Books item, see:

Jim Duncan quotes Ewald Junge from his "World Coin Dictionary" (p203):

Henry Goodman writes:

Ursula Kampmann writes:

At the end of the 15th / beginning of the 16th century, today's capital of Portugal, Lisbon, acquired a favoured position in the gold trade as a popular interstation. Italian merchants from Genoa or Venice bought gold in the Arab Maghreb that had been transported from the Sudan via the Sahara desert to the Mediterranean coastal towns. They paid with silver, only six times the gold weight. In the North, however, the gold was counterbalanced ten times the value of silver. What was easier than to travel the Atlantic route to the big commercial towns at the North Sea to sell the gold for plenty of money?

The most important reloading point became Portugal where the Arab money was recoined into Portuguese coins. These imposing gold coins worth 10 Cruzados were called Português. Their predecessors go back to 1340. In those days, tradesmen claimed that these Portuguese gold coins weighed as much as "100 Moroccan Doubloons".

Under John II of Castile (1406-1454), these pieces grew to an enormous size; they were produced in weights up to 235 grams. Coins that big were of course never intended to serve as currency in everyday transactions. Basically, they were ingots in the shape of coins whose weight and purity were guaranteed by the national die and hence were easier to trade on the market. In the Northern cities these coin ingots were recoined into local currency or saved as an investment of stable value and hoarded for the case of need. Portuguese large gold coins were very popular in the rich commercial cities in Northern Europe.

To read the complete article, see:Gold for Portugal(www.coinsweekly.com/en/Gold-for-Portugal/8?&id=69&type=a)

Dave Alexander writes:

Bruce W. Smith explains the different spellings. He writes:

Bruce also found this entry on the "Portugaleser", yet another spelling variant:

To read the complete article, see:Portugaleser(www.moneymuseum.com/moneymuseum/library/pictures/image.jsp?lang=en&ix=19&i=23)

Ralf Boepple writes:

Ron Haller-Williams writes:

Henk Groenendijk writes:

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:QUERY: WHAT IS A PORTUGALOZER?(www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v15n39a20.html)