Economic and Military Resource. The term alchemy originated in medieval Islam as an Arabization of the Greek word chemia, which referred to working with melted metals. Metallurgy and alchemy remained intimately connected through the Renaissance, although by 1600 the metallurgical arts had attained a degree of professional distinction and were producing their own descriptive and theoretical literature. Indeed, the mining, smelting, and refining of metals constituted an important industry in central Europe during the sixteenth century, and the princes who ruled emerging nation-states sought to encourage its development everywhere as an economic and military resource.

Coinage. Metals were the basis of coinage, too, and control of money was crucial to maintaining political authority and stability. For this reason the production and debasement of precious metals, whether by smelters or alchemists, was a sensitive matter and conferred on alchemy the dual status of...