 In the 1020s, Aribo, Archbishop of Mainz, began the minting of coins at Erfurt, the oldest market town in Thuringia with a history going back to the Merovingian period.The economy, especially trade (such as with the Slavs), greatly increased after that.The Thuringian nobility, which had an admixture of Frankish, Thuringian, and Saxon blood, was not as landed as that of Francia.