Grzywna (unit)

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Grzywna" unit – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (July 2014) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

The grzywna (Polish: [ˈɡʐɨvna]) was a measure of weight, mainly for silver, commonly used throughout medieval central and eastern Europe, particularly in the Kingdom of Poland and Kingdom of Bohemia (Czech: hřivna).

Grzywna was also a unit of measure of a unit of exchange, and as such used as money in the 10th–15th centuries. Silver ingots acted as commodity money before the widespread use of minted coins. Several different grzywnas developed with their own system of weight and exchange, such as the Kulm grzywna and the Kraków grzywna.