The decretal goes on to say that when the alchemists repeatedly fail in making gold, “in the end they feign true gold and silver with a false transmutation,” since the possibility of a real transmutation into gold and silver “does not exist in the nature of things.”26 Then they counterfeit coins and pass them off on honest people. In punishment, the decree stipulates, anyone selling or using alchemical metal as if it were natural gold or silver is sentenced to surrender an equal weight of true gold or silver to the public treasury for distribution to the poor.
