SA's favourites 2017: top 10 Medieval (incl. Byzantine)

Uggh! The auction that I accidentally missed. Great pickup! Coins of Christov doesn't come by that often.

 

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I'm sorry you missed it. But it sounds like I might have been out of luck on that Leo if you hadn't!

I haven't been able to find out anything about the Christov collection beyond some of the stuff it contained (just from acsearch). Do you know anything about the collector?

 

What th’ Hay, SA! What a GREAT set of DA Coins! 10-2 are pretty amazing. 1 is just plain fantastic! Well done @Severus Alexander !!!

 

Nice, I got a Basil II this year too..

 

Neat picks!

 

Thanks Gandalf!! Except... does "DA" mean what I think it means?

(boldface added )

 

High five from my Basil to your Basil! I see we both decided a flat faced Constantine VIII was OK. Poor old neglected Constantine.

 

@Severus Alexander , I really like the whole group. There is life after Roman and Greek coins!
All of them are interesting. I guess I "need" a Basil II miliaresion and a Philippicus.

One of my friends mentioned the danger of attempting to become the British Museum. But a few "dark ages" coins can't hurt, can they?

 

All is fair in love and coins, my loss is your gain . The only information I have on the Christov collection is whatever was posted on the Goldberg auction. It is just an outstanding collection with several of the coins in great condition. Wish I knew more...

 

Thanks to your original post @Severus Alexander I've started spending my 2018 coin budget before the year has started. Your AR grosso of Gian Galeazzo Visconti is such a striking coin I added the type to my 2018 want list. When I was looking through the coins of stevex6 that were for sale low and behold an AR grosso was part of the collection. I had to pounce on it. Thanks for the coin inspiration.

 

I’m glad one of Steve’s awesome medievals fond a good home.

 

Awesome!!! (And with the cool eagle on top too!) That's the very coin that inspired my own purchase. A neat little Coin Talk circle! We rock, n'est-ce pas?

 

They are all really nice additions but I especially like the Sceat and the Grosso. I think the serpent on the Grosso is eating a sinner. I had the pleasure of visiting a medieval (cira 1100) church on Visby Island off the coast of Sweden. There was a fresco of a serpent with sinners lined up to go into the serpents open jaws. I will try to find my pictures and scan them and post them if you like.

 

Thanks! Yes, I would be interested to see those photos, but only if it's no trouble! That sounds like a very reasonable hypothesis as to its origin. I've read at least a dozen different accounts, from legends of early Visconti killing a lake serpent that ate children, vanquishing an "infidel" in the Crusades and either symbolizing this or directly taking the heraldry from the vanquished foe, a similar story involving a Visconti's son perishing in the crusades or in the jaws of a monster, the Jonah story, the similarity of the Visconti's original town to a Latin word for snake, some symbolism involving the snake giving birth to a child... The only certainty seems to be that it was used by the Visconti's at least as early as the 11th century.

 

Yes we do! I love this wonderful community and being able to share my love coins with like minded individuals. To dust off my limited French: qui se ressemble s'assemble!
@alde please do share your photos. I've always wanted to visit Visby and would love to see them.

 

I found and scanned a few of my photos. At the time I only had a Pentax SLR with a 50mm 1.7 lens so I was not able to get good close ups of the frescos so those two are not mine but the others are. It's very faded and hard to see in a picture but the chained up people in the last photo are being pushed by the devil into the gaping jaws of the serpent of the underworld. I have always found religious symbolism fascinating.

 

Very cool, looks like that place has a lot of original frescos. And yes, the serpent is hard to make out, but I’ll take your word for it! Thanks for posting.

 

The nice thing about Visby Island is it had no strategic importance during WW 2 so it was not bombed. It has plenty of medieval sites and of course there is plenty of evidence of Vikings there.

 

Nice pictures alde! I'd like to visit Visby Island one day, seems like there's a lot of cool history to be experienced there.

I just got my first huge Justinian follis coin, but I just ran into a new problem: storage. It came in a 2.5x2.5 flip, not 2x2, and I store my coins in a 2x2 flip box. Not sure what to do about now. The coin seems like it can fit in a 2x2 flip, but I don't want to try just yet. I'll also get to photographing the coin soon, as soon as I can figure out a safe placement for the coin in my photography rig that's really designed for smaller coins. How do you guys store those big chunky bronze folli?

 

I look forward to seeing it! I store my oversize coins in an Abafil tray.