Medieval Monday!

Empire of Nicaea
AV hyperpyron ND 3.99g. 29mm.
Magnesia Mint
John III Ducas-Vatatzes 1222-54

obv: IC XC
Christ Pantokrator/ seated/ facing on Throne
rev:
Emperor standing/ facing/ holg Labarum and Akakia
being Crowned by the Virgin Mary to right

Sear 2073
ac quired from Naumann auction 111 lot 1118

 

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@panzeman, you're inexhaustibe!!! Gotta think of Uncle Scrooge McDuck, again --I think someone 's already given you that meme.
Two astounding examples of Louis VII, @Darius590. Here's the nearest I can get to loud shouting distance. Henri d'Anjou /Henry II of England as duke, in right of his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine (following her messy divorce from Louis) in 1152, two years before his coronation as king in 1154. All the deniers feature the title 'REX' (unlike the oboles, but presumably only for reasons of space).


...Compared to your examples, this is comic relief.

 

Speaking of Aquitaine I have a few questions:

1. did the minting of deniers and halves for Henry start as soon as 1152, and if so how come his titulature is REX (1154) is there some new research proving the early dating?

2. was this type struck (only) at Bordeaux, is there any new research about the mints in Aquitaine in the 12th century?

3. The coinage for Alienor and its dating -- is there any new research setting the type closer to 1137 or closer to 1200?

 

@seth77, even your questions are erudite. Couldn't tell you a thing about current research; from here, you're the go-to guy for that.
But on a more prosaic note, between a look at Duplessy and biographies of Henry (Warren) and Richard (Gillingham), its looks suspiciously as if Henry's issue, including the title 'REX,' postdated his coronation in 1154. (In the interval, of course, King Stephen still would have been on the throne, barring any co-coronation with Henry's (uncrowned) father, Geoffroi IV 'le Bel' of Anjou.) The following reign provides a numismatic hint. Richard's deniers as count of Poitou /Poitiers include the title 'REX,' while his issues as Duke of Aquitaine (from 1169; prior to his coronation in 1199) do not. ...During the 11th-12th centuries, coronations of male heirs as co-kings was actively in the dynastic repertoire not only in Germany, but in Capetian France and Angevin England. --But, relative to Germany, on a much more selective basis.
This brings us back to my favorite, if obvious hobby-horse; the wonder of coins (not least medieval ones) as historical documents. The written, legal ones are of primary value for genealogy precisely because they were legal in nature; inheritances were at stake, and strict accuracy of the facts on the ground, generally within a generational interval which was readily within common memory, was of paramount importance. There are good posts here, some of them by yours truly, on the coins of Richard both as count of Poitou and duke of Aquitaine.
...And while we're in the dynastic weeds about Angevins, I just won this. (I know it's bad luck to post things before they're in yer hot lickle hand. So far as risk factors are concerned, I for one deal with more than that on a daily basis.)

Frankish Levant; Principality of Antioch. AE fractional denier.
Rev. Altar with four legs, chalice and cross above; diamond and pellet to either side. Open oval below, with pellets to either side.
+A.NTIOCHIE
Obv. +PRINCEPS, 'S' retrograde. Malloy (1st ed., 1994), p. 204 (Antioch), 18.

For those of us who 'do' the Crusades period, whether as collectors or (often enough --Teacher, I Raise My Hand), amateur numismatists and students of history, the numismatic absence of Fulk V of Anjou (Henry II's grandfather), other than by means of immobilizations in the county of Anjou (naming a still earlier Fulk), might pose a systemmic problem.
This was the nearest I could get. It was Fulk V, as king of Jerusalem (from which point he abdicated the county of Anjou to his son, Henry II's dad), who arranged the marriage of Raymond of Poitiers to the heiress of Antioch, making Raymond the prince by marriage. --As Fulk had become King. And this guy (Raymond) is from the old neighborhood. Can you say, Nepotism?

 

What a wonderful specimen of this rather strange (and certainly scarce) copper fraction of Antioch. One of the best I've ever seen. Raymond's whole career in Antioch is one of 'reformer' and 'westernizer' -- which he undertook as official vassal to Constantinople, while his politics, more than his predecessors, was almost in its entirety in the Occitan cultural tradition, much more refined and 'stratified' (in lack of better terminology) than the Italo-Norman generation that had established the Principality in the First Crusade. His coinage is a melange of Occitan and Levantine systems, blended together seamlessly. If we surmise the monetary system of Antioch in 1136 we have on one side the copper petty currency, the reduced heirs of the 'folli' of 1100-1119, and the billon coinage of Valence that had been introduced by Patriarch Bernard ca. 1100. When Raymond died he left a full local monetary system with a local western-style denier of high billon quality and a local copper fraction -- a system that survived 100+ years.

About Fulk, there has been research done by R. Kool of Israel Antiquities Authority that tentatively assigns the very rare denier MONETA REGIS to him in the late 1130s to early 1140s (The Circulation and Use of Coins in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, 2013) -- so he might have been the one introducing the local denier in the Kingdom of Jerusalem. This would be in tune with what happens in Tripoli and Antioch also around this time or a bit later -- although Tripoli already had a denier experiment as early as Bertrand (1109-1112), which didn't seem to take root. Kool bases his hypothesis both on stylistic grounds -- the A and W tied to the arms of the cross are very reminiscent of the Angevin denier of the 1100s -- and on his observations as a field archaeologist, so there should be something there. Alas the coinage is very rare.

Now back to Henry and his deniers of Aquitaine, it would seem rather to be expected that his coinage there would postdate 1154 rather than antedate it. But everywhere in catalogs and auction entries you will see in the description of his deniers and halves 1152 to 1189 (if any date is mentioned at all). Those dates are impossible on many accounts such as that as early as 1169 or at the latest 1172 the denier of Aquitaine is struck in the name of Richard. Would this mean that there was room in the first half of the 1150s for the Alienor coinage say 1151/2 to 1155? On the other hand 'tresor de Saucats' mentioned by Duplessy has the deniers of Alienor only together with Guillaume and Louis implying the early date given by 19th century French antiquarians and numismatists and noted by Boudeau as 1137. The overall motif of the coinage fits with the coinage of Guillaume of the 1130s but the module does not. Plus the style and the lettering is certainly not 1130s but very much similar to the late coinage of Richard (which might have been struck to 1189, or some say even to around 1200). Alienor dies in 1204. To me her coinage also brings glimpses of the coinage of Hugo de Lusignan for his La Marche domain (the shape of the G or the S couchee or the 'thickness' of the lettering etc.) implying possibly the same hand (or the same school of hands) carving the dies for the Duke of Aquitaine and their vassal at Lusignan ca. 1200. Another thing -- Guillaume's coinage is localized at Bordeaux in the ancient tradition of the Dukes of Gascony, while the 'new' coinage of Louis, Alienor, Henry, Richard does not name the Bordeaux mint, allowing the possibility of a coinage of the realm struck (also) some place elsewhere.

 

Brilliant explication, @seth77. Sorry not to have responded yesterday; life happened.
Your assigning the ostensible /we hope issues of Eleanor ('DVCISIT,' Duplessy 1025) to the interval of 1152-4 smacks of deduction as much as induction. Even in a polity as progressive as Aquitaine, Eleanor might have seen fit to mint anonymously, perhaps by prior agreement with Henri/-y.
I've been paying attention to the variations in letter forms for as long as I've been collecting, but I never got beyond broad regional similarities. The lettering is very distinct from Poitou and points south, as compared to further north. I notice some northern mints appropriating the southern features (prominently including the couchant 'S'), as far afield as the duchy of Burgundy, especially from, say, the early 13th century. But I've never gotten further than thinking in terms of regional varieties per se, and shifting 'fashions' as the lettering began to abandon post-Carolingian /Romanesque forms in favor of Gothic on a more universal basis. Interesting thought, that the connection between Poitou/Aquitaine and La Marche could have been more substantive than that. They certainly were right next door to eachother, independently of the (fairly extreme) vagaries of political relations between the Lusignans and the Angevins.
(Just got up. This is the best I'm going to do right now....)

 

@+VGO.DVCKS -- your Henry has an S couchee mine does not (following at a glance the S couchee seems to be a feature employed regularly from Louis onward), Richard's issues from lack of space have the S in Italic but with the same general shape as Alienor and most of Henry's.

An even clearer break is in the G's -- Guillaume's Bordeaux coinage has the complex 2-punch G, Louis typ 2 has the q while from Alienor to Richard there's the pseudo/half-uncial G, while on Henry's coinage the spelling is as far as I have seen AQVITANIE (and some scarcer Alienor also have this spelling or at least something inbetween the old Bordeaux G, Henry's Q and Richard's G) -- thus we have as follows (generally speaking) on the cross side:

- pre-1137, the Bordeaux coinage likely immobilized from the grand denier of ca. 1000:


- Alienor types, first resembling both G from Guillaume's and the Q from Henry's issues, and then becoming the G from Richard's coinage -- the coinage no longer mentions Bordeaux:


- Richard types, with different degrees of the 'Aquitaine G' (this is probably the bulk of the coinage of Aquitaine from the second half of the 12th century, struck from the 1170s to at least 1189 or possibly to 1200):


- Hugo de Lusignan, Bellac mint(?) post-1200:

 

Edward IV second reign halfgroat of London with mm. pierced cross and pellet. All 2nd reign London halfgroats are rare, unlike the groats which were produced in large numbers.


Edward III Series D halfgroat of York with mm. broken cross 1


Henry VI Rosette-Mascle issue halfgroat of Calais with mm. cross V

 

Medieval Indian Hindu Kingdoms/ Central Deccan
Yadavas of Devagiri
Mahadeva I 1261-70
AV Padmatanka ND/ NM
16mm. 3.82g.
uniface
Lotus Blossom/ two "sri"/ Elephant/ Conch+ "Mahadeva" in devangiri/ above punchmarked "Sword"

 

The last coinage of medieval Cilician Armenia, from a king of Frankish origin - Levon V de Lusignan (1374-1375)

 

I showed off my other Frankfurt purchases this year in my top 10 list, except this one:
HRE - Frankfurt am Main
The City of Frankfurt (1460-1487)
AR Heller, 15.26 mm x 0.38 grams
Obv.: [￮F]RA￮NC’F’ Hand in circle
Rev.: Cross pattée with pellets at each end, within lozenge
Ref.: JuF 189l, cf. Saurmache 1063

 

Just won this. Antioch, Tancred as (nephew and) regent of Bohemond I, who was variously imprisoned by Alexius I, 1101-3; in Europe recruiting support from 1104; and campaigning fruitlessly against Alexius from 1107-1111. I liked how closely this one copies Byzantine Anonymous folles, along with actually being in Tancred's name. ...The overstriking doesn't seem to match any Antiocene issue; it might be on an actual Byzantine example. Malloy Antioch: 5.

It complements this one, which people here have seen too many times (the cross with a proper Byzantine inscription; Tancred in chain mail, with a sword, wearing a turban --sorry to those of you with better examples than this):

 

This one is very early Medieval India
AV Dinara ND/ NM 5.34g 19.7mm. .668
Post Gupta/ West Bengal/ Ratas of Samatata
Sridharanarata 664-75AD

obv: Stylized nimbate archer "King" holding bow in R hand/ arrow in L hand. Crude "Shanka' backgound/ "Sri" beneath King's Arm
rev: Goddess Lakshmi standing in Tribhanga pose/ Tamgha in field

 

Wow first post for medieval Monday! My new Aquitaine Denier of Richard I, unsure of the mint, maybe Bordeaux?

 

My close to where I was born....

Mainz/ Erzbistum
AV Goldgulden ND (1373)
Sedisvakanz (period in between Election of new Archbishop)
Mainz Mint

 

Bist du ein Deutscher, Panzerman?

 

Jawohl!

 

Ausgezeichnet! I have some German on my dads side from 1700s immigrants to colonial Virginia! Reinhardts and Rückers from Elsaß und Lothringen as well as Würrtemburg.

 

I was born in Jülich/ part of the Herzogtum of Jülich-Cleves-Berg/ my Mother's side of Family hail from Köln. This City was an Erzbistum ruled over by the Archbishop. Many German Cities where ruled by the Church/ all within the Holy Roman Empire. Lots of numismatic heritage/ one fifth of Friedberg's Gold Coinage of the World is from Germany. A metal detector would be handy/ most be lots of neat coins waiting to be found.

 

The only ancestors on either side of my family to have gotten to America as late as the 19th century were German. My aunt --who found the Anglo-Scottish criminal transportee-- traced two sides a little way into the 18th century.
...One summer, when I was 11, the family spent a month with the same aunt's family; she'd married a German. I learned more German that month than I did from several years of German in high school.