I got slapped silly on that auction, but I did manage to grab this lot by sheer luck. I wasn't able to attend the live auction. Totally insane, but expected..
Thanks for posting the link to your FORUM collection. I am gobsmacked, what an extraordinary collection.
Thanks @Black Friar! I still have tons to post and it is just so time consuming. But its no @AncientJoe collection
I checked out the first couple of Forum Byzantine coins; I guess you weren't slapped silly on those! Very impressive!
Congratulations on the lot, @Quant.Geek. I took one look at the auction, and said, 'This isn't happening.'
I've been seeing this lately in a lot of the medieval I collect (centering around the 11th and 12th centuries), in widely different areas and from different dealers, whether early Iberian feudal, or similar stuff from Picardy and the Low Countries, or Scandinavia, or even German royal and imperial. Getting the distinct impression that this stuff is catching up with high-end Ancient. Often enough, the starting price isn't outrageous, but the bidding goes through the roof anyway. ...You can always be grateful for what you managed to get from someplace closer to the ground floor.
Prices were really insane at that auction. I got two coins, both of them are very rare, but I paid a lot more than I expected/hoped:
Even those deniers I bought were on the high end and thus more than what I wanted to pay for them. Congrats on those coins. They are truly rare...
I specially woke up early in the morning , 5:30 here in the States , for the live bidding with big plans for this auction. And then…… There were two main players. A French guy who took most of the crusaders, and a German - who got almost all Rhodes. And it seems like they both have unlimited resources. So it was impossible to win anything from these guys if they want to get the coin no matter how much you bet. But I was lucky , I won very rare coin , that has been missing in my collection from the French guy. Most likely he’s been accidentally disconnected from the internet My second winning lot, most likely, went unnoticed- Tripoli/Sidon pougeoise , published unknown baronial denier and Otto III denier . And third one - the cheap Rhodes gigliato - only because it was cheap
Wow! You guys did a lot better than I did. I totally forgot about the auction until it was too late. The ones I was interested in went up the roof. The deniers was something I wanted and just put a bid on. Totally surprised I won that...
I managed to buy four sceattas, including my main target, and will post pictures when they arrive. There were to die-identical sceattas. Unfortunately, I managed to buy one of those, and not both. Alas.
@Roerbakmix, I feel your pain. The post resisted finding, but I did one here about losing a Salian denar with exactly the parts struck up that were missing on one I'd gotten a little before that. It wound up going to someone else at two or three times what I'd paid for mine. Yikes.
Yikes, not the best auction for buying. Some types that I own went for many, many times what I paid. Anybody know the story behind attributing these to Rhodes? They're standardly given to the Byzantines-in-exile in Nicaea (SB 2155): (Original links: lot 642 and lot 643.) I suspect this is Elsen's attribution mistake & somebody (or somebodies) got ripped off. See @seth77's post on some related coins, and this one which may be attributed correctly. Mine:
But, definitely not worth that much. I have several of these coins that I purchased over the years. Of course, I can say that about the deniers I purchased
I think it's possible that some of them are regular early Palaiologan coinage from Magnesia while others -- the ones with lower weight, irregular flans, less quality in the engraving etc -- are local issues from Rhodes. Coins were certainly struck in Rhodes by the Genoese before the arrival of the Hospitaller, and very likely they were struck there under John Palaiologos in the 1260s or so.
