For those who know about Roman Silver Coins

Hello everyone,

My girlfriend and I got in a discussion about older coins when I was showing her the small collection I have, and she had mentioned that many years ago when she went on a 2 week exchange to Italy when she was in High School. She went on an archeological dig somewhere in Italy (off my head I can't remember) and she had found a coin but had never had it identified. I am new at coin collecting but I wanted to take a look at it.

She brought it to me and I have spent a LONG time trying to find info about this, but I finally found out most of the information about it after searching a lot of different websites. I don't know what the information means, but here is a screenshot of the info I have found. Her coin is in much better shape than this one in the picture is, but does anyone know more about it than what is listed here? The value, the rarity, etc?

This info came from the following source: http://www.coingallery.de/KarlV/Mailand_E.htm



Thank you in advance guys!

 

Log in or Sign up to hide this ad.

Post a picture of YOUR coin, please. To one who is not familiar with Roman silver, such as yourself, many of them may look the same when there are actually very important details that differ. The image you posted is of a coin of the Holy Roman Empire, not the ancient Roman Empire.

 

Ok I will do that this weekend some time. I do know that every marking on the coin matches the one I posted exactly.

 

We need to see a scan of your coin. Until then...

The website provided a lot of information. If this is indeed your coin, then your is not an "ancient Roman" but a medieval Italian, from 1552. The coin is of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. It was struck in Milan. According to the website, Leone Lioni was the finest die cutter of his time. Your coin should be heavier than a US Quarter dollar. This "denaro of 25 soldi" weighs a hefty 8.6 grams versus the 6.25 grams of a US Quarter dollar.

The legends read:
IMP CAES CAROLVS V AVG
Imperator (or "Commander") and Caesar (or "Emperor") Charles V, Augustus (or "the Great").
SALVS AVGVSTA = Health to the Great (ruler)
PADVS MDL as the website says, "PADVS = river Po" and "MDL = MeDioLanum = Milan." The ancient name for Milan was Mediolanum, just as 1500 years ago, "York" was "Eboricum".

By this time (1550), the glory of the Renaissance was fadiing in Italy, but blooming in the north. The Reformation and Counter-Reformation were the forces of the time, but, realize, also when this coin was struck, Galileo was not yet born (15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642) and Copernicus had just died (19 February 1473 – 24 May 1543).

But, truly, we must see YOUR coin to know for sure what we are talking about here.

 

Sorry for the late response. Here are a few pics of it. I have not gotten all the tarnish off of it yet, but the inscriptions seem to be in great shape, and there are far fewer dents than I see on other coins.

What do you think this is worth?

 

Anyone?

 

It is now worth less than half of what it was worth before you cleaned it.

WE NEVER CLEAN COINS. (Except when it is called "Conservation.")

When you removed the "tarnish" you removed 500 years of patina. You stripped off the living history of the coin.

It can be saved. It can be retoned via conservation known to experienced collectors. Before you do any more damage to this artifact of Renaissance History, talk to us here. Your interest only in the coin's "value" (i.e., market value) proved your undoing.

As much as we worry about price -- and face it: numismatics is capitalism at its finest, an unregulated market for the buying and selling of money -- the Ground State, the bottom line, the entry point, the event horizon for us is the artistry of the history. Without that, they are just lumps of metal, not much more than shiny stones.

--------
Addendum: The reason that no one has any quick answers for you indicates the nominal rarity of this coin. We have many active world and medieval and ancient collectors here. I checked CoinArchives and VCoins and came up dry. Maybe if someone has a Davenport on their shelf, they can give you some indication of "price" (ahem) from 50 years ago.

 

Aren't coins supposed to worth more when they are shiny?

I found another citation, from the American Numismatic Society aquisitions database.

1937.146.1416
department: M
object type: C
weight: 8.57 g
axis: 10

Italy,Lombardy,Milan, / 1535 to 1556 / AR,testone
dynasty: Spain--Habsburg
person: Charles V Imp.
obverse type: bust r.
obverse legend: IMP CAES CAROLVS V AVG
reverse type: two figures
reverse legend: SALVS AVG VSTA PADVS MDL
references: CNI.V.235.43|Gnecchi.116.15

An item on Forum Ancient coins led to the website
MONETA ROMANA
http://www.forumancientcoins.com/monetaromana/corrisp/a385/a385.html

Which leads to this
http://www.coingallery.de/KarlV/Mailand_D.htm#0

(See, that's the tidbit of history that gives special value to the coin because you have a picture of Charles V right there.)

 

Well before I cleaned it you couldn't see any of the markings and you couldn't tell what it was. I wasn't trying to "shine" it, I just wanted to clean it enough so that I could see what it said. I knew that you should not shine them, but I had no idea that getting lumps of tarnish off was a no no. Oh well, live and learn.

I see a lot of the coins online (and even the ones in a lot of avatars on here) that are clean but not shined, so I figured that was ok.

 

Even the page that you showed has all their coins cleaner than mine as well. So I guess it would be easy to get confused for someone new to this. But thank you for your help though, I will remember not to do that in the future.

 

The question of cleaning is a 'big' thing among coin collectors and the answer depends on which coins you collect. For the most part, anything produced since Columbus discovered America is expected to be untouched by cleaning. The question is so major that mainstream US collectors prefer a 'natural' VF to a cleaned uncirculated. Ancient/Medieval coin collectors would like to have to option of being hardcore anti-cleaning but they are realistic enough to know that the number of coins available that have not been cleaned or do not need cleaning is small enough that they could not participate in the hobby so they accept well cleaned coins as improved and poorly cleaned coins as trashed. Learning the difference is a major part of that hobby.

You confuse me by the term 'lumps of tarnish'. If the surface of a coin is covered by three dimensional lumps, I'd not call it tarnish. That brings up the question of cleaning metal detector find coins and coins like yours that have something on the surface that keeps you from seeing the surface. Certainly you will offend purist collectors who would rather have no coin than a cleaned one but when you start with a lump of dirt the options do not include being a purist. Coins like yours are available that never had lumps hiding the letters. They will sell for more. Whether you halved or doubled the value of your coin has no relation to the price of the purist never cleaned models. The question is whether one prefers being able to see a surface and read a legend or not. There are separate markets for either answer. For me, the question is not whether you cleaned a coin of this period but whether you did it well. As a guideline, if I look at a coin and the first thing I see is the cleaning - that's very bad. If I see the coin and the question of whether it was cleaned doesn't come up - that's good.

 

I wont get into the moronic cleaning debate that causes people to bicker and threads to go on forever as people tell you exactly what is right...You might have been better off getting advice before cleaning but here, most likely, you would have just gotten useless advice such as 'dont clean it, keep all the corrosion' or 'you can never improve a coin by cleaning' (patently false when it come to coins from the ground), 'dont buy corroded filthy coins' (what if they were given to you or you found it) Or the best one...'I wont tell you what you need to do, pay a bunch of money to have someone else do it' (because you are too stupid to follow directions). You will find people talking for all of those who collect saying things like 'we dont clean coins' or 'You ruined what value it might have had by cleaning it'...that is all hogwash. People can only speak for how they feel about it, thats all...and if the coin was correded and filthy before and you give it a little TLC and it looks 10x better after...obviously you have only improved its worth.

As long as you didnt soak it in harsh chemicals or scrub it with a brillo pad you probably didn't harm it that much...people often confuse 'harsh' cleaning with 'cleaning'...If this was a find then of course it was probably filthy and corroded to black...cleaning it was probably your only option and if it wasn't overly harsh, you probably didn't harm it all that much, no more than mother nature. Sadly, people are so illogically anal about cleaning coins that many wouldn't tell you how to do it properly even if they knew (and most simply have no information to give) but because some people MUST give advice, even about things they dont know about, they will say 'I wouldn't tell you for your own good, wouldn't want you destroying a great historical artifact'...Then of course you have those who know and charge so they wont help you. Of course nobody wants a coin that is filthy and corroded so they go ahead and do it anyway and because they don't know how...they often ruin the coin. Its an interesting bizarre world in collecting coins.

Thats a real great find though. Grats! and good luck

 

Dodging a moronic cleaning debate ...

You never can be sure with images... but look at Post #5 to see his coin at that moment. To me, it was fine as it was. The brown spots in the field to the right of the Emperor were acceptable, as were the black spots on the reverse. I could not tell if the shiny blueish on the reverse within the lettering at the 4-5 o'clock were from cleaning or (bless me!) faint traces of a bit of mint luster -- and it did not matter much to me.

Doug Smith and Drusus both should know me as an ancients guy and accept that I understand the broader contexts. When Robert Hoge was at the ANA, he said that he prefers all the dirt because that is the archaeological context, but I was not sure if he was speaking from the heart or just making a case. Like all of us, I have been the route with olive oil and a rose thorn and even wrote a piece recommending Kroil lubricant (great for iron Chinese cash). I will shamelessly admit to retoning Pillar Dollars, a 19th century crown, and more. I have an old wooden bookcase under a sunny window -- and I take my suits to the dry cleaner. We all work our magic.

 

Ron Paul..What you did is called "Curating" so do not feel bad. A coin you can appreciate is a million times more valuable than a glorified slug. Traci

 

No there isn't any blueish tint to the coin, I just have a mediocre camera. I probably should of mentioned that.

 

That is what I figured, I at least wanted to see all of its markings, I am no coin connoisseur by any means, but being such a big history nerd I wanted to be able to appreciate the whole thing.

 

Hello,

I would very much like to see another picture than the blurry one you show. I find the coin I see quite strange in it's shape (too round with a very regular edge) and it rings a bell that I don't like...

Q

 

Well it was buried beneath the ground in Italy where my girlfriend found it on a dig that she took years ago on an exchange, and has been sitting at her house in a box since then. I would guess that this is why there is less damage.

I will try to get more pics soon, I might have to have a friend with a better camera take some pics for me.

 

I will not have the use of a good camera for a while now, so I won't be getting any new pictures of it soon.

That being said, my girlfriend asked me if anyone has figured out its ROUGH estimated value.

Any idea what this might go for?

 

Did you ever get a weight on the coin??