Medieval Monday!

Got his Edward iii half groat. Was a detector find near Cambridge and got it for a good price. Not sure which treaty period it is if someone could help thank you.

 

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I got this nice bronze (or poor billon?) coin last week and it is by far my nicest medieval piece. It's an imitative piece issued by the Kingdom of Hungary under Bela III (1172 to 1196 AD) loosely copying gold Islamic coins circulating at the time of issue. This piece has an unpublished control mark (or at least in that orientation, see attached photo) too, so it's especially interesting! Definitely my most interesting purchase in awhile.

Kingdom of Hungary
1172-1196 AD
Issued under Bela III
AE Imitation copying contemporary Islamic gold | 1.34 grams | 22.5mm wide
See it on Zeno.ru​

 

(...@seth77, Oh, Great. As of now, the scanner has entered the burgeoning pantheon of stuff here that doesn't work any more. And, as such, is taking up Way too much of the apartment's available, flat real estate. ...Yeah, Right, just Tell me about it.)

 

@TuckHard, been wanting one of these. I can't read a word of Arabic, but the apparent Arabic numerals are, well, evocative, to say the least.

 

No problem, whenever's convenient.

 

Sorry, anyway. I really need to upgrade, only starting with the computer. This just gets more ridiculous as it goes along.

 

Ahhh! I missed Monday! In my defense, I was traveling yesterday amd had a huge layover, so I didn’t get back home until midnight anyway.

okay, so a day late, but we’re close to the one year anniversary thread, and I’d like to make it to then:
Italy - Venice
Andrea Dandolo, r. 1343-1354 (1346-1353)
AR Mezzanino Nuovo, 15.52 mm x 0.9 grams
Obv.: ANDADVL ·SMVENE DVX. Saint Mark left receiving candle from Doge right. Or in field (unknown mintmaster)
Rev.: ·XPS·RES VRESIT·. Christ emerging from sepulchre
Ref.: MEC 12-1131; CNI VII, 30-3 (pg. 73); cf. De Wit 3640

 

These are actually copies of a Samanid prototype from Central Asia. The legends, including the names of the 'Abbasid caliph al-Muti' and the Samanid amir Mansur bin Nuh, are Stylized but still essentially legible. The error comes from a Hungarian cataloguer who saw a superficial stylistic similarity with certain North African gold but failed to take the Arabic inscription into account, apparently assuming it was decorative jibberish. There is a fuller discussion embedded within this thread.

 

AAAAhh the resurrection of Christ during the Black Death monies

 

In a recent post on Crusader coins, which was just augmented by the excellent post by @+VGO.DVCKS, I posted 5 gros tournois of St Louis, Tripoli, Naples, and Cyprus. Lined up in a row, the cross on the reverse of each of those coins impressed me as a consistent design element, and as a bold assertion of the Christian religion by rulers very conscious of the Muslim world against which they struggled. https://www.cointalk.com/threads/hi-crusader-coins……….384559/
This contemporary gros from Rome is therefore remarkable to me in its use of non-Christian imagery. The pagan Goddess Roma whose orb is not surmounted by a cross to form a globus cruciger, the lion which in this context is probably not the lion of Judah, the citation of the SENATUS POPULUSQUE ROMA which is a pre-Christian formulation, and ROMA CAP(UT) MUNDI, which to my mind is an assertion of secular power, not religious or ecclesiastical pre-eminence. Aside from the tiny perfunctory crosses which precede the obverse and reverse legends, this could be a pagan coin.



Rome, Grosso, 1256-1265 AD. This coin iconographically would seem to fit the Renaissance better than the era in which it was struck.

 

It's been a while for France's "Spider King" Louis XI (AD 1461-1483), the king who kept wild turkeys as pets, but here are a couple of silver coins of his:


France Louis XI Gros de Roi
Silver, 30 mm, 3.27 gm, Lyon Mint
Obverse:
Three fleur-de-lis
LVDOVICVS DEIGRA FRANCR REX
Reverse:
Cross fleur-de-lis
SIT NOMEN DOMINI BENEDICTVM

A gros was also know as a groschen or groat. A French livre (pound or 2/3 ecu) was worth 20 gros or 20 sols.


France Louis XI Blanc a la Couronne (blanc with crown)
Silver, 26 mm, 2.54 gm, Lyon Mint
Obverse:
Shield with three fleur-de-lis on it and trilobe
LVDOVICVS FRANCORVM REX
Reverse:
Cross potent with two fleur-de-lis and two crowns at corners
SIT NOMEN DNI BENEDICTVM

A French livre (pound or 2/3 ecu) was worth 24 blancs, but this varied.

 

@Hrefn, aside from being a truly remarkable example (...of an issue I'd never heard of), this grosso of Rome is as distinctive as you observe. Having never seen one before, the points you raised about it sent me as near as I could readily get to the political context. Hyde (Society and Politics in Medieval Italy) notes the rise of communes (largely autonomous municipal governments) in "north and central Italy" over the earlier 12th century, emphasizing Venice and Rome as relatively late arrivals to this civic status, in the 1140s and 1150s. Regarding Rome, he continues:
"In Rome, too, the older order with strong Byzantine influences lingered on, though here the most important factor in delaying the commune was the special position of the pope, who for many centuries had claimed sovereign power within the city and its district. Rome had a long history of risings against pope and [German] emperor, but [....] at last, in 1143, the Romans succeeded in forming a commune [...]. The core of the Roman commune was a rather small council of about fifty members, which was called the senate." (59.)
...Interpretively, where I'm going with this is that, maybe as late as the 13th century, the decidedly secular legends, along with the motifs, were a means of emphasizing the Roman commune's independence on more mundane, political levels. These people might have been asserting their own perceived secular rights, in the absence of attendant, overtly theological fireworks. To quote the novelist Jasper Fforde, "Religion isn't the cause of wars; it's the excuse."
Here's my better of two deniers /denaros, issued by the Roman Senate in imitation of the comital deniers of Provins, in Champagne. (Right, someone here put some real footwork into a post about the Champagne Fairs.) This anticipates a lot of the more easily legible legends of @Hrefn's grosso --whether by a century, or more like a half. And sorry for the pic.

(Cf. Roberts --only reference to hand-- 4733. Who reproduces a plate of Poey d'Avant; 139. 01. Roberts' attribution (/characterization) is "Roman Senate, 12-13th C., S above." This is when Poey's plates are that much help. --Yes, this example corresponds pretty well to Poey's, suggesting a prototype of Henri I's second issue, c. 1160's-1181.)
Obv. Comb / 'peigne' of the counts of Champagne; "S" [presumaby for 'SENATVS'] above. From 8 o'clock: 'IIOMA CAPVT MV' ('Roma Caput Mundi').
Rev. (From approx. 9 o'clock: ) SENATVS. P. Q. R
...The obverse legend was appropriated elsewhere, notably for Aachen /Aix, in issues of Friedrich Barbarrossa, when he was busily wrapping himself in the Carolingian flag. ...Evoking more of the same: appropriating what could easily be interpreted as religious rhetoric for the purposes of a more mundane, political agenda.


Right, on the reverse, you can see "+ROMA [CAPVT] MVNDI," plain as the nose on your face. ...Or not. Especially with the quality of the pics, you might need to squint for a minute.

 

will this due? It is a bit old now…

 

here is an article in Italian which covers the Senatorial grossi and their iconography.
Apparently Grierson wrote about them many years ago but I haven’t been able to find his article.
https://www.academia.edu/7609776/La_zecca_senatoriale_di_Roma_e_il_grosso_dargento

 

Ta-Da!!! Thanks, @FitzNigel!

 

I had to download this in English. Gotta get out the door; hopefully it worked.

 

Is it Monday already? Gotta keep this going!

Philippe de Savoia as Prince of Achaea AR20mm 0.81g 210/1000 billon denier tournois of Glarentza ca. 1302-3, an issue possibly struck to pay for the Epirote campaign of 1303:

 

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So sorry for the triple reply, it seems my internet connection had a glitch.