Medieval Monday!

Very cool, @Severus Alexander. From here, this is sit-up-in-your-chair late, even for someone like me, who likes to hang out in the earlier 13th century for this stuff. The denomination and motifs, harkening back to the early 12th century, strike me as bordering on anachronism. --In a Very, Very cool way!
More from @Chris B's neck of the woods, there's this.

Adalbert, Archbishop of Hamburg 1043-1066. Denar of Bremen.
Obv: Profile left, with cruciform sceptre.
Rev: Two keys; pellets in field. Dannenberg 1777.
Adalbert was the patron of the chronicler Adam of Bremen, who's a key source for the late phases of the Viking Age, especially in the western Baltic. ...His selective reliability notwithstanding. Adam devotes considerable attention to the longrunning feud between the Billung dukes of Saxony and the bishopric of Bremen. During the ducal reign of Bernhardt II

(note the gonfannon on the reverse, upside down in the dealer's pic), his son and eventual heir, Ordulf (/Otto; here 'ODDO,' retrograde on both sides)


sacked Bremen.
Ordulf went on to ally with his brother-in-law, Magnus 'the Good' of Norway and sometimes Denmark, in campaigns against the Slavic Wends on the southern Baltic coast. (One of Magnus, probably from Denmark; note the triquetra on the reverse, a common late Viking motif: )

 

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Richard ii, intermediate style half pence, London mint. I have read the Forme of Cury and the Canterbury tales so something from his reign was must! Also the wat Tyler uprising is very fascinating.

 

.i bought grand blanc's of each of the blokes..

 

pure speculation, but I wonder if it might be a late imitation of the Lucca denier design that was brought and imitated by the crusaders. If you were illiterate, or just not paying attention, those look like random right angles

Crusader Imitation - Lucca
Henry III-V, r. 1035-1125
Crude AR Denier, 15.27mm x 1.1 grams
Obv.: H center, IMPERATOR around
Rev.: LVCA forming cross, ENRICVS around
Note: Found in Holy Land

 

Interesting thought! You may be right!

As far as the overall design goes, @+VGO.DVCKS's thought is right that it derives from earlier (heavier) folles from Antioch. It's a design that persists for a while. Here's a Tancred coin, 3.35g (1101-1112):

(Looking at my coin's reverse, upside down again, makes me wonder if it doesn't have that crossed T that we see in the 4 o'clock quadrant on the above coin?)


Maybe worn versions of the Tancred coins were still circulating in Antioch a century and a half later, but illegible and so hard to copy? (Most that you see are pretty hard to read.)

Here's another interesting comparison, a coin minted by the Armenian king Levon I early in the 13th century in preparation for a takeover of Antioch which never happened. These coins were meant for circulation in the conquered city:


The Tancred design ultimately derives from Byzantine anonymous folles. Here's a heavy imitation (4.43g) that probably circulated in the area. Note the eight-sided flan, which is typical of the late Antioch folles:

And another, lighter (1.68g) imitation, possibly 13th century and close to my coin's weight standard:


And finally, here's another issue from Antioch from around the same time as mine, this time with Arabic on the obverse, reading "fals Antak" (still considered a crusader issue, though I'm not sure why it couldn't be a post-sack coin):


Anyway, lots to think about, and a fun series!

 

@FitzNigel, I can't doubt for a minute that you know this (thanks only in part to your conscientious explication of the caveats involved), but the original Salian issues of Lucca run to being crappy enough that your example could easily be one of those. Nope, I don't have pics of my sole example, bought from and presumably found in Europe. But this is one issue in which the engraving was nearly as bad as the typical striking. ...Unlike, for instance, a lot of the contemporaneous denars from northern Germany, in which remarkably elaborate designs run smack into comparable minting practice. ...Right, with ensuing violence.

 

@Severus Alexander, your interpretation regarding the crossed T gets my vote.
...This is a fantastic assemblage of these earlier Antiocene folles. It's really kind of amazing how much variety there is, given that these begin as imitations of the Byzantine ones, already notorious for their low 'production values,' and the less than exemplary diversity of their designs.
(Edit: ) Very impressionistically (please read, I'm not even checking Malloy), your suspicion that the last one might be post-reconquest is getting some traction. The only medieval coins I know of with a Magen David are either Muslim (conspicuously including Andalusian), or from Norman Sicily and the southern mainland, which likely were riffing off Muslim issues.

 

I don't know how the auction house arrived at fals Antak. To my eye, the obverse imitates a fals of the Mamluk sultan al-Nasir Muhammad (1293-1341) struck at Tripoli in AH 741/ AD 1340 (Balog 240). The obverse of the prototype reads al-malik al-Nasir and is a reasonable match to the pseudo-Arabic of the imitation. I suspect, however, that the Christian who engraved the die thought he was copying the mint name bi-Trablus ("of Tripoli") which is actually found on the other side.

 

Very interesting, thank you!! Here's another example with a clearer legend:

Even with my poor grasp of Arabic script, I can see that "fals Antak" isn't a very plausible reading. As far as I can tell, the fault lies with the reference the auction house cites, "CCS", which is Malloy et al.'s Coins of the Crusader States - though I don't have a copy so I can't check. As you intimate, the coin doesn't even seem likely to be an Antioch product, certainly not if it imitates Muhammad I. (I see the hexagram design also occurs for Qala'un, 678-689 AH, though the legend doesn't seem to match.)

I've also found the original Wäckerlin collection coin that I thought my example corrected the legend for. Here it is:

Mine again:

I don't think it's the same legend on either side... so mine is perhaps a new type?

 

@Severus Alexander, I have a copy of the first, 1994 edition of Malloy. It just might solve the problem. Here's the full listing --since paraphrases of this sort of thing give me, for one, fits.
[Antioch, p. 232, #132 --the very last listing in the Antiocene series.]
"AE. 0.64-0.98 g. [citing] Seltman, NCirc (1966), p. 61, 2; Waage, Antioch-on-the-Orontes IV, II, 2305.
O: A-N-T-I in angles of long cross pattée.
R: A-N-T-I retrograde in angles of long cross pattée.
Struck on late Antiocene ocatagonal flan."

 

Thanks, that's very helpful! Though clearly that's not an accurate description of either my coin or the Wäckerlin example. Maybe there are three varieties, or more!

What does Malloy et al. say for #130?

 

As given in Balog, the legend on the Mamluk coin is:

الملك ا
لناصر

Nearly stroke-for-stroke with the imitation. The Mamluk prototype was apparently struck at the end of al-Nasir Muhammad's third reign, only a few years before Tripoli passed to Peter of Cyprus.

 

Thanks, @FitzNigel, for having a working scanner!
@Severus Alexander, one thing to bear in mind is that, for much of earlier European medieval, you aren't looking at even the relative level of standardization that you can rely on in, for one obvious instance, Imperial Roman issues.
If you go back to the inception of the Norman Antiocene folles in the early 12th century, you're looking at two primary contemporaneous precedents. Regarding the early Norman follaros of Apulia and Calabria, someone here (rats, resisted finding), whether quoting someone in print or citing his own experience, characterized the issues of Robert Guiscard as 'chaotic.'
Similarly, moving dramatically northward, the anonymous 11th-c. deniers of Normandy itself (Dumas /Dumas-Dubourg's journal articles, cited by @seth77, notwithstanding), I'm still a little skeptical that all of the more substantive varieties have ever been catalogued. The same is emphatically true of, for instance, the neighboring 11th-c. deniers of Guy of Ponthieu.
By contrast, what I think is happening with your Crazy Late Antiocene folles may be reducible to the level of what early French feudal collectors could legitimately characterize as a 'sub-variant.' Likely not so much a matter of deliberate alteration of existing motifs, as of an individual celator having had a bad day. --Yes, anecdotally, this is a resonant complement to the kind of strikes you can see in European examples, especially from the 11th-13th centuries, eliciting speculation about how hungover the mint worker was.
Given that most of this is predicated on earlier issues, from across Europe, my guess is that, as late as your 13th-c. folles are, one other contributing factor to their sloppiness could have been the broadly deteriorating situation on the ground. --With the caveat that, with the dramatic contrast of this to the strikes and designs of the iconic Antiocene issues of the gros (...'tournois,' but only in general composition and module), you can also look at the denomination itself: an increasingly minor AE. Continued in Antioch, with a corresponding decline in weight and module, maybe a century and a half after the original Byzantine prototype had been dispensed with.

 

I agree with your general sentiments about varieties, @+VGO.DVCKS!

Thanks for that page, @FitzNigel! I see that #130 is not a good match for the two Leu coins - the illustration doesn't even have a hexagram design. Maybe a misattribution, though the coins are surely related in some way.

Except Tripoli fell to the Mamluks in 1289, long before al-Nasir's third reign. Are you suggesting that Peter of Cyprus issued these coins when he planned to retake territory on the mainland, including Tripoli? Otherwise the coin still seems quite puzzling to me. Its fabric puts it at the end of the Crusader period. It seems to be a Crusader product with imitative Arabic legends, reading al-malik al-Nasir. The closest hexagram design is found on falus of Qala'un, after the fall of Antioch but before the fall of Tripoli and Acre. The closest legend is al-Nasir Muhammad, but that's after the fall of Acre.

A few ideas that occurred to me:
- could the issuer simply be harking back to a legend of Saladin? (I believe he used al-malik al-Nasir.)
- or maybe of the Ayyubid ruler al-Zahir Ghazi? There are tons of earlier Crusader imitations of his coins.
- or what about al-Nasir Yusuf II of Aleppo, he has some falus with a hexagram design.
- Also, check out these very late Crusader coins attributed to Acre with a similar design, the AE coins on this page. Surely related?

Just throwing out some ideas and hoping you guys can solve this mystery for me, I'm really just floundering around. @dltsrq?

 

The coins of Qala'un and Muhammad share a similar hexagram design with the coin in question but only the type of Muhammad shares the legend al-malik al-Nasir. Crusader history is not my forte. All I can say is that in my opinion the best candidate for a prototype is the 741-742 Tripoli type of al-Nasir Muhammad. [edited]

 

Fair enough. I think the late date for al-Nasir Muhammad makes it extremely unlikely the coin can imitate his. (Note the hexagram style is wrong, too - Muhammad's coins have a 3D effect, where lines descend behind other lines.) Assuming, for the reasons I gave above, it's a late Crusader product, I think the betting is that the legend is derived from Saladin, al-Zahir Ghazi, or (most likely) al-Nasir Yusuf II (1250-60). He was the great grandson of Saladin and on friendly terms with the Crusaders. In which case it could be from Antioch, or Tripoli, or Acre. Here's a late product of (probably) Acre:


Here's a fals of al-Nasir Yusuf II:

Put those two together and you get something close to the coin in question.

BTW I think Malloy/CCS 130 is in fact the Leu coin, except the Malloy illustration is upside down. I think it may illustrate something like this example (pulled from David Ruckser's nice Crusader online book):

Here's CCS 130 from Fitz's photo:

Quite similar to the illustration. Now look at the Ruckser coin upside down:

That's clearly the same type as the Leu coin!


OK, I think I'm finally ready to shut up about this, you'll be glad to learn.

 

I've been enjoying this even though the Crusader aspect takes me from my comfort zone into "I dunno". So much more interesting than 'Roman' this and 'Greek' that...

 

...well...one Grand and its really not very grand, but it is a coin of his rule anyway and i didn't pay a mint for it. Louis XII(1498-1515) Grand Blanc, Obverse shield of 3 lilies, 2 & 1, within (and maybe 3 crowns without?) with dotted border on shield and inner circle, legend, 'Louie, King of the Franks'.
reverse cross with crowns & lilies alternately between cross arms, legend 'Blessed be the name of the Lord', 25mm, 2.12gms

 

This is a dirham of Al-Qadir, emir of the Andalusian taifa of Toledo from 1075 CE until its fall to Alfonso VI of Leon-Castile in 1085. ...He wound up in Valencia, where he was emir until 1092. Two years later, Valencia fell to Alfonso's sometime protege, Rodrigo Diaz /El Cid.

The dramatic level of debasement is very common to later coins of the Taifas. These were a patchwork of autonomous emirates arising from the collapse of the residual but regionally unitary Umayyad caliphate. As soon as al-Andalus (Muslim Iberia; most of the peninsula) became as fragmented as the Christian polities to the north were, the Reconquista began in earnest. The debasement symptomizes the considerable amounts of tribute that the Christian polities (in this case Leon-Castile) had already been exacting for decades. ...Yeah, temperamentally, the taifas were kind of the bonobos to the Christian chimpanzees.