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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Tejas, post: 7828684, member: 84905&quot;]Theoderic and Hrefn, you raised a number of interesting questions. Here is my take on them:</p><p><b>1. Why are there &quot;barbaric&quot; Leo I Tremisses, while Soldi were minted in fine style?</b></p><p>I&#039;m speculating, but I think all it needed was that Solidus production was done at a well controlled official workshop that employed capable celators and mintworkers, while the production of (at least some) Tremissss and Siliquae was, for some unknown reasons, temporarily shifted to lesser workshops.</p><p><br /></p><p>This Solidus of Anthemius (not my coin!) was produced by the official mint in Rome, but it looks much more barbaric than any of the later Ostrogothic gold coins. It looks like control over minting quality temporarily slipped during his reign.</p><p>I think we should not forget that celators that produced high quality Solidus dies, were real artists. These people may have been scarce and sometimes completely unavailable.</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1344895[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><b>2. Did the &quot;Barbarians&quot; prefer Tremisses over Solidi? </b>I think the relative frequency of Tremisses compared to Solidi in the Ostrogothic, Visigothic and Burgundian kingdoms says something about the purpose of money. Solidi were minted to pay taxes, make large scale international transactions or pay federate troops. Tremissis were much more useful in daily commerce. So I doubt that emergency Tremisses were ever minted to pay off barbarians because they generally preferred Tremisses over solidi.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>3. Why are these barbarian Tremisses and Siliquae focused on the reign of Leo I? </b>I think this comes back to question 1. Maybe the deployment of lesser, perhaps auxiliary workshops was a temporary emergency measure to alleviate resource bottlenecks at the main official workshops. Clearly, this is guesswork, but I think the &quot;barbaric&quot; Tremisses and Siliquae of Leo I may tell us more about the condition of coin production in Constantinople than any &quot;unknown Germanic barbarians&quot;.</p><p><br /></p><p>I think proponents of the &quot;unknown barbarians theory&quot; need to come up with a plausible barbarian people as originator of these coins. Who has produced these coins if not the Romans? The only barbarian peoples minting gold coins at the time of Leo were the Visigoths, some Gallic mints and perhaps the Burgundians and I&#039;m quite certain that the Leo I tremisses did not originate there. Also, there was no &quot;unknown&quot; barbarian mint operating in Italy at the time of Leo.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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