The obverse usually bore a crude bust, and the reverse a cross. They would have looked very much like silver. The sole denomination was the increasingly debased gold tremissis, at a reduced weight of about 1.2 grams.Ĭoins from early hoards averaged 85-95% gold, but by 670 the fineness was down to around 30%, with some late examples containing as little as 13% gold (Blet-Lemarquand, 178) in jeweler’s terms, less than four carats fine. The varying quality of the gold content of coins in a single hoard shows that users were prepared to accept as currency whatever came their way (Grierson and Blackburn, 109).Ībout the year 570, Merovingian pseudo-imperial coinage disappears and is replaced by a “national” coinage very different in style and fabric. A bent and nicked example went for $3,545 in a 2009 German auction. Gold tremisses in the name of Theudebert are also known. The last specimen to appear on the market sold for US$50,000 in a 2009 New York auction by Stack’s. Only about 35 examples of this coin–issued at several different mints–are known, with most in museums. On the solidus, the inscription reads D N THEODEBERTVS VICTOR (“Our Lord, Theodebert, Winner!”). Putting himself on the coinage asserted that Theudebert was equal to the ruler in Constantinople. For centuries, gold coinage had been a prerogative of the remote and semi-divine emperor. He must have had a high opinion of himself, because he did something then that shocked contemporaries: he issued gold coins in his own name, imitating those of the Byzantine emperor Justinian I (“ the Great”). When his father died in 533 (or 534 – many Merovingian dates are uncertain) he fought his uncles Childebert and Clothar to win his throne. As a teenager he fought in battle against raiding Danes and neighboring Visigoths. Theudebertīorn about the year 500, Theudebert son of Theuderic I ( Thierry in modern French) was a grandson of Clovis. If your kingdom was on bad terms with the current emperor in Constantinople, your gold solidi might carry the name of his long-dead predecessor, like Anastasius I (ruled 491-517). Pseudo-imperials are difficult to date precisely. These “pseudo-imperial” coins are crude in style and attributed to “uncertain mints.” Inscriptions are often blundered, and die engravers sometimes did not clearly understand what they were copying.įor example, a tremissis from the time of Chlotar (or Chlotaire), who ruled 511-561, depicts the winged figure of Victory on the reverse transformed into something more like an eagle. Pseudo-Imperial IssuesĪs the Roman Empire in the west declined, the supply of Imperial gold coins dried up and the Franks, like the Visigoths, the Ostrogoths and other emergent Germanic kingdoms, issued their own coinage in the name of the emperor in far-off Constantinople. Clovis I ( Hlodowig in Frankish), grandson of Merovech, was baptized as a Catholic on Christmas day, 496, thereby establishing an alliance between the Church of Rome and the rulers of France that would endure for centuries. He fought alongside the grand coalition of Romans and barbarians that turned back the armies of Attila the Hun at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains in central France, 20 June 451. The Merovingians took their name from Merovech (or Merovius) a semi-legendary fifth-century chieftain credited as the dynasty’s founder. The Frankish Merovingian dynasty, which ruled most of France and parts of neighboring lands from circa 457 to 751 CE, may be an obscure corner of late Antiquity but it offers numismatists a complex and challenging coinage. THEY GREW THEIR hair and beards long in medieval Latin they were called reges criniti, the “long haired kings.” In modern French they are known as les rois fainéants, the “do-nothing kings” (history has not treated them kindly). The Franks had little idea of the state as a public institution, and the regnum Francorum (kingdom of the Franks), while remaining a family inheritance, was inherited according to the rules of private law, divided on each occasion between the sons or nearest male relatives of the deceased (Grierson and Blackburn, 84).
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