Constantinopolis Barbs

Very interesting group of imitations. The Trier coin could easily pass an official issue.

This is a genre for which it might be very revealing to analyze via xray fluorescence for their composition, especially if comparisons could be made to known official issues.

Thank you for posting your material Doucet. Here are some of my pieces.

I'm leading off with these two because I am not sure about them. M much of the lettering is missing, including the mint marks, so comparisons are difficult, but there is a crudeness about them that makes me think they might be barbarous. Thoughts?

12mm/1.23g 14mm/1.36g



The rest are all imitative, I believe.
This one emulates a Constantinopolis issue from Lyons (Lugdunum)
13mm .90g




This one has a Const. reverse, but the obverse is up for grabs. The end of the obverse inscription seems to be patterned after Constantinopolis, but with an Urbs Roma style for the figure.
11x12mm .80g




Here the obverse is styled after Constantinopolis, but the reverse is obviously Urbs Roma.
11x12mm 1.00g




Here the obverse inscription is split but ends like Constantinopolis. The reverse is patterned after Urbs Roma, but the she wolf is facing the wrong way.
12x13mm 1.36g




This one is emulating an Urbs Roma from Trier, but the obverse inscription is too long. Influenced perhaps by the Contantinopolis obv?
13mm 1.37g




Poor example, but most likely this emulates an Urbs Roma on both sides.
12mm .88g



This one emulates an Urbs Roma for Trier.
14x15mm .96g


Note that all these are too small for the period when the original designs circulated. If they were minted at a later time, then the use of an obsolete issue design might have allowed the issuer, perhaps a local potentate, to dodge the claim of counterfeiting.

I have a slightly better example which Doucet has seen and commented on via a different site, so far there is no evidence that this type was ever issued by a Western mint but only by the Eastern mints. The few examples known are all classed as unofficial. mine is from Lugdunum.
There was a " similar " example up for sale with a ridiculous asking price of $5000, described by the seller as a prototype blah blah.
Still up for sale

Thank you for the link to the LRB site, tenbobbit. I seldom log in there (same user ID), but maybe should more often.

However, I do have to raise a question about the comment from Victor echoed here by you:
tenbobbit wrote:



Bruun list the example I referenced and calls it a hybrid in his footnote. That means it irregularly mixes an obverse with a reverse type. That was commonly done by counterfeiters, of course, and hybridization is sometimes an indication of that problem.

However, slipups could occur at the mint as well, if a celator happened to use the wrong hammer due with a particular anvil. Such items from the mint are irregular, to be sure, and are not "official" in the sense of regularly intended for issue. But as mint products they are not entirely unofficial either if that term is meant to convey the notion of having been made outside the normal channels of imperial production.

Certain "irregular" mint coins, when recognized as such, have in the past fetched startling prices; so, I can see how that seller might be thinking. Nonetheless, for my part I personally would not credit a verifiable mint produced "mule" with any more premium value than any other kind of striking error. It deserves a modest premium as an error coin. But as to source I would not hesitate to call it at least semi- or quasi- official. It should not be put in the same category as the imitative coinage.

How do you class striking errors - official, unofficial, or something else? That is where the mint mules belong, I think.

I would like to nuance this a bit, because I think we may be looking at striking errors (vis a vis barbarous imitations) a bit differently. I don't want to introduce confusion into the conversation by getting off into what ought to be a separate discussion of striking errors.

While it is true that some barbarous imitations may have been produced with striking errors, that is equally true for official issues. Specifically, a mule from an official mint is still an official coin, albeit one that was not intended for circulation as struck. The only relevance to a discussion about barbarous imitations is that the RIC listing for a two-standard GE reverse of a city commemorative bears the footnote "hybrid."

In the language conventions of the RIC volumes, a "hybrid" is popularly called a "mule." My comment above was simply to say that in terms of significance, such coins are striking errors and not much more. I also intimated that mules ought to be valued about the same as other kinds of striking errors, all of which are rarities, but of a specialized kind.


Your observation that all the examples you have seen of the muling of a two-standard GE reverse with a city commemorative obverse bear the marks of barbarous production in their inscriptions is interesting to me and important I think.

I have to wonder about the RIC entry for RIC VII Trier 541. I would like to see the Oxford coin to see if it may have some inscription problem.

I am working on my photo skills to try to give a better rendering of another coin in my collection, which seems to have a normal Constantinopolis obverse paired with a two-standard GE reverse from Trier, the latter of which has an altered legend. Here is a scan which does not reproduce the image as well as it can be seen in hand:



The "blundered" legend on the reverse reads GLOR - IAEX - ERCIT [in emulation of the VIRTVS EXERCIT inscription perhaps?]
The mint mark reads as TRS rather clearly, but in the pic the dimensionality is lost which makes that clear. Nonetheless, in view of the altered legend I would agree with the principle that this coin should be regarded as not from an official mint of the empire.

The principle being that if the design of either side of a coin does not correspond in all details with the designs known for imperial issues, then it is not to be assumed to have been issued by an imperial mint. It is at best an imitative local issue, and at worst an illegal fabrication.

A tougher question, which we are not yet addressing here, is whether or not semi-official status existed for any of the local coinages at the edges of empire.

To me the word "counterfeit" implies something illicit, illegal, a look-alike intended to deceive. To be sure there was a lot of that going on in the ancient world. I think most if not ALL of fouree coinage was counterfeit in its origin and purpose. How much of the imitative coinage in bronze falls into that category I am not sure. The metrological evidence Victor shows for the reduction of silver content in VLPP bronzes seems to suggest that it was being fraudulently done to harvest silver. Okay. Do we have a clear sense of chronology for the imitatives, or have we merely ASSUMED they are contemporaneous with the official issues they resemble?

But now, think with me...

I am not willing to assume that ALL imitatives were made for nefarious reasons. The reason for that is due to my limited understanding of the distribution of the hoards containing this material. In the hinterlands and on the frontiers garrisoned military needed low denomination coinage in an economic setting for which Imperial coinage might be overvalued. How much business can you do in an undeveloped region when your lowest denomination currency has the buying power of a US $20 bill? You need small change. And that was the big bugaboo in the outlying areas.

In settings like that, who do you suppose was going to try to do something about it? Local thieves? Local clan and tribal chieftans with no experience producing a currency of their own? Let me suggest that the most likely source for imitative currency in that kind of setting was a collaboration of the garrisoned military and the local governments under their oversight. Obviously they would need a special dispensation under Roman law in order to ward off charges of mutiny, subversion, or whatever. But who was better equipped to get that kind of permission than the military leaders stationed out there?

In order to keep the central government off their backs, and still have a currency they could use, they took to making and using the equivalent of "play money" - designed to resemble the real thing, but blundered and altered so as not to arouse suspicion about what it was - i.e. local currency for local circulation only. In the local setting such coinage could be tariffed as needed, whether in concert with the official currency of the time or not.

BUT

over time inflation hits the imperial currency and causes the official coins to shrink and devalue until eventually and inevitably some of the old imitatives are worth more as specie than contemporary official issue. So then, does the imitative currency become free to circulate more widely as a better currency than was officially being made?

---

So far that scenario is mostly a speculative reconstruction. But because it is so in accord with the history of inflation in the ancient world (4th century) and is in accord with Gresham's law, there is good reason to reconsider the ways that imitatives figure into the hoards so far recovered. Unfortunately, the tendency to dismiss them as fraudulent has caused them to be excluded from analysis too often for the picture to be easily understood.