20 Questions! (Forum Game)

Minted before 1800?

Was it minted between 1600 and 1699 AD?

Well, I was looking at the "How far back can we go" thread, where you have posted a number of coins from the 1600's.

Looks like I was barking up the wrong tree.

Was it minted between 1300 and 1500?




I think you're at the right tree, @joecoin. On those "How Far Back" threads, @spence is routinely posting dated coins well back into the 1400s mostly from central Europe, and his avatar coin is an even earlier dated coin. So that's the logic behind my questio.n But there are the earlier undated medievals, and I think ancients, though that's not a place where I hang out.
This could get REALLY hard

The coin that immediately comes to mind fitting that description is the Florentine florin (I know that sounds redundant, but it's not), but that's ruled out because we have ruled out Italy.

So ...hmmm

Agree we need some clarification on that. Comment in the last answer about a long date range suggests that maybe not even ruler is required?

Also, for benefit of other players who aren't so familiar with medieval coins, (and I apologize in advance if I insult anyone's existing knowledge in this area...)

The answer to the last clue says this is an undated type, and leaves the hint (intentional I bet) that it is from a "city state." Unless I'm mistaken, the two parts of Europe that had city states were the Holy Roman Empire in central Europe (today's Germany, but also parts of eastern France, Switzerland, Austria, Czech Rep. and western Poland), or Italy. Scandinavia was a couple of kingdoms. Southeast Europe I think was also kingdoms, albeit small ones (Hungary, Moldova, Serbia, Slavonia). Italy was ruled out by an earlier question, so we are likely talking about the Germanic world, consistent with many of the coins the gamemaster posts.

The bad news is that were were dozens of such city states in this part of Europe at this time.

The good news is that there were relatively few denominations. The thaler and its subdivisions did not yet exist. So we are talking pfennigs, groschen, and not much more I think. And the last answer seems to give a clue that this was a long-lived type that straddled the year 1300.
The other good news is that many of these can be found in this online reference, http://www.saurma.info/ . IN the menu on p.1 you can find a link to a map, and you can also search on only coins with human figures on them.

I'm not really sure what strategy to take next. We might ask if the coin type is in Saurma. Or we might ask if the weight is greater than 1.2 g which probably separates pfennigs from everything else.