Posted 12/05/2010 04:18 am
Quote:
It came with a collection of Spanish silver cobs.
It came with a collection of Spanish silver cobs.
Given the provenance, and the somewhat crude lion on one side and the Spanish-style cross on the other, a logical assumption would be a base-silver penny or "dinero" from Leon and/or Castile before the time of Columbus.
Unfortunately, searching for pics of dinero on the Web to compare it with is not easy, because "dinero" has become a slang word in Spanish for "money", while "cornado", another name for them, is a common Spanish surname. However, what I could find, either by Google or in Grierson's book "Coinage of Medieval Europe", I can't find anything similar from any of the early Spanish states.
There are base-silver deniers of this same basic design (cross on one side, lion on the other) from the Crusader kingdom of Cyprus. But the "however" in this case is that I can't find any lions facing right anywhere on Cypriot coinage; they're all left facing, like on the example on this blog.
So, I'm still looking.
Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise, you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis
