Suevian - Gold - Tremissis; ƆIIIVTIIIɅIIC / CONOB; Extremely Rare; 1.06g ; EF

In this auction, Numisma is presenting a very characteristic tremissis, from the Kingdom of the Suevi, one of the migrant people who crossed Europe, from East to West, in the Middle Ages, attacking and pillaging many of the main cities of the Roman world. In a similar odyssey to the Visigoths, these people eventually settled, with the permission of the emperor Honorius, in the northern part of western Hispania, establishing their capital in Braga, in a kingdom that prevailed for most of the 5th and 6th centuries of our era. It struck coins similar to Roman coins, solidi and thirds of a solidus, today considered the rarest of European medieval coins, of which no more than 200 examples have survived.

The present specimen, in a beautiful state of preservation, was known to Wilhelm Reinhart, who registered it in 1937 in his pioneering work, "Die Munzen des Schwebenreiches", as belonging to the Collection Luís Keil, with a weight of 1.06g. Peixoto Cabral and David Metcalf did not examine it in their research for their study "A Moeda Sueva", published in 1997 by the Sociedade Portuguesa de Numismática, but they refer to it from Reinhart's register on slide 22, no. 41, with a photograph of it. Note that the workshop that made it also presumably made tremisses Nos. 1 and 6 on slide 12, classified as "Miscellaneous tremisses with undisclosed markings" (p. 281), because the obverse has similar legends, with the same letters C (retrograde) IIIVTIIIV (inverted) IIC.