Thanks for visiting the www.medievalcoinage.com site! There isn't much here yet, but I have high aspirations for creating a site that will hopefully teach me along with you a lot about the fascinating segment of numismatics dealing with the coinage of Europe during the Middle Ages that began dating coins. The goal of the site is to offer simple and, hopefully, useful reference information for collectors of beginning to intermediate experience who either cannot find or do not wish to dive too deeply into the purchase of expensive and obscure titles on medieval coinage that are often in foreign languages to boot. I have amassed a weighty collection of auction catalogues, several key reference works, and would like to share what I learn with others of the same collecting interest. As time goes by and my database development and programming skills increase, I hope to add images of coins from catalogue scans and have a searchable database of coin legends, issuing rulers and states, weights, key design features to help ID those coins with few legends at all, etc.

Austria, Tyrol, Sechser c.1481 (no date)
Obv: +SIGISMVND·ARCHIDVX·AVSTRIE (Sigismund, Archduke of Austria)
Rev: +GRO-S.COM-ITIS.-TIROL (Grand Count of Tyrol)
Diam. 22.5mm, Saur.#818

What makes a European coin "medieval"? That's a question without a definitive answer. Most sources tend to classify coins minted after the fall of Rome in 476 AD as the beginning of the early medieval period. The great monetary reformations brought about by the introduction of the silver penny in the eighth century could be said to undoubtedly begin the true medieval age of coinage. The end of the medieval period is just as vague. Some people say it ends with the introduction of the renaissance-inspired coinage of Italy by the end of the 1450's. Others would push it back a few decades to the introduction of Archduke Sigismund of Tyrol's magnificent silver guldengroschen, the first really massive silver coin, in 1486. Still others would say it ends with the initial replacements of hammered coinage with machine milled coins in the latter half of the sixteenth century. This will be my criteria for content on this site. Hammered coinage vanishes by around the 1650's. Indeed, as the renaissance swept through Europe at a phenomenal pace it wiped out almost all traces of the centuries-old traditional medieval coin stylings in just a few decades. By 1540 there are to my knowledge no Lombardic or Gothic letted coins still being minted. My collecting focus is on late medieval pieces, focusing on dated coinage prior to 1500 and I have managed to acquire a dozen of these fantastic coins in the last six months or so. They are, as a general rule, quite rare. Indeed, the 1470's dated coins of the low countries (briquets, etc.) are about as common as pre-1500 dated coins get, but even getting one of them will often take dedicated searching of European auction houses and mailing lists. Chances are astronomically against your local coin shop having one.