Original scientific paper

The beginnings of minting the silver coinage of the “Sirmium group”: quarter-siliquae of the Victoria type (I)

Demo Željko ; Archaeological museum in Zagreb *

* Corresponding author.

Abstract

In 2024, it will be one hundred years since the publication of an article in which the Croatian archaeologist, numismatist, and museum curator Josip Brunšmid described and analyzed in detail a small group of previously unknown silver coins minted in the name of the Byzantine emperors Justinian and Justin II, while attributing the coinage to the Gepids and the mint in Sirmium. When not long afterwards, the minting in Sirmium was extended to include the Ostrogothic period, a historical framework between the years 504/5 and 568 was created – recently supplemented by an unrecognized Byzantine minting (567-568).1 Until the mid 80s of the last century, the number of known examples of these coins was still very small, but the
numerous easily noticeable differences and stylistic features of the silver coins from Sirmium prompted reflection and the desire to give the observed differences a clearer meaning, if possible united in just a few words – which is how the name “the Sirmium group” was coined and passed into usage over time. In the meantime, the development of digital technologies and their
wide availability on the one hand, and the uncontrolled activity of metal detector “archaeologists” on the other hand, have introduced large quantities of silver coins of the “Sirmium group” to the market for ancient coins, so what were until recently numismatic curiosities have suddenly become an easily accessible source of interest and investigation for many. In the mid-1990s, the beginning of the new era of the “Sirmium group” was symbolically announced by the appearance of a specimen that was different from all previously known ones – due to the reverse legend, it was called the Victoria type and associated with 504/505, the year in which the previously Gepidic Sirmium was once again ruled by the Ostrogoths. The unique nature of that
Ostrogothic variant of the Victoria type lasted until 2016, when four new, typologically related but nonetheless different variants appeared at numismatic auctions within a span of just three years. The stylistic and typological content of the three variants would suggest their creation
and minting in a period at least a decade earlier than the only previously known Ostrogothoc variants, and these, as considerably earlier, are now attributed to the Sirmium Gepids and their King Thrasaric (489-504/505). The fourth version is an imitation of the already well-known and currently most numerous Ostrogothic variant of the Victoria type minted in 504/505, with which it is either almost contemporaneous or only a few years earlier.

Keywords

Serbia, Syrmia; Pannonia Sirmiensis, Sirmium; silver coinage, quarter-siliquae; Gepids, Ostrogoths, Byzantium; Thrasaric, Theodoric, Anastasius

Hrčak ID:

320703

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/320703

Publication date:

1.8.2024.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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