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1 Tremissis In the name of Heraclius, Lined torso
| Issuer | Lombard Kingdom |
|---|---|
| Year | 610-690 |
| Type | Standard circulation coin |
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| Reverse description | Winged Victory standing, depicted with a cross to the right, the face rendered as a series of dots and the hair styled to suggest a helmet, all in a heavily barbarized manner derived from late Byzantine tremissis prototypes. The surrounding legend is entirely degenerate and nonsensical, reflecting the Lombard engravers' unfamiliarity with the Latin script, reduced to a sequence of meaningless letterforms. The field retains the general compositional scheme of the Byzantine Victory type but with marked abstraction of individual design elements. |
| Reverse script | Latin |
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| Additional information |
The Lombard tremissis issues struck in the name of Heraclius represent a particularly murky chapter in early medieval monetary history. The Lombards, who had seized much of Italy from Byzantine control after 568, continued issuing gold coinage in the name of reigning Eastern emperors for decades — not out of political submission, but because Byzantine-style gold was what merchants trusted. The "lined torso" type is a degenerate imitation, the imperial image progressively abstracted by craftsmen working from copies of copies rather than from official dies.
By the mid-seventh century these pieces were diverging sharply from Byzantine prototypes in both style and fineness.