1 Tremissis In the name of Justinian I, Crossed tassels, straight

The Lombards entered Italy in 568 under Alboin, displacing Byzantine authority across much of the peninsula within a decade. Their earliest gold coinage was explicitly imitative — struck in the name of reigning Eastern emperors to ease commercial acceptance in a region still economically tethered to Constantinople. The crossed-tassels reverse is a Lombard adaptation that gradually diverged from the Byzantine tremissis prototype, marking a transitional moment in which a migrating Germanic people quietly asserted monetary independence through incremental design drift rather than open declaration.

The "cf." qualifiers on both Arslan and MEC I are telling — precise die attribution for this type remains unresolved in the literature.