10 Nummi - Witigis Ravenna

Witigis seized the Ostrogothic throne in 536 by setting aside Theodahad — the bookish, ineffective nephew of Theodoric the Great — in favor of a soldier king the army could follow. It didn't save them. The years this coin was struck correspond almost exactly to Belisarius's Italian campaign, during which Byzantine forces progressively tightened their grip on the peninsula. Ravenna itself fell in 540, and Witigis was taken to Constantinople as a prisoner.

That Ravenna continued producing coinage through a siege of over a year speaks to the mint's operational stubbornness, if nothing else.