Cut Quarter Tremissis

Quartering a tremissis — itself already a third of a solidus — was an act of desperation or extreme precision in small-value exchange, reducing a coin already at the edge of practical mintable size into a fragment worth roughly one-twelfth of a solidus. This piece dates to the reign of Liuvigild, the Visigothic king who systematically reformed Iberian coinage and was the first Visigothic ruler to strike coins in his own name rather than in the name of the Byzantine emperor.