Denier - Boleslaus I the Cruel

Boleslaus I earned his epithet by murdering his brother Wenceslas in 935 — the same Wenceslas later canonized as Bohemia's patron saint — and then held the duchy against the Ottonian empire for fourteen years of sustained warfare before submitting to Henry I's successor in 950. These deniers belong to that consolidation period, when Boleslaus was simultaneously fighting off German pressure and centralizing Bohemian authority hard enough to require his own coinage. Cach 10 is among the earliest attributable Bohemian silver issues, placing it at the very root of the medieval Czech numismatic sequence.