Denier Bracteate - Otto das Kind

Otto das Kind — Otto I of Brunswick-Lüneburg — inherited a drastically reduced territory after the Welf dynasty's catastrophic fall from imperial favor. His grandfather Henry the Lion had been stripped of his duchies by Frederick Barbarossa in 1180, and the family spent decades rebuilding political legitimacy through exactly the kind of local lordship these thin bracteates physically embodied: small-scale, regionally circulated, bearing the authority of a diminished but surviving house.

Bracteates of this type were struck on foil-thin flans from a single die, meaning the reverse is simply a mirror impression of the obverse — a minting method common in northern Germany through the 13th century. The Denicke 112 attribution places this piece within a well-documented but seldom-complete typological series.